Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Hayden Pike

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Hayden Pike, Jackie Pike, Original Characters

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, NHL Entry Draft, Introspection, Shane Hollander-centric, Secret Relationship, eventually, Shane Hollander Has a Gay Awakening, it takes him a while but what else is new, Team Dynamics, Team as Family, I let Shane Hollander have nice things, Peer Pressure, Masculinity, Hockey, Eventual Romance, Eventual Fluff, Eventual Happy Ending, Shane Hollander & Hayden Pike Friendship, Trades (Hockey RPF), Stanley Cup Playoffs, POV Shane Hollander, POV Third Person Limited, no AI ever, Are bruise kinks a thing?, because I'd say that's something that's happening in here

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-23 Updated: 2026-06-29 Words: 28,432 Chapters: 3/5

49th Parallel

Summary

Shane tries not to be disappointed in the way the whole thing has worked out. Because the thing about Rozanov is that his existence is infuriating. And he is so much fun to play against. Shane had almost liked the thought of having a rival and, had the lottery gone a little differently, he and Rozanov would have been drafted to the same division and really delivered on that possibility. They could have really enjoyed it.

As it stands, one of them is going to the southernmost team in the league, and the other is going all the way up North.

Or-

The draft lottery goes a little differently and suddenly there is no rivalry, no joint CCM campaign, and nothing between Shane and Ilya but a charged encounter in a hotel gym and 4,000 kilometres of distance.

A lot of things are different, and some others are too fated to be ruined by something as immaterial as luck.

Notes

So, I really don't think anyone is going to take issue with me inventing any parallels between Shane and McDavid. I think that's a legal thing to do. However, I would NEVER in any way suggest that Ilya is anything like Matthew Tkachuk. Cool? Cool.
Generally, I'm not basing anybody on any real hockey players (though I may pick a few real things here and there), and I am fighting to not name any of the random fictional hockey players I am populating this fic with after actual hockey players, because the fact that I'm trying not to do it naturally means that all of the names I can think of are already taken.

This was originally supposed to be a one shot. Evidently it did not work out. I got like 4k words in and much less than halfway through it and decided I had to split it up. Current estimate is 4 chapters, but that is subject to change. Eagle eyes might notice that this first chapter is as long as I had thought the whole fic would be. I am very not good at sticking to my outlines. It's fine. Totally fine.
I have spent a lot of time dealing with Shane's first year here, because it felt important to build the foundation we're working from. I don't expect to linger quite so much on the coming years. If I do, this thing might just turn out endless.

Chapter 1

Chapter Notes

Shane is trying very hard to pretend nothing is bothering him.

It’s the day of the draft and he’s a shoe-in to be a first round pick, and he has been working at this for his entire life and now it’s happening. It’s a good thing. An inarguably good thing. He is happy about it.

He just also feels a little bit sick. Because he has worked this hard for so many years and been the best at every turn for a reason and now he isn’t the best. Just one of the best. Battling it out for first with Ilya Rozanov who is nothing like him and just as good as him, loath as he is to admit it. He started as a rumour Shane heard floating around Juniors; a Russian prospect who might be his equal after he had spent so long thinking that maybe he didn’t have one. A figure in grainy game tape, a big body that moved just as quickly across the ice as Shane, that hit harder, that took the sort of risks that paid off like he wasn’t even worried about there being a safer option. And then flesh and blood in a parking lot in Regina, with a cigarette to his lips and big, cold hands, and blond curls that suddenly weren’t being crushed beneath a helmet. He stood there like it was easy, even as he fumbled through a conversation that wasn’t really a conversation at all, and then Russia won, and Shane had been bitter.

He had also been awed.

His mom keeps telling him that Rozanov doesn’t matter: he’s been on top so definitively and for so long that they’ll pick him first anyway. Even with the Rozanov distraction. These scouts and coaches and managers are careful and they’re smart and they’ve thought these things through. Rozanov is good, but he is also a loose cannon, risky in a way Shane isn’t. He’ll be a good second pick, a consolation prize for whoever misses out on Shane.

Shane isn’t so sure. He might have the stability Rozanov lacks, but Rozanov has an aggression Shane doesn’t. An aggression his mom has reassured him time and time again he doesn’t need, even as she made sure he knew how to throw a punch, how to retaliate if he needed to. He shouldn’t start things, but finishing them is an altogether different thing. Still, she responds with the same excitement as anyone else when a fight breaks out, when the shoving escalates, when a hit is just on the right side of legal. She says it cheapens the game. Somehow he doesn’t believe her.

And, if he’s honest, after the lottery he’s almost conflicted. He wants to win more than anything else, no matter where that sends him. He knows it won’t be to a good team. The whole point of structuring the draft this way is that the scales keep tipping, that the best of new talent comes in with the expectation that they can turn failing teams around. He’s prepared to go anywhere; he has been uprooting his life for hockey for years already by now and this is the worst time to chicken out.

But the Florida Cougars won the lottery, and the Edmonton Sanders have second pick and, if Shane is honest with himself, he kind of wants to stay in Canada. Especially if the alternative is being shipped off to Miami—he doesn’t handle the heat very well. He grew up in Canadian ice rinks, it’s not his fault.

So he hopes to be drafted first and tries to tell himself that being drafted second overall won’t be too bad either. It’s still good, and not without its silver linings. He tries to believe that both of these options are unequivocally good, because by the end of tonight one of the two of them will have happened and the trajectory of his life will have shifted forever.

He also tries not to be disappointed in the way the whole thing has worked out. Because the thing about Rozanov is that his existence is infuriating. And he is so much fun to play against. Shane had almost liked the thought of having a rival and, had the lottery gone a little differently, he and Rozanov would have been drafted to the same division and really delivered on that possibility. They could have really enjoyed it.

As it stands, one of them is going to the southernmost team in the league, and the other is going all the way up North. One of them is going to the Eastern conference, the other to the West, and maybe the games will still be fun for them and the fans, but it’s a poor foundation to build a rivalry on.

Regardless of what happens now, Shane will be unhappy with it. Just a little bit. This isn’t the sort of thing you tell anybody else, though. Because that would make you ungrateful.

Shane is drafted second overall. He tries to smile for the photos but his suit is itchy and he has believed for basically his whole life that this moment would go differently. And Ilya Rozanov is grinning, smiling, holding up Florida’s jersey for the picture, sticking up one finger, standing too close to Shane and smelling like cologne over cigarette smoke and coconut shampoo. He is really selling it. Shane probably looks as nauseous as he feels.

This is the impetus for everything. And he is already losing. For most of these guys it’s an honour just to sign an NHL contract. Shane isn’t most of these guys.

Shane speaks to Edmonton’s representatives, white-knuckling an unnecessarily fancy glass of ginger ale and fighting to keep the room in focus. Shane listens to his parents speak when he runs out of things to say and lets his attention drift up to the balcony where Rozanov is standing like a soldier behind a man who is physically much smaller than him but dominates his space. He speaks worse English than Rozanov which does nothing to stop him from speaking on his behalf.

As Shane looks up, Rozanov looks down, and his face is blank, stoic and fixed. He looks different. Older and younger and like the joy of being a first round draft pick isn’t really making him feel the way it is supposed to either. Not anymore. Not when it needs to last longer than the time it takes to snap a photograph of him and Shane and the third pick, who appears to be the only one of the three of them who is doing this thing properly.

Shane offers him something that isn’t quite a smile, pulls his lips into a line that is tense at the corners. He isn’t sure what he means by it, just that he sees him, maybe. That Rozanov is up there and Shane is down here and neither of them should be miserable but they both are. They have something other than hockey, which they play completely differently, in common.

After the whole ordeal, Shane can’t sleep. Because he was supposed to win. Because he was supposed to, without any complication, want to. Because he doesn’t know how to settle. Because he keeps thinking about Ilya Rozanov looking down at him, because to the rest of their draft class they’re both objects of envy, and neither of them can make the whole situation uncomplicated enough to be properly happy about it.

Shane keeps trying to sleep, in his almost quiet hotel room, under sheets that don’t smell right, listening to the hum of the AC and the occasional sound of shifting, of footsteps moving and the elevator rising and falling, doors opening and closing. The sounds of a hotel. Sounds Shane is used to and has been used to and needs to keep being used to if he ever wants to be able to perform to the league’s exacting standards on the road. Outside of Edmonton, because that’s where he lives now.

He gives up some time around 2am. Because his hands are shaking. Because he is as wired as he is exhausted and apparently he has been trying to give into the wrong one of those instincts. He pulls on his workout gear and scrubs at his face with cold water in the hopes it might help him feel more like a person, and heads down to the gym.

It’s empty, which is unsurprising seeing as it’s the middle of the night and the people here are supposed to be tipsy and elated and set to change, in a day, from exceptional teenagers to men who have to prove their worth every game, at least until everybody stops questioning it. They aren’t supposed to be awake and fretting.

Shane can’t have spent more than five minutes on the stationary bike, staring at the wall in a room that’s silent aside from the squeaking of the pedals under his feet, before Ilya Rozanov joins him without announcing his presence. It’s a small gym, sure, but there are plenty of machines that aren’t the bike right next to Shane’s.

Rozanov beelines to it, settles himself onto the saddle, and peddles clearly intentionally just barely faster than Shane is. He looks over for just a second, to look at Rozanov and his hair that must be tousled from tossing and turning rather than sleep if he is here, and his bright eyes and the way the challenge is obvious in them. Shane wouldn’t be Shane Hollander if he didn’t rise to it.

He starts to sweat, feels the strain in his hips and his knees, and goes faster and faster and faster, setting the pace then following Rozanov’s lead to up it, alternating back and forth until his body is screaming and all that’s left is the exhaustion. And then he keeps going. For a few minutes more. Because Rozanov is still going. Because Shane doesn’t lose easily. Especially not twice in one day—defined for his purposes as a single period of wakefulness, not as a predefined 24-hour slot on a calendar.

But one of them has to lose, and Rozanov’s face is red and his hair is plastered to it with sweat, and he is breathing in the heavy, deliberate manner of a man who will not and cannot stop first. And Shane is mostly just tired now, and a little exhilarated, and he has almost forgotten that he was upset.

“What a fucking day, huh?” Rozanov sprawls across the hotel gym floor, sweaty and flushed and with his chest heaving, and Shane can’t look away. He squeezes water from his bottle into his mouth and Shane watches the arc of it until he realises that he forgot to bring his own. Rozanov taps his foot against Shane’s, leans forward to press the bottle into his hand and raises his eyebrows expectantly until Shane brings it to his lips. “Was it everything you dreamed?” His English is better than in Saskatchewan. He sounds like he is being careful with it, holding every syllable in his mouth like it is a thing he might break if he bites down. Shane follows the trail a bead of sweat cuts down his neck, past a mole, over a vein, into the damp fabric of a black tank top.

Shane forces his eyes back up to level him with a look. “Not quite.”

Rozanov gestures with his chin at the bottle in Shane’s hand, parts his lips. Shane watches them as he takes another drink. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you aren’t.”

“Is shame you are being…” he takes a moment to find a word. His voice is low and Shane feels it somewhere in his ribs, “banished to Edmonton.”

Shane shrugs, hands the bottle back, taps Rozanov’s ankle with his toe, doesn’t mind the sweat or the proximity or the fact that they should hate each other on principle. Doesn’t mind the way Rozanov is looking at him even if he doesn’t understand it. Doesn’t mind the heat on his skin and under it, the way it sits heavy but not sickly in his stomach. “Edmonton’s a nice city.”

“Miami is nice too, yes?”

“Yeah. It’s warm. Nice beaches.”

Rozanov nods, processes. “We will be far.”

Shane nods.

“I liked playing you.”

“You liked beating me.”

“Well…” he cocks his head, grins, holds eye contact as he drinks the last of the water. Shane watches his throat, his chest, his thighs and the space between his skin and his shorts. “Have fun in Oil Country.”

“Enjoy your beaches.”

“See you soon, Hollander.”

“Maybe not soon,” Shane corrects, frowning at the floor between Rozanov’s legs, breathing more evenly now and starting to feel strange about that almost pleasant heat in his gut.

Rozanov rolls his eyes and hauls himself to his feet. Shane tries to catalogue the movement of every muscle in those long limbs, shifting beneath mole-scattered skin. Tries not to think about why he’s doing it. “See you, Hollander.”

“I’ll win next time.”

“We’ll see.”

Shane stays there on the floor for a little while longer, in this room that smells like sweat and the ghost of a coconut. He tries to recall the minutiae, the placement of the most interesting moles, the way the sweat made the curls coil tighter, the damp whorl of hair at the wrist when the bottle had passed between them, the heat of skin on skin.

He holds onto the thought until he can construct a replica of the moment in his mind’s eye. He carries it back up to his almost-quiet hotel room with him then jerks off to the thought of it in the shower. He falls asleep too quickly to feel guilty about it. Then makes sure he is too busy to dedicate time to feeling weird about it after the fact. He breaks up with his girlfriend because he is moving to Edmonton.

Shane, back home in Ottawa and in the process of readying himself for rookie camp, is doing everything in his power to make the shift as smooth as it can be. He studies his welcome packet religiously, until he knows the names of all the grocery stores and hotels and restaurants listed by rote, and he understands the road grids, and he knows where he is staying for the duration of rookie camp, and he knows where to go to find somewhere more permanent to stay if everything works out the way it is supposed to. He knows who the other rookies are and the regular team roster and he has the GM’s email address, and the head coach’s, and he has his flight booked and a packing list meticulously written out, even if it is too early to action it.

He has done research on Oklahoma City too. Not as much, but enough. Just in case things don’t go to plan again, and he ends up playing for the AHL affiliate of the team that drafted him second because they thought he was a good enough player to pin their hopes on. He tries to tell himself he is hoping for the best and preparing for the worst, but somewhere down the line he worries what he is actually doing is just panicking in the form of seventeen active open tabs.

He wonders if Rozanov is feeling it too, or if he just glanced at the packet and left the worrying to someone else. He wonders if it’s different when you’ve known for so long that you were going to have to leave home half a world away. He wonders if Rozanov is already in Florida, feeling the sun, enjoying the beaches, having fun. Shane shakes his head and reads the Wikipedia entry for Rexall Place from top to bottom for the third time.

He refreshes his emails over and over again. He falls out of touch with his local friends before he has even left. He doesn’t text the guys from Juniors and they don’t text him either.

He drives to Toronto for a CCM shoot. His mom stresses how big it is that he got this deal as a rookie and isn’t quite as subtle as she could be that the Rozanov of it all still annoys her. She wants this opportunity to be all his, not something he shares with Rozanov who was here a week before, charming the makeup artist in broken English. 

She smiles at him, tells him “at least you both make my job easy,” and laughs when he blushes. He doesn’t think about Rozanov and his moles and his cheekbones, and the way the challenge had looked in his eyes.

He doesn’t look for signs of Rozanov on the ice, in the locker room, in comparisons the crew offers without very much prompting. He doesn’t think about how they are set to be parallel lines for the rest of their careers, how they are expected to do great things without meeting in the middle.

He poses for their photos and squints under their lights. He skates in the loops they ask him to and tries to be aware of what his face is doing the whole time.

Over dinner his mom says, “I’m sure you were much nicer to work with than Rozanov,” and Shane doesn’t ask her why she thinks that. He has a reputation as a brute already, like Shane has a reputation for being careful, being smart. He doesn’t know why that makes him feel so uncomfortable. He just nods and takes another bite of his salmon.

And then the day comes and his parents drive him to the airport hours before he needs to be there because all three of them are punctual to a fault and need time for goodbyes that aren’t tearful because the eyes are wet but the cheeks stay dry. 

His suitcase squeaks over linoleum. He goes through the motions of getting his gear bag checked. He waits in all the necessary lines and tries to block out the conversations happening around him, the sound of one toddler singing and another crying, the raised voice of a man at the help desk who is red-faced and just barely not shouting. He gets through security exactly as quickly as he thought he would and stops at a chain café for a black americano and oatmeal, and he spends a little too long looking at the barista whose straight-toothed smile doesn’t quite meet his eyes. He decides that doesn’t mean anything. It’s just early and he hasn’t had enough sleep and his brain is lagging a little. Simple, really.

He reads a hockey player’s obviously ghostwritten autobiography for the entire four-and-a-half hours of the flight. He drinks a ginger ale and a cup of tea that tastes a little like the inside of the hot water urn. He only talks to the woman in the middle seat to his left when he apologises for needing to slip past her to go to the bathroom. There is minimal turbulence which he chooses to believe is a good sign.

