Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov & Irina Rozanova

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Grief/Mourning, Childhood Trauma, Hurt/Comfort, Bad Parent Grigori Rozanov, Implied/Referenced Suicide, (we're talking about Irina babes)

Language:

English

Series:

Part 3 of [challenge] Heated Rivalry Febuwhump 2026

Collections:

febuwhump 2026

Stats:

Published: 2026-02-03 Words: 1,327 Chapters: 1/1

ghosts in our past

Summary

The realisation that Ilya doesn’t have a lot of pictures of himself comes early on in their actual relationship.

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Looking for footage to use in promo for the hockey camps associated with The Irina Foundation unearths some ghosts.

Notes

Day three – prompt: Ghost.

Edited because I jumped the gun and included a lovely little headcanon by a friend who hasn’t yet published their fic about it. Maybe the OG version will come back as a tribute because aaah may have gotten a little too excited

The realisation that Ilya doesn’t have a lot of pictures of himself comes early on in their actual relationship. It comes with the territory, really: once they're planning out how to proceed with the hockey camps they want to run, Yuna switches to manager mode and becomes all business.

“It’s all about kids learning to skate, so it stands to reason that we’d be using clips of you two from when you’re kids, that should be quite the draw. Ilya, would that be alright with you?”

That stops Ilya short. “Uh.” He looks at Shane, like Shane will have an answer that goes beyond whatever Ilya wants. It’s Ilya’s childhood, and he’s very careful with what he divulges, so that should be his call, lot.

“You can think about it,” Yuna says after a pause, smiling at the two of them. “We can of course also run a smaller camp first, get footage of you two with kids like that. Or just go with posters and still ads, first; I’ve already reached out to a few graphics designer and marketing experts, and –”

Yuna keeps going, but Shane’s attention is on Ilya. Ilya, who has grown very still. Small, or as small as a 6-foot hockey player can get.

Shane drops his hand, lets it come to rest on Ilya’s thigh. Casual, without looking away from his mother, and humming and nodding at the right moments.

An eternity later, Ilya’s hand finds his. His palm is familiar in its shape, in how it fits into Shane’s hand, but it’s cold and clammy. Shane squeezes.

“Do you have any questions so far?”

Ilya is quiet. For a moment, it seems like he’s shut down, before he exhales and suddenly is back to his charming, limber self. If he’s avoiding Shane’s eyes – well, Shane can hardly complain about that, now, can he? “No. Just – may be harder than you think. There… are not many recordings of me.”

Oh.

It doesn’t make sense. Ilya had been as much a prodigy as Shane had been, and there’s tape upon tape of him: from scouts and his parents, recorded for his grandparents and to go over with the private coach he sometimes skated with.

He can’t imagine the same not holding true for Ilya.

As it turns out, there is tape. Svetlana sends it over within a couple days, and Shane and Ilya sit down to watch: a tiny Ilya skating with pads that are comically large on him; a tiny Ilya weaving around players twice his size like they’re stationary targets; a tiny Ilya dancing so excitedly after a pretty nifty goal that he falls over and yet can’t stop laughing.

He’s tiny in all of them.

“There has to be tape from when you were older!” It can’t be that Ilya’s accomplishments stopped being recorded when he was eight years old.

Ilya’s answering smile is brittle. “Probably there is. I do not have it. And I do not know if the guys who took it are still alive. Probably not.”

“And – your parents?”

In all the recordings Ilya had shown Shane, it had been only him. Teammates in the periphery, sometimes, but the focus only on him, only on the ice. Like he’s a tiny ghost haunting the rink, Shane thinks, like he stops existing the moment he steps off the ice. The thought settles unpleasantly in his stomach.

A muscle in Ilya’s jaw jumps, like he’s chewing on his words. “I don’t think Father knew what I was outside his pride on ice.” His Russian accent is stronger than it’s been in a while, on these words, like he’s reciting them from memory. Like his father truly did only see him as fixture of the rink, and a spectre of the son he imagined outside it.

For a long, long minute, they are both quiet. Then, Ilya adds, “And my mother – she loved it. But… he was worried she would give me her laziness. Her weakness.”

The fabric of Ilya’s t-shirt is thin enough that the heat from his torso bleeds through, but it’s not enough. Shane slips his hands underneath the shirt so they’re skin-to-skin, because how else can he keep them both anchored in the now when Ilya looks like he’s being haunted by his past?

“And so he… also didn’t allow her to keep any… any footage – tape, pictures, anything – of you?”

When Ilya smiles, it’s that bleak, empty smile that makes Shane want to crawl inside him until he can erase every trace of its existence from Ilya’s cells. He settles for swinging one leg over Ilya’s so they’re face to face, Shane in Ilya’s lap, grounding his boyfriend (his boyfriend!) that way. Ilya’s hands drop to his hips immediately, though his gaze also skitters away to a point somewhere beyond Shane’s biceps.

“Ilya –”

“She would be seen in them. And Father… preferred not to be reminded.” He was so hard on her, Ilya had said a few days ago. “He didn’t like her… her cowardice, her laziness… he thought it did not reflect well on him.”

It’s stunning, in its callousness, and if the man weren’t dead already, Shane would be tempted to look for him and give him a piece of his mind. Not that it would have helped. Not that there ever was a time, probably, where that would have helped, but certainly not near the end. Still, rage claws at the back of Shane’s teeth with an intensity that takes him by surprise, because – Ilya is love, he’s radiant, he’s gorgeous, and he gets all that from his mother.

In Shane’s mind, Irina has the same cheekbones, the same curly, dirty-blonde hair, the same sparkling eyes; full of life and laughter and love. She must have been, to produce a child like Ilya, who has confidence and grace even after he lost her too soon. After all, what he does know is that Grigori Rozanov deserves none of the credit, and Ilya has never spoken of other adults in his life. When he has mentioned someone to Shane, it has always been his mother.

“I’m sorry.” The words are ash in his mouth; too little, too… vague, but what else can he say?

Ilya exhales shakily and leans his head against Shane’s chest.

“She deserved so much more. So much more life. So much more love, than what I was able to give her.”

“You – you were a child, Ilya.”

“No – yes, I – I loved her. But the whole world should have loved her. Her husband should have loved her.”

There is no arguing with that. Shane kisses the crown of Ilya’s head instead, feeling the curls tickling his nose. Feeling Ilya be here, in Shane’s cottage, vulnerable in a way that makes a pit open in Shane’s chest that only Ilya can close, that only Ilya can fill. “I love you,” he says instead.

“I love you, too.” Ilya raises his head. His eyes are rimmed red, but he is smiling. “I know that you will never let me become ghost in my own life the way she was. I know you see me. Thank you.”

“Of course,” Shane says, and that’s too little, too, and so he chooses the one language they’ve always done fairly well in: he slides his hands up Ilya’s arms to his throat and his jaw; feels the stubble under his fingers as he tilts Ilya’s head back and claims his lips in a kiss.

Ilya exhales with a shudder and lets his lips fall open, but Shane ignores it for the moment, nipping his bottom lip and soothing the sting with his tongue again and again, until Ilya’s hands clench on his hips. The kiss remains slow, and Shane tries to pour all his love, all his admiration, into the space between them.

Ilya is here, and he is absolutely right: Shane will make sure he never again haunts his own life like a ghost.