Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, David Hollander, Yuna Hollander, Luca Haas, Brandon Wiebe

Additional Tags:

Post-Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), Retirement, Mentions of Cancer, Cancer, Cancer scare, SPOILER: neither shane or ilya has canvcer, but these things are discussed so be careful, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Anxiety, Panic Attacks, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, also iyla loves shane but this is shane's pov so

Language:

English

Series:

Part 30 of my anonymous heated rivalry fic

Collections:

anonymous

Stats:

Published: 2026-10-24 Words: 8,197 Chapters: 1/1

new and exotic lands

Summary

David gets diagnosed with prostate cancer a few months before Shane turns forty.

“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” he says, right before he drops the news. Family dinner: pasta with vodka sauce, roasted broccoli, a tower of garlic bread stacked just as high as ever, even though Ilya, retired now, no longer has the appetite he once had. Usually, he still manages to put most of it away, even if it means he ends up groaning on the coach afterwards, begging Shane to rub his belly. Shane rolls his eyes, but he always does it, if only for the happy little sighs Ilya makes, like a fat house cat.

--

Or: there's a cancer diagnosis, then a cancer scare, and Shane contemplates retirement.

Notes

• Inspired by [Restricted Work] by ratherunnecessary

David gets diagnosed with prostate cancer a few months before Shane turns forty. “It’s nothing for you to worry about,” he says, right before he drops the news. Family dinner: pasta with vodka sauce, roasted broccoli, a tower of garlic bread stacked just as high as ever, even though Ilya, retired now, no longer has the appetite he once had. Usually, he still manages to put most of it away, even if it means he ends up groaning on the coach afterwards, begging Shane to rub his belly. Shane rolls his eyes, but he always does it, if only for the happy little sighs Ilya makes, like a fat house cat.

“We’ve got a plan,” Yuna says, as soon as David is done speaking. Her jaw set, eyes blazing and dry. Of course, she’s had time to think about this, time to panic, and then make her plans. Shane feels a fumbling under the table, and then Ilya’s hand is in Shane’s own. He grips it, hard. “Prostate cancer is extremely treatable. Your dad is going to have a surgery, and possibly some radiation, and then that’ll be it.”

Which sounds crazy, but when Shane looks it up, it turns out that this is, in fact, standard protocol. Prostate cancer in older adults is rarely aggressive. And as strange as it is for Shane to think about, that’s what his dad is: an older adult. Seventy-two now. Nearly the same age as Shane’s grandfather had been, when he died. Actually, Shane realizes, he’s about the same age as Ilya’s father had been at his passing.

It’s hard for Shane to remember, sometimes, that his parents are old. He looks at them and he still sees the people who held his hands crossing the street as a toddler, the people who lugged around his hockey bags with minimal effort when he was twelve and tired after a game, the people who marched out onto the ice easily after Shane won his first Stanley Cup. 

But two years ago, when the Centaurs last won the Cup—game six in Florida, his parents flown out for the occasion same as always—they had wobbled, a little bit, when they stepped out onto the rink. Yuna had gripped David’s forearm, hard, to steady herself. The WAGS had poured past them like they were tiptoeing.

At the door, Shane gives his parents tight, long hugs, much longer than normal, and tries not to think too much about the wrinkles by their eyes, the skin sagging around their jaws, the way the grey has spread along their hairlines without him noticing. “I’ll send you your dad’s treatment plan,” Yuna promises, and David says, “I’ll be fine, buddy. I swear,” and their careful, deliberate optimism carries Shane out the door.

Ilya’s driving the way he usually does at night now. Trees loom beside the road like intimidating strangers. Shane has a terrible, foreboding feeling that something is going to happen, that a deer is going to leap out of the trees and hit the car, that the car will hit a slick spot and spin out into the forest, but the road is as quiet and empty as it always is. Ilya reaches over the center console and lays a hand on Shane’s thigh.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, without looking away from the road. HIs face is hazed in eerie yellow from the reflecting headlights.

“I want you to go in and get tested,” Shane says. He hadn’t realized he was going to say before he did, but once the words are out of his mouth, he recognizes that they’re true. His mom has things with his dad’s cancer handled; Shane’s job, then, is Ilya.

“Tested for what? For prostate cancer?”

“Tested for everything,” Shane says. The steps slot into place in his mind, obvious, now. “I want you to get one of those full-body scans, the ones that check for cancer everywhere. And the blood test, that looks for biomarkers, or whatever. And I want to you to do genetic testing. I’ll do it all too, if you want. If it’ll make you feel better.”

“You do not have to.”

“No, I’ll do it,” Shane decides. “That way, we’ll have all the information. And we can plan appropriately. It’s a good idea, really. Just good to be cautious. Don’t you think?”

A beat of silence from Ilya. They’re rounding the corner towards their house, now. Shane can see the faint peak of the roof through the trees out front. Anya will be waiting for them in the front hallway, snoozing in her dog bed. Now she’ll be seeing their headlights, soaring through the windows. Now she’ll be hearing the creak of their tires on the gravel. She’ll be peeking her head up, now, optimistic, tail wagging. Now Ilya reaches up and presses the button to open their garage door, and now Anya will be leaping out of bed and dashing towards the back door, where she’ll hover with her face pressed to the crack of the doorframe so she doesn’t waste a single second in welcoming them home. 

