I am very sorry for deleting this. I was uncertain whether it made it past the great Ao3 shutdown.

Please let’s pretend there was a Winter Olympics featuring NHL players during HR that took place in, say, Milan. Let’s say Russia was banned from team competition, and that Canada played USA in the gold medal game.

Just as a thought exercise.

In terms of HR timeline, can we set this nebulously sometime in S1 E5 before Shane's injury? Thanks. Appreciate it. Please suspend disbelief if adding the Olympics in there fucks up the timeline too much.

Warnings for descriptions of insomnia, injury, hospitalization, pain medication and a mention of disordered eating. Sorry in advance for any medical inaccuracies, I am a hockey fan first and a doctor, like, 1 billionth.

Finally, thank you to the many people who have taken time to say kind things, it means a whole lot to me. I think this one is more feelings and less porn than my usual which I am nervous about, but like a certain temporary Team Canada captain who has lost back-to-back Stanley Cup Finals and a gold medal game I persevere nonetheless.

Title from this. Ugh.

Shane spends the entire flight back to North America studying his silver medal.

It’s a simple design, a split disc with one half slightly higher than the other and five interlocked rings stamped across the divide.

At one angle, the silver reflects the glare from the plane window to Shane’s left, so sharply his eyes water. At another, the sunlight catches on the smudge along the split, where Shane has been repeatedly rubbing his thumb.

Shane’s eyes are burning as he turns the medal over and studies the back side, where the year is embossed above a smaller version of the Olympic logo.

It hurts, when he blinks, like he’s scraping something rough over his dry eyes. He hadn’t slept, his last night in Italy, lying wide-eyed in his narrow Olympic village bed while his roommate tossed and turned on the other side of the room.

He’d thought that might mean he would sleep on the plane. But he’s still not sleeping, not even dozing, despite the hush of his sullen teammates around him and the flight attendants tip-toeing down the aisles like they’re trying not to disturb the despondent mood.

Despite the fluffy clouds in the blue sky outside the window, despite the lack of turbulence and the gentle engine-hum and the soothing rumble of the bulkhead against Shane’s left cheek, Shane is somehow still fully, totally awake.

He needs to sleep. Today’s a travel day, and tomorrow’s a day off, but he’s due back at Voyageurs practice Wednesday with an eight-p.m. puck drop in Columbus the following night.

It would have been nice to sleep, even if he didn’t need it so badly. It would have been nice just to close his eyes and stop thinking.

Shane turns the medal over again, until the light catches, until it stings his eyes. Until, even when he closes them, he can only see silver.

*

Shane had gone to a therapist, as a kid.

It’s not something he’s ever told anyone, as an adult. It’s something he actively tries not to think about. Sometimes he wakes up sweating from a dream where someone, somewhere, has found the therapist, has broken the story, has gotten her to give quotes about Shane.

In the dreams she is usually sitting in some vague talk show setting, something with a live studio audience, and she’s just been asked about what NHL star Shane Hollander had been so fucked up about that he’d needed therapy at an age where most kids couldn’t have even defined the word.

And then she would shake out her gray curls and say something like, Competitiveness helps athletes, to a degree. Sometimes, it gets to be too much. When Shane lost a game— for example, say, a gold medal game against the United States— he would begin obsessing over the loss.

And in response to the interviewer pressing for more, she would continue, He could tell you, without checking, that the shot total had been 39-22 in favor of Canada when the golden goal hit the net. He could tell you that goal was scored two minutes and two seconds into the overtime period. He could describe, in detail, each high-danger scoring chance his team missed. Even worse, he couldn’t think about anything else at all. It was like his mind got stuck in a sort of loop of defeat.

Wow, the interviewer might have said. And that was just for youth hockey. Imagine if he lost a Stanley Cup Final and an Olympic gold medal game in back-to-back years.

I imagine there’s a chance he could regress.

What a freak.

You’re telling me, Shane’s therapist might have responded. And I haven’t even gotten into all of those food issues of his I had to deal with.

There is a bump. Shane is jostled to the side.

He doesn’t open his eyes so much as blink them into focus to find that he’s in the backseat of a hired car, coming down on the other side of a speed bump as the driver winds through Shane’s neighborhood.

Shane blinks again, hard, and slowly turns his head to the side. He’s not sure if he had been dreaming so much as hallucinating. The sidewalk scrolling past outside the window is gleaming between the strips of neatly manicured grass to either side. It’s hurting his head to look at.

*

Shane decides around four A.M. Wednesday morning that he’s going to call the team doctor as soon as it’s an appropriate time to do so. It’s about at that point he decides he can’t be in bed, replaying the empty side of the net he’d missed with 12:03 left in the third period of the gold medal game, for one moment longer.

He rises, blinking his sandy eyes, and trudges back into the bathroom to start up the shower again, even though his hair is still damp from the last one.

Things keep moving out of the corners of his vision. It’s not that he thinks they’re really people. He knows he’s alone. But every time he sees a pale flash, he can’t help but flinch, turn to look, even though he knows that by the time he’s got his eyes focused on where it had been, there won’t be anything there at all.