All of the rookies are staying in the same hotel, spread across three floors. This is, at once, a good and bad thing. They all know who he is, so he has to know who they are too, lest he make things awkward. They are all happy to be here because the only options are happy and terrified and the latter is something none of them would admit to being. Shane, more than anyone else, is subject to the performance of confidence because he is the biggest threat to it. He doesn’t know how to respond appropriately so responds as little as he is able.

“That’s cold, Hollzy,” becomes a mantra amongst them. Never said meanly, always accompanied by a pat on the back, a tap to the shoulder, an eyeroll not familiar enough to be fond. Sometimes the bitterness seeps through and he knows that he is here to set the precedent, to be the benchmark they are striving to beat, to prove he is worth it. He knows that for the duration of rookie camp he is an opponent.

Still, it’s nice to not be alone. To have people to talk to who maybe don’t get him but aren’t completely bewildered by his obsession with hockey, the way he lives for it, the way it consumes him. There are two of them he likes more than the others, Pendleton and Boyce, mostly just because they are the worst of anyone at hiding how scared they are—and partially because Pendleton is the only other non-white person there. Between the whole group of them, there are some occasionally questionable choices being made because they are young and free to make them, and Pendleton and Boyce join him at the sidelines, trying to make better decisions and mostly not wholly succeeding.

They arrive at the practice facility on day one for introductions, a tour, a trial skate that is casual in name and absolutely nothing else. They meet the equipment management team, the physiotherapists, head coach Tremblay, and the members of the team who have decided to show up to say hello and assess the prospects, namely Captain Isaac Dowd who shakes hands and answers questions without complaining, and fails to disguise how excited he is to see what Shane specifically can bring to his team.

Shane has played a lot of important hockey by now. In front of scouts and in tournament finals and against people who didn’t believe he deserved to be there. He is prepared to play some more. He knows the adrenaline will drown out the nerves soon, and then he will just be carving his way across the ice the same as always, playing the same hockey as always, proving that he was born for this. Proving that this is all or nothing for him; if he can’t have this then he doesn’t want anything else.

Pendleton looks promising in goal. Boyce is good but everybody here is good and it’s not enough. Shane proves that he’s fast, that he knows how to take hits, that he isn’t scared of a board battle, that he backchecks without making it obvious that he hates it as much as everyone else does. Shane tries to imagine getting this far, getting this close to the only thing you’ve ever wanted, and falling right at the last hurdle. He thinks it might be for the best that he can’t do it.

The good news doesn’t come as a surprise so much as a relief. They want Shane here and they want him now and he will be back with some more of his things in two weeks time, and Dowd is going to spend the interstice getting his guest room ready for Shane to stay in for however long it takes for him to settle into a place of his own. This is really happening and it’s happening fast.

The second time Shane flies into Edmonton his parents come with him. They have a hotel room booked at the same hotel that Shane stayed in earlier this month, and they aren’t staying long. Just long enough to make sure that he’s good here, set up for success, and everybody relevant knows that they should respect Yuna Hollander or, failing that, fear her. David’s job is mostly to take up a supporting role, to be there and check in and make sure neither of them gets ahead of themselves and spirals somewhere impossible. It’s important work, not easily accomplished. David is the only person fit to do it.

Dowd and his wife, Lucy, meet them at the airport with big smiles and a handwritten sign. Shane watches them from a distance for a while, as local fans walk over with big, excited grins, like, at least right now, they don’t even mind that their team is a losing one. He tries to imagine how that might change in a couple years time, if they can turn the team around.

Dowd is a big guy, 6’5” and broad across the shoulders. He has a full beard, tattoos all the way down both arms, and a missing front tooth, and his wife is a willowy woman with dark hair and round glasses who looks tiny as she leans into his side. She grins at Shane like having him there isn’t even an inconvenience to her, which he knows can’t be true. She refuses to let Shane's parents pay for their own taxi.

He sits in her car, behind her seat because Dowd has his pushed all the way back for leg room, and she chats as she drives him to her home, and Shane thinks about silver linings. He thinks about Rozanov in Florida and tries to imagine what that looks like—mostly beaches, he imagines, damp skin and swim shorts, a tan, curls that turn blonder the longer he's outside. He doesn’t waste time thinking about Rozanov anywhere else, because there’s no chance he isn’t there, soaking in the sun, preparing for his real life to begin.

While Shane’s parents get settled in at their hotel, Shane gets the tour of the Dowd’s house just outside of the city. Lucy tells him about all of the hardy plants in her garden and Shane doesn’t understand but he does listen, and her enthusiasm doesn’t wane. Shane is shown how to use the espresso machine, which he is a little bit scared of, then where the pots and pans are and how to use the dishwasher, where the laundry room is. There is a laminated sheet of instructions on the wall beside the dryer that Dowd describes, index finger pressed against his own chest, as idiot-proof.

He is shown to his room that doesn’t smell like a hotel room, that has a big window and plenty of storage space. He says thank you enough times that Lucy starts actually shushing him when he opens his mouth. He puts his bags on the floor by the bed and lays down against the pillows to take a deep breath and collect himself as the Dowds leave him to get his bearings.

It’s a big house and they don’t have children, a rarity amongst hockey players who have been married since their early twenties, and they seem genuinely happy to have him there. Shane tries to convince himself that he doesn’t need to feel guilty for invading their space.

He gets used to it eventually. It’s not the first time he has ever billetted, it just feels different. He spends a lot of time sitting with a book and a Canada Dry in Lucy’s garden, reading by the light of the late evening sun. He finds himself liking it here.

He meets the team all at once, a couple of days before real training starts. They come to Dowd’s for something that isn’t quite a party and nobody is surprised to see Shane there, perched on the arm of the sofa because he feels like he should save the good seats for other people, chewing on his hoodie string. Pendleton is there, shifted up from the AHL to be their backup goaltender, glued to the starting goaltender’s side. There is another guy he recognises from rookie camp, and then the rest of the room fills up with established players who are already comfortable in it, who are already used to playing on NHL ice, who could be a little more subtle about their expectations that Shane will be instrumental in their pursuit not to lose on it quite so often.

He gets handed a beer he didn’t ask for and doesn’t really want, the lid already off, and drinks it because otherwise all it is going to do is sweat conspicuously in his hand. It doesn’t taste good, which he knew it wouldn’t. He knows from experience that wincing or complaining in a group of hockey players is how you make everybody realise that you don’t belong there and aren’t even trying to pretend you do.

He listens to more conversation than he participates in. He catalogues the accents and tries to remember the important things that are said. He eats through a bowl of vegetable chips Lucy put out specifically for him and that nobody else seems inclined to touch. He doesn’t have much fun and his face feels flushed half a beer in, but he is surrounded by new, loud people and he doesn’t hate it either which is something like progress.

He shows up to practice ready and wanting to prove himself, and isn’t surprised at all by the number of people who pull him aside to make sure he knows how different he is on and off the ice.

They want Shane on the ice right away. The pre-season opens with a game against the Calgary Fire in Rexall Place, and the inter-Alberta rivalry and the promise of seeing Shane Hollander’s first game has made the arena loud and busy and kind of stressful to listen to. It’s a pre-season game so it doesn’t really matter, but it’s Shane’s debut so it really does. Rexall Place is one of the smallest NHL arenas so the noise could be bigger. Will be bigger soon. Will be much less happy to see him.

Shane goes through the same steps as he always does: he taps the sides of his stall—left right right left right left—he tapes his stick—split tape in three tiers for the knob, blade wrapped from heel to toe, edges trimmed away, puck pushed across the blade, Yuna in marker on the grip—he cracks his knuckles one by one and doesn’t say a word until the tenth pop. He hears the noise of a real crowd waiting, of people who are here to see him, of people who have heard his name and all the good things associated with it and are hoping it’s all true. His hands don’t shake. He knocks his knuckles against the top of the doorframe on his way out.

They’re trialling lines tonight, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Shane is centering the second. They have Pendleton in goal to make sure he won’t buckle under the weight of the real thing. He's tall and broad even without the skates and the padding, and if you don't look too hard through his very loud mask you can't even tell how soft he is in the cheeks, how panicked in the eyes. He cuts an intimidating if inexperienced figure. Shane looks up at the crowd and enjoys the attention mitigated by the distance.

They win 3-1. Pendleton lets the puck into the net off a rebound he hasn’t recovered enough from the initial save to control. He talks it out with the goal posts and doesn’t let it happen again. Tremblay nods from his spot behind the bench. Shane feints like he is shooting and Calgary’s goalie shifts to save it as Shane passes it to Süsskind who tips it across the goal line on the other side of the net. He hooks his arm through Shane’s and spins him as the crowd cheers, taps their helmets together and then gets back to the game. It’s giddying, just like he hoped it would be.

When they leave the ice at the end of the game Pendleton is grinning like mad behind his mask. When Shane takes his turn in the line for goalie taps Pendleton whoops, unabashed, and Shane smiles so wide he thinks his cheeks might split.

He showers quickly, catalogues the bruises, takes note of an especially vivid one on his thigh from a check he had taken right as the puck left his tape. He feels sore in that familiar way that makes him feel everything, that makes every shift of every muscle a thing he has to notice. He feels sore in the way that makes him careful.

He gets dressed quickly then waits for Dowd to be done with his captain’s speech and his drawn-out post-game routine of combing wax through his beard. He answers questions enthusiastically the whole drive home, thrilled to be honest and happy at the same time. He prods the bruise then, before he takes his second, at-home shower, takes a photo of it. Just so he doesn’t forget. So he can remember, the entire duration of his illustrious career later, that it started like this.

He puts on his recording of the Florida-Tampa game he didn’t get the chance to watch live and settles back against his pillows with the lights off, eyes affixed to the screen. To the shape of Ilya Rozanov rocketing across the ice on one breakaway and then another, who Shane would recognise from a mile away even without the number because of the incongruent elegance of the way he moves. To the shape of Ilya Rozanov sandwiched between two wingers and two defensemen after the puck hits the back of the net and they all pile onto their rookie. To the shape of Ilya Rozanov on the Cougars bench between shifts, chewing on his mouthguard and spraying water into his mouth from a couple of inches away for as long as the camera is willing to linger on him. Memory overlaps with the moment, and Shane remembers his own winning game in a newly lurid way, and he twitches as his blood runs south.

It occurs to him, distantly, that jerking off to a hockey game might do strange Pavlovian things to his brain that he really doesn’t want to have to live with. But the adrenaline pulses in his veins, blood rushing just below his skin, and the game playing is really more background noise than anything else. This is celebratory. Rozanov’s first pre-season win—4-3 in overtime—playing concurrently is incidental. That’s all.

Shane takes a rookie lap in the first regular season game of his career, already a fixture on the Sanders second line with Süsskind and Ratnieks on either side. He is warned in advance because this isn’t a hazing tactic anymore; they’re celebrating him, they want him to be in on it. It occurs to him that they haven’t been hazing him at all. Or they’ve been hazing him so subtly and effectively that he hasn’t realised it’s happening. He tries not to worry about that when he has much better things to concern himself with.

He scores the game winner late in the third period, after they have been stuck at 4-4 since halfway through the second, and the blood rushes to his ears before the noise of the crowd or the team does. The squeal of the goal horn follows and Shane looks up at the ceiling as he drifts back to the bench, thinking I did that, thinking I need to do that again immediately.

They go out afterwards. Shane would prefer to go straight back to his room at the Dowds’ but tonight the team is partying in his honour so he can’t skip it, and the drinking age in Alberta is eighteen so he can’t even use his babyface as an excuse.

He doesn’t like the taste of any alcohol so drinks whatever he is given with equal complaints because he also doesn’t like feeling like he is letting any of his teammates down when they have all welcomed him with such open arms and they’re spending their money to make him feel appreciated. He doesn’t like the music, how loud it is and how many of the words he can’t understand, how, unlike the sound of a crowd, it refuses to shift to accommodate him.

He is uncomfortably warm and disconcertingly fuzzy and pretty sure he is wearing the wrong clothes for this. Darryn Pendleton signs himself up for karaoke willingly whilst the rest of the team is fighting to sneak each other’s names onto the list, and Shane doesn’t know or even really like the song but he grins as he listens because he likes Pendleton and he’s drunk enough to forget that he hates being drunk.

Shane is leaning back against a table and holding an empty glass close enough to his body that maybe nobody will notice it is empty and try to supply him with another one, watching Pendleton, whose back is to the screen and who is getting all the lyrics right anyway. He distantly hopes that the lean looks casual and normal, but its real purpose is to stop him swaying in place.

A group of girls approach him, which is nice for a moment because Ratnieks stops eyeing the glass Shane is holding onto for dear life and decides to grin at him instead. “Don’t fuck this up, Rook!” he says, and the girls giggle and Shane is glad for perhaps the first time in his life, that alcohol makes him as flushed as it does because he can’t blush through it. It stops being nice when there are hands on his arms he doesn’t really want there, just testing the waters. He tenses under them but is thinking too sluggishly to push them away or step out or do anything to make it stop. He stays and he bears it and the boldest of the girls leans into his space and her breath smells like sickly sweet alcopops but her hair smells like coconut. Shane rolls the glass between his palms.

He should leave, he knows, because he doesn’t want to be there. But the team are behind him and they’re expecting something from him, and Shane hasn’t been here long enough that he can afford to throw a wrench in things. He needs to keep things simple, to not challenge dynamics before he has even learned the ins-and-outs of them.

She asks if he wants to get out of there. He says he does.

He gets pats on the back from every teammate he passes. Pendleton leans in close to say “Nice one, Hollzy.” Dowd tells him this is exactly how half of the hockey guys he knows met their future wives. Shane sort of hopes his overenthusiastic companions might scare her off. No such luck.

Shane pays for the cab, she tells the driver the address. It’s dark out, and windy, and she’s shivering a little and Shane doesn’t have a coat to offer her.

If he’s honest, Shane doesn’t really get sex. The mechanics of it, sure. Those are simple enough. The urge makes sense too; just a biological drive he feels like anyone else. The wanting is where he falls short. The almost universal obsession with it is mystifying.

It’s just a way to get off. Much more embarrassing than masturbation—because there is no way to do it without being watched, without having to perform for someone else’s benefit—but no more satisfying. He spends the entire duration in his head, thinking everything through, thinking this is an extra stress that his body doesn’t need and it has been going on for too long and he just sort of wishes it were over already. He tucks his head into the crook of her neck and breathes in the smell of her shampoo and keeps his eyes closed.

There’s no morning practice the next day, which is a relief considering the pounding headache and sensitive stomach Shane is burdened by when he wakes up in someone else’s bed. He says goodbye without leaving a number or sticking around for breakfast, and contemplates whether or not he should apologise, for sweating in her sheets and everything else.

“Fun night?” Lucy sets a spinach smoothie she has already made in front of him basically as soon as he is back through the door and Shane is infinitely glad he didn’t have to listen to the blender.

He groans, which is closer to a no than a yes.

“I’m sure he did,” Dowd says from the sofa, eyes twinkling, grip just a little too tight on his glass of water to be entirely unaffected by a night of bad decisions. “So, when’s the wedding?”

“Oh,” Shane says, staring into the green pulp. “Never.” He sincerely doubts either of them is looking for a repeat performance.

His first NHL loss is frustrating, but also a chance to learn. A reason to get better at hockey. Pendleton, who had been swapped onto the ice after the first period because Knowles, the starting goalie, had tweaked an old injury making a truly heroic save, tells him “Y’know, Hollz, you’re allowed to be upset.”

He shrugs. He is upset. But he can’t waste time just being upset. He says, “Their goalie saw right through me. I need to work on my feints.”

Pendleton shakes his head and scrubs a hand across his close-cropped hair. “Your feints are solid, man. He must have x-ray vision.”

Shane remains unconvinced.

They take a break for All Stars week and Shane goes back to Ottawa for something other than a game against the Centaurs for the first time since his NHL career began. Dowd tells him to make the most of it, because next year he’ll end up wherever they’re hosting All Stars and it will be fun for maybe a year or two before it just turns into an obligation. After that grace period he will find himself sitting in a hotel room in Ohio, looking at other people’s vacation photos, and playing hockey nobody cares about. For the sake of Shane’s own sanity, he refuses to believe that.

His parents are happy to have him back. His mom is determined, now that he isn’t quite so far away from the rest of the world and the US border, that he is going to spend his time positively powering through brand shoots and obligations. Shane is powerless to oppose her.

But before there is a long drive to Toronto there is a family dinner at the home in Ottawa he grew up in. The time difference isn’t sufficient to qualify the bone-deep tiredness he is feeling as jet-lag but he is exhausted nonetheless. Like now that he has finally stopped moving, months of exhaustion are catching up to a stationary target all at once.

He stabs at more chickpea pasta than he ends up actually eating.

“I’m surprised you’re still with the Dowds,” his mom tells him.