Ilya says, “Whatever you want, we can do.” Which is just like him, really.

—

On the day of his dad’s surgery, Shane takes the day off from practice to sit in a waiting room at the hospital with his mom and Ilya. His mom told him it wasn’t necessary—“Honey, this is really such a routine procedure, and Ilya will be here, if anything happens”—but it felt like the right thing to do, to be there, and anyway, it won’t hurt Shane’s hip to get an extra day’s rest. 

It’s been a problem, on and off, since the Cens’ last successful Cup run, when Shane got his side busted open against the boards in round one and then kept playing on his injuries for another month. The million steroid shots and ibuprofen were worth it, for the Cup, but Shane is definitely going to need to get that hip replaced sooner rather than later. He’s been putting it off, knowing that he’s unlikely to be able to come back after that kind of major surgery. A hip surgery means retirement, and Shane thinks he’s still got a little time.

The timeline is starting to look shorter now, though. In January, a defenseman from Vegas checked Shane into the boards on his bad side, and it wasn’t even particularly hard, it wasn’t even an illegal hit, but things have been bad ever since. Shane hasn’t spent so much time in physiotherapy ever in his life, and still all it’s doing is keeping him fixed in place, treading water.  A summer of rest might help; that’s Shane’s last shot. If it doesn’t help, then Shane—

Well. Shane tries not to think about that.

The hospital is a good distraction. They let everyone hang out with David beforehand, in the pre-surgical room. David, recently returned from a week touring Mayan ruins in Mexico with Yuna, looks almost alarmingly tan against the white sheets. He smiles at Shane the same as always, jokes with Ilya and squeezes Yuna’s hand, and when the nurses come to take him to surgery, he waves cheerfully, saying he’ll see them in a couple hours.

On the walk back to the waiting room, Ilya grabs Yuna’s hand and says, “He’ll be okay.”

Yuna sniffs, swiping at her eyes. Shane realizes, with alarm, that she’s trying not to cry. “He seemed so scared.”

Which is not the feeling Shane got from David at all, but Ilya nods like this is undeniably true. “It is scary,” Ilya says. “Nobody likes surgery. But he is in good hands, and he has us here to help.”

Yuna smiles at him tremulously. “You’re right, sweetheart,” she says. Shane feels like a limb that’s fallen asleep, hanging off to the side of the body, useless. Then they emerge into the waiting room, where half a dozen other families are waiting for their loved ones, and a little boy looks up from his picture book, lays eyes on Shane, and gasps, “Shane Hollander?”

So Shane and Ilya kill half an hour taking pictures with everyone in the room, which at least helps Shane feel less like a useless lump of clay, and then there’s only an hour and a half left to go. By then, Yuna has her phone out, emailing some brand or another, tapping away at the keyboard she’s recently had to upsize yet again—the letters are so large now that you can practically see them from space, and still she sometimes squints at them. 

Ilya had brought an old, battered copy of Jurassic Park to read, but he waits until Shane nods at him to pull it out of Yuna’s purse. He holds it one handed—it’s so small, and Ilya’s hands are so big, that he can turn the pages with his thumb without issue—and Shane tucks himself into Ilya’s shoulder and closes his eyes. In for four, out for four.

The surgery goes well. Of course the surgery goes well: they’re at the best hospital for prostatectomy in all of Ontario. In the recovery room, David is loopy from the anesthetic and keeps talking about the robot he saw in the OR. “I’m a cyborg,” he slurs. Yuna laughs and pats his hand. Her tears are gone now that she has something to focus on. She keeps offering David crackers, sips of water from a plastic cup. 

A nurse comes in to check David’s incisions and Shane sees the tiny little wounds where the laparoscopic tools went in. Shane’s had worse damage from a check during a hockey game, but it’s the worst injury he’s ever seen on his father. For as long as Shane can remember, he’s never seen his dad worse off than sniffling over a bad cold. Neither has he ever seen his dad this high. It’s almost alarming, how giggly he is, the boisterousness and lack of inhibition, how loud he wants to shout.

Then David says, “I really hope I can still fuck you after this,” looking at Yuna with big teary eyes, and Shane and Ilya take that as their cue to clear out.

—

The Cens aren’t looking too good for the playoffs this year. It’s February, it’s still early, anything is still possible if they work hard enough—this is what Wiebe likes to tell them, in the locker room, before important games or after not-so-important games that the Cens have lost. 

It’s true that last year, the team almost didn’t make playoffs either, and then they got a wild-card spot and made it all the way to the Eastern Conference finals. Still, something feels different this time around. Something in the air, maybe, an attitude. Shane can’t explain it, but after so many years, he knows what it means.

Haas seems to have gotten the same vibe. During a shooting drill, he skates up beside Shane, leans hard on his stick, and says, “So, we’re kinda fucked, aren’t we?”

How different he’s become from the shy Swiss teenager who thought the sun shone out of Shane’s ass. Ilya’s influence, probably. Certainly the swearing is. More than once, Shane has caught Luca hissing blyat! to himself when he missed a goal.

