Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Wyatt Hayes, Ottawa Centaurs Team Ensemble (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Autistic Shane Hollander, Panic Attacks, Explicit Sexual Content, Sexual Overstimulation, Ottawa Centaurs are the best team, Found Family, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, post TLG, TLG Spoilers, POV Ilya Rozanov, POV Wyatt Hayes, POV Outsider on Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Homophobia

Language:

English

Collections:

Hollanov, *Heated rivalry melts my heart*, miQ_y's fav fav fics

Stats:

Published: 2026-02-27 Words: 7,429 Chapters: 1/1

Before It Gets Too Loud

Summary

Ilya realized that he had two choices, and neither of them was very good. He could let his teammates believe he was a controlling asshole of a husband, or he could talk to them about things that Shane would probably prefer to keep to himself. He knew how private his husband was, how much time he’d spent cultivating a very particular image of himself to the world. An image of himself that only Ilya and a few other people were ever able to see behind.

or

Wyatt Hayes and the rest of the Ottawa Centaurs find out that Shane Hollander isn’t exactly what they’d imagined.

Notes

So I’ve had a bunch of thematically connected post-TLG scenes in my brain for a while, but I thought maybe they’d fit better into a larger narrative. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a larger narrative in mind. My original plan had been to wait until Unrivaled comes out to see more details about the actual state of things in canon, but since the book has been postponed and I’m not sure if I’d remember the nuance of what I was going for with those scenes once it’s finally released, I decided to hunker down and try to make them into at least a satisfying oneshot, so they don’t get lost to the ether.

When planning this out, I went back and forth between whether I wanted to write from Ilya’s POV or Wyatt’s POV, so I made a weird choice and did both. 🤪

Shane was being twitchy. That could describe Shane on a lot of days, but usually those days were the stressful ones, like the first day of coaching in the summer, or the beginning of the season, or any time they’d been doing anything that Shane had feared might out them to the world. But the summer camps were over, the season hadn’t quite started yet, and they were already out and married, and still, Shane was nearly as uptight as Ilya had ever seen him. 

Ilya loved Shane more than anything, but sometimes understanding what was going on in Shane Hollander’s brain could be very challenging. He was sure if he asked Shane what was wrong, Shane would insist that nothing was bothering him—or if he did acknowledge it, he wouldn’t have words to explain why he was upset. Shane wasn’t like Ilya in that way, where he’d sit around and dissect his own feelings, and maybe it was better for Shane that he didn’t. Ilya’s brain needed medication to get all its chemicals in the right places, so Shane was probably lucky that he didn’t think too deeply on things like that. 

But that made it difficult, sometimes, to figure out how to help Shane when he was having one of those anxious moments. Sex was nearly always a good option, but sex probably wasn’t on the table when they had nearly the entire lineup of the Ottawa Centaurs gathered together in their house. That wasn’t the impression Shane wanted to give to his new teammates, probably. 

That might be it, actually, the more that Ilya thought about it. Shane knew the members of the team already, at least in passing from playing against them, but most of what he knew about them personally came from Ilya’s stories. That was why Ilya had proposed they have the team and their partners over before the season started. Shane had agreed with the suggestion, even slightly enthusiastically—or as enthusiastic as Shane Hollander ever got about anything that wasn’t hockey or Ilya’s dick, anyway. It was supposed to be casual and relaxing and fun. 

Except Shane was anything but casual and relaxed. He was perched on the edge of the sofa next to Ilya, seemingly listening to something Wyatt Hayes was saying, except his posture was stiff and his eyes had started doing that glazed-over thing where he stared off into the middle distance while he nodded periodically to show he was listening. Ilya wondered if he was. 

It had probably been a mistake to suggest casual and relaxing. Shane had never been great at being causal or at relaxing, and he was sure that most people wouldn’t call Shane fun either. Ilya had a lot of fun with Shane, of course, but no one else ever got to see Shane having that kind of fun, and if Ilya had his way, no one else ever would. Though Ilya had hoped that maybe Shane would unwind a little now that they no longer had such a huge secret hanging over them.  

But Shane hadn’t had to integrate into a new team for more than a decade, so maybe it was too much all at once. Or maybe it was so many people in their space, touching things and leaving messes. He’d been fine at the wedding, with all the guests in their house, but maybe that day had just been happy enough for even Shane Hollander to overlook some things that would usually bother him. 

Whatever it was, it was definitely something, and Ilya loved making Shane annoyed, but not like this. Not when it was real, and Shane was...well, Ilya was pretty sure his therapist might call this dissociating, and Ilya was about three seconds from wanting to kick all their teammates out of their house. And he liked their teammates quite a lot, but he’d do it in an instant if it would make Shane feel better. 

