Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Crack, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, worm Ilya, Magic Curse, POV Shane Hollander, Idiots in Love, Situationship Era

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-28 Words: 2,527 Chapters: 1/1

Love in the Time of Situationships and Worm Curses

Summary

Kiss, Ilya had managed to write in the dirt.

"Rozanov, you are literally a worm."

(or “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” except Ilya has been cursed to actually become a worm and they haven’t admitted they love each other yet.)

Notes

So I was reading Hoya by GingerBaggins (amazing, spectacular) and I got to the part where Ilya asks Shane if he would still love him if he was a worm. I started to think about how I’ve read multiple other fics where Ilya asked Shane that question, so obviously I thought: What if Ilya turned into a worm? What if a witch cursed him and he was a worm now?
Anyway, here’s the fic. (I don’t know why I’m like this, either.)

Timeline: Takes place during their situationship pre-tuna meltdown.

It had been impulsive, Shane knew that. He'd thought, New York was close enough to Boston (it wasn't) and the team was flying back to Montreal so it wouldn't be a big deal to catch a later flight separately (it would). If he'd known that fucking ESPN would start speculating about whether he was ill he wouldn't have bothered.

He shouldn't have bothered anyway, if he was being honest. Going out of his way to see his occasional hookup that he really was going to break things off with any day now was a bad idea. He was just a bit, well, desperate for it. He hadn't seen Ilya in over a month, and that made a really bad idea sound like a good and reasonable one.

Shane didn't text Ilya until he was in Boston, which was fucking stupid. What if he'd gotten a rental car and driven all this way for nothing?

Ilya texted him back immediately and said they could meet at his apartment in half an hour.

Ilya was walking up to the door just as Shane arrived.

"Running errands?" Shane asked, despite there being no evidence of errands anywhere on Ilya's person.

"No. Out on a date. Left early when I got your text." Ilya unlocked the door. "She was a bit upset about it."

"You ditched your date?" An odd mix of jealousy and vindication settled in Shane's stomach. The jealousy he dismissed out of hand as confused. Obviously he was just hooking up with Ilya, it wasn't like they were serious or anything.

"For a guaranteed lay? Yes."

Shane drew in a breath to argue but couldn't. He’d literally booty called Ilya, this was a guaranteed lay. "You could at least take me out to dinner first," Shane joked half heartedly.

"Can't." Ilya tossed his keys on the table like they'd offended him.

No, of course they couldn't go out to dinner like a normal couple. They couldn't be seen together. They weren't a couple, anyway. This was just a rivals with benefits situationship.

Ilya didn't make the first move for once, so Shane made it instead. Shane shut out the thought of someone else's tongue in Ilya's mouth and focused on the press of Ilya's lips against his. The escalation from there was rapid and familiar. Ilya tore Shane's clothes off and tried to throw them on the floor, Shane insisted they were set aside neatly to avoid wrinkling them, and then they were on the bed in a tangle of limbs and mindless lust.

Mostly mindless. We shouldn't be doing this, Shane managed to think once as he swallowed down Ilya's cock. He cancelled his date, why the fuck would he do that? somehow crept in as Ilya thrust his cock into the back of Shane's throat. He was Ilya Rozanov, every date was a guaranteed lay.

"Slut," Ilya gasped. "Look at you, hungry for it. Fuck, Hollander."

Afterwards, when they were lying spent on tangled sheets, the thoughts made a full force return. "You didn't tell her you were leaving for another date, right?" Shane asked. "You weren't rude to her."

Ilya lounged with his arm behind his head. "I said I was going to get laid."

"Ilya!"

"What? You prefer lying now? She'll be fine. She said she was a witch and was going to curse me."

Shane paused. "What?"

"A witch. I met her on Facebook Marketplace. Maybe I should try a reality show next time. Date a model." Ilya stretched. Fuck, a reality show would love Ilya.

"You're not worried about the curse?"

"Eh. She said she'd turn me into the lowly worm I am. I am not a lowly worm, so the curse will not work."

"I should go." Shane lazily slid a leg out of bed as if he was about to get up.

Ilya grabbed his arm. "No. You missed your flight anyway, yes? Where do you have to go?"

Shane hesitated. It felt greedy to stay longer. It wasn't like he was in a hurry to go back through an airport again, though. "I'll make some phone calls and get my flight rebooked. Someone has to make sure you don't get cursed to step on legos."

"That is a curse I'd be afraid of."

Ilya leaned forward to give him a kiss and... Shane didn't remember falling asleep. He blinked spots out of his eyes and pushed himself up onto his elbows past a wave of vertigo.

