Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

Gen

Fandom:

Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationship:

Shane Hollander & Ryan Price

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ryan Price (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Background Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov - Freeform, POV Ryan Price (Game Changers), Anxious Shane Hollander, Panic Attacks, Hurt/Comfort

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-10 Words: 1,871 Chapters: 1/1

Can I Take a Minute? A Breath?

Summary

Ryan walks down the hallway, noting the little details of the forgotten corners of the ice rink. It doesn’t look like people come back here a whole lot, which is just perfect for Ryan’s needs. He turns the corner to see an exposed brick wall with a door that presumably leads to a disused storage closet.

Then he sees Shane Hollander, sitting on the floor hunched over his knees.

Ryan comes across Shane having a panic attack.

Notes

Thank you to everyone in the Game Changers Library Discord for cheering me on! And for giving me ideas, even though I now maybe have more of them than I know what to do with...

Title is from Rest by half∙alive!

The camp is fun, so far. Ryan likes the kids, mostly, even though some of them are clearly only children raised by parents who think “no” is a word kids shouldn’t hear more than once a week. It’s honestly not what he expected at all, considering it’s a hockey camp led by the two top players in the league. Rozanov’s invitation had been casual enough, and the email from shane@irinafoundation.org had been almost comically formal and thorough in comparison. Ryan was expecting some sort of incubator for future hockey stars — very tolerant future hockey stars — but so far it’s just been a normal camp.

So the kids a great, mostly, and the camp is normal. It’s still a lot, and Ryan feels a little bit on-edge even though he’s just been teaching drills and safe falling for the past few hours. He tapped out, sicked his gaggle of kids on Wyatt for twenty minutes to have a glass of water and do some breathing exercises to calm his nervous system. Since retiring he’s been able to try new things with his medication, and it’s been fantastic, but a new, intense environment is still a lot.

Ryan walks down the hallway, noting the little details of the forgotten corners of the ice rink. It doesn’t look like people come back here a whole lot, which is just perfect for Ryan’s needs. He turns the corner to see an exposed brick wall with a door that presumably leads to a disused storage closet.

Then he sees Shane Hollander, sitting on the floor hunched over his knees. First, he can’t believe what he’s seeing. There’s a quota for how much unbelievable shit you can witness in one week, and Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov making out was plenty to fill that quota. Ryan blinks, sees Hollander still on the ground and definitely breathing not-right, and decides there should be designated private rooms in ice rinks.

He blinks again. Hollander is still on the ground. Definitely on the ground. Ryan isn’t hallucinating. Okay, sure. Hollander attempts a shuddering breath, which cracks on the inhale and ends up a sob on the way out. Fuck. This is definitely a panic attack he’s witnessing, and Ryan doesn’t really know what to do with that.

He’s had enough himself that he recognizes the signs, but somehow intervening feels invasive. Maybe it isn’t even necessary, and Hollander just needs a little time to collect himself before he’s right as rain again, and Ryan saying something will just make it worse.

Hollander’s breathing speeds up, ragged now, and Ryan can see him dragging a hand through his hair and pulling. Shit. Part of him is still stuck on the fact that the Shane Hollander is on the floor having a panic attack even as he takes a few steps forward.

“Hollander?” he tries. Nothing. He clears his throat. “Shane?”

“Huh?” Hollander looks up, startled, and then his wet eyes widen as soon as he sees Ryan. He looks terrified. “Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck—!”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Ryan babbles. “I can, uh, go, if you want. But I think— um. Have you ever had a panic attack before?”

Hollander is holding himself very, very still, aside from the heavy breaths still making his chest and shoulders rise and fall just the wrong side of too fast. He’s staring at Ryan like he’s sizing him up, and if Ryan didn’t know any better he’d say the look in his eye is hostile. He does know better, though, and it’s more cornered than anything. A prey animal puffing up its fur to look bigger and scarier under threat. “That’s—” a shallow breath, “not what this is.”

“I’m not… judging you, or whatever. Fuck, it’s— I get them too, alright? You’ve seen it.” If Ryan has learned anything about Shane Hollander in the few days since the Game Changer camp started, aside from the whole Rozanov thing, it’s that he’s a massive fucking hockey nerd. He can rattle stats like nobody’s business, and his finger is constantly on the MLH’s pulse. There’s no way he hasn’t seen clips of Ryan rushing out of that game, if he wasn’t watching it live. “When I was with Buffalo.”

“Shit,” Hollander says. “Shit!”

He tugs at his hair again, and Ryan is stepping forward before he even knows what he’s doing. He kneels next to Hollander and grabs his wrist. “Hey, stop. You’re gonna hurt yourself.”

Hollander strains against his grip, and fuck is this guy strong. Ryan knows this, of course, but it’s a surprising amount of resistance for someone that much smaller than him and in the middle of a panic attack. He’s in over his head here. Ryan has just barely learned how to handle his own panic attacks, what made him think he could talk someone else through one? What do the guided meditation videos do?