Once he’s in the dark bathroom, leaving the door open so that light from the hall leaks in and he can see enough to lean into the shower and start up the water, he is startled by a sudden glow of light from the edge of the sink.

He must have left his phone there, earlier. He remembers now that he had abandoned it because it had been making the headache worse to stare at the screen.

The notification says it’s from Lily.

Shane flips the phone over, so that the brightness won’t hurt his eyes, and strips in the dark.

He can still make out the shapes moving in the corners of the room, even in the dim. One of them shifts, then, and says, “Ignoring my text, Hollander?”

Shane’s eyes sink half-closed. He doesn’t turn to look, doesn’t chase the shape of him out of his peripheral vision. “I’m too tired.”

“You are going to have heart attack,” the shape says.

“I’m not going to have a heart attack,” Shane mutters. “I’m one of the healthiest people in the world.”

The shape doesn’t say anything, when Shane trips over the lip of the shower and almost brains himself against the tiles on his way in. It’s a pointed kind of silence, though.

*

Shane is pretty famously bad about going to the team doctor for anything short of badly broken bones. He’d been expecting her reaction to his arrival to be surprise he would come in for something so minor, and maybe some gentle mocking about how dramatic he’s being.

Instead, he has to talk her out of hospitalizing him.

“Since Sunday night,” she repeats, her eyes wide. “Shane, it’s Wednesday morning.”

“I know what day it is,” Shane says, although at this point the reminder is helpful. Those pale flickers in the corner of his vision are pretty much constant, now. “It’s just— it’s been kind of a stressful time. If you could just give me some caffeine shot, or something, so I’ll be more ready for practice, and then some sleep meds for tonight, I’ll be okay.”

“Caffeine shot,” she says.

Shane isn’t a huge fan of her new tactic of parroting his words back to him. Her office at the Voyageurs facilities is too bright, all the surfaces too angular and white. The edges of the counters and walls are starting to waver. “Sure. Whatever works.”

“Shane,” she says. “You are taking medicine. You are going home, and you’re sleeping.”

Shane’s jaw works for a moment. “I’ve been away from the team for three weeks,” he says, eventually. “I need to—”

“Will it be helpful to the team,” the doctor wants to know, “if you have a heart attack on the ice?”

“No,” Shane says, mulishly.

“Told you,” says the flicker at the corner of Shane’s vision.

“Just checking,” the doctor says. “Because that’s what you’re officially at risk of. Stay here. I’ll make some calls to the pharmacy and find someone to drive you there and back home.”

“I can drive my—”

“Either that or I can call an ambulance, and you can sleep in the hospital, instead,” she says. “Your choice.”

“Is there any chance you’ll clear me to go to Columbus tomorrow?” Shane asks.

“No,” the doctor says, firmly.

Shane hesitates. “We play Boston at home on Monday,” he says, after a moment. “Do you think I’ll be able to—”

“We’ll check in again after you’ve gotten some sleep,” says the doctor.

The shape wavering in Shane’s peripherals mocks, “Worried about Boston? Someone special you’re hoping to see?”

Shane sets his jaw. “I’ll be waiting by the parking garage entrance,” he says, with all the dignity he can manage.

The shape follows Shane out of her office, through the hall and down the stairs, along the basement hall and all the way to the doors to the parking garage. There Shane props himself up against the wall, crosses his arms over his chest, and closes his eyes.

“You are crazy, Hollander,” the shape says.

“I’m not crazy,” Shane says, without opening his eyes. “I’m just sleep deprived.”

“I am bad hallucination,” the shape says. “You should try hallucinating someone who is nice to you.”

“You’re nice, sometimes,” Shane mutters.

“I am nice when I want to fuck you,” the shape says. “I can’t fuck you when you are like this.”

“Maybe we could both be nicer to each other,” Shane says.

The shape says, “So, you imagine me, now, because this is only way we can be nice when we’re not even hard. Yes?”

“Maybe,” Shane agrees, tiredly.

A different voice says, “Shane?”

Shane opens his eyes. For a moment he thinks he’s looking at Ilya. Then he blinks, and the face of the blond man in front of him resolves into the uncertain expression of one of the Voyageurs physical trainers.

“I’m taking you home,” he says. “Can you give me your keys?”

Shane fumbles in his pocket for a moment before handing them over. He has the absurd urge to warn the trainer not to pay any attention to the hallucination he can still sense to his left.

*

Shane wakes up to horrible clarity.

The clarity doesn’t come right away. At first, regaining consciousness feels like unsticking his brain from a vat of glue. Shane almost falls over when he crawls out of bed, almost blinds himself when he pulls open the blackout curtains.

Only after staring at the clock on his bedside table for what must have been a full minute does Shane process that sixteen hours have passed since he laid down in his bed, his mouth still wet with the drink he’d chased the pill down with.

Once he's fully awake, after Shane has stumbled to the bathroom and splashed his face with cold water and blinked at himself in the mirror, he studies his own dripping reflection and realizes he’s been losing his fucking mind.

Only then does he realize he’d just spent a full day talking to a hallucination of Ilya Rozanov.

