Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types, Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Hanahaki Disease, Angst, Pining, Falling In Love, Love Confessions, Does it count as miscommunication if they aren't actually communicating, Emotional Sex, ONLY happy endings in this house, Canon divergent from end of ep2, Very mild gore (this is hanahaki so we know he will be coughing some stuff up), Discussion of death and mortality (because again: this is hanahaki), Mention of Irina's canonical suicide, Everything I know about hockey I learned from fanfiction, No AI was used in any way in the creation of this work, Blow Jobs, Anal Sex, emotional closeness through sex, ilya rozanov is not okay, how is that not a tag what are we doing here

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-24 Completed: 2026-06-06 Words: 31,914 Chapters: 3/3

limerence

Summary

The first one is perfect. A deep crimson, brightening to scarlet at its edges and thick, firm between his fingers. It's undamaged, not even torn at its thinnest parts for all of its violent means of arrival into the palm of his hand, but sticky with saliva making its texture unpleasant. It is, otherwise, a flawless rose petal, like something you would see in a drawing; an oil painting.

It's such a beautiful thing, and so small, to be killing him.

Ilya rubs at his breastbone and clears his throat but there's nothing else to come up; not today. Closing his eyes so that he doesn't have to look at himself in the mirror over the sink he pictures his lungs turning to dirt so that the roots of the rose can plant themselves in him; choke him from the inside.

That's not quite how it works, he knows.

It may as well be.
 

Notes

Hey there again, welcome to my angst vehicle. I have tagged for everything that's upcoming however given that we go through a tough spot or two I would point a big neon arrow towards the happy ending tag - I am far too delicate for a HNC, but not too delicate to make the boys work for their happy ever after; Hanahaki opens some wonderfully painful potential doors, especially for a character who says he wouldn't kill himself 'unless he couldn't help it', and I have flounced shamelessly through a bunch of those.

The definition of 'limerence' at the start of chapter one is from Miriam Webster. Hover over Russian text for translation.

Chapter 1: One

limerence: lim.er.ence (noun) - a state of intense often involuntary romantic attachment to a person who does not reciprocate the feelings and that is often characterised by excessive preoccupation and obsessive behaviours.

The first one is perfect. A deep crimson, brightening to scarlet at its edges and thick, firm between his fingers. It's undamaged, not even torn at its thinnest parts for all of its violent means of arrival into the palm of his hand, but sticky with saliva making its texture unpleasant. It is, otherwise, a flawless rose petal, like something you would see in a drawing; an oil painting.

It's such a beautiful thing, and so small, to be killing him.

Self-deceit is a skill; to be good at it takes practice and Ilya is an expert, the lies he has told himself about what he is doing with Shane Hollander his masterpiece.

He drops the petal onto his bathroom counter and spits into the sink; it is frothy-pink. His hands, resting on the counter's edge, are trembling.

A single petal, and his masterpiece of self delusion is razed to the ground leaving only the bitter, unhelpful truth standing in its place.

Ilya rubs at his breastbone and clears his throat but there's nothing else to come up; not today. Closing his eyes so that he doesn't have to look at himself in the mirror over the sink he pictures his lungs turning to dirt so that the roots of the rose can plant themselves in him; choke him from the inside.

That's not quite how it works, he knows.

It may as well be.

**

When the off-season starts to feel like it's ending is usually when the emails start arriving in threes and fives. The direction of cause and effect is debatable, whether a few weeks of idle time is all that people like Shane — people who live in the pro hockey trenches — can cope with, or whether the influx of messages, of new season planning, is what flips Shane's brain back over into thinking about the season.

It doesn't make a lot of difference either way, but come August when the plans for training camps start to be made and the preseason schedule is announced, Shane starts to feel like he's on the tail end of summer even if officially there's still a few weeks to go.

Outside of the couple of weeks he carves out for himself — that he blocks out in his calendar months in advance so his mom and his agent can't commit him to anything, so that he can go to his cottage and breathe air that isn't loud with voices and people wanting things from him — there is always something he's meant to be doing. The endorsements and the photo shoots and the interviews, it's the part of being who he is that he likes the least but he can't look his mom in the face and say he doesn't want to, not when she tells him matter of factly, "This is your retirement fund, honey, even you can't play hockey forever," like it's something he doesn't already know.

So he goes and he smiles and he answers their questions with his pre-prepped press-conference answers and takes his shirt off and holds still for photos if its that kind of day and he lets his mom organise it all because if it was left up to him he probably would just throw his phone in the lake so that he can deny all knowledge and never have to show up anywhere that's not a hockey rink ever again.

It's probably why, when he arrives for an interview filming on the last Monday in August he thinks it's about the Olympics, but it's actually the captain of this year's Olympic gold medal winning team alongside the captain of the team that won the Cup this year, so he finds himself sitting on the other end of a table to Rozanov under studio lights answering questions that feel like someone's doing an unimaginative compare and contrast exercise of two completely different victories.

He hasn't heard from Rozanov since Vegas, outside of a few texts while he'd been in Russia, and those had been flirty, inconsequential things that Shane had only responded to because he couldn't help himself. If he closes his eyes he can still remember how heavy the weight of Ilya's eyes felt on him as he watched Shane put his fingers inside himself and that remembered weight makes Shane, unfailingly, hard — so he doesn't remember.

Or, he tries not to. At the least, he makes himself limit it to nights when he's alone and the lights are long since out.

He is, he realises, staring at Rozanov's forearms where they rest on the desk in front of him with hands clasped; the cuffs of his shirt are flipped back and Shane can see the bones of his wrists, the clear visible strength in the muscles of his arms that he uses to pin Shane down when he fucks him, that —

"— and Shane, after a successful season for you personally with your success at the Olympics —" Shane blinks and looks to the interviewer, whose name he has forgotten, "— but a playoff season that ended early with the Metros beleaguered by injuries, how are you feeling about the upcoming season?"

Shane smiles his best helpful interviewee smile — small, bland, engaged but not too friendly, one he's practised in front of a mirror enough to know exactly how it looks on his face — and as he answers the question he doesn't look back Rozanov; doesn't want to be able to confirm or give lie to the surety he feels that Rozanov's eyes don't leave him the entire time he's speaking.

**

"There is no flight from Toronto to Boston until tomorrow."

Shane stops walking and turns; Rozanov is leaning against a wall just inside the door to the studio's parking lot, an unlit cigarette between his fingers. His eyes track a path from Shane's face, down his chest and his legs, lingering all the way down and back up again. The back of Shane's neck feels suddenly hot.

"So I am staying in hotel here. I will fly out in the morning." He rolls the cigarette between his fingertips like he's not really paying attention to what his hands are doing. It's hot here, in the glare of the late summer sun coming through the glass doors that's baking the air without the studio's climate control to adjust for it, and Rozanov's shirt — thin and dark blue — is clinging very slightly to his stomach. He must be starting to sweat. Shane tries not to picture it.

"I drove," Shane tells him in the end, since Rozanov seems to be waiting for him to say something. "I'm heading back to Montreal."

