Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov & Irina Rozanova

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Irina Rozanova, Grigori Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Irina Rozanova Lives, Bad Parent Grigori Rozanov, Alcohol, Ilya Rozanov is Obsessed With Shane Hollander, mothers are complicated even when they are the most loving ones, Ilya Rozanov is obsessed with Shane Hollander's freckles, how many times can I mention Shane Hollander's freckles before it becomes a crime?

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-01-27 Words: 2,778 Chapters: 2/?

Like I Love You

Summary

Irina Rozanova is alive. She's beautiful, funny and so sad.

or

The events of Heated Rivalry if Irina was alive.

Notes

Because apparently, I'm obsessed with the mothers of the Heated Rivalry universe.

---

Irina and Ilya talk to each other in Russian, but they talk to each other so much that trying to use italics or something would be very distracting.

Chapter 1

The first time Ilya comes to America, he is fifteen, on tourist visa, and he watches the ocean through the airplane window alongside his mother. Last summer, his brother got married, so everything was about Alexei then. Now, however, Irina insists on making this Ilya’s year.

“I’ll be good for him to practice his English,” she argued when Ilya’s father turned his displeased scowl towards her. “He’ll need to be able to speak it, when the MLH scouts come knocking.”

“Is KHL not good enough now?” Grigori growled, but at last gave them his blessing to go.

His absence on the new continent makes Ilya’s breathing ease, despite the scent of tobacco clinging to his mother’s golden curls like perfume. Even though she pretends not to notice when he sneaks a cigarette from the packet in her purse.

“When I play for the MLH, I’ll buy you an apartment here,” he says in the middle of a crowded New York street. “Here, or in Los Angeles.”

“I’m too old to be a movie star,” Irina laughs.

“Ah, no one would notice. You’d say you’re twenty-five, fresh out of school, they’d believe you just fine. All the directors would want you in their movies. All the hot, rich actors would want to marry you.”

Her laughter rings brighter here. Louder.

Ilya thinks it’s perhaps less about where they are and more about who they aren’t with, but he doesn’t mention that.

“I’m already married, Ilyushka.”

Ilya rolls his eyes and doesn’t say how that could easily change, too. He suggested it once, maybe a year ago, when he came across her crying after a particularly rough argument with his father. ‘You could ask for a divorce,’ he said, and she shushed him, harshly, and told him not to speak about things he can’t understand. He hasn’t mentioned it since.

“On MLH salary, I can buy you an apartment in every big city,” he says instead.

***

There are so many galleries, and it seems like Irina drags him into each and every one of them. Towards the end, Ilya wants to throw himself on the floor and kick and scream like a toddler, tired of colors and shapes and abstract faces and hyperrealistic oil paint eyes following him around rooms. Irina loves every moment of it, however, so he must suffer.

“Do you know why so much art is about suffering? So much literature? So many great poems?” she asks him later, standing in the doorway of his hotel room, a glass of liquor from the minibar in her hand.

Ilya shrugs. “Artists suffer, isn’t that a thing?”

Irina nods. “Yes,” she looks into her glass. “But it’s not because you need to suffer to see beauty, you know? It’s because you need beauty to survive the suffering.”

***

They watch a movie. Something slow, old and boring. In English.

It doesn’t matter, because they talk through most of it anyway. Ilya is tucked in like he’s still a child, Irina is sitting on top of his hotel bed’s covers. She’s wearing her street clothes, a long flowing skirt and a nice blouse, a thick belt pulling the look together. Appearance is important, she has taught him. People look at you differently, if you put in the effort. Even on your worst days. Especially on your worst days.

“Father would like me to play in KHL,” Ilya mutters. “If I have to play hockey at all.”

“That’s just posturing. Pride.” Irina adjusts his duvet like he’s still eight. “MLH is the superior league. If you get drafted, your father will have something to brag about, and he loves to brag. And you will get drafted.”

“And you?”

“I always brag about you, Ilyushka.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She goes quiet. Still.

“I’ll worry about you so far away,” she speaks finally, words slow and careful. Not because she’s tired, or a little tipsy, although she is both. No, she’s choosing each word intentionally. “But I think I’ll worry less than if you stayed home. It’ll give you opportunities. Freedoms you won’t have at home. If you’re smart about it. If you don’t take unnecessary risks.”

She knows, Ilya is aware. Just as she knows he steals her cigarettes and breaks into the liquor cabinets, his mother also knows he sneaks off with the coach’s son sometimes.

“No unnecessary risks,” she repeats, her speech slowing down further. She lays her head on his pillow. “But sometimes it’s necessary. To survive, to be safe… That only has meaning if you are living, too. It you find the beauty in the suffering.”

Her glass on the bedside table is empty.

She’s past the relaxation and joviality, down in the melancholy that follows.

She’s drunk and she’s sad and she’s half asleep.

But her words ring deeply true.

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

Ilya is seventeen the first time he visits Canada.

A captain of his national team, a force to behold, a player to watch out for.

