Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories:

Gen, M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau & Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Team Ensemble (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Hurt/Comfort, Medical realism because I watch the Pitt, Boston Bears | Boston Raiders (Game Changers), the author has some feelings about Boston winter, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pre-Relationship, Before Tuna Melt (BTM), Good Friend Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Trade Deadline, Secret Relationship, Ilya Rozanov Needs A Hug, Hurt Ilya Rozanov, emergency contacts, Idiots in Love, Shane Hollander Takes Care of Ilya Rozanov, boston bears one collective brain cell

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-13 Completed: 2026-09-07 Words: 23,759 Chapters: 9/9

Lucky Like That

Summary

Ilya is always thinking about things. The upcoming trade deadline and how it might shake up the team. His last call with his father. Freckles.

What he is not thinking about is how sometimes cars ignore pedestrian walk signs.

And he is definitely not thinking, when as they are wheeling him towards emergency surgery, he asks them to call the one person he always feels safe with.

-
Or, pre-relationship, circa situationship, Ilya gets hit by a cab in midtown New York (embarrassing) and asks the hospital to call Shane Hollander (more embarrassing).

Chapter 1

The brand shoot had been fine.

This was Ilya's assessment as he walked, hands in his pockets, no particular destination, aimless through the streets of Manhattan. Fine. The photographer had been professional, the lighting people had been professional, everyone in the room had been professional and also approximately twelve years old, which was something Ilya was noticing more and more lately and chose not to examine too carefully. Scott Hunter would have something to say about that. Ilya could hear him already, that particular laugh, the way he'd say welcome to my world, kid like he was some ancient sage dispensing wisdom from a mountain and not just a man who had been playing hockey for approximately one thousand years and refused to stop.

They had played Hunter and the rest of the octogenarians yesterday. That was a good word he had learned just in case he got to say it to Hunter. It came out sometimes like marbles from his mouth, but he still practiced in case one day he could smile and say it sweetly to Hunter before scoring seven goals.

It was one of his favorite day dreams. Up there with…others. Less PG as the kids would say.

But the Bears had won, but only by a point, which was okay but also irritating. They were in the slog right before the playoffs where the games mattered but also did not, the points mattered more sometimes, and now they were back to Boston for a game or two before the road again, and Ilya’s body was already pre-seeding its weariness. A marathon before the marathon.

Boston had a chance this year. Not a great chance, not like a few years ago, but a good one. It was irritating that somehow the Admirals and the Voyagers had great chances but the thing about hockey was things were always up for grabs if you tired hard enough.

Another turn. He was headed down 9th Ave now. No real destination in sight. The team had stayed near MSG as they always did, so at some point he would turn back towards there, but he was in no real hurry. The weather was cold, as one should always expect in New York in February but it wasn’t Boston cold - that cold was brutal and whipped through you and Ilya was never allowed to complain because everyone thought Moscow had the worst winters - but Boston had a way of leeching the warmth out of you in the dark and icy depths of January and February.

I'll see you boys in the morning. He'd said it so easily. Tapped the doorframe of the bus twice that would bring the rest of the team to the airport, the way he always did, some superstition he'd picked up somewhere and never put down. Cliff had given him a look — Cliff always gave him a look, like he could see slightly further into Ilya than other people — and then the doors had closed and the team had gone back to Boston and Ilya had gone back to the city. This was common enough, a brand deal in New York keeping him overnight when the practice schedule allowed. Not often, but designer watch photoshoots for spring collections had to happen at some point, and his one single day off was its sacrifice.

Ilya had smiled for the camera for two hours. He was good at that. He was good at most performed things. The smile, the press conference voice, the way he could walk into a room and immediately become the largest thing in it without trying. His English was good enough for interviews, good enough for chirping, good enough for the particular kind of conversation that happened in locker rooms and after games and in the lobbies of hotels in cities that weren't Boston or Moscow.

He was not thinking about Shane Hollander.

He turned left on 37th street. He had vague recollections of a pastry nearby that someone in the den of locker room chatter had mentioned. Maybe he would get a treat. He had smiled for many hours today. The city moved around him, indifferent, which was the thing he liked about New York. Boston knew who he was. Moscow knew who he was in a different and heavier way. Both watched him with eyes open at all times while New York just pushed past him on the sidewalk and didn't care, and there was something that felt almost like calm in that.

The photo shoot had been combined with boring meetings with his team. He still wasn’t quite sure when that had happened. Ha. Him and his “team” that was not the other 19 men who he laced up with. But he had them, and they said lots of boring words. The meeting had been about endorsements, contracts, the particular machinery of being “Ilya Rozanov”, half of the face of Hockey, that ran quietly in the background of his actual life. He'd sat across from two people from his “team” and nodded at the right moments and signed things.

Shane Hollander’s “team” was his mom and that made Ilya smile and also sent deep pangs across his ribs in a way he would not ever acknowledge.

The meeting had ended, and one from the assortment of women who escort people like him in and out of rooms offered him a car and on a whim he had said no. The woman - girl really - bright eye shadow, Ilya noticed these things - had only blinked once and said okay, before jetting away to take care of a hundred other small things most people would never even realize had to be done.

So there he had been. Standing on the sidewalk outside a building in midtown, the whole night ahead of him, and an early plane ride in the morning. He just…he just started walking.

His brain was full right now. The upcoming playoff run. Cliff’s left knee that was bothering him more this season but they were all ignoring. The rookie who tried so hard but had already been farmed out to Falmouth for a year. Alexi, who had called again, and he had left ringing. His father, and a conversation that had almost been pleasant, because his father had thought he was an old buddy from his twenties and not his disappointment of a son.

He wasn’t sure what it was now - what you called it when your father was gone but his body was still here. Not grief exactly. Grief’s waiting room perhaps. Maybe English had a word for it. English always had a word for these types of things but it would be hard to pronounce so he didn’t care to learn it anyways. Not like octogenarian. That was a good word.

Hockey was going well. Boston was going well. He was captain of a team that respected him and played for him and he would go to the mat for every single one of them without hesitation. That part felt solid. Reliable. He knew what he was doing there.

The trade deadline was coming up, and the front office was making noises about a defender in St. Louis, a goalie from Las Vegas of all places, and a winger from Kansas? No, Toronto? He wasn’t sure. They sometimes told him these things, but not always. Most of the time, one of the Assistant GMs would show him scouting tapes of acne-riddled-faced Juniors and tell him about how they looked in comparison to when they had first scouted him, which was interesting and annoying all in the same breath.

He had never had acne.

And he was thinking about the other thing. The thing in the corner. The thing from hotel rooms and secret sex condos. That thing with freckles.

A cab honked. Someone bumped his shoulder without apologizing. The city moved.

Shane Hollander was having an excellent season. Ilya knew this not because he was tracking it — he wasn't, that would be insane — but because it was simply information that existed in the world and Ilya lived in the world. Shane was leading the league in points. Shane had given an interview last week where he'd said something humble and precise and slightly annoying about his linemates and Ilya had watched it twice.

For no reason.

They had a game against Montreal in two weeks. Ilya was not thinking about that either.

He thought, sometimes, about a night four years ago in a hotel bar after some hockey related event. He and Shane had ended up next to each other at the bar in the specific way that felt accidental but probably wasn't, and they'd talked — actually talked, not chirped, not performed for cameras — for almost two hours. Ilya had switched to water after his second drink. Shane had switched to water after his first, which was very Shane. They had talked about hockey and then about other things and at some point Shane had said something quietly true about loneliness that had made Ilya look at him differently. The most amusing part is that for the life of him Ilya couldn’t remember what they had been there for. A charity? An award show? It didn’t matter, that part had never mattered, what had always mattered was the way time seemed to orbit Shane Hollander like the sun.

Since then it had been—

The crosswalk man appeared.

Ilya stepped off the curb.

He didn't see the car until it was already happening.

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

The thing about pain was that it reorganized everything.

Ilya knew this in an abstract way. He had been hurt before, had taken hits and blocked shots and come back from things that had sidelined other players for months in weeks — but this was different. This was not the clean, bright pain of impact on ice, the kind you skated off or didn’t. This was his whole body hitting asphalt, and for a moment he just lay there and took inventory.

It was cold. And rough. The texture grated on his cheek.

He was on the sidewalk. Maybe. That was — he was on the sidewalk, and there were sounds, a lot of sounds, and someone was saying something near his head in a voice that was trying very hard to be calm, and Ilya thought distantly that he appreciated the effort.

He was also calm.

Maybe he should not be.

He tried to move his arm.

That was a mistake.

Okay, he thought, in Russian, which was where his brain went when he wasn’t managing it carefully. Okay. Do not do that again.

“Sir, can you hear me? Sir—”

“Yes,” Ilya said. It came out wrong. He wasn’t sure what language it came out in, tried again. “Yes. I can hear.”

The sky above him was that particular New York orange-gray, light pollution turning the clouds into something almost pretty, and Ilya looked at it and thought about the fact that he had practice tomorrow. He had told Cliff he would see him at practice tomorrow. This was going to be a problem.

He had skipped practice a few times during his rookie year, stupid of course, but he was all fire and young recklessness, fueled with an urge he couldn’t quite articulate to push boundaries. He wanted to see how far he could go before the coach, his team, and America intervened. After the second skip, LeClaire pulled him aside and spoke to him like an adult. He reinforced the expectation that team members showed up, and if they didn’t, they were not only letting the team down but also letting themselves down. LeClaire conveyed his message with a soft smile, a mix of disappointment and understanding in his eyes, a testament to his years of coaching rookies through seasons. Ilya never missed a practice again.

He had a feeling he was going to be missing practice tomorrow.

Coach will be so mad. Coach will be so disappointed. 

More voices. More sounds. Somewhere, traffic. The city did not stop — of course it didn’t, it was New York, it had not stopped for anything in its entire history and it was not going to stop for Ilya Rozanov on a Wednesday in February — and that was almost funny, and he might have laughed except breathing was already requiring more concentration than usual. It hurt a little. Not a lot. But enough that he could track every breath, like the end of a long run or a long game, could feel his lungs pressing against ribs, feel it rattling in his throat.

That was probably fine.

His arm was wrong. He knew that with a clarity that cut through everything else. His arm was very, very wrong.

A woman was crouched next to him, her hand hovering near his shoulder like she wanted to help and wasn’t sure if she should touch him. She had kind eyes and a green coat and she was talking to someone on her phone in a very steady voice, giving cross streets, the particular tone of someone who was trying very hard to keep it cool. Ilya felt something almost like gratitude.

“Thank you,” he said.

Her face creased in a smile that looked strained. “You’re going to be okay.”

“Okay,” Ilya agreed.

He wasn’t quite sure that was true. The sidewalk beneath him continued to seep cold into his bones. His face felt wet, and he wasn’t sure why.

He thought about Shane’s text, still unanswered in his pocket. Good game.

He thought, very clearly, that he should have answered it. He would have to answer it soon. He wasn’t quite sure where his phone was at the moment. Hopefully, it was okay. Better than his arm.

Then the sirens arrived, and everything got very busy.

The paramedics were efficient and impersonal in a way Ilya found deeply reassuring. They did not care who he was. They cared about his airway, his pupils, and his arm, which one of them looked at and then very carefully did not react to, which told Ilya everything he needed to know about the arm.

They asked him questions in loud, clear voices.

“What’s your name?”

“Ilya. Ilya Rozanov.”

“Okay, Ilya. My name is Ric. I’m here with my buddy Chuck. Can you tell me where it hurts?”

“Arm,” Ilya said. “Right arm.” He paused. “Feels not good. Feels like bone is sticking out— is bone sticking out?”

“Got it. Anywhere else?” Ric asked, dodging his question, as his purple-gloved hands fussed around his body. “You think you hit your head?”

Ilya blinked. Good question.

“Ilya, buddy?”

“Not sure. That’s not good, no?”

“Not necessarily. Let’s not worry about it right now. You’ve got a bit of road rash on your face, so we’ll just go with ‘yes,’ and they’ll figure it out when we get to the hospital.”

That sounded — not good.

Ric’s hands started to graze down his body, his neck, his shoulder, his stomach—

Ilya let out a yelp.

“Little tender?” Ric asked.

“Yes, a little. But the car hit me, so…” He considered this. “Must be an Admirals fan.”

Ric, the paramedic, blinked. “Sorry?”

“Is a hockey joke.”

“I’m more of a baseball fan myself,” he responded with a smile. “But hopefully, our hockey fans are better than that. Was there a game tonight? Did you go?”

New York was such a big city that Ilya Rozanov, God’s gift to hockey, was truly just an anonymous man sprawled out on a sidewalk, bleeding. Amazing.

After that, things went quickly. They were careful with his arm, putting it in a splint, but it still screamed at him every time it was moved. The paramedics had also placed some gauze on his face — road rash, Ric had said — and Ilya was very much not thinking about what his face looked like. He did muse that it was probably a good thing that photo shoot for the fancy watch had already happened.

Face might be ruined.

Face might never be kissable again.

Good game.

He needed to respond to that text.

He was put on a backboard, something he had never experienced on the ice, and put into the back of the ambulance. He did not scream out loud though, even as his arm was jostled and his side burned. He was a good Russian hockey player. At some point, an IV was started in his other arm, and they had pushed some mild pain relief. He looked at the orange-gray sky one more time and then the doors closed and New York disappeared.

The ambulance was loud and very bright and smelled like antiseptic. Ric, the paramedic across from him, was doing things with an efficiency Ilya recognized from athletic trainers, from team doctors, a sense of urgency and calm mixed together into a ballet. It felt soothing in a way he could not quite describe.

