Rating:

General Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Troy Barrett/Harris Drover

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Troy Barrett, Harris Drover, Ottawa Centaurs Team Ensemble (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Shane Hollander Needs a Hug, Hurt Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander Has an Eating Disorder, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-04 Updated: 2026-05-05 Words: 4,477 Chapters: 3/4

An Apology?

Summary

Troy Barrett apologizes and Shane accepts it. That part is easy. The part that comes after—the parties, the double dates, performing happiness in his own home for a man who used to make him feel like a guest in his own sport—that part is harder. But Shane is good at hard, he's been good at it his whole life.

Notes

Chapter 1

Troy Barrett apologised on a Tuesday.

It wasn't dramatic. There was no crowd, no press, no moment Shane could point to later and say that was when it happened. It was just after practice, most of the guys already gone, and Troy had come up to him while Shane was still unlacing his skates and said, quietly, that he was sorry. That he knew sorry didn't cover it. That he'd spent a long time being someone he wasn't proud of, and that Shane had been on the receiving end of that more than most, and he was sorry.

Shane had looked up at him. Troy had his hands in his pockets and was looking at Shane's chin, not his eyes. He looked like he was bracing for something.

Shane said, "I appreciate that."

Troy exhaled. His whole shoulders dropped. "I mean it," he said. "I really do."

"I know," Shane said, and went back to his laces.

That was it. That was the apology. Later, Shane would try to remember if he'd felt anything in that moment--relief, or anger, or something loosening in his chest--and he couldn't. He remembered thinking that the knot in his left skate had been particularly bad that day.

It wasn't that he didn't believe Troy. That was the thing. He did believe him, actually. He could look at Troy Barrett and see that something had shifted, that he wasn't the same person who had stood next to Dallas Kent and laughed. People changed. Shane knew that. His mother had raised him to believe in it, had said it to him more times than he could count, usually in the context of Shane having to extend grace to someone who hadn't extended any to him first. People change, Shane. You don't have to forget, but you should try to forgive. It was one of those things she said that he had never quite figured out if he agreed with or not. He just knew that she meant it, and that she had usually been right about most things, and so he held onto it the way he held onto a lot of things she'd told him.

What Shane couldn't figure out was what believing in Troy's change was supposed to do for him.

Because the words hadn't changed. They had already been said. Said on the ice and in hallways and in handshake lines with the whole league watching, and Shane had swallowed all of them and gotten back on the ice the next game, same as always. Troy being sorry didn't reach back and undo any of that. It didn't change the specific way Shane's stomach had dropped the first time, eighteen years old and barely two months into his first NHL season, hearing his own voice used as a punchline in a voice he didn't recognise, in a hallway he hadn't known anyone else was in. It didn't change the eleven years after that. Troy being sorry just meant that Shane now had to figure out what to do with a version of Troy Barrett who was trying, which was somehow harder to navigate than a version of Troy Barrett who wasn't.

He had gotten good, over the years, at people who weren't trying. He knew what to do with that. You kept your face neutral and your stats up and you let the scoreboard do the talking, which was something his father had told him when he was seven and standing on a patch of frozen pond feeling humiliated, and it had turned out to be genuinely useful advice. The scoreboard didn't lie. Shane could always come back to the scoreboard. When someone said something on the ice, when a coach looked at him a certain way, when a reporter asked a question with something else inside it, Shane could come back to the numbers and know that the numbers were real and the numbers were his and nobody could take them.

But he didn't know what to do with someone who was sorry.

He shook Troy's hand before he left. It was a firm handshake, good eye contact, the kind his mother had also taught him. You shake someone's hand like you mean it, Shane, people remember a handshake. He smiled, and it was a real smile, or real enough. He was glad Troy was trying. He genuinely was. He just didn't know what it had to do with him, what he was supposed to do with the trying, where he was supposed to put it.
Ilya was waiting in the car. Shane got in and Ilya glanced over, reading him the way he always did, quick and thorough.

"How did it go?"

"Fine," Shane said. "Good. He apologised."

Ilya's face did something warm and complicated. "Good," he said. "That is good, yes? That he said it."