He shrugs. He is too, kind of, but it’s been nice to have some background noise, to not have to slink home alone after a long flight or a devastating loss, to feel a little bit like he might still be at his family home from time to time. “Just haven’t really found anywhere.”

“You’ve been looking?” His dad asks.

Shane nods. “Not super intensely or anything. You know being in the starting lineup my rookie year has been a lot and-”

“Oh Honey you’re doing perfect, don’t worry.” His mom slips all the way out of manager mode—a rare occurrence these days—and her hand finds his across the table. She doesn’t react at all to how clammy it is. “So long as they’re happy to have you then it’s fine. I’ll look for you and all you’ll have to do is sign off. How about that?”

So he just does what he always does and nods.

She works quick. Approximately three weeks after the season restarts his name is on the lease for an apartment—nice building, lots of natural light, close to the practice facility and far enough from the centre of the city that he won’t be bothered by the noise—and Lucy is putting together a folder of easy, healthy recipes for him to take with him. The guys insist he needs to host a housewarming party. He tries to deter them by reminding them that he doesn’t have anything but they just shrug and promise to bring everything he needs.

Everything he needs is apparently a lot of beer he doesn’t like and pizza he doesn’t eat. And, from Dowd, a small herb garden put together from sections of Lucy’s own. Shane can only assume it’s not his handiwork.

When they come back from the All Stars break, Shane has an A on his chest. On the surface nobody seems to begrudge him it, but he is still determined to prove he has really earned it. As he is reeling from the news, elated and determined and not nervous because it’s hockey and there is no space for that, Oskari Harjanne, Dowd’s right hand and now also Shane’s fellow alternate, claps him on the shoulder warmly. Says, “welcome to the club!” He even means it as far as Shane can tell.

There is a real moment there, in the midst of a five-game win streak late in the season, where it seems like the coveted second Western wild card spot might be within their reach. So close that Shane can taste it. So, so close that the want makes Shane’s teeth hurt.

And then Knowles has an off game and the rest of them fail to compensate for it and the momentum snaps. They lose 3-6 in their own barn to LA. Somewhere around the middle of the second the crowd falls quiet and never picks back up. Shane doesn’t give up the ghost but Ratnieks barely bothers to backcheck and it doesn’t have to be over, not while there is still time on the clock. They’ve scored multiple goals in quick succession before and they can do it again. They don’t. The third closes out scoreless after LA puts all their effort into watertight defense that not even Shane, as the fastest, wiliest player on the ice, can cut through.

They don’t win another game until they are officially knocked out of contention. They beat Vancouver, then Colorado, and then there is more hockey, the best hockey in the world, and Shane doesn’t get to play it.

He finishes his rookie season with 102 points—39 goals and 63 assists. This is a big deal. It would be a bigger one if Ilya Rozanov hadn’t managed 46 goals and 53 assists in the same season.

They have met twice since the night of the draft. Once in Edmonton, then again in Miami, and maybe ten words total passed between them on the ice. They didn’t see each other off of it. Still, Shane relished in those games over all the others. Because for once there was someone who really could keep up with him. Because he found himself strangely hoping that Rozanov was happy in Miami. That he liked it there. Every shift they didn’t share, Shane spent as much time as he felt he could watching Rozanov instead of anything else. Shane lost one of those games, won the other.

Now he gets to sit on his couch in his empty apartment that doesn’t have enough furniture in it, watching the wild card Cougars play against the President’s Trophy-receiving Toronto Guardians. Rozanov scores his first playoff goal unassisted and the camera draws in close on his celly and the real smile consuming his face so completely it doesn’t even really look like his anymore, and Shane feels his dick twitch in his sweatpants. He curses Pavlov’s name.

The Cougars lose the series in six, which is 2 more than anyone had thought it would take. Shane spends the entire time wondering what if. What if he had been drafted first. What if there was no Rozanov. What if he had just stagnated back home in the KHL. Shane feels somehow weird about it.

Shane goes to the NHL Awards in the nicest suit he has ever owned and tries to convince himself it is an honour just to be nominated, just in case this is another pivotal moment in his life that ends in abject disappointment—in an acknowledgement that he is one of the best but keeps falling short of that final hurdle. He spots Rozanov hanging around the bar, flaunting the best tailoring at the entire event.

Shane wins the Calder. He looks for Rozanov in the crowd, ostensibly to offer condolences, and doesn’t see a single sign of him. Shane lets Scott Hunter buy him a drink. It, like every other shot he has ever done, tastes like obligation and burns all the way down.

Chapter End Notes

(These are gonna be long notes, I won't be offended if you choose not to read them but I do want to talk a little about some of the choices I made regarding this fic.)

I love Shane very dearly, he is very important to me. It is also very important to me that I try to the best of my ability to write him properly. I'm white, Shane is not, and I feel like it would be doing him a disservice to not at least attempt to address the racial dynamics of hockey (which are overwhelmingly white) somewhat. I also feel like Shane is sort of trying to wilfully ignore this a lot of the time, so it's kind of hard to approach these things from his perspective. This basically amounts to a lot of acknowledging the issue by dancing around it. I'm absolutely open to constructive criticism on this matter from anyone who has more insight into it than me because, as much as this is just fanfic, I do want to do it right.

Also, on the matter of Darryn Pendleton I don't have a ton to say but I do just want to give a quick nod to Jet Greaves (who has a cool name), who is, as far as I'm aware, the only Black goalie in the NHL. He plays for Columbus and, at the time of writing, I am unaware of anything horrible that he may have done that would discourage me from positively acknowledging him. Well, anything aside from playing for the Blue Jackets (also, I don't think I have ever seen a Blue Jackets fan anywhere on the internet. Prove me wrong if you exist please). I also just think Shane would vibe with a goalie.

I also want to take a second to discuss Shane's team as a whole. These are guys who mean well and who aren't inclined towards hazing. They're genuinely happy to have Shane and he doesn't represent a threat to the Sanctity of (what they think of as) their sport in the same way I think he does to the Montreal of the GCU. They are also hockey players. They are not operating at any real level of Woke. They're probably the sort of people to really earnestly proclaim not to see race. Most of them have probably never knowingly met a gay person. Like they're chill but they aren't even a little bit dialled in.
On a similar note, as far as pressuring Shane into drinking and sleeping with women goes, they really do think they're doing him a favour. It's not about calling him boring or really even forcing him into conformity. He has shown up with a lot of people's hopes pinned to him and he is eighteen years old and they can tell that he's nervous. In their minds they're giving him permission to relax, take a load off, be something less than the perfect hockey-brained Wunderkind. They think they're giving Shane permission to be himself (which they misunderstand in no small part because of the hypermasculine culture they're embedded in, in this essay I will...), whereas what Shane is hearing is "assimilate assimilate assimilate".

To note, I started watching hockey after the Olympics, so it should be more or less coherent but it isn't something I've been embedded in for years or anything like that. So am I willing to find out which of its seventeen names Northlands Coliseum was going by at the time this fic was set? Sure. Am I happy to google out what the Oilers AHL affiliate was before the Bakersfield Condors for a throwaway line or two? Yeah, why not. Do I really want to figure out the playoff format before they switched to the current one? Eh. (Which is to say, I will be using the current playoff format for the entire duration of this fic and not caring about it being anachronistic.)
Also I'm trying my best with the geography but I am British and I simply do not have first hand experience of it so it may be wobbly or glossed over in places.

And if you're wondering if this is book or show-verse the answer is mostly show, but I'm using book names. I don't like the grammatical knots MLH wants to tie me in so I simply am not touching it. I also keep thinking about what exactly happens to the Metropolitan division when there is an Atlantic Original Six team that is already called the Metros and I'd sort of like to stop thinking about that. So book names it is.

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

Rookie camp is starting soon and Shane can’t shake the feeling that he’s supposed to be there. He’s not a rookie anymore, and nobody is expecting him, and Dowd and Harjanne are, as far as Shane is aware, the only vets going. But it feels like a missed opportunity. He wants to know how the team is changing, what the new prospects look like without a camera lens in the way, how well they might fit the team. He wants the most time possible to adapt. Tremblay’s primary concern is scouting for defencemen, because they have a couple in their core who are ageing and slow and who make better company than they do teammates, honestly. And Shane should know what they’re working with.

Instead he is in Ottawa, readjusting to his parents’ house after a few weeks at their cottage, thinking about how empty his apartment in Edmonton is, and how much he misses watching the long summer days stretch well into the evening in the Dowds’ garden. He googles interior design services in Edmonton and looks through portfolios until the eyestrain makes his head ache; nothing really feels like him, but if him is a sparse, functional use of a beautiful space he signed the lease on because he saw the potential, then maybe that’s for the best.

He emails back and forth with the team nutritionist about a performance diet plan because if he isn’t being productive he is going to drive himself to the airport and upset his parents by leaving when they all know he can stay. He watches game tape: of himself to see where he’s lacking; the new rookies so he can know what they’re working with; of Ilya Rozanoz, in whom Florida’s team saw potential worth overlooking Shane for. Who has something Shane doesn’t other than a challenge in his eyes and three playoff goals under his belt.

He goes just a little bit crazy. Harjanne texts the team’s group chat with frequent updates from rookie camp, and it isn’t enough.

Shane is sure he’ll know what enough is when he feels it. He just hasn’t felt it yet.

There’s an energy to the room when the team finally reconvenes in Edmonton that really highlights just how much they had started to flag late last season. They’re all on fresh legs and they’ve been able to stay in one place for more than a few days at a time, and they’re determined now that they have had time to look back and realise just how close they had come. The room in question is, again, Dowd’s living room. Shane sits on the arm of the sofa. Caleb Guthrie, rookie defenceman, looks around like a skittish cat and sits on the floor until Lucy walks in with the snacks, takes one look at him, and drags a dining chair through the door. She hands Shane the vegetable chips and doesn’t pretend to think anybody else might want some.

Guthrie is very obviously fighting to keep up with the room. He finds a place in every conversation, even if it means he can’t properly follow any single one of them, and he drinks at Pendleton’s exact pace which isn’t quite as fast as Ratnieks' but does make his co-ordination noticeably flag. He apologises for interrupting Harjanne’s conversation about his childhood in Tampere to talk about growing up in Salt Lake City. He is two years older than Shane but he feels much younger: he hasn’t quite mastered hiding just how hard he’s trying to fit in yet.

For the first ten minutes of their first practice of the pre-season, he’s a little like a fawn on his skates. He skids to clumsy stops and falls over his own feet, and the veteran defenceman sharing the ice with him reminds him that it’s slippery. He blushes all the way to his ginger roots, nods too quickly, and drums his gloved knuckles three times over his heart, like he is reminding it to beat properly. He must go to the Darryn Pendleton school of composure because, impossibly, it works. He could stand to shoot faster, and his footwork could be cleaner, but he is suddenly exactly where he needs to be. He closes passing channels and checks legally but hard enough to wind, and when he steals off with the puck his stickhandling is almost beautiful.

Shane doesn’t tell him that he is different on the ice and off of it. He assumes Guthrie is already aware. Shane tells him not unkindly to work on his edges, and then says, “Don’t let the pressure get to you,” by which he means push it all the way down.

Last season Shane spent almost every roadie rooming with a more established player. It is, he supposes, a good way to get to know the team, but Knowles wears the same socks for three days at a time—which Shane is about 80% sure is more of a superstition thing than a hygiene one, but it’s gross either way—which nobody should have to know about him, and Süsskind doesn’t have a single pair of underwear that doesn’t have at least one hole at the waistband— a fact Shane and everyone else who has ever roomed with him knows because all of his luggage ends up inevitably strewn about the floor and not returned haphazardly to his bag until approximately ten minutes before he needs to leave. So Shane prefers that particular tradition in theory over practice. Still, it’s sort of nice sometimes to not be in his apartment full of new furniture that is his now but isn’t really, to have somebody else there even if they aren’t perfectly clean and quiet and invisible. He just really doesn’t want to be more acquainted than he strictly needs to be with anyone’s underwear.

With the first roadie of Shane’s second NHL season looming, he has been preparing himself for more of the same, whether that be the loneliness of home or the bad habits of his teammates. So when Pendleton calls him to ask if he wants to room with him instead Shane can’t help but feel relieved. Pendleton can be a little loud, sure, and he spends a lot of time singing songs Shane has never heard of before to himself, but that’s probably mostly just goalie weirdness. His luggage stays packed, and he smells like citrus-y bar soap and aloe vera rather than feet, so Shane doesn’t really have many complaints.

They order room service and have the sort of conversation where Shane mostly listens and Darryn mostly rambles, while a movie that’s more cars and explosions than plot plays on the TV in a hotel room in Buffalo. Through the window the city looks desaturated and squared at every edge, like it is made of building blocks.

“I don’t think I know how to date anymore,” Darryn admits while the credits roll. “I only really meet women at bars.”

“Oh.”

“It gets lonely, right? I got too settled in Oklahoma, I think. And my girlfriend didn’t want to come all the way up to Edmonton with me, and she definitely didn’t want to do long distance.”

“You miss her?” It’s not something Shane thinks about. Jessica, his ex-girlfriend, appears in his thoughts only as often as his parents bring her up, which isn’t all that often. He doesn’t feel her absence in his space, doesn’t wish the pillowcases he paid someone to buy for him smelled like her perfume. He doesn’t remember the smell of her perfume. Hockey is everything and he doesn’t need more than that. Loneliness is a growing pain, the sort of thing that eventually goes away on its own. You just have to keep waiting for it.

“I miss having someone.” Darryn shrugs. “She was right to stay, probably. I don’t think she liked me enough to uproot her life for me, and she liked me too much to ask me to consider turning my dream down for her.”

“How’d you meet her?”

“I briefly joined a book club.”

Shane grins just a little. “Book club? Do you read much?”

“No, not at all. I was just looking for people to talk to and found their Facebook group. I don’t know if they read terrible books or if I was just too dumb to get them, but I didn’t stick around for very long.”

“Join another book club.” Shane shrugs.

Darryn laughs even though it isn’t really a joke at all. “I’m such a slow reader, I don't have time. I live, breathe, eat and sleep hockey. Probably shit it too.”

“That’s the dream.” Shane means it completely. That’s always been the dream: to be good enough at hockey nobody expects you to do anything else. To be good enough at hockey nobody minds that it’s all you’re good at.

“Suiting up for sixty games I don’t play: the dream.”

The answer, to Shane, is obvious: get better. Get better than Knowles. Better than everybody. Better than anyone thinks you can be. “You’re good,” he says instead, because it isn’t untrue.

“I need to be better.”

“Then be better.”

“That work for you?” He downs the last of a can of coke and looks Shane up and down, squinting, thinking, running a hand over the short, tight curls on his head. “What am I talking about? Of course it did.”

They start the season well, on a three game winning streak, an overtime loss, then two more wins before they lose 5-2 to the Minnesota Nomads. For a long time they were one of the worst teams in the league. The hands that pat Shane’s back and the faces that smile at him, bearing all the fucked up glory of the teeth that don’t come out for the game, are a reminder that they feel lucky to have him. That they think he is saving them. Sometimes, watching plays and games back, he isn’t necessarily inclined to disagree.

Down in Florida Rozanov is wearing an A and centering the top line and grinning at the crowd with bloody teeth after winning the fight that rounds out his first Gordie Howe hat trick.

Shane is watching because he loves hockey. Because it’s a game he can catch live. Because watching Rozanov is just watching someone who is good at hockey in a way that is different to how Shane is good at hockey. His helmet came off in the fight. He looks good with his hair all loose and sweaty and his teeth all pink with his own blood. He looks like a real hockey player. Shane balls his fists tight at his sides and thinks about the beautiful save the Cougars’ goalie just made. He thinks about losing the last game he played and the shot he pinged off the crossbar when it mattered most. He thinks about the way Rexall Place was quiet.

A month later the Cougars are in Edmonton and Shane sees Ilya Rozanov and Daniil Gushchin talking in animated Russian outside a chain coffee shop, apparently unconcerned about the snow on the ground and the bitter windchill. Rozanov’s cheeks are pink. Gushchin’s skin looks like it is made of old boot leather and no blood shows through. He spent most of his career playing defence in Boston, but he was traded to Florida seven years ago and seems set to retire there sometime soon. He’ll either call it after this season or the next, or else play until his body is too broken to stand upright on his skates.

Shane means to slip past unseen but Rozanov notices. Lots of people notice Shane day-to-day; Edmonton loves their hockey and Shane is revitalising it. “Hollander,” Rozanov says, accent making the sounds sharp, warm. His breath curls through the cold air like a plume of smoke, made hotter by the coffee he is holding between his bare hands, the knuckles red wherever they are not black and blue. “You’re an awesome player to watch.”