He closed his eyes for a moment as the jostling of the ambulance through the streets made him nauseous. Ric, apparently, took offense to that, and shook his shoulder.

“Ilya, buddy, keep your eyes open. Talk to me, how are you doing, how’s the pain?”

Ilya considered his arm. “Not good,” he said honestly.

“Right.” Ric responded, doing something with the IV. “Any nausea?”

“Little bit,” he said. “Normal.”

The paramedic nodded, made a note, and then said something into a radio in fast, clipped language. Ilya caught his own name, a radial fracture, and something else that he didn’t quite catch because the word radial fracture had arrived and sat down heavily in the center of his brain and was now taking up all available space.

Radial fracture. Did that mean bone outside of the body?

His brain, which had been very cooperative up until this point, distancing himself neatly from the horror of being flung across 10th Avenue by a yellow cab, decided to catch up all at once.

His arm. His actual arm. His right arm, his shooting arm, the arm that had been doing exactly what he needed it to do for twenty-eight years without complaint, that had the particular muscle memory of ten thousand shots on goal and ten thousand more in practice, that knew without thinking how hard to pass and when to hold and the exact angle of a wrist shot that had been beating goalies since he was fifteen years old.

Radial fracture.

“How bad,” Ilya said.

The paramedic looked at him. “The doctors will—”

“I am a professional hockey player,” Ilya said, and heard himself, and under any other circumstances this would have been very funny to say out loud because of course he was a professional hockey player. He was Ilya Rozanov. But right now it felt like the only relevant fact in the universe. “My arm. How bad is a radial fracture? I heard you say it.”

“The doctors at the hospital are going to give you a full assessment—”

“This is not an answer.”

“I know,” the paramedic said, not unkindly. “I know it’s not. But it’s the honest one right now. Okay?”

Ilya breathed. In through the nose, out slowly. His team was in Boston. They had practice tomorrow. They had a game in two days, a back-to-back, and then a roadie that was going to be annoying. He was supposed to be on the ice tomorrow. He was supposed to tap the doorframe twice and be on the first flight tomorrow back to Boston, and then step onto the ice and be Rozanov, which was something he knew how to do, something he had always known how to do, and instead he was—

Breathe. Said a voice in his head that was not his own, but that anchored him to the deep. 

He breathed.

The nausea was getting worse. Amped up by his panic, he could only assume. He breathed through it. A car hit him, he was in an ambulance, nausea was allowed.

“Cliff Marleau,” he said. “Boston Bears. Can someone call him?”

“We’ll get your phone from your belongings when we arrive—”

“He needs to know.” Ilya paused. Cliff needed to know before anyone else did, before it came from somewhere else, before Cliff heard it from a reporter or saw it on his phone and had to wonder. Cliff, who had decided to worry about the loud-mouthed Russian since his rookie season. Who had peeled him out of bars and clubs and Chinatown dumpling shops that filled Diet Coke cans with beer after hours. He would definitely think Ilya had done something dumb to end up in this mess.

“We’ll make sure he’s contacted,” Ric assured him. “I promise.”

Ilya nodded. The ambulance hit a bump and the pain in his arm went white for a second and he went back to breathing.

The nausea was even worse now. Still fine. He was almost certain.

The emergency room was nothing like television. Brighter, louder, more people moving with the specific purposeful energy of people who had somewhere to be that was more important than wherever they currently were. Someone took over from the paramedics with the practiced ease of a line change, information transferring in shorthand — Ilya caught his name, radial fracture, blunt force — and then he was moving again, ceiling tiles going past overhead.

The doctor was quick and thorough and asked him the questions he’d already answered twice. Name, date, what happened. Ilya answered all of them. She listened to his chest. She pressed carefully along his right arm in a way that made him very glad for whatever they’d put in the IV. She asked about the arm, and he told her everything he knew.

And then her hands moved to his abdomen.

“Tell me about the stomach pain,” she said. Her voice was the same as it had been for the arm. Professionally neutral. Ilya was good at reading people, and she was not giving him much to read.

“It is fine,” Ilya said. “Little sore. Car hit me.”

“On a scale of—”

“Five,” he said. “Maybe five and a half.”

She pressed gently on his side. Ilya screamed. 

Fuck

She nodded and said something to the person behind her, and this time Ilya caught it.

Get me CT, now.

Not schedule CT. Not let’s get imaging when we can.

Now.

Ilya looked at the ceiling and thought about his arm, and his team, and practice tomorrow. He thought about it very deliberately, because thinking about those things was better than thinking about the way she’d said now, and the way everyone in the room seemed be humming at a frequency now that said we might be in trouble here.

His stomach hurt.

It was fine. It was probably fine.

It was maybe not entirely fine.

“Ilya.” The doctor was back at his side. “We’re going to get you into CT. I want to take a look at a few things. Your arm we’re going to deal with — that’s not going anywhere — but first I want to figure out what’s going on with your abdomen. Okay?”

“Okay,” Ilya said.

He was fine. His stomach hurt, and everyone was moving very fast, and he was absolutely fine.

“Is there someone we can contact?” she asked. “Family?”

Family. A joke. Who to call? His brother? His stepmother, Polina? His father, in a facility outside Moscow, who on his best days knew Ilya’s voice and on his worst days knew nothing at all? His mother, sleeping beneath hard, cold Russian soil? He thought about all of these options and what each of them would mean, the calls that would have to be made, the things that would have to be explained, and he felt very tired.

“My teammate,” he said. “Cliff Marleau. He’s in Boston.” He swallowed. The nausea was now a five. “And—”

He stopped.

The doctor waited.

Everything was spinning now. Everything was out of his control. A car had hit him. A car.

His stomach hurt and his arm — god his arm was still piercing through everything and Ilya was afraid if he looked at it he would see bone and for some reason there was something he wanted, and for once, just for once, he wanted it and maybe that was selfish but he didn’t care. The lights were so bright and he wanted to close his eyes and be gone from all of this, and more than anything, more than anything at all —

“Shane Hollander,” Ilya said. “Number is in my phone. As Jane. Joke.” He paused. “He will come.”

He said it with a certainty he didn’t examine. He almost immediately regretted saying it but didn’t take it back.

The doctor nodded, unaware of the earthquake of information she had just been handed. God bless New Yorkers who didn’t care about hockey. “Okay. We’ll make those calls.” She touched his arm briefly, the good one. “You’re doing great.”

“I am just lying here,” Ilya said. “It is not hard.”

She almost smiled. Then she was gone and the ceiling was moving again and Ilya went into the CT machine and stared at the white curved interior of it and and tried not to panic.

His stomach hurt quite a lot now.

He thought about nothing.

He thought about Shane. He thought about if he would come. He closed his eyes and didn’t think what it meant that he hoped he would. 

He didn’t remember, later, exactly when they told him about his spleen. He remembered coming back from the CT, pain spiking more and more, every breath a new wave of agony. He remembered fast talking all around him about his blood pressure and his heart rate.  

He remembered the doctor’s face, which had changed from professionally neutral to carefully serious in a way that told him things were bad before her words did. He remembered the phrase internal bleeding landing somewhere in his chest. He remembered thinking, distantly, that he had never once in his life considered his spleen, had lived twenty-eight years in complete indifference to its existence, and now apparently it was the most important thing in the room.

“We need to go in,” she said. “We can save it — we think we can save it — but we need to move quickly. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Ilya said.

“We’ll need your consent—”

“Yes,” he said again.

“Is there anything you want us to tell the people we’re contacting? Hollander, Marleau—”

“Tell Cliff—” He stopped. Tell Cliff what? That he was sorry for not being on the plane. That he should have just gone back to Boston like a normal person instead of walking around New York in February thinking about things he couldn’t fix. That he was captain and he was supposed to be there tomorrow and he was very sorry that he wasn’t going to be. “Tell him I am fine,” Ilya said. “Tell him not to — tell him I am fine.”

The doctor nodded.

“And Shane—” Ilya looked at the ceiling.

Shane, please come because I am the world’s best hockey player and an Admiral tried to take me out and you must protect me. 

Shane, please come because they are talking about an organ I didn’t even know I had until 5 minutes ago and I know you will do much Googling and learn many things for me. 

Shane, please come, because I am scared and sometimes in those moments when we are alone and I have not yet sent you away out of fear, I look into your eyes and feel safe. 

Shane, please come because I do not know how to be brave right now.

His stomach hurt enormously, and his arm hurt enormously, and in a few minutes, apparently, someone was going to do something about his spleen, which was a sentence he had never expected to be true. “Just tell him to come. He will understand.”

At least, he hoped he would.

“Ready?” the doctor asked.

Not at all. He thought about his team and Cliff’s face, always checking to make sure Ilya had his feet on the ground. He thought about the orange-gray New York sky and Good game, still sitting unanswered in his pocket. He thought about freckles and a hope that was burning in his chest without his permission that he would not wake up alone like he had woken up alone so many times before.

“Ready,” he said.

Liar.

Chapter End Notes

Says she has whole story pre-written; rewrites whole second chapter and takes a week.

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

Ilya awoke, suddenly, disorderly, one moment not here and then the next moment here, and he whimpered a little without really meaning too. 

Hospital. He reminded himself. Admirals fan. Unfair, but that would be the story, better than maybe I didn’t look both ways. He was pretty sure he had looked both ways. 

Arm. Spleen. Surgery. 

Shane. 

At that last thought Ilya blinked open his eyes. Better not to linger there. Better not to have false hope. 

He took in his setting. He was flat on his back. There was something in his left arm — an IV line taped down with medical precision. His right arm was immobilized, elevated, held away from his body at an angle that felt foreign and wrong. His abdomen he became aware of slowly — a deep, dull ache, not sharp, the kind that sat under everything else and didn’t move. Not pain though. He wondered how you would know if that’s the ache of being an organ down or an organ saved?

He couldn’t help but wonder if you needed all of your organs to play hockey. Feels like you mostly only needed heart and arms and lungs and legs. Others were extra. 

So IV in good arm. Brace on bad arm. Organ placement to be determined later. 

His mouth tasted like something had died in it.

He was alive. He noted this last and held it for a moment.

A nurse appeared at the edge of his vision and he turned his head, which was slower than he expected. She was maybe thirty, dark hair pulled back, with a soft smile on her face, and she leaned down to speak with him.

“Mr. Rozanov.” Her voice was calm and clear and not too loud. “Can you hear me okay?”

“Yes,” he said. His voice came out strange. Rough and far away. He went to clear his throat and even that small movement sent reverbs of pain through him.

“Good. Do you know where you are?”

“Hospital,” he said. “New York.”

“That’s right.” She was checking him over, the monitor, her eyes moving between him and the readings. “You came out of surgery about an hour ago. Do you remember going into surgery?”

He remembered the ceiling tiles moving. He remembered a doctor’s face, serious and calm, and the word spleen and the phrase we think we can save it arriving one after the other in a way he hadn’t loved. He remembered saying ready when he wasn’t sure he was.

“Yes,” he said.

“Good.” She checked a thing at his side - no wait, going into his side - with efficient hands — “that’s a drain,” she said, without him asking, “completely normal, it’ll come out in a day or two. I always recommend trying not to think about it too much” — noted something, moved to the monitor again. “I’m going to ask you a few more questions and then I’ll let you rest. Can you tell me what month it is?”

“February,” he said.

“And the year?”

He told her. She nodded, made a small note.

“The surgeon was able to save your spleen,” she said, while she worked. Still speaking quietly. Not a whisper but close to it. Soothing, but also a little irritating because Ilya had to focus to follow along and make sure he heard. “The surgery went very well. You’re very lucky. Your arm has been stabilized — the orthopedic team will talk to you about next steps when you’re a little more with it.” She looked at him

“Oh.” A full body chill of relief went through him, and a pit in his chest released it’s grip. “Good. Spleen important, yes?”

The nurse laughed in spite of herself, a small smile gracing her serious face. “Yes, very good. That doesn’t mean we won’t keep an eye on it. Any pain right now? Scale of one to ten.”

Ilya took stock. His arm hurt — a deep, steady throb, worse than before, the anesthesia wearing off and making itself known. His abdomen was harder to quantify, more presence than pain. He wondered if organs felt pain. “Five,” he said. That was only a little lie.

She looked at him, eyes narrowed, a look he had seen before that meant I take no bullshit. It comforted him in a way. “We can adjust your pain management if you need it. Don’t try to tough it out.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Any questions?”

He had approximately forty questions. He found the one he could ask. “My teammate,” he said. “Cliff Marleau. Boston Bears. Someone was going to—”

“Yes. I believe someone is outside waiting to see you.”

Cliff. Trusty Cliff. Who still thought of Ilya as his responsibility. Like a barn cat grabbing a kitten by the scruff to make sure they took a nap. He had always used his extra five inches to steer Ilya towards better choices. Of course he was here. Had he turned around right at they had landed? 

He would not be disappointed that it was Cliff that was here.

He wouldn’t.

In his head, Ilya knew that Shane would not come. He was too deeply invested in the price of secrets to cash the check for a panicked plea in the middle of the night.

In fairness, Ilya was not sure he would come if roles were reversed. He was selfish like that. Less scared, but more selfish. It was a good yin and yang, them two. They were only good in dark hotel rooms, not hospitals. 

“We’re going to get you settled into a room,” the nurse continued, blissfully unaware of the war of expectations currently occurring within her patient’s head and heart.

“And then your friend can come in, okay?”

Ilya nodded and before he could really control it he was tumbling back down into sleep, soothed by the gentle movements of the competent hands of the nurse preparing him for transfer.