"That is a long drive."

Shane shrugs, his agreement and his dismissal both. He quite likes the drive; it's illegal for him to use his phone while he's driving, so he can't be expected to check his emails.

Rozanov digs into his pocket and fishes out his cell phone; his thumbs tap at the screen for a few seconds and then Shane feels his own phone buzz in his pocket and he knows the message waiting for him is an address; a room number.

"You shouldn't drive so long if you are distracted, tired," he waves a hand: and so on.

Shane wishes he didn't look at Rozanov and want, but he does; Rozanov is looking at Shane in a way that makes everything feel too warm, like he might only be looking at Shane standing still in the middle of a hallway but he's thinking: I know what you look like naked, I know what your face looks like when you come, I've been inside you and I'm the only one you've ever let do it.

He makes himself remember the way that he'd felt after Vegas; the black hole in his stomach that had followed him out of the elevator and had still been with him days later, that sense that he'd very badly misunderstood, after that time in Montreal, and that his view of what they were doing had been corrected and left him missing something for it.

Not that they're doing — well, anything. They can't be doing anything.

Shane's fingers itch for his phone, wanting to look at the message Rozanov has sent him even though they're only standing three feet away from each other. Rozanov is waiting for Shane to say something, and Shane doesn't want to feel like he did in the elevator in Vegas, not ever again.

He looks down at his car keys in his hands, turns them over in his fingers. Rozanov is still watching him.

"In an hour," he says, quietly enough that he's not totally sure Rozanov could have heard, but he did — his mouth quirks in a smile and he nods, and Shane walks out into the parking lot.

**

In the hour before he knocks on Rozanov's hotel door, Shane tells himself over and over that he can just not go — he doesn't even have to text to say he's not coming, although maybe he should just to be polite, but he can just not go; he doesn't ever again have to feel like he did in the elevator in Vegas if he doesn't go. Cycling through all of these objections though is, he knows, like watching the piracy warning ad at the beginning of a movie — the thing you have to sit through to get to the thing you came here for but not anything that really applies; not something that's going to change the fact that he's going to watch the movie.

He can make objections to himself all he likes, he knows he's still going to Rozanov's room.

What he doesn't tell himself, absolutely does not let himself think, is that as much as he doesn't want to feel like he did in the elevator in Vegas, he does want to feel like he did sitting in his stairwell in Montreal, when he was stupid and naive and hadn't yet spent six months of total radio silence learning that whatever Shane might have thought of what they had done together that night, Rozanov hadn't thought it was worth anything at all.

Shane knocks on Rozanov's door fifty-five minutes after he left him in the studio parking lot and he hears the lock slide open almost immediately; Shane lets himself have the fantasy that Rozanov was waiting for him just inside, that he's as eager for Shane's body as Shane is for Rozanov's, however much he might try to convince himself that he doesn't want what he wants.

Shane steps inside and Rozanov barely gives him enough room to come through the door before he's backed Shane up against it and reached over his shoulder to slide the deadbolt home.

"You came," Rozanov says. He's unfairly attractive, hair loosening from the gel that had held it camera-ready for the interview, his skin carrying a light tan from the summer. He has changed his clothes to track pants and a tank that lets Shane see the impressive muscles of his shoulders and so he looks since he can; wants to touch but presses his palms flat to the door behind him instead.

"I said I would, didn't I?" He sounds belligerent, defensive.

"You have a good summer? You miss me?"

Shane rolls his eyes. "Fuck off."

"I thought about you," Rozanov says, and he sounds strangely like there's not a trap in it, so Shane asks —

"You did?"

Ilya lets out a low, satisfied hum. "Yes, I thought about you many times," he smiles darkly, "in many different positions."

"What did you think about?" Shane asks before he can think better of it, and hates that it sounds like he's fishing for compliments but even though Shane's braced for it, Rozanov doesn't make fun of him.

"I thought about this," Rozanov pulls their hips together, so that Shane can feel that he's halfway hard and Rozanov must definitely be able to feel that Shane is too, and Shane thinks that's what Rozanov is talking about, that he thinks about dicks and hard-ons or whatever, but the position's secondary; he's moved Shane out of the way so that he can fit a hand behind Shane, in between him and the door.

Rozanov pushes Shane's shirt up out of the way with little flicks of his fingers and then presses his thumb to Shane's spine, right at the small of his back.

"This part," he murmurs. Their mouths are so, so close. Shane wants to kiss him, but wonders if that's not something they do any more. "The shape this part of you makes when I'm fucking you, the —" he traces a shape in the air with his other hand; a curve. Arch, Shane thinks; the arch of his back. "I thought about that."

His eyes fall to Shane's mouth and he licks his lips.

"And your mouth. You have such a good mouth."

It might be the words themselves or the praise in them that makes Shane shiver, he isn't sure, and his mouth is filling with saliva in anticipation. If he can't have kissing then he wants Rozanov's dick weighing down his tongue instead. Rozanov seems to want something back, though, because at Shane's silence he asks, "What? You did not think about me?"

It's asked innocently, deliberately and performatively so, and Shane flushes warm-red.

"Fuck off," comes out of him on a reflex, and Rozanov pulls a face of mock-hurt.

"No? I have never touched you good enough to think about after?"

It would be a lie to say no, no I don't think of you, I don't ever think of you — although Shane wants to say it anyway. But Rozanov gave up something first, said he thinks about Shane's body when they're apart and that makes it a little easier to tell him, "When you watched me," even though his voice is very, very quiet, "I think about when you watched me."

Rozanov's dick fills further; they're still pressed together from belly button to knee and Shane can feel it. Rozanov's thumb presses hard against Shane's spine and Shane's skin is starting to buzz with the need for hands on him; he wants so very badly and he dare not take.

"I want to watch you suck my dick."

Just the words make Shane's knees want to buckle, and he's nodding, feels fucking shameless in that way that only Rozanov has ever brought out in him; he's half a second from dropping to the floor when Rozanov starts pulling at the buttons on his shirt, stripping him efficiently, pulling off his own clothes with an urgency that feels carefully contained. Rozanov's clothes make a puddle on the floor as they move toward the bed, lit in the weak evening sunlight.

Shane's pants are unfastened and his shirt held in his fingers when Rozanov sits down on the edge of the bed, naked and hard and unembarrassed about it, and leans back on his hands. Watching. Shane sets his shirt over the arm of the plush chair that's pushed up against the wall; he kicks off his shoes and drops his pants and as all of his clothes join his shirt on the chair he is aware of Rozanov: watching him. He doesn't stop looking as Shane moves to the bed, and when his hands find Shane's sides, palms and reaching fingers broad and rough taking hold of him, Shane —

The point of Shane's summers are to have a break. He tries not to see anyone he doesn't know really well, he goes out of his way to lift out the mental effort of new people so it's not like he'd be dating anyone, he spends time at his cottage by himself on purpose, he —

He hasn't had another person's hands on his bare skin since Rozanov, in Vegas, and just the warmth of him, the roughness of calloused skin on him, it makes his whole body thrum with wanting more of it.

