Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories:

Gen, M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Rose Landry

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Rose Landry, Yuna Hollander

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, POV Shane Hollander, Anxious Shane Hollander, Pining, Heteronormativity is the secret antagonist, Light Angst, Happy Ending, Getting Together, Canon Compliant

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-02 Words: 4,098 Chapters: 1/1

Lovers and Letters

Summary

Shane wasn't looking forward to meeting his soulmate like everyone else, but the letters still came. Four letters. Four Cyrillic letters.

Or

Five times Shane doesn't want to think about his soulletters and One time he finally does.

Notes

Me: shamelessly stealing my own idea. Also, did I have time to write this weekend? No.

Did I have time to write this one way, tell my friend I was showing restraint but kinda being a bad writer but it was fine, decide it wasn't fine, and rewrite it? Extra no.

AO3 died while I was trying to post this :(

I am not Russian nor do I know any languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet. Though, Shane has no real way to know information accurately for most of this fic so maybe that enhances the experience. (If stuff is glaringly wrong please lmk but I think I did okay and I intentionally made sure I didn't need to go too in depth on anything I am poorly knowledgeable on)

They only had health class a couple times a week. It was the last class before lunch and happened on the days they didn’t have gym. Everyone else liked gym way more, but they always ended up playing the same couple of games over and over unless their teacher wanted them to practice a specific sport.

Shane liked health class. Learning about healthy eating and good habits was important for everyone but especially good hockey players and he was a good hockey player.

Someday, he would be great. The best.

“What kind of girl do you think your soulmate will be?” Ryan asked Jason. Shane always tried to find an empty table to sit at during lunch or at least get as far away from his classmates as he could between long periods of his teachers droning on with everyone around him trying to whisper to each other and the screaming and shouting that plagued him all recess. He just needed a little midday break.

Today especially. Today he kind of hated health class.

Sex Ed had been weird- every twelve year old in the room and their teacher could agree on that- but today’s lesson had made him queasy. They had split the guys and girls up just the same as they had the previous day.

“I think she’s gonna be super hot,” Jason said.

“How on earth do you know that?”

“Dunno. Just do. I’ll prove it to you after I see my letters.”

“How does that prove anything? They’re letters. Literally just lines.”

He had already had to sit through a whole class of their teacher going on and on about how they’ll get to see their marks when they’re sixteen and famous soulmate stories in history. Kings who sent out armies to search for his future wife. A woman who saved a soldier in World War II and nursed him back to health, only to realize afterwards that he was her soulmate.

The majority of them would see the first letter of their own last name as the last letter of their soulletters. Most women took their husbands last name and typically the happiest time in people with romantic soulmates’ lives was during that relationship. During their marriage.

“Hey, Shane?”

Today was officially the worst.

“Yes?”

Platonic soulmates existed, but he probably wasn’t going to get that lucky.

“What kind of girl do you think your soulmate will be?”

Shane shrugged and focused back on his lunch.

Hotel rooms were starting to blur together. Plain white sheets, too stiff pillows, and vaguely thematically chosen abstract art above the beds. He had already seen the inside of more hotel rooms at sixteen than some people did in their lives and he- if everything goes to plan- was far from done.

This hotel room would be memorable for something other than its decor or amenities.

His parents had dropped their coats and stuff off in the room after they came back from his game, they were gone down to the lobby to hang out with some of the other adults before they all went to a team supper that evening. His teammates were probably all going to hang out after their showers but Shane didn’t have it in him to give up his downtime, his post game internal debrief, today.

Not after what he felt during the third period.

Soulmate science was a field comprised of more questions than answers. Soulmarks showed themselves for about a day around someone’s sixteenth birthday. There were theories for why it wasn’t exact- leap years, differences between the start of labour and time of delivery, divine intervention- but Shane never paid too much attention to it outside of the one biology test he had earlier that year.

His birthday was four days ago. He was so certain he was going to luck out and be part of the small percentage of people who didn’t get stuck with a soulmark.