But it wouldn’t make Shane feel better, and Ilya knew that. Because they were technically hosting, no matter how casually, and Shane would hate thinking that he’d been a bad host. And he’d hate if that was the first impression that he’d left with all his new teammates. So Ilya had to find another way to fix this. 

“Well, that’s because Bruce Wayne has an adoption problem,” Hazy was saying to Evan Dykstra, and clearly Ilya had zoned out quite a bit thinking about Shane, because he hadn’t even noticed that suddenly, they were talking about Batman. Shane would definitely have nothing to contribute to this conversation, which was maybe the real reason he was nodding along so vaguely. Ilya wasn’t even sure Shane knew that Bruce Wayne was Batman.  

“I mean, is it a problem, though?” Caitlin Dykstra argued back. Ilya blinked at the realization that they were having a serious debate about Batman’s family life. Ilya was definitely not drunk enough for this, and sadly, Shane was not drunk at all. Ilya looked at his beer, which was not quite empty, and then he had an idea. He chugged the rest of it and then tapped Shane on the arm with the empty bottle. 

“Shane,” he said, maybe a little too loudly, because more than just Shane looked at him. Shane blinked a few times like he’d just come out of a trance. “Get me another beer.” 

Shane seemed a little dazed for a second before he looked down at Ilya’s empty bottle and appeared to make sense of the request.  

“Oh, yeah, sure,” he mumbled hazily, grabbing Ilya’s empty beer bottle and standing up to make his way toward the kitchen. Part of Ilya hoped that Shane might get his own beer, although he knew Shane wouldn’t. It was too close to the start of the season for Shane to drink alcohol, even newly-free-from-his-evil-diet-Shane. Even before the horrible diet, Shane rarely drank, which was both charming and frustrating, because there were a very small number of things that could make Shane Hollander relax, and alcohol was usually off the table. And Ilya really liked to see his husband relaxed. 

When Shane had disappeared from view, Ilya turned back to the group around him to find that (a) no one was arguing about Batman anymore and (b) everyone was staring at him. And none of them looked happy. 

“What the fuck, dude?” Wyatt said, sounding offended. In the years they’d played together, Ilya had rarely heard Wyatt Hayes get angry, and pretty much never at him. Ilya was suddenly very confused. 

“What?” 

Dykstra made a gesture that Ilya wasn’t sure how to interpret but he thought maybe meant that it didn’t need explanation. Except that for Ilya, apparently it did. 

“Do you always order your husband around like that?” Wyatt’s wife Lisa asked, quite a bit more delicately. Ilya almost grinned and said, Yes, sometimes, but they really didn’t need to know any details about what Shane liked in bed. Also, they appeared genuinely upset, and Ilya suddenly realized what they must be thinking. 

Which was...maybe a problem. Obviously because he really didn’t want his team to think he was a genuinely terrible husband to Shane, but that wasn’t the only reason. Because Ilya realized that he had two choices, and neither of them was very good. He could let his teammates believe he was a controlling asshole of a husband, or he could talk to them about things that Shane would probably prefer to keep to himself. He knew how private his husband was, how much time he’d spent cultivating a very particular image of himself to the world. An image of himself that only Ilya and a few other people were ever able to see behind. 

But it would be worse for Shane if they started to think bad things about Shane and Ilya’s relationship, because then they would go to Shane and start asking him questions that Shane would find very awkward having to answer. Ilya sighed and made a decision. 

“Shane is...” Ilya trailed off, trying to find the words “...sometimes, he needs a break from people for a few minutes. But he will not take one unless someone tells him.”  

And Ilya really hoped that Shane had taken the hint he hadn’t actually been able to say, because Shane was not good at taking hints. It had taken Ilya years to realize this. Shane needed to be told things directly, but Ilya had been hoping to avoid...this, exactly. Shane had had enough time to come back with Ilya’s beer already, so Ilya hoped that he’d understood, that he was taking a minute of quiet for himself in the kitchen. 

Caitlyn Dykstra’s face crumpled into something soft. “That’s sweet, actually,” she said smiling. Ilya shrugged. 

“Is normal, yes? To know things about your partner?” 

The rest of their small group’s faces had gone stupidly sappy, too. “Only Ilya Rozanov could find a way to make being an asshole into being a good partner,” said Evan Dykstra, shaking his head with a smile on his face, too. Wyatt winced. 

“Sorry, Roz,” he apologized, “I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions like that. I know you’re a good guy.” 

Maybe Ilya should have been offended that they so easily believed that he was a dick to his husband in a way Shane didn’t like, but he wasn’t offended at all. Actually, it was the opposite. 

“No, no,” Ilya dismissed. “I am glad that you would stand up for Shane. Even against me.” 