There's a feeling in his head like the buzz of static, wiping out his self-consciousness as he climbs on top of Rozanov and he wants to kiss him so badly so he does, only realising once it's too late to take it back that he still doesn't know if this is something that isn't meant to happen between them, any more — but Rozanov's mouth opens under his sweetly; welcoming and without hesitation.

Shane lets himself indulge, just for a few seconds; Rozanov kisses him wet and open-mouthed and hungry and Shane pushes him back, eventually, before he can let himself get too carried away, and thrills to know that Rozanov's still watching him when he moves down the bed and starts to suck him.

He hasn't had that many chances to do this, but it's definitely one of his favourite things of the things that him and Rozanov do together and it's almost disappointing that he'll have to give it up one day, when he finds someone to settle down with. He likes the sounds that Rozanov makes, the little ones, and the flushes of taste that go with them that let Shane know he's doing well; he likes how Rozanov pulls on his hair when he gets close like he's trying to pull him off but still pushes his head down to keep him on him, like maybe Shane's making him feel good enough that even Rozanov isn't quite sure which he wants more.

When he's close to coming Rozanov plants his feet on the bed so that Shane is bracketed between his thighs which start to shake, with all his muscles clenched tight, and when Shane looks up at him just to see, to know, Rozanov is still watching him — right up until his eyes fall closed and his body convulses and he pulls Shane off of him and comes over his belly, his fingers joining Shane's on the length of his cock to finish him. He moans as he does, says, "Hollander, fuck, fuck —" as he spills over his belly.

Shane's jaw aches, his cock hurts for how hard he is and he's still working to catch his breath but he's curious, because he's not really sure he wants Rozanov to come in his mouth — it sounds like it would be kind of gross and he's not sure if he'd like it, but Rozanov always swallows when they do this the other way around and Shane just wants to know, so he ducks his head and sticks his tongue out and carefully, gently, licks the head of Rozanov's softening cock through the stickiness of come there.

Rozanov jerks and gasps and grabs for his shoulder but doesn't push him off and Shane sucks, just barely, tongues the slit for a moment and lets it go when it's clean. It doesn't taste bad like he thought it might, and he thinks — he thinks about Rozanov's come in him, not like when they fuck because they always use condoms, but when he swallows what's in his mouth he thinks: Rozanov's come is in him. His dick jerks and leaks and his face flushes and he tries not to think too hard about what it is about that, exactly, that turns him on so much.

When he sits back, though, Rozanov is looking at him like he can't believe what he's seeing; he's panting and his mouth his open and he says, "Fuck, Hollander, every time you try to kill me," which Shane thinks he should probably take as a compliment, alongside the urgency with which Rozanov urges him onto his back.

Shane moans a shameless, "Oh, f-fuck," as Rozanov puts Shane's dick in his mouth and he knows this is going to be over so much faster than he's ready for, especially as Rozanov palms at his chest, tugs sharp on his nipples and holds Shane down with his weight when he tries to fuck deeper into the heat of him.

That's something else that Shane likes more than is sensible to think about.

His hands clutch at Rozanov when he comes and Rozanov swallows around him, won't let him get away until there's nothing left of him, until all of him that exists is his own skin in the places where Rozanov is touching him.

Rozanov lets him go and rests his forehead against Shane's hip, breathing calming.

"I want to fuck you," Rozanov says, biting little and soft into the crease of his left thigh, pushing his leg up and out so that he has room to go lower. "Do you have time? You are very hot, Hollander, will not be long I will be hard enough again."

It's so very, very tempting. It feels like indulgence, though; like something he shouldn't let himself have when he's had this today already, when he can still taste Rozanov in his mouth and his own dick isn't even all the way soft yet.

"I have to get going," he says instead, and the words sound almost natural, "It's a long drive to Montreal."

Rozanov shrugs and tells him quietly, "Ok," and he smiles although Shane thinks he's disappointed, which Shane finds strange given how easily Rozanov can find himself someone to have sex with if he wants it that he would care so much about getting it from Shane twice instead of once.

It's not even a lie — the length of the drive — but it's not like he has an early morning planned, he could stay a little longer; allow himself to indulge, this once, but once Rozanov lets him up and Shane heads into the bathroom it feels too late to change his mind.

When he comes out Rozanov is sitting on the end of his bed in his underwear, his phone in his hand; he looks up when Shane comes back into the bedroom and watches as Shane picks up his own underwear from his pile of clothes and pulls them on, then reaches for his pants.

"You had good summer?" Rozanov asks, dropping his phone onto the mattress next to him.

"Uh, yeah, I guess," Shane tries not to frown as he fastens his fly; Rozanov's hardly ever tried to talk to him before about anything that doesn't have to do with hockey or one of their dicks and he's not sure how much detail is too much. "Saw my parents, and I went to — I have this cottage, in Ottawa, real private, out the way of everything, you know? Construction on it just finished in June. I went there for a while."

"Sounds nice," Rozanov says, and Shane looks over at him waiting for the backhand to the compliment but there doesn't seem to be one, only Rozanov sitting on the end of the bed they just fucked in holding his shirt out to him. Shane reaches out for it, but Rozanov snatches it back just as his fingers are about to take custody of it, holding the collar in both hands so he can look at it and say, "Shane."

Shane blinks. That usually comes with a Hollander attached to it, and it's strangely friendly to hear Rozanov call him by only his first name.

"Shane?" he says again, like it's a question, and starts to smile, wide with all white teeth, "Why does your shirt have your name written in it, Shane?"

Wincing at the embarrassment, Shane tries to grab it from him but Rozanov stands and moves out of his way. Shane doesn't need to look, knows that on the collar of the shirt just where the tag has been carefully cut out is his name written in small capital letters in wash-proof pen.

It's so his mom can separate his and his dad's stuff easier when she does his laundry; she buys clothes for both of them and one white shirt looks a lot like another in a pile of them.

This doesn't feel like something he can say to Rozanov and ever live it down.

"Shut the fuck up," he snaps instead and tries again to take the shirt back but Rozanov stands and holds it behind his back.

"Do not be embarrassed," he says, still grinning, "Shane, I forget your first name sometimes also."

"Oh, fuck you, Ilya," he snaps, and tries to snatch his shirt from behind Rozanov's back, but he leans away. Their chests touch, and Shane wants for a fleeting moment to lean against him. "My mom does it, ok?" he admits, bracing for the inevitable mockery, but Rozanov's face softens instead, and he lets Shane take the shirt back.

He watches as Shane tugs it on and fastens the buttons, bottom to top.

"That is nice," Rozanov says, just as he's finishing on the last button, "you are grown but she still wants to look after you."

Shane isn't sure how nice it is up against being absolutely mortifying when his — his person that — when the person that he's having sex with notices and points it out, and he's about to say something to that end but catches, before he can open his mouth, a certain wistfulness in Ilya's eyes where he's still looking at the buttons of Shane's shirt. There's something there that's a little mournful and absolutely not at all Shane's business, so he shrugs instead of replying and puts his shoes on.