Shane is struck by a sense of foreboding. He looks around for his phone, but it’s not in the bathroom, which he is alarmed to see is uncharacteristically messy, with the bath mat crumpled and damp on the floor and hand towels askew and old soap sticky beside the sink.

He pads out to the bedroom, looks for his phone there. Finds it, after some searching, tangled up in the sheets at the foot of his bed.

Shane pulls it up and flicks away all the notifications, all the texts and missed calls. Pauses for a moment when he sees the score of the game the Voyageurs had just played without him, this afternoon, taps on the game sheet, studies the shot totals and the shift chart. Then he sighs and pulls up his text thread with Lily.

There’s just one new message in the thread, and it’s from Lily, sent without answer or follow-up three days ago.

At least silver looks good on u, it reads.

Shane doesn’t know what he’d been expecting. It’s not like Ilya could have known that he’s been losing his mind. Ilya hadn’t even been in Italy; the IOC still hasn't cleared Russia for participation in team sports. It’s not like Shane’s never let Ilya’s texts go unanswered before. Ilya had probably assumed Shane was too busy sulking about the loss to answer.

There’s a twinge of disappointment, nonetheless. That Ilya hadn’t actually cared, that he hadn't asked how Shane was doing. That Ilya had tried to flirt instead of telling Shane he had played well.

Shane hadn’t played well. It would have been a nice lie to read, though.

The conversations Shane had hallucinated having with Ilya aren’t clear in his memory. What’s uncomfortably easy to remember is the pleasure he’d taken in the idea that Ilya cared. The relief, somehow still lingering even now, that they were finally being nice to one another.

Shane shakes his head at himself. He puts his phone on the dresser. And then he climbs back into bed.

*

Shane starts sleeping again, after that.

It's for the most part the bad kind of sleep, the kind of sleep that reminds him of his first concussion: a knock on the head, then completely out.

He wakes eleven hours after taking the pill, every time, disoriented, not remembering a single dream. It's like falling unconscious, more than dozing. But it’s sleep, and he’s functioning again.

He’s mostly functioning, again.

An odd side effect to the pills is that Shane starts daydreaming, a lot. He daydreams while he’s idling in traffic, while he’s waiting for his turn in a drill, while he’s showering or shaving or getting dressed. It’s like his mind is trying to make up for the lack of dreams by shoving them into his waking life.

For some reason, a lot of these daydreams involve him being nice to Ilya Roznaov.

Shane already knows, from experience, how Ilya reacts to Shane being nice to him in real life. He gets stiff, when Shane brushes lips over his forehead, and starts talking about how it’s time for him to head out. He turns any clothed-mouth kiss filthy, even if he’s already come, gets his tongue inside and makes it about sex. He mocks Shane for expressing concern about his injuries, his state of mind, his feelings about going home for the summer. He starts looking for the nearest exit when Shane asks the mildest question about his family.

In the daydreams, though, Ilya, the same Ilya who had been concerned about Shane having a heart attack, doesn’t react like that.

He lets Shane hold him, lets Shane kiss him, doesn’t protest, doesn’t try to leave. He’s warm and malleable in Shane’s hands.  

It feels dirtier, to picture Ilya like that, than to imagine Ilya bare inside him.

*

At least it's nothing to seriously worry about, because the bad sleep and the daydreams aren’t distracting enough to stop Shane from playing hockey.

Shane is back at practice by Saturday. He skates again, by himself, during the team’s off-day Sunday. He makes it to Monday morning practice and gets officially cleared to play visiting Boston by Monday afternoon.

By the time the Bears pile onto the Montreal ice for Monday night warmups, Shane is back in full uniform, stickhandling over the shape of the chain restaurant logo dyed into the Voyageurs' side of the ice, sneaking glances over into the opposing zone until he sees Rozanov jump out onto the visitors' half of the rink.

Shane looks back down, concentrates on the puck on the end of his stick. He isn’t quite sure why he’s nervous, why he’s expecting things to be weird. Why he’s worried Rozanov might ignore him, like he’s somehow sensed the boundaries Shane has been crossing in his head.

If anything, though, Rozanov finds him faster than normal. It takes him just a minute or two to find his way to the blue line, oh-so-casually juggling the puck on his stick as he reaches the edge of the Boston zone, before he lets it drop and calls to Shane, “Hey, Hollander. Heard you were injured.”

Shane doesn’t pause where he’s in the middle of stretching out his hips. “I’m better now,” he says.

“That’s nice,” Rozanov says. “All of us in Boston, we were very worried.”

Shane glances up, then, to see the shit-eating grin spread wide across Rozanov’s face.

“Funny,” says Shane, without much energy behind it. He looks back down, then, and folds himself around to stretch out his opposite hip.

*

Rozanov isn’t grinning, when Shane next looks at him.

His face is contorted into a grimace as he battles for position in front of Montreal's net, shouldering a Voyageurs defender out of the way, screening the bobbing mask of the goaltender behind him.

Shane’s a few feet away, trying to poke the puck out of the reach of a Bears forward, who dekes away and gets enough space to snap a shot on net.