He doubts asking Hollander to picture a beach right now is going to be well recieved. Hey, Shane Hollander, could you just imagine the sound of waves lapping the shore for me, and stop panicking? Thanks. But after that it’s usually…

“Okay, okay. I’ll go if you want me to, but could you just take a breath? Just, like, a deep breath.” Hollander has stopped looking at him, if only because his eyes have glazed over and gained this weird, faraway quality instead. Ryan is getting concerned he actually isn’t getting enough oxygen, and is also privately, shamefully, glad he escaped that game so fast. If he looked anything like this, he would’ve been torn to fucking shreds on that bench. “C’mon. You know how to breathe, right?”

Hollander demonstrates this excellently by starting to hyperventilate into his hand. “I’m fine,” he grits out.

“If you’re fine, take a normal breath. A single one.”

It’s like Hollander glitches. All of him just freezes up, and then he takes a normal breath. Well, sort of normal, it’s still a bit shallow but it’s leagues better than whetever the hell he was doing before. Ryan exhales a breath of relief himself. He lets go of Hollander’s wrist as soon as he remembers he’s holding it.

“Okay,” Ryan says, nodding, “okay, good.”

The tension drains gradually out of Hollander’s frame, and after that they’re just two exhausted guys on the dirty floor of an ice rink. Hollander is rubbing the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, and Ryan shifted to sit instead of kneel when his knees started aching some minutes ago.

“Sorry,” Hollander says eventually, taking his hands from his eyes and staring at the wall in front of him. His eyes are red-rimmed and his hair is tousled. He looks exhausted. “That shouldn’t— I shouldn’t— you didn’t need to see that.”

“All good, dude,” Ryan tries for casual. “Like I said, I’m not going to judge. Just glad you got out of it okay. Even if…” he hesitates, glancing over at Hollander, “if it wasn’t a panic attack.”

Hollander huffs, picking at the sleeve of his camp-issue sweatshirt. Technically, they’re in matching clothes, which is a little bit ridiculous. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Thanks.”

There’s still tension in him, and the way Hollander is holding his shoulders is making Ryan tired just from looking. An episode like that is exhausting enough on its own without trying to maintain some sort of pretense about nothing happening afterwards. Ryan suddenly remembers the strange new reality he’s living in. “Do you want me to go get Rozanov?”

He knows he likes having Fabian around whenever he’s anxious. Probably it’s the same for Hollander with his guy. But then Hollander looks up at him like he’s about to have another panic attack and Ryan’s heart kicks up so much speed that he can’t take anything back before Hollander says, “do not.”

Ryan thinks about last time when he was really anxious and Fabian cuddled with him on the couch as they watched Hotel Hell re-runs. It’d helped, just to have another person close, and he bets that Hollander does actually want Rozanov here. But he can also see that the optics of it all are fucked to hell and back — him finding Hollander like this is bad enough, Rozanov disappearing as well, and risking them being found again… yeah, no.

Hollander is still looking at him. Ryan wrings his hands together, opens his mouth. Closes it. He doesn’t know what to say, and okay is apparently getting stuck in his throat. He nods stiffly, and that seems to settle Hollander enough to go back to staring at the wall. Still, there’s that tension in his shoulders, back as taught as a drawn bow. Ryan doesn’t know where this absurd need to fix this comes from, but maybe part of it is the sense-memory of stumbling through the back corridors of an ice rink with his lungs burning and not knowing what was going on.

“Can I give you a hug?” he blurts. He feels his neck and ears heating. Why did he say that? What made him think that was a good idea? Oh, god, Hollander’s going to think he’s some sort of weird freak. He’s gonna get kicked from the camp, which really is a damn shame because he’s liking hanging out with the kids—

“Oh. Uh, sure?”

Ryan’s thoughts skid to a halt. For a minute, him and Hollander are just blinking at each other, somehow both confused. And then Ryan just pushes himself off the ground, and then he reaches out a hand to help Shane up, too, and then he closes his arms around Shane. Okay, then.

He’s been told he gives great hugs, and he thinks the silence is part of it. Small talk during a hug has always felt weird to him, so Ryan stays quiet even as the tension bleeds out of Shane’s frame and he sinks into the hug a little bit. He draws back and immediately puts his hands in the pocket of his hoodie so he doesn’t have to think about what his hands are doing.

Hollander straightens his clothes out, dusts himself off, and then clears his throat. “Well. Um, thanks again.”

“Happy to help,” Ryan says. Hollander isn’t meeting his eyes at all, instead flickering between the floor and the wall and the ceiling and the print of Ryan’s hoodie. The same print that’s on his own sweatshirt that can’t possibly be that interesting.

“If you could, you know, not… tell anyone. That’d be great.”

“Of course.”

Hollander nods, almost automatically and taking a deep breath as he does. He draws his bottom lip between his teeth and rocks on his heels. He looks a little bit like an anxious bobblehead. “Cool. Thanks.”

“No worries,” Ryan assures. “Maybe go have a glass of water?”

Hollander freezes. He nods again, but just once this time, decisive. “Yeah. Yeah, thanks. I’ll, um, see you around.”

And then he’s off like a shot down the hallway, and Ryan is left standing wondering what the hell just happened. “See you,” he says lamely into the air.

This has got to be his quota for unbelievable shit for the week. He doesn’t know if he can take any more.