Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Rose Landry

Additional Tags:

Fluff and Humor, Secret Relationship, Sharing Clothes, Kleptomania, Scent as Comfort, emotional support hoodie, stealing your clothes to steal your heart, Good Friend Rose Landry

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-01-19 Words: 2,270 Chapters: 1/1

Finders, Keepers

Summary

Ilya just looked him up and down slowly. “You do realize you’re wearing my coat right now, yes?”

Shane glanced down at the sleeves covering his knuckles. “Oh. Huh. Must have grabbed it by mistake. We have similar… builds.”

Shane does not steal. Unfortunately, Ilya keeps leaving jackets behind, and Shane keeps reaching for clothes that aren’t his - clothes that smell like smoke and safety.

This is not a problem. It’s just a reasonable coping mechanism for bad games, and it definitely isn’t intimacy. Right?

Notes

PSA: if the creator’s style is hidden… please consider turning it on. I spent HOURS figuring out the texting work skin 😭

Shane woke up alone in the hotel room. The other half of the bed looked like it had been vacated with purpose. The sheets were a tangled mess, but the man himself was conspicuously absent. 

He took a deep breath and then stopped breathing altogether, because the air was still full of Ilya.

Shane had a mental filing cabinet of things he disapproved of. Cigarette smoke was wedged in there firmly between skipping warm-ups and eating dessert for breakfast. 

But this wasn't just smoke. This was smoke that had been taken for a long walk in the cold night air. It was mixed with the absurdly expensive and sharp scent of Ilya’s cologne, and something that smelled like city rooftops and quiet conversations. It smelled like the space between two in the morning and dawn, when the world was silent and so was Ilya.

He pushed himself up to sit - and that’s when his eyes landed on the hoodie.

Black, with the Boston Bears logo screaming across the chest. Shane remembered how Ilya had shown up wearing it last night, looking as if popping into a rival player's hotel room was no bigger a deal than picking up a newspaper.

It must have been discarded somewhere between the door clicking shut and things becoming significantly less about… vertical conversation.

Shane got up and approached it cautiously. 

He was not a thief. He was a returner of things. He gave back extra change. He had once mailed a single sock back to a laundry service with a note.

However, Ilya had probably left it behind on purpose, for deniability.

Shane picked it up.

Just to relocate it, he reasoned. 

The fabric was soft and well-worn. Then, in a move his conscious mind didn't entirely authorize, he pulled it over his head.

The bottom hem brushed his thighs.

He glanced at the door, almost expecting Ilya to waltz back in and deliver a line like, “Are you trying to become a souvenir?”

Shane swallowed.

If this hoodie were to, hypothetically, have a temporary layover in his possession, he would need an airtight cover story.

Option one: Accidental swap. Nonsense. That would imply Shane owned comparable Boston merch, which he did not.

Option two: Hotel laundry error. Laughable. Shane would rather fight a bear than outsource his laundry.

Option three: Ilya left it. Shane is holding it for safe return. The timeline for "return" was just… flexible.

He fiddled with the cuffs, rolling them up just enough to free his hands, and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. 

I will return it, he resolved, firmly. After a wear. Or perhaps two. 

~

Of course, Shane would later mark this as the official start of his kleptomania era.

It began simply, after bad games.

The first real slip was two weeks later, following a loss that stuck in his ribs long after the media had gotten their soundbites. 

Without letting himself think about it too much, he reached into the dark recesses of his closet and pulled out one of Ilya’s jackets.

He wore it while doing his floor stretches, counting breaths. He wore it while attempting to meditate, eyes squeezed shut, his frantic thoughts slowing to a less-panicked swirl. He wore it while lying stiffly in bed, glaring at the hotel ceiling as if it were responsible for the scoreboard.

A pattern was born.

Bad game? Jacket.

Heartbreaker overtime loss? Hoodie.

Playoff pressure squeezing his lungs like a vice? The big coat. Always the coat.

Shane did not enjoy observing patterns in his own behavior. He observed this one anyway.

By midseason, the assortment had… expanded.

He refused to call it a collection. He preferred “temporary redistribution of assets.”

And then there were the pockets.

The first discovery was a lighter shaped like a tiny hockey stick. 