It had felt like someone was alternating heat and ice on the skin above the front part of his left hip bone. He played like shit for the last ten minutes of the game and didn’t have anything to say to his coach afterward except a weak apology.

Shane showered in the dark, needing to wash off the game but not yet ready to look. He got dressed as well before flicking the bathroom light back on with too much familiarity for someone who had only checked into the room that morning.

He pushed down the front of his pants and looked first in the mirror. Something was wrong.

He looked again, directly at his hip. Something was definitely wrong.

Somehow two of the letters looked backwards.

He didn’t say anything to his parents, to his teammates, to anyone. He had crept out- even though his parents always announced when they came back into the room if he was in the bathroom- and found a hotel-branded pad of paper and a pen to carefully transcribe the letters onto.

It wasn’t until a week later, practically alone at home with his parents asleep down the hall, that he retrieved the paper from the smallest pocket in his backpack.

The mark was long gone which he had been thankful for even if he was the only one who could see it.

The letters weren’t backwards. They weren’t even letters he knew, technically. None of them were even if two of them were identical to ones he had known since before he started school.

They were Cyrillic letters. His soulmate was some girl from Russia, Ukraine, or a handful of other Eastern European and some Asian countries that he had never stepped foot in.

ИИHР.

As far as he could tell from a brief amount of looking into the alphabet and some popular Russian names in Latin and Cyrillic spellings, the anglicized version of her name was probably IINR.

A suggested search question prompted him to see common Russian girl names that started with I and Shane exited out of the tab, cleared his search history, and shut off the computer. He would have to deal with that some day, but he had time to get ready for that eventuality.

Shane had heard of Ilya Rozanov before the International Prospects Cup started, but not by much. He was a Russian hockey player the same age as Shane, possibly even playing at the same caliber as him.

Their names shared a headline before they had even been in the same country.

He watched the Russian team practice with his parents and sought Rozanov out after. It was a strange meeting, he had the whole interaction planned out so that they could have a normal meeting before the entire hockey world was watching them but Rozanov hadn’t reacted how he was supposed to. Hadn’t followed the general expectations of pleasantries exchanged between two people during their first meeting and Shane had fumbled.

It threw him off. Rozanov had watched him intensely the whole time and Shane should have hated it.

He didn’t. But he did.

In his hotel room that night he started seeking out information on Rozanov for the first time. English and French media had little to say about him but Shane managed to find some Russian sources talking about his hockey career thus far that he could put into a translator to at least get a rough idea what was being said.

Not before he caught one thing written in the mostly unfamiliar letters and for a moment every nerve in his body lit on fire.

His name. Илья Розанов. ИР.

Wikipedia saved him from the panic attack he almost worked his way into. Russian used patronims, Rozanov’s middle name- or what was there in place of one, he wasn’t sure if there was a distinction- was Grigoryevich after his father. Just one name, the letter Г, Rozanov wasn’t his soulmate.

He let out a breath that didn’t entirely feel like relief.

Some people had platonic soulmates, not as common as romantic ones but they were well known. Those types of soulmates were sometimes between two guys or two girls, maybe even more commonly than a guy and a girl being non-romantic soulmates like they always were.

He wasn’t really looking forward to having a romantic soulmate, but having Rozanov as his platonic soulmate was infinitely worse.

Rose had suggested the restaurant they were meeting at. She had asked him specifically to go out together sometime soon so that they could spend time together without distractions or places to be.

It was a quiet restaurant. Discrete in a way that her usual haunts weren’t.

Something was wrong.

She was unquestionably not his soulmate, he had known that since he had first seen her name in the credits of one of her movies even if he never had that thought for a number of reasons. He just knew her name and the tiny part of his brain that still cared about his soulmark didn’t light up in any way so he hadn’t needed to make the connection. She was nice and fun to hang out with, soulmates didn’t need to come into the equation.

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she had one and found him since they had last seen each other.