Ilya woke sometime later, in a real room. It was still dark, only light really coming from the gap in the door frame to outside. The windows — he had windows now, how nice — spoke to either still the depths of night for the city that never slept, or to a brick wall, another feature of New York Ilya despised.

There was someone in here with him, a burly figure sitting in the chair beside the bed, fiddling with his hands in the dark.

Marley does not fidget was Ilya’s first thought before thought caught up to heart and took his breath away.

Oh.

He came.

Hollander. Shane. There. In the chair.

Looking unmoored and unkempt, wearing the clothes of a man who had been called in the waning hours of a day and been told something he wasn’t even sure he had know to be afraid to hear.

Someone you love is in danger.

How had they told him, Ilya wondered. How dramatic had they been? Minor bumps and bruises or the end is nigh? Come with haste like an Austen letter or please respond in 4 to 5 business days like the financial entities they sometimes were.

Had he already been asleep? His boring Shane with his boring early bedtime? Ilya couldn’t remember if Montreal had played yesterday — was today now yesterday? Or was today still today? The hazing blur of sleep and pain and anesthesia was keeping him from an anchor of a day.

But there he was. In a Montreal hoodie with the drawstring in his mouth and his eyes staring at his hands fidgeting in the dark.

Ilya went to say hello but all that came out was a croak. Not dignified. Not a way to meet a…whatever they were. But that croak was enough to startle Shane out of his trance. His eyes darted up to Ilya’s face and a thousand emotions in a millisecond crossed over his face. Ilya would be translating that millisecond for the rest of his life.

Ilya looked back.

“Jesus. Hey,” Shane said, dropping the drawstring out of his mouth and leaning forward in the chair. 

“Hey,” Ilya replied, staring back at him. 

“I…” Ilya tried to start and stopped. What was there to say? 

“Yeah,” Shane responded. And then, with a small smile, “you look awful.”

Ilya huffed out a laugh and then winced at the movement, “yes, well, car hit me. Good excuse.” 

“Fair.”

This was awkward. Awkward in the dark, and they were never awkward in the dark, in the dark he knew how their bodies moved together. Ilya did not like this. This was his fault. 

“You did not have to come,” Ilya said, in way of apology. 

I’m sorry I was scared and you have always been a compass north.

“I know,” Shane said. Solid.

“I asked to come, yes, but…” Ilya started. “I was not… before surgery, I was not entirely…” not entirely what? Scared? Hopeful? Worried that words like blood loss and organ removal meant he wanted a small piece of stability he didn’t even really have.  Wanted it here with him.  Wanted an anchor in a port, an eye in a storm, someone who was there for him and knew him. He couldn’t say any of that. He didn’t even know if he had those words in English. Wasn’t sure he had them in Russian either. 

He found the version he could say. “I meant come in bed. Yes. Not come to me. Very dramatic, Hollander.” He wiggled an eyebrow for dramatic effect, trying to land the joke, to slide away from the sincerity of the original plea. Please come. 

Shane looked at him.

He didn’t laugh. Didn’t roll his eyes. Didn’t call him an asshole and take the exit Ilya had built for him. He just looked at Ilya for a moment with an expression Ilya was not going to name, and then he reached out and took Ilya’s left hand — the good one — and held it.

He didn’t say anything.

Ilya looked at the ceiling. Shane’s hand was warm and there, solid and unhurried, and the machines beeped, and the light was now coming in yellowish and dim through his window, and Ilya kept looking at the ceiling because looking at Shane right now would require something he didn’t have the reserves for. He could feel tears gathering in his eyes and was mortified at the thought of them falling.

“Thank you,” Ilya said, very quietly. To the ceiling.

Shane held his hand and didn’t say anything, but squeezed tighter for a moment, and Ilya felt two tears fall, quickly, down the side of his face. Shane didn’t let go, but brought his other hand up to wipe them away.

Ilya closed his eyes. The storm had been going for hours — the sidewalk, the sirens, the bright lights and the ceiling tiles moving and the words we think we can save it — and now, inexplicably, here was the harbor. Solid ground. Someone who knew where he was and could keep him there. 

He stayed there for a while, in the quiet, in the dark, safe, in Shane Hollander’s hands.

“How are you feeling,” Shane said breaking the silence, quietly. Hand still held.

“Spleen,” Ilya said, to the ceiling, for lack of a better answer. 

Shane’s thumb moved, slightly, against his hand.

“Still in body,” Ilya said. “They weren’t sure if that was going to be true for a moment.” He took a breath, “Was scary.”

“It is scary,” Shane said quietly. “I was scared, when I got the call. They didn’t tell me a lot, but they said you had to have emergency surgery.”

“I still have it — my spleen. Not sure you can play hockey without one.”

“I’m not even sure what a spleen does,” Shane quietly admitted.

Ilya huffed a laugh. “No, I don’t know either.”

“Though I bet if anyone could have still played without an organ it would have been you.”

Ilya hummed in agreement, his eyes closing without his approval. “Hmm, yes, still better than all of you, even without important spleen that does very important things.”

“The most important. Sleep. I’ll look it up while you rest.”

Before he could stop himself, embarrass himself, he asked, “You’ll be here when I wake up?”

Shane squeezed the hand he had still not let go of. “Yeah, I’ll be here when you wake up.”

Chapter End Notes

This chapter brought to you by minimal proofreading and too many ship metaphors.

Chapter 4

Chapter Summary

Shane Hollander’s odyssey to Ilya’s bedside. And Cliff arrives and has to adopt another hockey player

Chapter Notes

Ilya didn't wake up so much as he was thrown back into his skin.

One second he was nowhere and the next, he was back on that New York sidewalk. He could hear it again: the sudden, wet snap of his own body, the screech of tires that hadn't reacted in time, and the terrifying, heavy rush of displaced air as two tons of metal decided he was in the way.

He jerked, a violent, uncoordinated twitch that sent a white-hot flare of agony through his abdomen. His breath hitched, turning into a jagged, panicked sound in his throat.

"Ilya. Ilya, hey. You’re okay."

The voice was low, rough from lack of sleep, and hit him before the sterile hospital light did. Ilya felt a hand, warm and solid, wrap around his good arm, pinning him gently to the mattress. He blinked, his vision a smear of grays and clinical whites until it finally caught on Shane.

Shane looked terrible. He was still in the Montreal hoodie he'd arrived in, the drawstring he’d chewed fraying, his eyes tracing Ilya’s face with a focus that was too intense to be anything but fear.

"Breathe," Shane murmured, his thumb rubbing a steady, grounding rhythm against Ilya’s wrist. "You’re in the hospital. You had surgery. You’re safe. It’s just me and some really bad coffee."

The panic ebbed. Slowly. His breath found its rhythm again, his vision sharpening from smear to clarity. Shane’s thumb kept moving against his wrist. Steady. Unhurried. Like he had nowhere else to be and nothing else to do. 

Ilya looked at him.

Shane looked back.

“Bad dream,” Ilya said. Not a question. Maybe an apology. 

“Yeah, I bet.” Shane said.

They stayed like that for a moment, Shane’s hand still on his arm, the machines beeping, the morning coming in through the window. Ilya breathed. In and out. The sidewalk receded. The screech of tires receded. The fear he wouldn’t name receded. The hospital room came back into full focus and stayed there.

“You look terrible,” Ilya said, a little desperate to gain some control. 

“You look worse,” Shane said, a small smile on his face. 

“I was hit by car and had surgery,” Ilya said. “You just sat in chair all night. Very different situations.”

“Jesus, Rozanov, it’s not a competition.”

“Mmhm, yes only because you are losing?”

“The chair was extremely uncomfortable. Probably the worst lumbar support ever.” Shane offered, mostly because he had never backed down from a fight with Rozanov before and wasn’t going to start now. 

Ilya looked at him. “You could have—”

“I know,” Shane said. “I didn’t want to.”

The nurse who came in for morning rounds was older than the night nurse, efficient in a different key. She had a clear plastic bag with her that she set on the table beside the bed.

“Mr. Rozanov. Good morning. My name’s Nancy. ” She looked at him with the assessing eye of someone who had already checked his chart and was now checking it against the reality of him. “How are we feeling?”

“Like I was hit by car,” Ilya said.

“Mm.” She didn’t even roll her eyes, which Ilya was slightly offended by. She was already moving, checking the drain, the IV line, the monitor. “What about pain? On a scale of one to ten.”

“Six,” Ilya said. “Maybe five and a half.”

She gave him the look. He was becoming very familiar with the look. It appeared all the nurses in New York has been taught it “We can adjust—”

“I am good for now,” Ilya said. “Thank you.”

She noted something and picked up the plastic bag and set it on the bed beside him. “Your personal effects from the ER. Including your phone. It’s been going off quiet a bit, so I wanted to make sure it got back to you. Something tells me you have quiet a few worried people.”

As if the phone could hear, it lit up inside the plastic bag. A moment later, a subtle vibration shimmered and rustled the bag. 

“Thank you.” The nurse only hummed, and finished her round of checks. She left the room with a promise of the doctors coming by sometime in the morning. 

Then they were alone again, but with a phone that continued to vibrate and light up often. Ilya reached for it, but grimaced at the tug to his incision site. Abs will be ruined by this. Men of Boston Annual Calendar will be so sad. He thought to himself, while he summoned the courage and the strength to reach again for the phone through the pain and uncomfortableness. 

However, before he could reach again, Shane moved instead, reaching across the bed, and opened the bag, and pulled out the phone. He tapped it live and quietly swore.

“She wasn’t kidding. 92 unread message. 20 missed calls…well, uhm, 5 of those are from me, so you don’t have to bother with those.” He blushed without realizing it, freckles standing out even more beneath the rosy hue. “I can’t see who else, but you should probably check it out.”

The thought of it overwhelmed Ilya. It warmed him that people cared, but the idea of having to relive the last 10 hours over and over again to placate and soothe others was more than was able to take at the moment. He closed his eyes and didn’t accept the phone from Shane. 

Shane noticed, in the way he could often did, eyes scanning for the puck and for hesitation in others. He glanced down at the phone still in his hand as it vibrated again. 

“Cliff this time. I can read it, if that helps?” He asked, hesitantly. Was this a step too far?

“Please.” Ilya replied, opening his eyes and looking over at Shane.  

“Passcode?” Shane said quietly.

“Two four eight one,” Ilya said.

Shane’s fingers hesitated over the touch pad, and then, not with a smile, but with whatever comes before a smile, he typed in two sets of numbers he knew better than his birthdate. 

“Oh wow.” Shane let out a breath. “Cliff is, uhm, i think happy you are alive? Or he might be furious you are alive. It is a little hard to tell?”

Ilya closed his eyes. “How many times does he say do not die.”

Shane scrolled. “Three.” A pause. “Four if you count I will end you myself which I think—”

“Counts,” Ilya said.

“Counts.” Shane agreed, “Oh interesting, I didn’t know you could spell that like that.” He provided no additional context as he continued to scroll, but that made Ilya chuckle. Marley and spell check were more famous rivals than Hollander / Rozanov. 

Another pause, longer. “Last text says he’s ten minutes out.”

Ten minutes.

Shane set the phone down. Screen down. He picked up his coffee. He looked at the window. He looked at Ilya, and the morning was in the room between them, and neither of them said anything for a moment.

“I’m going to step out,” Shane said. “Give you some space when he gets here.”

Ilya looked at him.

There was the version of this where he said you don’t have to and the version where he said okay and the version where he said something true, which was not available to him, not here, not like this, maybe not ever. 

“Okay,” he said.

Shane stood. Put his jacket on. He came to the side of the bed and looked at Ilya for a moment and then leaned down and pressed a kiss briefly to Ilya’s forehead and whispered, “I’m so glad you’re okay,” and left the room.

The door swung shut behind him. Ilya listened to his footsteps walk away and wondered if he’d ever see him again. 

When Shane looks back on the last ten hours, he’s not quite sure he knows how he got here.

The day had started with an easy win in Philly, Montreal taking the game 2-0. Some of the guys had rallied to go out to the local spots, but Shane, like most nights, waved them off to watch game tape and go to bed early. He had almost been asleep for an hour when his phone buzzed him awake. He blearily checked the time, 9:15, and briefly considered ignoring the unknown number before swiping accept and putting the phone to his ear.

The woman on the other end had a calm, practiced voice. The kind of calm that had been learned rather than felt. She introduced herself — Sarah, from NewYork-Presbyterian — and Shane’s brain had gone, as it always did with unknown numbers at strange hours, immediately home. His mother. His father. Something wrong somewhere that couldn’t wait.

And then she said the name. Ilya Rozanov asked us to call you. 

Shane had sat up in the Philadelphia dark and felt something shift in him that he didn’t have a word for yet, something that rearranged quietly and completely while he was still trying to catch up to it.

He asked questions. She answered them carefully, in the measured way of someone trained to give enough without giving too much. He heard accident and surgery and internal bleeding and found the word stable and clung onto it. He wasn’t quiet sure what he was to do with this information. What do you do when you’re…friend that you sleep with sometimes when you’re in the same city is hurt? Send flowers? 

And then she said he asked for you specifically, before he went in and something in Shane’s chest cracked open just a little, just enough, and he stopped asking questions and started moving. Philly was close enough to New York. He said he would be there shortly, hung up, and worked the problem. 

He had almost been too late for the last train out of 30th Street.