The puck deflects off a Voyageur's stick. Shane spins around just in time to see it ricochet up and into Ilya’s face.

Rozanov goes down, instantly, so hard Shane can hear the thud of his knees cracking against the ice.

Shane's mouth opens. He might have shouted something, but he's not sure what, and it doesn't matter, anyway. It's instantly lost in the din, in the whistle of the ref blowing the play dead, in Ilya's teammates turning to bellow for a trainer.

In the center of the panic, Ilya leans forward, his hand rising to his face, up and under his visor, cradling his right eye as he bends forward over the blood pooling on the ice beneath him.

*

Shane plays fine, after they rush Ilya off the ice, after they scrape up all the blood with shovels and a bucket and whistle for play to resume.

By now, he's gotten used to skating through a haze. He wins most of his faceoffs even when he's seeing Ilya kneeling over a pool of his own blood every time he blinks.

*

It’s strange to be back in the hospital, so soon after Shane had been there for tests last week.

The beeping of the machines in the rooms he's trudging past make him think of that strange white tube they’d slid him into, in which he’d had to lie, teeth gritted, skull rattling, to wait and hear if he’d suffered brain damage.

Now he’s following a nurse through the brightly-lit hall with a plain baseball cap pulled low over his brow. He'd dressed deliberately without any logos on him, as if he hadn’t been sent here with express permission from his team. As if it wasn’t perfectly normal for a captain to go see an opposing player who’d gotten hurt during a game.

As if wasn’t perfectly normal for a captain to go see an opposing player who may or may not have lost an eye.

That exact question, as to the state of Ilya's eye, had been a topic of postgame debate in the Voyageurs’ locker room. “He’s gotta be fine,” Stedlund had said. “You don’t get up and skate off under your own power like that if you just went blind.”

“No way,” Koch had said. “That thing definitely popped like a ballon.”

“Hey,” Shane had snapped.

And all of the players in the conversational circle had paused in stripping off their equipment and turned to look at Shane, who abruptly realized he didn’t have anything to follow it up with.

After a moment, he had said, lamely, “Does anyone know what hospital they took him to? I feel like I should go visit, after this.”

Koch had nodded and resumed pulling off his sweater from where he’d left it half-tangled around his neck. “That’s my captain,” he says, tossing it into his locker. “Always the bigger guy.”

Someone clears their throat in front of Shane.

Shane blinks himself back to the present to find himself standing in the glow of the fluorescents lighting the hospital hall, with the nurse in front of him smiling uncertainly and pointing one finger toward the door to her left.

“He’s in there,” she says, like it’s not the first time she’d said it.

Shane nods. He smiles, too belatedly, far too weakly. And then he steps forward and pushes the door open.

Ilya is sitting up in a hospital bed in the center of a small, sunlit room, propped against pillows piled behind him. His shoulders are draped in a white gown, his legs covered by a thin blue blanket. There are tubes snaking up from his forearm to the IV dangling beside him.

There’s a blue compress strapped over his right eye, large enough to hide the socket entirely, not large enough to disguise how purple and swollen his face is on that side.

His good eye still thins with the smile he directs toward where Shane is stepping into the room. “Shane,” he says, sounding delighted.

Shane carefully finishes closing the door behind him, then turns back to Ilya. His eyes dart around the room, for a moment, like there might be a nurse hiding in the corner. Then he lets his hand drop from the door handle and says, too stiffly, “What’s the diagnosis?”

Ilya grins at him. His lips are chapped, his mouth red, like they’d been making him keep it open. “Orbital fracture,” he says, proudly.

Maybe he’d practiced the term with one of the nurses, because his pronunciation is flawless. Shane says, “And your eye?”

“Okay,” Ilya beams. “Vision, perfect. No surgery. Just stitches and ice packs and I can’t blow my nose.”

The surge of relief is so intense it makes Shane’s knees weak. When he lets out a breath, it emerges more shakily than he might have liked. “Thank God.”

“No, seriously, Shane,” Ilya insists. “I can’t blow my nose. Not even a little. It could…” His good eye narrows, slightly, like he’s trying to remember something. “Very bad thing could happen,” he concludes, after a moment.

Shane can feel his mouth twitch before he suppresses his smile. “I won’t make you blow your nose,” he promises, almost giddy with relief.

“Okay,” Ilya sighs. “Thank you. I am on many drugs. I am very vulnerable.”

Shane’s dick twitches.

Abruptly— out of nowhere, and for the first time since Italy— he feels himself starting to get hard.

It's the relief. Surely it's just the relief, and the adrenaline from the game, and at least Shane's pants are too loose for Ilya to notice.

Ilya sits up from the pillows. He pins Shane with an intense expression that says he has, in fact, noticed instantly.

Neither of them speak, for a long moment.

Shane says, several beats too late for it to be a timely response, “Well, I should probably—”

“Good thing there was no surgery,” says Ilya, speaking over him. “They would have to sedate me.”

Shane’s eyes widen. He stops moving, stops speaking, like that will stop Ilya from noticing the way he’s reacting.

