Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander

Additional Tags:

Shane Hollander Is a Menace, BAMF Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov is Whipped, And very proud of it, The anti!woobification of Shane Hollander, Autistic Shane Hollander, Character Study

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-19 Words: 1,941 Chapters: 1/1

Terminator

Summary

Shane is boring the way a sniper is boring. Boring the way a glacier is boring. Very slow, very quiet, very inevitable, and then suddenly you're kinda fucked.

Or, Ilya deserves a medal for the number of lives he's saved with the power of his dick and the ability to fuck the concept of revenge out of his husband's mind.

Notes

Shane Hollander is a world-class athlete at the top of a highly dangerous, very physically, insanely competitive sport. He didn't get there by being a wilting flower, which is exactly what Ilya loves about him.

I maybe wrote this in a petty fit instead of doing something sensible like eating.

It’s the worst-kept secret in Ilya’s little corner of the universe that he finds his husband wholly and not-safe-for-work hot as fuck.

And from the outside, he thinks people get it. At least in some abstract, hand-wavey kind of way, where they look at him, and look at Shane, and make certain assumptions about everything because their brains are wired in a very specific kind of way. He gets it.

But nuance was a word on the crossword puzzle Ilya did over the weekend, and it’s a word he likes a lot.

Because no one, no one, has any fucking clue how much time, effort, money, blood, sweat, and other people’s tears go into crafting the public persona that is Shane Hollander. Hockey’s Prince. Canada’s Golden Boy. Ha.

Ilya knows. Ilya’s married to him. Ilya finds it all, as often expressed, really fucking hot.

He’s pretty sure he is also half the reason Shane gets away with it. They’ve been held up as mirrors to each other right from the start of their careers, and Ilya doesn’t really have to try very hard to be Ilya Rozanov, Professional Asshole.

Is it his fault if he is the most witty? Is it his fault the idiots he plays against have the fragile egos of small-town politicians? Is it his fault people assume he hates them when that’s just his face?

But standing next to that, Shane, with his pretty face and prettier freckles and those polished, media-trained manners…

But Canadians are polite, they’re not fucking nice. Shane is not nice. In fact, he’s kinda a bitch. That’s literally one of Ilya’s favorite things.

Nice is a performance. Polite is a costume. Shane Hollander has been wearing both since he was old enough to understand that the world rewards a certain kind of face, and he has never once, not for a single second, let the mask slip in front of a camera.

Ilya's watched him do post-game pressers after losses that should have broken something in him, and Shane sits there under those lights with his jaw set and his eyes calm and says things like we just have to move forward and I believe in this team, and credit to them, they played a great game tonight.

He sounds like a greeting card. He sounds like a pamphlet about sportsmanship they hand out to twelve-year-olds.

He is, Ilya knows with absolute certainty, mentally cataloguing every single mistake, every blown coverage, every turnover, every millisecond of every shift, and filing it somewhere behind those pretty eyes in a place that does not have a delete function. He doesn't know why anyone even bothers with video replay when they have Shane right there.

Like, genuinely. Shane Hollander, pressed into a suit for some charity gala, shaking hands and doing the smile, the little one, not the press room one, because Shane has approximately four public smiles and Ilya has catalogued all of them, and everyone in the room just melts.

He’s a role model. And yes, he very much is, because it’s as important children grow up knowing how to enact obsessively detailed revenge plans as they know hard work and dedication are the best paths forward.

Shane's spent six months engineering the complete professional humiliation of a guy who'd talked shit about Ilya in a podcast no one listened to. Six months. The guy ended up in the AHL. Ilya isn't saying there's a direct line between those two things. He's also not not saying that.

And it kinda kills him. Kills him. In the very dramatic way his husband tells him he is. That his nickname is The Terminator. It’s flattering, sure, but it’s always been assigned to the wrong person in their marriage. Ilya is loud about his grudges. Ilya announces them. There is no ambiguity about where he stands on any given opponent, situation, or canapé.

Shane just nods and waits and then quietly ends you, and somehow everyone is thanking him afterward.

It's obscene. It's genuinely, almost cosmically unfair. It is also the single most attractive quality a human person has ever possessed, and Ilya has thought about this a lot, in the way he thinks about most things Shane related, which is to say obsessively and with great specificity.

Shane doesn't do any of it carelessly. That's what gets Ilya every single time. The competitiveness, the precision, the absolute refusal to lose… it's not arrogance. Arrogance is lazy. Shane works for every inch of it. Always has. He cares so much it should be embarrassing, and somehow it never is, because he keeps it all so terrifyingly tidy.

He finds a goal, he locks in, and he goes for it with the single-minded obsession of a serial killer. And really, of the two of them, Shane is far more likely to get away with murder than Ilya is. He’s also fully willing to bulldoze right through his opponent in any given situation. Even if that opponent is Ilya. Fuck, sometimes, especially if that opponent is Ilya.

Which is, honestly, the funniest and hottest part of the whole arrangement.

