Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Rose Landry, Cliff Marlow & Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov & Svetlana Vetrova, Yuna Hollander & Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Hayden Pike, Shane Hollander & Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Hayden Pike, Rose Landry, Svetlana Vetrova, Cliff Marlow, Scott Hunter (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Injury Recovery, Hurt/Comfort, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, shane and ilya develop emotional intelligence, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic Fluff, Shane Hollander Walks Ilya Rozanov Like A Dog, Shane Hollander Leaves Montreal, Medical Inaccuracies, SO MUCH FLUFF, Happy Ending, Multimedia, Long Shot, Suspend your disbelief for the preface, Temporary Amnesia, Sickfic, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, Secret Marriage, Fluff

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-01-03 Updated: 2026-04-24 Words: 37,143 Chapters: 7/?

Carpe Diem: Oh So Guilty (Oh So Loved)

Summary

Following an injury during a Montreal–Boston game in 2016, Ilya Rozanov remembers Shane Hollander, and forgets him. For a moment, he does not remember being loved.

So perhaps, it is time that Shane reminds himself, after a decade, to chase his future at a break-neck pace, because Shane is tired of feeling guilty, tired of hiding from the person he never truly wants to hide from.

It won't be so easy, of course, and maybe the path will take them two steps forward and one step back, but they will walk arm in arm, hand in hand, toward their forever.

or

ilya is injured in a game, and it is all the motivation shane will ever need to seize the day.

Notes

this fic is for my own enjoyment because i want it to check all the boxes i want in a fic so itll be a little bit of everything!! we're gonna start out realllllll angsty but i promise it gets better and then it gets kinda horny negl

Chapter 1

Chapter Notes

i swear the next chapter will be longer but im trying to rush through my homework at the end of break right now

EDITED AS OF 5/15/26

2016 - Late January

Shane knew somewhere between the curve of his skull and the soles of his sock feet that he was in love. He knew it the way he knew the sky was blue, the way he knew the particular weight of his own name when it was said aloud, especially when it came from Ilya Rozanov, softened and hardened once more by accent and intent. He knew it in the way that Rozanov was electrifying and also a salve for all his stress and pain. He knew it the way he knew hockey—something his body required in order to function, like the familiar ache that set in when he was kept from the ice too long, like sleep after bone-deep exhaustion, like air when he felt like he was drowning.

And, inconveniently, it appeared to be true, because as he stared at two hundred pounds of lean muscle heaped on the ice, he found himself unable to breathe.

The warm-up song was terrible.

It thudded out of the rafters anyway, heavy on bass and light on melody, some generic arena rock. Shane sat on the narrow bench in front of his stall and wound white tape around the end of his stick, neat and even, half-listening as the playlist tried to convince thirty grown men to feel something other than a desire to cheat on their wives. 

He didn’t need the help. His body already hummed with nerves and adrenaline.

The locker room air was damp and over-recycled, thick with sweat and detergent and that faint rubber sting from the floor mats. Slush dripped from sharpened blades onto towels someone had thrown down in front of the door. Someone else—probably Comeau—had gone heavy on whatever cologne he thought hid the hockey smell and only made it worse.

“Hey, Cap.” Hayden’s glove thudded lightly against the back of Shane’s helmet as he walked past. “You look like you’re boutta to eat somebody.”

“Just thinking about the game, Hayd,” Shane said. The tape lay flat under his fingers, no bubbles, no wrinkles.  “Maybe you should try it.”

Hayden snorted and nudged his knee into Shane’s. “Yeah, yeah. You can think for both of us. I’ll just go stand where they tell me and try not to embarrass you on national TV.”

“Local,” Theriault called from across the room without looking up from his phone. “We only get national if Boston does something stupid.”

“Great,” Hayden said. “So, what, seven cameras on Rozanov and one on our boy wonder here?”

Shane’s hand tightened for a second before he forced it to ease again, smoothing the last strip of tape down with his thumb. He kept his eyes on his stick as he groped around for his Sharpie. “They’re here for the game,” he said. It came out more even than it felt on his tongue.

“Sure,” Hayden said. “Game and the circus. Same thing tonight.”

From the hallway, the muffled announcer hit his practiced cadence—starting lineups, sponsors, the rivalry that had been sold and resold so many times it barely sounded like English to Shane. Someone turned the volume down on the TV and Shane could hear everything at once, his guys tightening their straps, adjusting pads, running their own little checklists.

Shane slid the tape roll back into his stall, lined it up with the others. His mom liked when the cameras caught him in these shots: focused, composed, the good Canadian boy who laced up the same way every time. Rose liked it too. She’d text him freeze-frames sometimes, of his head bowed, his number sharp against blue and white, and tell him he looked intense or terrifying or hot, depending on the day. 

He wondered if she was watching him now. If the broadcast director would cut from Rozanov’s smug face to Shane’s and put their names in a font big enough to see from outer space.

Coach stepped into the center of the room, and the low buzz dropped on instinct. “Same lines, as always, boys,” he said. “Keep your heads. We play our game, we’re fine. Shane, you’ll be first up against Rozanov.”

A couple of guys chuckled, muttering something about Russian spies, but Shane just nodded as his heart ticked up another notch. It should just be a game; there was nothing different about this match as opposed to any other. Except, everything was different, because Shane would be playing Boston tonight. 

He could see it as clearly as if he were already out there: Rozanov gliding into the circle opposite him, gloves bright against dark tape, visor pushed up just enough that Shane could read his eyes. For years, that had come with a running commentary of snapped insults, low jokes, the occasional filthy aside no mic had ever picked up. Whole little conversations lived in that moment between dropped puck and whistle.

Now, when they lined up, Rozanov wouldn’t say a word.

No smirk, no chirp, no muttered gibberish through his mouthguard. Just the set of his shoulders and the tilt of his stick, like Shane was any other center he was there to beat. The first time it had happened, the silence had rung in Shane’s ears louder than the crowd; he’d spent the whole shift waiting for a joke that would never come. He should have expected it, had expected it, had wanted it, even. Could it have been worse if Shane had spoken first? Would Shane have seen disgust on his face, or malice, or glee? 

He could hear him now, too, if he let himself. Not the bullshit Rozanov always gave reporters, but the things he’d say under his breath when they crowded the same patch of ice. Little insults, stupid quips, all said as if nobody else existed. Or maybe Shane would hear the things he would say to Shane in the dead of night, draped over the covers of a freshly re-christened bed.

The worst part of it all, was that Shane knew it was his own fault. His fault, for running away, for leaving Rozanov behind in a penthouse in Boston. 

He’d left him halfway through a season and halfway through something that hadn’t had a name yet, plates still on the coffee table and city lights still printing themselves across the floor. One stupid flight home and then no more rerouted layovers, no more extra nights on the schedule, no more knocking on that door like it was the most natural thing in the world to end an away game in Rozanov’s living room instead of the team hotel. 

Shane shoved his helmet on.

“Let’s go,” he said, to no one in particular and to everyone at once, and stood up into the familiar weight of his gear.

The hallway outside the room was narrow and bright, lined with concrete and peeling paint and a row of kids in Voyageurs jerseys clutching foam fingers. The building shook under their feet when the crowd started chanting, a low roar building toward something sharper, and for a second, as he stepped into the line, Shane could almost feel Rozanov like a ghost behind his back.

He rolled his shoulders back, tapped the blade of his stick against the doorframe the way he always did, and followed his team toward the light.

The whistle blew too late, or maybe it only felt late, sharp and piercing as it cut through a moment that had already gone wrong, and the roar of the crowd shifted into something uneasy and indistinct, but Shane barely registered any of it, because all he could see was that Rozanov was not moving.

Shane, who had spent nearly seven years learning the constant low-level motion of his body, the way he was never fully at rest even when he should have been, always shifting or adjusting or burning off energy in small unconscious ways, was looking at Rozanov now exactly as he had landed, weight uncorrected, limbs akimbo.

Rozanov was never still. Not on the ice, not in their hotel rooms, not before or after or even during the rare moments when he lay still long enough to pretend at rest. There was always something—an arm shifting, fingers flexing, energy burning off the man because he couldn’t help but draw attention. Shane had seen him asleep and awake and spent and wound tight again, and even then, Rozanov had never been motionless.

The trainers were already over the boards by the time Shane registered that the play had stopped, their skates cutting shallow arcs as they closed in, the practiced efficiency of people who had seen this before and would rather not see it again. A referee dropped to one knee near Rozanov’s head, one hand raised in a quiet, reflexive gesture that meant give him space, and the perimeter around Rozanov widened.

Rozanov’s eyes slid past the lights overhead without fixing on anything, lagging behind the world by just enough to be unmistakable, and when his mouth moved, it produced nothing at all, the effort of speech stalling somewhere between thought and muscle.

Shane was aware, distantly, of how he must have looked—how still he was, how carefully neutral (how robotic, his mind whispered)—but his body had gone rigid with the effort of not moving, of holding himself inside the narrow band of acceptable reaction he had learned to live within. He watched as a trainer spoke to Rozanov, calm and precise, asking questions that Shane had heard a hundred times before in other contexts, other games, and felt each one land with a delay he did not like.

“What’s your name?” a trainer asked, his voice steady and practiced.

Rozanov answered eventually, the syllables thick but there, and the sound of it should have been reassuring, should have been enough, but it wasn’t. 

“Do you know where you are?”

Rozanov frowned faintly, as if the question had arrived late or out of sequence, and then he laughed, quiet and off to the side of the moment, a laugh that did not belong there, a laugh that made Shane’s skin go cold.

Only then did he notice the blood.

He hadn’t seen it at first. He didn’t know how he’d missed it. But once the thought formed, it dragged his gaze down with horrible insistence to the dark smear at Rozanov’s temple, thick and uneven where the helmet sat askew, tracing a short, jagged line before soaking into the padding and dulling against the ice. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t cinematic. It was simply there, undeniable and real, and paired with the lag in Rozanov’s eyes and the wrongness of that laugh, it became unbearable.

Another official skated into place, body angled just enough to block the line of sight without making a spectacle of it, close enough that Shane could feel the vibration through the ice when he stopped. “Hollander,” he called. “Bench.” 

Shane’s mouth opened. Closed. The explanation for his behaviour rose and stalled, useless, because no interation of it would demand less attention than he could afford to have on him. He stayed where he was as the trainers fitted the collar around Rozanov’s neck, as they repeated instructions slowly and clearly, as Rozanov complied with visible lag, blinking hard and slow, and bleeding.

Shane hadn’t seen it at first, but now that he had, it pulled his attention downward with a kind of horrible insistence, to the thick, dark smear at Rozanov’s temple where the helmet sat askew, to the way it had traced a short, uneven line along his skin before soaking into the padding, already dulling where it met the ice. It wasn’t a lot, but it didn’t need to be. The fact of it was enough to tip something in Shane’s head from strained control into something looser and more dangerous.

He knew, rationally, that players would bleed on the ice, that cuts were ordinary and manageable and usually superficial, but this was blood and Rozanov, this blood was paired with the lag in Rozanov’s eyes and the laugh that had come out wrong, and Shane’s mind refused to file it anywhere useful. The image stuck, vivid and uncooperative, and every attempt to look away only brought him back to it again.

Rozanov’s gaze drifted, unfocused, and landed on Shane.

It paused there, uncertain, like he was trying to recognize something through fog, and Shane felt his pulse slam painfully against his ribs. He kept his face carefully neutral, his hands loose at his sides, even though every muscle in his body was straining toward him, every instinct screaming to close the distance, to kneel down and press his palm to Ilya’s chest just to feel it rise and fall.

Shane thought, stupidly and without warning, of Rozanov’s penthouse apartment in the late afternoon after they had woken up together for the first time, the only time, light leaking in through the blinds in pale bands across the floor. He remembered sitting on the couch with their knees bumping, plates balanced awkwardly between them, tuna melts going lukewarm because neither of them had bothered to move to the table. 

On the ice, with blood at his temple and confusion in his eyes, Rozanov became Ilya again.

And Shane knew, with the same certainty with which he knew he was in love, that something in his chest had run away from him and into Ilya's skin, into his soul.

He wanted to run his fingers through Ilya’s hair, even now, sweat-damp and sticky at the edges, to feel the familiar give at the nape of his neck where he always leaned without thinking. He wanted to be close enough that he wouldn’t have to explain anything, close enough that Ilya would simply understand what he meant, the way he usually did. He wanted to align himself with him the way they always had, chest to chest, the steady hammer of another heartbeat grounding the noise in his own head.

He wanted to reach out and tell Ilya that it would be okay, even though he didn’t believe that in any practical sense. He wanted the weight of him back where it belonged, solid and familiar, the pressure of another body against his own, the way it made things quieter in his head without him having to ask for it. 

He wanted proof that the motion he had always associated with him hadn’t vanished, had only gone temporarily, terribly still. The desire came tangled and incoherent, half-memory and half-panic, the urge to anchor something that had always been kinetic with the simplest, gentlest contact he knew how to give. 

Shane watched as Cliff Marleau leaned over Ilya, tapping his shoulders, trying to get a response, but it seemed it had been futile, because Marleau only doubled down, yelling something Shane couldn’t hear. He felt his stomach churn when Ilya’s head tipped over to the side, and Shane could see his eyes fluttering shut, his mouth barely forming simple shapes before it fell slack.

He wanted to say sorry for every time Shane's words had ruined something between them, for every time he had let fear speak louder than want, for every time he had watched Ilya’s face shift from open to guarded because Shane had panicked and stepped back first, or taken too many steps forward. He wanted to take back the exact second when Ilya had said his name in a moment of ecstasy and Shane’s brain had recoiled, had decided that this was too much, too real, too close to something that might demand permanence. He wanted to rewind to that moment and not flinch, not gather his things and leave.

He wanted to promise that he would stay.

He wanted to promise that if Ilya just got up—if he just opened his eyes and swore in any language under the sun and laughed it off—Shane would never walk away again, would never let his fear or his desire win him over, would swallow every ugly, inconvenient feeling whole if it meant keeping Ilya upright and moving.

He would never speak again if that was what it took.

The thought broke apart almost as soon as it formed, scattered by the sight of more doctors on the rink, by the ice beneath his skates and the crowd above them, by the fact that wanting at all in a place built for impact felt obscene and impossible and yet unbearably urgent.

“--llander, number twenty-four, Hollander!”

Shane jerked.

“The bench, now!”

The spinal board came out, wheels clattering softly as it was maneuvered into place, and the ref gestured again, patience running thin. 

He did not trust himself to speak. If he opened his mouth, something would come out that he could not take back. Something too raw, too visible. So he let himself be steered, one reluctant step and then another, retreating not because he wanted to but because the alternative was worse—because the cameras were already circling, because the questions would come, because if he moved toward Ilya in the way his body was screaming at him to move, the entire world would see what he had spent years trying to contain.

He stopped when they stopped him, hands clenched so tightly inside his gloves that his fingers ached, and he watched as they fitted the collar around Ilya’s neck, as they slid the board beneath him with careful precision, as they lifted him in one synchronized motion that looked almost gentle.

The space where he had been lying emptied too quickly.

The game’s machinery reasserted itself, erasing the outline of his body with ruthless efficiency. Only a dark red stain remained, thin and spreading, soaking into the ice in a way that felt horribly intimate.

That stain was proof that Ilya Rozanov had a heart, that it had been beating minutes ago, that it had been pumping blood through a body that refused to stay still, and now it sat there cooling under arena lights while they wheeled him away.

Shane stared until his vision blurred, and a zamboni came out to clear the ice.

The only thing worse than this image—worse than the slack mouth and the unfocused eyes and the blood against white ice—was the possibility that he would never see him move like that again, never watch him carve sharp, furious lines across the rink, never feel that reckless, impossible energy directed straight at him. 

And Shane, who had built his entire life around not losing, around never giving anyone the satisfaction of watching him fall apart, swallowed the taste of bile and forced his hands to unclench, because he would not let himself fall apart here.

He would not lose.

Even if it meant standing perfectly still while the only person who had ever made him feel truly alive was carried out of sight.

The rest of the game did not so much happen as pass through him. Shane went back onto the ice and found that the boards were where they were supposed to be, and the still puck moved when it was struck, and his skates still kept him upright when he shifted his weight from foot to foot. Whatever had gone wrong earlier did not belong to this part of his mind, and so it stayed elsewhere.

He skated hard. He tracked the puck and the bodies around it, adjusted his speed, cut his angles. He did not look toward the bench where Rozanov should have been. He did not look for him at all.

Shane knew each goal would go in before it did, so there was no need to look at the net again until hi next approach.

Shane knew it because each time the puck disappeared and the sound changed shape, the sudden rise of the crowd hit him all at once, too loud and too close. His body finished the motion anyway, automatic and precise, habits formed from years of drilling them into his very soul. 

When the lights above the goal turned red, hands were on him immediately. Someone shouted, someone laughed, and stick knocked against his shoulder hard enough to jolt him forward. Shane let himself be moved because pushing back would have required more effort than he had to spare. He lifted his stick when the others did. He nodded when someone said his name.

They scored again after that, and then again. The game blurred around the edges of his eyes, tension bleeding out of it until it was nothing but a set of rules, and the one player who knew them best. Shane stayed exactly as focused as he needed to be and no more.

He did not think about the score, or the clock, or what the win meant. He could have told you, later, that they’d dominated. He could not have told you by how much.

When the buzzer finally sounded, it startled him.

The noise came back all at once. The bench surged, thick, padded gloves slapped against his helmet, tapped at the C on his chest. Someone shouted something he didn’t catch. Shane skated off with his head held high, blades carving a familiar path he had walked a thousand times before. The noise stayed noise, and his helmet trapped it inside his head, his breath loud and uneven in his ears, and the lights overhead felt too bright, flattening the ice until depth disappeared. Shane became aware of his equipment in a way he tried not to be, lest he dare to lose a game to inattention, but the pressure of the strap under his jaw, the way his gloves pressed into his palms, the roar in his ears, and of how much effort it was taking just to stand where he was.

Winning usually came with a pleasant, clear feeling, tight, and sharp, and unmistakable.

This time, Shane felt decidedly unclean, because the buzz of a win had dropped away somewhere between the tunnel and the locker room, leaving behind only the noise—voices still too loud, laughter skidding across tile, the sharp slap of tape against the benches as his teammates unwrapped their sticks. The air felt thick with heat and sweat and disinfectant. 

Autopilot carried him the rest of the way because it always had, because two years of captaincy had taught him how to shepherd an ending even when the ending refused to settle. Shane congratulated the team with the ease of long practice, hands finding shoulders, words arriving where they were supposed to, the public shape of a win held intact even as the private one lagged behind. He felt faintly aware of how convincing it must have looked, how little anyone could tell that the satisfaction itself had failed to materialize.

He wondered, briefly and with a kind of dull self-loathing, what Rose might see through the small rectangle of her phone screen. Would she watch him lift his stick in triumph and think him heroic? Would she notice the second too long he had lingered on the ice after Rozanov fell, the way his gaze had fixed and refused to move? Would she text him later, bright and earnest, asking if he was okay, and would he respond with something measured and complete?

He imagined her watching him win while the man he loved lay somewhere under fluorescent lights, scalp cut open, skull closed again by strangers.

He imagined her smiling at him, and leaning in to embrace him, whispering in his ear.

The thought made his stomach turn.

He stood in the middle of the locker room, helmet finally off, noise still crashing around him, and felt something like shame settle deep and stubborn in his chest—not because they had won, not because he had played well, but because he had been capable of it at all.

Because somewhere across the city, Ilya Rozanov was lying motionless under white sheets, and Shane Hollander had scored a hat-trick.

Chapter 2

Chapter Summary

Shane gets a call

Chapter Notes

so sorry this took so long college apps are biting my ass

2016 - Late January

Ilya thought he might have heard the hit before he felt it. He heard a muffled curse, and the thud of a helmet hitting the ice, and the sound of someone calling for play to stop what felt like ages before he felt the cool surface against the back of his head, and the trickle of blood across his face.

He blinked once, experimentally, because blinking was something he could still do, and because it seemed important to take inventory while he had the chance. Above him, the lights burned like a row of small, indifferent suns. They looked the way they did sometimes after a long practice or a bad night’s sleep, except this time the reassembly lagged, and his world was buffering.

The ceiling tilted. Or perhaps he tilted around the ceiling, perhaps he was still drifting on the ice, waiting for impact. It was difficult to say.

He thought, absurdly, of the score, of whether the assist would still count if he left the game like this, of the way the tape on his stick had started to peel during warm-ups, and how he’d meant to redo it between periods. Perhaps Boston could still win without him, without their captain. 

Someone said his name, but the sound travelled through his ears thinned of meaning, stretched by distance and crowd noise until it no longer quite resembled any language that he knew of. The arena itself seemed to have lost its edges, the crowd flattening into something dense and undifferentiated.