The corners of Ilya’s mouth twitch, like he’s fighting a smile. “Can you imagine,” he says. “You come in here, and I am all, you know.” He lifts his right hand, lets it hang from his wrist, gives it a demonstrative flop. “What is the word, for when you are like this?”

Shane swallows, hard. “Limp?” he says, more breathlessly than would have been ideal.

“Yes,” Ilya hums. “I am all limp. You could do anything to me.”

Shane is afraid to breathe, afraid to move. He stands there and stares at Ilya like he’s been glued to the tile.

Ilya makes a sound like he’s just barely managed to choke back a giggle. “That would be scary,” he suggests.

Shane starts moving again, too suddenly, clearing his throat and shuffling his feet and reaching up to scratch at the back of his neck, all at once, trying to make up for how oddly still he’d been moments before. “Yes, very scary,” he says, tugging firmly at his cap, like it could have possibly slipped out of place. “Well, I should let you rest.”

“Yes,” Ilya agrees. “I need rest. I am so weak.”

Shane forces himself to glare at Ilya as he reaches behind himself for the door. “Goodbye, Rozanov,” he says, firmly. “I’m glad your eye is okay. Feel better.”

“Goodbye, Hollander,” says Ilya.

Shane can see, through the glass panel on the door, the huge smile that creeps across Ilya’s face as soon as he’s once more alone in the room.

*

The next day in his sunlit kitchen, with one hand on the blender churning around his morning smoothie, Shane texts Ilya, one-handed: How are you doing? It occurs to him, then, that Ilya might not have made his team's flight out of the city: Are you still in Montreal?

Shane abruptly remembers how strange he had acted, in the hospital, and adds, Sorry if yesterday was weird. Then he thinks about how many painkillers Ilya had probably been on at the time: Do you remember yesterday? If not, don’t worry what I’m talking about, it’s not impoaeng, at that point losing control of the keyboard as his hand slips and he very nearly sprays the entirety of his kitchen with smoothie.

After Shane has gotten the blender situation under control and is sipping, sour-faced, on his bitter green drink, he lifts up his phone to see Lily has responded, They won’t let me get on airplane. I’m trapped in stupid cold Montreal. And some guy visiting me at hospital is trying to take advantage of me.

A reluctant smile tugs at the corner of Shane’s mouth. He finds himself begrudgingly impressed, by the way Ilya has found yet another button of his to press, as he bites down on his lower lip and types, Are you still in the hospital?

No. I am in hotel, Lily sends, followed by an address and a room number.

Shane hesitates. Do you want a visitor?

Ilya responds, 30 mins until I take pills.

Shane’s fingers tighten on the edges of his phone. He tries to think of something measured, something reasonable, to say in response.

Ilya, apparently having run out of patience, adds, Very strong pills.

Shane swallows, hard. Be there in 20, he writes, and puts the phone down to chug the rest of his smoothie.

*

“Jesus,” says Shane, as soon as he’s safely inside Ilya’s hotel room with the door shut behind him. “It looks worse than yesterday.”

“You always say sweetest things, Hollander,” Ilya says, shuffling away from the door, lifting the compress back to his face and hiding the purple skin swollen over his right eye socket as he turns away from Shane. He’s shirtless, in bare feet and sweatpants that Shane can tell, just from how low they’re sitting on his hips, don’t have anything beneath them.

Shane follows him inside, blinks when he sees the state of the suite, the blackout curtains pulled shut despite the early afternoon hour, the suitcase upended beside the couch, the clothes draped over chairs and tables where they’re not crumpled in piles on the carpet. “It looks like a bomb went off in here,” he says, surprised.

Ilya walks through the suite and past the open door to his bedroom, which is lit only by where the sun is peeking around the edges of the blackout curtains. He sinks onto the edge of his bed, then looks up at Shane around the edges of the compress.  “I was in hurry to get ready for game,” he says. “And now I have broken face, and you are fifteen minutes late.”

“Yeah, sorry, I got tied up in—” Shane pauses, hesitates in the doorway to Ilya’s bedroom. “You were counting?”

Ilya lifts his phone, waves it at Shane, as if the blank lockscreen explains anything. “I have timer,” he says. “For meds.”

Shane feels chagrined. “Sorry,” he says, again. “Have you taken them?”

“No,” says Ilya. He drops his phone on the bed beside him, reaches for the pill bottle on his nightstand.

Shane doesn’t see a glass of water within reach. “Hold on,” he says, and steps out of the bedroom, hurries past the piles of clothes and into the untouched kitchenette, where he finds a glass, rinses it out, fills it with water and jogs back to the bedroom.

Ilya, still sitting on the side of the bed with one hand on the compress and the other on the pill bottle, hasn’t moved.

Shane steps toward him, gingerly settles on the edge of the bed beside him. He takes a deep, steadying breath.

They sit there in silence for a moment before Ilya says, “Were you thirsty, or…?”

“Oh,” says Shane, jolted. “Sorry. I forgot.” He passes the glass to Ilya.

Ilya fits one pill onto his tongue, knocks it back, chases it with water. “Doctor says I can have two,” he tells Shane, as if Shane had made some noise of protest, before he takes another.

