Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander

Additional Tags:

Childhood Trauma, Canon Autistic Character, Autistic Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, Introspection, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized racism, (I think?), growing up different, Hurt/Comfort, Character Study

Language:

English

Series:

Part 1 of [challenge] Heated Rivalry Febuwhump 2026

Collections:

febuwhump 2026

Stats:

Published: 2026-02-01 Words: 1,328 Chapters: 1/1

not flawed (just a little under-rehearsed)

Summary

Shane cannot remember a time when he didn’t think he was broken.

Notes

So I saw the Febuwhump prompt list this morning and promptly (haha) got inspired. This fills Day 1, “I like you better broken”

Blame Rio that I’m actually doing this 😂

Title is once again from The Amazing Devil – Marbles.

Ilya doesn’t have a lot of pictures of himself.

It’s an alien realisation, especially when they’re sitting on the couch in Shane’s childhood home, where the walls are decorated with pictures of him skiing and skating and even the brief detour into gymnastics that had lasted all of three months (Ilya still had had a field day, when he’d learned).

There’s one, of Ilya at age three or four, stick in his hands and a concentrated frown on his face, even then. It’s the one that’s always trotted out when it’s about the young Russian phenom, Ilya Rozanov. It’s usually side-by-side with Ilya, age 12 – months before his life got flipped upside down with the death of his mother – where he has a gold-medal between his teeth. His face is still that of a child, made all the more obvious by the older kids surrounding him.

There are no pictures of him after that.

“Sveta kept this,” Ilya says when they’re talking about it one afternoon in the off-season. He pulls the picture up on his phone, and Shane absolutely knows that they need a print of it for his mother, which would be one Christmas present sorted.

Ilya gives him an indulgent smile when he says as much, but dutifully forwards it.

“I think… maybe this is the first time I realised something is wrong with me.” Contrary to his words, Ilya smiles and shakes his head. In the picture, a younger Ilya is lying on a twin-sized bed, fully clothed with his legs hanging off. His hair is shorn short, and his limbs are splayed out on top of the duvet covered with hockey sticks and pucks. A dark-skinned girl is sitting cross-legged next to him – a younger Svetlana, Shane would wager. “Because I like Svetlana, yes? People joke she is my girlfriend, and it never bothers us, because we are friends, but this… we talk about Sasha. That he is cute. That I also think he is cute.” He smiles wryly. “It was so exciting to understand, that maybe it is not that my father hates me just because, but because I am not normal.”

“I’m so sorry,” Shane says, and cards his fingers through Ilya’s gloriously long curls.

“Eh.” Ilya waves him off. “Now I know that he was asshole because he was stupid. But back then…” He smiles. “It helped.”

Shane can’t help but smile back. He can’t quite relate because – “I don’t think there ever was a time I didn’t know I was fundamentally… broken.”

In his lap, Ilya starts, and then scrambles up. “What are you talking about?” he demands, suddenly all business.

Shane can’t help but stare back, wide-eyed. “Uh…”

How can he put it into words? He didn’t have words back then –

Being five years old at pre-school, with the other children (white, all of them, with their flawless French and their halting English) staring at him and whispering, falling silent when he came near;

Being seven and the coach looking at him, an expression on his face almost like he is mad except what he’s saying is that Shane is exceptional, and that he can’t coach him because Shane is too good, and the other children all giving him a wide berth when he goes to collect his gear because apparently nobody, not coach nor his teammates, actually want him on the team;

Being eight and getting shoved by players who are three, four, sometimes five years older than him, on the opposing team as much as his own team who are supposed to be protecting him, except he doesn’t even know what to say to kids his own age much less to kids who are so much older;

Being ten and near the top of the Peewee league in scoring, even though his teammates only pass to him reluctantly, even though he’s told go back to kindergarten and does mama need to change your diapers in intermission and did they hate you in your own league so much they made you our problem?

Being eleven and asked, so who do you like? There’s gotta be a girl at your school, while everyone else laughed in a joke Shane didn’t get;

Being twelve and making his mother cry with his refusal to learn more Japanese, but he couldn’t, couldn’t bear the snide comments any longer, couldn’t bear the hissed insults, and couldn’t, above all else, bear the thought of telling his mother, so he told her he wanted to focus on hockey more;

Being thirteen and getting strong-armed into kissing Elisa behind the gym building and trying not to cry when she’d wiped off her lips in disgust afterwards even though he’d wanted to do the same, and wasn’t he supposed to like it?;

Being fourteen and aware of the eyes on him that had been there for the past two seasons but even more so now, and they came to watch him, and he didn’t know if it was because of his skin-colour and the broken bits of Japanese that were all he retained or because he was showing up everyone else without even trying to because if they only applied themselves –

Being fifteen and talking to his mom about playing in the Junior Leagues versus going Shattuck-St. Mary’s and maybe play college hockey, and he’d thought about his Peewee team four years ago and the Bantam teams he’s played with the past two seasons and couldn’t stomach the thought of two or three more years, and really, how much worse could high school be?;

Being sixteen and noticing other boys for the first time, the frisson of something he’d known even then was fucked up and wrong and not for him, not with his career plan, not with the scouts that came to so many of his games, and Shane tried to ignore them but it was hard with everyone whispering about it;

Being seventeen and seeing Ilya fucking Rozanov, and that frisson grew until he couldn’t ignore it, until he looked at Ilya at eighteen and nineteen and all the way up until now and thought, put me on my knees and make your home inside my chest until we are one and similar, no less understandable versions.

Ilya’s hand finds his jaw, and Shane blinks, all those versions of himself collapsing into the singular, broken person who’s sitting on the couch in his childhood home and zones out at an innocuous question.

“Hollander, what are you talking about?”

Shane shrugs and wills the burning in his eyes to subside. “I tried not being broken, but we all saw how that ended.” When Ilya just keeps looking at him like he’s lost his mind, he adds, “Rose. Y’know.”

A muscle in Ilya’s jaw jumps. “Listen to me, Hollander,” he says. Usually, when he calls Shane by his last name, it’s a sex thing, but this feels different. Like he’s imploring Shane to listen. Shane is powerless to disobey. “If that was you trying to – to fix yourself, I like you better broken.”

Shane huffs, a grin cracking over his face without his conscious input. “How romantic.”

“You are the one to say you are broken! You are not, but if this is you broken – then broken is perfect!” Ilya swoops in and kisses him, pressing the sentiment into Shane’s lips and his tongue.

“How romantic,” Shane repeats when Ilya pulls back and leans their foreheads together. This time, his voice comes out soft. “I love you, too.”

“Maybe we are broken. But we fit. And I would not have you any other way.”

“Neither would I.” The words come out choked, because –

Shane remembers being all those ages, being convinced he will never fit, and yet here he is, with a man who loves him, and parents who support him and… maybe Ilya is right. If this is what it means to be broken, maybe Shane is perfectly alright not being perfect.

Just in this.