He thought, in that moment, that he wasn’t even upset that he wouldn’t get to go home that night. He would find himself in a hospital instead, fluorescent and procedural, a place that would not want for anything of him beyond his compliance. The realization almost brought him peace as his head became fuzzier with every second. He would have once again spent the night waiting for a text that would not come, the familiar vigil of checking his phone and pretending not to, if only to convince himself that it was an irrelevant action.

The view of his apartment drifted before his eyes. The photos on the walls, where there had been none before Shane, added after he had once remarked (with an odd disgust that Ilya didn't quite understand) that the place, four years after Ilya had moved in, still felt more like a hotel room than somewhere a person lived. The drawer in his closet set aside for Shane’s things, holding a Montreal Voyageurs sweatshirt and the clothes he had walked in wearing on the day he ran, on the day Ilya lost him, touched again and again until they no longer smelled of his cedar and cinnamon. He thought of the second toothbrush in his ensuite bathroom, where not even Sveta left her things. 

He thought of the ginger ale in the fridge, and his shoes still lined up in the same place by the door, aligned the way they needed to be when Shane came over, or else he should expect a lecture. He thought of the sectioned laundry basket Shane had ordered for him two years ago, still in use, along with a million other small adjustments that had never been reversed. He would have gone home tonight and moved through all of it again, as he had been doing for weeks now, for months.

But that wasn't quite right either, because Ilya wasn't in Boston, and the thought of a blank hotel room, all alone on Montreal, sounded worse than his penthouse made for two.

It seemed important, suddenly, to restore order to the world, because Ilya did not think he could rest in any death if not. 

“My…phone. Need to—” he heard himself say, distantly, through tears and a hacking lung, and the pain shooting through his face. “Need to tell Jane.”

Jane, Jane, Jane. Lovely Jane, his sweet girl, his good boy, his most precious desire, his greatest rival.

A face entered his field of vision, close enough to distract his blurry vision from the stands. Ilya was quite sure, from his vantage point on the ice, that it must be Marleau. He recognized him by structure more than detail, by the set of his shoulders, the familiar width of his presence. Cliff said something immediately, too fast, his mouth moving with an urgency that did not translate, because Ilya was just so tired. The words came and went as sound only, the semantic layer lost somewhere along the way.

And then the words were gone completely, along with the lights, the thoughts of a warm body he was meant to come home to, and any coherent thread of thought.

Ilya tried to follow it and found that he couldn’t remember where it had started, nor where it had ended. 

He had time to think, very clearly, that he should stay awake. Then even that thought let go of him, and there was only the ice, and then not even that.

Shane’s phone was buzzing nonstop on the bedside table, rattling faintly against the wood with every new notification, a thin, persistent vibration that felt like it was crawling under his skin. He could see the screen lighting up from where he lay on his side, face half-buried in the pillow, but he couldn’t make himself turn over. He didn’t want to know if it was Rose, polite and patient and undeserving of this silence. He didn’t want to know if it was his mom, already worried because he’d sounded strange on the phone earlier. He didn’t want to know if it was Hayden, or any of the guys, riding the high of a win that now felt obscene.

He didn’t want to know if Ilya had his phone back.

He didn’t want to see Lily’s name on his screen. Or worse—nothing at all.

The room was dark except for the streetlight leaking through the blinds, striping the wall in dull orange. His apartment felt wrong around him. Too tidy, and too empty. Ilya had never been here. Shane had made sure of that. This had always been the safe place, the separate place. Hockey here, Rose here, his mother here.

Now it felt like a mistake. A catastrophic one.

His head throbbed behind his eyes, a steady pulse that made it hard to think, but his heart was worse. It felt swollen. Too large for his ribs. Every beat hurt, like it was slamming against bone and not finding enough room. He pressed his fist against his sternum as if he could hold it in place, as if he could keep it from breaking something on the way out.

He was in love.

It cracked through him, blunt and irreversible. He was in love, and the man he loved was lying somewhere in Montréal—on a stretcher, on a surgical table, in a corridor under fluorescent lights—or maybe he wasn’t lying anywhere at all. Maybe he hadn’t made it that far.

Maybe there hadn’t been time.

Shane’s stomach turned over violently at that. He squeezed his eyes shut, but it didn’t help. The images came anyway. A sheet pulled up too high. A nurse’s face going carefully blank. Someone saying we did everything we could.

He had been to Montréal General once, in his rookie year, trailing behind veterans who walked the halls like they belonged there, like broken bodies were just another part of the job. He remembered the smell. Antiseptic and something metallic underneath it. He remembered the directory screen, the endless list of departments—trauma, neurology, rehabilitation—and how long-term had sounded like a life sentence. Jasperson had never come back. Just disappeared from the lineup, from the locker room, from the rhythm of their season, as if hockey had swallowed him whole and decided not to spit him back out.

And now—

Shane rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, the faint shadow of the fan unmoving above him. Rozanov might never skate again. The thought was unbearable. Worse than death in some sick, selfish corner of his brain. Hockey without Rozanov was a world drained of color. No sharp turns. No reckless, furious charges down the ice. No smirk across the faceoff circle. No fire answering fire.

And so Shane lay there in his bed, in his own apartment, where Rozanov had never been, because Shane hadn’t let him, and where he might never be, because it might all be over. Because maybe Rozanov was done for, just as Jazzy had been in Shane’s rookie year, just as Zednick had been, just two years earlier, just as Gretzky had almost been, the year Shane was born. Shane couldn’t imagine hockey without Rozanov. They had been playing on the same ice since they were only kids—since they were fresh-faced and not-yet nubile. It had been eight years since they met on the ice, since Shane fell in love with hockey for a second time. Maybe it had been eight years, too, since Shane had fallen in love with Ilya Rozanov. 

It had been eight years since Shane had extended his hand to a tall blond with the most stunning set of eyes Shane had ever encountered, the most beautiful hockey he had ever seen played. He loved watching him skate. God. He loved it. The way Rozanov carved the ice like he was punishing it, like he was daring it to throw him off balance. The way he moved—sharp, ruthless, beautiful. It had reignited something in Shane that he hadn’t even realized had gone dim. It had made hockey feel alive again, dangerous and sacred and worth bleeding for.

It had made Shane feel alive.

The fire had been there every time their eyes met across the rink. Every time their shoulders slammed together and neither of them backed down. Every time Rozanov’s hand had slid over the curve of his lower back in the dark, fingers pressing like he was memorizing him by touch alone. Every time their mouths met, bruising and hungry and desperate like it might be the last time.

What if it had been, that time on Rozanov’s couch, when Shane had taken him for granted and fled?

He swallowed, his throat dry and aching.

If Rozanov died without ever stepping foot in this apartment—without ever seeing this stupid couch, this kitchen, this bed—then Shane would have kept him compartmentalized right up until the end. Hidden, and contained, tucked away like something shameful.

If a momentary thought of someone knowing about them didn't fill Shane with days-long dread, if he didn't need to be worried about hockey, or his mother, Shane would scream it for the world to hear. There was no world in which Ilya could be something shameful. Not Ilya

And yet, he had never let Ilya see where he lived.

What if that was the last line Shane ever drew between them? What if the final shape of their relationship was this: secrecy, distance, and a hospital room he wasn’t even in?

His chest tightened until breathing felt optional. He rolled onto his side, curling in on himself, knees drawn up like he was trying to make himself smaller, less likely to shatter.

“Please,” he whispered into the pillow, voice breaking on the word.

He wasn’t even sure what he was asking for. For Ilya to be alive. For him to wake up, for him to skate again, for him to walk into this apartment one day and complain about the bland furniture and open every cabinet like he owned the place.

For just one more chance.

He swiped.

The screen flooded with notifications. Text after text stacked on top of each other so fast they blurred, little grey and blue bubbles smearing together. Another one slid down as he watched.

None of them were from Lily.

Eight missed calls from his mom. Two from Rose. Four from an unknown number. Fourteen from Montréal General.

Fourteen.

His fingers went numb. For a split second, the phone slipped in his grip and nearly hit the floor. He caught it against his chest, heart kicking violently, and fumbled to hit call back before he could think too hard about what fourteen missed calls from a hospital meant.

They wouldn’t call him. They shouldn’t call him. There was no version of this where the hospital needed Shane Hollander. But if they had—

The line rang twice.

“Hello, this is Amy at the Montréal Neurological Institute-Hospital. How can I help you?”

The Neuro.

For a second, Shane couldn’t remember what he was supposed to say. His name, probably. 

“I—” He stopped, swallowed. “I missed a call. From this number.”

There was a pause, the faint clatter of keys. “All right,” the woman said. “May I have your name, please?”

He considered lying, the thought flickering through him so quickly it barely took shape—some instinct to protect himself from what might follow—but it collapsed immediately under its own absurdity. He had been on national television less than three hours ago. His name had been shouted by thousands of people. There was no anonymity left to hide inside.

Shane tightened his grip on the phone. “This is Shane Hollander.”

“Yes,” she said, tone adjusted just a fraction, still professional, but Shane could tell she had recognized him. “Thank you, Mr. Hollander. One moment, please.”

The line went quiet.

Shane stared at the wall, acutely aware of his own breathing, of how thin the barrier suddenly felt between who he was on the ice and who he was now, sitting alone in a cold, empty bed, waiting for a stranger to come back and tell him something he could not afford to misunderstand.

The line clicked again, a soft mechanical sound that felt too loud in the quiet of his bedroom.

“Mr. Hollander,” the woman said, and now he could hear the muffled excitement in her voice at his name, quickly smoothed over, enthusiasm pressed flat into something that passed for neutrality. She was doing her best to sound professional, to keep the situation in its proper frame, and it wasn’t quite working, but Shane appreciated the effort. “Thank you for holding. I just need to confirm a few details with you.”

Shane nodded automatically, then realized she couldn’t see him. “Okay,” he said. His mouth felt dry. He tried to remember when he’d last had water, and it must have been at some point during the game, but 

“You’re listed here as an emergency contact for Mr Ilya Rozanov,” she continued. “Is that correct?”

For a moment, the words didn’t assemble properly in his mind. Shane waited for the sentence to finish rearranging itself into something he recognized, and when it didn’t, he felt the floor drop out from under him.

“I—” He stopped, then started again. “I’m sorry, I’m listed as what?”

There was a brief pause, the sound of a mouse clicking as the woman must have been double-checking a screen. “You’re listed as the primary emergency contact in the event of an injury during a game in Montréal,” she said. “Your name and number are here.”

Shane swallowed. “Okay,” he said, because it was the only word that came quickly enough. “I didn’t— I wasn’t aware of that, but yes. That’s me.”

“All right,” she said, accepting it without comment. There was the sound of typing, brisk and efficient. “Thank you for confirming. For the record, can you please verify your date of birth?”

As he recited the numbers, Shane found himself staring at the far wall of his apartment, at a faint scuff near the baseboard he had meant to clean and never had, and it struck him with dizzying force that this was what the room would look like if Ilya never saw it—this exact wall, this exact mark, preserved in its dull, meaningless imperfection.

He tried to imagine Ilya somewhere, at some point, filling out a form with that same deliberateness, writing Shane’s name in a line that had probably been meant for a parent, a spouse, a brother.

“And your current location?” she asked, even though she must have known he had just played a game and was definitely still in Montreal.

“I’m in Montreal,” Shane said, anyway. “I’m at home.”

Ottawa had been home once. He wondered when Montreal had become his home. He spent nineteen years of his life in Ottawa, in low residential neighborhoods that spread outward instead of up, strip malls and government buildings, and long stretches of road that led mostly to more road. 

Montréal had been hockey, had been danger, had been Ilya.

“Thank you.” More typing. “I’m calling to provide a brief update and to confirm contact information. I won’t be able to go into full medical details at this time.”

“Okay,” Shane said again, because his mouth seemed to know what to do even when the rest of him didn’t. 

“Ilya Rozanov is currently stable,” she said, and Shane could almost feel the relief entering his bloodstream, but something wasn’t quite right in the woman’s tone, and he knew the comfort wouldn’t last. “He’s being monitored following a neurosurgical procedure related to a head injury sustained during the game. He is in our care at the moment, but visiting hours are over for the night…”

Shane didn’t hear what she said next, because in the time he had been ignoring his phone, ignoring the world, Rozanov had been in the hospital for fucking brain surgery. 

The woman continued, as if she hadn’t delivered some of the most terrifying news of Shane’s life, “If there are any changes overnight, you, or another contact if you are unavailable, will be contacted.”

“Okay,” Shane said.

“Do you have any questions for me at this time?”

He opened his mouth, and for a moment the questions pressed at the back of his teeth—Is he awake? Does he know what happened? Did he ask for anyone? Is he still himself?—but none of them felt like something he could entrust to a stranger’s voice over a line that could disconnect at any moment.

“No,” he said finally. “No, I don’t think so.”

“All right. If you think of anything later, you can call the unit directly. Otherwise, someone will follow up with you.”

“Thank you,” he replied, and he hated how thin it sounded, how civilized.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Hollander. Take care.”

The line went dead.

He remained standing in the middle of his empty bedroom, phone still pressed to his ear, listening to the empty hum on the other end as if, if he waited long enough, she might return and amend it, soften it, take back the part about surgery.

Ilya had made him official in the one place that would still matter when everything else fell apart, and Shane had not even known.

He had been the one they were meant to call, and he had not been there.

The apartment felt impossibly quiet around him, too intact, too unchanged, for the riot in his mind.

Sleep was no longer even a distant possibility tonight. He moved toward the kitchen on unsteady legs. He filled the kettle, water sloshing over the edge and onto the counter, and did not bother to wipe it up. The small domesticity of it felt grotesque. 

When he flipped the switch and the kettle began its low, steady hum, he braced both hands against the counter and bowed his head, breathing carefully, because somewhere across the city, under fluorescent lights and behind closed doors, the man who had written his name down as the person to call if something went wrong was lying still, his skull newly closed, and Shane had not even known until a stranger told him.

Chapter End Notes

I'm about halfway through writing the third chapter and plotting the rest of this story, and I realized that this got WAYYYYY out of hand, so i will be adjusting the tags to account for the direction I plan to take this fic. Thank you so much to the author of back and forth from new york for being an incredible inspiration i will do my best to live up to the work you have done.

Chapter 3

Chapter Summary

Rose my queen

Chapter Notes

I hope you all enjoy this!!! I hope to have the next chapter out soon))))

2016 - Late January

When Shane was a kid and stayed home sick, his mother would keep him on the couch and bring soup in a mug so it wouldn’t spill if his hands shook. She poured ginger ale and left it on the counter until it went flat, because bubbles made his stomach hurt. She shut the blinds halfway, not all the way, and turned the television down low enough that it was background rather than something he had to follow. She checked his temperature, wrote it down, and told him when she would check it again. There was always a trash can nearby, always tissues, always water within reach. He did not have to ask for any of it.

He noticed, absently, that there was no system in place now for when he was sick—no small rules, no next step already decided. He ate when he remembered, and he slept when he stopped functioning. Everything else continued as normal.

Shane wasn’t sick, though.

It was late, past midnight now, edging toward one as Shane sat at the kitchen counter with his tea cupped between his hands, the tea gone lukewarm and faintly unpleasant from sitting too long. He drank it anyway, and the cool liquid was soothing against his throat. 

He needed to talk to Rose, and he needed to find out why a random number had been messaging him, but he couldn't feel his limbs, and his brain was foggy, and he felt like he was drifting. He wanted to get up off this damn stool in his kitchen, wanted to grab for his phone and throw it in a ditch and ignore the world, but he couldn't do that yet. 

The minutes passed, and when he felt like his body was his own once more, he left the kitchen and went back to his room to call her. He didn't know what he should say or what he was supposed to do.

Should he pull all the stops, tell her everything? Did he trust her with it all?

That was silly, of course he did. Even if he didn't love Rose the way he should, he still loved her. She was kind and beautiful, and one of the funniest people he had ever met. He wished, briefly, that he could have loved her for real, but that was silly too, because if he had, there would probably have never been Ilya. 

Ilya, who was soft and harsh and so very warm. Ilya, who made him food and held him when Shane needed to be held, and who never missed a chance to chirp at Shane. 

Ilya, who was lying in a hospital bed in Montreal, recovering from brain surgery, and all alone. 

Rose picked up on the third ring. Shane hadn’t thought she’d be asleep—it was only approaching eleven in Los Angeles—but the relief still punched through him when he heard her voice, immediate and humiliating, like his body had made the decision for him before his brain could catch up.

“Shane,” she said. “I called you hours ago. What’s going on? Are you all right?”

He tried to speak and failed. Rose, I have to tell you something but I can’t do it over the phone—or, no, that’s not true, because there was no other way to do it. After all, if he waited, he would never do it. I’m—

“Shane?”

His heart stuttered, a sharp misfire, and then everything sped up too fast, his pulse rattling in his chest like a dozen rabbit feet tapping against his clavicle, frantic and directionless. He could feel it everywhere, in his throat, in his hands, in the hollow at the base of his neck.

There was no logical way to explain this to his girlfriend. No clean story where he sounded like a reasonable person. There was no way to say that he, an NHL player, and the man who had been his rival for eight years, had been hooking up for the last six and a half of them. There was no way to say that the person was Ilya Rozanov without the words rearranging his entire life, shaking out his body, and smearing him all over a filthy Las Vegas bathroom floor.

He was about to tell Rose fucking Landry that he, Shane Hollander, was in love with Ilya Rozanov, captain of the Boston Bears, that he was in love with the man everyone expected him to hate. He was about to tell his girlfriend of three months and fifteen days that he was gay.

Shane must have been losing his mind. That was the only explanation that made sense for how he was acting.

“Shane?” Rose said again, softer now, careful. “Shane, sweetheart, are you all right?”

“Yeah,” he said automatically, because reflex was easier than truth. “I am—” His voice wobbled and he hated that it did. He swallowed and tried again. “Yeah. I’m okay. I just—” He couldn’t finish it. The words backed up in his throat, threatening to spill over or to choke him, he wasn’t sure. “I have to tell you something.”

There was a pause on the line, Rose giving him space, trusting him, just like she always did, and it was unbearable, like it always was.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m listening.”

Shane closed his eyes.

Ilya in a hospital bed. A game in Montreal and then brain surgery. Ilya alone and in pain. The facts piled up until they overshadowed everything else, and he knew he had to say it now, lest he explode.

“Rose,” he said, and his heart was still racing, still refusing to calm down, “there isn’t a good way to say this. And I know the timing is bad, and I’m sorry I can’t tell you this in person, but I can’t lie to you anymore.”

“Hey,” Rose said, gently, and somehow managed to sound like herself even through the phone—warm and already trying to fix something, because she was perfect and kind and wonderful, and Shane would have married her in another life. “You’re scaring me a little. Talk to me.”

Shane pressed his thumb hard into the edge of the counter because he needed the pressure, needed something physical to keep him from floating apart into the upper atmosphere.

“I’m sorry,” he said, the word tumbling out before anything else, like bile and ginger ale and cold tea came up his throat. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean for it to—” to what, exactly, to happen, to exist? “I never wanted to hurt you.”

There was a small sound on the other end, not alarmed, not angry, but it hurt all the same, because he had lied to her. He had done the unforgivable, what he swore he would never do, and he hurt someone because of a lie.

“Okay,” Rose said. “I hear that. But you don’t have to apologize before you’ve even said the thing.”

He exhaled, ragged, and it shook all the way through him. He could feel tears building, hot and humiliating, and he hated that too, hated that he was about to cry to her when he was the one who’d done something wrong, when she was the one who deserved comfort.

“I just—” His voice cracked completely that time, broke open, and his heart went with it. “You’ve been really good to me. You are good to me. And I know I haven’t always been… fully here, and that’s not fair, and it’s not because of anything you did.” He swiped at his face with the heel of his hand, breath hitching. “You’re funny, and you’re kind, and you make things easier, and I care about you so much, and I feel awful, and Rose, please—”

“Shane,” she said softly, but her voice was tinged with worry, with hints of panic. “Breathe.”

He tried, but it didn’t work very well, and his chest tightened instead, grief and guilt tangling until they were virtually indistinguishable. “I feel sick,” he admitted, because he did, because nothing was right. After all, he’d told himself he’d take this to the grave.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and the image of Ilya in a hospital bed flashed uninvited: white sheets and sutures, and the unbearable fact that Shane could not be near him, sharpening everything to a point.

“There’s someone else,” Shane said, and the words hurt on the way out, because how could he ever refer to Ilya as just someone else? Ilya was… everything. “Someone who’s been part of my life for a long time.” He could hear how bad it sounded and barreled forward anyway, because stopping would be worse. “I didn’t think it was like this, I didn’t understand it for a long time, but I can’t keep—keep doing this.”

Silence. Then, gently, Rose asked him, “Are you telling me you cheated on me?”

The question was reasonable, of course, given what he was saying. It was devastating anyway, because he could hear Rose sniffling, and he could feel himself sinking deeper into this dirty can of worms that he’d opened for himself.

He knew that whatever he said to Rose would not sound like the thing itself, that language would fail him the way it always did when he tried to talk about wanting, or not wanting, or the absence between those two states. He would hurt her no matter how carefully he spoke, and the idea that he could be gentle enough to avoid that felt childish now. 