Rozanov has only dressed as far as having pants on by the time Shane's ready to leave and probably he'll want to shower once he's got Shane out of his way, but as Shane reaches for the deadbolt on the hotel room door Rozanov pulls on his elbow to turn him back around, just far enough to kiss him. It's soft and lingering and there's the slightest brush of tongue against his bottom lip.

Shane feels warm; the orgasm-fizz in his blood is fading but the lessening of its effervescence is slowed, most sweetly, in careful kisses. He thinks about how he felt in the elevator in Vegas and can hardly compare.

It's not like he thinks this is anything, like kissing makes what they do anything, but it makes it, maybe, so that Shane isn't anyone. That Rozanov is here with him, and not just a man who's willing.

"See you in preseason," Ilya tells him, almost a whisper, and then, eyes bright, adds, "Shane."

Shane laughs and rolls his eyes. "See you in preseason," he reaches for the door handle again, but smiles back in the end, and teases back, "Ilya."

**

The hotel water pressure is good and the temperature almost hot enough to scald and Ilya stands in the shower until his fingertips wrinkle. He can still feel the impression of Shane's hands on his hips, his thighs; of Shane's mouth, greedy for him.

He has the sound of his first name, now, in Shane's voice: a perfect opportunity, taken.

Putting all of this away, calling it meaningless and packing it down into nothing in his mind in the way that he can do so deftly, seems like a pointless exercise; the pair of petals that sits on the hotel's bathroom countertop calls out those efforts for the mockery that they are.

The literature is unclear on whether seeing Shane will give Ilya less time; Ilya knows this, he has read extensively since the first petal came up in his apartment in Moscow the day he arrived there at the start of summer. The size of a mass in the lungs can be measured, its growth tracked, but how that correlates with the variable tides of feeling — how to define, to track, the strength of love, how it grows and changes in presence and in absence is —

Is not something that medicine can quantify.

If he is going to die for loving Shane Hollander and have no choice in either of those things then he will love him as much and for as long as he can, even if he will have to do it as carefully, as inwardly as he is capable so that he is allowed to drag it out for every last bittersweet moment.

Shane will notice, Ilya is sure, if Ilya is different with him — is softer, closer — but Ilya will tread carefully and accept the risk. Shane will never love him back but that is the awful point of all of this, and at least when Shane has enough information to understand why Ilya is being different with him, Ilya will be gone, and beyond having to explain himself.

**

The first text pings in two days after Shane gets back from Toronto, and his eyebrows lift when he sees it's from Lily. It's too soon; they'll play against each other in the preseason but he's only just moved back to his apartment in Montreal, there's no reason for Rozanov to be in touch until a day or two before the schedule has them in the same city, if he even wants to hook up again so soon.

The text is a link, and he taps it: it takes him to a website for little white iron-on name tags, meant to be stuck into kids' clothes; you can order them printed with the name of your choice. The ones Rozanov has directed him to have a little cartoon hockey stick design on either end.

His phone vibrates in his hand, and another text banner appears at the top of his screen.

Lily: Might be useful for new season. Clothes mix up easy in locker room.

"What an asshole," Shane mutters, but finds he's smiling just a little bit anyway. For good measure, he types out a reply and sends it without letting himself think too much about it. If there's anything he doesn't have to overthink it's fucking name tags.

Shane: My jersey already has my name on it, asshole.

A pause: three bouncing typing dots and then, horrifyingly:

Lily: what the fuck

Lily: You think that is why they put Hollander on the back of it???

Shane sputters out meaningless mortified part-words at no-one and shoves his phone into his pocket.

**

Their joint interview airs just before training camp starts and Shane watches it with half an eye while he eats meal prep chicken standing up in his kitchen. He looks at Ilya talking about the Raiders' victory, about the ups and downs of their season and turns off the sound, watches Ilya's mouth move as he makes words and thinks about how, a couple of hours after this was filmed, that mouth had been on Shane's body.

It's stark against six months of silence, though, that Rozanov's messages carry on coming in every couple of days in little flurries of three or four. Shane doesn't reply at first, wonders if maybe Rozanov's sending them to him by mistake, but they keep arriving. A link to an article about the Metros' chances for the upcoming season, positing them as poor; a picture of a very fluffy grey kitten, a link to a website arguing seriously for the existence of Bigfoot with the comment, "Big hairy guy in woods, maybe is hockey player got lost after playoffs."

When training camp has caught steam the messages get more specific and Shane thinks that they might not be meant for someone else after all, and Shane starts to write replies that he doesn't send, waiting for the other shoe. There's never anything that Rozanov shouldn't say to someone on an opposing team, just little complaints and chirps and teasing, it's almost — if Shane didn't know better he'd say, almost — friendly, little nudges asking for a reply:

Lily: New goalie is eight feet tall. I think you will not get anything past him.

Lily: Did you have yet this cucumber gatorade? like drinking grass, horrible.

Shane quite likes the cucumber Gatorade but doesn't say so, although eventually, Shane smiles and worries a little and writes and deletes half a dozen times but replies:

Lily: Rookies are children. Never were we this young.

Shane: I guess you must be old like Scott Hunter by now.

Lily: Why do you say this to me?

Lily: Shane you are terrible, cruel person. the world must be told.

Shane: Shut up and sort out your rookies.

Lily: do not worry, none of them are as pretty as you

It's not every day but it becomes more often than not; Rozanov ends up making him blush more than he doesn't with texts Shane ends up deleting just in case, but it's — nice. It's actually nice, like when they're playing against each other but without the crowd and without the pressure, just able to bounce words backwards and forward between each other without worrying about who might hear.

Shane moves into the first games of the season talking to Rozanov more regularly than he talks to almost anyone else and he wonders if this makes them friends. Friends who meet up sometimes and have sex, like some of the guys on the team have their regular hookups, only more than that — sex friends, Shane supposes, that would still have the friends part even if the sex were off the table.

It feels a little better, somehow, to have a sex friend than a hookup; less sordid and not so much of a pro-sports-asshole stereotype, and even though he acknowledges only to himself with a little spidering of guilt that he never mentions this maybe-friendship to a single other person, it can't surely be so bad to be friends with Rozanov. The fact that they fuck sometimes is irrelevant; a stupid risk that they probably shouldn't be taking and one day they'll stop it, when Rozanov gets bored or Shane meets someone he wants a proper relationship with, but friends —

They more or less work together. They're going to see each other regularly for their whole careers. Shane doesn't want to have to have a rivalry with anyone, doesn't want the mental effort that all that dislike needs to feed off of. He can act it up for the League all he needs to, but sometime soon they'll stop hooking up like risk-taking morons with nothing to lose and Shane finds, as he reads through four texts in a row bemoaning the change in brand of the stick tape that's now the Raider's locker room default, that he might quite like if he's got a friend when all's said and done; someone who knows him and understands him the way that Rozanov does and almost no one else can.