Because here they are. Married. Actually, legally married, with a certificate and everything, and somewhere in the world there is a photograph of them signing it where Ilya looks like a man who has just been told something wonderful and Shane looks like he's completing a tax form, which is so perfectly them that Ilya had it framed.

And the world looks at them and they see: Shane Hollander, patient saint, and Ilya Rozanov, his feral little problem.

Ilya is fine with this. Ilya is, in fact, delighted by this.

Because here's what being married to Shane Hollander actually means in practical terms. It means Ilya gets to be the attack dog, and Shane gets to stand slightly behind him with that very particular expression - the one that says oh, my husband, he's a lot, isn't he, bless - while privately, somewhere behind those extremely pretty eyes, he's already building the architecture of something so much worse.

Ilya is the explosion. Shane is the engineer who laid the charges six months ago.

It's the most efficient division of labor in any marriage Ilya has ever heard of. Not that he has a great sample size. But still.

The thing is - and this is important - Ilya is not actually mean. He knows people think he is. He has cultivated people thinking he is, with the dedication and artistry of a man who understands that a reputation is a weapon and weapons should be maintained. But he's not. He's just honest, and blunt, and deeply uninterested in performing warmth he doesn't feel for people who haven't earned it.

Shane is meaner. By a significant margin. Shane is meaner and kinder in equal measure, which should not be a coherent sentence about one person, and yet.

And the kinder part - the part that is genuinely, actually kind, that remembers things and checks in and quietly makes sure people are okay without making a production of it - that part is just for people Shane has decided matter. The list is not long. The list is not accepting applications.

Ilya is on the list. Has been on the list since before he fully understood what the list was. That's the part that lives in his chest like a warm, slightly embarrassing thing he's not going to examine directly.

And now they are married, Ilya is obsessively invested in the time, effort, money, blood, sweat, and other people’s tears that go into crafting the public persona that is Shane Hollander.

Part of it is practical. Maybe a little irrational. Certainly the reason Shane’s the planner in their relationship.

People look at them, at Shane and Ilya, and make certain assumptions, and yes, in this case, those assumptions are bang on accurate, but that doesn’t mean anyone is allowed to use that against him.

Shane might be a cock hungry slut, but he’s Ilya’s cock hungry slut. If he has to be a little more ridiculous to provoke the idea that Shane is the one keeping him in line, so be it. The public doesn’t need to know exactly how many times Ilya has saved lives with the power of his dick and the ability to make his husband forget coherent thought, revenge included.

It's a public service, really. That's how Ilya frames it. Give him the keys to the city. Give him the keys to Canada. He wants to put 'Shane Hollander Wrangler' on his citizenship application. Shane doesn't let him.

But someone has to be the reason Shane looks reasonable by comparison, and Ilya is, above all things, a team player. Has been his whole career, even without knowing it.

There is a particular kind of journalist who looks at Shane and sees exactly what Shane wants them to see. The patience. The grace. They write pieces about his leadership. His character. His positive influence on the sport.

Ilya reads these pieces. Ilya reads them and laughs until he has to put his phone down.

Not because they're wrong. There’s nothing in the content he can dispute. Shane sets the standard. Shane raises the bar. Shane is the single greatest player in the history of the sport, and Ilya can, has, and no doubt will fight someone again should they disagree.

Shane does have character. Shane's character is just considerably more interesting than any of those journalists are equipped to understand.

Ilya had kissed him on the side of his very pretty head and gone back to his breakfast.

The thing about Shane is that he’s not suppressing some wilder, messier version of himself that would otherwise claw out. Shane is not secretly a creature of chaos in a nice suit. He is exactly as controlled as he appears, and that control is load-bearing, and underneath it is not softness but something far more interesting.

Hunger. A very precise, very quiet, very relentless kind.

Shane wants to win. Not in the way people talk about board games or arguments. Shane wants to win the way some people need to breathe, which is to say constantly and without negotiation and with a level of physical investment that is, frankly, a lot to witness up close.

He just also happens to be really boring about how he does it.

Boring being a relative term, obviously. Boring the way a sniper is boring. Boring the way a glacier is boring. Very slow, very quiet, very inevitable, and then suddenly you're kinda fucked.

Hockey gets seventy, maybe seventy-five percent of it.

Ilya gets the rest.

Which sounds like it should be a problem, maybe. Like it should feel like second billing. And it would, probably, if the rest wasn't the most concentrated, most detailed, most frankly alarming amount of attention one human being has ever paid to another human being in the history of documented time.

It's binary. It's completely, structurally binary. Either something doesn't register on the Shane Hollander radar, in which case it does not exist, or it does register, in which case Shane has already read everything ever written about it, identified all relevant variables, and is currently optimizing.

Ilya registers.

Which either makes him Sarah or John Connor… or the T3, depending on the mood Shane is in. Either way, he is the nice one. And it's horrifying for the wider world in general, sure, but it's really, really important to Ilya to know, even if no one else ever will...

That when Shane Hollander allows his attack dog off the leash, Ilya is genuinely, and without a doubt, the safer of the two options.