“Season’s not over until it’s over,” Shane recites dutifully. Then, because he’s known Luca a long time and because there’s an A shining on Luca’s chest which will one day certainly become a C: “But, yeah, it’s not looking good.”

Luca gives an attempt at a rousing speech in the locker room before their next game, during which he raises both his arms up to the ceiling and says, “Who knows how long we will have this team? Who knows how long we will be together like this?” And Shane realizes, suddenly, that everyone is expecting him to retire after this season. Half the room is looking at him; the other half are very conspicuously not looking at him. 

Shane has half a mind to pipe up and say something like, hey, I’m still fucking here, but it would undermine Luca’s upcoming captaincy, a rift between the leadership, and anyway he doesn’t want to seem too sensitive. Jesus Christ, he’s thirty-nine. 

He plays the hardest he’s played during a game in a while, the sort of effort that ten years ago would probably have gotten him a dick trick and a spectacular fucking from Ilya when they got home. Now, Shane barely manages three points—two goals and an assist—and afterwards has to sit in an ice bath for thirty minutes just to get his hip to calm down long enough for him to limp home. 

There, Ilya half-carries him to bed, laying him out on carefully arranged pillows and covering him with prepared ice packs. Ilya had probably started planning this as soon as he saw the way Shane was playing in the first period, as soon as he saw the way Shane glided onto the ice, the set of his jaw.

“What am I going to do with you?” Ilya tuts, brushing the hair off Shane’s forehead. It’s a phrase Ilya has picked up from Yuna, and it always irritates Shane to hear it. Like he’s just some thing that needs to be managed, a bruised rib or busted hip.

He can’t bite back now, though, because Ilya has given Shane a sleeping pill, and some pain meds, and Anya is curled up against Shane’s side, her head soft and heavy on Shane’s chest. He’s so comfortable, as comfortable as he could possibly be with his hip the way it is. If Shane is a thing that needs to be managed, then Ilya is undeniably good at managing him. He lets Ilya pet him until he falls asleep.

—

For scheduling reasons, Ilya and Shane have their full-body scans on different days. Ilya does his while the Cens are off on a one-day road trip to Toronto, where they eek out a win against a team that’s been five years free of Kent and yet still shows his echoes. Two days later, Ilya goes to some pre-planned outing with a crew of former Centaurs and Shane takes his turn in the hospital.

It’s a good thing Shane has experience with meditation, because it’s a mind-bogglingly boring day. Physical assessment, then a scan, then another physical assessment, then another scan. Five million fucking questions, all asked by nurses with flat smiles and clinically bored voices. Shane reviews hockey stats in his mind to keep himself occupied, and every hour or so he checks his phone, hoping to find something from Ilya. Always, there’s nothing.

It’s not a surprise, really—Ilya is busy, the same way that Shane is busy. It’s not like Shane was texting Ilya from behind the boards at practice, while Ilya was waiting for his own MRI scan.

But, Shane realizes, somewhere around hour four, Ilya always knew exactly what Shane was doing when they weren’t together. He could probably glanced at the clock and and timed it out: now Shane was stretching in the locker room pre-practice, now he was skating laps to get his blood pumping, now he was practicing shots on the back-up goalie. 

Shane, on the other hand, isn’t even entirely sure what activity Ilya is meant to be busy with. Disc golfing, maybe? Shane knows the former Cens like disc golfing. There was a big debate about it, years ago, when it first got popular, Hazy contending that it was a perfectly valid sport that required skill and finesse, Chouinard arguing that because there was no cardio or strength component that it shouldn’t count as exercise.

But it’s still pretty frosty outside, and Shane isn’t sure if you can play disc golf when the ground is snowy. Maybe, he thinks, the guys went to the golf simulator. That’s possible, right? That seems likely. 

Yes, he tells himself, that’s almost definitely it. He contents himself with this answer until he gets home, and, finding Ilya playing Chel on the couch, asks him how golf went.

Ilya frowns at him. “Golf?” he says. “Is still winter. We were at pottery class.”

Pottery class. Pottery class? How the fuck could Ilya could be taking regular pottery classes without mentioning them to Shane? He must have told him. Of course he would have told him. It’s just that Shane—Shane doesn’t remember this at all.

Not that the idea of Ilya in pottery doesn’t make sense. It’s so obvious, now that Shane thinks of it. Ilya bent over the pottery wheel, elbows braced on his knees, frowning down at his pot with total concentration. He’s excellent at it, probably. Probably threw a perfect vase on his first attempt, and had their pottery teacher melting all over herself at his obvious skill. 

But he won’t be cocky: he won’t get upset when he makes a mistake. He’ll just laugh and say it’s all good practice, then scoop the wasted clay up with one big hand to start over again. Everyone will love him for it, for his modesty, and they’ll love him even more when it comes time to paint their pots and they see what a terrible fucking eye Ilya has for colors.

Shit. Shane’s heart drops. People who make pottery finish pottery. People who finish pottery bring that pottery home. Does Ilya have something he made, in the house somewhere, hidden away? Is it possible that he showed it to Shane, and Shane said something stupid? Is that why Shane doesn’t know more about this hobby?