Shane wonders if Rozanov thinks the same word about Shane: friends. He can't decide how he feels about that whichever way the answer falls, so he puts the question away and does his best not to think about it again.

Once, Shane comes out of the bathroom on his way to bed, muscles sore from the effort of the day, to find his phone displaying a missed call from Lily. His thumb hovers over it for a long time, wondering. He scrolls back to their text chain but can't see anything in it that might prompt a call, just where they left things that morning with Rozanov bitching about the apparently woeful state of the Dunkin' fall menu.

Putting his phone on its charger on his bedside table, Shane clears the missed call notification and looks to make sure that the little red number one in its circle has disappeared. It's strange, but he figures that it was probably a mistake. Rozanov would never call him on purpose.

**

They meet at the beginning of October. Shane tells Hayden he's going for a walk and heads out barely an hour after they've checked in to their shared room in the same hotel they always stay at in Boston, then he walks to the end of the block and calls a cab to take him to the hotel where Rozanov is waiting for him. It's fancier than the one the Metros are staying in, upscale and expensive and carrying an expectation of privacy with it, so that Shane almost feels that the staff there can't see him for all they seem politely ambivalent to his presence as he walks through the doors, collects the keycard that's waiting for him at reception and crosses to the elevators.

Shane doesn't encounter another person on his way to the room, the carpets under his feet thick enough that he can't even hear his own footsteps, the implication of privacy — that he goes entirely unnoticed — soothing to the watchful corners of his mind. Rozanov answers the door in track pants and a wash-worn henley, its thin cotton fighting for its life against the stretch of his arms and his shoulders. Shane's eyes track the shape of him without his say-so.

With the door clicking closed behind him Shane gives an awkward little smile and says, "Hi," and Ilya smiles back at him, steps close and kisses him soft and deep and hungry, his hand on Shane's face with his thumb pressing into the soft part under Shane's jaw like he has every right.

He quirks a smile as he lets Shane go and says, "Hello, Shane," but Shane's head is swimming.

This is Rozanov when he's not postgame, when he hasn't come from anywhere except, Shane assumes, his house.

He mumbles back, "Hi, Ilya," but he's thinking about how there isn't the lingering smell of locker rooms around Ilya's clothes, or the bland man-scent of the generic body wash that ends up in the dispensers in every rink shower Shane's ever set foot in. There's no undertone of cigarette smoke or blur of food and alcohol and bodies that sticks to someone who's been in a roomful of people all night.

Ilya smells fucking amazing, so good it's unfair; Shane ducks his face to press into the side of Ilya's neck, his mouth open against him so that his tongue can press to skin and he inhales and groans before he can remind himself to hold it in. Ilya's wearing cologne and there's something that's probably his shampoo or hair products and it's those but it's also not, not at all. Shane's been near plenty of guys who were wearing cologne and never before wanted to just hump one of them until he comes.

He's getting hard, and Ilya's fingers are digging in at his waist, holding them flush together; Shane's face is still against Ilya's neck, his mouth making little bites to the soft part above his collarbone. Ilya's hand is in his hair, twisted up like it gets when Shane sucks him off.

Ilya tugs at him until Shane lifts his face; Ilya is looking at him with a familiar heat, but he lifts his eyebrows in a question, too.

There's no room for embarrassment left in him, although maybe he'll find it again later, so Shane kisses him open-mouthed and tells him, "You smell fucking incredible." Ilya's hands spasm on him. "Fuck me?"

Ilya puts him on his hands and knees to fuck him and Shane's head drops and his back arches and he moans when Ilya's dick pushes in and stretches him wide. He's ready to brace himself, waiting to feel Ilya's broad hands take their place on his hips and pull them hard against each other, but once Ilya's in him all the way his arms move around Shane's chest to pull him back and up, drag him so that he's kneeling upright with Ilya's chest to his back and his dick still in him, absolute acres of skin pressed flush to him.

Fucking like this isn't so frantic, Ilya's thrusts not so hard; Ilya doesn't pull out all the way and Shane can't really fuck back on to him, has to work to keep upright instead and let himself be taken, so it's more of a grind, more of Ilya filling Shane obscenely full and not letting him get away from it. Ilya holds Shane against him with an arm across his chest while Shane gasps and pants and lets his head drop back, turns his face into Ilya's neck so he can breathe him in and pant wetly against his cheek and scrape teeth against his jaw and inhale, fumbling behind himself to press his hands to Ilya's thighs, his ass, into his hair.

By the time he comes Shane is a trembling mess; Ilya's nails drag sharp lines across his hip and his belly to loop loosely around his dick and Shane's eyes fly wide and he fucks into Ilya's grip and barely has time to beg, "Please, oh yes, please —" before he's shuddering and crying out and spilling over Ilya's hand.

He goes boneless after, needs Ilya to hold him up so that he doesn't collapse into the puddle he's made on the bedspread; Ilya's still hard in him, fucking in and bringing little whimpers of overstimulation out of him as he does. Shane feels perfect.

"Can I come on you?" Ilya asks, accent thick against Shane's ear.

Shane can still hardly think. "Wh-what?"

"On your back, can I come on — oh, oh fuck —" His voice is tight and Shane recognises it, with the short, hard thrusts into him. He's going to come, and Shane's nodding before he knows he's decided to.

"Yes, yes do it."

Ilya pulls out of him suddenly enough that Shane gasps high and sharp and the arm that's been holding Shane up lets go; Shane catches himself on shaking arms to keep himself from falling on his face and sees the condom dropped on the mattress to the side of them; it's only seconds before Ilya groans and Shane feels him spilling onto his skin, spurting onto the top of his ass cheeks and the small of his back; Shane bites his lip so that Ilya can't hear him moan softly at the filth of it.

Shane ends up letting himself drop in the wet spot anyway, head resting on his arms as he gathers himself, collects his scattered pieces and resets them into the right shape — which is always, after Ilya is done with him, slightly different and slightly more comfortable than he'd been keeping himself before, as if he can feel that he's stretching to find the right dimensions for himself.

"Блядь, I wish I could take a picture of this," Ilya murmurs, and presses his thumbs into the roundness at the tops of Shane's ass cheeks. It's such a bizarre thing to want; Shane looks over his shoulder with a frown.

"Why?"

Ilya laughs and drops down onto the bed next to him, settling on his side facing Shane with his head propped up on his hand. "Shane, if you are telling me you do not know why I would want dirty pictures of you I will not believe you. Personal use only." He grins but it's not mocking, and Shane thinks that he might be blushing.

They smell of sex, now, as well as whatever it is of Ilya that makes Shane want to press his whole face against his chest and breathe in, and although he doesn't really know what does and doesn't constitute a sex-friend activity he thinks that even in this moment of strange quiet that would probably be a weird thing to do. He moves close an inch, maybe two, instead, so that they're touching from his hip to his toes.

He glances back over his shoulder to where he can't quite see the state of himself, and replies, "Oh. Oh, I. Really?"