He’d packed in four minutes — he was a hockey player, he lived out of bags, this part at least he knew how to do — and gotten in a cab and made it to the platform with minutes to spare, his heart still doing something irregular in his chest that he was choosing not to examine too closely. The train car was nearly empty. A few other people, but everyone with their heads down, headphone in, not making eye contract with anyone else. Shane found a window seat and sat down and looked at his phone.

He played the nurse’s words back. Spleen laceration. Complex fracture. Emergency surgery. He played them back again, trying to locate the edges of them, what they meant exactly, what they didn’t mean. And then he opened his browser and typed spleen laceration and read, because reading was something to do and doing something was better than sitting in the dark on a train to New York thinking about all the things he hadn’t thought through before he’d gotten on it.

The team he had left in Philly. Practice tomorrow. The fact that he had no real explanation for any of this that he could give to anyone. The fact that he hadn’t thought about any of that until just now, hadn’t even hesitated, had just — moved, toward Ilya, the way you moved toward something when you weren’t thinking about whether you should.

He read about spleens. He read about radial fractures and recovery timelines and return to play protocols and absorbed all of it in the distracted way of someone whose brain was elsewhere, filing information it didn’t quite believe it was going to need.

He had asked for him.

He must be so scared.

Shane put his phone face down on his knee and looked out the window at the dark Pennsylvania landscape giving way to New Jersey and thought about that — about Ilya in a hospital, Ilya who was never scared, or never showed it, or showed it in ways that most people didn’t recognize as fear. Shane recognized it. Had been recognizing it for years, the particular tells, the way the jokes came faster when something was wrong, the way Ilya got very still right before he did something that cost him.

He must be so scared.

And he had asked for Shane.

Shane picked his phone back up and went back to reading about spleens, because it was better than sitting with what that meant for the rest of the train ride.

He learned what a spleen did, at least. Funny little organ. 

He was going to tell Ilya what a spleen did. He was holding onto that specific future moment like a small, manageable promise.

Visiting hours. Fuck.

He hadn’t even thought of that. Had only thought about all the movements and tickets and choices he had needed to make to get here, and hadn’t stopped for a second to consider that he would be denied entrance once he arrived.

Please, he said. They told me he was hurt.  Which sounded dumb even as he said it, of course he was hurt, he was in the hospital, but he said it anyway because bigger words were failing him right now. His fingers were worrying at the seam of his pants as he talked to the no-nonsense woman behind the desk, wondering if he was about to sit in the lobby of this hospital for the next seven hours. He had pulled a black hat low over his head, not stupid enough to brazenly wear Voyageurs gear, but now he wondered if he could have thrown his weight around — though in New York he reckoned he was pretty low on the totem pole of privilege, even within the sports ecosystem. Maybe Scott Hunter would have some weight. Maybe he should call him. Yeah, and maybe he should out himself to the whole MHL while he was at it.

Please, he said again. He asked for me. I came from Philly. I just — I just need to see him.

Something moved in the cold face of the woman seated behind the desk. A softening, maybe. Hopefully.

She picked up her phone and made a call, and Shane stood at the desk and looked at his shoes and waited, and a few minutes later a nurse appeared — older, unhurried, with the assessing look of someone who had seen a lot of people in a lot of states in a lot of hospital lobbies at one in the morning. She looked at Shane. At the hat tucked low over his face, at his eyes darting back and forth desperate to be let in but also afraid to be seen. At the hands that weren’t quite still.

She didn’t ask who he was.

She just said follow me and turned toward the elevator, and Shane followed her, and she told him on the way up that Ilya was sleeping and he was to let him sleep, and that he was a little banged up and she wanted to prepare him for that. The drain. The IV. The various tubes and beeps and chirps that meant he was alive and well taken care of. Shane nodded at all of it.

At the door she paused. It can be scary, she said, to see someone you care for this way. But he came through the surgery beautifully and is going to be just fine.

Shane nodded again and went in.

He had heard people say that people look small in hospital beds. He had never really gotten it. Even now it wasn’t that Ilya was small. It was that he was still.

Ilya Rozanov was never still. He was the (second) fastest player in the league. He was a million little ticks and idiosyncratic movements, winking and smart talking and movement and grace and sheer relentless aliveness. He was never still.

And yet.

There he was.

Road rash across his face, some of it bandaged, some of it not, and Shane wasn’t fully tracking the rhyme or reason there. The arm, immobilized, strapped against his chest in a sling Shane knew Ilya would hate. The drain at his side that the nurse had warned him about. The IV.  So many parts of this were wrong. But he was there. He was alive. 

Shane found the chair and sat down heavily.  It felt like he hadn’t breathed in hours. 

He sat there for a long time. He went back to his phone at some point and read more things he didn’t need to read, and then he put it down and just looked at Ilya, and thought about what the nurse had said — he came through beautifully, he’s going to be just fine — and needed Ilya to wake up and prove it. To move a little. To say something dry and deflecting and completely himself.

And yet. 

He was so still.

He sat in the chair all night and watched Ilya breathe. He didn’t know what he would actually do when he awoke, and even more what he would do when the morning really came and every decision he made in the last ten hours came home to roost. 

But Ilya was breathing. 

That had to matter enough for now. 

He had left Ilya’s room because he had to. He had to keep reminding himself of that. Cliff Marlow walking in to his Captain’s hospital room and finding Shane Hollander there before visiting hours, when Shane Hollander hadn’t even played a game in that city the day before? That was too much. That was way too much, honestly, even for them, even for this, even for whatever this was.

So he’d said he was stepping out and he’d found the elevator and pressed two and now here he was.

He wasn’t even sure he was ever going to go back upstairs.

The coffee had been hot when he sat down. It wasn’t anymore.’

It was a battle between his head and his heart as he sat in the cafeteria. One was saying that this was enough, he had seen Ilya and now it was time to go. Before he got caught, seen, scandalized, tarred and feathered. The other was saying that Ilya still looked rumpled and unwell in the morning light, and Shane still felt like half of his self was in that room, and how could he leave without a hundred more reassurances that everything was okay?

It was warring inside him — a tempest in a teacup — as he stirred lukewarm coffee the color of the polluted East River after a storm, and that tasted like it too. He looked up every so often to see who else was coming into the cafeteria this early, what other early morning pilgrims there were. Mostly overnight staff that looked even more bedraggled than he did, and maintenance and cleaning staff sitting quietly on their phones.

He should leave. He knew he should leave. Cliff was with Ilya now. Shane could only assume that the Bear’s medical team wasn’t far behind, probably terrified at their playoff chances with Ilya horizontal on a bed. Shane had practice and a team and a life that existed somewhere other than this table, this room, this hospital. He had come, and Ilya was stable, and he had sat in the chair all night, and that was already more than he could explain to anyone, including himself.

And then Cliff Marlow walked in and locked eyes on Shane Hollander immediately.

If I run out of this room like a bad action movie that will look even worse was all Shane could think before Cliff had made his way across the room in long strides. God, he forgot how tall Cliff was, even off the ice.

Maybe I have a dying grandmother or a wounded cat or I killed someone.

Maybe I visit New York hospitals in my spare time? 

Maybe I am considering a career change? 

Cliff was dressed in athletic pants and a nondescript quarter zip, charcoal grey that washed him out in the overhead fluorescent lights. He didn’t even say hello before he pulled out the chair across from Shane and sat down, his eyes locked on Shane’s.

“Hollander.” Cliff grunted. 

“Marlow.” Shane responded, almost swallowing the greeting. 

They looked at each other for a moment, the cafeteria humming quietly around them, and Shane became very aware of how he must look. The hat. The clothes from yesterday. The cold coffee he’d been stirring without drinking. There was no easy way to explain this and Shane’s heart was pounding in his chest. 

Here’s the thing about Cliff Marlow. He was a tall left wing with a penchant for redheads, spicy food, and keeping Ilya Rozanov (mostly) out of trouble. He had never met a three syllable word he hadn’t misspelled and had lost his phone, his wallet and his dignity several times in the same night.

But Cliff Marlow was not dumb.

“How’s the coffee?”

“Uh.” Shit. Shit. Okay. “Bad?”

“I figured.”

“Uh… what are you…?” Wait. Cliff was supposed to be with Ilya. The whole reason Shane had left the room - had left maybe forever - was because Cliff was supposed to be in the room with him. What had happened? Did Cliff look worse because Ilya had gotten worse? Did Cliff look worried? Was Ilya back in emergency surgery? Would Ilya ask for him again?

“Hollander. Breathe. Early morning rounds and hygienic checks. They asked for the room for thirty minutes. Then they’ll let us both back in.”

Us.

Shane sat with that for a second. Just a second. The word and what it meant and what it assumed and what it offered, all at once, in one syllable, from a man who owed him nothing.

Us. US.

“Uhm. Look. Uhm. Marlow. It’s not. I mean, we, uhm.” Shit. Shane think. 

Cliff held up a hand, stopping Shane mid ramble. “Hollander. Stop. I have had the night from hell. I think you have too. I don’t care. I don’t want to care. If you’re here as a friend, or as a rival doing some serious psych ops bullshit, or even something more. I don’t care.”

“I’m not —”

“What? Not here for Roz? Who are you here for then, at the crack of dawn, before official visiting hours, huh?”

“My cat murdered my grandmother.” He blurted that out and then winced and closed his eyes and debated dying. Shane needed to sleep and then maybe jump off the roof of this building.

“Yeah I bet he did.” Cliff sighed. “Ugly Russian cats can kill a lot of grandmothers, if you’re not careful. They are way more trouble then they are worth. Adopt don’t shop my ass.”

Shane huffed out a laugh, “yeah, so much trouble.”

Cliff looked him over and then stood. “Look Hollander, I’m going to go grab my own cup of shitty coffee and add so much fucking sugar to it you will be able to hear the team nutritionist scream from here, because i fucking deserve it. And if you’re still here when I get back in two minutes, we can go back up together. There’s two chairs.”

Chapter End Notes

I tried something new and fun with this chapter but apologies if the format doesn’t work!

This chapter also brought to you by forehead kisses may you never die.

Chapter 5

Chapter Summary

Cliff was large and imposing, but he was also the eldest brother to so many sisters. He took the concept of brotherhood impossibly to heart, and at some point between Ilya being an annoying rookie and becoming captain, Cliff had adopted him as just another younger sibling. Ilya didn’t mind. It was nice to have a brother who reached out with open palms instead of closed fists.

Chapter Notes

Ilya used to think he knew what tired meant. He’d once played a grueling game at the Garden, gotten rip-roaring drunk to celebrate the win, and ended the night in Chinatown drinking beers hidden in coke cans, barely making it onto the plane the next morning for a roadie. But that didn't even begin to measure up to how he felt right now.

A kind, discreet nurse had helped clean him up, gently washing away the thick layer of road grime caked onto his skin. He was clean, but he wasn't refreshed. Instead, the lack of dirt just made him hyper-aware of how raw he felt underneath it, his body throbbing with a deep, sharp ache that he couldn't escape. He had never felt so entirely, hopelessly down-to-his-bones exhausted, but he refused to let himself sleep.

Embarrassing, he couldn't help but think.

It didn't help matters that the emotional tidal wave of Shane leaving had barely settled before Cliff walked in—Cliff, with his massive bulk and an aura of anxiety floating around him like a cartoon speech balloon.

"Rozzy," he breathed out, hustling into the room. "Holy actual fuck, my man."

Cliff was large and imposing, but he was also the eldest brother to so many sisters. He took the concept of brotherhood impossibly to heart, and at some point between Ilya being an annoying rookie and becoming captain, Cliff had adopted him as just another younger sibling. Ilya didn’t mind. It was nice to have a brother who reached out with open palms instead of closed fists.

Ilya watched Cliff drop his bag and come bedside, gently cupping the back of Ilya's neck to press their foreheads together.

"Hi," Ilya weakly replied.

Hollander kissed me on the forehead, he wanted to tell Cliff, the thought looping through his exhausted brain before he remembered that Hollander was a secret, and a forehead kiss was an even deeper one.

"Do not ever do that again," Cliff muttered, his head still pressed against his. He didn't pull away, just held him there in that heavy, stubborn hockey-player embrace, as if he could physically anchor Ilya to the bed and keep him from breaking any further.

"What, walk?" Ilya croaked.

Cliff didn't laugh. He just let out a long, shaky exhale, the hot breath puffing against Ilya’s cheek as the tension finally drained out of his massive shoulders. He gave the back of Ilya’s neck one final, anchoring squeeze before pulling back, wiping a hand aggressively over his face as he dropped heavily into the plastic bedside chair.

The chair groaned under his weight, a stark, normal sound in the quiet room. Cliff looked like he’d aged five years on the flight over, his face pale under his beard, but his hands were steady as he reached out to tuck the edge of the scratchy hospital blanket around Ilya's shoulder.

"Scare me like that. Jesus."

They hadn't had long before the nurses walked in, softly asking Cliff to make himself scarce for half an hour. Armed with a sticky note detailing where he could find a decent cup of coffee, Cliff was out the door, leaving Ilya to their ministrations.

Now here he was. Maybe not squeaky clean, but fresher. Still, the temporary comfort did nothing to ease the guilt; he felt bad that Cliff had been rushed out, and even worse that Shane had been forced to leave. But overriding all of it was the rising, vicious heat in his stomach and the relentless, deep ache in his arm.

His shooting arm.

Holy actual fuck, this was a disaster. Organs come and go, but his arm? His arm was everything.

The train of thought was cut short by a familiar vibration in the floorboards. The thing about Cliff was that he couldn't help but be loud. He was a loud left wing who had spent years yelling for the puck, delivering chirps that could be heard from the opposite rafters, and moving with thundering steps, as if his feet had never learned how to walk without the extra weight of hockey skates.