"Ilya?"

The apartment was silent. Shane checked the clock. It was still the same time it had been before he'd... blacked out? How had Ilya disappeared that quickly? And how the fuck had a worm gotten onto Ilya's nightstand?

A block of ice settled in Shane's stomach. The Facebook Marketplace witch had actually turned Ilya into a worm.

"Shit." He needed to figure out how to break the curse. He needed to make sure worm Ilya didn't die before that. Shane was an athlete, he didn't know anything about worm care. Did worms need dirt? That seemed like a worm thing, didn't it? How long could a worm survive wriggling around on a nightstand?

Ilya had a potted plant on his windowsill. It was a sad, wilted thing but Shane grabbed it and hoped it would work well enough as a temporary worm habitat.

He set the potted plant down on the nightstand and then very carefully lifted worm Ilya, holding his breath as if that would better help him make sure he didn't squish any part of Ilya's tiny worm body.

Shane's shoulders sagged as Ilya safely squirmed around the dirt of the dying houseplant. Did worms need water? Most things needed water, didn't they? But what if he put out a water dish and Ilya drowned?

Shane swore under his breath and pulled out his phone to google worm care. The internet immediately informed him there were thousands of different types of worm, apparently.

"I should have spent less time on hockey and more time on studying worms."

Shane knew it was impossible to interpret a worm’s movements as expressing anything, but the wiggle Ilya did at that looked sarcastic.

"I'm trying to help you, asshole." Shane snapped a picture and was quickly informed by his phone that Ilya was a European Nightcrawler.

Shane was glad that he hadn't dumped a glass of water in the dirt because apparently that would suffocate him. An attempt to search for further worm care yielded results intent on informing him that worms had both male and female sex organs and reproduced by exchanging sperm for some reason.

"If we were both worms you could get me pregnant." Shane realized a beat too late what he'd just said and frantically googled do worms have ears? No, and no eyes, either. They detected their surroundings through vibrations or something.

Sound waves were vibrations. Shane looked at worm Ilya suspiciously. Ilya rolled in the dirt, and Shane could swear Ilya was laughing at him.

The information beyond that was incomprehensible. Nitrogen versus carbon percentages of dirt meant nothing to him.

He found the address of a garden center nearby. "You hang tight here. Be a worm. I'll be back soon."

The elderly man working at the garden center sold him a terrarium and the correct type of dirt.

"You're keeping them as pets?" the man asked for the fourth time. "Not to cultivate the soil?"

Shane nodded. "Just the one worm pet."

"Earthworms are social. I can order you a herd."

"Not... yet." Shane didn't want to lose track of Ilya in a herd of worms. Plan A was still to break the curse today, anything longer term than that could wait.

Shane hauled his supplies back to Ilya's apartment and set up the terrarium. When he went to fetch Ilya from the plant pot, he found lines in the soil that spelled out hi :)

Well. At least he had confirmed that the worm was definitely Ilya. "Hi," Shane said. "Can you hear me?"

Fuck, it must have taken Ilya forever to carve those lines. "You could at least have written something useful."

With extreme care, Shane moved Ilya into the terrarium.

"Okay. Right. Next step. Find the witch." Ilya had been on a date with her an hour ago, so her number had to be in his phone, right?

Ilya's phone was on the counter, but it presented a new problem. What was his password? Shane hesitated before trying the same number he'd set as the passcode on his own phone. 1410. It worked. He wasn't going to think about that too hard.

Shane checked the call log. The most recent call was to a Svetlana, so he tried that. It wasn't until she picked up and said "Ilya?" that Shane realized he didn't have a plan here.

"Um, hi, this is actually, uh. Were you on a date with Rozanov earlier?"

A pause from the other end of the line, then, "Jane?" followed by laughter. "Did you steal Ilya's phone? You have nothing to be jealous of, I—”

"Did you curse Ilya to be a worm?"

"Did I what?"

Shane hung up in a panic. Very, very wrong number. Shit, had Ilya's friend recognized his voice? How? Never mind, Ilya could be the one to deal with it once he was un-wormified.

There weren't any other calls from today, so Shane switched to texts. There was a text thread with Svetlana. A feeling Shane would not allow himself to call jealousy bubbled up inside him.

The only other person who'd texted with Ilya today had been Shane himself. Ilya had gone on an entire date with a woman without texting her?

Facebook Marketplace, Shane remembered. He searched for an app on Ilya's phone, then pulled up the site in a browser. Thank god Ilya was still logged in.