But she hadn’t. Shane hadn’t done a good enough job of being her boyfriend.

It wasn’t his fault, she promised him that. He was gay.

He was gay.

“I won’t tell anyone ever,” she reiterated for the dozenth time, “not a thing. But, I am also still here for you. If you want to talk about anything. Ever.”

“I-”

Some part of him was twelve years old, sitting in a room surrounded by other boys his age while their health teacher talked about boys and girls and romantic soulmates. The unspoken guarantee that all of them would have a female soulmate if they were ‘lucky’ enough to have a romantic soulmate.

It hadn’t felt like luck to him at the time.

He had rationalized it to himself as a distaste for the notion that romantic connections were superior in all ways to platonic ones. A sentiment he still maintains, his friendship with Hayden, and J.J. to a degree too, was an invaluable part of his life but that wasn’t the main reason he had felt like that.

He knew that gay people existed, obviously, but that information never came up at the same time as when he was made to think about soulmates. His twelve year old self had only been taught about boys and girls being romantic soulmates. His sixteen year old self had been given statistics in his biology class about soulmate pairings- romantic or platonic- by county and continent but no one ever mentioned the specific genders involved.

He had hooked up with a man for his entire adult life thus far and never once considered that someone- let alone him- could have a same gender romantic soulmate.

It was a revelation. It didn’t matter at the end of the day because he would never be able to tell anyone that. If he found his soulmate and it happened to be a romantic connection and with a man, that would be a secret. He would be a secret.

Maybe he could say they had a platonic connection. People would have questions. Soulmates and soulletters were considered private matters that adults rarely talked about outside of with close friends and family, especially so for people with platonic soulmates. It had always felt, to him, like it was out of respect for the romantic ones and out of pity for platonic ones.

Either way, he would never get to tell his parents, tell Hayden, tell anyone if he did find his soulmate.

“Shane?”

“Sorry. Yeah, thank you. I think I’m all talked-out for today though.”

“That’s understandable.” She offered him a soft smile. “Anytime though, I mean it.”

Shane forced himself to grin back as best as he could. “I know.”

Shane was standing in the hallway where he had slipped away to answer Ilya’s call in private. His phone was clutched in his hand and had already shut itself off from disuse.

They hadn’t spoken for long- they couldn’t with Shane’s parents just outside of earshot and friends littering Ilya’s house.

I’m coming to the cottage.

Distantly, he was aware of his parents talking. The television was still playing, showing the post match celebration, discussing the journey the Admirals had that year, and the kiss.

He wished he had been alone to process what he watched.

He wished he had been able to have people know why seeing that had shocked and thrilled him exactly how it had.

He wished he had been with Ilya when that happened.

Scott Hunter kissed a man after winning the Stanley Cup on national television. The whole world saw. The whole world was going to know that a hockey player- a pretty good, Cup winning, captain of a professional men's team, hockey player- could like men. A man. His man.

“I wonder if they’re soulmates,” his mother said.

“You can’t just speculate about people like that,” his father countered, “it’s impolite.”

“I’ve said it about non-queer athletes before.”

“And I’ve said it was impolite then too.”

Maybe they were soulmates. Scott Hunter and his man, the internet definitely knew his name by now but Shane didn’t care to know it unless Scott shared that himself.

A hockey player, an MLH player, with a male romantic soulmate. The league wasn’t ready for something like this, no locker room Shane had ever stepped foot in would welcome this, but it was happening.

Shane wasn’t the only one.

He and Ilya weren’t the only ones.

Shane could be an MLH player with a male romantic soulmate. Ilya could have any kind of romantic soulmate.

“Good for him,” his mom said as the television was finally turned off.

Shane could never have Ilya as his soulmate. It didn’t fit. None of what they have been through together would have happened like it did if Ilya was his soulmate, if Ilya had SH appear on his body for one day so many years ago.

They could still have each other. That was all that mattered to him.

Ilya was coming to his cottage.