He waits until the morning before his last game, the final, to call his mother. Although he’s been aching for her voice since he departed Russian soil, he is practically an adult now. He is leading men on the ice. It shouldn’t matter that for the first time in his life, his mother is not in the stands.

“I’m so proud of you,” is the first thing she tells him.

“I haven’t won yet.” He holds the phone to his ear, thinks he hears the sound of the ocean between them.

“It’s between silver and gold now,” Irina says, her voice sounding bright. “That’s reason for pride enough.”

Father wouldn’t agree.

Silver medal would still mark a loss. What is there to brag about when you lost the game that mattered the most? Second place would be a failure.

“I won’t lose to Canada.”

“Their team is good. Probably the only team that could really make you struggle.”

“The Czechs were okay,” Ilya can’t help but point out. Without a decent competitor, any victory would feel cheap anyway. “The Finns, too.”

“But not as good as you, or the Canadians. Everyone is comparing their captain to you.”

Something uncoils in Ilya’s stomach. “Shane Hollander,” the names sounds foreign, but it tastes good on his tongue as he carefully wraps it around the syllables.

Shane Hollander came to watch him practice.

Ilya went to watch Shane Hollander’s practice, too.

There is something…

A pull.

He could call it professional interest. Curiosity.

The way his entire body reacts to Shane fucking Hollander, though…

It’s something else entirely.

“He came to talk to me,” he admits. “Shane Hollander. He introduced himself, it was all very strange. Very Canadian, I suppose.”

Shane Hollander.

Even on repeat, the name sounds…

Heavy.

But in the way of expensive chocolate or aged alcohol. Almost too much and yet he wants another taste.

“What did you talk about?”

“I don’t remember,” is not a lie. He barely remembers any of Shane Hollander’s words. What he remembers are the freckles, constellations scattered across the Canadian boy’s cheekbones. Ilya has the urge to play connect-the-dots. He wants to see whether he can chase them down Hollanders skin to find out where to they continue under his clothes. It’s a stupid desire, of course. “Everyone here just assumes I speak English.”

“You’ll need to speak English,” Irina reminds him. “If you play for an MLH team.”

Ilya glares at the view in front of him, which happens to be gray sky framed by a window.

He’s been learning English for years.

Right now, however, speaking if feels impossible. The language spoken here sounds nothing like his Russian teachers, their accents heavy and sentences carefully constructed to abide by every grammar rule, half of which, Ilya suspects, they made up.

English here sounds also nothing like the English of salespeople in the tourist traps he visited with his mother. They made sure to be understood by foreign guests.

“I know,” he groans.

“But it’s nice of him, anyway,” Irina tries to cheer him up. “You could have someone there already. A friend.”

Ilya snorts. He doesn’t want to be friends with Shane Hollander. Instead, he wants to destroy him on the ice until no one wonders which one of them is the best. Until it doesn’t matter that Shane Hollander speaks English and fluent French. Until the only thing Shane Hollander has left are his stupid, perfect freckles.

Stupid Shane Hollander, who tried to speak clearly, tried to make himself easy to understand and somehow, somehow, that made him so much more infuriating.

“Sure. A friend,” he repeats without enthusiasm.

***

They beat the Canadians.

He beats Shane Hollander on the ice.

It feels good.

And yet it’s not enough.

When their hands touch in the handshake line, Ilya wants to carve himself into Hollander’s mind. He would carve himself right into his skin, in between his pretty freckles, if he could.

“See you in the draft,” he says, holding Hollander’s hand a little longer than anyone else’s, the only English words he bothers to utter. All the other Canadians get a polite nod from him, their faces something of a blur.

Only Hollander gets words.

Ilya hopes Hollander keeps thinking of him, all the way to the draft.

***

Back in Moscow, Ilya and Irina watch games with English commentary. When Grigori isn’t home, when he can’t scold and mock them, when he can’t chastise Ilya for abandoning his roots before he’s even left the country.

Ilya doesn’t think of it as abandoning.

He’s growing. He’s expanding.

***

He beats Shane Hollander again, at the draft, and that’s the best part of his night.

He’s drafted first, Hollander second.

It’s his main reason to smile.

If he were honest with himself, which he is not very good at, he would admit that it’s not because he is the first and Shane Hollander is the second. It’s because the competition is between the two of them. It’s because Hollander is there, at his side, and it doesn’t really matter whether he stands to the right or left of Ilya, as long as Hollander is as aware of Ilya as Ilya is aware of him.

Shane Hollander is a rival worth competing with.

***

Grigori Rozanov’s English is much better than Ilya’s.

Not for the first time, Ilya feels like he doesn’t need to be there at all. In the conversation his father is having with the Boston Raiders’ representative about Ilya, while Ilya stands there feeling useless, embarrassment creeping into his cheeks when his father says: “He can be… how do you say… lazy.”

He’s heard the word from his father many times. When he went to a friend’s birthday party instead of his English tutoring, when he got up at ten instead of eight the morning after a game, when he let his smart friend, Svetlana, help him with homework so he wouldn’t fail his classes. When his grades slipped because he was spending every spare minute on ice, when he was benched to rest an injury, when he decided to skip an optional practice to go meet his newborn niece.