Gushchin looks confused, like maybe twenty years of English is suddenly failing him without warning, but Shane chokes out a laugh. “Yes,” he says and Rozanov grins wide and toothy and pink-cheeked in a way that reminds Shane that they are both nineteen and it’s crazy that these are their lives and that their paths ever crossed at all.

“We will beat you.”

“That’s supposed to be my line.”

“Ah, but that would be lie.”

It wouldn’t. It goes to a shootout. Shane and Dowd both score and Rozanov’s shot through the five-hole is the only goal Darryn lets in. The Sanders win 2-1 and it’s a tense game all the way through. Not high-scoring, not flashy. Rozanov draws a hooking penalty from Guthrie in the second period and it’s probably the only consequential mistake either team makes the whole game. Florida’s goaltender breaks his stick against the plexiglass after the fact. The crowd starts breathing again, starts celebrating.

Shane has started turning down invites this season. Not all of them, not even most, but enough. They win and he can go home. He wants to go home. He wants to have his second shower and watch the game back and scrawl notes in handwriting nobody else can read and eat chicken breast and pak choi over brown rice. Süsskind asks if he is coming out with them and he says yes before it occurs to him to say no. He drinks one beer and one ginger ale then switches to water even though he isn’t thirsty, just so he always has a drink in his hand, and spends most of the night watching the door. He isn’t consciously hoping for anyone in particular to walk through it, but is still disappointed when they don’t show up.

Shane spends Christmas getting recognised in Ottawa by people who all sort of wish he was playing for their team. Ottawa, like Edmonton, has been a failing team for a long time, perhaps since its inception, and there is no Shane Hollander to save it. He hopes the Rideau Canal skateway might open while he’s there but isn’t surprised, with the slushy, grey winter they’re having, when it doesn’t.

The Hollander Christmases of Shane’s childhood were big events: every year a different family member would host and the entire extended family would drive on icy roads to Ottawa, Kitchener, Greater Sudbury, or Montreal. When Shane was twelve his dad’s dad died, and there was a funeral in Gatineau, and Shane hasn’t seen his cousins since. The Hollander Christmases of Shane’s teenage years are small affairs. Three people who eat dinner together often, eating dinner together again just earlier in the day. There is an empty chair to Shane’s lefthand side. There is always an empty chair to Shane’s lefthand side.

They talk about his sponsorships and his hockey. They talk about the new puzzles his dad’s siblings sent him in the mail because they don’t see each other in person. Shane talks about Darryn Pendleton, back home in Milwaukee, sneezing because he is allergic to his grandma’s cats. He reassures his mom he is taking his vitamin D supplements. She asks if he’s doing okay, making friends, meeting people. He says he loves his team and means it.

When he gets back to Edmonton it is 25 degrees below freezing and the middle of the night. Shane looks up at the sky, at the full moon and the auroras that are weak and washed-out against the streetlights. It’s nice, he thinks. He likes it here. The loneliness is temporary—he’ll have real roots soon, and hockey, and that will be everything. That will be enough. He’ll know it when he feels it.

The All Stars invite is expected and welcome. There are forty-two players the league the fans want to see this year in Raleigh and Shane is nineteen and one of them. Rozanov is nineteen and one of them. Dowd is thirty-seven and free for the first time in years and is already snoozing on a flight to Cancun.

He checks into the hotel and tries to telegraph that he is supposed to be there. He is a generational player, which in his case does not mean once in a generation, and his stats speak on his behalf. He unpacks then shoves his bags beneath the bed then just stands there in the middle of the room taking stock of it. It’s nice. Not penthouse nice, but nicer than Shane really needs it to be. And it’s all his. He doesn’t have to think about Knowles’ socks or Ratnieks’ boxer briefs. He doesn’t have Darryn to fill the silence. He looks through his window at the hotel pool nobody is using because it’s barely above freezing. Scott Hunter and Carter Vaughn walk past it, engaged in enthusiastic conversation on their way to the hotel bar.

The bar is busy, loud in the specific way rooms full of hockey players always are. Laughs boom—hockey players don’t giggle, at least not in front of anyone. There is an argument happening by a pool table that starts quiet but is escalating. Chairs scrape the floor and glasses clink and there is constant competition to be the loudest in the room. Shane doesn’t join it.

He searches for the most familiar faces in the room. Hunter and Vaughn are sitting in a booth with one of LA’s alternates and Colorado’s top line centre. The FIre's captain, Demchak, who Shane hates on principle, has three empty beer bottles lined up in front of him and a fourth halfway to his mouth. Ilya Rozanov is leaning on the bar, smiling the smile that softens his features—as opposed to the one that makes him look like he was put on this earth to inflict suffering on others—and trying to charm the bartender into serving him alcohol despite him being famously nineteen. Shane chooses his target with almost no conscious thought whatsoever and heads right over.

By the time Shane reaches the bar the bartender is guiltily pouring a glass of top-shelf vodka, looking around himself as if to double check that he isn’t going to get caught. Rozanov has settled himself onto one of the barstools, looking wholly self-satisfied. It, like all of his other expressions, suits him in a way that makes Shane so infuriated his blood runs hot. He thinks, not for the first time, about possibility. About a version of Rozanov that isn’t quite so far away.

Rozanov pays for his drink in cash, tips handsomely, and winks in a way that makes the bartender blush hard enough to turn his neck red. His eyes shift to Shane somewhat apprehensively, sweeping over his face, registering who he is, processing how he definitely doesn’t pass for twenty-one, even in the dubious way Rozanov might.

Shane slides into the seat on Rozanov’s right, not looking over to see if he is reacting at all, and orders a ginger ale. The bartender deflates, mutters something to himself that sounds suspiciously like “thank fuck.”

“Boring,” Rozanov remarks conversationally, taking a sip of his vodka and nodding at the glass in his own hand with quiet approval. “You did not have anyone else boring to talk to?”

Shane shrugs. He should have a reason for approaching Rozanov but he is coming up blank. They aren’t teammates and they aren’t friends and Shane sat right next to him. “I know it’s your first All Stars too,” Shane tries to make it sound casual and Rozanov doesn’t betray that he’s failing so he goes on, “and I thought I’d see how you were finding it.”

Rozanov started nodding while Shane was speaking and now continues, slow and obvious. Shane isn’t sure how to interpret it. Rozanov is looking at Shane directly, focused, rather than scanning the room for a way out. Shane recalls a poorly ventilated hotel gym in detail so lurid and intricate the memory of exercise makes him sweat beneath his hoodie. “You were right about Miami. Is nice. Raleigh is…” Rozanov talks with his hands a lot. He gestures with a relaxed hand then tips his thumb down, “not so nice.”

“Still, it’s an honour to be invited, right? Especially in your sophomore season.”

Rozanov mouths the word sophomore back to himself without making a sound but doesn’t ask Shane what it means. Either he is using context clues or is content to power through conversation without knowing entirely what is going on. Shane hopes it’s the first with more feeling than he should have about this man he sees twice—now three times—a year. “Hmm. I’m very good at hockey, it is not surprise.”

“I was also invited my sophomore season.” Shane gestures at himself then stares at his ginger ale because Rozanov’s look turns appraising and Shane doesn’t know how to return it.

“You are good too.” Rozanov says it like it’s obvious, which it is, Shane just wasn’t expecting him to acknowledge it.

“That’s almost humble.” That almost is doing a lot of heavy lifting but Shane needs Rozanov to keep talking. Shane needs to keep watching the way his lips move against the English sounds, the unique shapes they make. Shane needs to commit the sharpness of his cupid's bow to the same persistent memory that holds the night of the draft like it’s something precious even though Shane had spent so much of it feeling like crap.

“Ah, not quite. Did not say you were better than me.” Another sip of vodka. Shane watches closely to see if he is suppressing a flinch but there is no reaction at all. “I would not do that.”

Shane smiles, which is a strange way to react to being sorta-kinda-not really insulted. “Of course not.”

Rozanov shifts in his seat and Shane assumes with a stab of disappointment that he is leaving. He inches his stool ever so slightly closer to Shane’s and stays put. He orders another vodka and “another boring ginger ale,” and Shane lets him even though he is still only halfway done with the first. They keep talking. Rozanov offers Shane a sip of vodka in a way that actually feels like an offer—not like the offers of his teammates which always feel like obligation. Shane accepts anyway, then flinches at the burn. He downs the rest of the first ginger ale to wash the taste away and Rozanov laughs openly in his face. It doesn’t boom; Rozanov giggles. Shane’s tolerance is so poor that just that one sip makes his face hot.

They aren’t saying much really, but Shane can infer one important thing: he loves Edmonton and he loves hockey and he loves his career so far but he is sort of terrified of all of it, and Rozanov is the only other person in the world who gets it. Shane fills the space with Darryn Pendleton, who makes the most noise of any person Shane has ever met and grins brightly through it, whereas Rozanov notoriously fills it with women and booze, but he can’t deny that Rozanov knows the shape of the space. Rozanov mentions Russia only once in the entire conversation, to say that he likes how Miami is nothing like Moscow. Shane asks if he misses it and Rozanov looks at him strangely, not unkindly but almost disbelievingly, like the answer should be obvious. Like Shane is missing something he is also supposed to understand.

The bartender finishes his shift and the middle-aged woman who replaces him is more easily swayed by a smile and a ridiculous tip to serve them without checking IDs. Rozanov orders his vodka then asks Shane if he wants one and it doesn’t feel like he has to say yes but he does anyway, which he knows is stupid but he wants to stay where he is. He looks around and sees that the room has changed but not completely, sees that people are registering Hollander and Rozanov in the same place for once. Hollander and Rozanov in the same space for once and friendly, even though one is notoriously awkward and the other is notoriously an asshole. Sees that the room has changed behind him and he has stayed in the same place.

It’s the alcohol’s idea more than it is Shane’s, but he goes to bed just a little bit hazy and walks himself slowly through every detail of the night of the draft, until he is certain that Rozanov was wearing a different cologne today but still uses the same products in his hair. Until he is certain which of Rozanov’s incisors has gained a fake white cap since that day. Until he is certain that he has accidentally conditioned himself to associate hockey and sex because he has to care about sex somehow and he doesn’t care about anything like he cares about hockey.

Rozanov breaks Hunter’s record in the shot accuracy competition, then Shane breaks Rozanov’s. Rozanov must take this as a challenge because he rises to it, plays the All Stars game like it matters, powers his team through to the final like a man possessed. His team beats Shane’s. Not by much, but they do, and nobody takes All Stars seriously, except for Hollander and Rozanov who are too competitive for their own goods and could not be half as good as they are if they were anything else.

Shane flies back to Edmonton with a book he doesn’t plan on reading in his lap, thinking that hockey would be better only if he got to play it with Rozanov all the time. Thinking that the culture of the sport and the sport itself are different things entirely and always have been, and his rising above one of them makes him better at the other. Thinking that hockey was made in Montreal to be a perfect sport and Rozanov was made in a lab in Moscow to be the perfect opponent.

The season begins again after All Stars and Shane launches himself into it, reinvigorated, ready for something more. Dowd is playing one final season after this one, then retiring and wants to know now that his team is in good hands, so Shane restarts his sophomore season after swapping his A for a C. He feels the pressure constantly, whether he is losing a game to Vancouver in his own barn, or hosting the second ever gathering at his apartment full of things he doesn’t care about, or telling a defenceman twice his age to get his head in the game. He feels like the rest of the team, all of whom are older than him, must resent him. Just a little bit. For stealing the opportunity out from under them. They all want to buy him drinks and he says yes to all of them because he can’t have them thinking he believes that they’re beneath him now.

They play well, though they are still playing through some growing pains. They record some impressive winning streaks, and then they lose one game and take a knock to their collective confidence that has them losing the next too. Guthrie plays some incredible hockey, really gets his head down and focuses on the ice, and then seemingly forgets how to stop or slow on his skates and goes rattling about the ice like a pinball. Harjanne fractures an ankle and goes into LTIR so they have to adjust the lines and call up a replacement and they feel his absence greatly.

Even so, they snag the first wildcard spot in the playoffs and Harjanne is back by the first game even if he isn’t skating at full power and Shane keeps staring at the C on his chest, thinking that he is where he is supposed to be. Thinking that he is proving that he was the right choice even if he wasn’t the first choice.

They go down three games to one but Shane can’t let it end there so it doesn’t; they force a game seven, and then they force double overtime, and then they win and Shane has never felt more bruised or more boneless. Shane has never felt closer to fulfilment, even if he can still feel the absence of not being quite there yet.

They are eliminated in round two by Nashville the same day Florida is eliminated by Pittsburgh. Shane stumbles home and into an ice bath but makes sure he pokes every bruise first. Slowly and methodically. He presses the pad of his pointer finger to purpled skin and sinks it into the flesh until it won’t go any further. He catalogues the way the pain changes. He looks back at the picture of his first NHL bruise and thinks almost smugly that it looks almost like nothing compared to what he has going on now. He is giving himself over completely to the one thing he really loves, and this is what that commitment looks like. Hockey loves him back in shades of black and blue and angry red and yellow-green at the edges.

Ratnieks continues to be lazy on the backcheck. Management finally deals with this issue by trading him thirty-five games into the 2011-12 season. Nils Ratnieks goes to Montreal, Hayden Pike goes to Edmonton, and Shane walks into the locker room bright and early for the first practice since the trade and finds Pike already there, twiddling his thumbs and staring at the floor between his feet.

He assures Shane he is glad to be there with the distinct cadence of a man who didn’t really want to be traded. Shane invites him over for dinner because he is trying to prove he can be a good captain, then spends approximately two hours agonising over what to make before deciding he is just going to order in because he can only really cook three things.

The first thing Shane learns about Hayden Pike—beyond that he is fast on the ice, and dedicated, and actually backchecks even if his stickhandling could use some work, and he has a bad habit of pausing to search for opportunities whilst they are actively closing in front of him—is that he is very talkative. The next things Shane learns about Hayden Pike are consequently multifarious.

He is twenty-three like Darryn. Unlike Darryn he is already very married. His very lovely wife is currently very pregnant with twins back in his old house in Montreal. He is living in a just okay apartment for the time being and Jackie, the aforementioned wife, won’t be moving up until he is settled somewhere more permanent, with room for the babies. He has to find this somewhere more permanent before the babies come. Shane spends the entire dinner feeling thoroughly out of his depth. The hockey part of captaincy he understands, because hockey is like breathing to him. But this eludes him. He doesn’t date or have any real interest in dating. He doesn’t remember ever having even thought about children. He doesn’t know how to make reassurance sound sincere.

He spends hours upon hours on Zillow on Pike’s behalf, even though Pike didn’t ask him to. This is something helpful he can do. This is a way he can show support as captain. He sends Pike ten separate listings, each carefully chosen from a much larger list of very variable quality, and receives a response that simply reads Wow!

When Pike buys one of the homes, and Jackie books her flight and Pike perks up noticeably, Shane decides, relieved, that he is captaining successfully.

He talks to Rozanov again at All Stars. He notices the changes in his face—the new stubble is the main one, and Shane’s playoff run last post-season had proven that his own facial hair is still growing in patchy like a teenager’s, so what he feels is probably a sort of jealousy—and files them away. Shane asks him if he has any big plans queued up for next season, after his entry level contract has run its course and he will be paid something closer to his actual worth, and Rozanov says no in a way that invites no further conversation.

Shane dreams about him. He dreams about Rozanov’s weight behind him, the force of being crushed into the boards. He dreams about desecrating centre ice and wakes up to gross sheets and a horrifying hypothesis he isn’t sure he can ever afford to test.

Shane lets Pike set him up on dates with the women Jackie has managed to become fast friends with since her move to Edmonton, and leaves every one of them thinking that it would be better for all of them if he were to set them up with Darryn instead. Shane sleeps with one of them, mostly just to prove to himself that he can.

He almost can’t; he lets that almost do a lot of heavy lifting.

He starts turning down the dates after that, nudges Pike in Darryn’s direction instead. Watches his two friends become friends without him in the middle then finds space in between them whenever he wants it. He feels the loneliness shrink the first time he holds one of the Pikes’ twins, and thinks he is finally starting to grow out of it.

Shane wins his first Art Ross that year. Rozanov wins the Rocket Richard as the Florida Cougars’ new captain. Dowd retires with the respect of peers and opponents alike, a handshake line at the end of their elimination game that is realistically all for him. He doesn’t cry until he is in his car, ready to head home, and Shane pretends not to see it.

Shane is selected to play for Team Canada in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, which both should and should not be surprising—because it’s a dream, because he knows he is good enough to achieve it, because he knows he’s the best.