Which was to say, Ilya heard him coming from a mile away—Cliff clomping like the Budweiser horses down the sterile hospital hallway.

What was interesting to Ilya was that Cliff was chatting—again, the man was impossibly, without malice, without control, loud as fuck. How Cliff had already found a friend in the hospital at 7:30 in the morning was a mystery.

Unless.

Oh fuck.

This day.

Maybe the car should have killed him. It would be easier than this.

Cliff opened the door, holding it wide as—yep, just as Ilya had feared—Shane walked in right behind him.

"Rozzy," Cliff announced, "you are looking mighty fresh and clean."

Shane was staring at the linoleum like a badger. Or a beaver. Whatever dumb, nervous North American animal was always terrified of its own shadow, that was exactly what Shane looked like right now.

"And look who I found," Cliff continued cheerfully, entirely blind to the frantic, light-speed ping-pong of panic passing between the two of them. "Brought Hollander right back so he knew when the coast was clear. Which is good, because I'm the only one here who actually knows when the team doctors are arriving, and when certain people might need to... go visit their grandmothers."

Ilya’s exhausted brain stalled out entirely. "Your grandmother?" he asked, looking past Cliff straight at Shane.

Shane looked like he wanted the floorboards to swallow him whole. "Yeah. My grandmother."

"Please do not ask," Shane added quickly. He finally looked up, his eyes meeting Ilya’s, and despite the ache in his side and the terror in his arm, Ilya couldn't help the small, weak grin that tugged at his mouth. Oh, he was absolutely going to ask. But later.

Cliff clapped his hands together, effectively shattering the moment. "Good! Now that that's settled—Ilya Rozanov, what the actual fuck? Are you a complete idiot? Who gets hit by a fucking car?"

Cliff Marlow, ladies and gentlemen.

Sometimes things will always feel awkward. Like when you sleep with a girl and then sleep with her sister, and then they both end up being the sisters of a mediocre hockey player who gets sent back down to the AHL. Or when you are new to the country and keep forgetting that you cannot tip zero percent, even if the service was genuinely terrible, because Americans take it very personally.

But for some magical reason, Cliff Marlow and Shane Hollander sitting with Ilya Rozanov in his hospital room was not awkward at all.

There was talk about games, and talk about players, and talk about who had better stats in NHL 14. It was Ilya, obviously—he was on the cover.

Shane even appeared to relax, softening within the space. They weren't touching, but Cliff had strategically taken the seat furthest away from the bed, leaving the gap open so that, if they needed to, they could reach out and touch one another.

But there was only so long before Cliff's phone buzzed again. He grabbed it and grimaces.

"Right," he said, looking up. "Dr. Petrov says he's about thirty minutes out with traffic. So what I'm going to do is go find a bomb-ass breakfast sandwich from a bodega nearby, and then meet him in the lobby. Unfortunately," at this, he looked up and locked eyes with Shane, "the room should probably be empty when he gets up here."

"Yeah," Shane nodded. "Yeah."

Cliff stood to leave, looking at both of them. "I'm gonna say this once, even though I hope you know it already. I don't care. I love you, Rozzy, and that doesn't change, okay? And Hollander, whatever this is, I don't care—unless you break my boy's heart, and then all fucking bets are off."

"Jesus, Cliff," Ilya barks out a laugh.

"The shovel talk. Nice," Shane smiled, reaching out a hand to shake Cliff's. "Marlow, thank you. For it all."

"Nothing to thank."

And with that, he was gone.

Ilya wishes he could say that the next thirty minutes were monumental or dramatic or life-changing. Instead, all that happened was Shane went back to holding his hand while they talked about what proposed recovery plans looked like—and also absolutely nothing at all. And then Shane left for good, another forehead kiss left like an icy burn on his soul, echoing even as his back disappeared behind the door frame.

The pain medication top-off had been a blessing. It efficiently dulled the many pings across his body and let him relax enough to grab some sleep. Cliff had turned on the early morning news and kept up a quiet dialogue about the bullshit of what it must be like to live in New York City while Ilya dozed in and out for the next few hours. He and Cliff had roomed together many times over the years, and Ilya was more than used to falling asleep while Cliff rambled on and on near him—often to one of his many sisters back home in Connecticut. Ilya worried he had become dependent on the background noise of Cliff Marlow, and he would go to his grave before he ever said it out loud.

Petrov reappeared after a few hours, and he didn't come alone. He was joined by two other doctors: Dr. Okafor—"call me Dr. O"—and Dr. Chen, responsible for his spleen and his arm, respectively.

Dr. O was a lanky man who started off his update with another reminder of how lucky Ilya was that they had been able to save his spleen. Ilya just nodded, wondering if there was a minimum number of times they had to say it. Maybe for insurance reasons?

Dr. O then proceeded to say many words that amounted to: spleen still in body, the drain—which Ilya was actively trying not to think about at all—could probably come out in a day or two, spleen very important, Ilya will feel tired for a while.

Ilya nodded like a good boy and mentally subtracted at least two weeks from the proposed timeline.

But then, it was arm time.

Dr. Chen pulled up a tablet with his X-ray on it and kindly but factually explained the situation. Ilya didn't like it one bit.

Surgery, she said first. The fracture was displaced in a way that wasn't going to resolve itself; they needed to go in with plates and screws to give it the best possible chance at a full range of motion. Ilya nodded. He had gathered this. What he had not gathered, or had gathered and was refusing to fully accept, was what came next.

Three to four months minimum before a return to play.

"No? No. I have seen—" he started.

"Different fractures," she said simply, the rainbow badge on her lanyard catching the light as she shifted the tablet toward him. "I know what you're going to say. For some fractures, yes. Not this one."

Ilya looked at the X-ray. Two clean pieces of his radius. He looked at them for a long moment.

Dr. O cleared his throat gently. "Can I jump in here?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Look, if it was just the arm, we might be having a different conversation. Six weeks, maybe eight, we push hard in rehab, see what happens. But Ilya," he said his name like they'd known each other for years, which Ilya found he didn't mind, "you also have an organ healing. A slightly less important organ—"

Ah, Ilya thought. So someone finally admits it.

"—but an organ nonetheless. Your body right now is essentially being asked to run two construction projects at the same time with half the usual workforce. Something has to give. We don't get to choose what."

Ilya absorbed this. It made sense. He hated that it made sense.

"So," Petrov said, pushing off the wall and coming to stand at the foot of the bed, switching into the tone he used when the plan had already been decided and he was simply delivering it. "Here is what happens. Tomorrow morning, we bring you back to Boston. Our ortho team comes in, they do the surgery there—our guys, our facility, best possible outcome for range of motion. And then, Rozz," he met Ilya's eyes, "we take it day by day. Maybe your body surprises us. It has before." A pause. "But we do not rush this."

The playoff math ran through Ilya's head whether he wanted it to or not. February. Three months was May. Four was June. Playoffs ran through June. The rest of the season. 

He was nodding. He was being a good patient. He was listening and asking the right questions because that was what you did. You nodded and accepted the sentence and didn’t ask for Cliff to hold his hand like Shane had just so he didn’t feel like the world was spinning away from him. 

Dr. O and Dr. Chen said the right things and left. Petrov lingered at the door.

"Get some sleep, Ilyusha," he said in Russian. "You're going to need it."

And then he was gone. Cliff turned the television down, the room settled into its quiet, and Ilya lay in the middle of it. He looked at the ceiling and thought about three to four months, and June, and his arm, and Boston. And Shane—always Shane—in whatever corner of his mind he was currently occupying.

Home, he thought.

Home sounded like it was going to be a bitch to get to. And home meant conversations. About the Bears’ salary cap with a useless captain.

The trade deadline was in five days.

Ilya slept two hours.

Chapter End Notes

I got distracted halfway through this update with the plot bunny for another fic where Shane needs a kidney transplant and the MHL puts on a whole campaign to find him a match b/c he is prince of hockey and you’ll never guess who is a match!!!

and anyways that might be coming soon to a inbox near you.

Chapter 6

Chapter Summary

Ilya is flown home to Boston, gains a BEAR-y good friend, and can feel the repercussions of his injury start to hit.

Chapter Notes

The thing about Dr. Andrei Petrov, head of the Medical team for the Boston Bears, was that he had been in the States for years, and had quickly learned to take no bullshit from anyone, especially young hockey players who didn't know their limits. He had perfected over the years a sharp eyebrow to stop lies in their tracks—everything from "no this doesn't hurt at all" to "this hurts so much I definitely can’t participate in bag skates today." He didn’t have favorites; that wasn’t the way he operated. Players came and went through the Boston system, and his job was to keep them healthy, sane, and on the ice.

But Ilya Rozanov never played by the rules.

He had been a scrappy, lanky, all-arms-and-legs rookie when he had arrived in Boston, full of posturing and confidence. He was loud—lord, was he loud—around the locker room, cocky and brash with the coaches, the trainers, and the staff. But with Petrov? There Ilya shrunk, became small, quiet, and deflated. Petrov wasn’t blind to it. He could figure out why. There wasn’t much that old Russian men couldn't figure out about how young Russian men behaved. He had subtly walked the path between silent assurances to Ilya that he was safe and feigned ignorance that Ilya felt discomfited at all in his presence. But he wasn’t going to treat the Russian teen any different. 

And yet over the years, the little monster had still wormed his way past Petrov’s guard. When he entered the hospital room the previous day he had been relieved - more so that he probably would have been with any other member of the team. And he hadn’t liked what he had seen. Just by sight alone, Petrov could tell that Rozanov was in pain, uncomfortable, and tired. Marlow also looked like he had been through the ringer, and Petrov could sympathize with the late-night, early-morning rush back to New York for their wayward captain.

“Ilyusha,” Petrov had said, “what are we going to do with you?”

That had made Marlow smile, and had even gotten a smirk out of the man in the bed who had caused so much chaos over the last 24 hours for half of Boston.

“We sue New York, yes? I think I saw Scott Hunter behind the wheel, he couldn't see with his old man eyes. He had on those big sunglasses.”

“Mhhm, yes, we shall tell the league. Vehicular checking. Now,” Petrov pivoted, looking his patient up and down, “how are you feeling? How is the pain?”

“Fine.” What a surprise. Russian boys, all the same. 

His eyebrow came out, and he stared down at the boy—they were always boys to him—waiting for an answer to change. None came.

“Okay,” Dr. Petrov said. “My number one rule. What is it?”

Ilya smiled. “Always wear a condom.”

Petrov raised his eyes towards the heavens and prayed for sanity. “That is the rule for rookies who do not know better. What is the rule for people who are not idiot rookies?”

With a bit less excitement in his voice, Ilya replied, “Never lie about the pain.”

“Good.” Petrov’s eyes were steady on his. “So I ask again, how is the pain?”

Silence for a moment. Petrov’s eyes didn’t waver, and he caught Marlow squeezing Ilya’s good hand for a moment in calm reassurance.

“Not great. Kind of awful,” the kid finally admitted.

“Jesus, Roz,” Marlow breathed out, “you could have said something.”

“Didn’t want to sleep,” was all Rozanov responded with, which seemed to mean more to Marlow than it did to Petrov and was also a stupid reason to deny pain medication.

“Sleep is what you need, Ilyusha. You will not heal in pain, and you will not heal without sleep. I am going to find your nurse and we are going to address that. And then I am going to come back with some people I want you to meet, and we are going to talk about what comes next.”

Ilya looked at him. “Okay,” he said, not fighting back, which told Petrov more about his pain and exhaustion than anything else.

“Good,” Petrov said. And then, almost to himself, already half out the door: “Also. Next time you decide to take a walk in New York. Don’t.”

“Very helpful,” Ilya responded, groaning, resting his head back against the pillows and closing his eyes. “Thank you.”

Transport happened early the next morning, before the city that never sleeps had really even woken up.

“First helicopter ride, very exciting,” Ilya had joked as Petrov had overseen final prep for transport.

Petrov had only raised his eyebrow at him.

“Ilyusha, if you think you are going to be awake for this, I am rechecking you for a concussion.”

“What?” Ilya replied.

“You can barely breathe without wincing, there’s no way you’ll be able to handle the movement and jerking for 90 minutes. You are severely mistaken. We are knocking you out.”

“Oh.” Ilya couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. A helicopter ride, even for a pro hockey player, wasn’t an everyday occurrence. “So no pictures?”

“No.” A definitive end to the argument before it could ever really start, and Ilya wasn’t going to be grumpy about it, no he wasn’t. He wasn’t going to get to see the helicopter. Wasn’t going to get to see the cool New York skyline from the helicopter. He probably wasn’t even going to get a lollipop out of this whole thing.

Petrov spent the remainder of the time before the helicopter ride bundling Ilya in what felt like the whole ward’s blanket supply and rechecking the several tubes and wires he was still connected to. Finally, when the nurse gently rapped on the door, he administered a large dose of…something, and the morning blurred away from Ilya like an overpriced watercolor painting.

He came back into focus in another hospital room, much like the one he had been in before. Same style of bed, same motley assortment of machines beeping and whirring around him. However, that was where the similarities ended. Whereas the New York room had been sterile, this room was—honestly—an over-stimulated cacophony of Boston Bears merchandise and colors.

There was a black and gold blanket now tucked against his feet.

Four vases of flowers in differing varieties of bloom and color on his windowsill.

Staring back at him on the bedside tray was a tawny brown bear in a miniature Boston Bears jersey. He was holding a balloon, also small, that somehow still was able to fit: “Get well BEARy soon.” Ilya loved him immediately.