Shane chose that moment to reappear with a new bottle of beer and a fresh can of ginger ale for himself. He also looked...refreshed, maybe, or at least less like a zombie, and Ilya was gratified that his little plan had worked, even if he’d had to have an annoying conversation. He hoped none of them said anything about it to Shane. Talking about it would definitely make Shane uncomfortable again. 

Shane wasn’t the best at reading social cues, but even he could tell that something was strange about the group. He glanced back and forth between the five of them. 

“What is everybody smiling about?” he asked suspiciously, sliding back into place beside Ilya on the sofa and handing Ilya his beer. Ilya gave Shane his most innocent smile. 

“I was telling everyone how much I love you,” Ilya told him quite sincerely. That was what he had been doing, in a way. He loved the blush that found its way to Shane’s face beneath his freckles. 

“You’re so embarrassing,” Shane complained. Ilya just grabbed Shane’s hand and kissed it, reveling in Shane’s annoyed groan. 

---

Shane Hollander wasn’t quite what Wyatt Hayes expected. It seemed like a weird thing to say, considering that he’d coached with Shane for multiple years at his and Ilya’s summer hockey camp. Out of all the members of the Ottawa Centaurs—except, obviously, Ilya—he probably had the claim of knowing Shane Hollander best. But once Shane joined the Centaurs, Wyatt began to feel like he didn’t know Shane Hollander at all. 

When Wyatt had met Shane, he had always come across confident, self-assured, well-spoken. When they’d played games against the Voyageurs, when they’d been at the All-Star Game, Shane had always seemed perfectly poised and in control. The only time Wyatt had seen Shane look truly nervous had been at those camps, coaching the kids—because it was obvious that he wasn’t a natural with children, not the way that Ilya was.  

But when Shane Hollander had entered the NHL as a teenager, he’d already sounded like he’d had years of media training, like he’d been made for answering reporters’ inane and repetitive hockey questions. He was insanely focused on the ice, which was still true even close up, and he was still one of the most talented players Wyatt had ever seen. 

But off the ice, Shane was different. Uptight was the word that Ilya had used to describe his husband, though he’d said it with an annoyed sort of fondness, and it seemed like an accurate assessment.  

The first time Wyatt had noticed it was when Shane and Ilya had hosted the team and their partners at their house before the season started. He still felt bad for assuming that Ilya was somehow an awful and controlling husband, but in Wyatt’s defense, he’d never seen Ilya Rozanov in a relationship before that, for obvious reasons. Wyatt knew better than to believe that just because someone had always been nice to him that that meant he couldn’t be awful to someone else.  

Wyatt was thankful that that wasn’t the case, obviously, because he liked Ilya Rozanov an awful lot. He was a great friend, a great teammate, and a great captain. But Wyatt definitely would have tossed that all out the window if he’d thought his friend was mistreating his husband. 

But after what Ilya had told them, even if he hadn’t said much—even though he’d obviously wanted to respect Shane’s privacy—Wyatt had started to notice things. It had become clear, after a certain point in the afternoon, what Ilya had been noticing in Shane, when he’d started to get tense and glaze over, like he was overloaded on human contact for the day. Wyatt had very subtly started trying to convince his teammates to head out after that. He wasn’t sure if Shane and Ilya had noticed. 

And Wyatt had started watching Shane pretty closely, although he wasn’t alone in that on the team. They all knew that Shane Hollander was probably the most talented player in the NHL, that he’d taken a huge pay cut to join their team. That they were all fucking lucky to have him, to practice with him and play with him and learn from him. Wyatt was a goalie, so it wasn’t like there were a lot of a skater’s skills he wanted to learn to emulate, but practicing against Shane every day was an exhilarating challenge, and so different than only playing against him a few times a year. 

Shane was incredibly awkward in a way that Wyatt had never realized before. Unless he was talking to Ilya, it was almost like he didn’t understand the flow of a conversation, because when he was asked a question, half the time he seemed to give an answer that was impossible to follow up on. It usually came out forced when he asked anyone else a question, like he was belatedly reminding himself that it was polite to seem interested in the person you were talking to.  

With anyone else, Wyatt might have thought that it was just that he hadn’t had time to integrate with the team yet. And that was probably part of it, but the only person that Shane seemed to have smooth conversations with was his husband, and that mostly seemed to be because Ilya spent a good amount of time antagonizing Shane to get him to respond. Apparently, chirping was their love language, weird as that seemed. 

Wyatt didn’t think it was malicious. In fact, Wyatt had some suspicions about why Shane might be the way that he was, not that he was going to bring it up. He was sure that Shane probably knew, but it wasn’t as though he was obligated to share his diagnosis with his team or with the world. But after his sister’s journey through getting her son diagnosed, after all the hours that Wyatt had spent reading through articles about autism to try to support his sister and his nephew any way he could, he thought he recognized some of the signs. 