“Yes,” he said, because he would not lie now, not after everything. “But not like—I mean—yes. I did, but I didn’t. I didn’t sleep with anyone while we were together or anything, and I didn’t go out with other people, but I—” His voice dissolved, tears spilling over finally, unstoppable. “I wasn’t ever truly loyal to you, and I never wanted to be that person to you.”

“No, Shane, you’ve been lovely to me, Shane, so lovely,” she told him, and Shane almost wanted to take it all back, to tell her that he had been playing some awful prank, but it was time for him to be honest with Rose, and be honest with himself. “And— I’m glad you didn’t sleep with anyone else, at least.”

At least, she said. At least he didn't sleep with anyone else, as if that could be his only fault. As if he hadn’t let another person, unseen and unheard, into bed with them, because he was selfish and cruel. He realized that this was the moment where he could choose to be forgiven cheaply or understood accurately, and that the two were not the same. Rose was offering him mercy without knowing the full scope of what she was forgiving, and taking it would have been easier, kinder in the short term, almost gentle. But she would never know what he had done, or who he really was.

“I hurt you though, and—please just listen, I hurt you, and I’m sorry, and I will never be able to say sorry enough, but I can’t seem to feel too guilty about it, because you are one of the best things to ever happen to me, and I do love you, even if it’s not like that.”

He took a deep breath, and Rose waited patiently for him to finish speaking, because she was lovely and sweet, and Shane was a plastic skeleton blowing in the wind on Halloween.

“I don’t know what happens now,” Shane said finally. “I don’t know what the right next step is, or if there even is one. But I can’t— I can’t keep lying to you.”

Rose made a small, understanding sound, not quite an answer, but not nothing either.

“I didn’t want to be someone who wastes your time,” he added, quieter now. “Or my own.”

He didn’t know how to begin the next part. He’d never told anyone about Ilya before; he’d never told anyone he’d ever slept with a man at all.

“Um…” He began, rather eloquently. “I truly didn’t mean for this to happen, Rose I swear, and now you’re caught in the middle of this whole thing, and you don’t deserve it one bit. I treated you like a rebound for them, and I’m sorry, and I never should have agreed to go out with you, because I knew I was hung up on them, and I’m sorry. They—no—he,” Shane stopped for a second, just to hear Rose take a sharp inhale. “Before you and I met, I tried to end things with him, because I was scared, but he—”

“Hey,” she cut in, and Shane could tell she was trying to stop him from saying something he would regret, but he knew it truly was time, had been time for a while. “You don’t owe me any explanation.”

“I really do.”

“You really don’t, but okay. Tell me the whole story another day, please.”

Another day, as in, they could still talk. Shane could still have a friend, could still have Rose in his life, even though it was greedy and selfish, and it was a terrible idea. But Shane had a track record of terrible ideas already, didn’t he? What was one more, even if it meant he would be selfish?

“So… you’ve been with another guy before, then?” 

“Yeah, I have.”

“Have you ever told anyone that before?” He shook his head, and when he remembered she couldn’t see him, he murmured that he hadn’t. “Was it different? With a guy?”

He thought of Ilya, who could lift him like a feather, who could snap him at a moment's notice, who was sturdy and angular, who was warm and could cover him from head to toe.

“Of course.”

“Was it better?”

“Yeah, it was, uh… Um. It was better.” Thick, calloused fingers, and broad shoulders, and his eyes. Shane loved his eyes. He loved them when they were bright and blue and sparkling in light reflected from the ice, and he loved them when they were blown black, staring into his own, framed by the soft, golden hair hanging around his face. “The thing is, I—”

The thing was, Rose loved hockey. She stayed up late to watch his games on TV, to call him and congratulate him after a win, to console him after a brutal loss, to bicker for hours about completely irrelevant games from the other side of the continent, even. She would know in a heartbeat if he mentioned one too many details, but he couldn’t really bring himself to care.

“The thing is, it’s only ever truly been one guy. There were others, but never for more than a night. I’ll tell you about them eventually, if you’re curious.”

Rose had gone quiet again, just waiting for him to say what he needed to say, and he loved her. Oh, how he loved her.

“I met him… well, it's been about eight years now, I think,” he said, but even then he was lying, because he would never forget the day they met. “It’s not even—it’s not even serious, really. I didn’t, like, get out of a relationship right before you and I started dating, but it kind of felt like that. Not that I would know, actually, because all my other relationships before that were more or less doomed from the start.”

He let out a mirthless laugh because, truly, he and Rose had been doomed from the start, too. 

“Anyway, we were seventeen when we met, but nothing really happened until 2010.”

He said two thousand ten because that was how Ilya said it. Ilya had always told Shane that it was stupid to abbreviate a year out loud, because what if he had been talking about 2009? Should he say twenty-oh-nine? 

“We hooked up that year,” Shane said. “For the first time. It was my first time with a man.” He didn’t elaborate, didn’t try to. “I’d had girlfriends before. It was fine, I guess, but I didn’t know that’s what was missing until it wasn’t anymore.”

He exhaled, slow and thin.

“I remember thinking—back in 2008—that I should break up with Jess, she was my girlfriend at the time, only minutes after I met him. I didn’t really understand why I thought that at the time.” He shrugged, even though Rose couldn’t see it. “I guess I do now.”

Here he was, doing it again. He wasn’t so conceited to think that he alone was breaking these girls' hearts, but he knew he was in the wrong anyway.

“I do love you, Rose. I mean that. I just… can’t love you like that. And I wish I could. It would be easier for everyone.”

Then his attention snapped back into his body, and his world seemed to tilt on its axis. It had been close to five hours since Ilya had been taken off the ice.

“He’s in the hospital right now,” Shane said. “In the Montreal General Neuro ICU for post-op.” He pressed his thumb into the counter again, grounding himself. “And I’m here, in my fucking apartment, breaking up with my incredible girlfriend.”

He choked on a laugh, then added, almost absently, “Apparently, he made me his emergency contact. I didn’t even know, we haven’t talked in months. Not since before…”

Before Rose, before Shane ran away, before he fucked it all up for what could be forever.

“Well, you know, before. Anyway, he’s infuriating, and kind of an asshole, and he makes everything harder than it needs to be.” 

And yet… here they were, because Shane didnt think he could live another second without him.

“But I love him. I know that now.”

Shane had said it, and it felt like agony, because he was still alone. He was in love, and he was alone.

“Shane,” Rose said, gently now. “Are we talking about Ilya Rozanov?”

Of course he was, who else could it possibly be? Who else was like Ilya, and his all-consuming energy, the magnetic field that had propelled Shane to take his bleeding heart out of his chest, and give it to a seventeen-year-old Russian hockey player at their first meeting, leaving him free to break it or protect it or cherish it and shatter it anyway. He didn’t answer right away, because these were the words he could never take back, could never unsay. Then, very softly, “Yes.”

And then he was sobbing, his shoulders shaking, and Shane didn’t think he’d cried this hard since the night of the draft, lying in his bed and knowing that he had come second.

“And to think this is all about a man,” he grumbled, over his tears and the feeling of his heart soaring past his ears, because even if he was worried sick and he was admitting he had been with a man for the first time, this all came back to Ilya Fucking Rozanov, Asshole Extraordinaire.

Then she laughed over the phone, and it was wet and teary, but at least she was laughing. Shane wasn’t sure which part of the whole thing she was laughing at, but it was infectious, and in seconds, he was laughing with her, his heart rate slowing down.

“I’m gay, Rose. I swear it was never a matter of loving you, I’m just really fucking gay.”

There was a moment where nobody spoke, and Shane was of half a mind to chuck his phone across the room and never look at it again, but then Rose was talking, and it sounded like she was muffling a giggle, and he wanted to hear her laugh again.

“I’m pretty sure that makes it a nice and round, seven gay boyfriends for me,” she said, voice tittering, and Shane threw himself against the covers, and then she was laughing harder, and the sound was happier, relieved, and Shane knew in that moment that even if the world ended, he and Rose would be alright.

Chapter End Notes

Next chapter will feature the hospital and socmed reactions!!!!

Chapter 4

Chapter Summary

the hospital

Chapter Notes

NOTE: i have made edits to chapters 1-3, and i would recommend checking them out if you are just here for the new update. I'm quite a bit ahppier with the pacing now.

i swear we'll get the hollanov reunion soon but this was getting too long for me to think about, and i was getting too sad

The roads were still quiet as Shane drove to the hospital, the late-January sun still yet to rise. It probably wasn’t a good idea for him to be driving in his state, but he truly did not care at that moment. The hospital had called an hour ago to let him know that he’d be allowed in two hours before visiting hours began, and Shane, in that moment, had thanked every star that had aligned for Ilya to register him as an emergency contact, because Shane thought he would have gone insane walking another lap around his empty apartment. It had gotten so bad around four that he was ready to drive through town and visit the condo, if only to confine his thoughts of Ilya to the space that had, in his head, become theirs.

Shane didn’t know what exactly to expect when he arrived. Hopefully, Ilya would be up and moving again already, laughing and joking as if everything was alright, but Shane knew he would not be so lucky. Perhaps it would be for the best if Ilya was blissfully asleep, unaware of his surroundings, of the pain.

If Ilya was awake, it would probably bring questions Shane might not be able to answer without giving something away, without saying too much or, worse, saying the wrong thing. Asleep meant nothing changing yet. Shane found that he was clinging to the idea of nothing happening, of the world pausing just long enough for him to catch his breath, even though he knew that was not how hospitals worked, not how injuries worked, not how time worked.

The car moved easily through the streets, as if the city had decided not to interfere while Shane was three seconds away from breaking down. Snow sat in low, dirty banks along the curbs, pressed flat and grey by days of traffic, and the streetlights cast a tired kind of light that didn’t quite illuminate anything so much as dull it. Shane followed familiar routes without really thinking about them, his hands steady on the wheel, his foot light on the gas. He felt strangely competent. He had expected shaking, or vertigo, or something to justify pulling over. Instead, there was a narrow, contained version of himself, just intact enough to function.

He wondered if Ilya would even want to see him. He knew that it had to have been a conscious decision to write Shane in as his emergency contact, but perhaps that had been months ago, before everything had gone awry, before Shane had mucked it all up.

The woman behind the front desk of The Neuro looked up as he approached. She had a cardigan draped over the back of her chair and a paper cup of coffee cooling beside the keyboard, its lid already stained with a ring of condensation. He saw the moment that recognition flickered in her eyes, and prayed to whatever God he didn’t believe in that she would honour her privacy regulations.

“Hello, my name is Shane Hollander, I’m here to visit Ilya Rozanov.”

In all honesty, he wasn’t even sure there was a need for him to introduce himself, but he did anyway. 

Shane watched the woman’s face as she typed it into the computer, the soft clicking of the keys filling the space where his thoughts threatened to rush back in. For a moment, the only sound in the lobby was that rhythm and the distant echo of footsteps somewhere down a hallway he could not see.

She paused, eyes flicking from the screen to him and back again.

“One moment,” she said, already reaching for a badge and a visitor slip. “I’ll need you to sign here, and here,” she told him, pointing to each spot.

“I understand that you already called to confirm your arrival, but since we are outside of visiting hours at the moment, you will have to wait for someone to escort you to Mr Rozanov’s room. In the meantime, we have a coffee machine over there,” she pointed to the other side of the lobby, “feel free to make use of it.”

The woman was awfully chipper for five in the morning, but at least she wasn’t rude or invasive. He didn’t plan to take up her offer of coffee— he didn’t like the stuff—but he made his way over to the chairs she’d pointed out and set himself up for a wait that could be anywhere from five to fifty minutes, given that he was in a hospital. But as he sat, he realized that she could also have been taking a sad sort of pity on him. Shane knew he looked a wreck, running into the lobby like a lost dog looking for its owner.

He had come all this way without letting himself think too carefully about what after would look like, about the fact that the next time he saw Ilya would not be in a hotel room or a kitchen or anywhere that belonged to either of them, but here, after surgery, after something had gone wrong badly enough that people had called him in the middle of the night and used words like ‘stable’ as if that were supposed to be reassuring on its own. Stable did not tell him whether whatever existed between them before—whatever had already been strained to the breaking point the last time they spoke—was still intact.

The chair creaked when he shifted his weight, the sound uncomfortably loud in the silent lobby, and he went still again, hands folded loosely between his knees. From where he was sitting, he could see the front desk out of the corner of his eye, the woman already absorbed back into her screen, and he was grateful for it. He did not want to be looked at.

He had not let himself think of Ilya in months, not without immediately turning his attention to something else, but now there was nothing else to turn to, and the version of Ilya that surfaced was not the one from the ice or the news or the highlight reels, but the one from their last night, oddly gentle, standing in a kitchen that smelled of toasted bread and canned tuna and melted cheese. Shane had left, then, believing he was doing the sensible thing, the necessary thing, and only later realized that what he had really done was postpone the damage.

Now there was no postponing anything. Someone had opened Ilya’s skull; someone had touched parts of him Shane did not even like to imagine existing, much less being interfered with, and all Shane had been told was that he was stable. He tried, unsuccessfully, not to wonder what Ilya would remember when he woke up, or how he would feel, or whether whatever distance Shane had allowed to harden between them would matter in the face of potentially losing hockey forever. He wasn’t sure about Ilya, but Shane was nearly certain he would rather die than be forced to stop playing hockey.

He stared at the floor and waited, aware of how thin his patience felt, how little room there was in him right now for uncertainty. When his name was called, it took him a moment to recognize it as his own. He stood, smoothed his jacket, and followed the nurse down the hallway, trying not to think too far ahead, trying not to think at all.

“My name is Claire,” the nurse told him. “I’m Mr. Rozanov’s assigned nurse this morning.”

Shane nodded. “It’s nice to meet you, Claire.”

They stopped outside a closed door near the end of the corridor. A cart was parked beside it, equipment arranged neatly, the monitor dark. The nurse slowed and turned slightly, careful not to block the doorway.

“Before you go in,” the nurse said, turning back toward him, “the attending wants to speak with you.”

Shane nodded again, and he felt a bit like those collectible toys, of which JJ seemed to have a million, with the large, squarish heads. 

A man in a white coat approached from the opposite end of the corridor, holding a thick stack of papers on a clipboard, walking with the unhurried certainty of someone who knew exactly where he was going. Shane could only wish for his confidence in that moment. The man stopped in front of Shane and extended his unoccupied hand.

“Dr. Lefebvre,” he said. “I’m the attending neurosurgeon.”

“Shane Hollander,” Shane replied, shaking his hand. His grip was careful, because he hadn’t interacted with doctors outside the NHL in years, and he wasn’t quite sure what would be appropriate. “Thank you for speaking with me.”

“This is Nurse Pelletier,” the doctor added, gesturing to Claire. “She’s been assigned to Mr. Rozanov since he arrived post-op.”

Claire turned away from the doctor for a moment to give Shane a small smile, and Shane could finally tell that she seemed exhausted.

Dr. Lefebvre glanced down at the chart in his hand. “Before we talk about his condition, I want to confirm a few details. You are listed as an emergency contact, and the team physicians indicated that, aside from them, you are the only individual authorized to receive updates at this time. No family has arrived yet, and we were informed that we should not expect any. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” Shane said. Then, after a moment, because it felt too blunt, “That’s correct.”

As far as Shane knew, all of Ilya’s family was in Russia, and the only person he could think of who would visit Ilya was a woman he was pretty sure was named Sveta, whom Ilya had mentioned to him on a few occasions. It occurred to him that if someone asked him to list Ilya’s next of kin, he wouldn’t know where to start, and that the fact that this hadn’t come up before said more about the state of their not-a-relationship than he wanted to think about right now. He wondered who the hospital would call if he hadn’t picked up. He wondered whether someone else was supposed to be standing here instead of him, someone who knew how to answer these questions without hesitating.

“Good,” the doctor said. “I’ll explain what happened and where we are now. If you need me to slow down or clarify something, let me know.”

Shane just nodded again.

“Mr. Rozanov sustained a traumatic brain injury during last night’s game,” Dr. Lefebvre said. “He presented with an intracranial hemorrhage, a moderate to severe concussion, and a scalp laceration at the site of impact. There were no spinal injuries, nor any fractures to other parts of the body, so aside from bruising, there are no significant injuries.”

So maybe, after all, Ilya would be okay. Maybe it would be fine. Maybe he would wake up furious and miserable and loud, and Shane would deserve whatever Ilya would say to him, and it would be awful in the familiar way things were always awful between them, and nearly always left Shane miserable, but Ilya would be alive and himself and angry, and that would be enough, because he would be okay.

“Alright,” Shane said.

“The bleed required surgical intervention. We performed a decompressive procedure to relieve pressure. Surgery itself was straightforward, and Mr Rozanov experienced no complications during the procedure.”

“And now?”

“He is currently in a medically induced coma,” the doctor said, not unkindly. “It will allow us to control any swelling and reduce metabolic demand on the brain. He has been stable since the operation, and we are approximately three hours post-op.”

And just like that, his stomach fell through the floor below him, and maybe the rest of his body had gone with it. Ilya Rozanov, Captain of the Boston Bears, Stanley Cup winner, was in a coma. 

“He hasn’t woken up,” Shane said, and it came out sounding less like a question than an attempt to remind himself of the circumstances.

“No,” the doctor agreed. “We do not expect him to while sedated. There is no need to be overly careful about making noise; rather, speaking to him may provide positive external stimulation, which has a chance of increasing his immediate recovery time.”

“How long,” Shane said, and then stopped, because there were too many versions of the next sentence competing in his head. He tried again, and cringed when he heard his voice crack, vaguely audible past the rushing in his ears, “How long will he be sedated?”

He felt a dizzying, swooping feeling that there must be worse news on the way, because the doctor’s eyes softened, and Shane felt like he was being pitied again, and he hated it, because there was no way for the doctor to know what he was feeling in that moment, and yet the man seemed to know exactly that.

“Twenty-four to forty-eight hours,” Dr. Lefebvre said, and there it was. “After that, we taper sedation and allow him to wake on his own.”

Shane pressed his fingers into his thigh and then shifted his weight slightly, the hallway suddenly feeling narrower than it had a moment ago. He thought of the number of times he’d seen Ilya shaken but upright, bleeding but furious, pacing the bench while someone tried to convince him to sit down. He thought of the last hit he’d taken that should have been worse than it was, the way they’d both laughed it off later, wrapped up in the sheets of the affectionately nicknamed sex-condo, adrenaline doing its job. 

Shane looked at the door behind them and then back at the doctor. Ilya Rozanov, Shane’s only rival, his only love, was lying completely unconscious in a plain white bed, just past that door. 

“In terms of recovery,” Dr. Lefebvre said, and here his speech loosened slightly, “there are firm restrictions. He will not be cleared for physical activity for a minimum of four to six weeks. Given the severity of the concussion and the surgery, we do not recommend he return to play this season.”

“Mr Rozanov’s long-term outlook is highly optimistic,” the doctor went on. Shane shifted his weight and pressed his palm flat against his thigh, holding it there until the urge to move passed. 

“At present, there is no evidence of permanent neurological damage, but further assessment will depend on how he presents once awake. Headaches, light sensitivity, confusion, potential memory gaps — all of that would be expected. We will know more after neurological exams begin.”

No present evidence meant there very well could be permanent damage, and the doctors wouldn’t know until Ilya woke up, and Ilya would not wake up until his body decided it was time.

“When he wakes up, will he be…” Shane wasn’t sure what he wanted to ask. “Oriented?”

“Not necessarily,” Dr. Lefebvre said. “Disorientation is common, agitation is also relatively common. That is not, on its own, a sign  deterioration.”

“What would be a sign of deterioration?” Shane asked because he needed to know, needed to hear it out of the doctor’s mouth.

The doctor looked briefly pleased, but Shane wasn’t sure why. There was nothing to be pleased about. “Sudden loss of responsiveness, unequal pupil dilation, acute distress. You will not be responsible for identifying these,” he said, past a low chuckle. “Nursing staff will be present.”

“That’s good,” Shane said, because he didn’t know what else to say.

Nurse Pelletier—Claire— shifted slightly. “When he wakes, we’ll keep stimulation minimal. Low light and short visits only.”

“I understand,” Shane said, and he did, but he knew it would tear him to shreds to leave Ilya today, and it would only be worse once the man woke up.

Dr. Lefebvre glanced at his watch. “You may see him now. If at any point you need to step out, you do so. It may be upsetting.”

“Yes,” Shane said. “Okay.”

The nurse reached for the door handle and paused. “Ready?”

No, he wasn’t ready. Shane took a breath, and it didn’t help, but it didn’t hurt either. All he could think was Thank God, Ilya is still breathing.

“Yes,” he said.

The door opened, and suddenly, Shane was face-to-face with his worst nightmare.