Shane needs a shower; his skin is cooling and the thing that was hot three minutes ago is about to encounter sober thought and be disgusting, but before he can start to do anything about that Ilya reaches out and drags a fingertip along the ridge of his shoulder blade, from the centre of his back outward to its edge, but his eyes stay on Shane's face.

"Really, yes. You are very beautiful, Shane Hollander. I hope the others you allow into your bed tell you this also."

The words are soft and serious, said as fact and not as teasing, and Shane's breath catches and holds. He isn't sure where to start: with the incongruousness of Ilya calling him beautiful or with denial of its truth; with the knee-jerk rebuff that he doesn't have other people that he goes to bed with, give or take a girl or two over the years that really didn't go so well — or with a passing back of the compliment, saying that Ilya is beautiful, too, in this moment with its closeness and soft light and quiet breathing.

He doesn't get the chance to say anything, though; Ilya presses a soft kiss to his slack mouth then stands and flips on the bathroom light; he recovers the condom and throws it in the trash and asks, as if nothing unusual has come out of his mouth, "You want shower first? You need it." The fucker winks at him, and Shane scowls and stands and pushes past him into the bathroom.

**

The first time Rozanov calls and Shane answers, it's to argue about an ESPN interview.

"I know you did not forget," he starts, as soon as Shane picks up and before he can even get a word out, before he can decide between a tentative hello or a more demanding what do you want.

"What?" he stutters out instead, thrown.

"You tell this reporter on EPSN you don't remember how many goals I scored last season —" Shane rolls his eyes and finds himself smiling the smallest bit, glad that there's no one here with him in his kitchen to see, "and you know it was seventy —"

"Hey, woah, it wasn't seventy anything, it was sixty six."

There's a silence that carries Rozanov's indignant annoyance loud in it. "You liar!" He sounds delighted, somehow. "You try to tell me my own scores and you cannot admit you are wrong!"

"You can't count All Stars, that's barely even real hockey. We were talking about the regular season; in the regular season it was sixty six."

"I think perhaps you do not want to say it was such a big number."

"Fuck you, I'm being accurate."

"And you know it, Shane, hm?" He sounds quietly victorious.

That's not wrong, but — "I know lots of players' stats. That's not weird."

"Oh yes, what was Pike's for last season, hm?" Shane pauses. He knows this. He knows this for basically every high scorer in the league, and somehow Rozanov's quiet smug confidence has driven everything he knows right out of his head. "You remember Pike, yes, fifteenth best Metro?"

"Fuck off, Hayden did just fine last season, he," Shane pauses, all his thoughts in a tangle. He doesn't understand how Rozanov does this to him.

"It is all right, he is very forgettable. Not like me, hm, Shane?"

"You're such an asshole," Shane tells him and fears that he might sound fond, "I don't know why I even picked up."

"Why did you pick up?" Rozanov asks, curious.

"I thought you were someone else," Shane lies, when the answer lies embedded instead somewhere in his own curiosity.

"Well, now we agree you are obsessed with me —"

"I am not obsessed with you."

"— I need to go," Ilya says, and Shane can hear noises in the background that sound like they might be doors slamming, then muffled voices, "which is a shame, I did not even get chance to ask what you are wearing."

"What I'm wearing?" Shane asks, stupidly.

"Yes. Maybe if I call again you will tell me." The sound of voices is getting louder wherever Rozanov is. "Then you will take it all off for me."

"Fuck you, no I fucking won't."

"We will see. Goodbye, Shane."

He hangs up and leaves Shane standing in his kitchen, staring at call ended on his phone screen, halfway hard and not sure if he's disappointed or relieved that Rozanov hung up without letting his voice drop into that lower, softer, dangerous register that makes Shane shiver and want to do deeply ill-advised things because they feel good enough that he loses his grasp on rational thought.

Maybe next time, he thinks, instead — and rolls his eyes at himself and shuts his phone away into the nearest kitchen drawer with an, entirely necessary, slam.

**

The routine of the season grinds itself along and takes Shane with it in its teeth. It keeps going well for Montreal, the wins stacking up, and by Christmas there are stifled, hesitant murmurings about the playoffs, about their chances; about bringing the Metros finally bringing the Cup home. Shane listens and puts it away and buckles down.

He's never played better in his life.

Rozanov agrees, which Shane knows by how much shit he gives him for it.

By the turn of the New Year it's starting to feel weird if a week goes by and they don't text or call or something, and their schedules are lining up beautifully for them to have almost regular hookups — if more or less once a month counts as regular, but Shane finds that he thinks so — or at least his body does, with its twitchy sense of dissatisfaction building to an uncomfortable peak when the time between their meetings breaks the three week mark, and the need to touch by the time they're safe behind a hotel room door is a physical thing, a hand on his back pushing him always closer.

It's the friends question, though, that itches at him; that the hooking up feels like the icing on the cake, the addictive, perfect bonus to having Ilya as his utterly unlikely friend, a foundation that he would be miserable to lose, at this point and that he hopes outlasts the place where physical wanting and poor decision making meet. He finds he doesn't like the idea that Ilya might have other friends like him that can also lose themselves in Ilya's touch like Shane gets to, and more than once finds himself trawling the tabloid news feeds for proof of them — of Rozanov's women — and finds himself gratified that he can't find anything particularly recent.

It's right after All-Stars that Shane cracks, just enough to get the question out, needing to know that he's not building up some awful one-sided thing that'll leave him feeling like he's really lost something when they finally see sense and stop fucking, if he finds suddenly that Ilya isn't in his life at all.

It hadn't exactly been his plan to say it the minute he walked into Ilya's house, but he's in Ilya's house; it's the first time Shane's been invited over and he can't get it out of his head that this, too, isn't a casual fuck sort of thing, and even though he's probably opening himself up for mockery just by asking he finds himself breaking their frantic kiss to blurt it out while Ilya's still backing him up against the inside of his closed bedroom door.

"Hey, so — we're friends, right?" Shane's a little ashamed of himself that there is a whiny little twist of pleading to his question, but if Rozanov says no, laughs the concept away, Shane knows he'll be disappointed. He'll be hurt.

It isn't entirely welcome, the thought that Ilya has the power to hurt him.

The heat in Ilya's face fades into something neutral and he looks at him without a flicker to his expression for long enough that Shane all but feels that hurt incoming, but then Ilya smiles and the relief is a rush even if Shane is sure that smile doesn't quite look right; it doesn't quite reach his eyes.

"Yes, Shane, we are friends."

Shane's grin is reflexive and full of relief; he'd thought so, but hearing it back spreads warm in his chest, bright and glittering.

Rozanov looks away, clears his throat, then looks back to Shane with a tease in his eyes. "Now we know we are friends I am going to suck your dick for you. Spirit of friendship, yes?"