Shane spends the next week and a half subtly snooping around the house, searching for unfamiliar decor, but he doesn’t find anything out of place. He’s pretty sure the bowl on the front hallway table has been there for a while, and he knows he’s used that trinket ring over the sink for years. Maybe the cup Ilya soaks his night guard in? Is it possible that he made that for himself?

Shane hasn’t found anything definitive by the time his test results come back, eleven days after his appointment.  The report is clean, except for his hip, which, while not malignant, is so twisted and arthritic that the health report spends three whole paragraphs talking about it. To preserve the joint insofar as possible and to maintain usage in older age, patient is strongly recommended to reduce active use of the joint and schedule a hip replacement as soon as possible, the radiologist concludes.

The results come in on an online portal, with a small note from the doctor, saying to call her with any questions. When Ilya’s results don’t arrive that same day, Shane thinks at first that there’s just been a delay with radiology, and is tempted to gloat to Ilya about beating him to the finish line yet again. Then another day passes, and then another, and then Ilya gets a message in the portal from his doctor with no results package attached, asking when might be a good time for a call.

“I’ll get right to it: there’s an abnormality in your lung scan that we’d like to pursue further,” the doctor says. Her last name is Theriault, which is terrible, so mostly Shane and Ilya have been calling her Dr. T. “Now, it’s possible this could be a lot of things, so I don’t want you to panic. It’s very common to see irregularities in the lungs of smokers.”

“I don’t smoke anymore,” Ilya pipes up, as if he didn’t give Dr. T an exhaustive history of his smoking habits the first time they sat down in her office together.

“Right, I’m sorry, former smoker. Still, these kinds of impacts can be seen a really long time after someone stops smoking. Smoking causes scar tissue, which can show up as the kind of shadow we’re seeing her on the X-ray. There are also certain benign bumps that can grow in the lungs which are a lot more common amongst former smokers. But there is, of course, also a possibility that it’s malignant. To be safe, I’d suggest we do a biopsy, so we can send a sample to the lab to get tested.”

At which point, Shane starts breathing so hard that Ilya has to ask Dr. T if he can call back later to make an appointment for the biopsy. He and Shane spend ten minutes on the couch doing box breathing, foreheads pressed together, Shane’s grip so tight on Ilya’s thigh that he’s probably leaving bruises.

“Good,” Ilya says, when finally, finally, Shane’s heart-rate dips below a hundred beats per minute. It’s still way too fucking high—his normal resting heart-rate is forty—but at least it’s no longer in actively going to die mode. Ilya cups Shane’s jaw in his hand and rubs his thumb over Shane’s cheekbone and says, “Sweetheart, you are okay. You are good here. We are good here.”

Except while Shane and Ilya are sitting here on the couch, in their home, there is something in Ilya’s lung that might be killing him. Something that might be burrowing into Ilya’s lung and eating Ilya from the inside out. Shane’s husband. Like it has any right. 

Shane has a horrible, sudden vision of cutting through Ilya’s chest with a steak knife to try to remove the tumor.

“Shane,” Ilya says, slapping at Shane’s face, and the sting takes away the vision as quickly as it had come. “Hey. This could be nothing. We don’t know anything yet, okay? We do not want to get ahead of ourselves. What does Dr. Rosenthal say about worry?”

“Worry means you suffer twice,” Shane says dutifully. It’s a good adage, hard to argue with, and Shane has thought about it a lot, since Dr. Rosenthal first gifted it to him like a shimmering pearl at one of their first therapy appointments. Still, it’s not the best at stopping him worrying when he’s already in a spiral. It’s not as though Shane’s anxiety gives a fuck about logic.

“So we are not going to worry,” Ilya says. “I will get biopsy, we will get more information, we will figure it out from there. Okay?”

Shane makes Ilya call back right away, and he gets in for the biopsy the next week. A quick turnaround, which Shane is accustomed to—it's been a very long time since he was subject to the healthcare wait times he so often hears about on the news—but this time, Shane knows it’s not money that’s making things happen, and he feels faintly sick. How worried must Ilya’s doctors be, to get him in for a procedure next week?

Before David’s surgery, David had done a whole cleanse, not eating for twenty-four hours, only clear liquids, no medications. Ilya’s procedure, apparently, is a lot simpler. He’ll be getting in at eight in the morning, and he’s not supposed to eat or drink anything after midnight the night before, but otherwise, he’s supposed to go about life as normal. “It’ll be quick,” the nurse on the phone promises, when they’re making the appointment. “Usually, we don’t even do general anesthesia.”

Ilya wants to tell Shane’s parents about the appointment, but Shane says no. “I don’t want them to worry,” Shane says. “My dad’s still recovering.” 

Ilya frowns. “I don’t want you to be waiting for me all alone,” he says. But Shane shakes his head, resolute, swallowing around the monster in his throat. 

“I’ve got you,” Shane says.

So Ilya caves, like he always does, and it’s just the two of them at the hospital, the day of the procedure. This time, Ilya asks the nurse beforehand if there’s somewhere private his husband can wait. She looks confused for a moment, and then she looks over at Shane again and her eyes go wide. They find him a private waiting room. Shane stays until the moment the orderlies kick up the brakes on Ilya’s hospital bed to roll him into CT, and even then he holds Ilya’s hand for as long as possible, kissing his knuckles like Ilya’s some kind of Victorian maiden and Shane is seeing him off to the sanatorium. He wants to stand in the hallway and watch Ilya’s entourage disappear around the corner, but a nurse takes his shoulder and gently steers him away.