The second was receipts, in three different languages. 

The third was a softly crumpled funeral program.

Shane refolded it with care and placed it back exactly where he’d found it.

After that, he avoided pocket-checking for a respectable period.

Ilya, of course, noticed, he just enjoyed pretending he was oblivious. The first complaint was almost an afterthought.

“Where is my black hoodie?”

“Laundry mix-up,” Shane said smoothly. “Might have ended up in my bag.”

Ilya snorted. “You separate your laundry by fiber content and season.”

Shane had no rebuttal for that.

The second time, it was a jacket. 

“You are stealing my wardrobe, Mr. Real Estate.”

“I am not,” Shane said, sounding appropriately offended. “You leave them lying around.”

“In my own room.”

“You bring them into my room,” Shane countered, which was, on occasion, technically true.

The third time, Ilya just looked him up and down slowly. “You do realize you’re wearing my coat right now, yes?”

Shane glanced down at the sleeves covering his knuckles, then back up, his heartbeat perfectly steady because he had rehearsed for this moment. “Oh. Huh. Must have grabbed it by mistake. We have similar… builds.”

Ilya laughed so hard he had to sit on the bed to recover.

After that, it evolved into an ongoing game.

Ilya would issue a half-hearted grievance. Shane would deploy a meticulously crafted excuse. Left it at the practice rink. Accidentally packed after that trip. Needed an extra layer on the bus. Borrowing it for climatic reasons. Borrowing it for unspecified but legitimate purposes.

Shane told himself he had everything under perfect control.

~

Rose found out entirely by accident, which was, in retrospect, Shane’s first critical error. His second was assuming that "accident" meant she wouldn’t launch a full-scale investigation.

They were on one of their regular video calls with Rose leaning against her headboard with a mug of tea, Shane perched on the very edge of his bed. The conversation was standard: upcoming charity events, her week, his sleep (adequate), his diet (sufficient), his general state of being (completely fine).

At one point, Shane stood to fetch his charger from the dresser.

It didn’t occur to him to check his background. 

The silence on her end became suddenly very loud.

Shane turned back, charger in hand. 

“…Shane,” she said, her voice deliberately slow.

“Yes?”

“Why,” she continued, “do you have what looks like seven jackets that are distinctly not your style hanging in your open closet?”

Shane glanced over his shoulder. The camera’s view had captured it all. The parade of dark, oversized shapes. The slouchy hoodies. The Boston Bears logo, visible on at least two items.

“They aren’t - ” he began, then stopped. Rose was already smiling. 

“Are you… curating a collection?” she asked.

“No.”

“That was a very defensive ‘no.’”

“They’re not a collection. They’re in temporary storage.”

Rose took a long sip of tea. “Whose temporary storage are they in?”

Shane considered a lie. Then he remembered he was speaking to the human equivalent of a polygraph test.

“Ilya’s,” he said, the word barely above a murmur.

Rose blinked. “Oh.”

Somehow, her understanding was infinitely worse than outright judgment.

They attempted to change the subject. But for the rest of the call, Shane was hyper-aware of the closet behind him, half-expecting the jackets to stage a coup and announce his crimes themselves. The moment they hung up, he lunged for the closet door and slid it shut, his heart pounding like he’d just smuggled a penguin through customs.

He had just finished desperately reorganizing the jackets when his phone buzzed.

Three links followed.

The preview snippets alone seemed to accuse him: compulsive behavior, emotional attachment objects, stress response rituals. 

He typed back.

Shane closed his eyes.

“That was one time!” Shane muttered to his empty room, his face heating.

Shane opened the first article.

Stress-induced attachment. Comfort-seeking through objects associated with safety. Avoidance of direct emotional vulnerability. Substitution behaviors in high-performance individuals.

Shane huffed a weak laugh.

Maybe he should tell him.

~

To deliver his confession, Shane rehearsed two separate monologues in his head, scrapped both for being either too clinical or too deranged, and finally ambushed Ilya in the least conducive setting possible: Ilya's own hotel room.

Ilya glanced up from his phone. “You look like you are here to tell me you have sold my soul on internet.”

“I need to speak with you,” Shane announced.