**

Ilya is a fool. With the roses giving him no choice in the matter he'd accepted the truth that he loved Shane Hollander bare days after he'd cold-shouldered him out of his penthouse in Vegas, but it had been a love born of wanting and distance, of watching and waiting and need building up into a mass of emotion. It was love that had grown from stolen slices of him: watching his games and his interviews and reading his articles and seeing his face, the determined downturn to his eyes as he'd refused to meet Ilya's at the red line, all of it making Ilya burn for the wanting of him until it all fused in him as love, and —

And it's a shadow to what he feels now, with months of conversations and visits that Ilya engineers more frequently than should be believable as coincidence, if Shane really thought it through. Now that Ilya knows how to make Shane laugh and can hear it in the brightness to his voice when he's trying not to; now that Ilya has put his mouth on every square inch of Shane's body, has felt him shake and heard him beg and seen that fleeting peace in his face for the few minutes after they're finished, when Ilya can lie with him and Shane doesn't mind.

It's the most tragic indictment of any hope he had left that Shane might ever feel the same for him, that he has declared them, so very, very tentatively, to be friends, when even the love that Ilya had felt at the start of summer seems as nothing, in retrospect; childish and long since outgrown. What was shallow, albeit real, now runs messy and tangled and deep, and all the way through him.

Chapter 2: Two

Chapter Summary

Shane knows that it's nearing the end of May but is a little fuzzy on the actual date, so when he arrives home from the airport one step closer to the final after ending New Jersey's run in game six, there's a moment when he's surprised that he's got as much mail as he does. There's a parcel about the size of a shoebox as well as a little stack of envelopes, most of which are thick paper and rigid, like they have card in them rather than paper. It takes him a stupidly long moment to realise that they're birthday cards; that this week — he thinks, isn't sure and has to check his phone for the date — tomorrow is his birthday.

Chapter Notes

Shane hasn't been back to his apartment in a week, every single part of him hurts and there's a black hole of hunger in his stomach that no amount of brown rice and chicken is able to satisfy. Objectively he's an absolute mess: exhausted, battered, bruised and taped and wrapped — and still, he feels fantastic. This is it: this will be it, he knows it to his bones, there's no other way he's going to let it happen. This is their year. Their Cup.

It's going to be his — Montreal's — Shane can almost taste it.

He knows that it's nearing the end of May but is a little fuzzy on the actual date, so when he arrives home from the airport one step closer to the final after ending New Jersey's run in game six, there's a moment when he's surprised that he's got as much mail as he does. There's a parcel about the size of a shoebox as well as a little stack of envelopes, most of which are thick paper and rigid, like they have card in them rather than paper. It takes him a stupidly long moment to realise that they're birthday cards; that this week — he thinks, isn't sure and has to check his phone for the date — tomorrow is his birthday.

Standing at his kitchen counter and flicking through the pile of mail Shane pays it only a sliver of his attention in favour of the parcel, which has customs stickers on it, he sees, and he pauses and sets the letters down when he realises that it's postmarked Boston.

There's no return address, but there doesn't need to be; Shane only knows one person in Boston so even though he has no idea what Rozanov might be mailing to him he has no doubt that he's the one it's come from. Shane picks the box up: gently shakes it. It's not very heavy and when he shakes the box there's a little shushing sound of something moving in there, but nothing that gives anything away.

Fetching a pair of scissors out of a kitchen drawer for the tape on the lid of the box, Shane fiddles with his phone until he finds their text thread, then asks:

Shane: Did you know it's my birthday?

Lily: yes.

Shane: how??

The typing bubble appears and disappears, then eventually another message pings through: a link to Shane's wikipedia page.

Lily: turns out even second best hockey player is on internet.

Shane feels momentarily stupid, because of course Rozanov actually could have found out his birthday from so many different places — but then his brain stalls over the fact that he's gone to the trouble of looking it up; of — apparently — sending him a gift.

Except, they're friends. Friends know this stuff about each other. Shane taps the search in without really thinking about it, Ilya Rozanov birthday, and it only takes about ten seconds for him to find out it's only three weeks away.

Lily: Think of me when you use it 😉

Shane remembers the parcel, then, and sets his phone down to pick up the kitchen scissors and carefully slice through the tape holding it closed. There's a box inside surrounded by packing paper, matte black and sleek — expensive-looking — and Shane carefully lifts the lid off and blushes furiously, instantly at the toy he finds there, audacious in its size, thick silicone in gold. Think of me when you use it, Ilya had said.

Of fucking course.

Shane's phone buzzes on the counter, and he snatches it up.

Lily: You want to say thank you, send me a picture 🥵🍆🍑

Shane's first reaction is a sort of indignant, embarrassed anger: as if, like he would take pictures of himself like that just for anyone — but he's pulled up short at the thought because Ilya really isn't, actually, just anyone; possibly hasn't ever been, if he's honest about it, and he trusts him not to be stupid with something like that.

There's already a dildo sitting in the back of a drawer upstairs. He doesn't really use it all that often; it seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to get himself off and it's never as satisfying as the real thing, is so deficient compared to Ilya's touch and the knowledge of Shane's body that drives it.

Shane doesn't exactly make a decision to do it but he takes the whole box upstairs with him anyway, strips and takes the dildo out of the box — washes it first because he's not an animal — but then he takes the lube out of his drawer and settles himself on his bed and does just as Ilya had asked him, and thinks of him the whole time.

It takes a stupidly short time, to say Shane is alone and is tired and all of him aches like playoff hockey and no part of him was even thinking about sex a few minutes ago, but there's something about knowing that Ilya thought of him, that he picked this specific thing out for him, that he'd planned it, mailed it to arrive for Shane's birthday, has been picturing him using it and wants to see and is waiting for it.

So he pushes it into himself with slippy fingers and thinks of Ilya's talented hands and his mouth and his dick and his voice, the constant low murmur of it in Shane's ear when they fuck until he comes eventually with a groan, satisfied and, yet, still wanting for the feel of skin and the weight of heavy muscle over him.

Shane fumbles for his phone before he thinks better of it and takes an awkwardly-angled picture of himself before the orgasm high can fade out of his blood, then lies back on his bed and looks at it. There's nothing identifying, save the edge of impact bruises on his thigh that you can't tell flood up to his hip out of frame and that'll be yellowing or gone in a week; there's just the toy still half in him, his softening dick and a puddle of come on his belly.

Shane: Promise you'll delete it?

Lily: Yes

The reply is immediate, like Ilya really was waiting for him, and Shane knows even as he reads it that he didn't actually need the confirmation; he does trust Ilya in this, more than he's ever trusted anyone with himself — so he sends it then deletes it out of his own photos for good measure, and leaves his phone on the bed while he cleans himself up. He comes back a few minutes later, dressed and with the first tinges of real self-consciousness starting to claw at him, to find more messages waiting.

Lily: oh fuck Shane

And then, after a gap of ten minutes or so:

Lily: I have deleted now

Lily: is a shame. It looks so good in you.

Shane smiles and tells himself he shouldn't feel so flattered by a compliment over a fucking dirty picture, and picks up the parcel that the dildo came in to throw it in the recycling — but as he breaks the box down flat something else falls out and drops to the floor; it clatters. He bends, picks it up.