He researches Russia like he researches everything that scares him. He studies a map of Krasnodar Krai like he studied a map of Alberta after the draft. He thinks about Ilya Rozanov in the same way he always thinks about Ilya Rozanov: mostly unintentionally. He thinks about Russia like he thinks about Canada, about a country that is massive and cold and largely empty, and he thinks about the cities where the people gather, the specific smallness of the specific people who gather there.

Team Canada is all NHL players and Shane knows them all at least peripherally which doesn’t make the first, second or third days of training camp any less nerve-wracking. John Knowles is the only other Sander among them and Shane tries not to be obvious about the fact that he is clinging to his side for as long as it takes for Jean-Jacques “JJ” Boiziau of the Montreal Voyageurs to settle himself next to Shane in the locker room and ask how Hayden Pike is doing since the trade, gesticulating as he talks and smiling at Shane until he gives him something like a smile in return.

The team comes together well and Shane is at once relieved and stung that the captaincy has gone to a more senior player. He is the best and, for the first time in a long while now, there is nothing contentious about that statement because Rozanov is not part of this equation. He is also intimidated by the stage and by his teammates—in a way that will fade away the second he is on the ice but that probably would impede his ability to be a captain here. In Edmonton he knows the room and the room knows him: they trust him and they listen to him and he does everything he can to do right by them in return. Here he is an alternate so still has plenty to prove to this strange new room, but not quite so much. He can enjoy the way they marvel at the experience of playing with rather than against him, the way they enjoy his speed now that they aren’t playing against it. He can do this. He is more than good enough for it.

The round-robin format is, to someone who has grown used to the playoff format that is more forgiving to mistakes provided you only make them once, sort of terrifying. Not terrifying in a way that Shane can afford to be thrown off by, just terrifying in a way that has him steeling himself in the locker room before every game.

They play well. They win. They watch Russia lose to Latvia and Shane thinks about Rozanov who is, for at least the duration of All Stars every year, maybe almost a friend of his, and twenty-two and captain of the host country’s losing national team. Shane wants to console him—not the way he wants to console his teammates which is because it is his job—but doesn’t know where he is and doesn’t have his number because they aren’t actual friends.

He eats ice cream in a Russian resort town with a lump in his throat, and has a conversation with Carter Vaughn that shouldn’t, for as long as he refuses to test that horrible hypothesis of his, make his palms sweat but does. He watches the male figure skaters skating their short programs for an old buddy who Shane knows only in his memory because they’re both from Ottawa and they shared space occasionally years ago.

Joe finishes with a flourish and Shane spots Rozanov somewhere above them, peering down at the ice. He excuses himself and heads over before he thinks to formulate something to say.

“I don’t want to talk,” Rozanov tells him, pressing his body to the railing so all Shane can see is his back and not the uncomfortable tightness of his features. He keeps looking down. They can’t see the intricacies of the routines from up here, just the broad strokes.

“You played well,” Shane tells him, which is true. Russia’s team, a sort of haphazard blend of NHL and KHL players, has a lot of talent, just none of the chemistry necessary to back it up.

“Not well enough.”

“You were a highlight.”

“What do you want, Hollander?”

“To talk to my friend?”

“We are not friends.”

“Bullshit.”

Rozanov sighs and turns around so he is looking at Shane. The tone of his voice, low and rough like it is pushing through gritted teeth, implies that the look on his face should be anger. But it’s softer than that, sadder. “We talk one time a year at All Stars. I don’t know you.”

“Well there’s no All Stars this year so we’re talking now instead.”

“You are wasting your time.”

Shane shrugs. “Maybe,” he says and stays completely still.

Rozanov groans and slumps. “Fine,” he says. “Talk.”

“Um,” Shane says ineloquently. Rozanov groans again. “Is it nice to be home, at least?”

“I am not home.”

“I guess we are pretty far from Moscow.”

“You really don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?”

“You like it in Canada, yes?”

“Yes? I mean it’s home. I don’t want to live anywhere else.”

Rozanov’s eyebrows shoot up. “Right,” he says like that answers everything, and then pushes past Shane before he can be interrogated further.

Canada loses in the final to the USA. It’s a low-scoring game, played tightly and well on all sides, and then won thirty seconds into overtime. Shane is exhausted immediately, like all the adrenaline has been sapped from his body and all he has left is the feeling of the loss. The feeling of stumbling at the final hurdle again. He is supposed to be the best but the evidence is stacked up against him and the medal is silver and that’s a great accomplishment. Shane Hollander, Olympic medallist. Shane Hollander, Olympic loser when it mattered the most. People keep congratulating him and there is maybe nothing he wants to hear less.

The Olympic break is much less relaxing than the All Stars break. Shane comes back from it reinvigorated nonetheless. He plays to win because he has experienced a whole new dimension to losing he never wants to have to feel again.

Their playoff spot this year is never really a question; they finish third in the conference and first in the division. They play the LA Royals in round one and sweep them four to nothing. In the second period of the final game LA is getting desperate, getting reckless, and one of their forwards follows the momentum of the puck and crashes right into Knowles. The goal is waived for interference but Knowles goes down hard and gets up cradling his shoulder and play has to stop so he can go to the dressing room and Darryn can take his place, hulking between the goal posts and wide-eyed behind the mask.

They play six games against Vegas, win the first, second, fourth and sixth, and then it’s the conference finals against Colorado. It’s the furthest they’ve ever made it and Shane can almost taste the victory, can imagine the heft of the cup in his hands. He refuses to be sure about it because he can’t afford to jinx this, but he acknowledges that it is a possibility and he needs to keep on winning until it becomes an inevitability.

Knowles is out on injury and furious about it. Darryn is ecstatic to be their starting goalie for the time being and trying to be subtle about it because he feels guilty for revelling in what is essentially his friend’s misfortune. They have Shane, Hayden and Harjanne on the first line and they make a dangerous, cohesive unit. They lose the first two games in the series and the persistent hole in their defence rears its ugly, obvious head not for the first time, and Shane finds himself missing JJ Boiziau, who is busy with the Voyageurs, losing to the Cougars in game five.

The Sanders force a game seven then win it. Hayden scores his first career hat trick. There is no part of Shane’s body that doesn’t hurt and there has never been anything less comfortable than the aeroplane seat he is crammed into for the flight to Miami for the first game in the Stanley Cup final series.

They touch down in Miami and they drive to their hotel where they collapse like sacks of flour onto their beds. Off the ice most of them are limping just a little bit, and on the ice none of them can afford to slow down. Shane has never dreaded hockey before, but tomorrow’s morning skate looms in front of him like a bad omen. He ices his swollen ankle and bruised ribs and eats as much as he can without feeling nauseous because he has been perpetually hungry since sometime around game two against Vegas. He thinks, not for the first time, about commissioning someone to build him his own cottage he can spend summers relaxing and recovering in, but still can’t decide if he wants it in Lanaudière near his parents’ cottage, or maybe somewhere within driving distance of his home rather than theirs.

Team breakfasts are always hectic affairs. The mounting playoff exhaustion and determination means this one is less raucous than most, but they still house ridiculous quantities of food with all the grace and coordination of somnambulators. It isn’t a pretty sight, Shane is sure, but he is too embedded in it to really be aware. Darryn is eating a frankly ridiculously large bowl of oatmeal and complaining every three bites that it’s cold and tastes like glue. Hayden is shovelling food into his mouth whilst staring at a picture of his daughters wistfully. Shane is running plays and possibilities through his mind, determined that there will be nothing that he is not prepared for. Nobody is trying very hard to be good company this morning. They all have much more important things to worry about, and limited energy to expend on anything that is not winning.

They come out all guns blazing and Florida meets them with the same energy. It’s not quite reckless but it’s not far away from it; they want to win now and this is the game that sets the tone for the rest of the series. The tone in question is that these are two rebuilt teams hungry for a win they have both gone for a long time without. That these are two teams being captained by generational talents who are the closest thing to evenly matched, and they are both fresh off different kinds of losses and hungry for a victory. Starving for it.

They skirt roughing penalties on both sides at almost every whistle. More than a few checks are just barely on the right side of legal. Board battles become ugly and desperate and Rozanov’s entire weight trapping Shane against the plexiglass, his breath hot and laboured on the back of Shane’s neck, isn’t as unwelcome as it is supposed to be. Every time Shane tries to race off with the puck on a breakaway that would work in any other game, Rozanov is right there on his tail because there is only one player in the league who can keep up with Shane and the challenge in his eyes is bright, obvious, and familiar behind his visor.

Shane forgets, for a few moments at a time, that this is stressful and important, and the thing he has wanted forever more than anything else. In those moments of forgetfulness it becomes simply exhilarating. He is reminded, even through all the aches and pains, just why he loves this.

Edmonton wins that first game 5-3 but loses the next 4-7. The third game hovers at 0-0 until Rozanov opens the scoring halfway through the third period with a high-speed slapshot on a power play he earned by taking a highstick to the face. He grins and his split lip seeps more blood and Shane looks at anything else. Florida wins that game 2-1 after Guthrie scores Edmonton’s only goal which comes too late to do much more than soften the blow. In game four Hayden falls wrong after a hit Shane will swear until the day he dies the ref should have called, and is out for the rest of the series with a concussion that they are forced to take more seriously than any of the other injuries the rest of the team is playing through. Shane can tell he is mostly disappointed and just a little bit relieved.

Game seven happens in Miami and Shane breathes intentionally, tapes his stick intentionally, taps about his stall in the visiting team’s locker room intentionally. Harjanne tells him that what happens happens and Shane nods but internally rejects it. They can’t get this far and not win it. Shane can smell it even over the stench of old sweat soaked into every crevice of the room and every piece of equipment inside it.

They start strong, score the first goal of the game five minutes into the first period. From Edmonton’s bench Shane looks at Rozanov, leaning his elbows on the boards and watching the game with his face hard as ice, his lips a straight line beneath the playoff beard Shane still can’t grow. It’s fine that Shane can’t really see them properly, because he has all the intricacies of Rozanov’s face committed to a part of memory that turns more and more guilty every time he revisits it.

Ten minutes later Edmonton are up by two and Shane doesn’t let himself think that they’ve won it yet, but he does let himself feel good about the way the game is going, good about his assist, good about pushing his body to its breaking point then past it because it ends here and he can postpone the pain for another hour or two if he tries hard enough.

The lead doesn’t last. The Sanders don’t score at all in the second period, and the Cougars score twice, and suddenly they are even heading into the third period and this is anyone’s game. Shane turns up the focus, narrows the world to the width and length of the ice and shuts out the crowd behind the glass, doesn’t look at Florida’s bench even when he is sitting his own, except for when he is watching their lines change. Rozanov becomes a monster, calling on bursts of speed that must come from somewhere superhuman, while Shane computes the ice and suppresses everything but hockey until he has space for it again. Unstoppable force checks immovable object into the boards and doesn’t linger past what the urgency of the game necessitates.

It looks for a long time like a game that is destined to end in overtime. Then, with thirty seconds left in regulation time, Rozanov takes off with the puck, slips past Guthrie, dekes past Shane, and pokes the puck between Harjanne’s legs to pick it back up on the other side of him like it’s easy. Like he doesn’t have any choice but to make it easy. The breakaway is flashy but the shot itself is controlled, careful. It sails just over Darryn’s glove and hits right into the back of the net.

There is no question about its legitimacy and there are a matter of seconds left on the clock. Shane keeps playing them, because it isn’t over until it’s over. And then it really is over. The Cougars are cheering, screaming, celebrating, and Shane is still and silent and watching them, feeling like it is the day of the draft again, and he is staring up at a miserable kid on a balcony. Feeling like he is back in Sochi, wearing silver and envying gold.

He swallows a mix of saliva and sweat and takes off his gloves to wipe his face and everything hurts and his right wrist is purple and burning hot.

Rozanov is Rozanoz so Shane is expecting a final chirp in the handshake line, something gloating and genuinely mean, to rub the loss in like this brand new gaping wound needs salt pressed into it. What he gets instead is relief showing through the excitement, a grin Rozanov can’t help and is panting through. “Thank you,” he says, and the hand that shakes Shane’s is gentler with it than anyone else’s has been. Shane has no idea what to do with it.

Shane showers, changes, goes through the usual motions of a loss and slumps back to the hotel room he isn’t sharing with anyone, where his things are all still in his bag and the bed is made with sheets that smell like cheap detergent. There is a big window facing out towards the sea and he can see it beyond the last vestiges of the city. People are still moving out there, tiny from this vantage point. It’s getting dark but it isn’t quite dark yet.

It’s humid in the room and humid outside and Shane cranks the AC up to full power and sprawls across clean sheets in outdoor clothes and lets the hurt catch up to him. He lets the bruises be without prodding at them. He moves his wrists and ankles in slow, careful circles, and there isn’t a single one of them that doesn’t smart against the motion. He lets out an exhale and his eyes sting and his stomach roils and he is angry and disappointed and too exhausted to fully commit himself to feeling either one. The sooner he sleeps, he thinks, the sooner tomorrow will come. And the sooner tomorrow comes the sooner he can fly back to Edmonton and mourn his loss at home instead of this city thousands of kilometres away from it that rejoices with his loss even if Miami isn’t a hockey city. He closes his eyes against the light of a lamp he doesn’t have the energy to get up and turn off.

Someone knocks at the door. Shane ignores them.

They keep knocking. He groans and heaves himself to his feet and every movement sets every part of him alight. He forgets to look through the peephole because he just wants whoever is there to go so he can sleep.

“Rozanov,” he says, surprised, as the man in question is already pushing past Shane and making his way into the room. The door stays open behind him and for a good moment Shane just stares at him, convinced most of his brain has melted onto the floor somewhere between the hotel and the arena. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be out celebrating with your team?” The bitterness seeps into Shane’s tone and he doesn’t have any energy left to stop it. He shuts the door and drops back onto the bed and lets whatever is happening happen, too worn down to stop it.

Rozanov waves one hand and scratches at his beard with the other. “Team is doing mushy family stuff. We reconvene in an hour.”

Shane blinks at him like it will make the image make any more sense. No such luck. “Reconvene?”

“It’s right word, yes?”

“Right… Why the fuck are you here?”

Rozanov is standing in front of where Shane is sitting even though he must be dead on his feet too, so Shane is leaning back and looking up at him. He resents it but does nothing to change it. “I want to suck your dick,” Rozanov says conversationally. It takes Shane a minute to really register what he has said.

“What?”

Something like fear cuts through the exhaustion, and something a little too much like desire cuts through the fear. It isn’t quite unfamiliar. Rozanov still smells like coconut shampoo and the sweat he hasn’t been entirely able to wash away. Shane looks up, terrified that Rozanov has noticed the way Shane tries not to notice him, the way they interact when they share space, with the exception of that arena in Sochi. Terrified that Rozanov has noticed and is disgusted and wants to use it against him.

“I want to suck your dick.” Rozanov holds his hands up as if in surrender, takes a step back as if to prove to Shane that he isn’t trapped here, can leave if he wants even if this is his room. “Call it consolation prize.”

“A consolation prize?”

“Hollander,” Rozanov rolls his eyes, “you are so boring.” He takes another step, forwards this time, and puts his hands on Shane’s shoulders. Shane lets him. “You are very obvious and I am very bored of pretending you are not.”

And the thing is this is such a bad idea. Shane is suddenly more wired than tired and his brain and his body are pulling him in two entirely different directions. He wants and he is terrified of wanting and he has had this hypothesis for a while now and decided not to test it because he doesn’t want proof that it’s true. But he wants in a way that proves that he can want something that isn’t hockey—even if Rozanov, freshly minted Stanley Cup champion, is obviously hockey adjacent.

But this is a bad idea for both of them, because of hockey and because of Russia, and if there is ever a safe space to test out that nagging hypothesis it is here in this hotel room. “You can’t tell anyone,” Shane says, more breath than sound, staring up into Rozanov’s dark eyes, drifting down to watch him licking his lips. Wanting.

“We have same secret,” Rozanov reassures him, letting his aching knees buckle and dropping to the carpet between Shane’s legs. He reaches for Shane’s zipper but Shane has to grab him by the collar first, lift him into a kiss that is hungry in a way that Shane isn’t used to kisses being, just to prove that the moment is real. The beard is rough and the scab on Rozanov’s lip tastes like iron and Shane stops thinking completely.

Shane doesn’t have any doubts that Rozanov has done this before. He lets his exhausted body collapse completely beneath him, lets Rozanov methodically take the last of his composure apart. His ears ring and he moves lethargically, fully intending on returning the favour. Desperate to do it.

Rozanov pulls him into another saltier kiss, tugs at his hair just hard enough to sting, and leaves, claiming that he is going to be late, and Shane is too wrung-out and boneless to think about trying to follow him until after he is already long gone.