In the waiting room, Shane takes a few deep breaths and then pulls Ilya’s copy of Jurassic Park out of his bag. He thought Ilya might want Shane to read it to him while he was in the recovery room, and it’d be good if Shane had a sense of what was going on. He flips to the first page of the prologue.

The tropical rain fell in drenching sheets, hammering the corrugated roof of the clinic building, roaring down the metal gutters, splashing on the ground in a torrent. 

Shane keeps reading.

—

David’s surgery recovery goes well. Within three weeks, he’s cleared to return to most of his usual tasks, exercise excluded. To celebrate his freedom, he invites Shane and Ilya over to a special family dinner: chicken parmesan, with all the accompaniments.

The date he suggests is the day after Ilya’s procedure. Shane wants to reschedule, but Ilya groans and says, “Shane, it has already been a month since I have had chicken parmesan, you cannot expect me to wait even longer.” So they don’t reschedule. Shane flutters around Ilya like an anxious chicken, but Ilya is just the same as he always is, acting as if nothing at all is wrong.

As far as Shane’s parents are concerned, nothing is. David, broken out of his medical cage, is cheerful and energetic, bustling around the kitchen with clear joy.

“Everything is great,” he says, when Ilya asks. “I mean, I miss my morning bike rides, but I think I can live without those for a while, given everything.” Shane thinks of a bike saddle and winces.

Over dinner, Yuna presses them for details of their summer plans, and Ilya shares news from the Centaurs. The Dykstras are having another kid, an oopsie baby that they couldn’t bring themselves to get rid of. Evan says Caitlin is alternately excited and dreading the sleep deprivation. “I’m sure it’s much worse at forty than it was in her twenties,” Yuna says sympathetically, and Ilya hums in agreement. 

“We are all getting old,” Ilya jokes, and David and Yuna agree, laughing. Shane changes the subject.

After dinner, Yuna and Shane clean up the kitchen while David and Ilya excuse themselves to the living room to work on a puzzle. It’s calming for Shane, scrubbing at the crusted cheese on the casserole dish and listening to Ilya and David’s soft murmurs in the other room, the occasional exclamation when someone finds the placement for a particularly tricky piece.

“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” Yuna says, and Shane immediately tenses up.

“Nothing bad!” Yuna assures him, though that doesn’t really help. “It’s just—your father and I touched base with our attorney, recently, and he suggested we update some of our papers. Our will, life insurance, things like that.”

“Mom—“

“Most of it we just handled ourselves, but we need your sign-off on power of attorney.”

Shane doesn’t follow. “Power of attorney?”

“You know we used to have your Aunt Kara listed, and we need your signature to transfer it to you.”

Shane sets down the sponge. “You want me to be your power of attorney?”

Yuna furrows her brow. “Well, your Aunt Kara is getting very old, honey,” she says. “And, frankly, I think her mind’s starting to go. But even if she wasn’t, we’d rather you have control over these things. We just didn’t want to put too much on you when you were so young. But you’re ready now.”

Shane’s ready now? Who the fuck decided that? Shane’s not ready for anything. Shane is still seventeen yeas old and needs his mom to sign off on his business deals. Shane is still eleven and desperate for his dad to bring him oatmeal because he’s sick. Shane is still four and buzzing out of his body until his parents grab him, squeeze him tight, put him back in himself. Fix the world.

Shane shakes his head, steps back from the sink with his dirty, damp hands. “I don’t think so,” he says.

Yuna frowns. “Shane—“

“Make it Ilya, if you don’t want it to be Aunt Kara,” Shane says. “Not me.”

“Honey, maybe we should talk about this—“

“Nope,” Shane says firmly, turns on his heel, and stalks into the living room. Ilya glances up, automatic, but his expression sharpens when he sees Shane.

“Sweetheart?”

“Time to go,” Shane says. There’s a buzzing beneath his skin, spreading out from his chest to his arms and his legs, and he needs to go before it consumes him whole. “Dad, I’m glad you’re feeling better. Keep us posted on how things are going, okay?”

David is frowning at him now, too. Everyone’s upset with Shane. “Shane, buddy—“

“Yes, we will see you next week,” Ilya says, because he’s perfect, and he’s rising to his feet as quickly as he can on his terrible knee, guiding Shane to the doorway, grabbing both their coats off the hook, shoving their feet into shoes. “Yuna, I will text you about camps, yes?”

Which means he’ll text her about other things to, a report on Shane like he’s a teacher and Shane is a naughty pupil, but right now Shane doesn’t care. He darts out of the door before Ilya, jumps into the passenger seat because he knows Ilya won’t let him drive, and when Ilya clambers into his own seat, says, “Go, go, I don’t want to be here right now, Ilya, please.”

So Ilya drives the ten minutes home, one hand stretched out and clamped over the back of Shane’s neck like a vise, as Shane panic-breathes into his own knees. God, again? Fucking again? Sometimes Shane feels like nothing more than a stack of panic attacks dressed in a trench coat. 