"Yeah," Shane said. "It is."

He looked out the window. The parking lot was mostly empty, just a few guys' cars left and the orange tint of the overhead lights. Ilya reached over and squeezed his knee once, the way he did when he wanted Shane to know he was there without making Shane talk about it. Then he put the car in drive.

They didn't say anything else about it on the way home. Shane watched the city and Ilya had music on low and it was a perfectly fine drive. Normal. Easy. Shane was good at easy.

He spent the whole drive home trying to figure out why he felt like he'd lost something.

It took him a few days to land on what it was. He was in the shower after a practice, standing under the water longer than he needed to, and it came to him. The thing he'd lost was the clean, simple line of it. For years, Troy Barrett had been easy to categorise. He was the guy who said those things. He was one of the ones. Shane had known exactly where he stood with Troy, and knowing where you stood with someone, even if where you stood was bad, was at least a kind of solid ground. You could orient yourself around it. You could factor it in.

Now Troy was trying, and the solid ground was gone, and Shane was supposed to be glad about that. And he was. Mostly. It was just that he didn't know where to stand anymore, and he hadn't realised until it was gone how much energy he'd spent over the years on exactly that. On knowing where to stand.

He told Ilya it had gone well. That was true. He told Ilya he thought Troy meant it. That was also true.

He didn't tell Ilya that he'd been standing in the shower for twenty minutes feeling like he'd had something taken away from him, because he didn't have the words for that yet, and because he wasn't sure it would make sense to anyone outside his own head, and because Ilya's face when he talked about Troy these days had a particular kind of hope in it that Shane didn't want to be the one to complicate.

Ilya loved Troy. Not in the way he loved Shane (it wasn't in that way) but in the straightforward, uncomplicated way that Ilya loved people who had been genuinely good to him. Troy had been there for Ilya during the parts of Ilya's life that Shane hadn't been present for yet, the parts Shane only knew about secondhand, and that meant something. Shane understood that. He respected it.

He just needed a little more time to figure out what to do with it.

He towelled off and got dressed and went out to where Ilya was waiting, and when Ilya looked up and said, "You okay?" Shane said yes, and it was true enough, and they had dinner and watched something on TV and it was a good night. Normal. Fine.

Shane was good at fine. He had been good at fine for a very long time. It was practically the thing he was best at.

Chapter 2: Chapter 2

The parties started about six weeks after the apology.

Ilya had always been social in a way that still occasionally caught Shane off guard. Not because it was surprising exactly--Ilya was one of the most naturally magnetic people Shane had ever met--but because for a long time Shane had only known a version of Ilya that was kept at a careful distance from everyone else. The Ilya who was all sharp edges in public and something else entirely in private. That version of Ilya still existed, still came out on the ice and in press conferences and in the particular way he looked at opposing players who were getting on his nerves. But this version, the one who opened their home like it was a community space and genuinely meant it, was still sometimes new to Shane, was still something he was learning.

He liked it. He wanted to be clear about that, even just to himself. He liked that Ilya wanted people around. He liked the way their house sounded when it was full, the overlapping conversations and the music Ilya always put on slightly too loud and the way the kitchen always ended up being where everyone gathered no matter how deliberately Ilya had arranged the living room. Shane liked people. He was quieter than Ilya, always had been, but he liked being around people he was comfortable with. He liked the team. He'd gotten lucky with this team, luckier than he'd expected, and he knew it.

He just hadn't fully accounted for who came with the team.

The first party Troy came to, Shane was fine. He stayed on the other side of the room mostly, fell into an easy conversation with Bood and Wyatt about something he couldn't remember the next day, and kept his drink in his hand and his back to the wall the way he always did at parties when he was in a room he wasn't totally sure of yet. When Troy said goodbye he clapped Shane on the shoulder. Shane felt it, the hand, registered it and filed it away and kept his face the same, and Troy said, "Good hang, man," and Shane said, "Yeah, for sure," and that was that. Fine. Easy.

The second party, Troy brought Harris.