Hockey players were all very particular in certain ways. Most people taped their stick exactly the same way every time, had idiosyncrasies about their gear, and had all kinds of weird rituals they went through before a game. But with Shane, it seemed like it was more than that. Everything in his stall was placed very precisely, in exactly the same position every time. He had the same—very disgusting, according to Ilya—protein smoothie every day. More than once, Wyatt had watched him repark his car because it hadn’t been perfectly between the lines. 

Shane Hollander had, it could be charitably said, a very particular opinion about how everything should be done. He wasn’t overbearing about it, and the only person he ever nagged about doing things ‘wrong’ was Ilya, who seemed to be used to it and even do things on purpose to invite Shane’s criticism on some days.  

But on the ice, they both took things quite seriously. And on days when Ilya was running drills, everything with Shane always went smoothly. Those two were so in sync on the ice that it wasn’t difficult to believe that they’d apparently been together for years and no one had been the wiser. 

But Bood had...a particular way of running drills that could be described, at best, as carefully controlled chaos. Some of the team hated it and groaned about it, but no one seemed to hate it more than Shane did. Ilya was pretty talented at soothing Shane’s annoyance on those days, but it was clear that Shane functioned better under something more regimented, was frustrated with Bood’s barely structured approach. 

So yeah, Wyatt had noticed some signs, though obviously, he did not know for sure, and it really wasn’t his business either way. Maybe autism was even the reason that Shane was as great as he was, because he had an almost singular focus on hockey that most of the team wasn’t able to match. 

But whatever quirks Shane had, Wyatt started trying to make things easier for him. Most of the team was ready to roll out the red carpet for Shane Fucking Hollander anyway, so it wasn’t that hard to try to convince Bood to please reign in some of his chaos or to maybe not extend incredibly last-minute barbecue invitations after Ilya had politely declined for both of them, citing unspecified plans.  

Wyatt convinced the kids, despite their boundless enthusiasm to be playing with Shane Hollander, that maybe there was a limit to how many questions they could ask him at one time. On days when Wyatt noticed Shane bouncing his leg or picking at his cuticles—which Ilya gently put a stop to, when he saw it—he’d managed to convince everyone to leave Shane alone and to definitely not touch him. He’d also started finding increasingly ridiculous reasons for someone to ask Shane to go somewhere outside with them when the dressing room was just getting too loud and rowdy, whether it was Harris asking Shane to take Chiron out or someone needing a sudden, desperate coffee run because the coffee at the practice facility simply was not adequate. 

Ilya noticed, Wyatt was pretty sure. Wyatt was also pretty sure that Shane hadn’t noticed anything, although he did seem to think Wyatt was a little weird. Which was fine, because Wyatt was more than a little weird, and everyone in the hockey world knew that goalies were weird. 

As their first game against the Voyageurs approached, Shane got significantly antsier. Any player tended to, their first time playing against a former team, and most players didn’t have as many years with a team or nearly as dramatic a departure as Shane Hollander had had. The Montreal press was relentless as the game approached, bringing up the circumstances of the Voyageurs’ playoff elimination the previous season and all but calling Shane a traitor in big, bold letters. 

Anyone would be nervous, but Shane was anxious on a level that the whole team had started to notice. Everyone gave him a wide berth in the dressing room for the whole week leading up to their game in Montreal, and Wyatt was slightly concerned when Shane suddenly started ordering almost exclusively salads with the dressing on the side whenever they ate together, even though Shane had insisted he’d given up the high performance diet he’d been on the previous season. The last time, when Wyatt had shot Ilya a look, Ilya had just pursed his lips tightly and shook his head. 

So yeah, Shane was obviously struggling off the ice. On the ice, he was nothing short of amazing, sharp and focused and playing with more energy at thirty than he had at twenty. Ilya seemed to be making a concerted effort to keep the team’s concern away from Shane, and Wyatt was inclined to trust him now when it came to what Shane might need when he was struggling. Also, Shane Hollander was a grown man, and the last thing Wyatt wanted to do was infantalize the most talented center in the NHL. 

Shane sat alone on the bus ride to Montreal, headphones on with his eyes closed or gazing out the window, and they were all inclined to let Shane Hollander do whatever Shane Hollander needed to do to get through his first game against the team that had, for lack of a better description, entirely betrayed him. It was pretty clear that everyone, Coach Wiebe included, expected several players to spend time in the penalty box if any Montreal player tried to start something with Shane, and he hadn’t even tried to dissuade them. 

