Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Brandon Wiebe, Farah Jalali

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ottawa Centaurs Player Shane Hollander, Ottawa Centaurs Player Ilya Rozanov, Autistic Shane Hollander

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-09-07 Words: 1,918 Chapters: 1/1

an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability

Summary

Shane finds out about five minutes before it's set to be announced to the public, when Farah calls him and says, “I'm so sorry, I don't know what the fuck just happened.”

Notes

Any inaccuracies in how hockey trades work can be attributed to this being a fictional hockey universe.

Shane finds out about five minutes before it's set to be announced to the public, when Farah calls him and says, “I'm so sorry, I don't know what the fuck just happened.”

Shane can guess what the fuck just happened. He asks, “Where?”

Farah says, “Ottawa.”

Farah doesn't know about the Ottawa plan, because there isn't officially an Ottawa plan until Ilya is at Ottawa, which is supposed to be happening right now.

“Okay,” Shane says.

“I—” Farah pauses, and she's gone for so long Shane checks to see if his call dropped. She laughs. “Oh my god.”

Shane, who is the sort of numb he knows won't last much longer but is extremely useful right now, asks, “What?” His voice sounds very flat.

“I think Ottawa’s GM has just managed to fuck the entire NHL. Holy shit.”

“What?” he asks again, slightly louder.

“The announcement just came out,” she says, “and you're not the only person they just acquired.”

His phone starts vibrating with another call, and he glances down to see Lily in big letters. Beyond that, he can also see a push notification from a hockey news site, announcing that Ottawa has acquired Shane Hollander in a three-way trade with Montreal and Toronto, and they have also acquired Ilya Rozanov from free agency.

“What,” Shane says, and hangs up on Farah.

He opens the push notification, just in case it's a mistake or he's maybe hallucinating it, but the article says the same thing. Montreal got Dallas fucking Kent, Toronto got Ottawa's first round draft pick and some forward Shane doesn't care about, and Ottawa just got Ilya Rozanov and Shane fucking Hollander.

His phone starts ringing again, which is how he realizes it stopped in the first place. It says Lily. He answers.

“I did not know,” Ilya says, voice odd. “I just signed with them, and they—we will be in Ottawa together. Fuck. Shane.”

“I want to see you,” Shane says. He doesn't know it's true until he says it—or rather, it's always true, but he doesn't know it specifically until the words are leaving his mouth.

“Did they tell you?” Ilya asks.

“Nobody told me anything,” Shane says. He still feels oddly numb. “I want to see you.” The gravity of what's going on registers all at once, like a puck to the solar plexus, and he breathes, “Oh, fuck.”

“Shane?” Ilya asks cautiously.

Shane starts laughing and can't stop, and he knows he sounds insane but underneath the panic and fear and anger and betrayal is a wellspring of elation. “All our planning,” he says between laughs, “our fucking multi-year timeline, and they just traded us to the same fucking team. What the fuck?”

His phone starts vibrating again, and he sees a text from Farah reading The Ottawa coach is about to call you which means that the call from the Ottawa area code is probably them.

“I have to go,” he says. “The Ottawa coach is calling me. I love you.”

“Ya teblya lyublyu,” Ilya says, and then Shane hangs up to answer the other call.

The man on the other end of the line introduces himself as Brandon Wiebe, and it takes Shane a second longer than it should to place the name because he’s new and because Shane feels like his entire brain has been stuck in a blender.

But Shane has been having professional hockey calls for his entire adult life, so he says, “Hi, it’s nice to meet you,” in a voice that sounds the way it always sounds when he is talking on the phone with hockey-related people he needs to make a good impression with.

“It’s nice to meet you, too,” Wiebe says, “and welcome you to the team, but first I actually wanted to apologize. I fully expected to be able to have this conversation before the announcement went out, but the timing got, if you’ll excuse my language, fucked about twenty minutes ago, so…sorry for springing this on you. I’m not sure how much Montreal talked to you about the negotiation—”

“They didn’t,” Shane says. His voice has lost the make-a-good-impression tone. He makes himself smile so the smile reaches his voice, a trick his mom taught him, but he can feel it not making it to his eyes.

Wiebe lets out a breath. “Then I’m extra sorry. As I’m sure you saw, we also just signed Ilya Rozanov, which accelerated some of our timelines to make sure we got the deal for you finalized before it leaked. But I wanted to be the first person from Ottawa to call you and tell you how excited we are to have you joining us.”

“Thanks,” Shane says. He can hear the smile.

“I know you have a rivalry with Rozanov, but—well, we all watched the 2017 All-Star Game, and if you can play like that here…well, I don’t want to jinx us.”

He wants to ask who will play center. Will he be moved to a wing? Will Ilya? He can’t imagine one of them playing second line, but maybe that will be Wiebe’s move. He says, without really intending to, “We’re friends. The rivalry is—we’re friends.”