Shane had been prepared, in an abstract way, for Harris. He'd heard enough about him from Ilya to have a rough shape of the person and enough meetings with Harris in attendance to know what he was--content manager, responsible for the Centaur's image, Troy's boyfriend, a quiet, good guy, and, most importantly, Ilya liked him. Shane had been ready for someone he'd manage just fine but not especially connect with, someone he could be polite to without it costing him much. What he had not been prepared for was someone he actually liked.

Harris was warm without being loud about it. He had a dry sense of humour that came out after getting to know him, and Shane found himself genuinely caught off guard by it a couple of times. He asked Shane real questions and listened to the answers in a way that felt like he actually wanted to know, not like he was waiting for his turn to talk. He'd brought a good bottle of wine and hadn't made a thing of it. When the conversation moved away from him he was easy about it, didn't try to drag it back.

Shane stood in his own kitchen talking to Harris about the differences between Montreal and Ottawa--the pace of the cities, the way the hockey culture sat differently in each of them, the particular specific loneliness of being traded mid-career--and found himself thinking, somewhere underneath the conversation, this would be so much easier if you were awful.

Because if Harris were awful, Shane would have something to do with what he was feeling. He could say, quietly and only to himself, that he didn't like them, and that would be clean. Instead Harris was genuinely good company and Shane liked him and it didn't change anything about where Harris went home at night or whose hand he held or what that meant for Shane, who was standing in his own kitchen performing a smile while Troy Barrett laughed at something across the room.

Troy, across the room, was laughing at something Ilya had said. Ilya was laughing back. The ease between them was genuine and Shane knew that. He'd always known it, had known it before he'd even met Troy properly, had understood from the way Ilya talked about him that this was a real friendship and not a convenient one. Ilya didn't do convenient friendships. When Ilya loved someone it was because he'd decided to and he meant it, and Shane had always found that one of the things he loved most about him.

He just hadn't expected it to feel like this.

Standing in his own home, having a good conversation with a man he genuinely liked, and not being able to stop tracking where Troy was in the room.

It wasn't conscious, exactly. That was the part that was hard to explain, even to himself. He wasn't standing there thinking about it. It was more like something underneath thought, something automatic, the same part of him that had learned at eighteen to always know where the exits were in a new arena, that had learned to clock certain tones of voice before the words themselves fully registered. He always knew where Troy was. He knew when Troy was moving toward him and when he wasn't. He knew when Troy's voice got louder and when it dropped. He couldn't turn it off because he hadn't turned it on. It was just there.

Shane refreshed Harris's drink when it got low. He made sure the food board in the living room didn't empty out. He laughed in the right places and asked the right questions and when Ilya caught his eye from across the room and smiled at him, that warm specific smile that meant look at us, look at this, isn't this good, Shane smiled back and meant it. He did mean it. He loved Ilya. He loved that Ilya was happy. He wanted this for him.

He just also wanted to go upstairs and lie down in the dark for about an hour, and he wasn't going to do that, so...

After, when everyone had gone and Ilya was rinsing glasses at the sink, he said without turning around, "I think tonight was good, yes? Troy and Harris, they are--I think they are good for us to know. As a couple. It is nice to have friends who understand."

Shane was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed, not because he was closed off but because he was tired and it was something to do with his body. "Yeah," he said. "Harris is great."

"Troy too, I think," Ilya said, "he is trying very hard."

"I know he is."

Ilya turned off the tap and dried his hands and turned around. He looked at Shane for a moment, and Shane kept his face neutral because he was good at keeping his face neutral.

"You are tired," Ilya said.

"Long week."

"Mm." Ilya put the dish towel down and crossed the kitchen and put both hands on the sides of Shane's face, tilting his head up slightly. His palms were warm, he always ran a bit warm. He looked at Shane carefully. "You would tell me if something was wrong."

It wasn't quite a question. It was the kind of thing Ilya said when he suspected an answer and was offering Shane the space to give a different one, and Shane understood the offer and was grateful for it and was not going to take it, because he didn't have the words yet and because Ilya's eyes right now had that specific hope in them, the one about Troy, the one Shane didn't want to be the one to complicate things and ruin that look.