---

The game in Montreal went better than Ilya had expected. Mostly, he’d expected to spend at least five or ten minutes in the sin bin for fighting, but Wiebe had seemed fairly pleased when Ilya’s only penalty for the whole game had been a double minor for high sticking, which he had definitely done on purpose, not that he’d admit that out loud. Those things sometimes happen in hockey, he’d told the reporter when they’d interviewed him during the first intermission. 

Wiebe had run Ilya on the first line with Shane for part of the game, which had resulted in a goal for Shane off an assist from Ilya, which Ilya was very happy about. Shane scoring a goal during the game had been very important to Ilya, if only to rub in the Voyageurs’ faces what they’d given up by being assholes. Also because he felt like Shane maybe needed the reminder that he was better than they could ever hope to be. 

Ilya maybe hated all-access hockey coverage, mostly because of the stupid cameras in the locker room, and mostly because he didn’t want the whole world staring at Shane, wondering how he was reacting to playing his old team. Because it was very much...not well. And Ilya wouldn’t go to check on him during the intermissions, because he knew before the numbers were announced that this would be the most watched game of the season so far, and he would not show the public any of his husband’s tender, delicate spots, the spots where they could hurt him, even if they already suspected. 

Shane maybe was thinking about the cameras, too, or maybe it was just how he was getting through it, but he spent both intermissions sitting in his stall, eyes closed and just breathing. Maybe he was visualizing plays or maybe he was just trying to shut out the world, but Ilya had no intention of bothering him, and the rest of the team seemed to get that message as well. 

The game ended 5-1, because the Voyageurs truly did suck without Shane. Ilya almost felt bad for Hayden Pike, being stuck on that horrible team. He almost wanted to invite Pike to join the Centaurs for real, but they couldn’t be an orphanage that picked up every discarded hockey player on a shitty team. Probably not, anyway. 

The mood in the locker room was weirdly solemn after the game, and Ilya caught players looking at Shane more than once as they’d all started shedding their gear. Despite the decisive win, Shane hadn’t exactly looked in the mood to celebrate, and Ilya had his suspicions that the pent-up stress of the days leading up to the game would be coming out, and quite soon. 

Harris popped his head into the locker room as they were changing, a slight grimace on his face. “Shane,” he called from the doorway, waiting for Shane to look up in acknowledgment. “Are you good to give a quick sound bite to some reporters about the game?” 

Ilya watched Shane, out of his pads and jersey already, watched him shrug nonchalantly. “Sure,” he agreed easily, and that was...actually a little alarming, Ilya thought. Harris blinked, seemingly surprised as well. 

“Are you sure? I can tell them to fuck off,” Harris offered, having clearly expected a little more hesitation from Shane. Shane shook his head. 

“No, I’m good,” he assured Harris with a dismissive little wave. Harris looked at Ilya over Shane’s shoulder. Ilya just shrugged. 

“Okay, great,” Harris said uncertainly, waiting at the door for Shane. Ilya watched them both disappear. 

“Was that weird?” Troy asked once both their partners were gone. Ilya stared after them. 

“Yes,” Ilya admitted slowly. It was weird, actually, because of how not weird Shane had been, how casual and normal he’d sounded. 

Troy made a face but went to join most of the rest of the team in the showers. Only a few people were still stripping out of their gear—Luca Haas, Evan Dykstra, and Wyatt. Wyatt had an excuse, maybe, because goalies had more gear than anyone, but Ilya would have to be blind not to have seen Wyatt hovering since the beginning of the season. Shane was mostly oblivious about how hard Wyatt was trying to make sure that Shane integrated into the team, which was good. Shane probably wouldn’t like thinking that he needed special treatment, but Ilya thought any team that had any sense would do everything in their power to make sure Shane Hollander was as comfortable as he could possibly be. 

Any team with sense...so not the Montreal Voyageurs, of course. 

Shane was practically vibrating by the time he returned to the locker room, and there was something weird and wild in his eyes. Ilya would happily kill any reporter who had asked Shane a rude question, though he was pretty sure Harris would have put a stop to any of those. Probably the adrenaline crash was just starting to hit him, along with all of the other things that he’d very pointedly ignored for days. 

“Okay?” Ilya asked rather unnecessarily, since it was very clear that Shane was moving quickly to not okay territory. Shane gave a ragged little laugh.  

“I fucking hate this place,” Shane admitted after a second, sitting down and burying his fingers in his sweat-soaked hair, tightening his grip enough to pull at his scalp in a way that looked fucking painful. And suddenly, Shane was breathing way too fast. 

Ilya glanced around the locker room. He had really made a point not to touch Shane during official team activities, because he knew Shane preferred it that way, and part of Ilya did, too. The Centaurs were great, but it was difficult not to feel like they had something to prove, that they could be married and still be professional, that Ilya as a captain wouldn’t show unearned favoritism toward Shane just because he loved him. But the locker room camera feed was off now in deference to the game being over and the players actually getting naked, and given the choice between touching Shane in a rather husbandly way in front of members of their team and allowing him to devolve into a full-blown panic attack, it really was no question. 