Chapter End Notes

So the estimated chapter count has shifted to five now. If you're wondering how I ever thought this could be an 8-10k one shot and not the approximately 40-50k multi-chapter fic I'm now predicting it will be, the answer is that I made the mistake of assuming I could put Shane into the Connor McDavid torment nexus and be mostly casual about it. And then I wanted to explore every single consequence of doing that and now it's this instead.

I know we all love that Shane's first gay experience was basically him dropping to his knees instinctually and immediately, but I am choosing very intentionally to not let him reciprocate because I need to keep that man //wanting//.

Also, I did say that I wasn't taking inspiration from real hockey players for the most part. I made an exception regarding Guthrie, who I have made do the Connor Bedard hockey interspersed with insane slapstick bullshit thing, simply because I think it's funny.

There are I think four comments I have left on the google doc I'm writing this in. One is a rough outline, another is a character bank that is being constantly updated so I can keep track of all of my OCs and where canon characters like Hayden (who we will be seeing more of in the next chapters) are at the present time. A third is a note to myself about a thing to circle back to later. The fourth and final one is that the way I've written Shane he thinks about fulfilment how the US Supreme Court thinks about obscenity/pornography: "I know it when I see it."

I read every single comment on every single one of my fics even if I don't really get around to responding to them anymore, so if anyone has any questions or anything please feel free to ask them, and I will read them and try to actually get around to giving you answers. I'm having a lot of fun with this fic and I'd sort of love an excuse to talk about it, if the length of the notes on the first chapter didn't already kind of give that away :)

Chapter 3

The thing about trying not to think about something, is that it is a surefire way to always have it positioned at the very forefront of your mind. Shane is spending the off-season learning this lesson over and over and over again.

It’s Rozanov’s fault. Shane is having a hard time blaming him because the guilt is gone from the memory and now it’s just… not quite fond but something much too close to it. Closer to it than anyone should be able to feel for the man whose team beat theirs in the cup final. But when Shane thinks about that day, he doesn’t think about Rozanov’s masterful breakaway, the clock ticking down from thirty seconds, one at a time. He thinks about the hotel room afterwards instead. He thinks about Rozanov and the warmth of his hands, the warmth of his mouth, the rasp in his voice, the fact that he had won the cup and thought that the obvious next thing to do was to find Shane. He tries not to think about it and ends up wondering how Rozanov even knew his room number, wonders how long Rozanov had been thinking about it, wonders if he really is as obvious as Rozanov says.

Shane’s mom keeps calling Rozanov his nemesis, only half-way joking about it. This is a direct consequence of that aforementioned breakaway. It makes Shane feel weird. “We’re almost friends,” he tells her, which is both over and underselling whatever the hell they are to each other, and she squints then shrugs.

“I don’t see how,” she responds, and he doesn’t even try to explain it. He should, maybe. At least to say that the life he lives is crazy and weird and Rozanov understands it, which she doesn’t and can’t. That they understand each other, almost. That they are two parallel lines. That they have met impossibly in the middle anyway.

“We talk at All-Stars,” he settles for, which isn’t untrue but also completely ignores every single thing he wishes he knew how to say. Part of him is fixated on the idea of telling her, of sitting her down and saying something along the lines of “I think I might be gay. On a related note, I think I’ve been thinking about Ilya Rozanov—yeah, that Ilya Rozanov—since World Juniors. Thoughts? Opinions?” Lucky for Shane, the rest of him is sane, so the confession sits at the back of his mind, somewhere behind the picture of Rozanov on his knees, his eyes tipped up to meet Shane’s. His mom sits in front of him, on the couch in the living room of her cottage in Lanaudière because he still can’t quite commit to building his own. He watches the sun set through the window and thinks about how it is still up in Edmonton. He thinks about the summer before his rookie year, how he spent it drinking ginger ale and reading books in the Dowds’ garden. He thinks about how long it has been since he spoke to either of them.

“It must bother you,” she goes on, “that he’s that good but he acts like that about it.”

He toys with the idea of asking her what she means for all of one second. He shrugs. “It’s fun.”

“I’m sure losing that game seven wasn’t fun.”

“No,” Shane agrees honestly, but that consolation prize has made the memory an easier one to revisit, “but we’ll still talk at All-Stars.” At least he hopes so. In fact, he hopes they’ll talk before then, address the elephant in the room, do something about it. He shouldn’t want a repeat performance but he keeps thinking about it despite—or perhaps because of—all his efforts to think about anything else. He wants to return the favour. He wants to see what Rozanov’s face does when he comes undone, wants to know what he tastes like. He knows he wants the wrong things, but he is still exhilarated at the thought of wanting at all. Fixated on the thought that all those wrong things he wants are ones he can actually have, so long as he doesn’t get caught. He thinks about Rozanov calling it a shared secret, then kicks himself for thinking at all.

“Well,” she says, “maybe you’ll rub off on him.”

Back in Edmonton everything is just the same as it is every other year except for the energy. This is a room that knows now that they can win, that they didn’t. This is a room that wants the cup, not as some sort of pipe dream now, and instead something they have come close enough to reach out and touch—that none of them did, because nobody wants to jinx it.

But this is also a room that has had the shortest off-season of any team but Florida and they’re feeling it. There are a few new guys: two traded from other teams, one signed in free agency, two AHL call-ups. They’re easy to pick out of the crowd because they don’t share the exhaustion, or the buzzing unrest of almost.

Shane tries to match them. He tries to look them in the eyes. Then, failing that, look them above the eyes convincingly enough that they don’t notice. He tries not to think about Ilya Rozanov, who shouldn’t be in this locker room but is apparently everywhere Shane goes now, like a ghost sent to haunt him specifically. He thinks about blurting it out just for the moment of relief of no longer having to live with the secret, and then he thinks about the aftermath. Of everything he has worked for falling away because who he is and what he wants are fundamentally incompatible. It feels like having a body in the basement—somehow even more incriminating than a skeleton in the closet. He sucks in air through his teeth, shakes his head, and settles back into the version of himself the team needs him to be.

They get back to training and try to incorporate the new roster into the team without breaking any of the things that worked so well for them last season. They test out lines to see what works and don’t dare to touch the Pike-Hollander-Harjanne line lest it lose its magic. They discuss starting Darryn in goal and Knowles pretends he isn’t bothered by it, while Darryn pretends he isn’t buzzing under his skin. Shane knows that this is all he wants. All he has ever wanted. And he’s earned it. He’s good enough to have it. He taps their helmets together—a quick congratulations—then puts his head down and focuses on nothing but practise. Getting better because he can’t let himself lose like that again.

Shane’s apartment still feels more like a hotel than a home. It’s the end of summer and the late evening sunlight floods through the big windows and across the hardwood floors. There’s a large, leafy monstera in the corner, a succulent on a bookshelf, and an orchid on the coffee table. They’re all well-cared for, in condition so perfect they look almost plastic at a glance. Shane pays someone else to look after them when he isn’t here, and waters them to a schedule someone else wrote for him when he is. He pushes all the cushions on the couch to one side before sitting down, and runs his fingers across the perfect machine-stitched seams of the high-quality, mass-produced quilt on the back of the sofa. Like everything else in here aside from the books on the shelves, he didn’t pick it out. He wouldn’t have chosen something quite so grey but his interior designer obviously knows something he doesn’t.

He and Darryn are going over to the Pikes’ for dinner. Theirs is a nice house, outside of the city, with a minivan in the garage and signs of life wherever you look. Shane found it for them, three hours deep in real estate sites. He has lived in his apartment for much longer than they’ve lived in their house, but they’ve never seemed to struggle with the same issue of impersonality. Shane remembers going there once, right after the sale was completed, and seeing it as an unfurnished skeleton, but every other time he has been there it has felt like a family home. It has a charm to it, something Shane doesn’t know how to capture. Maybe the real difference is just that he lives alone.

He hugs Jackie at the door, clasps Hayden’s hand in his and wonders if any of this will ever start to feel natural. He accepts an armful of baby—though he admittedly isn’t sure which of the twins it is—and a can of Canada Dry, and he sits on the sofa with his back pressed against a crocheted blanket Jackie’s grandmother made a decade ago and watches the TV play hockey highlights on mute. There’s a text on his phone from Darryn, sent thirty minutes ago, saying he’ll be ten minutes late. Shane is ten minutes early.

“Good to be back?” Jackie asks him. She’s wearing an apron, her hair messily pulled back into a claw clip. She looks happy. Shane probably isn’t supposed to envy her.

“I’m always excited for the season to start.”

She nods. “I’ll be worried the day you aren’t. Hayden was so annoying this summer, I’m happy for him to be your problem for a while.”

“Hey!” Hayden protests.

Jackie shoots him an unimpressed look, obviously teasing, and then smiles at Shane. “You’re winning this year,” she tells him.

“You’ll jinx it.” Shane reminds her.

She waves a hand. “You’re good enough to win. You’re giving the universe too much credit.”

The season starts well and continues the same way. They beat Calgary at home because there is only maybe one team Shane likes to lose to less, and then they beat Columbus at Nationwide Arena and Shane is reminded of how much he loves a crowd that hates his success. He loves noise when it’s the right kind of noise, he loves its peaks and valleys and the way they bend to accommodate him. He loves the proof that he exists. He loves hockey, and he loves that people care how good he is at it. He loves that, at this moment, the only reason anyone hates him is because he is too good at what he does.

He doesn’t love Columbus. It’s too flat—not like how Edmonton is flat except for the rolling ravines and river valleys, and the Canadian Rockies in the distance—and it sprawls too wide. It feels, like too many things in Shane’s life, like it isn’t quite real. He goes for a walk through a breezy neighbourhood full of dollhouses at 10pm to burn some excess energy, and has to cut it short because he starts to feel unreal too.

The next stop on their roadie is Toronto and Shane is almost excited for it. Almost. He knows they have Wunderkinder of their own, Dallas Kent and Troy Barrett. According to some—though satisfyingly few—they are the answer to Hollander and Rozanov every other team in the league has been hoping for. According to just about everybody, they’re assholes. Not in the way Rozanov is an asshole; he’s a rat, and his antics make people laugh when they aren’t the ones targeted by them. Barrett and Kent just exemplify the worst of the league, the worst of the sport. The things Shane chooses not to think about whenever he doesn’t absolutely have to. He likes, when he is able, to live with the illusion that hockey loves him back the same way he loves it: like it’s uncomplicated, easy, everything.

Darryn tells him, “I’m dreading this.”

Hayden sympathetically responds, “I wouldn’t want to stare down Kent’s slapshot either.”

Darryn makes a face. Shane looks at the floor. Neither of them say anything, which is more significant from Darryn’s end than Shane’s.

They win that game too, not without a fight. Regulation time finishes 1-1, and Shane is proud of his team for not starting the fight Toronto is clearly trying to force out of them, but he’s also pissed off. Kent and Barrett are exactly what everyone says they are, and nothing they can say to Shane is something he hasn’t heard before, but it still catches him off guard. Not enough to throw him off his game beyond fumbling a faceoff or two he should’ve won, would’ve won had they played it fairly, had the ref cared enough to kick them from the circle for the offence. But these days people rarely say them straight to his face so directly. On the internet, sure, and behind his back, probably, but being with the Sanders has given him a false sense of security. An understanding that nobody will question his place on the team or in the league even if he doesn’t look like most of them, so long as he keeps proving that he belongs, that he isn’t all that different from them.

He doesn’t expect anything more than that, but the reminder that he isn’t even supposed to expect that much stings. “Don’t let it get to you,” Hayden tells him. Shane chews on his mouthguard, nods only once, and gets back on the ice for overtime. Harjanne follows, squeezes his shoulder through the padding.

He isn’t shy outside of games, but when he is playing he goes quiet. He communicates what he thinks he needs to do to win and that’s about it. Nonetheless he tells Shane, “They don’t deserve this. We do.” Shane listens, remembers that he wasn’t the youngest captain in the history of the league for no reason, remembers who he is and what losing feels like and the fact that, at least right now, he doesn’t have to do it.

Kent continues with the same bigoted insults but Shane is newly determined to ignore them, at least outwardly. He’s angry, for his own sake, and his mother’s, and Darryn’s, and he figures if he wants to make Kent angry too, winning is the perfect way to do it. He doesn’t let it shake him. He steals the puck and makes the most of the newly open ice the overtime has afforded him, and the speed that very few players in the league can keep up with. One minute into overtime he sends the puck over the goal line with a wristshot because there is no traffic in the way to stop him and Toronto’s goaltender is just a second too slow to throw his blocker or body in the way.

The crowd hates Shane. Because he is good, because he doesn’t need to stoop to anyone’s level to beat them. He tries to enjoy it but it feels tainted somewhat, by the reminder that sometimes people hate him for other reasons. Ones without an echo of satisfaction about them.

They’re two months into the season before they find themselves in Miami again. They fly in from Chicago and Shane reads the first three chapters of Indian Horse on the plane—he’s trying to read more things that aren’t hockey player biographies written by men whose brains spent years splatting against their skulls professionally.

It’s early December and still more than twenty degrees out, and Shane thinks not for the first time about the silver linings of being drafted second, because this doesn’t feel like something he could ever get used to. He still isn’t convinced. Especially not standing as he is just outside the arrivals gate of Miami International Airport, smelling the warm tarmac and the salt of the sea he can just about see if he squints in the right direction. It isn’t quite as intense as the baked pavement of June, the closeness of the sea to the hotel, but it’s impossible not to think about losing here. Losing to Ilya Rozanov again.

Subsequently, it’s difficult not to think about that consolation prize as well. In detail that would be excruciating were it possible not to delight in it, even if somewhat guiltily. Shane shifts his hand luggage—a small Reebok-branded backpack big enough for his phone, headphones, book and water bottle—as subtly as possible in front of his crotch. Just in case.

They pile onto the bus to the hotel—the same one, always the same one—and Shane watches Miami through the window and can’t help but imagine Ilya Rozanov everywhere. On every street, smoking outside every club, in every horrible, garish sports car, sunning himself on every beach. Miami isn’t a hockey city so here he’s probably just like anyone else with too much money, enjoying himself in relative anonymity. It has an appeal to it, Shane must admit—it’s one thing to be known for being the best on the ice, and another thing entirely to be recognised off of it. Shane wonders how much difference it would make to the way he conducts his life, if he would be able to enjoy himself in ways he is too scared to now, or if he still wouldn’t be able to forget that there are still hockey fans here, even if not nearly so many as in a Canadian market, and all it would take to be caught is one single person recognising his face. He tries not to remind himself that his happiness and satisfaction are incompatible things, and only manages to make himself catastrophise about how he has almost everything he has ever wanted and it’s not enough. It has never seemed further away from being enough.

They lose the game 2-4 so Shane chooses to focus on the fact that he made plans around a faceoff circle to meet a friend outside of the arena, rather than the fact that it feels like his chest is constricting because this team is one it now physically pains him to lose to. He tries to remember that before the game was crushing it was just fun. He retreats into the visiting team’s locker room and stares at a smudge of marker on the wall that probably actually said something once upon a time but is entirely illegible now.

The room around him keeps going, albeit with something like the wounded gait of June. There is conversation but it is subdued. About half of the guys are planning on going out drinking tonight in spite of the loss, because it’s Miami and it has an appeal Edmonton doesn’t, but nobody is convincingly happy about it. Shane predicts it will be more a night of drinking the pain away than of dancing, having fun. If anyone takes anybody home that will be just another consolation prize. Shane wants nothing to do with it. The thought of his own, even if he feels dizzy with whatever the nameless feeling where want and fear intersect is, seems much more appealing. And much more taboo. In the way of things he tries not to think about, he’s having a hard time forgetting that factor.

When he leaves the arena, Rozanov is waiting in the parking lot, chewing gum and flicking a heavy silver lighter open and closed. His game day suit is nicer than Shane’s, and just one of a selection that Shane knows he has. It’s not that Shane couldn’t afford a nicer one with better tailoring if he wanted it, it’s just that he keeps bumping up against things he doesn’t know whether or not he is supposed to care about. Rozanov’s hair is damp, pushed back behind his ears, shiny under the streetlights. It isn’t quite dark out yet. Shane doesn’t think he would ever get used to that either, the way the difference between summer and winter in a place like this seems to be nothing but a matter of degrees.

His car is just as sporty and awful as Shane had hoped and dreaded it would be. Nobody appears to have anything to say about Shane clambering in through the passenger-side door, beside Rozanov who laughs shortly at him.

“You are very graceful on ice. And like baby deer off of it.”

“Fuck off.” Shane is maybe laughing a little bit too, not that he has any inclination to admit to that. “It’s your stupid car. I feel like I’m sitting on the floor.”

“Goes round corners faster that way.”

“I’m pretty happy driving safely at the speed limit.”