Chapter End Notes

regardless of the massive shitshow occuring in Hollanov's lives at this moment, please leave a comment if you enjoyed!!! (or if you have theories, or just wanna chat, or have requests.....i love talking to people on the internet)

i know some of the pfps are wonky on the timeline, i swear ill fix them T_T

Chapter 5

Chapter Summary

2/11/26 i have once again made edits to the previous chapters (mostly one and two) so please go check those out if you've already read them

Chapter Notes

Ilya felt a bit like he was floating. Had he died? Maybe he would get to see his mother soon. 

Under the harsh lights of the hospital, Ilya looked as if he had one foot in the grave. Shane felt sick looking at him, everything in his body churning, and yet he couldn’t look away, because even like this, Ilya was beautiful. Shane hadn’t let himself acknowledge it in months, but this close to Ilya’s sleeping face, he couldn’t help it. 

Shane didn’t know how he could have forgotten how long Ilya’s eyelashes were, or the slant of his brow, the way the line of his nose broke the symmetry of his face just enough to make it conceivable that one could be distracted from it.

Half of Ilya’s head was shaved clean, pale scalp exposed around thick white bandages where soft, blond curls should have been. The remaining hair lay flat against the pillow, stripped of its shape, damp and lifeless, no spring to it at all. Shane stared at the space where Ilya’s hair used to fall into his eyes, where he used to push it back with impatient fingers, where Shane would have once buried his face without thinking. 

Shane had spent years watching Ilya push his curls back, tug at them absentmindedly, complain about them, and still refuse to cut them properly.

Now there was nothing to tug at. 

The ventilator breathed for him, a steady mechanical rhythm that made Ilya’s chest rise and fall without any visible effort on his part. His mouth was held open around the tube, his face slack in a way Shane had never seen outside of sleep, and even then not like this. His skin was pale, colorless under the fluorescent lights, the sun-touched warmth Shane associated with him entirely gone.

He looked thinner in the face, sharper somehow, and at the same time strangely younger, stripped of all the things that usually made him look indestructible. Shane knew that Ilya would be upset about it when he woke up. Shane had poked fun at the man before for being vain, but he knew it was important to Ilya, for one reason or another, to always be beautiful.

Dr Lefebvre cleared his throat behind him.

Shane startled, just barely, and turned. The doctor was standing a few steps back, clipboard tucked under his arm, expression neutral. Claire stood beside him, already moving past Shane toward the IV pole, eyes on her task rather than on either of them.

“Mr. Hollander,” the doctor began. “We’re going to adjust his sedation slightly, it’s nothing unexpected.”

Shane watched the clear liquid move from a large syringe into the tubing attached to Ilya’s upper arm before he asked, “May I ask what that was?”

“Propofol,” Claire said, not looking at him. “It’s a very small dose, just to maintain his state.”

Shane nodded. “Okay. Thank you.”

He hesitated, cringing at himself for his endless list of questions, and then said, “And the ventilator—do you have a sense of how long that will be necessary?”

The doctor glanced at the monitor, then back at him. “He’s breathing on his own, for the most part, so this is just precautionary. We’ll reassess over the next day or two.”

Shane nodded again, fingers curling once at his side and then stilling. “When he does wake up,” he said, carefully, “what should we be prepared for?”

“Confusion, certainly,” said Dr Lefebvre. “He will also be experiencing a lot of headaches, possibly nausea. Also, memory issues are not uncommon with this kind of injury, but most cases are not permanent and will resolve themselves quickly.”

“Memory issues,” Shane repeated. 

“Yes. Mr. Rozanov could experience a mild form of amnesia, retrograde or anterograde, or some degree of aphasia in the early weeks of recovery,” the doctor said. “It is highly unlikely that it will be more severe than that.”

“And do you— do you have any sense yet of how significant those might be?”

Shane wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“Unfortunately, we won’t know until he’s awake and responsive,” the doctor said. “But given the location of the trauma, we would not expect anything extensive.”

“Of course, yeah, thank you.”

What would Shane do if Ilya forgot himself? Rose had once asked him, if she ever lost her memory, what he would tell her about herself, and he hadn’t quite been able to come up with a cohesive answer. Still, he knew what he would tell Ilya.

He would tell him that he played first-line minutes most nights, that coaches put him out when the score was tight and the clock was running down. That his name was written at the top of line charts often enough that no one commented on it anymore. That he had won awards Shane had watched other players pretend not to care about, and that he had won them young, but not all of them before Shane.

He would tell him that reporters always asked him one more question than they were supposed to, and that their camera shots always lingered just a moment too long. That there were ads Shane couldn’t avoid seeing when they played away games, his face blown up on bus stops and billboards, and that Ilya complained about it, loudly, every time, and then showed up to the next interview with a beaming smile anyway.

He would tell Ilya of his temper, and that he couldn’t help but chirp on the ice, and that he had spent hours in the penalty box over the course of his career. Shane would tell him that he slammed doors and snapped at refs and then skated harder the next shift. That Shane had seen him get chirped all game and still turn around and set up a goal instead of starting a fight, but that the fight would always come eventually. Shane would tell him of how he never went after rookies, of how he protected his teammates, and of how his response to Shane receiving a particularly harsh check from Gatsin had been to drop gloves at Boston’s next game against the Wild.

He would tell him that they had played on the same ice for eight years. That they knew how each other moved without looking. That sometimes, between whistles, Ilya glanced at him like he was checking where Shane was, and Shane always was.

Shane stood there, looking at him now, and knew that if Ilya lost himself, that Shane would lose him, too. And in that same breath. Shane knew that if he lost Ilya again, he would lose himself forever.

Fifteen minutes, give or take, if he wanted to be gone before Marleau arrived. Enough time to sit. Not enough time to make anything worse.

He pulled the chair closer to the bed and sat, careful of the wires, of the IV line, of the space around Ilya that now seemed to belong to the machines as much as it did to him. After a moment’s hesitation, he reached for Ilya’s hand, fitting his fingers around the inside of his wrist, where the skin was thinner. He pressed just enough to feel the pulse there, steady and present, and then watched the monitor until the rhythm lined up, until the beat under his fingers matched the one on the screen.

The doctor came back once more before Shane had properly settled, and Shane startled, jolting away from Ilya before he could think anything of it.

The doctor stood in the doorway this time, did not come all the way in, and the nurse remained half a step behind him, hand already on the doorframe. They told him, politely, that a medical proxy had been contacted, that Mr. Rozanov had updated his files months ago, that any further decisions would be discussed with the proxy first. Did Shane have any questions? No, he didn’t, thank you. Did he want any water or coffee? No, he was leaving soon, thank you.

And then they were gone again, and Shane was alone again, because Ilya wasn’t all there either.

Shane let his gaze drift, took in what he could without looking too closely. It occurred to him, distantly, that this would be the end of the season for Ilya, no matter how well things went from here. That there would be no miraculous return in time for playoffs, no rushed rehab, no careful exception made because he was important enough to justify it.

He replaced his hand on Ilya’s wrist, tightened his grip, then loosened it again.

For a brief, unreasonable moment, he imagined picking him up and leaving. Taking him out of the hospital, out of the city, back to the condo, or to his cottage, drawing the blinds and keeping the world at bay. No reporters, no cameras, no questions, no expectations. Just rest, and quiet, and time, stretched out and private. The idea flickered, warm and tempting, and then collapsed under its own weight almost immediately.

He would never do that. He knew it even as the thought finished forming. Ilya belonged to too many people, to too much. The ice, the team, the noise of it all. Taking that away from him would be a different kind of injury, one Shane wasn’t willing to pretend he had the right to inflict.

Shane watched the numbers on the monitor rise and fall, kept his fingers where they were, counted the seconds without meaning to. Fifteen minutes, he thought, and then stopped thinking about time altogether, content, for the moment, to sit and feel the proof of Ilya’s pulse under his hand and nothing else.

Shane pulled his hood up as he left the Neuro, tugging it forward until it sat low on his forehead. He kept his eyes down as he walked, focused on the floor, on the thin seams between tiles, on the slow drift of other people moving through the space. There were more of them now than there had been earlier, a handful gathered near the elevators, a couple seated along the wall, coats folded over their laps. It was still quiet, still early, but the lobby no longer felt empty.

He saw Marleau before Marleau saw him.

The man stood off to the side, positioned awkwardly between two rows of chairs. His head was bowed, phone held low in both hands, shoulders rounded forward. His eyes stayed fixed on the screen, scrolling, stopping, scrolling again, resisting the urge to look up, knowing it might reveal something he wasn’t supposed to see yet.

Shane slowed, then stopped just short of the exit.

He stayed there longer than he meant to, watching Marleau shift his weight, tuck his phone into his pocket, pull it out again. The care in it was obvious, and Shane felt a small pressure lift off his chest at the knowledge that Ilya would have someone he could trust with him.

His own phone was still in his hand. He didn’t move to check it. He stepped outside instead, letting the glass doors slide closed behind him, and moved a few feet to the side of the entrance, close enough to the window to see back in without being visible himself.

I’m out now.

He sent it and lifted his head, glancing toward the Bears’ Alternate Captain.

Inside, Marleau looked up immediately. He scanned the lobby once, quickly, eyes moving from the desk to the doors and back again, and he didn’t linger. He put his phone away and walked straight to the front desk.

Shane watched through the glass as the woman typed, as Marleau leaned forward slightly, nodded, waited. When Marleau turned and headed down the hallway toward the elevators, Shane stepped away from the window.

The parking lot was mostly empty. A few cars sat idling near the far edge, headlights still on in the twilight of early morning. Shane walked toward his own (not boring, thanks, Rozanov) car, keys already in his hand, unlocked the door, and got in. He shut the door behind himself with care and sat there without starting the engine.

He needed to text Rose. He needed to call his mother. He needed to respond to Hayden.

He needed Ilya to wake up.

He rested his phone in his lap and stared through the windshield, watching the automatic doors slide open and closed as people passed through them, until the screen of his phone lit up again with a message from Marleau.

okay

i’m going up

And then it seemed like the phrase about thinking of the devil, and he shall appear, was true because not 5 minutes after he had the thought, his mother called him. 

“Shane?”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, Mom, I’m fine,” he said, and his voice cracked badly enough that he immediately regretted answering at all. He knew she would hear it, but he truly did not have the energy to deal with it. “I’m fine.”

“Shane, are you sure you’re all right? You haven’t called since before your game. What happened?”

He watched the automatic doors open again, a man in scrubs stepping out into the cold, shoulders hunched, a steaming coffee cup held carefully in both hands.

“I understand that Rozanov got injured,” she said, before he could put together an answer that would satisfy her, “but that’s no reason for you to be playing poorly too.”

“Mom, I’m fine.”

He shifted in his seat, nudged the mirror even though it was already aligned, the engine still silent under the hood. The hospital stood heavy in front of him, the floors stacked neatly one on top of another, Ilya somewhere inside it.

“Shane, sweetheart, I know you’re worried about him, but make sure it doesn’t throw off your game, okay? You’re flying to San Jose in two days, and you know they’ve seemed stronger in the three games since they got Madison.”

“Mom, a new goalie isn’t going to change anything,” Shane said. “You know as well as I do that they’re trying to build their team up before Seattle opens the expansion draft this summer.”

“A new goalie might not change anything, but their playstyle is going to be different,” she said. “You haven’t played them with the new lineup yet. What if they change things to throw off your game?”

He leaned forward slightly, forearms resting against his thighs, phone pressed to his ear.

“If they change things,” Shane said, “I’ll change things too. Mom, I have two Stanley Cups.”

She exhaled, long and audible.

“Oh, honey. I know, I know, I didn’t mean to doubt you. I’m sorry.”

The line went quiet for a moment. Shane glanced down at his phone, at Marleau’s last message still sitting there on the screen. He tried to estimate where the elevator would be by now, but he didn’t let himself think further than that.

“Shane,” she said, softer now. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

No, he wasn’t sure. But was nothing to be done about that from a hospital parking lot, from a phone call, from anywhere at all.

“I’m fine,” he said.

He rested his elbow against the door, fingers pressing lightly into the fabric of his jacket sleeve. His eyes dropped to the dash, to the dark lcd screen where the time would be if the car were on.

“Well,” she said, regrouping, “try to get some rest when you can. And eat something. You sound tired.”

“I will, Mom, thanks.”

“Shane,” she added, stopping him again. “You know you can tell me if something’s wrong.”

He looked up at the building then, at the stacked windows, at the floor he’d just left. He thought about how easily her questions could wander into places in his mind he did not have words for, places in his life that did not belong to her, no matter how much he loved her.

“I know,” he said anyway.

“I love you, Shane.”

“I love you too. Say hi to dad for me.”

He ended the call before she had time to ask another question.

Shane turned the phone over in his hand once, then set it face-down in the console, reaching for his keys.

Cliff didn’t think he would be spending his first off day in Montréal at the hospital, but he also didn’t think that his captain was going to suffer a TBI.

They’d finished the game less than twelve hours ago. Cliff still felt like he could smell the rink on himself, that sharp mix of ice and sweat and stale equipment that never quite went away on road trips. Normally, after a loss like that, he’d be thinking about the flight home, about how to split up ice time better next game, about whether Roz was going to be unbearable at practice for the next week.

Instead, he was sitting in a plastic chair outside the ICU, his phone face-down in his hands because he’d checked it too many times already.

He’d seen Rozanov get hurt before, but so had everyone. Ilya played hard, took hits, and didn’t shy away from contact, because more often than not, he would be the first to drop his gloves. Most of the time, it ended with a broken finger or a shoulder that needed strapping or a concussion that was labeled “minor” and came with a lot of eye-rolling and complaints about the protocol. It was familiar territory. You adjusted lines, you filled minutes, you waited for him to come back.

Cliff had been close enough on the ice to see the hit properly. Close enough to know it wasn’t clean, to know something was wrong before Ilya even went down. He hadn’t watched the replay afterward, because he knew it would have only made him feel sick. The image of his captain on the ice, all but begging him to text his Montréal girl before he was out cold, had stuck well enough on its own.

When they finally let him in, the room looked more or less like every other hospital room Cliff had ever been in, which somehow made it worse. Same bed, same monitors, same low hum of machines doing their thing, but Roz wasn’t sitting upright, chattering away, and already complaining about concussion procedure. Instead, the only motion from the man was his chest rising and falling artificially. 

Half of Rozanov’s head was shaved, wrapped up in a thick plaster, and Cliff was almost thankful that at least he couldn’t see the wound. He had seen the gash in Ilya’s face while they had still been on the ice, and even that was enough blood leaking from his captain for Cliff to feel a bit ill.

He took the chair beside the bed and sat down. There wasn’t much else to do. He rested his forearms on his thighs and looked at Ilya’s face, checking for something he couldn’t have named if asked. Ilya looked younger like this, more like the boy that Cliff had met after the draft in 2010.

A nurse came in at some point and asked if he was Cliff Marleau. Cliff said yes. She confirmed he was the medical proxy and handed him a clipboard. He read everything carefully, because that was the job now, and signed where he was told to sign. The nurse explained things in a calm, practiced voice. Cliff asked a few questions, but there hadn’t really been any updates since Jane had left.

When the nurse left, the room went quiet again, save for the steady beep of the heart monitor and the rasping sound of Rozanov’s ventilator. They would be taking it out the following morning.

He checked his phone and finally had a text from Jane. Cliff typed back a short update, just what the doctors had said and what they hadn’t, and Jane, polite as she always seemed to be, thanked him. 

He had been relieved when Jane had responded to him last night. He’d thought, for a time, that she would ignore him, but instead she told him that she would go so far as to visit before hours were even open.

Cliff set the phone back down.

He had always trusted Roz to get back up. He’d never really considered what it would feel like to sit beside him and hope he would wake up instead.

He wondered how Jane was feeling, knowing that her… whatever Roz was to her, was lying in a coma. Cliff couldn’t really place their thing in his head, especially since Roz hadn’t texted her in months, or at least, Cliff hadn’t seen Jane text him, and Roz had been a particular brand of moody since their last game against Montréal in Boston. Maybe Jane had gotten upset that Boston won and ended things? 

But surely that wasn’t it, because Ilya had been texting Jane for what seemed like forever. Cliff wasn’t sure he’d ever known an Ilya who didn’t have Jane. 

Cliff couldn’t remember the last time he’d teased Roz about Jane.

It had always been an easy thing to do. Jane this, Jane that, usually dropped in casually, usually enough to get Roz to scoff and then immediately contradict him. It wasn’t even really teasing, more a habit, something that had existed in the background for as long as Cliff had known him.

The last time Cliff had mentioned her, Roz hadn’t snapped or argued. He’d just gone quiet. Not his usual moody brand of upset, either, where he would grumble at Cliff to shut up, because no, Marleau, Russians do not do this blushing. He’d shut down entirely, and the conversation had been cut off mid-sentence. Cliff had noticed it because Cliff always noticed when Roz did that, and he hadn’t brought her up again after that.

Since then, Jane hadn’t come up much at all. Cliff couldn’t remember seeing her name on Roz’s phone lately, though that didn’t mean much. Roz had always been careful about his screen, even more so recently. What Cliff had noticed was the attitude. Shorter answers and less energy for chirping at practice. He still did his job, and spectacularly at that, but with a tightness to it that hadn’t been there before.

Cliff had assumed it was hockey. It usually was, so it couldn’t have been a far-off assumption.

Sitting there now, he found himself running back through the last few months instead. The game in Boston, and how Roz had been in an absolutely dreadful mood for the next week, and then Jane not getting mentioned again. Cliff hadn’t asked. It hadn’t been his place.

He glanced down at Ilya’s face, at the closed eyes and the stillness that made it hard to connect this version of him to the one Cliff was used to reading so easily after so many years on the same team, so many years as friends, as brothers.

Cliff didn’t know what Jane was to Roz, exactly. He’d never tried to pin it down, because he knew that Roz had girls in every other city, some more than others. But he also knew that she’d been there for as long as he could remember, which was long enough that her absence now felt noticeable even to him. 

He could only hope that this injury could bring them back together.

Shane let himself into his apartment without turning on the lights, toeing his shoes off at the door, and setting his keys in the ceramic dish by the entryway. The air smelled faintly of lemon cleaner, and he stood there longer than necessary with his hands braced on the counter, breathing until the tightness in his chest loosened into something that could pass for calm.

He went into the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and left it by the sink, untouched. His phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out, saw Hayden’s name at the top of the screen, and let the notification fade without opening it. The phone vibrated again a few seconds later. He set it face down beside the glass of water.

He should have gone to the optional skate. Shane hadn’t missed a morning skate since 2012, at the latest. He tried to remember the last time and came up with nothing. There had been injuries, sure, and travel delays, but never this. He had made a choice. 

He sat down on the couch and leaned forward, forearms on his thighs, phone in his hands again. He checked the time. Cliff Marleau would still be at the hospital. Shane could picture it, Marleau sitting in a chair, probably half-slouched, probably with his phone out, watching Ilya sleep because there was nothing else to do. No one would ask him stupid questions about why he was there, because Ilya was his teammate, his captain. They were friends. 

Jealousy, and the shame that followed, left a sour taste in Shane’s mouth.

His phone buzzed again. Hayden, again. Shane knew roughly what the messages would say. He knew Hayden well enough to predict tone and content. He would be just checking in and offering to talk. Possibly asking if Shane needed company. Shane did not open them. He did not feel capable of answering questions that required more than yes or no.

Instead, he opened his messages with Rose.

Hey, how's the shoot going?

He knew she wouldn't answer right away, because it was five in the morning on the opposite coast, but she’d told him the night before she would have an early morning, so he would probably hear back from her soon enough. 

Or maybe she wanted nothing to do with him, maybe she was just being nice yesterday, so he would hang up. Maybe she’d thought it over and realized that there was no reason to associate with a hockey player who had no loyalty to his team. 

Shane set the phone down beside him and leaned back against the couch, eyes on the ceiling. Minutes went by without him noticing. Then more.

Eventually, when his legs started falling asleep, he went into his bedroom to change into an old T-shirt and sweatpants, folding everything else with an automatic precision and setting it on the chair instead of putting it away properly. 

The light in the room shifted, the morning thinning out into something duller as the clouds covered the barely-present sun, and he got up at some point and went back into the kitchen, rinsed the glass he had filled earlier, and left it on the towel by the sink. He checked the lock on the door again it, then corrected the angle of the rug by the entryway with his foot. The apartment felt unused, just waiting for him to leave again. 

He did not want to leave Montreal.

It was still early, Marleau might still be at the hospital.

He pictured the chair by the bed, the way Marleau would sit in it without complaint, phone in hand, his jacket off on the chair beside him. No one would ask why he was there. No one would expect him to justify staying. 

His game against San Jose was in two days. He would get on a plane and go west, and they would win. He knew the rink well enough, and he knew his team. He knew what it would feel like to give a speech in the locker room, how it would feel to step onto the ice. By the time it was over, it would already be the next night in Montreal, and Marleau would have been over twenty-four hours gone, and Ilya would be alone again.

The idea of leaving Ilya in Montreal, even with Cliff Marleau there, even with nurses and doctors and machines doing what they were supposed to do, made him feel vaguely unwell. Boston played again the very next night, and Shane knew better than to ask Marleau to miss a game, especially since the rivalry made the whole situation strange, even if part of him wanted to keep Ilya tethered to someone familiar for as long as possible.