Ilya went to Shane and rested his hand atop his husband’s, gently coaxing him to loosen his hold on his own hair. “Shane,” he prodded gently, bringing his other hand to rest on Shane’s shoulder, “breathe, please.”  

Shane released a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and he leaned forward and buried his face against Ilya’s stomach. Ilya brushed his fingers through Shane’s sweaty hair, listening to Shane try to comply, try to slow his breathing down. At the edges of his awareness, Ilya noticed Wyatt ushering the other two out of the room. A second later, he placed Shane’s water bottle in easy reach on the bench. 

Thank you, Ilya mouthed at him, and Wyatt nodded and made himself scarce, too. And none of the Centaurs players came back from the showers for quite a long time after that. 

---

Ten minutes into their bus ride back to Ottawa, Shane was boneless and asleep with his head in Ilya’s lap. It was the first time any of the team had seen anything like it; they’d had a few roadies already, and Ilya had Shane had sometimes sat next to each other on planes and buses, but they had always kept a careful, friendly distance. Maybe they’d been trying to prove that they could be professional, or maybe one of them hated public displays of affection (if Wyatt had to bet on it, he’d put his money on Shane). But looking at the two of them in the past, it would have been difficult to guess that they were married. 

Or...well, not that difficult. They had avoided touching each other in a way that was incredibly noticeable, because both of them always had an air about them that they always wanted to be touching. And even if they weren’t, they both seemed entirely incapable of schooling the love out of their features. Now that he knew about their relationship, Wyatt didn’t understand how the world had ever missed it. Even across the room from each other, it was so very obvious that Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander were deeply in love. 

It was even more obvious now, with Ilya absently carding his fingers through Shane’s hair, watching his husband sleep with a goofy little smile on his face. Until he’d seen Ilya and Shane together as a couple, Wyatt hadn’t realized how unhappy Ilya had been those previous years, how brittle most of his smiles had been. Ilya Rozanov's smiles had been very convincing, until Wyatt had finally seen what his real smiles looked like.  

It wasn’t just Shane who had done that, of course; Ilya had been very open with the team as the new season had started, about his depression diagnosis and what he was doing to manage it. It was maybe weird to say about someone who was so much more professionally accomplished than Wyatt was, but Wyatt was incredibly proud of Ilya. 

“Will he be okay?” came a whispered comment, but the inside of the bus was quiet enough that anyone who wasn’t wearing headphones probably heard it. Wyatt turned around to see Luca Haas peeking back at Ilya and Shane in the row behind him. The smile that Ilya turned on Luca was soft. 

“Yes,” he said, quiet but confident. Wyatt didn’t think Ilya would offer any more, but then he surprised Wyatt by continuing, “It is difficult for him, I think. He is used to being golden boy of hockey. He has not learned how to be so hated, yet.” 

Ilya said it with enough sadness that it was clear enough what he meant. He didn’t want Shane to have to learn how to be hated. Shane had cultivated a squeaky-clean image over the years, and he was talented enough that even rival teams had usually spoken of him with more respect than vitriol. Until the end of the previous season, and the firestorm that had come with it. 

It had been worse than Wyatt had expected when the video first came out. He’d probably gotten too naïve, too complacent, because he’d actually started to believe that maybe the hockey world was better than this. He’d started to believe that maybe the culture had changed more than it had, when Scott Hunter had been the first player to come out, when he’d done it in such public and spectacular fashion.  

There had been pushback then, too, had been assholes on the internet and shitty comments hurled back and forth on the ice, but the response to Shane and Ilya’s relationship had been something else entirely. Maybe it was their relative levels of fame, or maybe it was that they had been rival players, but a very particular and very vocal subset of media and fans had been vicious, and they had barely let up even months later. He didn’t think Shane or Ilya even looked at social media anymore, if they ever had. 

“How can we help?” whispered another voice, and it was LaPointe from where he was seated across the aisle from Shane and Ilya. Wyatt smiled to himself, very satisfied. He couldn’t control the rest of the world, but at least he was confident that their team could be an oasis from all that other bullshit. They couldn’t control any other team’s culture, but they could control their own. 

Ilya was smiling, still stroking Shane’s hair as he slept on, oblivious. “Well, when Shane is being weird, you must act like the weird thing he does is very normal,” Ilya said with a crooked grin. 

“We already do that,” Young pointed out, and Ilya barked out a soft laugh. 

“Yes,” Ilya agreed, “and you do a very good job.” Ilya looked like he might ruffle Young’s hair if his hand wasn’t already occupied. 