Ilya knows he should work harder.

Some days he struggles to see how.

“I promise to work very hard for you,” Ilya says now, only to get scolded by his father in Russian for opening his mouth at all.

Irina puts her hand on his back then. “I think I need to refresh my makeup,” she says, softly, in Russian. “Will you escort me, please? I don’t trust these shoes.”

Ilya sees a vein twitch in Grigori’s face, but in front of people he only makes an excuse for his wife and son.

“These shoes really are awful,” Irina admits when they are out of the earshot. “I wasn’t lying about that.”

“I knew you were lying about the makeup. Nothing to fix,” Ilya smirks.

“Since when are you an expert?”

“I’ve just done a whole photoshoot, didn’t you see?”

It was only maybe two pictures of him, Hollander and the guy drafted third holding up their new teams’ jerseys. But it still felt good. He didn’t have to fake his smile as he held up his jersey; he was now officially Ilya Rozanov, number 81, of the Boston Raiders. Shane Hollander was number 24, Montreal Metros. The third guy’s name was Korogyi and Ilya only remembered his number, 91, because it was so similar to his own.

Maybe his father was right.

He was lazy.

He should learn everyone and their game rather than let Hollander fill his mind. They were going to be pros now. Being the best would take more effort than just beating Shane Hollander.

“He’s very handsome,” Irina says.

“Who?”

“The Canadian.”

Ilya snorts, although he knows exactly who she’s talking about. “There are many Canadians here.”

“The second draft. Have you talked to him since Juniors?”

Ilya shakes his head. “He’s looked like he’s at the dentist every time I’ve noticed him tonight. Like he doesn’t even want to be here. I’m not sure it’ll be much fun competing with him if he takes it so badly.”

It’s a lie.

Staring at Shane Hollander, waiting for him to notice him back, has been the only fun he’s had all evening.

“His mother’s so pretty, too,” Irina muses. “He has her looks. But she navigates all of this so gracefully!”

“You mean, unlike us, who are currently hiding in a corner?”

Irina exhales. “I could use a smoke.” Her fingers twitch against her purse.

“Me too.”

She narrows her eyes at him.

“I’m kidding.”

“You should talk to Shane Hollander. I think maybe you could both use a friend here, and he’d be good influence.”

Ilya shakes his head.

The last thing he wants to be influenced by is Shane Hollander. Because every time their eyes met so far, Ilya felt a little like he was under the influence. It’s those stupid freckles, and those deep eyes, and the fact that Shane Hollander is just his size and so fast on his skates and so precise with the puck and so—

So polite, perfect litttle Canadian golden boy.

Ilya wants to ruin him.

He wants to make home in Shane Hollander’s brain the way Shane Hollander has moved into his own.

And he wants to scream, because this night should not be about Shane Hollander at all.

And he is grateful Shane Hollander exists, because otherwise this night would be so painfully boring.

He thinks about what Irina said to him a few times before, about finding beauty in the suffering. Tonight he feels like perhaps Shane Hollander is both his suffering and the beauty in it.

What a ridiculous thought.

Ilya could really use a cigarette.

***

He hears his parents argue through the thin hotel wall that separates his bedroom through theirs. Grigori scolds Irina for embarrassing him at the event, Irina argues that he shouldn’t have said the things he’s said about Ilya.

And Ilya can’t step in the middle of it. Not when they are arguing about him.

His presence would only make it worse.

Sometimes he wonders if they’d argue so much if he was a little simpler child to raise.

So Ilya puts on workout clothes, grabs his water bottle, and he wanders into the gym—

And there he is.

Shane Hollander.

He’s pedaling on a bike like he’s running away from his demons.

And this.

This is the best part of Ilya’s night.

He gets up on the bike right next to Hollander’s and he knows, he knows then, Shane Hollander feels it, too. Whatever it is between them. The way winning matters more when they are competing against each other.

Perhaps the only thing that truly matters is competing against each other.

They push the bikes to their physical limits.

Neither of them speaks, but Ilya can hear Hollander breathing. He can smell him: Hollander’s deodorant and his sweat, the good kind of physical exercise, warm and salty and comforting. Ilya wants to crawl under Hollander’s white shirt and live there.

He settles for sharing his water bottle.

Their fingers brush, not by an accident.

Ilya is half-hard watching Hollander’s Adam’s apple move as he gulps. Hollander’s keeping his eyes on Ilya, right where they should always be.

Always.

Ilya doesn’t mind these eyes following him around the room. Put a painting of Shane Hollander in every gallery, in every room, so he can watch Ilya Rozanov, always.

What an absurd, ridiculous thought.

Ilya wishes they were back on ice so that he could press his body against Hollander’s without it being a big deal.

He can’t wait for Boston to play Montreal.

Chapter End Notes

I was taught English under similar circumstances to Ilya in this fic. It was not fun.