Boston. He was back in Boston. Land of thick accents, North End cannolis if you knew the right spot, and hockey fans who really cared but also left Ilya alone when he bought cigarettes at two in the morning.

His body felt floaty—there was really no other word for it, and Ilya was quickly growing tired of that sensation. He was used to feeling grounded, ten feet tall, the impossible Russian machine, a gift to hockey, twins, and Shane Hollander. Instead, he was a wafting, sad birthday balloon three days post-cake and candles. He was over falling asleep and waking up in new rooms, alone, wondering what came next.

Hopefully this odyssey would be over soon.

He was deep in his thoughts still, staring down at the bear on the tray, when the door opened and Petrov walked in, Cliff behind him.

“My boys!” Ilya exclaimed with fake enthusiasm, trying to paint over the morose that kept creeping in. “Welcome to my crib.”

“Like what you’ve done with the place, Roz!” Cliff replied, smiling.

“I have a bear, Marley. He is my new best friend. You have been replaced.”

Marley looked at the bear, squinted his eyes, and said, “I could take him.”

Petrov cleared his throat before the two could start truly arguing over whether Cliff could fight a stuffed bear or not—he had seen versions of that argument several times before. The locker room had never truly recovered from a duck-sized elephant or an elephant-sized duck argument from last season.

He ran Ilya through some quick vital checks, grunting in a way that meant things were as good as could be. Ilya noted the drain in his side had also made the journey from New York, as were other assorted tubes that he was not thinking about at all, thank you very much.

“Good, this morning’s journey did not impact things too badly. I’m meeting with the rest of the team now, and then we’ll do the surgery this afternoon. Marlow,” Petrov stated, turning toward the right wing, “do not excite him or cause chaos.”

“Usually the other way around, Doc,” Cliff said cheerily, “but I’ll do my best.”

Petrov only sighed and turned to leave. “Oh, one more thing before I forget,” he pulled out his phone and tapped a few times. Ilya’s phone buzzed silently where it sat on the table. “Because you were such a good boy. Consider this your lollipop.” And left the room.

Marlow watched him leave and then turned back to the bed. “Dude, what do you have on the doc? He is never that nice to me, even when I’m bleeding.”

Ilya grunted as he leaned forward to grab his phone, his stomach still burning with any movement. “Russians before uh, you know what. It does not translate well. But is well-known saying.”

“There is no way that is a saying.”

Ilya ignored him as he unlocked his phone and grinned widely. Photos. Of the skyline of New York. From a helicopter.

The photos kept them busy for a while, which was probably the point. Ilya zoomed in on things and Cliff identified buildings he definitely did not know the names of with complete confidence. It was good, it was easy, and Ilya was grateful for it in the way he was grateful for most things Cliff did—quietly and without saying so.

Eventually the afternoon came back for them, the way it had been waiting to.

Dr. Reeves, Ilya knew, which helped. The Bears' orthopedic guy had looked at his shoulder two seasons ago and his hand the season before that, and there was something steadying about a familiar face appearing in the doorway instead of another stranger with a chart. He came in with a couple of the medical staff behind him and Petrov bringing up the rear, and they had clearly already talked through everything they were going to talk through, because the whole thing moved with the easy focus of people who knew their jobs.

Dr. Reeves walked Ilya through the plan for his arm. Plain language, no drama. Plates and screws, a few hours, they'd done this plenty of times. Ilya nodded and tried to look like a person who was fine about it, which he mostly was, or was at least pretending convincingly enough. The timeline for recovery did not change, even now, with a sports guy looking at it.

“Okay,” Ilya sighed.

Even though he was pretty sure the Bears' team could do whatever they wanted to his body and he only got like a twenty percent say, somehow he still had to sign paperwork. America, land of fried twinkies and unnecessary paperwork. He signed left-handed and produced something that could generously be called a signature and was more accurately described as what Cliff, leaning over the side of the bed, dubbed an abstract mountain landscape.

“Roz, dude, that is not a name. There is no way this is legally binding. You’re going to come out with a gold plating or six fingers.”

Petrov smacked the back of Cliff’s head gently as he left the room. Hockey players, honestly.

The nurse appeared at the door a few moments later, ready to take him to the OR.

“Ready?”

Ilya looked at Cliff. Cliff looked back at him, steady, and reached over and squeezed his foot through the blanket—quick, solid, the Cliff version of everything he wasn't going to say out loud.

"Ready," Ilya said.

Post-surgery, things settled down as much as they could given everything. Cliff stayed until the following morning when he had to hit the road for a game in Toronto. The team would be back in a few days for a stretch of home games, but until then, Ilya realized he would be alone. That was fine; he could handle it.

He spent the first full day alone sleeping, watching basketball games that seemed to always be on this time of year, and eating clear liquids and blue jello.

The blue jello was terrible. It tasted like sweet chemicals and didn't require chewing, which was the entire point, but it felt offensive to a man who lived on protein and spite, and had until now only had jello when mixed with horrific American vodka in funny shapes at Fourth of July barbecues.

He looked over at the bedside tray. The little tawny bear was still there, holding its ridiculous balloon. Get well BEARy soon.

"You look stupid," Ilya told it, his voice scratchy and thick in the quiet room.

The bear didn't contradict him. Ilya felt guilty. 

“You are not stupid.” Ilya amended. 

He reached out with his left hand, his fingers clumsy and slow, and dragged his phone off the table. He opened his messages and sent a quick, left-handed text to Hollander—Surgery done. Still have arm and spleen. Model patient. Might even play tonight.—fighting the auto-correct twice before hitting send.

He was about to lock the screen when the phone buzzed against his palm. It was Donnie, his agent—a five-foot-four Bostonian whose accent made Ilya fear he still couldn’t understand English at times.

Donnie: Not that it should be a shock, but team will announce tonight before the Toronto game you’re on LTIR. No other details.

Donnie: Just wanted you to see it from me before the notifications start blowing up your phone.

Ilya stared at the text. He wasn't surprised. He knew the timeline, technically. Dr. Reeves had said it, Petrov had implied it, and his body certainly felt it. But seeing the letters—official, LTIR, announce tonight—made it real in a way that the sterile hospital walls hadn't. By the time the puck dropped in Toronto, the whole world would know. Ilya Rozanov was benched.

He didn't put the phone away. Instead, his thumb hovered over the screen, drawn by a bad habit he had picked up his rookie season and couldn’t quit. He opened Reddit, clicking into the hockey subreddits. He liked reading it, especially after a Bears/Voyagers game; it made him laugh.

Nothing yet on the subs. Just the usual pre-game chirping, fans arguing about line combinations for the game. A few talking shit about one of the rookies' outfits for the walk-in. But the press release was coming. It would drop in minutes.

His phone vibrated again. Hollander’s reply finally popped up at the top of the screen:

Jane: Yeah, that’ll be a great game to see. Let me know how the first shift goes.

Jane: Get off your phone and go to sleep, Rozanov.

Ilya smirked a little, his thumb freezing over the screen. Even three hundred miles away, Hollander still managed to sound entirely unimpressed.

Instead of answering, he snapped a quick, slightly blurry photo of the tawny bear on the tray and dropped it straight into the Bears team group chat.

Ilya: probably better player than half of you, prove me wrong.

Hammy: one goal for every organ Rozzy still has

Ilya: i still have all of them you freak

Cliff: Tell the bear I'm coming for him.

They were trying to keep things normal. They were being their usual idiot selves, trying to fill the quiet room from three hundred miles away, but underneath the chirping, Ilya could feel the clock ticking down to the official announcement. The storm was coming, and he was stuck in a bed in Boston, unable to do a single thing about it.

He didn't turn the phone off. He just leaned his head back against the stiff hospital pillows, keeping the screen lit, waiting for the internet to notice he was gone.

Chapter End Notes

Delay due to a nasty case of writer’s block that I think I have cured, the insanity of June in NYC (KNICKS IN FIVE!) followed by the tragedy of July in NYC (poop parasite, forest fires, heat waves).

Chapter 7

Chapter Summary

Fevers spike, text messages abound, and the one braincell of the Boston Bears (TM) is out for lunch.

Chapter Notes

i had so much fun learning how to do skins to make the text messages and reddit come through. Hopefully it works!!

That night—the first night after the Bears had made the preliminary tweet announcing he would be on LTIR and out for the road trip—he woke up feeling wrong.

His skin was too warm and his thoughts weren't sitting right. His abdomen, which had been quieter the last few days, had cramped back up. This time it was sharper than the usual ache, more insistent. He could feel his heartbeat through the line of stitches, a pulse of fire.

He lay still and breathed and waited to see if it would pass.

It didn't pass.

There was a version of this story where he suffered all night. A version where he rode the waves of fire and ping-pong pain between his side and his arm until it crested and retreated. But Ilya was so, so tired. So tired of waking up in pain and waking up tired and waking up in new rooms with new faces of doctors who looked at his body like a problem and not like the answer.

He pressed the call button.

The nurse who came was someone from the night team he hadn't met, efficient and focused, and she took his temperature and smiled tightly at him in a way that told Ilya she was not pleased, and then there were a lot of things happening all at once. But it wasn't like before, in the ER in New York where things felt rapid and blurry. Now things felt controlled and assured, even if he continued to feel shittier and shittier.

An on-call doctor was in the room now. One that he had never seen before. So many people he hadn’t seen before. He was asking him questions and he was answering them correctly, maybe, though his thoughts kept sliding sideways before he could get a proper hold on them.

He was so hot.

He was so tired.

His phone was on the table, right where he'd left it after snapping that picture of the stupid bear for the team chat. It was within an arm's reach, and so easy to get to and pick up.

He didn't pick it up.

What would he say? Cliff was on a plane to Toronto, or maybe already at the hotel, Ilya had already forgotten the schedule, which was not like him. Cliff would be playing the game with frantic energy and gusto for the sole purpose of racking up more points before playoffs began. He'd do post-media press after the win where he said things like 'we try to make our captain proud' and sidestep any questions about the injury or the accident, or length of time to return to play. That bigger, official news was coming soon. The one that would leave no room for hope.

Shane was—no. Stop. It didn't matter where Shane was, or that he’d just texted him hours ago telling him to go to sleep. Ilya wouldn't make that mistake again. Wouldn't be that weak, even as the fever baked him slowly like a kebab on a spit. What would he say this time, "help i am sick and my tummy hurts and it's not as scary but i still feel bad?". Does he now expect Hollander to drop everything every time his tummy hurts?

No. Ilya was stronger than that. He could weather this storm alone. He had already once reached out in desperation, and all for what? For bedside hand-holds? He was better than that. He was stronger than that. He didn't need anyone.

He had the bear, the dumb bear holding its ridiculous balloon, who the nurses kept asking what the bear's name was and Ilya didn't know. He didn't know what the bear's name was, which made him a bad parent. But Bear-Without-A-Name at some point in the night had come to be curled against his side as a counterweight to sutures that were pulsing with fire. Bear-Without-A-Name didn't deserve such a fate, smushed against him, but there were only so many people that Ilya could protect from his downfall right now. Bear would have to suffer so that Cliff and Shane could sleep tonight.

He didn't reach for his phone. He didn't look for comfort against this storm. Russians did not need such things. He just lay there and let the doctors do what they were doing and breathed through the cramping and the fire and waited.

The fever raged the rest of the night, and came down slowly toward morning. In small words, clipped English so that Ilya's tired mind could easily translate, they explained that this was normal, honestly a little bit expected. Inflammation and a body that had been put through the ringer, coupled with the surgeries and transportation. This was his body's way of saying "hey, stop that" and that Ilya should listen, and rest.

He tried very hard to not bite back that all he did was lay here, it wasn't like he was the one who kept putting him in ORs or helicopters.

His phone lit up at seven forty-three the following morning.

There were a hundred ways Ilya could respond.

Not really. I had a fever in the night that was scarier than i want to admit

No. No. He would not show that kind of weakness again.

Yes. The announcement made it all much more real.

No. He couldn't say that either. Hollander didn't need his mental spirals. He had already asked too much of him.

Instead he responded:

The days that followed had a different texture than the New York days. Still slow, still unglamorous, still defined by the particular rhythms of a hospital, but something had settled, some acute phase passed, and what remained was the long middle part of recovery, which was its own kind of difficult. And boring.

Dr. Petrov came in the mornings, Dunkin’ coffee in hand, remnants of a Boston cream in crumbs on his shirt. He was thorough, and unhurried. They spoke Russian when it was just the two of them and English when it wasn't, and Ilya looked forward to the mornings in a way that had something to do with that brief moment of respite in his mother tongue, the particular relief of thinking without translating. Of one part of his life being a little less hard.

The drain came out on the third day, which was a significant improvement in ways both practical and psychological. His body felt incrementally more his own. He was eating more now—soft foods that were bland and boring. He sent photos of each bowl of mush to Hollander and rated if they were more or less boring than him. Hollander’s response was a crisp Fuck you every time, followed by quick notice of something about the food that made Ilya 5% more likely to actually eat it.

The Bears were coming home from the road trip in two days. Cliff texted with the regularity that kept Ilya from ever feeling super lonely—quips about the team, about the rookies being idiots, the flavor of gatorade they got, whether orange made Cliff perform better than red, if the Philly goalie actually had a third nipple or if that was just a rumor. He facetimed him into every locker room for a few brief moments before every game, mostly to a cacophony of sounds and "CAP!!!!" being screamed at different levels until even Ilya’s ears rang.