“That can’t be everything,” LaPointe protested, and Wyatt loved this team, the way they all genuinely wanted to support each other. When Wyatt looked back at Ilya, his expression was thoughtful, actually searching his mind for an answer. 

“Shane likes routines very much,” Ilya said at last. “You should not interrupt his routines without warning in advance.” 

Wyatt recognized the same sort of advice his sister had gotten about his nephew, Isaac—though to be fair, Isaac was four. He would let you know, sometimes very loudly and dramatically, how much he disliked his routines being interrupted. 

“How can anyone have a routine during the season, when we travel so much?” Dykstra asked skeptically. Ilya snorted quietly. 

“You underestimate my husband,” Ilya said quite lovingly. “There are many routines, all very specific. There is game day routine for evening games, game day routine for afternoon games, travel day routine, routine for days off...” 

---

After having slept nearly the entire two-hour drive from Montreal, Shane was very awake, but still tense and jumpy the way he sometimes got after an aborted panic attack, like his body was still trying to figure out if it would try again to have a panic attack successfully. Ilya managed to bundle Shane away into the car before he’d fully woken up, but halfway through their short drive home, Shane was alert and fidgeting and repeatedly adjusting where his seatbelt rested against his shoulder like the thing was trying to choke him, so Ilya had his suspicions about how Shane was feeling. 

Shane’s parents had walked and fed Anya while they’d been gone, so Ilya didn’t have to take her out, and Anya seemed to understand Shane’s mood in a way that dogs always seemed to, because she greeted Shane with subdued nuzzles and licks to his hand rather than the jumping exuberance she sometimes showed when they got back. Of course, they had not been gone long. Montreal, which had once felt unbearably far, suddenly was way too close. 

Ilya kissed Shane once he’d allowed Anya adequate time to greet them both, walked Shane clumsily backward up the stairs to their bedroom. When Ilya was in a strange mood, most often he preferred the slow comfort of Shane’s fingers inside him or Shane’s mouth on his dick—and, on very pleasant occasions, sometimes both at once. But Ilya knew Shane well enough after so many years, and Shane was different. What Shane always wanted in moments like these was something hard and fast and maybe just on the right side of painful, something that would get him out of his head and remembering all the good things about his body. 

“Clothes off,” Ilya commanded once they’d reached the bedroom, because as much as he’d like to undress Shane, the quickest route to being inside Shane before he got impatient was for them to take off their own clothes. Shane took to the order with the single-minded focus of a man unable to do anything else, and Ilya began disrobing at the same time.  

“On the bed. Hands and knees,” Ilya said once Shane was naked, and Shane sucked in a sharp breath and obeyed. Ilya abruptly remembered Lisa Hayes asking Do you always order your husband around like that? and the memory of it almost made him laugh. He was doing it now for the same reason, because he knew sometimes that Shane Hollander needed a few minutes to just not think, and Ilya could give that to him. 

Ilya groaned at the sight of Shane when he settled himself on the bed, legs spread and round ass on perfect display. He stroked himself through his boxer-briefs, because the sight of Shane like that was arousing, but he wasn’t quite there yet. And Shane didn’t need very much prep these days, because they fucked a lot, and he had a feeling that Shane wouldn’t have much patience for it today. Ilya walked around to the bedside table and opened the drawer to retrieve the lube. 

“Condom?” he asked, and Shane shook his head.  

“No,” Shane dismissed without hesitation. “I want to feel you.” 

Ilya raised an eyebrow, though Shane wasn’t looking at him to see it. Ilya would have guessed that today would be one of the days Shane would want to use one, but despite how hard he tried sometimes, Ilya was not inside Shane’s head. He wasn’t sure that the nerve endings in Shane’s ass were all that sophisticated to tell the difference, but he wasn’t going to argue, not when Shane had so very clearly stated what he wanted. 

Ilya stripped off his underwear and got onto the bed behind Shane. He poured lube onto his fingers and steadied himself against Shane’s hip as he slid two slick fingers inside him in one sharp moment. 

“Fuck,” Shane hissed, already collapsing onto his forearms, burying his face against the pillows. Ilya was quite well-acquainted with the many ways Shane Hollander could say the word fuck, and this was one of the very good ones. Ilya grinned and curled his fingers until he found Shane’s prostate. It was so much, so fast, just like he was pretty sure Shane needed. 

“Jesus,” Shane whimpered against his forearm. “Come on. Don’t make me wait.” 

The response was more impatient than even Ilya had expected. He pulled his fingers out of Shane’s body and quickly slicked up his dick, which was more than interested in the proceedings now, not that it could possibly have resisted when those sounds had been coming out of Shane’s mouth.  

