Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories:

Gen, M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Hayden Pike & Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov & Svetlana Vetrova

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Hayden Pike, Svetlana Vetrova

Additional Tags:

Angst, Closeted Character, Episode: s01e05 I'll Believe in Anything (Heated Rivalry), Injury, Hospitals, Introspection, POV Ilya Rozanov, Hurt No Comfort

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2025-12-25 Words: 1,563 Chapters: 1/1

the ghost

Summary

Ilya tries to visit Shane in the hospital the night he's injured, and fails.

Notes

the response to "Dog" was crazy, this fandom is amazing. i'm starting to feel like a broken record because every conversation i have involves heated rivalry. oh what a life, to be a queer canadian wasian witnessing queer canadian wasian cinematic history

There is a lot of French at the hospital.

Ilya has been to Montreal enough times to know that they speak French here, obviously. He even knows enough about neighbourhoods in Montreal to know that they are on the anglophone side of St Catherine. Still there is a lot of French, which Ilya cannot read.

As another captain, it is easy for Ilya to find out where Hollander is staying. Everyone commends him for his sportsmanship. They say, it is very appropriate to check in on Hollander. Shows good character. As if it is a hard thing for Ilya Rozanov to do—to be appropriate, and to show good character. As if Ilya Rozanov is lazy. 

The French reminds him of Sasha. He never visited Sasha in Paris. In fact, he has never been to France. Despite all that, he can imagine Sasha in a place like Montreal. Sasha in Mile End, dancing around tables and snorting cocaine in the bathroom. Sasha with a picnic basket on Mount Royal in the summer. Sasha in a hospital like this one, with no one to ask after him.

That feeling goes tight in him, and then Ilya lets it go. He knew Sasha only a long time ago.

Ilya waits just down the hall from Hollander’s room, leaning against the wall. Hollander is in Room 246-C. There is a waiting area with sad chairs and sadder people just in front of the elevator, but Ilya cannot sit there with the other people anxiously waiting for news about their mothers and husbands and children, because he is no one’s child or husband or father.

It is not your right, he thinks to himself. When Ilya is very, very anxious, he shakes himself, twitches his head and shakes out his hands. He does this because it is not attractive to pick at his skin or tap his feet, and Ilya knows how to see himself. It is not your right to know what has happened to Hollander. You are nothing to him.

It was not nothing in the hotel room in Florida. Ilya flexes his hands. He had gripped Hollander’s shirt so tightly. He can almost feel the fabric under his palms again. He is not nothing. Hollander looked at him, even when Ilya turned away, and held him. He was not nothing then.

But still, here, now, he has nothing. He threw his life in Russia away and still he does not have this. He will never see his niece grow up. He will never go home.

To cope with this, he calls Sveta.

“Ilyusha,” she says softly. Of course, she knows. “Where are you?”

“Hospital.” Ilya does not move a muscle. He is in control. “Montreal.”

“For Hollander, yes?”

Ilya’s mouth twists. So it is obvious. He knew she knew, anyway, from the way her teeth shaped the name Jane.

“Is he all right?”

“I don’t—” Ilya exhales through his nose. Like an animal. “I don’t know.”

“Ah.” Sveta waits with him in the silence for a moment. Then, she says, “He will be all right. It would already be news if he had been seriously injured. His parents would have called everyone.”

“I am not on any list of people to call.” 

“Ilyusha.”

“Sveta.”

She sighs. “I’m sorry, my baby. You will see him soon. Breathe.”

Ilya breathes. Shane had looked at him. He knew in 2008 that he could kill Shane if he wasn’t careful. He knew from the minute he stepped into Shane’s room and put his thumb in his mouth that Shane could have been ruined by a careless man. But he trusted Ilya, and so Ilya had tried to be safe for him. He’d tried his very, very best.

But on the ice, Shane had— and only for a second. Only for a fraction of a second. Shane was not a man to lose control of the puck in a game. But just a tenth, a hundredth of a second, of looking at Ilya was enough to put him in the hospital.

Out of the corner of his eye, Ilya sees Hayden Pike step out of Room 246-C. “Pike is here,” Ilya says quietly. “I will go.”

“Call me when you need me,” Sveta says. “He will be all right.”