They were over at his parents’ cottage for dinner and some Foundation stuff. Mostly them giving opinions on artwork and other design stuff for the website and branding.

Shane thought all of it looked good, they had hired a professional to do the mock ups so he didn’t really think it was a surprise they all looked good. Ilya had had a lot more fun than him giving his opinions on the options and narrowing things down with his mom.

The logo- and thus the main theme of the website and everything- that they decided on was the name of the Foundation written in an elegant script on a pale blue background with a stylized swoop above Ilya’s mom’s name that looked like a shining halo. That had been one of his mom’s top two, the ones she got additional prints of the logo done for in a collection of languages.

The English one was the one they were already shown.

The French one was just as familiar.

The Japanese one was recognizable.

The Russian one gave him pause.

His mom and Ilya kept talking after those ones were done. His mom was finding the appropriate people to contact in the local Indigenous tribes to have them offer translation to have the name also displayable in their language or languages between Ottawa and Montreal and maybe put them in contact with someone who does translating work to do the whole website once they were at that stage.

Shane had been fairly silent the whole time. He hadn’t offered anything else after that.

There was one thing that the English, French, and Japanese variants of the logo all shared that the Russian one didn’t. The Irina Foundation. Irina. Written in Latin letters. Her name was written how Ilya would have known it in the final mock-up they were shown.

Ирина.

Ilya had asked him when they got back to their cottage that night if he was okay. Shane had said that he was, that he had just been thinking about something all day. He promised to tell him about it in the morning once he slept on it.

He hadn’t made it that far.

It was a clear night, the stars outside of the cottage and him were the only ones still awake. It wasn’t the first time he had stayed up like this, not even in this bed with Ilya sleeping an elbow’s length away. Their relationship stuff was supposed to all be worked out. They love each other, Ilya was in Ottawa, and The Irina Foundation was being set up more and more everyday.

But maybe he had been wrong about it. Maybe there was a chance that, all along-

Ilya’s name never fit. That was a fact that he had built his entire evidence that they were not actually soulmates on top of the few times his traitorous mind tried to swing in that direction. They didn’t need to be soulmates, they loved each other and they were together.

They could be.

It was a dangerous thought.

He knew since the first time at the cottage that Ilya and his mother shared the first letter of their names. They did in either alphabet, but actually seeing her name written out properly, starting with the letter he had seen for the first time on his own body at sixteen… for just a second he considered that maybe.

Patronims were, obviously, from the father. Ilya didn’t have a good relationship with his father before or after the man passed. It wasn’t his choice to carry his father with him like he did.

Would he want to carry his mother’s name like that? Was it even allowed?

Would he…

Could the happiest time in his life come after changing it to represent Irina?

The problem of the fourth letter still remained. The letter that looked identical to the first letter of his own last name. He could be completely off base, but everything fit. It felt almost cruel if this was so close but it wasn’t real.

Ilya Irinavich Hollander-Rozanov.

ИИHР.

That piece of paper from all those years ago was sitting in the safe in the closest of the second guest room where he had a bookshelf and some other storage of childhood belongings he didn’t want to part with but didn’t need to have in Montreal. He could go look, go see if the one part he could check was there.

He could try once more to distinguish between two indistinguishable letters.

His hand was on Ilya’s shoulder before he considered the time.

“At cottage you are meant to relax,” Ilya muttered, his face still smushed against his pillow. “What have you been thinking about this time, Moya Lyubov?”

“Do you remember your soul letters?”

Ilya pushed himself up on his elbows, his half lidded eyes locked on Shane’s face. “Yes? We are in happy relationship, why do they matter?”

The wind let out of Shane’s sails ever so slightly. Ilya also didn’t think they were soulmates. But they were also kind of stupid when it came to their relationship after so many years of trying to pretend the thing between them wasn’t more. Wasn’t everything.

“Have you ever…?”