Shane thought about the next morning, about waking up and doing nothing differently, about not packing yet, about how easy it would be to let the day pass without committing to anything at all. 

He opened his calendar and scrolled without really looking, past the game, past the flight, to the blank space around it. There was room there. Not much, because there would be a game in Ottawa another week later, but enough, because the one before it would be at home. 

He would have to call his coach, not to say he would be late or rerouted or delayed, but to say he would not be getting on the plane at all. He had missed practices before, and optional skates, and stretches of time where he was less present than usual, but not a game he was healthy enough to play. 

Then he thought about his mother.

She would ask what was wrong. She would ask if he was hurt, if he was sick, if something had happened that he wasn’t saying yet. She would ask when it started, whether he had seen a doctor, whether anyone else knew. 

But he couldn’t tell her everything, so he would tell her nothing.

Not lies, exactly. Just very little. Enough to keep her from panicking, not enough to satisfy her. 

He picked up his phone and opened her contact, then closed it again without doing anything. He knew better than to practice. Anything he settled on now would fall apart the moment she started asking questions from the side instead of straight on. He would just have to face the music.

He had time, though, didn’t he?

Cliff had been about to leave the hospital when he got her text. 

He was halfway down the corridor already, coat on, keys in his hand, his head doing the necessary arithmetic of timing and traffic and the very real fact that he still had a game to get to tomorrow, even if everything in him resisted that logic. The staff had just finished telling him that Roz would probably be asleep for a few more days, that he would wake up disoriented, and that if he was to be discharged after that, he would need someone to watch him.

Cliff had a game. But Roz should have had a game too, and instead, he was unconscious and looked to be around the corner from a morgue. And so, Cliff would have to miss the game. Except—he wouldn’t, because apparently, Jane had taken it upon herself to cancel all her appointments for the next week to stay with Ilya.

Montréal Jane, who was supposed to be nobody, who was married to her high-travel job, who was boring and straightlined, who was just a hook-up, who had nice skin, and a dozen other things that Ilya had let slip over the years, was going to look after him. 

Montréal Jane, who texted like she had a dictionary open in front of her at all times, even now, even with Ilya laid out behind a wall of glass and wires, sentences tidy and polite and maddeningly calm. 

Rozy’s Jane, who was supposed to be a fling, and whose very usefulness, as Ilya had once explained it in a tone Cliff hadn’t liked but hadn’t challenged, was that she was convenient, and did not ask for things, did not linger, did not require rearrangement. 

Ilya’s Jane, who had apparently rearranged things for him.

If Jane was staying, then either Cliff had misunderstood the situation for years, or Ilya had, and Cliff trusted Ilya’s judgment on the ice a hell of a lot more than he trusted it in his personal life.

He turned back toward the room without really deciding to. If Jane was going to be here, then Cliff needed to see what that meant in real terms, not in the abstract version he’d been carrying around secondhand. He needed to see how she moved around the bed, whether she asked questions, whether she hesitated. Whether she stayed because she wanted to, or because she felt like she should.

Roz was still unconscious when Cliff reached the glass again (he didn’t know why he’d expected anything different; the man was in a coma), face slack, chest rising and falling with mechanical regularity. Cliff rested his hand against the wall and exhaled slowly.

Someone would need to watch him, yes, and Cliff had a game, but he wasn’t ready to hand that responsibility over to a woman he only knew through Ilya’s offhand comments, no matter how long she’d been around.

Jane would show up eventually. That was the practical reality of it. She always did, according to Ilya, always slipped back into the picture on a schedule that only made sense to her, and sometimes to Ilya, orbiting just close enough to be useful. Cliff tried to imagine her here, in this room, in this light, navigating nurses and machines and a body that no longer belonged entirely to itself, but instead to the hands of doctors and surgeons and nurses. Was she tall? How old was she? Maybe she was a blonde, or maybe she was bald, maybe she looked like Camila from Tampa, or like Katya from Toronto, or like Maria, that one time in Mexico. He couldn’t quite make it line up with the woman Ilya had described, but then again, Ilya had never described her in a way that suggested he expected to need her like this.

Cliff’s phone buzzed again in his hand. A teammate, checking in, asking if he was on his way back to the hotel yet, whether he’d be flying out tonight or early morning. Cliff stared at the message without opening it, thumb hovering uselessly over the screen. 

He thought about Roz waking up disoriented, about the staff’s careful phrasing, about the warning underneath it all. He might say things he didn’t mean, might forget things he shouldn’t. He would need patience, of a different kind than his prescence usually required. Cliff had seen it before, had seen enough injury in his career to predict the aftermath.

Jane might be good at that, or she might not. Cliff had no solid data either way.

He finally replied to Hughes with something noncommittal and slid the phone back into his pocket. The decision about the game could wait another hour. The decision about Jane couldn’t, not really, but it would make itself whether Cliff liked it or not. She would arrive, or she wouldn’t.

Chapter End Notes

this got wayyy longer than i intended it to get im so so so sorry for the delay!!! i am almost done with my applications, but i really needed this chapter to get out so i can focus on my schoolwork ahhhhhhhhh
also i am newly single which means more time for fanfic

Chapter 6

Chapter Notes

ITS HERE YALL

2016 - Early February

Shane hung up the phone before Theriault could start up his tangent again. For the first time in his career, maybe in his life, Shane didn’t care that his coach had been irritated. He wouldn’t have cared even if the man had been furious.

The dial tone had cut him off mid-sentence—something about discipline, about optics, about how it looked to management when a captain asked for time without offering specifics—and Shane had pressed end with a calm that had surprised even himself. He set the phone down on the kitchen counter and watched his own hand for a moment, as if expecting it to tremble in belated apology. It didn’t.

He had said it was a family emergency because that was the only phrase the league seemed to accept without prying too far. It was a sanctioned category of absence, and came pre-approved with solemn nods and a temporary suspension of suspicion.

He had not said that the emergency was a man lying in a hospital bed fifteen minutes away, his head shaved on one side, his body held in place by wires and machines that transcribed his breath into numbers. He had not said that the emergency was the possibility that Ilya Rozanov might wake up and not recognize the shape of his own life.

Theriault had asked how long he would be gone.

Just one game, Shane had said. Or maybe two.

The team was in the middle of an important stretch in the season—the trade deadline was coming up, as well as all-stars, and Shane knew that. He had built his entire adult self around knowing that. But he also knew that he couldn’t stop the flow of his own life.

He crossed the kitchen, then doubled back, then crossed it again, not restless exactly but too charged to sit. His apartment was immaculate, everything placed where it belonged, counters wiped down, skates drying by the door from the morning skate. The television was dark, and below it, his gear bag sat open, half-packed for the flight he would not be taking.

For years, hockey had been the organizing principle of his life. He had played through pain and illness and irritation. He did not make himself larger than the team. If he wanted something, he worked until wanting and working became indistinguishable. 

He had always believed that he was different from the players who let other things interfere. He did not skip optional skates. He did not miss games unless bone or ligament forced him to. Even then, he negotiated with his own body like it was a reluctant employee.

And yet, the hospital would remain standing whether he boarded his flight or not. The monitors would continue their steady accounting, and Ilya would remain unconscious, suspended in that thin space between here and somewhere else, whether Shane was in San Jose or Montréal.

He had spent a decade insisting that his life outside hockey, if it was to exist at all, had to fit around the sport like insulation, unseen and non-disruptive. He had treated his own life as something to be contained and scheduled, as something that would need to be justified. The game had come first because it was hockey. 

But then there had been that moment on the ice, before the spinal board, before the hospital, when Ilya had not moved, and something in Shane’s chest had split open with the realization that there were things he could never outskate. One of those, it seemed, was his despair.

He leaned back against the counter now and closed his eyes.

If Ilya woke up tomorrow and did not remember him, if the last decade became a rivalry in the news and nothing more, what would Shane regret more: the missed game, or the missed hours?

He thought of the way he had left, once, in Boston, the way he had chosen the optics of their situation over his honesty because it had seemed easier to preserve his career than to risk bending his image. He had told himself it was temporary. He had told himself there would be time.

And for a moment, there had been time— until there wasn’t any at all.

Truly, Shane skipping one or two games would not dismantle the Montréal Voyageurs. The franchise would survive his absence for a few hours of playtime. They had survived injuries and trades; they had survived their three-year streak without making the playoffs. They would survive him sacrificing a game or two to remain in the same city as a man in a hospital bed.

The more unsettling truth was that this choice did not feel like a sacrifice.

He picked up his phone again, opened the team group chat, and typed a brief message about the family emergency, about being back as soon as possible. He kept it spare, and the responses came quickly—thumbs up, brief acknowledgments, a couple of private messages asking if everything was okay.

He answered them all with variations of yes, and I’m okay, and it’ll be alright.

He was not quite lying.

Everything was not okay, but the path forward was clear how it hadn’t been in years. Hockey was still his first love, his career, but it was no longer his only axis, because it didn’t have to be.

Fifteen minutes away, machines counted seconds in green light and a steady beeping. Shane pushed off the counter, grabbed his keys, and headed for the door. 

If he was going to stay in Montréal, he had things to buy.

An hour and a half went by, and Cliff found himself in front of a rather grandiose apartment building in one of the nicer parts of Montréal.

Inside, the lobby echoed the sound of his footsteps. The marble floor held a reflection of him that looked, to his own eye, slightly less certain than he felt. The doorman asked his name; Cliff gave it, and the doorman took a moment to check something on his computer, nodded once, and gestured toward the elevators with a kind neutrality.

Roz’s Jane, apparently, lived in a place with a doorman and polished brass handles and a lobby that smelled faintly of eucalyptus. Montréal Jane, who Roz had described, on various occasions and with varying degrees of alleged boredom, as “fine,” “adequate,” “just someone,” and once, quite memorably in Cliff’s opinion, “not interesting, just a good fuck, Marleau, relax.” Roz’s Jane, who texted in complete sentences and had opinions about defensive zone coverage and had once sent Roz a multi-paragraph breakdown of a power play adjustment during the playoffs.

The elevator rose fast enough that his ears popped. Cliff watched the floors climb and tried, unsuccessfully, to construct a version of Jane that fit the details he had gathered so far. Wealthy, apparently, and very private, but comfortable with inviting a stranger to her home, provided he agreed to the rules. Comfortable, also, with threatening statements like You might not like what you’ll find out, so long as they were delivered with perfect grammar and punctuation. 

The elevator doors opened onto a hallway that was wider than it needed to be and lit evenly enough that there were no shadows to hide in. As Cliff stepped out he felt abruptly underdressed, which was an absurd thought, given the lobby had been much more elaborate than the carpeted hall that reminded him a bit of a nice hotel. 

There were only two doors, at either end of the hallway.

The door itself was unremarkable: dark wood, clean lines, a small brass number matching the one in his phone. 

When Cliff knocked, the door opened almost immediately, and in the landing of a Montréal apartment on the sixteenth floor, Cliff felt a bit faint. Behind the door stood Shane Hollander, in a black T-shirt and sweatpants, socked feet on hardwood, expression level and unreadable in the way Cliff had seen from across the ice a hundred times, a thousand times on TV, and never, until now, at eye level from less than a foot away.

It must have been a coincidence. Hollander must have been the other tenant on the same floor, and Cliff had knocked on the wrong door. Hollander must have been visiting someone else in the building, some other unit, some other life that did not intersect with Jane.

Hollander did not look confused, though, and he did not look like a man who had opened the door to an unexpected visitor.

Jane texted in fully punctuated sentences, and she was a hockey fan, and she had the nerve to put up with the captain of the Boston Bears for at least five years.

Rozy’s Jane lived here, and Hollander was Rozy’s Jane. 

Cliff did not trust himself to speak yet, so instead he stepped inside, because that seemed like the next correct action, and because Hollander had already moved back to make space, holding the door open for Cliff to walk through.

The apartment was large—ceiling high, windows taller than they truly needed to be for one man—but it was almost empty of personality. No art crowding the walls, or photographs in silver frames. Just a couch, low and gray, and a coffee table with nothing on it but a single glass coaster placed exactly in the center. The kitchen beyond it was immaculate, counters bare, knives aligned in a block.

Cliff turned slowly, absorbing it.

“You live here,” he said, and it wasn’t quite a question, but he didn’t really know what he could have asked, and so he looked again at Shane Hollander and his twitching fingers, and his dull eyes, and his tortoiseshell glasses that Cliff had never seen before. 

“Yes.”

The man did not elaborate, so Cliff let his eyes travel once more across the room, searching for evidence of another person. An extra mug, maybe, or a jacket draped carelessly over a chair. Anything that suggested a shared domesticity. Instead, there was a reminder of Cliff’s first and only venture into real estate, when he walked through countless showrooms with an agent trying to sell him his first house. Truly, Cliff felt as if he had stepped into his worst nightmare. 

Rozanov’s Jane sent three-paragraph analyses of power plays. Rozy’s Jane met him after every game in Montréal, and left scratches over Ilya’s shoulders and spine. Ilya’s Jane made him play better, made him work harder, made him blush. Rozy’s Jane made him happy.

Rozy’s Jane stood three feet away, barefoot, hands relaxed at his sides.

Cliff pressed his tongue briefly against the back of his teeth.

“You realize,” he began, “that you are being insanely reckless?”

What if Cliff had told the commissioner? What if he had posted on the internet for everyone and their mother to see it? What if Cliff had hated Ilya for— for what? For having sex? For being human?

 “I assumed you’d want to see for yourself.”

That was not an answer to the question. It was, however, accurate. No matter how insane, he was glad to know, after all these years.

“This is fucking nuts.”

Hollander’s mouth shifted at one corner. “It’s not ideal.”

Not ideal.

Cliff almost laughed, but then, it felt like he had simply blinked and reappeared on Hollander’s couch. Hollander took the opposite end, perched stiffly on the burnt orange leather with his hands folded neatly in his lap.

Cliff clasped his own hands, unfolded them as he became aware of the quiet hum of the refrigerator somewhere behind him. 

This was not how he had imagined this afternoon.

He studied the man opposite him more closely now, from across the couch, attempting to strip away the instinctive framing of opponent, rival, captain of the other side. Up close, without a crowd or a camera, Hollander seemed leaner than he did on the ice. Younger, somehow. 

Here, Hollander looked less like a man destined for the Hall of Fame and more like a man who had not slept enough in the last week, or maybe the last few years. There were deep shadows under his eyes, and his shoulders were loose, but not relaxed. He looked exhausted.

Cliff watched him for another second.

“You look like hell,” he said.

Hollander gave a small, tired shrug. “Yeah.”

Cliff didn’t know how he was supposed to talk to Hollander when they passed each other at NHL events, much less how to interact with the man in his home. Hollander, in Cliff’s mental filing cabinet, was anti-social, meticulous, a pacifist to the point of irritation, allergic to fun, allergic to noise, allergic to anything that wasn’t hockey. An incredible fucking hockey player — one he watched on tape a hundred thousand times and swore at under his breath because how the hell does he see that lane — but still. Boring and impossible to read.

It seemed that too much time had passed, and Hollander decided to take pity on him.

“I’ve cleared my schedule for the next four days.”

Cliff blinked.

“Minimum,” Hollander added.

Perhaps Cliff had spontaneously developed an auditory hallucination, because he was quite sure that Shane Hollander had just suggested that he would take a day off, or four, minimum.

“You must have practice tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“And a game the next day—aren’t you playing the Sharks?”

“Yes.”

“I won’t be at either,” Hollander said.

The words were delivered in the same tone someone might use to reschedule a weekly meeting.

Shane Hollander was missing a game. Shane Hollander was missing a game for Ilya Rozanov.

“You’ve already told your coach, then?”

Cliff had heard horror stories about Coach Theriault. A kid who had been traded from Montréal last year would go on and on about the man having a stick up his ass that was certainly longer and thicker than the one up Hollander’s. Hollander was known around the league to be a rough captain, but it obviously paid off, because a trade with Montréal was incredible news for any team in the NHL. But apart from endless bag skates and making his team run plays until they felt they would pass out, he was fair and always took care of his rookies. 

On second thought, this might not be the time to think about any sticks that might be up Hollander’s ass.

“Yes.”

“And…?”

“And I won’t be there.”

Cliff let out a short breath through his nose, and it was almost a laugh.

“You don’t even know what the neurologist is going to say.”

“No.”

Cliff leaned back further now, posture easing by a fraction. Maybe, Ilya would be fine with Jane, with Hollander. 

He shifted his weight on the couch and watched as Hollander’s shoulders lifted, then fell. Cliff shook his head again, and this time he felt reluctant respect encroaching on his disbelief. 

“So you’re really doing this,” he murmered.

Hollander just hummed, but there was a look in his eyes that wasn’t there before, and it was almost fond. It felt crazy to think of anyone outside of their team being fond of Roz, except some particular corners of the internet.

Cliff let his head fall back against the couch and stared at the ceiling for a second. He had come here prepared to evaluate a stranger. To gauge her tone and posture, and whether he liked her enough to let her sit by his captain’s side for a few days, within fifteen minutes. Instead, he was sitting across from the captain of the Montréal Voyageurs, trying to decide whether he trusted him with his captain’s brain, or possibly, with the rest of Ilya’s life.

He looked back at Hollander.

“You’re not even angry at me,” Cliff said, almost accusingly.

“Why would I be?”

“I showed up at your apartment ready to what, interrogate you?”

Hollander’s mouth curved faintly. “You are interrogating me.”

Cliff snorted.

“I am well within my rights, I think.”

Cliff didn’t know if he expected pushback, or for Hollander to tell him off for being presumptuous, but instead, the man just laughed. 

Hollander’s laugh was quieter than Cliff expected. It wasn’t sharp or mocking, like most of the other guys in the league. It was brief, low in his chest, and it made him look more carefree than Cliff had ever seen him. If he thought about it, he would realize that he had never seen Hollander laugh before, except maybe once in 2011, during the tail end of the man’s rookie season.

Hollander shifted slightly on the couch, one ankle crossing over the other in a way that felt almost casual. The tension in his shoulders eased a fraction, like the laugh had cost him something but also given something back.

Cliff shook his head, faintly incredulous. He had played this man for years. He had lined up across from him, chirped him, watched him skate circles around veterans, watched him dismantle a power play with surgical calm. He had never once thought: this guy probably laughs in his living room.

He tried to overlay this man onto the one he knew from the ice. He had expected ego, or defensiveness, or at the very least irritation. Instead Hollander was rather withdrawn, and infectiously anxious, to the point where Cliff could nearly see his nerves bleeding into the fine lines of his furniture.

“So that’s it?” Cliff asked.

“You’re concerned about him,” Hollander replied. “I’d be more worried if you weren’t.”

Hollander’s eyes shifted briefly toward the window beside them. 

“I don’t have time to be threatened,” he said.

“You seem very calm about all of this,” Cliff said.

“I’m not calm.”

If anything, Hollander looked the same way he always did—upright, contained, economical.

“You look calm,” Cliff said.

“I’m not,” Hollander repeated. “This might be a bit of shocking information to you, but I’m not super big on yelling.”

“You’re missing a game,” Cliff said again, because it still didn’t feel real, didn't seem quite right in his mind. “Without knowing what the doctors are going to say.”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

It sure bothered Cliff, not knowing the fate of a man who had come to be one of his closest friends over the years. 

“It bothers me a lot.”

Hollander exhaled through his nose, slower this time. “It doesn’t change what I’m doing, though. ”

Cliff watched him, waiting for the crack. The twitch, the tell, the admission that this was bravado disguised as resolve. Hollander only looked back at him, hands loosely clasped between his knees, like they were discussing a film instead of the very real possibility that Ilya might wake up and not recognize his own life, might not wake up at all.

“You don’t even know,” Cliff said, more quietly now, “if he’s going to remember you.”

Cliff didn’t know if Ilya would remember him, or even anything at all. The doctors had seemed optimistic, but there was no telling after a coma. Any number of things could go wrong with his brain.

“I know,” Hollander said, and his voice seemed steady, but his eyes were shining behind his glasses where they caught the light from the window.

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then he doesn’t,” he said. 

Hollander sounded like someone who had already walked himself through every ugly outcome and come back with the same answer. Cliff had done the same, only hours before, in a too-small plastic seat under the harsh lights of a hospital in Montréal. 

“He’s allowed to hate me,” he said, and Cliff thought that maybe this was heartbreak, just like in the Hollywood films. Ha. Hollywood, Hollander. “He’s allowed to do whatever he wants.”

He thought of every time Ilya had snuck back into their shared hotel room past two, past three, with a spring in his step and a smile across his face. He thought of Rozanov on the glossy cover of Sports Illustrated looking on with stone-cold eyes 

“You’re his Jane,” Cliff said finally. 

Hollander just stared straight on and hummed his assent. 

It was quite bizarre, overlaying the image of Shane Hollander onto the woman he'd imagined.