The boys were holding their own without him, won three games and lost one. He was proud. He was. He knew that he wasn’t the only thing keeping a team afloat, that was a ridiculous thing to think. He had been out on IR before—a shoulder tweak here, a rib going wonky there, the great daycare flu pandemic of 2015, and the boys had always carried the load—but those had been short stints, a missed game, or one missed roadie. Not this. Not a season.

By eleven on the fourth day, the hospital room had filled up with the particular, efficient bustle of an eviction.

It wasn't just the nurses stripping the IV poles. Not when the patient being discharged was Ilya Rozanov. The Bears’ front office had arrived to manage the logistics of moving their most expensive asset back into the wild…or at least to his apartment in Beacon Hill.

At the center of it was Brenda from Bears Communications, holding a black iPad like a shield. She looked all of five minutes out of college, dressed in a sharp navy blazer that was trying very hard to make her look like an executive, standing near the foot of Ilya’s bed while Dr. Petrov methodically packed Ilya’s personal effects and the assortment of detritus that had collected in the room over the past few days into a heavy canvas Bears duffel in the corner.

"The statement will go out to the wire at noon, Mr. Rozanov," Brenda said, her voice pitched to that careful, overly rehearsed tone PR people used when delivering bad news. She turned the tablet toward him.

Ilya didn't need to read the whole thing. His eyes caught the important lines instantly: ...sustained significant injuries... expected to miss the remainder of the regular season and playoffs... asks for privacy for Ilya and his family...

What family, really? His brother, who had not called? Not once, not a text, not anything, not even after that first announcement of IR. Not even to check that the money would still flow while he was off the ice. His father, who was in a facility outside Moscow and who could not remember consistently if his son was six or twelve or a disappointment? Polina, his stepmother, who had her own calculations to make about what Ilya's injury meant for certain things, and had apparently decided that calling was not one of them.

Yes, please keep his family private during this difficult time.

And always.

But he didn't say any of that. One more thing to bury down deep enough he couldn't feel the aftershocks and tremors.

"It's funny, no? Doctors just this morning say I am healthy enough to go home," Ilya said smoothly instead, looking up from the screen to fix Brenda with a mild, unblinking stare. "And yet here we are saying I am worse than tenth round draft pick?"

Brenda blinked. Her face went a swift, impressive shade of paper-white.

"I, uh, well, Mr. Rozanov, the phrasing was crafted specifically to manage media expectations," she stammered, her fingers tightening on the edges of the iPad. "To ensure the press doesn't harass you at your home or expect a timeline that—"

"Ilya, be nice," Dr. Petrov interjected without looking up.

"I am very nice," Ilya said to Brenda, not shifting his gaze. "I am angel. Ask anyone."

Petrov zipped the duffel with a loud, harsh grating noise, turned around, and picked up the soft, brown stuffed bear that had been sitting on the bedside table. Without warning, he tossed it straight at Ilya’s chest.

Ilya’s left hand shot out instinctively, catching Bear-Still-Without-A-Name and moving him to be against his ribs before he could stop himself.

Brenda offered a weak, immensely grateful nod toward the doctor, holding out the stylus with trembling fingers. "It’s... it’s standard language, Mr. Rozanov. Truly."

"Yes," Ilya murmured, pressing the stylus to the digital line without reading another word. "Protecting my privacy. Very thoughtful."

He handed the tablet back. Brenda practically snatched it, offered a tight, nervous knot of a smile, and backed out of the room like she was exiting the enclosure of a quiet, unpredictable predator.

"Transport is downstairs," Petrov said, walking over to inspect the sling supporting Ilya’s right arm. His hands were quick and practiced, gentle in the way only team doctors who had taped up hundreds of broken men knew how to be.

"And then?" Ilya asked, looking at the bare white walls he’d stared at for a week.

"And then you go sit on your couch, you eat food, and you let your body heal," Petrov replied sternly, tapping a finger against Ilya's chest. "Jamie will be at your apartment tomorrow morning to start you on gentle mobility and stretches. Sarah from the nutrition team has already come by to stock your fridge with the post-op meal plan. And if your temperature goes even a tenth of a degree above ninety-nine, you call my cell immediately. Do not try to be a hero and sweat out a fever alone, or I will personally drag you back here and put you on a drip myself. Clear?"

Ilya gave a faint, humorless huff. "I am not hero. Heroes get paid more."

"Clear, Rozanov?" Petrov repeated, unyielding.

"Clear," Ilya grunted.

"Good," Petrov said, stepping back and opening the door to the hallway. "Let's get you home."

The driver dropped him off at his building, and the ride up the elevator was routine and uneventful.

When he unlocked his front door, it was quiet. A heavy, hollow kind of quiet that hit him the second the door clicked shut. It smelled like stale, cold air, untouched for two weeks. No hospital beeps, no nurses shuffling down the hall, no Petrov demanding vitals. Just his empty living room, his couch, and his own shadow stretching across the hardwood floor.

He dropped his duffel near the entry, set Bear Who Still Needs A Name on the cushion of his sofa, and sat down carefully, his abdominal sutures pulling with a dull, familiar ache.

He pulled out his phone and fired off a quick text to the Bears chat first.

Then, he opened his thread with Hollander. He stared at the blank text box for a long moment, his thumb hovering over the glass. There were many things he could say. He was tempted to send a dick pic - reset their relationship - get it back to normal - the way it should be - just sex (no outreached hands to provide anchors against the chaos and the pain).

But his heart wasn’t in it… and also he was a little afraid of what little Ilya looked like at the moment. There had been so many tubes in places tubes didn’t need to be.

He locked the screen and set the phone on the cushion beside him. It was quiet all around him.

By ten o'clock that evening, the press release had been live for a few hours, the Bears had scraped by another win without him, and the group chat went off like a bomb.

The apartment had gone entirely dark around him. He hadn't bothered to turn on the lamps, preferring the dim grey wash of the city lights filtering through his floor-to-ceiling windows.

His phone buzzed repeatedly against the couch cushion as the boys reacted to the official media blast. Marty had sent the statement from Boston with three exclamation points and a string of emojis that didn't entirely make sense together.

There were seventeen messages in the time it took Ilya to scroll up to the beginning of the conversation, and three more arrived while he was doing it. Then came the barrage of unhelpful advice and panic.

St. Simon, bless him, who could never fucking focus.

He put his phone face down on the couch cushion.

He picked it up again five seconds later.

He was not going to go on reddit. He was going to listen to Hammy, who had clearly already been there so Ilya didn't have to, and he was going to watch something, maybe Toy Story, even though he was a grown man who did not watch children's movies (and didn’t need to leave the room at the end of Inside Out). He was going to not look at the internet and he was going to be fine.

He opened reddit.

The reddit situation was, as it turned out, not something Toy Story could have prepared him for.

He found the main Bears subreddit first, which had a pinned post about the statement with four hundred comments, and he knew, he genuinely knew, that he should close the app and put his phone down and watch something and go to sleep, and he scrolled anyway because he was sitting on his couch with nowhere to be and his family hadn't called and he was apparently doing this now.

The top comment was sympathetic.

A lot of upvotes. Good.

He kept scrolling down his screen, his thumb moving in small, compulsive flicks.

Then came the speculation from people who had heard something from someone who had heard something else.

Ilya had not flown into the air, he had mostly splat against the grill of the car and then deflated to the ground and really hoped there wasn't video, so he kept scrolling. He was past the point of thinking he was going to stop.

Ilya was tempted to make an account right then and there just so he could give this person an award. They were the only ones on the whole internet who spoke the truth.

The plastic surgery thread made him stop for a moment. Someone had started a whole separate post: do we think the accident affected his face? which had generated responses ranging from genuinely concerned NO, MY HUSBAND’S FACE. to that man has been getting his face rearranged by hockey sticks for ten years, what's one more thing which was, Ilya had to admit, not inaccurate. His face had been through things. One car was not going to be the thing that ended it. The few stitches in his forehead were almost fully gone anyway. Hollander had kissed his forehead right near them.

He almost found that funny.

Almost.

He kept scrolling.

And then he found the thread he'd been looking for without knowing he was looking for it, the one that had been waiting for him, the one that confirmed what was already sitting in his chest.

Ilya stopped reading.

His chest tightened, an involuntary, sharp catch in his breath that pulled viciously against his abdominal sutures.

He shoved the phone face down on the cushion beside him, staring into the dark corner of his living room.

The thing was... they weren't wrong. Not by the logic of what they were doing, which was trying to win hockey games. The same logic Ilya had always operated by. The same logic that had gotten him here.

He couldn't play. He couldn't help his team get to the playoffs. He was a dead weight on the salary cap. An expensive, broken thing.

The quiet of the apartment pressed in on him, heavy and suffocating.

His phone glowed bright with texts and notifications for the rest of the night, but he sat in the dark and didn’t reach for it.

Chapter End Notes

this chapter lived many lives. I'm still not 100% in love with it, but at some point you just need to send your child to summer camp, ya know?

Chapter 8

Chapter Summary

Cliff calls in backup if Shane's grandmother or cat is doing better

 

[if you saw me post this to "Leo with a scorpio touch" no you didn't i literally don't even know how that happened, gonna go die. ]

Chapter Notes

The worst part wasn't the pain of recovery. That part was simple.

Pain was a physical thing Ilya knew how to categorize: a sharp pull in his side when he breathed too deep, the dull, heavy throb in his right arm that meant plates and screws. He knew how to map pain. He’d spent twenty-eight years shoving physical damage into mental drawers marked Play Through It or Don’t be a Baby or Definitely Tell Someone. There were fewer things in the third drawer.

No, the worst part of recovery was the stillness.

Ilya had never been still. He’d skated through Moscow winters until his ankles bled, pushed through double-overtimes, paced hotel rooms across sixty different cities. Motion was how he survived. Skating on the ice was all about being in motion. You were stable as long as you kept moving. As soon as you were still, the thin pieces of metal you stood on were apt to give way leaving you sprawled out on your back. 

He had managed twenty-four hours of fake motion. He’d let Jamie, the team PT, guide his uncasted left arm through basic range-of-motion stretches at nine in the morning. Jamie had frowned at him when he had arrived earlier to see Ilya not in the sling, starting in on a very long monologue with very many words all the while gentle hands helped slip his useless arm back into the mesh fabric

He’d eaten half a container of the bland chicken and rice Maureen from nutrition had stocked in his fridge. He had answered Dr. Petrov’s daily check-in text at two in the afternoon with a crisp temperature 98.4 leave me alone. He had done every administrative task necessary to keep the Bears from barging through his front door and trying to solve him.

But by eight o'clock on his second night home, the schedule ran out. The errands and appointments ended, the apartment went dark, and the stillness caught up to him.

His right arm was pinned in a heavy sling, and was making him feel lopsided. His abdomen was a patchwork of tight, pulling stitches, making acts like sitting up and standing feats on par with double overtime with twenty minutes of ice time.

And yeah. He also couldn’t help himself. The trade deadline math was constantly looping.

Ilya wasn't naive. He knew how the league worked. He was the Captain, but he was also an expensive asset taking up eight million dollars in cap space while sitting on a couch. The trade deadline was seventy-two hours away. Front offices didn't operate on sentiment; they operated on utility. He knew what conversations were happening halfway across town while he celebrated moving his pinky. They were moving his LTIR relief around to buy rentals for the playoff push, setting up a roster designed to win without him.

In hockey, if you can't skate, you're dead weight. You’re instability on the ice. What was it that mean Reddit man had said? “An expensive, broken thing.” That was all he was now. They would have to bring in relief, guys up from the Falmouth Faeries to get them through the slog, and Ilya knew, deep in his core: Once they see they can win without me, I'm done for.

So he turned his phone face down on the cushion, sank back into the dark, and stared at the wall.

The scrape of a key in the front door lock broke the quiet.

Cliff Marlow walked in carrying a heavy canvas duffel and a heaving plastic bag full of deli containers. He was fresh off the charter flight from Toronto, still wearing his team travel suit with the tie loosened, looking like a single father who had spent four days dragging twenty four-year-olds through a road trip without backup. Though, to be fair, his backup was pretty shoddy on being helpful and often was the lead instigator of the riots.

Cliff had had a key to Ilya’s home for a while now, a combination of necessity from Ilya’s younger years—dragging home the wayward rookie from bars and women across the city—and from the brief stint where, hypothetically, Boston Police had asked if someone could drive Mr. Rozanov to and from practice to avoid any more speed-based encounters with local officers.

Cliff dropped his duffel by the entryway, set the bag on the kitchen counter, and stopped in the doorway of the living room. He looked at the pitch-black space, the drawn blinds, and the motionless shape of Ilya on the sofa.

"Jesus man, what are you, a vampire?" Cliff said, his voice deep and gravelly from travel, thickened by fatigue from the long days and longer games with his center of gravity gone. "Turn a light on."

"No," Ilya said into the dark.

Cliff didn't press it. He walked into the kitchen, unpacked two plastic containers of pho, the scent rich and soothing. He had extra meat and noodles, but he had left Ilya’s simpler, after a quick check with Petrov. He retrieved two spoons from a drawer he already knew the location of, and set up both meals at the dining room table.

“Dinner is served, dear,” Cliff said deadpan, flipping on a switch to let light bleed throughout the first floor of the open floor plan home.

"I am not hungry," Ilya said. He didn't move. He didn't even turn his head.

“Dude, I got this from Pho 23. Mimi with her gooey eyes wanted to come with to spoon-feed you. I will take her up on that offer if you don’t get over here.”