“Yes, yes. Thank you.” Ilya hangs up just as Pike makes it to him. “Pike.”

“Rozanov.” Pike looks him dead in the face. “You got no right to be here.”

Ilya is the captain of the opposing team. It is good sportsmanship to see Hollander. But, of course, it would be better sportsmanship to leave Hollander’s family and team for the whole evening, and instead to come in the morning, when Hollander is settled and the family has had their time.

“I know,” Ilya says, and even he can tell he sounds broken. He does not cry, though. “I know.”

Pike looks at him and he knows, too. Perhaps what he knows is only that they are friends. But there is something he knows. And Pike, who Ilya has always hated for being irritatingly American, is kind to him and says, “Look, he’s all right. He’s asleep, not unconscious. He’ll be up in the morning. Get some rest.”

It is a very American string of sentences. Look, he’s all right. Get some rest. Ilya has been looking.

“Asleep,” Ilya repeats, stupidly. “Yes.”

Pike says, maybe out of pity, “They won’t let you see him, man.”

“I—” Ilya chokes.

He can’t say it. He can’t say, I won’t be able to sleep unless I see Hollander. Already he has told his coach he cannot make their 9am flight. Already he is in trouble. But somehow, he cannot form the words.

Into the silence, Pike sighs explosively. He leans back against the opposing wall of the hallway. “Fuck, man,” he says, as if he has any idea what Ilya is going through. 

A moment passes. And then, inexplicably, Pike says, “I’m sorry about your dad.”

What. “What?”

“I know Hollander gave you his condolences,” Pike says glumly. “Made me realize I shoulda done that too.”

When on earth did he do that, Ilya wonders, but then realizes that, of course, it was when they spoke on the ice. This is the excuse Hollander used for why they would speak to each other before a game.

Ilya’s stomach twists. PIke knows nothing. Pike knows nothing of the thrumming in his chest, the feel of Alexei’s hands on him, the way Sveta saved him. He knows nothing of the teeth-clenching fear in his father’s voice over the phone. He knows nothing of the way Hollander laid his head on Ilya’s chest in Boston, the way Shane rocked him in that hotel room in Florida. He knows nothing of Polina’s absence or the ghost of Irina.

It strikes Ilya, suddenly, that no one knows anything about him at all.

“Thank you,” Ilya says stiffly.

Pike exhales. “Visiting hours start again at 8 am,” he says. “Come back then. He’ll probably be awake.”

“Okay,” Ilya says, and then again, “Thank you.”

Pike looks like he is about to touch Ilya, maybe clap him on the shoulder, but he leaves him there instead, fortunately. Ilya looks at his hands. They are trembling. He looks at the blank wall across from him.

He looks at his phone. It is just past midnight. In eight hours he can come back, like a dog who has been left outside as a punishment.

Jesus, he thinks to himself. He’s so gloomy. Hollander, obviously, is fine. He has to get a grip.

Instead of doing anything reasonable, Ilya unlocks his phone and finds the album he made years and years ago. The four selfies from that awards show, Hollander fuming but forcing a smile anyway. Ilya’s hand on the back of his neck. He remembers the feeling of that. He didn’t know anything, then, except that he wanted to touch Hollander so bad.

These are the only pictures they have together, other than that CCM photoshoot from when they were rookies. Ilya is certain there must be a photo they are both in, perhaps a group shot from a gala, but he has no way of finding it.

He Googles it. ilya rozanov and shane hollander. The only results are news articles about their game, a hockey blogger’s overview of their rivalry, and inexplicably, an ETalk video about Shane’s relationship with Rose Landry. The images are generally of one or the other of them, or headshots spliced together for the rivalry articles. There is an MLH article about the All-Stars game in Tampa Bay where they are in a team shot, because they were on the same team. They are on either side of the coach and other VIPs, four or five people between them. Ilya saves the photo and adds it to the same album as the Vegas pictures.

The album is pathetic. This is the closest he’ll ever come to evidence of friendship with Shane. What a joke.

Ilya puts his phone away and walks, casually, down the hallway. Through the door he can see Shane’s parents next to him. Ilya doesn’t belong there.

He forces himself to walk down the hallway, take the elevator, and order an Uber to his hotel room. He sets an alarm for seven in the morning. Ilya lies in bed, and does not sleep.