"I'm fine," Shane said. "I'm just tired."

Ilya held his gaze for another second. Then he pressed a kiss to Shane's forehead, and let him go.

"Okay," he said, and went back to the dishes.

Shane stood in the middle of his kitchen, in his own home, and felt tired. He was good at this. He had been good at this his entire life, performing okay when okay was what the situation needed, keeping the difficult parts of himself somewhere small and manageable where they wouldn't inconvenience anyone. His mother had taught him that. The league had reinforced it. He had gotten so good at it that sometimes he went whole days without noticing he was doing it.

He pushed off the counter and went to help with the dishes, and Ilya made room for him at the sink, and they finished cleaning up together, and it was a nice night. It was a genuinely nice night.

Shane knew that. He just also knew that he was going to be doing this again next month, and the month after that, and the month after that, and that was the part he was trying not to think about too directly--the long version of whatever this was.

But he was good at this. He'd know, he'd been doing it for almost thirty years.

Chapter 3: Chapter 3

The double date was Ilya's idea, which wasn't a surprise.

He'd been circling it for a while. Shane had noticed, the way he noticed most things Ilya was working up to, which was early and quietly and without saying anything about it. Ilya would mention Troy and Harris in the same sentence as it would be nice or we should all and then let it sit there, not pushing, giving Shane room to pick it up or leave it. Shane always left it. He was good at leaving things along without making it into a thing.

The mentions had gotten slightly more frequent after the last party. Nothing dramatic, nothing Shane could point to as pressure exactly. Just Ilya saying, over dinner one night, that Troy had asked about them, that he wanted to do something smaller, just the four of them, and wasn't that a nice idea. And Shane had said yes, probably, sometime, and moved the conversation, and Ilya had let him.

He let him twice more after that.

And then one evening in February, Ilya came into the kitchen where Shane was making coffee and said, "I have made a reservation. Friday. That place you like with the good salmon."

Shane was quiet for a moment. He kept his hands where they were on the coffee press.

"Troy and Harris?" he said.

"Yes." Ilya leaned against the doorframe. His voice had the careful quality it got when he was being very honest and knew it might not land well. "I know you are—I know it is not always easy. But Shane, Troy is my closest friend here. My closest friend outside of you. And I love you, and I would never ask you to be uncomfortable, but I would like very much if the people I love could—I think it could be good. I think if we just tried, properly, the four of us, it could be really good."

Shane looked at him. Ilya was looking back steadily, not flinching away from the request.

Shane thought about Boston. He thought about Russia, about what going back there meant for Ilya now and what it had cost him to stop trying. He thought about the life Ilya had handed over without making Shane feel the weight of it, the specific quiet sacrifice of a man who never once said look what I gave up. If Troy Barrett was something that gave Ilya back even a fraction of what he'd lost—a friend, a history—then Shane could do this. He could try.

"Okay," Shane said.

Ilya's face opened up. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." Shane turned back to the coffee press. "It'll be good."

He heard Ilya cross the kitchen, felt him press a kiss to the back of his neck, warm and grateful. "Thank you," Ilya said, quietly, just for him.

"It's just dinner," Shane said.

Ilya made a small sound against his neck that meant he knew it wasn't just dinner and he was grateful anyway, and then he went back to whatever he'd been doing, and Shane stood at the counter and pressed the coffee and held onto the thought of Ilya's face when he'd said yeah.

That was the reason. That was enough of a reason.

Friday came. Shane put on the dark green jacket that led to a heated look from Ilya, and they drove over together, Ilya's hand finding his at some point on the centre console without either of them making it a thing.

Troy and Harris were already there when they arrived. Harris stood up when they came in, and hugged Shane briefly. Shane received it and returned it at the right level.

Troy clapped Ilya on the back and they fell immediately into each other, the re-entry into old shorthand that looked effortless from the outside. Shane watched it for just a second and then sat down and opened his menu.