When Cliff looked closer, he could see the growing tremble in Hollander’s hands, and how there was a small streak of blood at the corner of his mouth, signalling a worried-through lip. There was a sheen over the man’s eyes, filling up his waterline, and he was blinking too fast for it to be normal, but he seemed not to notice. 

Cliff hoped Hollander wouldn’t cry; he was thoroughly unprepared for that kind of response. Still, he wondered who Hollander had told, because it couldn’t have been easy to tell anyone, and Cliff must have been an incidental extra in whatever their plan was. In any case, Roz and Hollander must have either been lying to each other, or lying to themselves, or lying to everybody else. 

Maybe Hollander's parents knew, but Yuna Hollander was well-known for hating Ilya with a burning passion. Or maybe Svetlana knew, or some of Hollander's friends, like Pike or—

“What about Rose Landry?”

Cliff didn’t know how he’d forgotten about the existence of Hollander's girlfriend during their conversation. He didn't know how he'd forgotten, when that was seemingly all that Connors talked about lately. It was kind of funny, his obsession with the actress, and how whenever she was brought, Roz would— 

Oh. Hollander had a girlfriend. Cliff felt his heart sink into the pits of his stomach. Even greater than his shock that Hollander had an interest in men, he would never have believed Hollander was a cheater. Looking at Hollander now, at hockey’s golden boy sitting across the couch from him, looking faintly green and struck with shock, Cliff felt bile rising in his throat. 

For a moment, Hollander didn’t say anything at all. The stillness between them stretched just long enough that Cliff wondered whether he had misread the question somehow, whether Hollander had not heard him, or had decided that the subject was beneath his acknowledgement.

But Hollander had heard him; that much was clear from the way the man’s shoulders tightened, very slightly, before settling again.

“What about her?”

Cliff stared at him.

“What about—” He let out a short, disbelieving breath. “You’re dating her!”

Hollander blinked once, slowly, like a prey animal, like a deer in headlights, like a bird in front of a jet engine.

“Was,” he said. “I was dating her, and we broke up. I broke up with her. We weren’t…compatible.”

That was not a satisfying answer, and Cliff knew Hollander knew it. Still, the man didn’t elaborate, and Cliff found himself studying him again with a different kind of scrutiny.

Cliff rubbed his jaw.

“So you’re telling me,” he said slowly, “that you and Roz have been… whatever the hell this is… for five years. But you were dating Rose Landry. What the fuck, Hollander?”

“Not quite.”

“Not quite?”

Cliff watched as Hollander took a deep breath in, and the tears in his eyes vanished near-instantly as he locked his expression down. He looked once more like the beast on the ice, like the god of Montréal, like the heartthrob plastered across billboards and the STM and the commercial breaks between play. Had he always done this? How had Cliff never noticed that Hollander was, in the end, just a man?

“Ilya and I…” Hollander began, but cut himself short, trailing off into thought.

Cliff wanted to interject, wanted to scream and yell and shake the man who had been the source of Roz’s foul mood over the last few months, but then he remembered the blush across his cheeks as he checked his phone, or his wiggling eyebrows as he slunk out of a club in Montréal to see his favourite girl.

She’d always been his favorite. He’d always been Rozanov’s favorite. Roz had a well-known reputation for never sleeping with the same girl more than twice, and even though Cliff suspected that Ilya had most definitely slept with Svetlana five or a hundred times, it seemed to stay true for the rest of them. 

Except Jane.

Except, apparently, Shane Hollander.

Hollander’s mouth pressed thin for a moment, his tongue laving over his lips as he considered what to say. His gaze drifted toward the window again, toward the gray winter light over Montréal, and for a moment, Cliff had the strange impression that the man had forgotten he was there at all.

Then Hollander blinked and looked back at him.

“Ilya and I weren’t… um… seeing each other, then. We—”

That wasn’t quite what he had expected, and it also didn’t actually solve anything.

Because whatever they had been doing before, whatever strange orbit the two of them had maintained for half a decade without apparently colliding, it had clearly resumed with enough force that Shane Hollander had just voluntarily removed himself from an NHL game to sit in a hospital waiting room.

“And now?” 

Now, Cliff thought, the answer didn’t actually matter. Ilya Rozanov was lying unconscious in a hospital bed across the city, and whatever strange arrangement the two of them had managed to maintain over the last five years had already been interrupted by a piece of bad ice and a collision at thirty miles an hour.

Cliff exhaled slowly through his nose.

No.

Now really wasn’t the point.

The door closed behind Marleau with a quiet, careful click.

The number of people, and Shane just barely suppressed the urge to think of them as outsiders, who knew of him and Ilya had just doubled, and Shane wasn’t sure how to feel. 

Shane moved back into the apartment, setting the empty glass he had been holding down on the kitchen counter without remembering when he had picked it up. His fingers stayed resting against the cool surface of the granite for a moment, his mind returning to the way Marleau had reacted.

He tried, briefly, to imagine Marleau repeating the conversation to someone else—another teammate, a trainer, management—but it didn’t feel like a rational fear. 

Shane pushed away from the counter and moved slowly through the living room. The apartment looked exactly the same as it had an hour earlier. His jacket still hung over the back of the chair near the window. The television remote sat on the coffee table, slightly askew. 

Two people know.

The thought came again, and with it the immediate recoil that had followed it the first time. His chest tightened instinctively, the reflexive fear that had lived in him for years rising up before he could stop it. 

His first instinct was still to regret it, but the guilt arrived just as quickly.

It should have been Ilya’s decision to tell Marleau.

But the alternative had been standing in that hospital corridor and pretending that the most important person in his life was nothing more than a rival who happened to play for the other team.

Still, it should have been Ilya’s choice. He should have had the chance to tell the man whatever he wished, without Shane's bleeding heart leaking into the story. Maybe Ilya didn't want Shane the same way Shane wanted, maybe he was well and truly done with Shane. Maybe there were words to describe them that Shane hadn't thought of, that Ilya, even in his second language, would be able to wind together perfectly.

His apartment remained quiet as he got lost in thought. The season would continue, and tomorrow there would still be games, and reporters, and the ordinary machinery of the league grinding forward with the same energy it always had. 

Shane rested his hand briefly on the back of the chair, his fingers brushing the sleeve of his jacket, and tried—only for a moment—to imagine Ilya awake enough to argue with him about it.

You told Cliff? He might have said.

Shane wasn’t sure if he would be angry, maybe just surprised, the faint amusement that always crept into his voice when Shane did something unexpectedly reckless.

Shane could almost hear the pause that would follow, the quick internal adjustment that Ilya was so good at making.

He is good friend.

Maybe he was, maybe that was why Shane had told him.

Or maybe it was simpler than that, maybe the secret had simply grown too heavy in his mind to carry entirely alone while Ilya lay unconscious three floors above the hospital lobby, his memory potentially scattered forever. Maybe Shane was just tired, so tired that it felt like agony to think of Ilya and not to hold him, not to hide him away in Shane’s bedroom for him alone, not to parade him in front of the world.

Shane exhaled slowly and stepped back from the window.

The fear remained, sharp and watchful in the back of his mind, but underneath it there was something else now, something he would not have expected to feel. If one were naive enough to believe it, the feeling might have been hope.

Ilya woke to the rapid beating of a heart monitor and a warm weight over his hand. 

His fingers twitched reflexively, curling in on themselves, and the sensation sharpened instead of fading, resolved into warmth and weight and the unmistakable shape of another person’s hand wrapped around his. 

When he opened his eyes on the third try, the lights slammed into him, too bright, too close, a flat white that erased depth and shadow, and his first instinct was to flinch away from it, to roll onto his side and shield his eyes with his arm, but it wouldn’t respond to him.

His arm, which was currently being held captive by none other than Shane Hollander.

“Ilya—”

His pulse kicked hard, stomach dropping unpleasantly as his body reacted before his brain could catch up, heat flaring in places it absolutely should not have been flaring given the circumstances. His mouth went dry. His hand curled again, traitorously, fingers flexing against Hollander’s palm.

The last time he had seen Hollander this close had been… he wasn't sure. In that moment, he finally realized that he was dressed in a paper gown, wrapped up in wires, and lying in a plain white bed. He was in the hospital. When had he gotten injured? What was wrong with him? 

“What the fuck are you doing here, Hollander?” 

That seemed to be a more pertinent question. But when he thought about it, it only raised another question— why did Hollander look so… strange? His shoulders seemed wider than usual, and he seemed to have replaced a few teeth, and he had said— fuck. Hollander had called him Ilya.

Ilya felt sick, and then only worse when the man said it again.

“Ilya, please—” 

“Don’t call me that,” he snapped, yanking his hand back with more force than was strictly necessary, ignoring the way his head protested the movement. “What the hell are you doing here? Did you decide to ambush me in fucking hospital?”

A voice cut in from somewhere to his left, and then another one answered it immediately, lower, urgent, pitched wrong for his ears.

Ilya squeezed his eyes shut as pain bloomed behind them, sharp and nauseating, like someone had driven a spike straight through the center of his skull and left it there. The light didn’t go away when he closed his eyes. It just turned red, pulsing unpleasantly in time with his heartbeat.

“—sorry, he just—”

That was Hollander again, or at the very least, Ilya assumed it was. The voice matched the face, more or less. Familiar, but not in any way that helped him at all, and the words slid past him without sticking, each one gone and forgotten before he could make sense of it. 

Something tugged at his arm, enough that it sent a jolt of pain down through his shoulder and into his chest, like his body was wired wrong. He hissed despite himself and tried to pull away, only to discover that moving was… difficult. Not impossible, exactly, but slow, heavy, like his limbs had been replaced with lead while he wasn’t looking.

“Hey— no, don’t—” Hollander said, sharper now.

Another voice, this one calmer, closer. A nurse, probably. Ilya knew that much, the same way he knew the ceiling above him was white, and the bed beneath him wasn’t his. The nurse said something reassuring, or maybe directive, but he couldn’t tell. 

Hands pressed gently at his shoulders, encouraging stillness. Ilya clenched his jaw and let them, because fighting took too much effort and made the pain worse. His head throbbed insistently, every pulse dragging nausea along with it. His chest felt tight. His throat was dry. His tongue felt thick in his mouth.

“Just relax,” the nurse said, or maybe she said his name. He wasn’t sure. 

Hollander was still there. Ilya could feel him more than see him now, a presence close to the bed, crowding his space. His body seemed very aware of that fact, responding instinctively in ways Ilya didn’t have the energy to interrogate. He tried to turn his head, to get a better look, and immediately regretted it as the room tilted unpleasantly.

“Чёрт,” he muttered, the word scraping its way out of his throat.

The nurse made a noise that might have been a warning, might have been a coo, and adjusted something near his arm. Cool liquid slid into his vein, a strange, spreading sensation that made his skin prickle. His eyelids felt heavier almost immediately, the effort of keeping them open suddenly not worth the reward.

The last thing he registered was the nurse telling Hollander to give him some space, her hand briefly brushing Ilya’s wrist.

Then the edges of the room softened, the light dimming at last, and Ilya let himself sink back into the bed, surrendering to the dark because it hurt less than staying awake.

Ilya found himself alone during his next foray into consciousness.

The ceiling was there when he opened his eyes, already waiting for him, a flat white broken by seams that refused to stay put when he tried to follow them. His head hurt. The pain sat deep and wide, pressing outward from the center of his chest, making it difficult to decide what was worth the effort.

He stayed still, and if he narrowed his focus, there was a steady beeping, close enough to be irritating, regular enough to fade in and out of notice. There was another sound beneath it, lower, constant. He listened to both until they blended together.

A hospital?

His throat burned, and swallowing scraped something raw behind his tongue, and the sound he made afterward surprised him with how thin it was. He let his mouth close again and did not try a second time.

The curtain shifted, and a woman stepped into view, her face sharp-edged and composed, eyes moving immediately to the monitor before settling on him. She did not smile at him, like the nurses usually did.

“You’re awake,” she said.

He tried to nod, but his neck was stiff, and the rest of his body felt like it weighed a tonne.

“I’m going to ask you a few questions,” she said. “Just answer what you can.”

She waited for him to hum his affirmation, a low sound that scratched at his throat.

“What’s your name?”

“Ilya. Ilya Rozanov.”

He felt relief follow his words, quick and sharp, because he knew that had been the right answer. He was Ilya Grigorievich Rozanov, son to Grigori Rozanov and Irina Rozanova, brother to Andrei Rozanov and his wife, Natalia.

“Good,” she said, already writing. “Do you know where you are?”

“... a hospital.” 

He knew it by the bed, the lights, the smell. 

“Do you know which hospital?”

He wracked his brain for an answer, but the effort made his head throb harder. He shook his head instead.

“That’s okay,” she said. “Can you tell me which city you are in right now?”

“Montréal.”

Probably, just like how he was probably injured, and probably alive.

She nodded and kept writing, the scratch of her pen grating on his nervous system.

“And can you tell me what day it is today?”

For a moment, there was nothing but the beeping, the ceiling, the ache. Then the relief drained out of him all at once, replaced by a sinking feeling in his gut. Maybe his father had been right, and he had inherited his mother’s crazy. 

His beautiful, wonderful mother, and her warm smiles, and her stunning face, and her broken, damaged head. His lovely mother and her rigid body, draped over her favorite rug.

“I don’t know.”

“And the month?”

Nothing.

“The year?”

He felt his stomach dip, like he’d missed a step on a flight of stairs, just barely avoiding a tumble. He stared at the ceiling for a second too long. 

“I don’t know.”

“I’m going to check your eyes,” she said, in lieu of a response. “Look straight at me.”

The light was unpleasant, and it filled his senses with television static. He blinked once, then forced his eyes open while she checked both pupils. The room stayed whole, didn’t swallow him up into whichever Hell he had landed in, and it was a small mercy to soothe his soul.

“Any double vision?”

“No.”

She held up her finger and asked him to follow it. Left. Right. Up. Down. His eyes moved more easily than his head would have. He kept his neck still, just as she asked. 

“Can you squeeze my hands for me?”

Her grip was firm, assessing. He wondered what she was comparing it to.

“Good. Now push against my hands with your feet.”

He complied, one foot and then the other, the effort pulling a faint tremor into his thighs. He was aware, distantly, of how tired he already felt. 

“Any numbness or tingling anywhere?”

“No.”

“Nausea?”

“Yes.”

He felt sick, disoriented, and disjointed, and he wasn’t sure what day it was, or what year it was, or whether he was even in his own body, and yes, he was nauseous.

She said something he didn’t catch because his arm burned suddenly and then went cold, and he lost the rest of the sentence trying to breathe through it.

“Mr Rozanov?”

He hummed.

“Do you remember what happened before you came in?”

Something on the ice, a loud noise, a lot of commotion. He tried to hold onto it and lost it immediately. 

“No. Hockey?”

“Do you remember waking up earlier?”

Something surfaced —heat, a voice too near his ear— and then was gone again before he could grasp it. He shook his head.

She set the clipboard down.

“You’ve had a head injury,” she said. “Some confusion and some memory loss are expected right now. We’re keeping you here so we can monitor you closely.”

Ilya didn’t want to listen to the nurse. He wanted to walk through the hot summer air to the cool air of the metro, the clanking of the train on the tracks taking him back to Mama. Perhaps she would make him blini to have with tea.

He saw her shining blue eyes as she told him to rest. She told him to call if the headache worsened, if he felt more nauseated, or if anything changed. Her hand hovered near the call button long enough to make sure he saw it.

Then she left, the curtain sliding back into place.

The room returned to its earlier quiet, and Ilya stared at the ceiling again, waiting until it faded to black once more. For some reason, he wished it would go black forever.

Shane had learned, over the past several days, exactly how long a person could sit in the same chair before it stopped feeling like a separate object and started feeling like an extension of the body, how the edge of the plastic would press into the backs of his legs until he went numb, how the sound of the monitor would stop registering as sound at all and instead become something closer to a condition of the room, like the air or the light.

He had not learned how to leave Ilya. It was becoming a bit of a problem.

Every time he tried to stand, even just to stretch his legs, there had been a moment—small, stupid, impossible to justify—where he thought, this is when he’ll wake up, and the idea of stepping out of the room, of missing it by thirty seconds, by the time it took to walk down the hall and back, had been enough to keep him where he was. So he stayed. 

He stayed through the evening until they kicked him out at the end of visiting hours. He sat in the condo, looking out the window at nights that blurred into mornings without anything actually changing, through the slow rotations of nurses and the occasional check-ins from doctors who spoke in the same careful language each time, as if repetition might make it easier to hear.

Might. Could. We don’t know yet.

Ilya lay there, unchanged in the way objects remained unchanged, like something that would be undone at any moment and then simply wasn’t.

Shane found himself watching for movement the way he watched for the puck on the ice, tracking nothing and insisting on tracking it anyway, eyes fixed on small, meaningless things—the slight shift of the blanket when the air moved, the almost-movement of his hand where it rested against the sheet, the place where the light from the window hit his face and made it look less like him and more like a ghost, or a statue.

His mind kept folding back, against his will, to the same thought.

There had been a moment—he could place it exactly, if he let himself—where none of this had happened yet, where Ilya had been standing in a kitchen that was too large for only one of them and somehow still felt like it was cramped, and Ilya was just millimeters from burrowing under Shane's skin. There had been a moment where staying could have meant nothing more than staying, no consequences beyond the immediate, no audience but each other. Ilya had said something, not even carefully, not even with any real expectation that Shane would take it seriously, and Shane had understood it anyway. He had understood what was being offered, how simple it would have been to just… not leave.

He had left anyway.

At the time, it had been a need, compulsive and incessant in his heart. Like choosing the version of his life that would keep moving in the direction it was supposed to go.

Now it felt like he had walked out of something and the door had locked behind him without him noticing.

He pressed his thumb into his palm hard enough for it to hurt, watching the skin blanch and then flood back, something small and contained that still responded the way it was supposed to.

If there had been a point where this could have gone differently, Shane had already passed it.

He didn’t really see Ilya wake up, he had missed it somewhere between regretting every decision he had made in his life and begging every higher being for a re-do. 

“Hollander, Hollander, why are you here? You left when... I was thinking—why…”

The voice pulled him out of the chair before the meaning did. It was thin, scraped raw by sleep and tubes and the sheer effort of being used again, and for half a second Shane thought he might have imagined it, the way he’d imagined it every other time, head lolling forward only to jerk awake when nothing happened. But Ilya’s eyes were open, unfocused but undeniably there, fixed somewhere in Shane’s direction like they were trying to find purchase.

“Oh, Ilya, Jesus fucking Christ. You’re okay. You’re okay….”

The words spilled out of him without structure, without sense, his hands already gripping the bedrail hard enough to hurt, as if the physical act of holding something might keep him from dissolving. His vision blurred immediately, hot and humiliating, his chest locking up around a breath.

“Why are you crying? Wait— Ilya? Hollander, what in the actual fuck?”

The confusion cut sharply through the fog, irritation breaking through first the way it always did with Ilya, even half-broken, even drugged-up. Shane let out a sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t folded in on itself halfway through, his head dropping forward as he pressed his forehead briefly to the metal rail.

“I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry. I didn’t mean it, I was just scared. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, Ilya.”

He had only wanted to keep things as they were, had only wanted the boat that drifted on the river in his lungs to stop rocking at Ilya’s every word. 

He couldn’t stop rambling, and the apologies came out tangled together, indistinguishable from one another, every version trying to occupy the same sentence at once. He felt ridiculous and desperate and eighteen years old all over again, begging for something he hadn’t earned the right to ask for.

“Hollander—hey. Shane, what… where is Rose Landry? Why are you here? When is it right now?”

But no matter how much he loved and appreciated her support these past few weeks, Shane could not think of Rose Landry at that moment. The only thing on his mind was relief, because even if Ilya hated him, even if Shane would never be forgiven, Ilya was okay.

“You’ve been asleep for a week, Ilya. Please never do that to me again. Please, please, please. You woke up, and you didn’t remember anything, and I can’t—”

His voice broke outright on the last word as he caught a glimpse of Ilya's worried brow, the sentence flying back into his chest before it could reach whatever ending he’d intended, if he’d intended one at all. He stayed where he was, bent awkwardly over the bed, afraid to touch him and more afraid not to, watching Ilya’s face for signs, for anything that would tell him which way this was about to go.

It seemed that Shane was out of luck, because in that moment, Ilya’s eyes, his beautiful blue eyes, glazed over and he blinked sleepily a few times before asking, “Какого… ты чего плачешь, Hollander? What are you doing here? Why are you crying?”

Chapter End Notes

SO SO SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG OMFG SFNHAIK
Next chapter might take me a while because i have a massive project for a class, but i swear im working on it!!!

come scream at me on twitter @ku5hka !!!!
its not an hr account but im ALWAYS happy to have hr mooties <3

Chapter 7

Chapter Summary

joy and happiness and fluff and LOVE SO MUCH LOVE

Chapter Notes

thank you for waiting so long, i hope this is worth it!!!!

Hollander had run out of the room like the place was on fire, and Ilya had no idea why.