Shane found the message in the DMs. Ilya had asked a witch name Emery about hiring her to curse 'whoever had airbrushed out Shane Hollander's freckles on that cologne advertisement.' Rude, and also, what the fuck.

Emery had insisted she needed a specific person’s name and could not curse the vague idea of freckle erasure. Ilya had sent her a pouting selfie, somehow they had ended up arranging a date. No, not a date, a hookup at her place. Had Ilya walked out of her house to go sleep with someone else? No wonder she'd cursed him. If Ilya ditched Shane for someone else halfway through sex, Shane would turn him into a worm, too.

Shane assumed Ilya was blocked at this point, but he had an address. Shane jotted it down then checked on worm Ilya while he put on his shoes.

Kiss, Ilya had managed to write in the dirt.

"Rozanov, you are literally a worm."

Shane hesitated before kissing his fingertip and lightly pressing it to what he assumed was Ilya's head. Ilya wrapped around his finger affectionately.

"I'll go talk to Emery. With any luck you'll be human again next time I see you.” The sentiment was a bit optimistic, he had to admit, since he still had to talk Emery into reversing the worm curse.

The address was on the outskirts of Boston, an old colonial house with an elaborate garden. Shane imagined Emery knew how to care for an earthworm.

He knocked on the door and hoped she would answer. It opened to reveal a woman in jeans and a tshirt that read Hex You.

“Emery?” Shane asked uncertainly.

She stared at him. "You're Shane Hollander."

"Yeah, um, can you turn Ilya Rozanov back into a human? He has a hockey game tomorrow."

"How did you... was he hooking up with you?"

"No," Shane said quickly. "I just really don't want him to miss the game."

Her incredulous expression slid into a glare. "That asshole checked his texts while he was undressing, put his shirt back on, and said sorry, I have a thing."

Shane coughed. "Yeah, umm, that's..."

"The thing was you."

"No. I'm just a concerned coworker. He's probably, uh, he'll send you an apology card." Shane would send it himself and pretend it was from Ilya if he had to.

"I don't want an apology, I want him to be a worm."

"Please turn him back? Aren't you a Boston fan?"

"I was. Then I met Ilya Rozanov."

Shane blew out a breath. "Okay. But you can't just leave him a worm. Can you?"

She scowled. "It'll reverse in a month or two."

"A month? I can’t— there has to be a quicker way to reverse it."

"Of course there is," she said smugly. "Love's true kiss. Too bad he's a heartless jerk." She slammed the door in his face.

Shane did not want to do this. He paced a circle around Ilya's apartment and considered his options. He needed to catch a flight back to Montreal. He couldn't spend weeks taking care of a worm. He absolutely was going to, though, if this didn't work. Could he take a worm on a plane or would he be stuck in Boston?

Shane took a deep breath and turned to face the terrarium. "Whether this works or not, we are never speaking of it again."

He scooped worm Ilya into the palm of his hand. His entire body cringed, but he brought his hand to his lips and gave worm Ilya a soft kiss.

He woke up on the floor, blinking spots out of his eyes for the second time that day. There was a groan from beside him.

"Ilya." He pressed his face against Ilya's warm shoulder. Ilya was solid under Shane's hands and he smelled like earth.

Obviously if that had worked that meant they both... loved playing hockey against each other.

Shane's body shuddered as the tension of the last few hours left him. Ilya wrapped an arm around him and made no attempt to get up. In a moment, once the aftershocks of nearly losing Ilya had left his system, Shane would get around to complaining they both needed a shower.

"Don't scare me like that again," Shane mumbled against Ilya's skin, not willing to pull away just yet.

"I will avoid dating witches in the future."

"Or maybe just be less of an asshole."

"Shane."

He wasn't used to hearing his first name from Ilya's mouth. If the sound of it warmed his insides, that was his own business.

"Thank you," Ilya said. "For not leaving me when I turned into a worm."

"Nothing you wouldn't have done for me."

"Yes, but I would have kissed you immediately and turned you back."

Shane shoved away from him. "Fuck off. I wouldn't have gotten myself turned into a worm in the first place."

"No, because you are too boring to get cursed.”

Shane rolled his eyes. "Next time you get cursed I'm feeding you to a loon."

"What the fuck is a loon? Hollander? Where are you going? I need more kisses to make sure curse is broken."

"I have a plane to catch." He brushed dirt off his clothes then made the mistake of looking back at Ilya. His flight could wait an hour.

Works inspired by this one

Podfic - Love in the Time of Situationships and Worm Curses by DiabolicalWordreader (DiabolicalWorldwriter)