They pull into their garage, and before the door is even shut behind them, Ilya is out of the car and on his knees beside Shane—his bad knee, on the cold concrete—leaning up through the open car door to grip Shane’s thighs, hard, in both his hands.

“I’m not ready for this,” Shane chokes. “I’m not—I don’t—I don’t want my parents to die.”

“Lyubyimyy, breathe,” Ilya orders, and Shane chokes in a gasping breath. “I know, I know, sweetheart, just try to breathe. Breathe with me, okay? In and out. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”

“But they’re going to die,” Shane manages, in between trembling deaths. “They’re going to die, Ilya.”

Ilya’s beautiful face creased with sadness. Later, Shane will feel so stupid for saying all this, and saying it to Ilya, of all people. Like Ilya doesn’t know about parents. Like Ilya doesn’t know about death. But in the moment, a monster is bursting out of Shane’s chest and he doesn’t know how else to explain. What else to say.

Ilya rubs his hands up and down Shane’s thighs. “I know, sweetheart,” he says, instead of what Shane wants him to say, which is no, no, they won’t, they’ll live forever, we’ll live just like this forever. “They will.”

—

Eventually, Shane and Ilya make their way inside, upstairs to the bathroom. “We should remove your bandage,” Shane says. “The doctors said twenty-four hours.”

So Ilya sits on the edge of the bathtub, shirtless, as Shane re-reads the aftercare instructions. Ilya’s wound is easy to miss: a single white bandage the size of Shane’s thumb, plastered between two of his ribs. Shane gets out soap, clean towels, runs the tap to the perfect, mild warmth.

Then Shane squats down beside Ilya, eye-level with the wound. “Let me know if this hurts,” Shane says.

He peels up the edge of Ilya’s bandage slowly, careful of the skin. The skin is faintly pink where the adhesive had been, but the wound itself looks good, flushed with blood flow but not the overly dark red of infection. Shane presses a careful fingertip to the edge of the wound, gauging temperature, but it feels just the same as the rest of Ilya’s chest. 

Shane slicks up his fingers with soap and water. He touches the edge of the open wound gently. “Still okay?” he asks. Ilya nods. He’s still and calm as Shane meticulously covers the wound in suds, then, just as careful, uses a damp, clean washcloth to wash them away. When he’s done, Shane dots Vaseline on top, then sits back, satisfied.

“Okay,” he says. “All done.”

Shane tilts his head back to look up at Ilya, isn’t surprised to find Ilya already look down at him. He cups his free hand around the back of Shane’s head, twisting his fingers in Shane’s head. 

“You take such good care of me,” Ilya says. His fingers scratch, faintly, at the edge of Shane’s hairline, behind his ears.

Shane’s eyes burn. It’s a genuine compliment, and a terrible one. Shane hasn’t been taking good care of Ilya at all. Sure, after Ilya retired, that first summer, Shane had waited on Ilya hand and foot, enforced the recommended bed rest like Ilya’s knee was the goalie, made terrible golutbski and borscht and his mother’s okayu which he brought to Ilya on the couch, on a wooden tray, with napkins and glasses of room-temperature water. 

But as Ilya had gotten better, Shane had relaxed, and by the time the season had started, Shane and Ilya were spending more time apart than they were together, Shane taking Anya on long loping training runs and spending hours in meditative yoga, visualizing success for his first season without his husband in nearly a decade, while Ilya did—what? What did Ilya do?

Shane doesn’t know, not really. It’s a humiliating thought. He knows Ilya had spent a lot of time with his parents, especially that first year, doing puzzles with David and helping him with his garden and working with Yuna on Foundation work. He spent a lot of time with the former Cens, including Bood and Hazy. But mostly what Shane knows is that every afternoon, when Shane got home from practice, Ilya was there waiting for him with a dietician-approved lunch. When Shane looked up into the stands at games, into the WAGS box, Ilya was always there, grinning and cheering.

Shane has been a terrible husband.

Now, Shane turns his head and kisses the inside of Ilya’s wrist. There’s a faint pink mark there, where Ilya had burned himself cooking a couple weeks ago, that fits very nicely between Shane’s lips. It probably won’t scar, but you never know. Bodies are unpredictable like that.

“I love you so much,” Shane says. He swallows hard. “So, so, much.”

“I know,” Ilya says, sweet as cream. He rubs his thumb over Shane’s cheekbone again. “Come here, sweetheart. Let me take care of you, now.”

Shane follows him to bed.

—

By the first week of April, the Cens are officially ruled out of the playoffs. It’s the first time they haven’t made it for five years, since the rebuild season when Bood and Dykstra and Chouinard all left at once and the GM had to scramble to bring in a bunch of rookies who still kind of sucked at their jobs.

The team had been bad, then, too, but it had been clear that at least they were building towards something. This is different: a step down on the beginning of a downward spiral. Shane can see it clearly, the trajectory of the Cens if nothing changes. Next year, with no real new talent and the same leadership, they’ll do their best but they’ll miss out on the playoffs again, or if they do make it in, they’ll crash and burn early in the first round. That summer, the attrition will start. The mid-ground players, those skilled enough for second or third line but not good enough to be stars, will start to make their way towards better teams. Their replacements will be halfway through their own downward spirals. In another couple years, Wiebe will be replaced, in a blind effort to switch things up, but the owners won’t realize what they’re throwing away and things will again get a little worse. In another few years, Ottawa will be back at the bottom of the pack, in the running for high draft picks, hoping to get lucky and select the next big thing. The next Shane Hollander.