More to the point, he had no idea why he was in a hospital in the first place.

He hadn’t taken a bad hit lately—that he remembered—but there was no other explanation for the bright white room, the stiff sheets, the paper gown that scratched at his collarbones. His head hurt, his body hurt, and all he wanted was his mother.

And Hollander had been here.

Hollander, standing right beside his bed like it was the most normal thing in the world. Hollander, with his face wet and his mouth shaking, crying hard enough that his voice had cracked around every other word. The memory of it slid just out of reach when Ilya tried to pin it down. It rearranged itself into something that made more sense, because Hollander didn’t cry. Hollander didn’t even yell most of the time.

He frowned up at the ceiling and tried again to picture it, to make the pieces of it fit together. They refused. His skull throbbed in protest.

Ilya let his eyes fall closed and breathed carefully through the ache, counting his inhales the way the trainers had taught him years ago. Eventually the stabbing behind his eyes dulled back into the steady, miserable pressure that seemed to have taken up permanent residence there.

When he opened his eyes again, nothing had changed. Same ceiling tiles, same ugly light fixture, same monitor with its slow green line and quiet mechanical beeping, measuring something about him he could not quite identify.

He licked his lips and felt the skin catch and pull, dry enough that it might crack.

Hollander had no reason to be here. They barely spoke unless a camera was nearby or a faceoff forced them into the same narrow slice of ice. The idea of him standing at Ilya’s bedside, crying like someone had died, felt so absurd that for a moment Ilya wondered if this was some fucked-up coke hallucination.

But he hadn’t touched coke since 2012. He knew that the way he knew how to lace his skates, even if he wasn’t sure what year it was right now. That didn’t seem right either.

Still, the image clung to him, stubborn as a bruise: Hollander bent over the bedrail, eyes red, voice breaking on Ilya’s name.

A clinical overhead light in the bathroom was the last thing Shane needed, but anything would  be relief from the way that Ilya had looked at him. Bloodshot eyes and dazed confusion and all, not a memory in his mind.

Shane crossed the distance to the sink without really registering it, his body moving in the efficient, pre-decided way it always did when there was nothing to be gained from delay, and set his hands against the edge.

For a few seconds—long enough to be counted, not long enough to be anything at all—he did nothing.

Then, from the pits of his soul, maybe from the heavens, arose a nausea that sent him tumbling to his knees on the tile.

His legs went out underneath him, graceless as a blown tire on bad ice, and suddenly his knees were crashing into cold tile, one hand scrambling for the trash can. Nothing came up, but his body still insisted on trying, dry heaves that wrung him out anyway, leaving his eyes burning.

He had known this was on the table. The doctors had diagrammed it for him in steady, careful voices, like they were walking him through a penalty kill on a whiteboard: here’s where the hit was, here’s the swelling, here’s what that can do to memory. Gaps. Confusion. Forgetting names. Forgetting faces.

Forgetting Shane.

He’d taken it in, nodded like a good student, repeated the phrases back so they knew he understood. It had all felt hypothetical, in the same way a storm is hypothetical when it’s still two days out on the radar.

Then Ilya had looked at him and not known who he was.

And worse—worse than that, somehow—there had been that brief, stupid miracle first.

For maybe five seconds, Ilya had been there. Really there. His gaze had cleared, gone sharp. His mouth had shaped Shane’s name like it was something familiar and treasured, not just someone he recognized from highlight reels. Shane had felt his own knees go weak with relief, felt the whole world tilt back into alignment.

Then a wince, a blink, the tiniest falter in Ilya’s expression—and when their eyes met again, he was squinting at Shane like he was an opposing center who’d drifted too close, not the man who’d spent years pressed against his chest in the dark.

Hope had been the worst part. The flare of it, brief and blinding, and the way it guttered out.

Shane sat back on his heels and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until stars burst in the dark, sharp little constellations that meant absolutely nothing. His chest hurt. His throat hurt. His head hurt. All of it was preferable to walking back into that room still cracked open.

“Okay,” he said, because the word gave his lungs something to do. His voice sounded scraped. “Okay. All right.”

Ilya was the one in the bed. Ilya was the one whose brain had been shaken like a snow globe, who was missing pieces of whole years. Ilya was the one staring at the ceiling and trying to figure out why his rival was crying at his bedside.

Shane was not hurt. Shane was not concussed. Shane was, unfortunately, fully conscious and stone-cold sober.

But there were other truths layered around it, and he forced himself to pick those up too: Ilya knew his own name. He knew he was in a hospital. He could speak. He could move his hands. He was alive.

Alive and confused was, disgustingly, a good outcome for what it had looked like on the ice.

Shoulders back. Unlock his jaw. Breathe in slow, out slower, the way the team psychologist had insisted on teaching him back when panic felt more hypothetical. He could feel the panic condensing, not disappearing but folding down into something he could tuck behind his ribs for later.

If there was no intact path back to the life they’d built, they could lay a new one brick by brick. If ten years of hotel rooms and long-distance calls had been scrambled, he could sit at his bedside and tell the stories again, and again, until they stuck. He could be the fixed point. Let Ilya’s memory come and go; he would stay.

He shut off the tap, dried his hands with slow, unnecessary precision, smoothing the paper towel over each finger like getting this one small thing exactly right might prove he could still be useful. It was ridiculous. It helped anyway.

At the door, his hand paused on the handle. Not long enough to count as hesitation, just long enough to admit—to himself, if no one else—that it would be easier to stay in this ugly little room with its bright light and its empty mirror.

Nothing in the hallway would have changed in the time he’d been gone. Ilya would still be in that bed. His head would still hurt. His memories would still be a mess. The only thing that could be even slightly different when he stepped out was Shane.

Shane lay on his back and watched the faint glow from his phone paint the ceiling.

His bedroom felt borrowed, like a hotel he’d stayed in too long. The sheets were his, the dip in the mattress was his, the framed jersey on the wall was his, but his head was still full of the hospital: the click of the door, the hiss of the oxygen, the green pulse of the monitors that kept insisting time was moving even when nothing else seemed to.

He scrolled without seeing much. Headlines about the Sharks loss he’d watched on mute from Ilya’s room. A beat writer dissecting the penalty kill. Fans arguing in the replies about whether the Voyageurs could function without their captain for “personal reasons.”

He locked the phone. The screen went black, and for a second his own face looked back at him in the reflection—blue glow under his eyes, hair a mess, mouth set.

He unlocked it again and opened Hayden’s thread.

He stared at the last line until the letters lost their meaning. He should answer. If he didn’t, Hayden would escalate, and then it would be GM calls and theory threads and someone eventually saying the word “burnout” on TV like they’d invented it.

He rolled onto his side, turned the brightness down, and hit call.

“Finally,” Hayden said, almost before the first ring finished. “Do you know what my imagination has been doing with your silence? It’s not pretty.”

“Hi,” Shane said.

It came out thin. He cleared his throat, but the sound stuck anyway.

There was a pause. He could almost hear Hayden’s brain switching gears.

“Okay, you sound like a ghost,” Hayden said, less flippant now. “Where are you? And don’t give me some cryptic crap. You’ve missed, like, everything. Theriault looks like someone moved his coffee two inches to the left.”

“I’m at home,” Shane said. “Tonight. I’ve been at the hospital.”

He heard his own voice say it and felt weirdly detached from it, like someone else was feeding him lines.

“Hospital… right,” Hayden repeated. “Is it you? Tell me it’s not you. If you’ve been secretly concussed for a week, I’m coming over there with a frying pan.”

“It’s not me,” Shane said. “I’m fine. Physically.”

His mind tugged sideways even as he spoke. He saw the route in his head: alarm going off at six, shower, coffee, hospital parking lot just before visiting hours; Ilya’s room, Marleau on the phone, the little crease between Ilya’s eyebrows even when he slept. He needed to pick up more clean T-shirts. He needed to talk to his mom. He needed to—

“Then what?” Hayden was saying. “Family? Your mom? Is it Rose?”

“Someone close,” Shane said. “Medical emergency. I needed to be there.”

The words sounded rehearsed. He guessed they were, by now.

Hayden was quiet on the other end. Shane could hear a TV in the background, muffled play-by-play, the way sound carried in apartments with thin walls. It made his own room feel even more sealed off.

“You know you can just tell me that,” Hayden said finally. “Instead of disappearing and leaving your gear bag staged like a crime scene. I went by your place yesterday. Skates by the door, your bag is spilled out in the entrance, and for a clean-freak like you that’s serial killer documentary stuff, man. Liek the true crime shit Jackie likes, you know?”

Shane’s hand drifted up, rubbing at the edge of his collarbone through the cotton of his T-shirt. The motion was more reflex than comfort.

“I called Theriault,” he said. “Told him I’d miss the road trip. He got to say ‘discipline’ a lot. I figured that covered the bases.”

“Yeah, we got the ‘family emergency’ speech,” Hayden said. “Then he stared at the whiteboard like it had personally offended him, but Drapeau’s been drawing plays without you here, so it might have actually been the board. The guys keep asking where you are. You barely miss optional, much less a game.”

“I know,” Shane said. His eyes had drifted to the ceiling again; the little swirl in the plaster was suddenly fascinating. “I’ll be back. I just can’t get on a plane right now. I’m aiming for before Ottawa.”

“Aiming,” Hayden echoed. “There’s a word I never thought I’d hear out of your mouth.”

Shane’s thumb dragged along the seam of his pillowcase.

“Trying new things,” he said. “Being a human, or whatever.”

“Gross,” Hayden said automatically. There was a rustle, like he was shifting on his couch. “Seriously, though. Are you okay?”

The word hung there. Shane’s brain slipped sideways again, back to Ilya’s room: the way Ilya’s hand had twitched under Shane’s, fingers curling like they were reaching for something; the one bright, precise look of recognition that had flashed and vanished like a glitch; the blankness after.

“I’m…here,” Shane said.

“That’s not an answer,” Hayden said.

He was right. The ceiling refused to resolve into anything but off-white.

“Not really,” Shane said. “But I’m where I need to be.”

There was a pause, longer this time. When Hayden spoke again, his voice had gone careful.

“Okay,” he said. “Then that’s enough for me. I’ll tell the guys you’re not secretly traded, not in rehab, not hiding a baby somewhere. You can owe me later.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Shane said. His attention drifted again, skimming over tomorrow morning: the drive, the elevator, the smell of antiseptic that had already threaded itself into all his clothes.

“Yeah, I kind of do,” Hayden said. “You’ve played through everything short of decapitation. You get to sit out two games to…sit next to a hospital bed, I guess.”

Shane swallowed. His throat suddenly felt tight.

“Thanks,” he said. It sounded small.

“Hey,” Hayden said, softer than before. “You’re my best friend, man. You vanish, and I worry. That’s the deal. Text me if you need anything. I’ll bring food, or clothes, or… I don’t know, a terrible movie so you can fall asleep to people making worse life choices than you. Or you can text Jackie, you’ve gotta know she misses you, man.”

Shane’s mind slid again. For a second he saw Ilya instead of Hayden: Ilya’s mouth quirking, the way he’d snorted at Shane’s stupid Netflix picks, calling him “boring” and then watching that  documentary anyway.

He must have gone quiet too long, because Hayden spoke again.

“Hey,” he said. “You still with me?”

“Yeah,” Shane said, dragging himself back. “Sorry. Zoned out.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Hayden said. “You’ve done that, like, three times. I can practically hear you leaving your body. Is it…is it really bad?”

Shane’s chest tightened. 

“It’s not—” he started, and then stopped. The ceiling stayed stubbornly blank.

“Is it someone from back home?” he asked. “Or—” He hesitated, then let out a short breath. “Or is it hockey stuff? Somebody from around the league? People are already guessing. Media keeps bringing up Rozanov, because of course they do.”

Shane’s fingers spasmed around the phone.

“What?” he said, too quickly.

“Relax,” Hayden said. “They don’t know anything. They’re just doing the usual ‘Oh, Hollander’s out and Rozanov’s injured, must be fate, rivals, blah blah’ narrative. You know how they get. Couple of talking heads were acting like you both being out at the same time is some kind of cosmic drama.”

The room snapped into focus around him, edges suddenly too sharp. His heart kicked once, hard.

“What—what did they say?” Shane asked.

“Just the usual garbage. ‘Shame we’re missing both sides of the rivalry,’ ‘hope they’re both back soon,’ that kind of thing. I just—” He sighed. “I thought maybe that’s why you were…off. Like, watching all that and not being able to do anything.”

Shane stared at the dark window across the room. His own reflection looked back, pale and wide-eyed. He wondered if it had changed at all in the last few days. Shane had never really been one to care about his appearance, that had always been his mom’s job, but he couldn’t help thinking that he shouldn’t go back to practice looking like Gollum.

“I don’t care what they say about Rozanov,” he lied automatically.

“Sure,” Hayden said dryly. “Tell that to the picture of you trying to kill a referee the last time he got boarded.”

“It was a bad hit,” Shane said, reflexive. His jaw clenched.

“Yeah, man, I know,” Hayden said. “Look, I get that you don’t want to talk about it. I’m not going to keep poking. Just—if this is about hockey stuff, or…” He faltered, then pushed through. “Or about somebody you can’t talk about, I’m still here. You know that, right?”

Shane’s grip on the phone eased, just a fraction. He could feel his pulse in his fingers.

“I know,” he said.

“Okay,” Hayden said. He sounded like he believed him, which was almost worse. “Then go be where you have to be. I’ll keep things from falling totally apart on this end. Try to sleep a little, yeah?”

“I’ll try,” Shane said.

“Liar,” Hayden said, but it was gentle. “Text me tomorrow so I know you’re still alive. Or I’m escalating to mom-call territory.”

“Please don’t call my mother,” Shane said, a little more urgently than he’d meant to.

“There he is,” Hayden said. “All right. Night, man.”

The line clicked off.

Shane let the phone rest on his chest, screen still glowing faintly against his shirt. The room around him was the same as it had been ten minutes ago—same ceiling, same shadows, same hum from the kitchen. His head felt clearer and more crowded at the same time.

Somewhere across the river, in a too-bright room that smelled like antiseptic and cheap coffee, machines were still counting out each second Ilya lived.

Shane turned the phone face down on the nightstand, closed his eyes, and tried to picture tomorrow as a simple series of motions: get up, get dressed, drive, walk down the hall to the right door.

Shane was halfway through tying his second skate before it occurred to him that he had no idea how he’d driven here.

He sat on the narrow bench in the Voyageurs practice dressing room, fingers moving on autopilot. Over-under, pull tight, double-knot. His hands could have done it in the dark. 

He blinked down at his skates, at the familiar scuffed white plastic and the black laces biting clean lines across the tongue, and tried to drag his focus back into his body. Around him, the room buzzed in that particular early-morning way: French and English overlapping, the thud of gear bags, someone laughing too loud, someone else complaining about the cold.

“Holy shit, look who it is,” Hayden announced, loud enough for half the room to hear. He dropped onto the bench beside Shane with more enthusiasm than grace. “Thought we were gonna have to get your jersey retired and everything.”

“I was gone for four days,” Shane said.

“Yeah, and in the Book of Hollander that’s, like, forty years in the desert,” Hayden said. “We were about to start carving your face into the wall.”

Across the room, Patrice Drapeau glanced up from where he was re-taping his stick. The corner of his mouth twitched. On the far side, JJ Boiziau leaned back in his stall and gave Shane an exaggerated golf clap.

“Captain makes an appearance,” JJ said. “I guess we all have to try now.”

The chirps landed softer than they might have a week ago. There was a real something underneath them—relief, maybe—that made Shane’s chest feel tight and weird.

Theriault’s office door opened with a sharp click. The low murmur in the room dipped out of pure habit. Coach stepped out in his track suit and whistle, expression already set to “displeased.”

“Hollander,” he said. “My office. Two minutes.”

Hayden made a face as Shane stood.

“Have fun,” he muttered. “Blink twice if he murders you.”

Shane wasn’t quite sure how he was supposed to blink to Hayden if he was dead.

Theriault’s office was exactly as it always was: whiteboard, desk, framed Voyageurs Cup photo hung just a little crooked. “Dig deep. Push harder.” was stenciled over the door in bold letters. Today it looked less like a slogan and more like a commandment. Perhaps Shane would be lucky not to be sacrificed to the Hockey gods on this fine February morning.

Shane stepped in and closed the door.

“How is your…situation?” Theriault asked. 

“Still unresolved, unfortunately” Shane said. “But it’s stable enough that I should be back to regular practice and the home games for this next week.”

Theriault studied him. “You missed a lot of ice this week,” he said. “We are in the middle of a tight stretch. You know this, Hollander.”

“I know,” Shane said. “You went one-and-one without me. That is better than some teams can say.”

“That is not the point,” Theriault snapped.

Shane raised his eyebrows, the closest he came to pushing.

“What is the point?” he asked.

For a second, it looked like Theriault might launch into a speech about commitment. Instead, he exhaled, long and sharp.

“The point is optics, Hollander” he said. “Captain disappears, people talk.”

“They were talking when I was playing, too,” Shane said. “They always are.”

Theriault’s jaw twitched, but he let that slide.

“A family emergency is a family emergency,” he said. “The league respects that. I respect that. I am…” He grimaced, as if it hurt. “I am glad you are here today.”

“Thank you,” Shane said, and meant it.

“You skate today,” Theriault went on. “We see how you look. You must tell me if you plan to leave again. Understood?”

“Understood,” Shane said.

“Bon,” Theriault said. “Go get dressed. The ice will not wait for you.”

Back in the dressing room, the noise level jumped a notch the moment Shane stepped out of the office. Someone banged a stick against a locker. Someone else wolf-whistled.

“Let’s go, boys,” Drapeau called out. “The superstar is back. Try not to embarrass yourselves in front of Shane fucking Hollander.”

“Gonna need you at at least eighty percent, cap,” JJ added. “The power play is ugly without your pretty little one-timer.”

Shane rolled his eyes, but something unknotted in his chest. If chirping was back, maybe things were not entirely off the rails.

They filed out toward the tunnel. The air from the rink hit them in a cold wave: sharp, clean, edged with that specific smell of scraped ice and old sweat. The boards creaked as they stepped through the gate. One by one, blades hit the surface with that thin, slicing sound that always made Shane’s shoulders drop half an inch, like his bones recognized where they were before his brain did.

When he stepped onto the ice, there was a little ripple from the guys already circling. Someone tapped their stick. Then someone else. Within a few seconds, it was a full-on racket.

“Hollander!”
“Cap’s back!”
“About time, man—we were starting to miss you, and I hated it!”

Shane felt heat crawl up the back of his neck. He raised his stick once in acknowledgment, and fell into the flow of warm-up laps.

His stride felt almost normal. His lungs burned in that familiar, not-unpleasant way. The ice gave under his blades, forgiving and exact. His body knew this language in a way it didn’t know how to sit still in a hospital chair.

They moved through the first set of drills. Simple passing to start, then stretch passes, then a couple of timing plays. Shane hit his marks without thinking too hard. The puck found his stick; he sent it on. If his timing felt a half beat off on the first few reps, only Hayden would notice.

“Hey, robot,” Hayden said under his breath as they coasted back into line after a rush. “Your hands get rusty or you just doing that thing where you pretend to be human?”

“I’m pacing myself,” Shane said.

“Uh-huh,” Hayden said. “Sure. Tell that to the kid falling over himself because you breathed near his lane.”

He jerked his chin toward Wilson, who absolutely had just blown an edge after glancing at Shane.

“Settle, rookie,” Shane called. “It’s practice, not the Olympics.”

Shane tried not to think too much of the Olympics, which, without a hint of exaggeration, had been smack dab in the middle of the worst months of his life.

“Sorry, cap,” Wilson said, cheeks flushing as he scrambled back into line.

They shifted into more drills, then into a full-ice scrimmage. Blue jerseys against white, lines set roughly the way they’d play next week. Theriault barked assignments from center ice; they shuffled into position.

Shane’s line rolled over the boards. He glided into the faceoff circle, crouched, and set his stick. The opposing center—Duval, today—tried to look cocky and failed by about fifty percent.

“Go easy on me, eh, Hollander?” Duval said. “You’ve had all this time off to rest.”

“If you lose this, you owe me dinner,” Shane said. “If you don’t, you owe me two.”

The puck dropped. Shane snapped it back so cleanly Duval’s stick might as well not have been there.

“Fuck,” Duval said, as Hayden scooped the puck up and broke out.

“Start saving, rookie,” Hayden called over his shoulder.

Hayden drove wide, drew the defense, slipped the puck through a seam that barely existed. The pass came back to Shane on his off side in the slot.

For a heartbeat, he felt the echo of the hospital—beep, hiss, green light—and his stick twitched.

The puck hopped, barely. It was enough to throw the shot fractionally off. It pinged off the post and clanged into the glass.

“Ooooh,” the bench groaned in unison. “Hollander!”

Drapeau skated past him, tapping his shin pad with his stick.

“It’s okay, cap,” he said cheerfully. “We cannot have you showing off all at once. You make us look bad.”