Shane says, abruptly, “I don’t know why I’m reacting like this.”

“It’s okay,” says Ilya. “I think it’s sexy.”

Shane slides his eyes hesitantly over toward Ilya. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” Ilya says. “It is hot, that you want me like that. Like you want me any way you can get me. You know?"

Shane swallows. It's not like it isn't true. "Yeah," he admits.

Ilya sets the bottle down on the bedside table. “I am very tired," he says.

Shane nods, hesitates. He debates whether he should offer to leave.

Ilya reaches down, hooks his thumbs under his waistband. “Take off your clothes,” he tells Shane, and lifts his hips from the bed so he can slide off his sweatpants.

Shane rises and undresses, silently, as Ilya pulls back the duvet and crawls between the sheets the bed, lowers his head carefully to the pillows like he’s trying hard not to jar his face. He sighs a little, as he does it, his hand twitching over the compress he’s still holding over his right eye.

Shane drops his shirt without folding it and climbs in after him, scooting in close, getting one warm hand over Ilya’s sternum. “Your clothes will get all wrinkled,” he tells Ilya in a whisper.

Ilya hums noncommittally. His good eye is starting to slide shut.

“I think—” Shane shuffles closer, so that the warm line of his torso is pressed against Ilya’s shoulder. “I think you need to give me some boundaries, here.”

“Hm,” says Ilya. He lets go of the compress, lets it balance on his face as he reaches down, eyes still closed, and finds Shane’s free hand. He tangles his fingers with Shane’s and guides it down to slide down to his hip, around to the side of his ass. “Nothing inside, here,” he says. “Anything else, okay.”

“That’s too vague, Ilya,” Shane says, and gives him a gentle squeeze. 

“I trust you,” says Ilya. “I might sleep, now. Do what you want. I want you to. Okay?”

“Okay,” Shane whispers.

“I am at your mercy,” Ilya says, peaceably, and closes his good eye.

The room is quiet, and dark, and the hum of the air conditioner a soothing rumble in the corner. Ilya is warm, the rise and fall of his chest steady under Shane’s hand.

He’s warm, just like he’d been in Shane’s daydreams.

Shane swallows down his guilt. Ilya hadn’t known what was going on in Shane’s brain, when he’d agreed to this. He hadn’t known about Shane’s delusions, about his fantasies, about just how many of them had involved holding Ilya, just like this.

Ilya hadn’t asked. He hadn’t even seemed all that curious about what Shane might do. I trust you, he’d said, and closed his eyes.

Shane slides his hand up from Ilya’s shoulder, up between his head and the pillow, cradles his skull gently in Shane’s palm. His other hand slides up from where Ilya had placed it on his hip, traces over the scratch of hair between his legs, bumps over his muscled torso.

His grip comes up to settle lightly over Ilya’s throat, where his pulse thrums steadily against Shane’s palm.

Shane leans in and presses a light, closed-mouth kiss to Ilya’s forehead.

It’s precisely the kind of kiss that had made Ilya’s eyelids flutter, that first time back at Shane’s place in Montreal, right before he’d sat up and said he needed to get going.

This time he stays lax, his pulse steady and even against Shane’s palm, his mouth slack beneath the lower edge of the blue compress.

It’s Shane’s heart that’s beating faster, now, his fingers that are trembling, just slightly, against the delicate skin of Ilya’s throat.

Shane lifts his head, leans down. Closes a careful, gentle kiss over the closed lid of Ilya’s good eye.

He feels a slight twitch beneath his lips, but Ilya still doesn’t stir. His pulse picks up, just barely, against Shane’s palm.

Shane slides his fingers gently through Ilya’s hair. He kisses him lightly, again and again, on the side of his nose, on the swell of his cheek, on the corner of his slack mouth and the stubbly side of his jaw. He smells faintly of the hospital, but mostly of soap, and he’s so warm and so relaxed in Shane’s hands. He’s like Shane’s daydreams come to life.

Shane slides his hand down from Ilya’s throat, traces it back down over Ilya’s warm body, reaches his cock beneath the sheets.

His breath catches in his throat to find Ilya’s half-hard. He hadn’t been sure if Ilya would be, with the meds, but there’s that friendly springy push against Shane’s palm, the familiar bloom of wetness at the head.

Shane brushes one last kiss over Ilya’s good eye, gives a goodbye press to his mouth. Then he gently lowers Ilya’s head back down to the pillow, makes sure the compress is still in place, and slides back down beneath the covers.

It’s warm under there, cloyingly so, with the air so thick it’s hard to breath. It smells less like the hospital and soap and more like Ilya, warm and tangy and base and animal. Shane is already dizzy as he noses his way down Ilya’s stomach, pressing his mouth to his warm stomach, to his happy trail, to the base of his cock.

Shane settles himself between Ilya’s legs, then, in the dark and the stifling heat. He braces one hand at the base, gathers spit in his mouth, and leans forward to slide his mouth over the head of Ilya’s cock.

Shane’s gotten better at this, at yawning internally to open his throat, at fighting the urge to gag against the pressure at the back of his mouth. But this is the easiest it’s ever been, maybe because Ilya is only half-hard, maybe because they’re both so relaxed.