“I have not thought about them in a very long time. Did not think I would deserve a soulmate. When I saw the letters, I thought maybe Sveta. But only one letter fit and it would not make sense to be her name one way and my last name to be another- and she would never take my last name. Was probably not Russian anyway, whole name I mean. Middle was wrong too.”

Shane didn’t know how to write Svetlana’s name with the Cyrillic alphabet but the math was easy enough to do. Her father’s name was Sergei, her second initial would be the same as her first, but that part didn’t matter much since Ilya said it wasn’t what he had in his soulletters. S and Р or some Cyrillic letter and R. If Shane took Ilya’s last name and added it to his own, he would be S and Р with a H in the middle but not as a middle name.

“You deserve everything.”

“Have everything, I have you.”

Shane leaned down to kiss the top of his head. “I love you.” After another moment, he asked, “have you ever thought about changing your middle name from being from your dad’s name to your mother’s?”

“That is not how this works.”

“But…”

“Why are you thinking about my name in the middle of the night and soulletters?”

Ilya was always the best person at cutting straight to the point when Shane needed it. At seeing into his spiraling mind and finding exactly where in the jumbled mess to tug and unwind everything into neatly laid string instead of a knotted ball.

Shane’s left hand pressed against the front of his hip bone. The place Ilya always kissed when he was trailing down Shane’s body and where the letters made their first appearance.

“I don’t think I’ve seen your mother’s name written down properly until today. Got me thinking about my soulletters since parts of it line up with your name but not all of it. And I realized that maybe I was wrong about one of the letters.”

“You like details too much to get something wrong like this.”

“I wasn’t the one who decided two different alphabets should use the same letter as far as I can tell for completely different sounds.”

Ilya was more awake now, watching him in his usual soft way- if a bit intense- instead of sleepily. “Which letter?”

“H.”

“That is in your letters?”

“The first letter of your name twice, then H, then the P-looking letter that I don’t think is the Latin use of it.”

“Would be like my last name. I have the same letter at the end of my soul letters. And a maybe H before it.”

Hollander-Розанов.

“And the rest?”

“Just one letter. Starts with S.”

SHР.

Holy shit.

The skin on his hip tingled.

“Ilya?”

“Yes?”

“What I said earlier about your mom’s name…”

Ilya kissed his thigh through his shorts. “I have thought before that it would have been nicer if it was the other parent. Never thought about doing it myself, I think I would like it.”

Shane’s heart was crashing against his ribs. His hip was getting insistent in its feeling, like someone was alternating ice and heat on the small patch of skin. “Do you feel it too?”

“Feel what?” He asked without trying to hide his smirk.

“Asshole.”

“You solved mystery; we are soulmates, Moy Detektiv.”

“I can guess that one without any Russian knowledge. We’re soulmates,” he agreed. “Holy shit.”

Ilya pushed himself the rest of the way up and onto Shane’s lap. Like he had done that first time, only slightly further back, leaving space between their hips. The night they set their hearts into each other’s hands intentionally for the first time.

They were soulmates. Shane found his soulmate. His hip stopped tingling as Ilya pulled down his shorts and traced the letters that had returned to their rightful place. They were back, Ilya could see them as only a soulmate could.

On his right hip, in the mirrored position to Shane’s own mark, SHР.

Shane Hollander-Розанов.

The happiest time in his life would be when he was carrying Ilya’s last name- sharing last names with Ilya. Married. They could do that. They would do that, it was already a part of their plans but this made it all the more real. They were actually going to get that, together.

It was everything.

Shane moved his hand from Ilya’s mark to his neck and pulled him in, suddenly desperate for him to be close in a different way. They kissed until they needed to breathe, pulling back but pressing their foreheads together.

“I love you.” Ilya stared straight into his soul as he spoke those three words. Ilya was his soul. His soulmate.

“Ya tebya lyublyu,” Shane promised back. He was Ilya’s soulmate.

Their happiest time was yet to come, but it would. Until then, they had each other and that was what mattered most.