“Pretty sure I do that anyway,” Shane said.

The next time down the ice, there was no thinking. The puck came across from Hayden, flat and fast. Shane stepped into it, weight forward, wrists snapping through. The shot went bar-down, in-and-out so quickly the goalie barely twitched.

The bench answered like someone had scored in a real game—sticks slamming the boards, hollers echoing inside the rink.

“There he is!” Hayden yelled. “That’s my captain!”

Theriault did not smile, but he did not whistle them dead either. Which, in his language, counted as praise.

The rest of practice passed in that sweat-blurred way good work did. Shane ran the top power play unit like he always did, seeing lanes before they opened. He felt the rust flake off with each rep. His body remembered. His mind tried to keep up.

Every so often his attention snagged on something small and stupid—the way the condensation gathered on the glass, the way the overhead lights reflected off the fresh scrape—and he had to drag it back. Not the hospital, he told himself. Not right now. Blue line. Puck. Drapeau’s stick. Go.

By the time Theriault finally blew the whistle and barked, “Cool down, then off,” Shane’s undershirt was plastered to his back and his thighs were aching with a slow, steady burn.

In the dressing room afterward, the volume spiked. Guys shouted over one another, swapping stories about last night’s games and arguing about who had to do media.

“Not it,” JJ said immediately. “I did it last time.”

“You did it because you tripped in warm-up and they wanted to ask about it,” Hayden said. “That doesn’t count.”

Marcel, the PR guy, poked his head in.

“We need Hollander for ten minutes,” he said. “Quick scrum. Everyone wants to ask where he has been.”

A few heads turned toward Shane. He could feel the weight of their curiosity without any of them actually saying it aloud.

“Make something up,” he told Marcel. “Tell them I finally took a vacation and you’re very proud of my work-life balance.”

Marcel did not laugh. “Ten minutes,” he repeated. “Please. Then you go.”

Shane sighed, grabbed a hoodie and ran a towel over his hair. The scrum would be the usual: a half-circle of microphones, polite questions with teeth behind them, answers that said nothing and everything at once.

“Need me to come stand behind you and look intimidating?” Hayden offered.

“You’re five-ten on a good day,” Shane said. “You look like a choirboy.”

“Wow,” Hayden said. “Rude. Accurate, but rude.”

The scrum went as expected. Where have you been, how serious is it, how long will you be out, is it related to the hit on Ilya Rozanov.

“Family emergency,” Shane said, over and over, in slightly different ways. “I’ll be back on my game as soon as I can. I’m fine. I’m just taking care of something important.”

He slipped out as soon as Marcel gave him the nod. In the room, guys were already halfway through getting dressed, arguing about lunch plans.

“Cap,” Hayden called, tossing him his keys. “You dropped these.”

“Not my car keys, Hayd,” Shane said, rolling his eyes.

“Yeah, but it’s something dramatic to say on your way out,” Hayden said. “Go. Before Theriault remembers video exists.”

Shane shook his head, grabbed his actual keys off his shelf, and headed for the exit. He did not shower. He would regret that in the car, but he did not have it in him to linger.

The February air outside punched into his damp skin, making him shiver. He unlocked the car, slid into the driver’s seat, and pulled his phone out again.

Shane’s phone buzzed on the dash. Marleau’s name lit up the screen.

He answered on speaker as he pulled his seatbelt across his chest.

“Yeah?”

“I just got off the phone with the nurse. He woke up for a bit.”

Every sound in the car seemed to dull.

“He…” Shane swallowed. “He did?”

“Yeah,” Marleau said. “Didn’t stay awake long, but she said he was talking more. And he asked for you.”

Shane’s hands tightened around the steering wheel.

“He asked for me,” he repeated.

“By name,” Marleau said. “So. Whatever’s going on in there, you’re still in it.”

Shane exhaled, shaky.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m going back now.”

“Didn’t doubt it,” Marleau said. “Drive safe, man.”

Shane tapped the call off, put the car in gear, and headed for home. For Ilya.

Shane almost walked past the room.

He’d done this loop enough times to know it by muscle memory—nurses’ station, humming vending machine, third door on the right—but his feet carried him all the way to the fire exit before his brain caught up. He stopped with his hand on the cold metal bar, heart pounding like he’d just finished a shift, and doubled back.

1. ROZANOV, the plaque said. Same temporary plastic, same crooked little Voyageurs sticker someone had pressed on there with too much thumb.

He’d seen that sign a hundred times in the last few days. It had never felt this sharp, like the letters were carved straight into his ribs.

He knocked once, knuckles a dull thunk against wood, and pushed the door open.

The room was the same too-bright box it had always been: thin curtains, beige walls, the low hiss of the vent. The TV muttered to itself in the corner. The balloon in the far corner had slumped down to eye level, its shiny surface gone a little wrinkled.

The only thing that was different was Ilya.

Ilya was awake.

Not drifting, not half-there behind too-wide pupils—awake. Propped up higher, bed angled toward the window, one arm resting on top of the blanket. The bruises were ugly and yellowing now, spreading under his eye and along his cheekbone, but his eyes were clear.

He turned at the sound of the door. His gaze hit Shane and locked on, focused and familiar, like a spotlight straight to the chest.

For a split second, all Shane could think was: he’s here. He’s here, he knows me, he’s still himself. Then, right on top of that, a second wave: he’s beautiful, and I am so in love with him it’s actually stupid.

“Привет,” Ilya said. “Shane Hollander.”

Shane’s hand tightened on the door handle.

“Bonjour, Ilya Rozanov.”

He closed the door behind him. The visitor chair was where he’d left it yesterday, half a step too far from the bed for comfort. The balloon some nurse had left in the corner had sunk lower, bobbing at shoulder height like it was tired too.

He crossed the room and sat down. The chair complained under his weight, an awful scraping squeak that somehow made everything more awkward.

For a moment they just looked at each other.

“So,” Ilya said at last. “You survived.”

Shane’s mouth twitched.

“Barely,” he said. “How’s the head?”

“Feels like they used Zamboni on it,” Ilya said. “But I know where I am. I know who I am. I remember you. So, good enough.”

Relief loosened something in Shane’s chest.

“You remember… everything?” he asked. “Before the hit, I mean.”

“Yes.” Ilya’s gaze didn’t waver. “Before this, I remember all of it.”

He let that hang there, heavy with things they hadn’t said in years.

“Hospital days are fuzzy,” Ilya went on. “Nurses tell me I was very charming. I do not remember being charming. They also tell me you were here.” Ilya smiled, a crooked grin that Shane was very familiar with. “A lot.”

Shane swallowed.

“I was,” he said. “I… have been.”

“I don’t remember that part,” Ilya said. “But I believe them. You look like you have not seen real bed in a while.”

Shane huffed out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh.

“Hotel pillows are ruined forever anyway,” he said. “Might as well downgrade to hospital chairs.”

Ilya’s mouth twitched, but his eyes stayed intent.

“Why?” he asked. No heat, just that blunt, curious cut he used when he wanted the truth on the ice.

Shane had spent nights in this room while Ilya slept, rehearsing answers to that question. All of them sounded thin now.

“Because it’s you,” he said. “Because you scared the crap out of me. Because I needed to be here when you woke up and knew… anything.”

“You were afraid I would die,” Ilya said.

“Yeah,” Shane said. “I was.”

Silence settled again, close and too bright.

He knew he was staring too much. He could feel it in the way his eyes kept snagging on small, stupid details: the blunt curl of Ilya’s lashes, the shadow of stubble along his jaw, the little crease between his brows that meant a headache was starting. It was ridiculous; they’d spent years in each other’s faces, bodies smashed against the glass, sweating and swearing and laughing and doing much worse than looking. But something about having almost lost the right to look at all made every second feel stolen. His whole body was buzzing with an animal, useless urge to catalog every inch of Ilya and then wrap himself around him like that would be enough to keep him here.

“And now I am not dead,” Ilya said. “I remember everything from before this stupid hit. Including Boston. Including you leaving …after.”

There it was: the line straight from his kitchen to this bed.

Shane felt the words like a glove closing around his ribs.

“Okay,” he said. “We should talk about that.”

Ilya shifted a little against the pillows, a careful adjustment of wires and tape.

“Good,” he said. “Because I have had nothing to do but think about it.”

Shane almost smiled at the dryness of it, then didn’t. He laced his fingers together and stared at his hands for a second before forcing himself to look up.

“That night in Boston,” he said, “at your place. I freaked out, and I’m sorry.”

“It was normal sandwich,” Ilya said. “You were very dramatic.”

Ilya must have known that Shane wasn’t talking about the sandwich, but rather about how the way Shane’s name had sounded on Ilya’s lips as they met Shane’s.

“You had my favorite brand of ginger ale in your fridge,” Shane reminded him, lips curling up. “You asked if I wanted to stay.”

One corner of Ilya’s mouth curved.

“There was… invitation,” he said. “Yes.”

“I know,” Shane said. “I wanted to say yes. I wanted to stay. My whole body wanted to stay. And my brain—” He blew out a slow breath. “My brain took one look at you in your own kitchen, feeding me, being… soft, and decided that if I stayed, that was it. It was real.”

“That was also idea,” Ilya said. “I am very good at ideas.”

“I know,” Shane said again, quieter. “And I was a coward.”

He could see it behind his eyes: Ilya leaning against the counter, bare feet on tile, like he wasn’t rewriting both their lives with one word.

“I’ve been in love with you for years,” Shane said. The words were clumsy and huge and also the only ones that fit. “Since Sochi, at least. Probably earlier. I called it all kinds of things—competition, obsession, whatever made it sound less serious—but it was always you.”

Something flickered over Ilya’s face, quick and raw, before he smoothed it out.

“So instead of staying,” he said, “you run away. And then you show up on my TV with Rose Landry.”

“Yeah,” Shane said. “Because I am an idiot who thought it would be easier to date a nice girl everyone already liked than to blow up my life for the guy who chirps me in two languages.”

“Was she nice?” Ilya asked. There was no jealousy in the question, which somehow made it worse—just an honest request for information.

“She is,” Shane said. “She’s great. Smart. Funny. Way too patient. She deserved better than the half-person I was able to be.”

“What did you give her?” Ilya asked. “Exactly. What part?”

“Whatever was left over after I spent all day not thinking about you,” Shane said. “Turns out that is not a lot. It also turns out trying to have sex while pretending you’re not in love with someone else is a terrible plan.”

Ilya’s eyebrows climbed.

“So internet is correct,” he said. “Bad sex with woman.”

Shane groaned.

“I walked into that one,” he said. “She did everything right. I was… not quite there. If you catch my drift.”

“And you told her this?” Ilya asked. “You told her about me?”

“I told her she deserved someone who wasn’t in love with somebody else,” Shane said. “She’s not stupid. She knows who you are.”

Ilya let his head tip back against the pillow, eyes on the ceiling for a second.

“You know what it looked like, from my side?” he asked.

“I have a guess,” Shane said. “But I think I should hear it.”

“It looked like I was… extra,” Ilya said. “Fun secret. Practice for the real thing. And when you were ready for daylight, you chose girl with perfect hair and family Christmas photos. I thought I imagined everything. That I was stupid for thinking I was anything but… intermission.”

Shane’s throat hurt.

“You weren’t stupid,” he said. “You were right. I just wouldn’t admit it. Even to myself.”

“You could have said you were scared,” Ilya replied. His voice stayed level, but his fingers tightened in the blanket. “You could have said, ‘wait for me, I need time.’ Instead you left me in my kitchen thinking I was… embarrassing. Wrong choice.”

“I know,” Shane said. The words felt small. “I am sorry. I can’t change that. I can only tell you what finally made me stop being a coward.”

Ilya looked back at him, eyes sharpened again.

“I got hit,” he said. “That did it.”

“When you went down, everything just—,” Shane didn’t know how to continue. “There was this version of my life where you didn’t wake up. And in that version, you died thinking you were… a mistake I fixed by going straight. I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t even stand the idea of it.”

He remembered the slap of skates on the ice, the green of the boards, that horrible stillness when Ilya didn’t move.

“So I stopped pretending,” he said. “I called Coach. Told him I was going to miss some games. Called Rose. Told her the truth. And then I showed up in your hospital room.”

“Every day,” Ilya said.

“Every day I could,” Shane said. “If I wasn’t on the ice, I was in this room. If I wasn’t in this room, I was on the phone with your doctors being a pain in the ass.”

A tiny huff of breath escaped Ilya, almost a laugh.

“Very on brand,” he said.

“I’m in love with you,” Shane said, because all the circling around it was starting to feel like an insult. “I told Rose. I told Coach. I’m telling you. I don’t want a life where I win everything but lose you because I was too scared to say it out loud. I want you. Not just the games and the hotels. The real thing. If you’ll let me have another shot.”

Ilya stared at him, expression unreadable for a long stretch of heartbeats. His thumb was moving against the blanket now, restless.

“You realize I might not be same,” he said finally. “Doctors say I could be fine, but they also say maybe not. Maybe I am slower. Maybe I forget plays. Maybe I never play again. You still want… all this? Headaches and mood swings and me being even more of asshole than usual?”

“I want you,” Shane said. “Whatever version of you that it is. Scoring forty goals, yelling at me from the press box, running a hockey school somewhere with terrible coffee. I don’t care. I care that you’re here.”

“You say that like it will be easy,” Ilya said quietly.

“It won’t be,” Shane said. “I’m terrified. I’ve spent my whole life building this career and making sure no one had a reason to look too close. And now I’m sitting here ruining the closet and my shot percentage at the same time. But I am more scared of going back to pretending I don’t love you than I am of any of that.”

The room felt very small. The monitor in the corner beeped steadily, oblivious.

“I hate you a little,” Ilya said.

Shane let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

“Fair,” he said. 

“I hate you,” Ilya went on, “and also I have been in love with you so long it is stupid. Since before Sochi, maybe. You were very annoying.”

Shane’s vision blurred for a second. He blinked hard.

“You don’t have to say that,” he said. “You don’t owe me anything just because I finally pulled it together in a hospital room.”

“You think I am saying it as favor?” Ilya asked. “My brain is still bruised, Hollander. I don’t have energy for performance. If I say it, it is because it is true.”

He shifted his right hand out from under the blanket and set it palm-up on top, fingers relaxed but close enough that Shane could reach without standing.

“Here is what I can do right now,” he said. “I believe you about Rose. I believe you love me. I am not ready to pretend Boston did not happen. I am still angry. My head hurts. Doctors tell me that sometimes I will forget what day it is.” His mouth twisted. “But I am also completely gone for you, which is very inconvenient. So we try again. If you stay.”

Shane slid his hand across the thin hospital sheet until his fingers brushed Ilya’s. He waited.

Ilya curled his fingers in, catching his.

“I’m staying,” Shane said. “I will say dumb things. I will panic. But I am done running.”

“If you run,” Ilya said, voice rough now, “I will chase you and hit you with stick. In front of cameras. Very dramatic.”

“I deserve that,” Shane said.

“Yes,” Ilya replied. His grip tightened, a small tremor riding through it. “You do.”

He let out a shaky breath.

“And for your ego,” he added, eyes flicking down to their hands and back up, “sex with you was not bad. Not even once.”

Shane’s mouth curled helplessly.

“Good,” he said. “I was a little worried.”

“It was…” Ilya hesitated, then committed. “Best I ever had. Unfortunately.”

“Unfortunately?” Shane asked.

“Means nobody else had a chance,” Ilya said. “After you, everything else felt wrong. Very rude of you.”

Shane felt something in his chest settle, like a skate blade finally finding an edge.

“Same,” he said. “It’s always been you.”

“Yeah,” Ilya said quietly. “I can tell now.”

He shifted his hand so their fingers twined properly, knuckles pressed together, the contact warm and solid.

“You stay,” he said. 

It was almost funny, in a sick way, how clear everything felt now that it was already on fire. All the excuses he’d leaned on for years—career, sponsors, parents, Canada, Russia, whatever—felt flimsy compared to the fact of Ilya breathing in front of him. He’d spent so long convincing himself that wanting this was unreasonable, irresponsible, unsafe, that an entire decade had gone by without him ever saying the simplest possible thing. Three words, three syllables. He’d choked on them over and over, like they were something complicated and dangerous, when the truth was they were the only part that had ever been easy.

“Yeah,” Shane said. “I’ll stay, because I love you, Ilya.”

Ilya really shouldn’t feel this good with his head like this.

There was a dull, mean ache pulsing behind his eyes, a little throb at every staple, a fuzziness at the edges of his thoughts whenever he tried to count backwards or remember what he’d had for breakfast. None of that stopped the warm, floaty feeling in his chest, like someone had poured hot tea in there and it was spreading through his ribs.

Maybe the nurses had changed his meds. Maybe he’d accidentally taken molly in the past hour; that would explain a lot.

“I love you,” Shane had said.

Ilya had heard a lot of things in this room—doctors, beeping, his own heartbeat thudding behind his eyes—but this felt like the thing that actually stuck to the walls.

“I love you,” Shane said again, like he was testing the shape of it. “I love you, I love you, I love you. I could say it a million times and it wouldn’t be enough, Ilya.”

His voice cracked a little on Ilya’s name. That part Ilya liked more than he was going to ever admit.

“I can’t stand life without you,” Shane went on, quieter. “It’s miserable. I’ve been miserable.”

Ah. Yes. There was the molly.

Shane was here. Shane was still here. Shane had sat in this stupid squeaky chair and told Ilya all his secret thoughts and not one of them had been “I hate you” or “this was a mistake” or “I choose her.” Shane had said all the opposite things instead. I love you, I love you, I love you. He’d said it like he was finally putting down something heavy he’d been carrying around since they first met behind a rink in Regina.

If Ilya closed his eyes, he could still hear it: the way Shane’s voice had gone rough on the word love, the way his mouth had shaped Ilya like it was fragile, like he was afraid someone might take it away if he said it too loud.

And somehow, all at the same time, the rest of it was true too. Shane had skipped games. Shane had told Coach. Shane had told Rose. Marleau knew and had not burst into flames. Rose knew and the world had not ended. There was a plan for after the hospital that did not involve Ilya going back to Boston alone and pretending this had all been funny hallucination. They were going to live together. In Montréal. With hockey and furniture and maybe terrible coffee.

Shane loved him. Shane was in love with him.

It made about as much sense as anything else in his life, which was to say: none, but in a way he liked.

Later—maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, whenever the doctors stopped looking at him like he was made of glass—he knew other feelings would come back. Fear, probably. Anger, still. All the old habits about who was allowed to know what and which parts of himself had to stay behind locked doors. The thought of it made his head hurt in a different way.

Right now, though, with Shane’s hand wrapped around his and the room humming quietly around them, all he could manage was: happy. Stupidly, embarrassingly happy. The kind of happy that made him want to laugh into Shane’s shoulder until they kicked him out of the ward.

He shifted a little, careful of wires, and tugged weakly at Shane’s hand.

“Come here,” he muttered.

Shane gave him a questioning look, but he stood, leaned in, let Ilya pull him down until his head was tucked awkwardly against Ilya’s chest, then his shoulder, then finally his neck. It wasn’t graceful. Shane was all elbows and caution, like he thought one wrong move might break something.

Ilya slid his fingers into Shane’s hair and held on.

“Shane,” he said, just to see if it still felt as good out loud as it did in his head. “Shane, Shane, Shane.”

The first time, the word came out careful, testing. By the third, it had gone soft at the edges, the way it did when he was exhausted and happy and not pretending to be anyone’s enemy. He felt Shane breathe, a little stutter against his throat.

“You can’t just—” Shane started, voice muffled, then stopped when Ilya tightened his grip.

“I can,” Ilya said. “You said I can.”

He had, in so many words. You can assume some things. You can know where I am. You can know I love you.

So Ilya told him.

He told him in Russian and in English, in words and in the way his hand curled at the back of Shane’s neck. He told him he loved him, that he had been miserable too, that Boston without him had been like playing with someone else’s stick—technically possible, completely wrong. He told him he never wanted to go back to a life where they were on opposite sides of the ice and on opposite sides of everything else.

He didn’t say it all at once; his mouth wasn’t fast enough and his brain kept short-circuiting every time Shane made a tiny surprised sound. Instead, it came out in pieces, between breaths.

“Шаня,” he said into his hair. “I love you. You hear me? Очень.”

“Yeah,” Shane said, so quietly Ilya almost missed it. “I hear you.”

“Good,” Ilya said. “I will keep saying. Just in case.”

Chapter End Notes

i love them so much oh my fucking god theyre so cute and lovely and awwwwwwww

 

also thank you all so much for the wonderful comments, it truly means the world to me that you guys like this!!! i'm having so much fun mucking up the timeline and taking you guys for the ride with me <3333 so crazy that we're over 5000 hits wtf T_T also 81 comments at this very moment feels like fate.

ALSO: PSA! I plan to rewrite and add to the first two chapters, because they don't feel substantial enough to me at the moment, but I will leave an authors note before I post my next chapter with the dates of the edit 🙏