Of course, none of this is set in stone. There’s another route forward, one that perhaps involves freeing up significant cap space from a player with a no-trade clause. Shane should probably call Hunter, soon, to ask him how he liked the surgeon that replaced his hip. No—he should let Ilya do it. He’d get a kick out of that.

In the locker room after the definitive game, Shane claps his hands together. “You all did a fantastic job this season,” he says, which is a bit of a lie, but one he’s comfortable giving. A few of the guys have tears in their eyes as they look at him. Luca is keeping his chin up, even though Shane knows he’ll probably go home and curl into his boyfriends side and mope as soon as the younger kids aren’t watching him. God, how strange to think that Luca isn’t one of the younger kids, now.

“Do you have things to work on next season? Sure. There are always things to work on next season. But it’s important to stay focused on the bigger picture here. Bigger picture, this is a winning team. You may not have won this year. You may not win next year. But you are winners. And even if we haven’t made the playoffs, this season isn’t over yet. I expect everyone to keep focused, to keep working hard, to keep showing up until the whistle blows during the eighty-second game. We’re here to play. Let’s enjoy that.”

Shane taps his stick on the floor, twice, a habit he picked up from Luca, who has a tendency to knock a tabletop before he gets up to leave. It’s a German thing, apparently. The team echoes Shane’s taps, and then Wiebe claps his hands and says, “Go shower, you all smell like a clogged toilet,” and the tension breaks. Gradually, the guys strip, grab their towels, meander into the showers. A few punch Shane’s shoulder as they pass him, or smack out vaguely at his ass.

Wiebe waits until the locker room is mostly cleared to saddle up to Shane, busy shucking his skates. “Good speech,” he says. “Can’t help but notice there were a lot of yous in there, though.”

Shane looks up at him, impassive. “Oh, really? I didn’t notice.”

Wiebe snorts. “I’m sure you didn’t,” he says. “Good on ya, Hollzy. Tell your husband hey for me, yeah?” And then he wanders off again. Shane takes a deep breath. 

—

The doctor’s office calls and asks Shane and Ilya to make an appointment to go over Ilya’s results. Shane immediately decides that this means bad news and has another panic attack that Ilya has to pull him out of. Afterwards, Shane sees the tremor in Ilya’s own hands and feels terrible, terrible enough that he calls the doctor’s office and pulls a do you know who we are? to get a special appointment scheduled that very same evening, outside of the usual office hours, to go over things.

Walking into the building feels like walking into a grave. Shane’s never liked doctor’s offices before, but after this he thinks he may actually try to avoid them. He hates white walls, suddenly. He wants to repaint every white room in their house.

“I’ll get right to it,” Dr. T says, when she finally makes her way into the exam room, after making them wait for nearly fifteen minutes. “It’s not cancer.”

Not cancer, not cancer, not cancer. Possibly Shane’s new favorite phrase in the English language. The words sing through his head like a bird call. Shane feels lightheaded with relief, is glad he is sitting down so he doesn’t do something embarrassing like fall over and crack his head open on the doctor's very ugly linoleum floors.

Dr. T explains: it’s a pulmonary nodule. Whatever the fuck that is. Not cancer is all that really matters. Shane grasps Ilya’s sweaty palm in his own and listens to Dr. T blab on about regular scans, experimental treatments that might reduce the risk of developing cancer in the future, blah blah blah. Shane will probably have to call the office back later to get a summary of all everything he’s missing, but for now he can’t do much but watch Ilya’s face—Ilya’s beautiful, smiling face—as he nods and listens and chats up the doctor just as charmingly as he does every other person in his life.

Now, Shane loves white walls again. They don’t actually need to repaint the basement, probably. Maybe they could even paint another room white. What would his office look like, with white walls? Like the inside of a cloud, maybe. Shane feels like he could find his way into the inside of a cloud right now if he wanted to. All he would have to do is jump into the air and a wind current could sweep him away. He’s so light, swelled with joy like a fucking balloon.

Dr. T ushers them to the front door herself, so she can lock up behind them, and they’re silent on the walk together out of the parking lot. In sync, they climb into the car, slamming their doors shut behind them, and for a brief moment, there’s silence. Then Ilya turns to look at Shane, his eyes wide, mouth already open to say—

“We should go to Europe,” Shane blurts.

Ilya stops. “What?”

“Europe,” Shane says. “I know we can’t go to Russia, but I’ve been doing some research. There are a lot of cities with big Russian populations. Like Estonia. Or Latvia. Or we could screw the whole Russia thing and go somewhere else. I’ve always thought Switzerland looked cool, and Luca could give us some recs. Or Germany, didn’t you say you always wanted to go to Berlin?”

 “Shane, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” Ilya shakes his head. “Like a vacation? Instead of the cottage?”

“No,” Shane says. “Or, I mean, yes, if that’s what you want to do. But no, I’m thinking for longer than that. Like, six months. Or a year. Get an apartment somewhere, stay for a while. Try something new.”