He looked at it for longer than he needed to. The salmon was the obvious choice, what he'd come here for, but he found himself reading the rest of the page anyway. He'd been stricter than usual lately with the macrobiotic stuff, tighter in a way that felt like control when other things didn't. The salmon with brown rice was the right choice. Clean protein, complex carbs, nothing he'd have to think about later. He ordered it when the server came. Harris ordered it too, which made things easy.

"Good choice," Harris said, and smiled, and Shane smiled back.

They talked through the first drinks easily enough. Harris asked Shane about the upcoming road trip and Shane answered and asked something back and they found a rhythm without much effort. Shane liked talking to Harris. That part was genuine and uncomplicated and he leaned into it a little, let Harris carry slightly more of the conversation than he might have otherwise. Harris didn't seem to mind.

Across the table, Troy said something and Ilya laughed, loud and unguarded, the laugh Shane heard at home when Ilya thought nobody was paying attention. Shane glanced over and felt the specific quality of what he was seeing. Ilya was leaning forward, shoulders dropped, the careful public version of himself entirely gone.

Shane just looked back at Harris and asked a follow-up question about something Harris had just said.

The food came. The salmon was good, well prepared, and Shane ate steadily, focused on the taste of it, on being present in the meal. He was especially aware, at the edge of his attention, of how much was left on the plate, but he kept eating and didn't make it a thing.

Troy was talking about a game from a few years back, something that had happened on the ice between him and Ilya when they were on different rosters, and Ilya was laughing again and shaking his head. The story had the shape of something that had been told before, worn smooth from use, and Shane watched Troy tell it and felt, underneath everything else, the low hum he couldn't quite turn off. He knew, rationally, that Troy wasn't going to say anything. He knew that. And still some part of him just kept waiting, the way you brace for a sound you've heard before in a particular kind of room.

He took a sip of his water and turned back to Harris.

They talked about Montreal for a while, what the city was like to actually live in, the hockey culture, the specific feeling of winter there. Shane had things to say about it and meant them. Harris listened well and offered things back and it was a good conversation, genuinely. Shane was present for most of it.

At some point he noticed his hand was in his lap under the table, turned slightly inward. He put it back on the table and reached for his water glass.

Ilya caught his eye across the table and smiled, warm and grateful and happy, that specific smile that meant look at us, isn't this good. Shane smiled back and meant it because Ilya meant it, because Ilya's happiness was real and Shane had chosen to be here and he wasn't going to take that from him.

He ordered dessert because Ilya liked it when he ordered dessert. Ilya lit up and said, "We will share," and Shane said, "You always say that and then eat most of it," and Ilya said something in Russian and Troy laughed and Harris leaned in toward Troy with a quiet smile, and the table was warm.

Shane cut a piece of the dessert, contemplated it, then put the fork down and let Ilya have the rest and didn't think about it.

Outside on the pavement after, in the cold, Harris hugged him goodbye and said, "This was so good. Shane, really, it was great to do this properly," with that genuine brightness he always had, and Shane said, "Yeah, it really was," and meant it because Harris, at least, he could say that about cleanly.

Troy said, "We should do this again soon," and looked at Shane when he said it, not just Ilya. Making the effort. Shane could see the effort.

"Definitely," Shane said, and shook his hand, and smiled.

They got in the car. Ilya waited until they'd pulled into traffic and then said, quietly, "Thank you for tonight."

"It was good," Shane said.

"It was," Ilya agreed. A pause. "Harris really likes you."

"I really like Harris."

"And Troy—"

"It was a good night, Ilya."

A beat. "Okay," Ilya said softly.

He reached over and took Shane's hand where it rested on his knee and didn't say anything else. Shane let him. The music was low and the heater was running and it was a perfectly fine drive home.

Shane watched the city go past and thought about Ilya's face across the table, that uncomplicated happiness. He'd put it there, partly. He'd shown up and done his best and Ilya had been happy, and that was the reason he'd said yes and it was still a good reason.

He was just tired. That was all. He was tired and he'd done a good thing and tomorrow he could rest, and it would be fine.

He turned his hand over in Ilya's and held on, and Ilya squeezed back, and neither of them said anything else the whole way home.