“That is because you don’t know any better. It’s okay, I’ll show you and you will never want to go back to boring cars ever again.”

“Somehow I doubt that.” This sort of conversation is familiar. Shane chooses to focus on it rather than the sound or sensation of the purring engine and the uncomfortable proximity of his ass to the road. He has found, since that first All Stars, that Ilya Rozanov is not someone he particularly struggles to talk to. In hindsight, the stumbling conversation they had at Juniors was probably more language barrier than anything else. Still, Shane can’t relax into it today, because the loss still stings, positively aching with the history behind it. But more than that, because he isn’t sure what to expect. Without June this would just be them being friends more than once a year. With June, there is a part of Shane’s mind he can’t ignore that he hopes that every house they pass is Rozanov’s, and every glance of Miami he is going to get tonight is going to be brief, observed through a window as they are speeding past it.

“We could go to beach,” Rozanov suggests, casual in a way Shane doesn’t know how to be. He lifts a hand from the steering wheel to scratch at the side of his nose.

“Sure,” Shane agrees, disappointed and probably doing a subpar job at disguising it.

“Or we go to my house.”

“Oh.” Shane wants to agree without seeming desperate. He could admit that he has been thinking about Rozanov’s mouth almost daily for the past six months and it would be honest, but it would also be humiliating. He swallows, more excited than he is nervous but still more nervous than he wishes he had to be. “I’m not much of a beach person, honestly.”

“Ah. A shame. Guess it has to be my place, then.”

“Guess it has to be.”

Rozanov stops looking at the road to focus his gaze on Shane instead, just for a second. He smiles, all teeth and dark eyes. Shane doesn’t struggle to return it, and it doesn’t even occur to him to worry about what the expression might look like on his own face until after Rozanov has already looked away.

“I’m not taking you away from your team, am I?” Shane worries suddenly that he is being selfish. That he doesn’t deserve this.

“I am here every night, they will live.”

“They’re probably celebrating without you. I don’t want you to miss out.”

Rozanov’s mouth goes tight at the corners. “I’m not missing much.”

He pulls his ridiculous car onto the driveway outside a modern house with large, immaculately clean windows and a seaside view. There are palm trees in the garden, swaying in the breeze. Shane takes stock of clean white walls and the sleek, dark frames around the windows and the doorway. In a similar way to the car—which is bright orange with tinted windows—it feels very distinctively Rozanov. It feels like his.

Shane takes his shoes off by the front door and breathes in the clean scent of the air. There’s a large mirror mounted to his left, above a narrow cabinet with a bowl full of too many sets of car keys for one man to own. The room is open plan and the furniture is all sleek, minimal, understated. It should have a certain showroom quality about it but there is art on the walls that’s lacking any telltale sterility, cushions on the couch that don’t quite match anything else in the room including each other, and a sweatshirt cast carelessly across a barstool that is doing more than it should to ground the space in a reality Shane’s own apartment still can’t quite grasp.

“So,” Shane says, rocking from his heels to his toes then back again, standing at what he would consider the boundary between the entryway and the lounge.

Rozanov cocks an eyebrow at him, steps into his space. “So,” he parrots, voice low, accent wrapping around the vowel. The top three buttons of his shirt are undone and Shane watches his pulse jump beneath the skin of his neck. He wants to lick him. He is still entirely unadjusted to the idea that maybe he can.

“Is this a repeat of last time?” Shane’s words come out breathier than he’d like, more blatant in their desire. Rozanov’s hands settle on his upper arms, warm and solid.

“I’d like that,” he says as he leans in. Shane should meet him halfway but that would take too long. He presses his lips to Rozanov’s without drawing out the wait.

Just like last time, it’s an easy kiss. Shane isn’t in his head about the mechanics, isn’t worried about whether or not he is doing it right because it doesn’t feel the way he thinks it’s supposed to. If this doesn’t feel right then he doesn’t know what does. Rozanov moans into his mouth and Shane feels warm all over, not just because the weather is wholly inappropriate for December.

Their blazers end up on the floor barely four feet from the front door, and Shane rucks up the gauzy fabric of Rozanov’s shirt, grabbing him by the smooth, warm flesh of his hips. He didn’t get to touch last time. This time there is no impending time limit, no reason Shane can’t take anything Rozanov is willing to give him—beyond all the undeniable reasons Shane has already forced out of his head while anticipating a moment like this one. Rozanov pulls back, face consumed with a satisfied smile that softens his features but sharpens his gaze. “You were waiting for this.”

Shane looks him in the eyes, doesn’t struggle to do it, and drops to his knees. He hooks his thumbs under the elasticated waistband of Rozanov’s underwear, wanting desperately but waiting for permission anyway. “I’ve been waiting for this,” he admits. He’s embarrassed by the earnestness of it but there are a lot of things that strike him as much more important in the moment.

“Whatever you want,” Rozanov breathes, so Shane takes it.

They exchange numbers before Shane leaves, lying together in Rozanov’s bed, sweaty skin pressed together wherever they can find contact. They didn’t make it to the bed the first time—they didn’t even make it to the couch—so they agreed without words that a round two was necessary, to do it right. Shane’s jaw aches, and his skin feels sticky, and there is the lingering taste of sweat on the back of his tongue. He could live like this forever and never complain. He thinks he’s starting to understand sex finally, but he wouldn’t say no to another demonstration, just to make sure.

Rozanov gets up to shower eventually, and Shane doesn’t exactly feel cold in his absence but it does make him feel oddly hollow. Shane lets himself really look around while he’s gone, and lets it really hit him that he is in Ilya Rozanov’s bedroom. The jacket on the back of the chair in the corner is Ilya Rozanov’s. This is the art Ilya Rozanov likes. The smell of his detergent. His cologne and his shampoo. The view he wakes up to whenever he isn’t on the road or spending the summers back home in Russia. If Shane ever gets to see it again it probably won’t be for another year so he makes the most of it now.

When Rozanov walks back in he is wearing nothing but a towel around his waist, low enough for Shane to see the cut of his obliques and reconsider, only briefly, his plan to spend his life doing anything more than melting into these sheets. “Give me your phone,” Rozanov says, and suddenly there are three contacts in Shane’s phone that don’t follow the same first name, surname rubric as all the others: Mom, Dad, and Lily.

It’s fine that Rozanov is the one who drives Shane back to his hotel, because they’re friends when they’re in the same ZIP code and that isn’t a secret. It just feels like it should be, like something about the two of them in one place should be immediately incriminating. That anyone who looks at them should know what neither of them can afford to give away. There is nobody outside of the hotel when Rozanov drops Shane off, which does very little to stop him from feeling watched. He doesn’t go inside right away, just watches Rozanov’s car as he drives away, then slumps against the exterior wall with his head in his hands. Thinking I can’t believe we just did that, then I can’t wait to do that again. All he says aloud is “Fuck!” but he thinks it gets the whole point across pretty effectively.

He spends the brief Christmas break lying to his family by omission. Then he spends the rest of the season lying to his teammates a little more directly because they are a little more insistent and direct about probing into the sex life he barely has. He keeps his toque on, the hood of his parka up, and the zip up over his chin, wears sunglasses even though the sun has already started to set, then walks into a sex shop on the corner of a little street in Edmonton he has never had any reason to go to before. He is hoping that means none of his teammates are there either. He is terrified of being recognised, but he’d be terrified of being recognised anywhere in Canada, and he refuses to cross the US border with anything like that in his bag. He tries to be quick about it. Efficient. He buys something phallic, silicone, not as intimidating as most of the things he sees in that store. Purple.

He sees Rozanov at All Stars like every other year, and bites the flesh of his own hand to stop himself from making any sort of noise that might give him away in a hotel full of hockey players who could ruin everything if they found out.

When the Cougars come to Edmonton the Sanders win the game 3-1 and Shane appreciates the reminder of just how well-matched these two teams are. Of just how well he and Ilya Rozanov play off each other on the ice. They trade wins back and forth. The Cougars won the cup because the chips fell in their favour and luck is just a part of the game sometimes. On occasion it is exhilarating, beautiful, and sometimes it is infuriating, but it is hockey and Shane can’t hate it without loving it enough to offset it.

They spend the night in Rozanov’s hotel room because Shane keeps remembering that all his teammates know where he lives, and he is trying very hard all of the time to be a good captain to them, so if they show up and he is inside he is all but obliged to help them. Rozanov has a room to himself, and Gushchin who is his only immediate neighbour is spending the night in the most Alberta bar Edmonton has to offer; cowboy hats are encouraged, and a rickety old mechanical bull takes over most of the floor space, and all they play is modern country music, which is how Shane discovered that he prefers classic country music, which he also doesn’t like.

The feeling of fullness is strange, mostly just because it feels so natural, so right. He wonders as well as he is able while his brain turns to pleasant mush, if that just means that he is usually empty. If this is how he is supposed to be all the time. Rozanov is almost sweet about checking in, making sure Shane still wants it every time his breath hitches. Shane can’t find the words to say that Rozanov is the reason he truly knows what wanting is. That he doesn’t know how not to want this even if he knows what it might cost, that he maybe doesn’t know how to want anything or anyone else.

He doesn’t mean to fall asleep there, but he never quite manages to come back to his body for longer than it takes to shower, and Rozanov doesn’t try to kick him out. So he wakes up to Rozanov’s early alarm, yawning and sated and enjoying the way he aches in the same way he enjoys a good hockey bruise. He smooths his fingers over a contusion on Rozanov’s outer thigh that looks to be a few days old and wonders if he feels the same.

It’s awkward to have to sneak out of the hotel right as the Cougars are stirring within it, but it isn’t difficult to be in Rozanov’s space. They’re friends and they have sex sometimes, on the rare occasions when they actually get to see each other, and that doesn’t have to be so complicated. Not when Shane pretends that there is nothing else going on: it is just friendship and sex, and not hockey, which doesn’t love him how he wishes it could, and Russia, that scares him to think about at all. That makes him feel like he is putting Rozanov in danger by letting himself indulge in nights like these, no matter how infrequently.

He keeps lying because it isn’t so uncomplicated. Because he has no other option.

They make playoffs easily. They win their first series, then their second, then suddenly the conference finals are Edmonton against St. Louis and Florida vs. Pittsburgh and all Shane can think of is a rematch of last year’s cup final. The opportunity for the perfect redemption. The opportunity to play the best hockey in the world against the most fun opponent.

Both series are won in six and the exhaustion going into the final is somehow worse this time around. Shane sleeps and he works out and he trains and he eats exactly what his nutritionist tells him to in an attempt to keep up with the caloric demand but he can still feel the difference when he glances his fingers across his ribs. He studies how the Cougars play and gets fixated on Rozanov the way he always does, drawn in by the way he plays hockey then stuck on the way he looks while he does it. Shane watches the footage of Florida sweeping Toronto in the first round. There are more important things than the way that Rozanov’s expression turns cruel moments before Kent throws the first punch—like, for example, the way that Rozanov’s team doesn’t seem particularly inclined to intervene—but nothing more interesting.

The first game is in Edmonton this year. The crowd is alive when they win it and they love Shane because he has proven to them again and again that he’s worthy of it. It goes into double overtime which just means the thrill of the win is reinforced by the relief.

They win the second one too, a little more neatly. 3-1. Shane sees his own face blown up on a screen and shown to all of Rexall Place, red about the cheeks, smiling while the noise around him crescendoes, fills his ears so entirely he can’t hear anything else. It looks normal, natural. At least until the moment he becomes aware of it.

The crowd in Miami is anxious with it. Jittering. Shane is comfortable with that energy up until the moment Florida is up 2-0 and it relaxes. He tries to come back from it. Prove it wrong. In his experience, there is little in hockey more fragile than a two-point lead. By the end of the second it’s 2-1 to Florida and Shane has an assist and they can do this. He knows they can. They don’t. The Cougars’ defense is watertight; the Sanders only get three shots on goal in the whole third period.

Both teams fall into a pattern of only winning the games played on their own ice. Shane tries to believe this will work in his favour going into game seven at Rexall Place. The Stanley Cup is in the building, his building, and this is his crowd, his city. The distance between games, the long flights and the ways they all ache in their seats, are almost as punishing as the games themselves.

Like all but games three and five of this series, it goes into overtime. And then overtime again. They were stuck at 0-0 until the third period, and by the time Shane catches a rebound and tucks it so neatly around the goal post it just has to go in, they’ve been at 1-1 for 37 minutes and 48 seconds. It’s like time slows down. He watches the puck wobble in the air, watches the way Florida’s goalie isn’t looking at Shane because he’s watching—well, Shane isn’t sure, the jumbotron maybe? And then he watches the goalie who isn’t watching him slam his body to the left, get in the way at the last possible second to make a positively miraculous save. He watches the puck halt against the padding under the sweater, the big body falling on top of it, stopping it. There’s a whistle, a faceoff Shane wins, and then the sort of desperate hockey the cup final game can’t help but warrant. The kind of recklessness. They are all men who have decided hockey is worth their bodies, worth bleeding for, breaking for, loving anyway.

Ilya Rozanov slams the puck into the back of Darryn’s net seven minutes and fourteen seconds later. There are bodies in between him and the goal but none in quite the right spot to block what must be a 160km/h slapshot. The cup-winning goal is scored from the blue line, by the same man who scored the winning goal last year, and Shane can’t hate him.

The Cougars are met halfway across the ice by their goaltender, and there is Rozanov right in the middle of it, sweaty and breathing heavily and already missing his helmet, gloves and stick. He is smiling and when Shane looks up at him, giant on the jumbotron, he doesn’t struggle to read the relief in it. It strikes him as odd, even if he is having a hard time pinpointing precisely why. There are pockets of Florida fans in the crowd but most of the spectators came here to see the Sanders win. And Shane has let them down. He can see it on every face he looks at so he stops looking at anything but the cut-up ice, the evidence of the game he lost.

He drives himself home, sore and defeated and miserable and getting too used to the way that feels. And still part of him hopes beyond all reason that Rozanov might show up to his door again, drunk on a win, smelling like champagne and sweat, elated in a way that suits him even if it necessarily means Shane is miserable. He hopes for a measly consolation prize.

His doorbell doesn’t ring. He stays up late to wait for it, just in case, and doesn’t realise until the next morning, staring at the spinach and kale at the bottom of his blender, that Rozanov doesn’t know his address. He’s never been here. Shane lets himself wonder if things would be different if he did. Then if Rozanov even considered texting to ask for it.

Shane finds a somewhat flimsy excuse to stay in Edmonton for a couple of weeks before his parents are expecting him to join them in Lanaudière. He starts looking into contractors to build his own cabin close by to theirs—not for the first time—because he has been spending all of his summers there anyway, despite all his umming and ahhing.

He has promised to babysit for the Pikes for a weekend so they can have some time away together before they go back to Jackie’s family in Quebec who they love but find to be the perfect opposite of relaxing. That’s it. There are other people who’d be willing to do it: other teammates, friends of Jackie’s from her book club, her yoga class, other WAGs, and, failing that, they have the money to hire someone for a few days. But Shane volunteered, even if he doesn’t really like sticky toddler hands and sticky toddler messes. Mostly just for a few days of peace between then and the end of playoffs where nobody will be expecting anything at all from him. Not even the bare minimum level of performance he is affecting all of the time.

He reads about a third of a book that isn’t even tangentially about hockey before he gets bored of it. He listens to the albums his teammates recommend—well, not Harjanne. Shane has heard enough weird Finnish metal to know he doesn’t like it—and doesn’t finish a single one of them because he just doesn’t get it. He does yoga in his living room in the spot of sun streaming through the full-length window and doesn’t understand how Jackie makes this such a social activity as she does. He double checks that Darryn’s packing list for his roadtrip back to Wisconsin isn’t missing anything important because Darryn asked him to and Shane appreciates forethought and organisation. He shoves all the couch cushions and his grey, mostly decorative quilt onto the floor and just sits amongst them, between the coffee table and the sofa, and stares out the window. At the Rockies in the distance. He thinks about the size of them, how they shape the landscape. He goes for a day hike and doesn’t pack enough food even though he is supposed to be recovering from playoffs.

He drives halfway to the Dowds’—where they still live even though neither of them is originally from Edmonton and they have no real reason to stay here except that it has been their home for something like twenty years and it isn’t the sort of home they want to leave behind—then parks his car in town and walks the rest of the way. He gets nervous when he walks up to their door then knocks anyway, and when Isaac Dowd opens it he is beaming. And greying. Shane is having a hard time not thinking that he looks different, old, because he also looks happy. Softer around the edges. Dowd doesn’t even seem surprised to see him.

“Long time no see.” Shane offers a hand because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Dowd rolls his eyes but still shakes it. “I knew you’d be back eventually.”

“You did?”

“Well, I hoped. Come on kid, come inside. Talk.”