Maybe because it feels like time is suspended, here in the warm and the dark, where Ilya won't say Enough, enough and pull him upward to kiss him and fuck him and make him come. It's like he’s slipped into a gap between minutes where he can be as nice as he wants to be.

Shane’s eyes slide closed. He settles in, wiggles to get his belly comfortably on the sheet between Ilya’s knees, and dips deeper, lets the head bump that sensitive spot at the back of his mouth. He barely even has to fight to keep from retching, this time.

It’s quieter than usual, the obscene wet sounds absent, because Shane isn’t even moving, this time, not really. He’s lying there with his eyes shut, feeling Ilya’s cock slowly swell against his soft palette, breathing through his nose, not bothering to try and stop the drool slowly slipping down from the sides of his mouth to drip down between Ilya’s legs.  

It’s less like Shane’s an active participant and more like he’s being used as a warm place for Ilya to keep his cock.

Shane’s hips shudder downward, roll his own cock against the mattress. He furrows his brow at how good it feels before he tightens his lips, sucks against the warm weight on his tongue. Feels Ilya twitch up and into the warm grip of his mouth.

Minutes pass, like that, full and held, pinned and suffocating. Shane drifts. It’s the first time since Italy that he’s felt sleepy without meds, beneath the covers with Ilya’s cock hard in his mouth. He suckles, presses deeper, takes him all the way into his throat and holds him there.

It’s in too deep, for Shane to taste the tell-tale bitterness that means Ilya’s close. All he gets is the bumping of the vein in the base of Ilya’s cock against his tongue to warn him before it’s pulsing into his mouth, painting warmth down the back of his throat.

Shane has choked, in similar situations. He doesn’t cough now, manages to pull gently back and swallow with his lips still wrapped loosely around the head of Ilya’s dick.

Only then, only once he lifts his mouth from Ilya's wet cock, does he realize he's about to pass out from lack of oxygen.

Shane crawls inelegantly out from under the covers, emerges gasping, hangs up on his elbows and sucks in a few inhales with the hotel room air feeling abruptly cool against his cheeks.

Then he looks over, panting, to check on Ilya.

Ilya’s good eye is still closed. The compress still balanced on the other side of his face, although his hands have gone lax from where they’re curled over the edges of the duvet. His pink mouth is open, his face relaxed.

After a moment, he lets out a soft snore.

The swell of affection Shane feels, in that moment, is so strong he almost chokes anyway.

Shane settles back down onto his stomach, careful not to jostle Ilya as he lays his head down on Ilya’s chest, turns his cheek so that his ear is pressed right against the thrum of Ilya’s heart. He twitches a little when his dick, still hot and hard, rubs against the mattress.

It’s the middle of the afternoon, and Shane hasn’t been able to sleep unmedicated, even at normal times, for more than a week.

He won’t actually fall asleep, now, which is good, because he has things to do today, a training session with his PT in the afternoon and a check-in with the team doctor this evening. He’ll just stay here, for a moment, and rest his eyes, in the dark warm room with Ilya’s heartbeat getting slower against his cheek. Maybe he'll jerk off, in a few minutes, with the taste of Ilya still bitter in the back of his mouth.

*

Shane wakes up to find he’s alone in bed.

He’s been getting used to waking up disoriented, so he doesn’t panic, at first, when he opens his eyes and doesn’t recognize the pattern of the ceiling above him. It’s just the meds, he tells himself, automatically. You’re just traveling for a road game.

And then he remembers that Montreal’s at home for the rest of the week.

Shane blinks up at the ceiling. He licks his lips and realizes he recognizes the taste at the back of his throat.

His eyes widen.

Shane sits up, the sheets falling down to his hips, and looks around to see he’s still in Ilya Rozanov’s hotel room. That he’s been left alone in the bed.

That he had fallen asleep, without meds, for the first time in more than a week.

Shane, still wide-eyed, fumbles for his phone, groans when he checks the time. He fires off apologetic texts and reassurances to his trainer, his doctor, to a missed call from his mom. Then he puts his phone down and climbs out, naked, to pull on the clothes he’d left crumpled on the carpet.

Ilya is out in the living room, still in the dark with the curtains pulled mostly shut. His attempts to clean up the clothes he’d left scattered around the suite seem to have been limited to shoving the ones piled on the couch off to the side so that he can sit there in the glow of the muted TV and tap at his phone.

He looks up when Shane steps out of the bedroom. His hair is tousled, his mouth soft. He’s holding a new compress up to his right eye, a pink one, this time. “Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Shane echoes. He shoves his hand into his pants pockets. It seems horribly awkward, to have come to the hotel room of someone recovering from such a bad injury, and then taken up his bed so thoroughly he had to move to the couch. He wonders if Ilya wants him to leave. “Sorry for falling asleep.”

“Why do you apologize?” Ilya asks, looking back down at his phone. “I slept, too. Was nice.” He reaches out, eyes still on his screen, to pat the spot on the couch beside him.

Shane swallows down the surge of relief. He steps around the piles of clothes to sit down on the cushion Ilya had patted.