“Great,” Wiebe says, sounding delighted. Shane wonders if he knows the smiling trick, too. “Obviously we’re about a month away from the start of training camp, but I’d love if you can come to Ottawa in the next few days so you can meet the staff and start to get spun up on everything.”

“Of course.”

“Great,” Wiebe says again. “I know you’ll be getting about a thousand emails and probably twice as many phone calls, but feel free to reach out to me directly, or to any of our staff.”

They say their goodbyes.

Shane hangs up.

He stops smiling.

His phone starts vibrating again. He sets it to Do Not Disturb, so the only people who can reach him are his parents and Ilya.

He thought he would play his entire career in Montreal. He thought they would retire his number there.

And then he told them he was gay at the end of the season, and before the off-season even ended they replaced him with Dallas fucking Kent, that monumental piece of shit.

“I hate them,” he says out loud. He flinches. “I’m going to get to play with Ilya.” He doesn’t flinch at that. He says it again. “I’m going to get to play with Ilya. I’m going to get to see Ilya every day. Maybe we can share a hotel room.” He covers his mouth, like there’s a person with a telephoto lens peering into his window reading his lips just to see him confessing his desire to share a room with Ilya without needing to hide it.

Abruptly, the few days between now and whenever he will get to see Ilya in Ottawa feel like too long, even though he’s gone months at a time without seeing him in person, without touching him. He wants it to be then already, wants to skip time until they are both together again, in Ottawa.

Shane needs to see him.

So he hits the videocall button, even though it’s careless, even though they always check beforehand to make sure the other person is alone unless it’s a pre-schedued time, and even then Shane will usually ask if the time is still good.

But Ilya picks up before it even starts the second ring, and he looks so happy that it makes Shane’s chest ache. “We should share a hotel room,” Shane blurts out. “Nobody will—I mean—so we can sleep in the same bed when we’re traveling. I love you. You’re going to fuck up my night-before-a-game routine so much, but I don’t even care.”

Ilya looks somehow even happier the longer Shane talks, and Shane can see his own face in the stupid little square in the corner and he doesn’t look happy, but he is, he just doesn’t know how to make it happen on his face.

So he says, “I told Coach Wiebe that we’re friends. So we can be friends. Or, I mean, we can—”

“Friends with benefits,” Ilya says, sounding delighted. “Just two bros who are fucking.”

Shane snorts out a laugh. “You might be the only person who has ever called me a bro.” But something settles in his chest for the first time since Farah’s call. “Are you—are you okay with this? I know this wasn’t the plan.”

“Moya lyubov,” Ilya says, and he looks so happy it almost hurts to look at him, like staring at the sun. “I tried not to pray that you would end up at Ottawa with me because I knew it would hurt you to leave Montreal, but I did when I could not stop myself.”

“We can’t both play center at the same time,” Shane says before he can help himself.

Ilya laughs, but not like he’s laughing at Shane, which is nice of him, because Shane wants to go live in a hole and never look Ilya in the face again, because he knows that’s not supposed to be what matters when he just found out he’s going to get to see the love of his life every day.

But he does care.

“I will play right wing,” Ilya says, like it’s no problem. “Like All-Star Game. Or we will play different lines.”

“You should be captain, if they ask,” Shane says, and it’s not a concession, not really. Some part of him squirms at the idea of it being seen as a demotion, but being traded to Ottawa will already be seen as a demotion—it is, in every way that people know about—but the pragmatic part of him knows that Ilya will be able to adjust faster to captaining a new team. Shane could do it, but Ilya will be better at it faster.

Shane understands hockey better than any person he’s ever met, but Ilya understands people better than he does.

Ilya laughs. “Pawning off your duties on me already?”

“You can wash the dishes, too.”

“I own a dishwasher.”

“There are things that shouldn’t be washed in a dishwasher.” Shane has a horrified thought. “Do you wash your kitchen knives in the dishwasher? They’ll rust.”

“I know how to wash dishes,” Ilya says, but he’s smiling so hard it looks like it must be hurting his face. “So I will be Captain and you will be A,” he says, like he’s planning things. “You will be 1C and I will be 2C, and we will never let the enemy rest for a moment.”

Shane can already see it, even as he says, “The coach will have to agree—”

“Coach will be so happy we are not murdering each other for 1C and Captain that he will not fight what is good idea. We will have separate places but close, and nobody will question why we are together, best bro friends who fuck each other and win at hockey. We will share hotel room and sit next to each other on plane and I will tell you good game, I love you and you will eat weird bird food and I will do the dishes and you will wash the kitchen knives so they do not rust and we will get married and get a dog and have kids and one of them will have my mama’s eyes and the other will have your smile.”