Ilya’s eyebrow arched. “That never sounds fun.”

Shane launched.

“Alright. This concerns personal boundaries, and behavioral habits, and stress-related coping mechanisms. I want to state for the record that I have the utmost respect for personal property and individual autonomy. This is not a typical behavior for me, except it has, become a pattern.”

Ilya slowly set his phone aside.

Shane’s words began to accelerate. “The postseason pressure has been significant, and my tolerance for loss is suboptimal, and there’s this concept called sensory regulation that I’ve only recently researched, and while it’s not physically detrimental, emotionally it might be problematic, and I want to be clear that cessation was always the intended goal - ”

He cut himself off abruptly, chest rising and falling as if he’d just sprinted here. 

With flawless deadpan delivery, Ilya said, “You know theft is generally frowned upon, yes?”

“It was a temporary relocation!” Shane sputtered, horrified. “With full intent to return!”

Ilya tilted his head. “You even folded them. And washed them. My hoodie smells like your cedarwood detergent.”

“There were… olfactory considerations.”

“Should I be touched or terrified?” 

“Possibly both?”

Something in Ilya’s expression shifted, as if he’d just noticed a fascinating, flustered species of bird in his room. He leaned back, crossing his arms.

“You are nesting in my clothes.”

Shane blinked. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means,” Ilya said, looking smug, “you are a disaster.”

Shane drew himself up, summoning every ounce of his captain’s dignity. “You can have everything back. Today. I’ve already reorganized my closet to eliminate the… temptations.”

“Okay,” Ilya said finally. “Then I will just give them to you.”

“No,” Shane said quickly. “That defeats the entire purpose. Then it would be intentional.”

Ilya smiled.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You have stumbled into intimacy.”

Shane stared at him. “That is a mischaracterization.”

Ilya stood, closing the distance between them without a hint of hesitation. He reached out and pinched the sleeve of the jacket Shane was wearing - the very jacket Shane hadn’t even consciously registered putting on that morning.

“You look better in them anyway,” Ilya remarked. “Is a good look for you.”

Shane groaned, dropping his forehead toward Ilya’s shoulder.

“And,” Ilya continued, his amusement warming his voice, “I will forgive you. It will be very easy.”

Shane eyed him with suspicion. “That feels like the setup for an unfair negotiation.”

Ilya leaned in before Shane could protest further. The kiss was warm and unhurried, like Ilya had decided exactly how much of it Shane could handle and was enjoying giving him just that. His mouth was soft, familiar now in a way that still startled Shane, the kind of closeness that made his breath catch even as his hands curled reflexively in the fabric of Ilya’s sleeve.

It lingered just long enough to leave Shane aware of the space between them when Ilya pulled back, foreheads nearly touching.

“Wear my jersey to the next game.”

Shane pulled back just enough to see Ilya’s face. “That’s publicly visible.”

“Yes.”

“That would be intentional,” Shane repeated.

Ilya’s eyes gleamed with triumph. “Exactly.”

Shane shook his head, reaching for deflection like it was a life raft. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. From a media standpoint. Jerseys have significance. You don’t just - ”

“You’re overthinking.”

“I am thinking the correct amount,” Shane insisted. “This is a rivalry game. People zoom in.”

“They already zoom in,” Ilya said easily. “You just don’t notice.”

Shane tried again. “What if it becomes a thing?”

Ilya smiled. “It already is.”

Shane exhaled through his nose. “This is manipulation.”

“Affection,” Ilya corrected. “With incentives.”

Shane looked away, jaw tight, brain scrambling for a rational objection. Something about professionalism. Or luck. Anything that didn’t sound like I don’t want people to see how much I like you.

Nothing came.

Instead, unhelpfully, his mind supplied the image: the weight of the jersey on his shoulders. The familiar smell. Ilya’s name across his back. The way Ilya would look at him from the ice, knowing Shane had agreed.

Shane wasn’t… entirely opposed to it. He guessed.

“I reserve the right to regret this,” Shane said finally.

Ilya’s grin softened a little. “You reserve a lot of rights you never use.”

Shane’s ears burned.

“Fine,” he said. “But if we lose, I’m blaming you.”

Ilya’s eyes lit up like he’d won something important.