Ilya didn’t respond. Cliff watched him for a long minute. Normally, this was where Ilya the asshole would arrive, bite back, remind Cliff that Mimi only even spoke to the left wing as charity while she waited for the grand prize—him.

Instead, Ilya just sat there, unblinking and quiet.

“Come on, dude. The quicker we eat, the quicker we can start the movie. I am not eating pho on your couch, far too fucking messy.”

“Go home, Marlow.”

“'Thank you, Marlow, thank you for picking up dinner even after your very long day while I probably watched the first two movies without you,' is what I think you were trying to say, Roz.”

Ilya did not respond.

"We won today, not sure if you watched," Cliff tried again. "Four-three in OT. Marty took a dumb penalty in the third, but Hammy bailed him out."

More silence, and then - 

"Good," Ilya said softly. "That’s good."

“Don’t worry, Roz, we fucking miss you man. We held your portrait up like a Victorian widow before we went out. Had that fake restaurant candle Sainty nicked underneath it.”

“Maybe I am ghost too. They do not need me.”

Cliff froze.

The words weren't angry or sarcastic. They were delivered with flat, quiet acceptance. It ricocheted across the room and broke Cliff’s heart faster than a bullet.

He’d seen Ilya angry. He’d seen Ilya playing through a cracked rib, screaming at refs, pacing locker rooms like a caged animal. Cliff knew how to handle all of those Ilyas. You gave him space, or you bought him a shot, or you threw a bad comedy on the TV until his spite kicked back in.

He had never seen Ilya quit.

“Ilya…” He started. He was out of his depth a little, he feared. Maybe Clarissa, his oldest sister who taught seventh graders and was constantly bitching at Thanksgiving about the mood swings of boys, would know what to do? Or Sarah, his youngest, who worked with rats that always nipped at her in the lab—maybe she’d get why Ilya was doing this?

Cliff stood up slowly. "I'm grabbing water."

He walked out into the carpeted hallway of the building, letting the heavy door click shut behind him. He took a breath and dialed.

It rang once before Hollander picked up.

"Marlow," Shane said instantly. His voice was sharp, wired, and entirely too awake for eleven at night.

"Look," Cliff said, skipping any attempt at a greeting. "I know you guys just got into town for tomorrow's game. I am not asking questions. I don't know if you were planning on coming by tomorrow or what, but…”

"Is he okay?" Shane interrupted, his tone hard and fast. "What happened? Fuck, let me see if I can sneak out."

Cliff paused, hearing the immediate, frantic focus on the other end of the line. "Physically? He's fine. Mentally? He's gone. I’ve never seen him like this before—and I’ve seen, like, a lot of Ilya Rozanov. Like… a lot. But tonight, I walked into his place, and he’s sitting in the pitch dark, staring at a wall. No TV, nothing. He’s like a zombie. He told me the team doesn't need him, Hollander. And he said it like it was a fact."

Silence stretched over the line. Cliff started to ramble a bit—he couldn’t help himself—fast and soft, afraid even a few rooms over Ilya might be able to hear him in the cavern of silence that was currently the house. “And you know, usually I can fix it? He’s a sucker for a Harry Potter movie marathon and this soup place, like, that has never not worked before, but something is off, more than usual, and I am not sure if I can help this time.”

Again, Hollander said nothing, but Cliff could hear him breathing.

"So look. I’m, to repeat, not asking any questions, or implying anything that means I know anything because I don’t. And if I did know anything I would also, like, totally, not care. But if your grandma is better, and your cat is out of jail…”

“Jesus, Cliff,” Shane interrupted, letting out a huff of air that was either humor or incredulity.

“All I’m saying is, I think, or maybe I don’t think, that there’s someone here that needs you, not me, right now. So, if you’re already in town, and if there's any way you can get over here tonight instead of tomorrow…”

"What's the door code?" Shane cut in.

In truth, Shane was already standing in his hotel room at the Four Seasons Boston with his jacket on, phone pressed to his ear. He’d spent the last forty-five minutes staring at the door, paralyzed by the fact that he couldn't just turn up at Ilya's place uninvited without an emergency call giving him an excuse. He had needed to lay eyes on Ilya for six days, and he just needed the code.

Cliff gave it to him, hung up, and went back inside to wait.

Eighteen minutes later, the keypad on the front door beeped, and the lock disengaged.

Ilya didn't move. He sighed, though, and turned to Cliff, who had sat next to him on the couch—not touching, but close. Both soups had cooled behind them on the table. “I do not want more of the team here tonight, Cliff.”

"Too bad."

Ilya went rigid.

Shane Hollander stood in the foyer in a dark coat and a navy baseball cap pulled down low.

This was new. They knew how to handle hotel rooms. They knew how to handle post-game texts and quick hookups behind locked doors. He did not know how to handle Shane standing in Ilya’s living room while Ilya was stuck in sweatpants, pinned in a sling, and completely stripped of his armor.

"What are you doing here?" Ilya demanded, a spike of pure defensive panic hitting his chest. "You have a game tomorrow. You're supposed to be at the hotel."

Shane didn't answer. He hung his coat on the hook by the door, set his keys on the table, and walked over. He sat down on the far end of the sofa, his eyes locked onto Ilya’s face—taking in the dark circles, the sling, and the quiet devastation in his posture.

"Marlow called me," Shane said simply. "Took a cab."

"Marlow is an idiot," Ilya snapped, looking back at the window. "I am fine."

“Bullshit,” Cliff said, even as he stood up. “Rozzy, look at me.”

Ilya didn’t.

“Asshole.” Cliff squeezed Ilya’s knee as he passed by. “Listen, what you’ve got going in your head right now, that can’t be good. But whatever it is, we got you, okay? Me, the boys, fucking Shane Hollander apparently. We got you. So listen, okay, and know whatever comes next, we do together. Always.”

Ilya looked over at his giant friend of a man, and could only move his head slightly up and down. Unconvinced, but heartfelt regardless for this labrador of a man.

“Good,” Cliff continued. “Hollander, I’m out for the night, but call me if you need me. There’s a few other numbers on the fridge if you need them too. He hasn’t eaten. I assume he hasn’t eaten all day.”

“He is right here.” Ilya couldn’t stop himself.

“Yeah, and? Did you feed yourself?”

The silence was answer enough. Cliff sighed, picking up his keys.

“You got him?”

“I got him,” Shane replied.

The ambient noise of a person leaving a home, starting their car, and guiding it down the gravel driveway was the only sound for a few minutes before Shane deigned to break it.

"So, you look like shit," Shane said, his voice flat.

“Fuck you, Hollander.”

“No, I'm serious, what the hell is going on?”

“Nothing, okay? You can leave. Thank you for playing the part with Cliff, very convincing, but go.”

“What? No. Something is obviously wrong. You honestly look worse than New York.”

“Yes, New York, where I was a blubbering mess on asphalt, and now I look worse on my very expensive couch? I am fine, Hollander, just go.”

“I’m not leaving, so you can get over it. You call, I come.”

“I did not call you. Marlow, the giant nanny dog from Peter Pan, called you. You should not have picked up—it is dangerous you picked up.” A low, vicious ball, meant to trigger Shane’s always on fear of discovery.

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t you who called last time either, was it? It was a nice lady named Sarah who I will probably be sending flowers to, and guess what, asshole? I came. Okay? I will always come. Just, Jesus, Ilya,” a jolt of something coursed through his body; had he ever said his first name out loud before? “talk to me.”

"It is just math, Hollander!" Ilya burst out, his good left hand gesturing vaguely toward the room. "The cap space. The LTIR. They are buying rentals for the playoffs. I am taking up millions of dollars to sit on a couch. They will bench me, drop me, send me to the farm you send dogs you don’t like."

Shane stared at him. Then he let out a harsh, disbelieving breath and sat down right next to Ilya on the couch, knees touching. He smiled, a soft smile, the one Ilya had seen before for the children that play during intermission at the arena. 

"Ilya… are you fucking stupid?" Shane said, his voice low and incredulous.

Ilya blinked. "What—"

"Shit, sorry, that was a bit much, sorry.” His boy, still Canadian. “You think Boston is going to trade you?" Shane leaned closer. "Are you out of your mind, Rozanov? You think they built this entire franchise around you and what, they’re going to drop you at the first sign of blood? We’ve all done time on the bench for injuries, we all get back out there.”

“I have never been out like this, no? One game for a rib, two maybe. But this is season, Hollander—rest of season. They will call up some hotshot nineteen-year-old and he will take my place and they will realize I am not worth it.”

“Ilya, where are you getting this from? Did someone in the front office say something to you?”

He couldn’t exactly say that it was u/BearBeast81 on a Reddit forum because even during his spiral he had some dignity, so he opted to keep quiet.

“Ilya, come on,” Shane continued, fired up. Ilya could admit to himself that this—this rage and fight toward the gnawing fear that had been building in his head all day—was very sexy. Mr. Hollander with the hockey facts. “They built the team around you. You think if the roles were reversed, anyone in Montreal would trade me because I broke an arm?"

"No, but that is different."

“How?” Shane asked.

Because you are good, he wanted to say. Because you are the spirit of Canada and I think the hockey gods kissed you and made you and each of your freckles is one of their blessings.

Because I am not good, and I am fucked up beyond just this arm—maybe something deeper is broken.

“I don’t know, Hollander. Okay? It is just different.”

“Look,” Shane said, softer, “I get that this is scary, I do. But Ilya, look at me”—and he did, he couldn’t stop himself, he would always look into Shane Hollander’s eyes—“you are going to be okay. Boston will never drop you, not for this, probably not for anything. You have done much stupider shit than the audacity of getting hurt, and they have never wavered. You’re safe. You’re not going anywhere. Okay?”

All Ilya Rozanov had wanted his whole life was stability. A precarious ask for someone who spent so much of his time balanced on two thin sheets of metal. It was often too much of a want, and a selfish one at that, but he yearned for it. Boston had been that first place where life had felt solid underneath him. He had things here. A life here. A Cliff here, and a coffee shop here. He didn't want it to go away.

All he said instead was, “Okay. Yes. Okay.” 

Shane let that ‘okay’ settle for a moment. He wasn’t still fully sure what was going on inside the other man’s head. This was a different side to him he hadn’t seen before, but he was glad to be here, glad to be able to support him, in any of the small ways that he could. 

“C’mon,” Shane said. “Marlow was right, you do need to eat. Though maybe not pho? God, that has like no nutritional macros, there’s no way that is approved on either of your diet plans.”

He leaned his head back against the sofa cushions. "You are very annoying, Hollander."

"I know," Shane murmured, sliding a few inches closer until their legs brushed. "That's why you like me."

He helped Ilya to sit forward and then stand, like he had somehow also been in Ilya’s first few PT sessions. Ilya quirked an eyebrow at those practiced movements, and Shane blushed a little but didn’t offer up any reasoning.

The next little bit was filled with the soft world of making and eating the late dinner. Shane didn’t mention once returning to his hotel, and Ilya feared even the mention of it, for worry it would break the spell. Shane would leave, and he would be left alone again to the dark and his despair and the message boards.

"So," Shane said after a few minutes, a tiny smirk catching the corner of his mouth. "Marlow mentioned something on the phone about Harry Potter? That is the next step in tonight’s plan?”

Ilya dragged his good left hand up to cover his face, groaning softly. "I am going to murder him. I am going to throw Cliff Marlow into the river."

"Which house are you?" Shane pressed, nudging his leg. "If you say Slytherin, I'm leaving."

"I was lonely rookie who spoke no English," Ilya grumbled into his palm. "Of course I picked Slytherin. Slytherin has very good work ethic. It was basically modeled after Russia. Cold, dungeon, obsessed with purity and blood hierarchy. Be happy I have bear tattoo, not snake tattoo.”

Shane laughed. “It’s late. Let’s get you settled into bed instead of the couch. We can watch in your bedroom.”

“You’ll stay?” Ilya asked, facing his fears, his demons, the next moments of instability with a nonchalance he did not have.

“Yeah, I’ve got nowhere else I want to be.”

Chapter End Notes

-- if you saw me post this to "Leo with a scorpio touch" no you didn't i literally don't even know how that happened, gonna go die.
1/ PHO IS PERFECT BUT NOT TO SHANE HOLLANDER
2/ I support trans right but also Ilya is Slytherin coded sorry!!
3/ Shane knows ball and is an athlete and I will write him as such (I mean as much as I know ball which isn't a lot but Shane. is. a. jock!!)
4/ I hate that AI has stolen the "---" from us because its the only way i know how to show breaks in dialogue but now I'm afraid to use it and the "..." doesn't do the same thing. So sorry those are my dashes, officer!!
5/ There's an epilogue coming featuring the Bear's collective one brain cell.
6/ sometimes you feel very proud of a chapter and sometimes it is an ugly baby you have been poking around with for a while

Chapter 9: Epilogue

Chapter Summary

EPILOGUE: bear's one brain cell vs reddit conspiracy thread

Chapter Notes

just a little treat b/c i love these dumb rocks

By his third day home, the stillness didn't feel so heavy anymore.

It helped that Shane was still there, occupying space with a quiet, grounding permanence. It helped that team management had called at noon with an aggressive timeline to get him back on the ice for the postseason.

And it helped that u/BearBeast81 on Reddit had just posted a four-hundred-comment conspiracy theory alleging that Ilya’s "upper body injury" was actually a cover-up for a multi-million-dollar, German-engineered cosmetic procedure to his groin.

Not one to let a good conspiracy theory go to waste, Ilya’s phone began to vibrate violently in his hand. The Bears main chat had just found the link.

Ilya laughed until Shane feared he might pop a stitch.