Shane has never met anyone with eyebrows as expressive as Ilya’s. Right now, they look like they’re about to shoot right off his face. “What about hockey?”

“My hip is shot,” Shane says. “I still got a bit of this season left, I don’t mean we should leave right now, but. I don’t want to be a dead weight for the team.”

“You could never be a dead weight,” Ilya protests immediately.

But Shane shakes his head. “I don’t want to be stuck on the bench more than I’m playing,” he says. “I’ve put it off long enough. I finish the season, I get the hip replacement, rehab at the cottage for the summer. It’s meant to be a quick recovery. By the time fall comes around, we could be in Europe. I’ve heard fall’s the best time to go anyway. So many places don’t have A/C, it’s better to skip the worst of the summer.”

“Shane,” Ilya says.

Shane charges forward, “I didn’t think I would want to. Do something like this. I don’t know, you know I’m not a traveler. I’m not good at new things. But. I think there’s going to be new things coming in the next few years whether I want them or not. And, you know, it’d be nice to get ahead of it, I guess. Like, if I’m going to do a bunch of new shit, it might as well be stuff I think I’ll enjoy, right? Stuff I thought I couldn’t do before. Like, I never thought about traveling, but maybe I’d like it? I think you’d like it. You’d make all these new friends, and find all these cool new places. I want to do that with you. To get to do something real with you, again. I’ve been missing you, I think. Working on something, together. I mean, I know we’re in this together. Like, life, whatever. I just mean—I haven’t been very good about acting like it, lately. And I just. Thought it could be nice. We don’t have to.”

Ilya presses his thumb in the divot of Shane’s chin, right below his lower lip. “You’re so beautiful,” he says, a strange nonsequitor, until he continues, “Yes, I would like to see you somewhere beautiful. I think you would like the lakes in Switzerland. The ones high up in mountains, what are they called?”

“Alpine lakes,” Shane says.

“Alpine lakes,” Ilya agrees. “I can see us on long hike. You get hot, so you jump in the water, and then you pretend it is not cold even though you are shaking and your balls have crawled back into your body like scared turtle.”

Shane makes a face. “Don’t compare my balls to a turtle, Ilya, that’s so gross.” But his face is tipping into Ilya’s hand more and more, until Ilya is basically holding him up, until Shane is little more than a doll in Ilya’s grip, ready to be moved as Ilya wants him to.

“I do not agree with everything you say,” Ilya says. “You are very good husband, like always. But, yes. Is probably smart to retire before your hip explodes like bomb. And I am selfish. I would always like more time with you. Wherever you want to give it to me.”

Nobody else in Shane’s life would take this news so easily, but then nobody else in Shane’s life knows Shane how Ilya does. Shane wonders what his dad will say, when he tells him; wonders, more importantly, about his mom. All the work she’s done to shape Shane’s career, and here he is, ending it early. Will she fight Shane, when he tells her? At the next family dinner, maybe. Maybe David will be back on his bike by then. Maybe the foundation camps will finally be planned for and Yuna will be refocusing her attention on next season. She’ll ask Shane about his schedule, about fitting in sponsorship meetings, about whether he expects he’ll make All-Stars, and Shane will tell her—what? What will Shane tell her?

He supposes it doesn’t matter. Ilya will be beside him, anyway. And, hey, maybe there’s a chance she does take it well. After all, isn’t it possible that she’s getting tired? That grey in her hair. The eyeglasses she’s always losing. She’s nearly seventy, now, and Shane had thought she wasn’t slowing down, but maybe he was just blind to it. Maybe she needs a change and has just been waiting on him.

Shane says none of this, because he still feels high as a kite and he doesn’t want to bring the mood down. “That’s interesting,” he says instead. “Wherever I want to give it to you, huh?”

Ilya gasps, pressing a hand to his chest. “Shane Hollander,” he says. “Did you just take a tender moment and turn it into a sex joke?”

Shane grins, and grins, and can’t stop grinning. 

“You menace,” Ilya says. “You absolute demon. People would not believe this. People need to know this about Shane Hollander. Hold on.” He turns and starts rolling down his window, and Shane breaks into giggles, lunging across to try to grab his arms.

“No, Ilya, wait, stop—“

“The people must know, Hollander, they must know that you are a bitch—everyone! Everyone! Listen up, Shane Hollander—“

“Ilya, you fucking asshole, don’t you dare—“

Shane tries to plaster a hand over Ilya’s mouth, which accidentally leads to him pulling Ilya’s nose up towards his forehead so it looks like he has a pig nose, to which Ilya retaliates by reaching across and grabbing Shane’s cock where it’s lying undefended in his jeans, and the net effect of the whole thing is that they fuck in the car in the parking lot of their doctor’s office, the window cracked open, bent awkwardly over the gear-shift, Shane’s hip aching like a bitch. He’s sure Ilya’s knee can’t be much better, but Ilya is smiling like he can’t help himself, smiling like he never thought he could be this happy. And, well. Everything is new horizons, now. Might as well get comfortable being uncomfortable. So Shane yanks the lever on the side of Ilya’s chair until it lays back flat, and he clambers into Ilya’s pretty, perfect lap.