Ilya doesn’t look away from his phone, but he leans over, until the back of his skull bumps into Shane’s shoulder.

Shane’s eyes prickle. He blinks it away, reaches up, slides a careful hand into Ilya’s curls. It’s the kind of gentle touch that has always been dangerous, the kind most likely to make Ilya pull away.

But at least the position keeps Ilya from looking at him, and it’s easier to talk to him when they’re not making eye contact. Shane stares blankly ahead, at where the television is displaying some game show on mute, and says, “I haven’t slept like that in a while.”

Ilya hums. Shane would have thought he was using his phone to tap through Instagram. He can see, from here, that Ilya’s playing some word game, something with a circle of letters around a big yellow one in the center. “You don’t nap?”

“No,” says Shane. “But it’s more than that. I, um.” He swallows. “I haven’t been able to sleep without meds since Milan."

Ilya presses the back of his head harder into Shane’s shoulder. "That is bad for you."

Shane blinks through a hazy half-memory of Ilya's voice saying, You are going to have heart attack. "Yeah," he says. "I'm getting better, though."

Ilya says, “I watched your games, in Milan."

Shane looks away from the television, blinks down at the top of Ilya’s head. It’s not that surprising that Ilya watched them, really; he likes to pretend it's not true, but Ilya's almost as obsessed with hockey as Shane is. What’s surprising is that he so readily admitted it. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” Ilya says. “I watched gold medal game.”

“Yeah,” Shane says, past the sudden lump in his throat. Humiliating, to think Ilya had witnessed his failure.

Ilya taps out of his game, lowers the compress to the couch beside him so that he can get both hands on his phone. He’s not trying to hold his phone away from Shane, or anything, so Shane watches as he opens his photos app, scrolls back a bit, taps on a recently-saved image. Then he holds his phone up, like he’s trying to make it easier for Shane to see.

It’s a photo of a photograph, laid out on a wooden table, bordered in white. It shows a smiling woman with dark, curly hair in a white jacket, her arm around the shoulders of a serious-faced blond boy with matching curls and a puffy black coat.

They’re in front of some stadium, rising against a white sky in the background, with five interlocked rings emblazoned on the side.

“I ask my brother to send me this,” Ilya says. “My mother took me, when I was in kid. We went to Salt Lake City.” He pronounces it carefully.

Shane’s fingers are shaking, slightly, when he reaches down, tugs gently at the phone so that Ilya raises it closer to Shane’s face. Young Ilya looks so serious, his round face set, even with the jacket all puffed around his shoulders like it's about to swallow him right up. "Thank you for showing me," he says, his voice tight.

“I have wanted to go to Olympics ever since. I think it is honor, to go,” Ilya says. He is still speaking deliberately, like he’s making sure he gets all the words right. “I think it is honor to play for your country, to make them proud. I think— watching you, I think, you made them proud.”

Shane can’t blink back the sting at the back of his eyes, this time. He leans forward and buries his face in Ilya’s curls to hide it. It smells sweet, like generic hotel shampoo, like Ilya's sweat. “It kills me that I lost,” he whispers into the dark. “I can’t stop thinking about that empty net.”

“Yes,” says Ilya. “But if you didn’t care, it wouldn't mean as much, when you come back in four years and beat USA. Yes?”

Shane opens his eyes. He moves the hand he still has in Ilya’s hair, brushes away the tears he'd gotten on Ilya's curls. “Since when are you such an optimist?” he asks, smiling despite himself.

“Well, I haven’t told you whole story,” says Ilya, twisting his bruised face around toward Shane, and Shane isn’t ready, but Ilya doesn’t say anything about Shane’s wet eyes. He just looks steadily at Shane and says, “You can beat USA in semis before you lose to Russia in finals.”

Shane’s mouth is still open for his laugh when Ilya leans in and closes his mouth over Shane’s bottom lip.

Shane's eyes slide shut.

They linger there, for a long, silent moment.

When Ilya leans back, Shane opens his eyes to see an uncertain look on his swollen face.

Shane isn’t ready for that expression to shutter. He reaches out, curls his hand around the undamaged side of Ilya’s face, holds him in place. “Was that okay, earlier?” he whispers. “When you were falling asleep in there?”

Ilya looks up, past where Shane’s thumb is resting on his cheek, like he might find the answer somewhere on the ceiling. “It wasn’t what I expected,” he says, after a moment.

Shane’s stomach lurches. His hand goes slack on Ilya’s face. “Yeah?”

Ilya reaches up, clamps Shane’s hand against his cheek before Shane can pull it away. “I liked it,” he says. “It was nice.”

Shane swallows, nods. “Okay,” he says. “Good.”

Ilya’s smile is a little tentative. “It's nice to be at your mercy,” he says, like he might be half-joking about it.

Shane doesn’t say, I think I’m at yours, too. It wouldn't sound like a joke, if he tried. He just leans in and presses another kiss to Ilya’s forehead, just above his good eye. He lingers there, for a long moment, just to draw out the time until he has to pull back and see if Ilya is ready to tell him it’s time to go.