He’d barely done more to prep Shane than spread some lube around, and even with how often they fucked now that they lived full time in the same house, Ilya was more than certain that Shane would feel the sharp sting of pain when Ilya entered him. He also knew that that was exactly what Shane wanted, so he lined himself up and pressed inside Shane’s body. 

Shane hissed, then moaned, then pressed back against Ilya’s body, trying to get Ilya impossibly deeper, and Ilya groaned at the tight warmth of him. No matter how many times he fucked Shane, he could never get enough of him, couldn’t even imagine ever getting tired of this feeling or of hearing Shane moan in pleasure. 

Ilya set a brutal pace, hard enough that Shane had to brace his hand against the headboard, hard enough that Ilya figured it would be impossible for Shane to think about anything, not the game or the media or whatever bullshit his former teammates had spewed on the ice. He fucked Shane hard enough that he was hopeful that Shane’s brain would stop working completely, at least for a little while, would go completely white and staticky and reset itself into something more pleasant than wherever it had been. 

By the time Ilya wrapped his fingers around Shane’s dick, Shane was releasing a whole string of incoherent words that weren’t any English words Ilya had ever heard, and he was pretty sure they weren’t French, either. He was pretty sure they were not words at all. He stroked Shane’s dick until Shane writhed and groaned and came, and then he kept stroking him, kept fucking him until he was so overstimulated that he was nearly crying, until the sounds coming out of his mouth were too much for Ilya’s self-control and he came inside Shane’s body. 

Ilya collapsed to the bed, rolling Shane over to his side with an arm around his chest before stroking Shane’s softening dick again, his own still buried inside Shane’s ass—because Shane had confessed to him, flustered and blushing, that sometimes he liked that, when Ilya pushed him further than his body could go, when everything was just a little too much. And when Shane asked for something, Shane got it, especially when he gathered up enough courage to ask for a very filthy sex thing. 

Ilya only stopped when Shane’s hitching, breathy sounds seemed like more pain than pleasure, let Shane’s dick fall from his hand and gently separated their bodies. Ilya lay there for a minute, his face against Shane’s neck, his hand resting lightly on Shane’s hip. He listened to the sound of Shane’s breathing going back to normal, then placed a kiss right beneath Shane’s ear. 

“Go shower,” Ilya breathed. “I will change the sheets.” 

Shane made a noncommittal sort of sound but he did roll out of bed, making his way toward the bathroom. There were some days when Shane could handle it, could save the task of changing the soiled sheets until morning, but Ilya didn’t think this was one of those days, and Shane’s lack of protest seemed confirmation enough of that.  

Ilya heard the sound of the shower turning on as he stripped the bed and changed the sheets; he had it nearly down to a science, now, and wanting to join Shane in the shower was motivation enough to be quick. 

Shane startled when Ilya opened the shower door, clearly not having heard him over the sound of the shower spray, but he relaxed when Ilya stepped forward and wrapped an arm around him, leaning his head back against Ilya’s shoulder. 

“All clean?” Ilya asked with a smile, running his hands along Shane’s wet skin. Shane released a neutral hum in response, so maybe he wasn’t quite verbal yet. That was very flattering. Ilya slid his hand down the side of Shane’s hip, then down between their bodies, his fingers questing along Shane’s rim. “Let me check,” Ilya said, and slid one finger inside. 

Shane’s breath came faster, and he tensed against Ilya’s body. Ilya stilled. “Too much?” he asked, but Shane shook his head. 

“No,” Shane said emphatically, and then, “we’re wasting water.” 

Ilya huffed a laugh against Shane’s neck. “Let’s be quick then, yes?” he pressed, and Shane nodded. “I will make sure you are nice and clean.” 

“Yes,” Shane breathed, and he leaned forward, bracing his hand against the tiled wall, spreading his legs a little to accommodate Ilya’s hand. Fuck, Shane was so perfect.  

“Let me see,” Ilya purred, then dropped to his knees. He moved his finger around inside Shane’s body, probing, pressing, and doing absolutely nothing actually useful, which they both knew. Still, Shane groaned, and his dick gave a halfhearted twitch. Ilya dragged his thumb against Shane’s oversensitive rim, which accomplished even less but made Shane release a tired moan. Ilya toyed with Shane for another minute under the guise of helping him get clean, until Shane started to tremble and Ilya decided he’d had enough. Ilya stood and gathered Shane into his arms. He spun Shane around so they were facing each other and placed a gentle kiss on Shane’s lips. 

“Feeling better?” Ilya asked when he pulled away, and Shane looked hazy and calm and totally fucked out, which was exactly how Ilya liked him best. 

“Yeah,” Shane agreed with a gentle sigh. “We really are wasting water, though.” 

Ilya snorted and reached over to turn off the tap. Before Shane could remind him, he made sure to turn it all the way, so it didn’t drip.