“Can we talk in the garden, actually?”

“Sure, Lucy has been teaching me the ropes out there. You still have her herbs?”

Shane, as a general rule, doesn’t cook. He doesn’t remember the last time he used them. They live on the windowsill in his kitchen, thriving in the sunlight. He has a list of belongings he’d save in a house fire or similar disaster on his phone, and they’re ranked probably inappropriately highly on it. “Yes.”

The culmination of Shane’s concerns comes out of his mouth too simply, too plainly, missing all the nuance he wishes he knew how to articulate: “Am I fucking it up?”

“I captained that team for years,” Dowd tells him with saintly patience, “and I never got them past the second round of playoffs once. We missed playoffs completely most years. This isn’t what fucking it up looks like.”

Shane swallows dry air and looks up at the wisps of pink-tinged clouds in the blue sky over the trees disguising the garden fence from his view. He doesn’t know what time it is. It’s easy this far north to lose track in the light nights and dark afternoons. It’s easy to think, the closer he gets to either solstice, that this night or this day will be infinite, everything. He shouldn’t like it but it’s nice to let himself believe sometimes that maybe he exists outside of time. There is no clock ticking, nothing catching up to him. There is something that can go on forever, that doesn’t have to end—and of course it does, but he ignores that pesky little fact as well as he can, for as long as he can.

 “Rozanov,” Shane chokes out, not sure where the rest of that sentence is supposed to go, very aware that there is a secret that sits on the back of his tongue, that too often seeks forbidden passage past his teeth. That there is a part of him without self-preservation instincts that contemplates ripping the bandaid off every time he thinks about the wound. And he does think about the wound. Like an itch that doesn’t go away unless you are actively scratching it. The kind that demands you break the skin then keep scratching with blood under your nails.

Dowd nods knowingly anyway. He doesn’t know, can’t, but he obviously doesn’t realise anything is a miss. Shane thinks again about his position in the NHL, and his position in Rozanov’s bed, how one is shared with only one other person and the other is shared by a long list of women and, presumably, other men. How both feel special anyway. Special enough that he finds himself so consumed by the allure of the second he can’t help but risk the first for it. “Rozanov is your perfect match. And apparently luckier than you.”

“I love playing him,” Shane admits, in a way that makes the truth even heavier than it already is. “I hate losing to him. We hang out at All Stars and I feel like I’m doing something wrong.” There is more he could say, that he wants to say, but he doesn’t.

“Everyone has friends on other teams.” Dowd shrugs. “You’re in a unique position and he’s someone who gets it.” Like it’s easy. Like it ever could be. Shane considers the half-truth, how simple it would be to crack it open. How fragile everything he has ever worked for is.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Well,” there’s something so easy about Dowd, with his silver-streaked beard and his missing teeth he still hasn’t bothered to fix, and his beautiful garden and his everything, that Shane envies, “what you’ve been doing has been working pretty well if you ask me.”

“What I’ve been doing,” Shane echoes bitterly and does not explain the glaring problems with. He has had satisfying sex four times in the past year or so, which is a new personal best that beats the previous one by four. He has found a new way to belong in his body, a sort of submissive power in granting someone else access to it. He wants it even more now that he has had it. He thinks he might have ruined himself forever by giving into desire just once. He likes what he has been doing well enough but he suspects that his would be a very fringe opinion in the league.

“Whatever you’ve been doing is working for you,” Dowd reiterates, then squeezes Shane’s shoulder and gets up with a groan on creaking knees that betray both their age and the years of abuse they’ve been subjected to. He leaves Shane there, in his garden, without a book or a ginger ale, to watch the sunset and smell the flowers and sit on the grass for as long as it takes for his legs to start to itch.

Shane hates the word almost. He hates the shape of it, the sound of it, the meaning. He hates knowing that Florida thought long and hard about whether to draft him or Rozanov first, that he was almost the first overall pick. He hates that he has almost won two stanley cups but never been able to touch it, never gotten a ring. He hates the silver Olympic medal that lives in his office-slash-trophy-room, because it was almost a gold. He hates the fact that the deciding game was lost in overtime. He hates his apartment that almost feels like a home—not his, but someone’s. He hates how often he feels like he is almost living up to the legend the league wrote for him before he was even a real part of it.

It’s all over the locker room when they come back to training: almost almost almost. It’s less of an energy this year and more of a tension. There’s a bomb in the room and they are all passing it back and forth, cradled carefully between calloused palms, keeping themselves almost safe so long as they don’t jostle it into detonating.

It’s throwing them off. They struggle through the pre-season and it’s obvious that something that was working for them last year isn’t working anymore. Shane tries to pinpoint what it is. So does Tremblay. But their combined efforts fall short and it isn’t even a matter of almost.

They stumble through the start of the season clumsily and lose their first game, and then their second and third. They win the fourth, and look like they might win the fifth too, up until the third period when their 3-1 lead suddenly becomes 3-3 and Knowles tweaks that same old injury less than a minute into overtime.

They keep playing through it, trying to iron out the bumps whenever it becomes a little bit clearer where exactly those bumps are. Shane needs to get everything back in order, needs to make it the same as it was last year, and then force it to be even better.

It’s still not quite right by All Stars, though it is getting better. In a further attempt to keep doing the same thing as last year and definitely not something more selfish, more poorly considered, Shane finds himself in Rozanov’s hotel room again. Fighting himself to stay quiet. At one point, when Shane is holding Rozanov by the hips, pressing a hot kiss to the skin below his navel, he catches sight of another bruise—palm sized and obvious—at the top of Rozanov’s leg, right where it meets his hip. Shane presses his thumb into it experimentally, which is not to say gently, and the way that Rozanov groans rather than yelping or backing away radiates through him. He gets it, Shane thinks. He gets this too. He understands how worthwhile things leave an impression.

Later that night Shane lets himself be just a little bit intentional about raking his nails down Rozanov’s back.

Aside from the sex, they’re the same as they’ve always been. They talk about Rozanov’s ridiculous cars. The stupidest things their teammates have ever done. The fact that Rozanov is allowed to punch Dallas Kent but Shane has to rise above it. They don’t talk about the secret. It exists only behind locked doors which is what makes it such a good secret. Shane hits him hard on the back, outwardly nothing more than a friendly gesture, where he knows the scratches are, just to watch his eyes go dark.

The Sanders stumble back into their usual rhythm when they get back from the break. It’s enough to clinch them the first Western Wildcard spot. Both of their games with the Cougars are clustered closely together at the tail end of the season and, even though they, as usual, win one and lose the other, Shane would still consider both of them amongst the best games the team has played in months.

The playoff spot is a relief in a way playoff spots haven’t been the past couple of years. Shane tries to do the Good Captain thing and has the guys over. It’s a party in their parlance and a gathering in his. He asks Darryn to choose the music and Hayden to choose the catering and buy the right amount of the right beers. Shane drags the monstera to his bedroom just in case, then moves the herb garden in there for the night too.

Darryn and Hayden help him set up, along with Jackie—who is pretty heavily pregnant and mostly just there for moral support and good vibes—and Darryn’s new Girlfriend, Petra, who Shane has met a few times but never quite so officially. She has been pre-vetted by Jackie, and Darryn’s judgement is generally reliable so long as nobody gets tequila involved, so Shane tries to accept that she is carefully carrying dining chairs into his lounge so nobody scrapes them all the way across the floor later. She picks up his copy of Sharp Objects from the coffee table where it has lived for months, still bookmarked a third of the way in, and asks if it’s any good. Shane shrugs, says he hasn’t finished it, and tells her to keep it so he can stop lying to himself that he’s going to read the rest someday. It disappears into her brown leather designer handbag, which also gets stashed in Shane’s room before the gathering starts, along with the other things he doesn’t want to see ruined.

Less than an hour after he arrives fifteen minutes late, Guthrie spills the last quarter of his Molsons on Shane’s grey quilt and starts apologising profusely—Hayden jabs him softly in the ribs with his elbow, says “We’ll make a Canadian of you yet!”—and promising to pay to have it dry-cleaned. Shane just throws it out.

The whole thing is more of a success than he thought it would be. It cuts through the remainder of the weird energy that’s been plaguing them, and he has some nice if slightly stilted surface-level conversations with the WAGs, and then works with Harjanne’s wife, Saana, to produce a painstakingly detailed breakdown of all of pros and cons of facing LA in the first round that keeps them both entertained even if only Hayden and Darryn really humour them by listening to it.

Two people leave tins of nicotine pouches between the cushions of his couch—technically preferable to smoking, he supposes, but gross in a different way and still something he’d rather his team of professional athletes stayed away from—he assumes unintentionally. He could find out who they belong to, but whoever they are, they're also millionaires who can afford replacements; he puts them in a black garbage bag alongside all the rest of the trash.

They lose the first game of the series and win the next four. Meanwhile something strange is happening in Florida and the team that won the cup two years in a row, despite being mostly unchanged from last post-season, just doesn’t… click. Rozanov still plays like Rozanov. They still have a goalie with a .912 regular season save percentage. They have some of the tallest d-men in the league, who still dominate the ice. And it just doesn’t work. They lose the first two games then struggle all the way through to a game seven they win with twelve total shots on goal only because their goaltender is a brick wall. Then they lose to Toronto in five.

Edmonton loses the conference final in six games to Minnesota. It’s a good effort, one it didn’t look like they’d be capable of when the season began. Harjanne organises last-minute watch parties at his house for every game that stands a chance of being the cup final. They’re all exhausted, boneless on his couch. He has his leg propped up on a cushion on the coffee table, his knee in a brace. He is going to spend the off-season having surgery then recovering from it, and they all know it but don’t talk about it.

Montreal win it eventually, after a hard-fought game seven. They’re Shane’s mom’s team and always have been, so she’ll be thrilled and doing a bad job of hiding it. He’ll enjoy poking and prodding her about it once his own loss has stopped stinging quite so much. The team's family pour onto the ice, trying their level best not to slip, and nobody is really watching the TV anymore because the important things are over.

Shane’s phone buzzes in his pocket, with a call from Lily. He looks at it for a second like he’s trying to make sense of it, then walks into the hallway before he presses answer.

“Did you see Comeau’s wife?” No greeting, no preamble.

“Probably?” Shane could probably count the amount of times he’s spoken to Montreal’s Gilbert Comeau on one hand. Presumably his wife was one of the women who joined the team on the ice but Shane doesn’t know which one. The only player from Montreal he ever meets off the ice is JJ Boiziau—they’re Hayden’s old team and does exactly the same.

Rozanov hums. “She is cheating on him.”

“Oh.”

“Whenever we are in Montreal, Peters disappears, has done for years. He got drunk at team party and lost his phone, and Ivan found it, thought it was funny to call his Montreal girl—we played them a few days before and he had big bruise on neck, liked marked territory. Comeau answered, very confused why the babysitter was calling his wife at 2am.”

“Oh,” Shane says again, thinking about the one person saved under a fake contact in his phone because he is allowed to be friends with Rozanov but most of their texts aren’t exactly friendly and they can’t risk anyone knowing about the benefits of said friendship. “It definitely wasn’t something like… this? What we do, I mean.”

Rozanov lets out a single bark of laughter. It’s loud through the phone. “Gilbert Comeau? No. Nope. Never.”

Shane feels somewhat inclined to laugh back. “How are you so sure?”

“I know these things. Some people are very obvious about them.”

“Oh, fuck off.” Shane smiles in spite of himself for a moment before he panics. “Does anyone think anything of you disappearing in Edmonton?”

“Ah, no. I don’t think so. I disappear everywhere.”

It helps with the panic somewhat, but not without putting a strange sour taste in his mouth. They don’t say much more after that.

Shane walks back into the living room and sits back in the same spot on the couch, between Hayden and Harjanne. “Who’s Lily?” Hayden asks him with a cocked eyebrow, not exactly as quietly as Shane wishes he would.

“Nobody,” Shane hisses back, which is completely true. Lily doesn’t exist.

Shane scans the TV for Comeau’s semi-familiar face. He finds him quickly enough, a short woman with bleached blonde hair leaning into his side and beaming for the crowd, for the cameras.

A year later they are in Harjanne’s living room again, pressed a little too closely together on his couch which is technically supposed to seat four people but probably didn’t predict that all four of those people would be 200+ pound professional hockey players. Shane is drinking a ginger ale because Harjanne—or, more likely, Saana—bought some specifically for him after he spent last year's watch parties drinking nothing but water.

The team is mostly the same except for the fact that it’s missing Guthrie. He was traded without warning, to Anaheim. Shane read back his own contract when it happened, mostly the no trade clause, just to reassure himself that this couldn’t happen to him—except, if anyone found out, there’s no way of predicting what would happen to him. Maybe being traded to Anaheim rather than being booted from the league entirely would be a best-case scenario.

They’re watching the Royals play the Admirals in New York. Game seven, 1-1 at the second intermission. Scott Hunter’s name has unfortunately become nearly synonymous with falling short of expectations in the league. This year he has had his wobbles in the regular season but led his team to playoffs and then through them. Finally been the player he usually is in three game increments for long enough for it to make a real impact.

Shane has met him at All Stars a few times. He’s a nice enough guy. Shane wouldn’t mind seeing him win more than he minds seeing anyone else win. It still makes his ribs feel tight, his lungs too small for everything he needs to hold in them. Because he still doesn’t know what the cup feels like in his hands, hoisted above his head for a well-earned victory lap. His name still isn’t on it.

Scott Hunter’s will be. Fifteen minutes into the third period he assists on a goal that ticks the score to 2-1. It stays that way for the rest of the game and then the Admirals are flinging helmets, crashing into each other, celebrating like people who hadn’t let themselves believe this could happen, who are just now realising that it’s real. It’s theirs. It should be Shane’s.

He shouldn’t be bitter but he’s getting fucking sick of almost.

He loves his team, he does, and he’s pretty sure they like him too, but it feels, every time they drag him to a club or probe about Lily—who they shouldn’t know about at all—or mention not quite off-handedly that their wife has a friend he should meet, like they don’t actually know how to do that. Like there is always some sort of disconnect. Like he should be able to overcome it if he can just be normal, be who they need him to be. It feels like he is constantly falling short of what they need him to be; bumping up against new versions of almost all the time.

On Harjanne’s big TV, Scott Hunter skates his lap with the cup, then passes it to Vaughn, and there’s something strange about his face. Something not like the usual elation of a winning captain, something that doesn’t match the giddy excitement of his teammates. It doesn’t even manage to be as uncomplicated as Rozanov’s bizarre relief. He stands away from the rest of the team, looking up at the crowd as the team’s family floods the ice just like any other year.

Hunter is an orphan. This is a thing that Shane, like anyone else, knows but rarely if ever thinks about. There is nobody on the ice for him. There was never anybody on the ice for Rozanov either, but Shane had never really had the mental space to think much about it, considering that both of Rozanov’s wins coincided with his own losses. As the team celebrates, kisses their wives, hugs their mothers, Hunter finds someone in the crowd and calls something up to them, beckoning them down. The commentators don’t know what to make of it, and neither does Shane. At least until there is a man scrambling over the boards, holding onto Hunter’s hands for balance.

Shane puts it together then. “What’s he doing?” Darryn asks. Nobody else has figured it out yet apparently, but there is still something about the hesitating, halting form the conversation takes that makes it clear that they don’t understand what’s happening, but they do know that it must be important. Somehow.

Shane isn’t part of the chatter. He’s bracing his elbows on his knees, leaning closer to the TV like there’s any chance he’s about to miss what’s going to happen next. As if the camera could possibly focus on anything else. He is already thinking about what this means for him, before Hunter is kissing this random guy on the ice—and he is just a random guy. Not a public figure, and definitely not one from a country that would make this dangerous for him. It’s complicated, absolutely, but to Shane specifically it seems relatively simple, relatively easy. By the time their lips touch, everybody ese has gotten with the program, put two and two together to make four.

“No way,” Süsskind says.

“Holy shit,” Hayden says, jostling Shane’s shoulder like he wants to hear his response too. The exact form of simple awe he will opt for.

Shane says nothing. He can’t. There isn’t space in his brain to form words, to do more than stare wide-eyed at the TV and feel too big for his body. Everybody else is shocked too, but not how Shane is shocked. They’re just surprised; he is being restructured. He is thinking maybe and failing to elaborate further because he doesn’t know where to go from here—maybe what exactly? What does he want? Why does he think that maybe he can have it?

He stays still for too long, then stands up like he’s just remembering that moving is an option, that he knows a friend whose reaction to this is going to be something more important than monosyllabic shock. He still doesn’t say anything, just fishes his phone from his pocket, walks out of the room, out of the house, and all the way to his car before he presses the call button. To keep the secret safe.