It takes him a minute to place, but their faces are still babyish enough that the picture must be from the Prospect Cup; Saskatchewan. They aren't looking at each other, staring straight ahead into the camera, the entirely unoccupied stands of the rink rising behind them and half a foot of empty air in between them, Shane's black and red jersey alongside Ilya's red and white. They look so unbearably young.

Shane remembers pictures being taken — pictures of everyone; the teams standing in awkward rows, the practises, shots of just himself — and of him and Rozanov, the final's two team captains standing awkwardly side by side and not saying a word to each other. He's never seen this one before.

This photo was taken before they'd ever spoken. Shane had followed Rozanov outside after this to introduce himself, because he hadn't wanted to do it with half the team and the photographer watching. This is them before they were ever them, and even so Shane remembers the urgency that he'd felt — that he had to go outside and talk to him; the inevitability of it.

He has no idea how Ilya would have gotten hold of this; he must have gone looking for it, searched it out, then for reasons that Shane cannot put together he had it printed up, this reminder of where they started together, and put it in a thin black frame and sent it to him for his birthday.

What Shane is supposed to think of this he has no idea, but what he does feel is — is —

Big. Massive, in his chest.

He fumbles for his phone again and looks at the screen until it comes back into focus.

Shane: Nice picture. Where did you get it?

Lily: Was worth the effort. You look like small child.

Shane: Not more than you do.

Lily: You were very short.

Lily: tiny legs. no surprise you lost.

Shane looks back to the picture to check and, all right, he hadn't finished growing yet, but there was still barely anything to draw a difference between them.

Shane: Fuck you

Lily: Happy birthday.

It's soft, the feeling pushing beneath Shane's breastbone, and warm; welcome. Terrifying.

**

Svetlana's tears are angry, and she wipes them away with her fingertips like they have insulted her. In between them on the table rests a rose: a full bloom, but in pieces. There is a small green leaf attached to the bottom of the largest clump of petals.

"You will not have the surgery," she tells him. She knows well enough not to make it a question.

He thinks about a pink scar on pale skin, barely healed. About arguments that he couldn't help but overhear before the pink scar appeared, and of the flowers that he had found crushed in the trash — but they didn't keep flowers in the house, so he hadn't understood at first where they had come from.

It had always been the worst thing when his father made his mother cry, and so he tried not to listen while it happened and tried to comfort her afterwards, but he remembers in particular how fiercely she had screamed it, told his father I do not want it and how he had shouted straight back at her You will have it anyway, and it had been too loud for Ilya to be able to avoid without going out of the house but he needed to be there after they argued in case he could help her, and so he stayed, and listened.

You will have it anyway, and not long after that the pink scar appeared. Bandaged, first, and then healing and a livid pink, cutting down her breastbone.

Ilya had thought she had just been sad. He had heard of it, the flower disease, and with the flowers in the trash and the scar to work from he had thought that he could put it all together. He was old enough to know that love could make you sad sometimes, but he didn't understand why all the light had gone from his mother's eyes on the day she came back with a scar.

She'd told him, later, sitting at their kitchen table with a cigarette in her hand although she hadn't smoked since before he was born, "I do not love him any more. He is gone. But so is my mama, and my sister, and you."

She had held his hand, but looked at it as if his touch confused her. "You are gone, too."

The pink scar hadn't yet faded to healed-white by the time Ilya found her in their bathtub, and he had understood her reasons.

"No," he tells Svetlana, "I will not have the surgery."

**

Shane's mom had said that MVP was practically a done deal, and it went against the grain to imagine it as his before anything was announced but Shane had hoped; captaining the team that brought the Cup back to Montreal after sixteen years had to count for something, after all. He'd still barely believed it, standing on the stage reading out the acceptance speech his mom had written for him and even as he did feeling his phone buzz in his pocket, Rozanov choosing that moment on purpose to text him, the absolute fucker.

Shane replies to the room number with 11pm? as soon as he's off the stage, because he'd been waiting for that exact invitation for hours, if he's lying to himself, and weeks if he isn't — so Shane was never going to do anything else.

Rozanov is in a penthouse again this year, although a different one, and still Shane feels a strange deja vu as he takes the elevator up to his floor and follows the short corridor to the only door that there is to go to when the elevator lets you off here. He remembers how he felt leaving Ilya's room a year ago and swallows away nervousness while he reminds himself that it hasn't felt like that since, that the anticipation that thrums through him as he lifts his hand to knock on the door is real and thrilling and not just because he's going to have sex tonight — good sex, sex that will make his muscles ache and his body feel like it's doing the only thing that it was made for that doesn't involve a pair of hockey skates.

The anticipation is for Ilya. For the way he looks at Shane and Shane feels like —

He feels like, maybe —

It really doesn't matter what it feels like, because being sex-friends doesn't come with feelings outside of the bounds of their carefully yet also somehow imprecisely delineated friendship.

But sometimes, Ilya looks at him like he's — like maybe he thinks that Shane is something precious, like maybe this isn't all in Shane's head and Ilya feels it as well, like they're —

The door opens.

Shane steps inside and closes it behind him. Ilya is standing a metre or so away, stripped to the waist. He's definitely slimmer — leaner — than a few months ago. It's hard to keep weight on in the playoffs, Shane knows that well enough, but Boston's run ended weeks ago and there's something about him that makes Shane think thin, think unwell, rather than simply underfed. Maybe it's the shadows under his eyes; they make him look tired.

This is what the summer is for, anyway — resting, healing — and he pushes the thought out of his mind and lets Ilya kiss him welcome.

Ilya blows him stretched out on the suite's enormous couch before he takes him to bed, strips him and puts him on his stomach and fucks him slow and hard with his whole weight stretched out heavy over him, his mouth busy on Shane's shoulders and the back of his neck but Shane doesn't even care that he's going to be marked up to hell and back while Ilya is pinning him down like there can't be any moving him, whispering little choked words in Russian into his hair.

After, Ilya moves off to the side of him just enough that Shane can turn over onto his back but he doesn't get up, not for a while. Shane is still not able to pull his thoughts properly together and he is wading through the very middle of the bone-deep satisfaction that he has never found anywhere else but with Ilya, so he hums, pleased, and Ilya mouths at his shoulder and then his jawline until Shane turns his head far enough for them to kiss, all slow, tongue and syrup-sweet; kisses that would lead to fucking if they hadn't only just finished.

"Food," Ilya murmurs to him, once Shane's skin is starting to cool. "Room service. You want? I order now and we can shower while we wait."

Shane is about to open his mouth and say no, Ilya doesn't have to, Shane can get going so he doesn't overstay his welcome but before he can open his mouth his stomach growls, and Ilya smiles at him.

"Sorry," Shane winces, "the food at this thing is always kinda bad, and it's all tiny little plates."

"Yes, this. Is like they do not know they are feeding hockey players at the hockey awards." Ilya's hand has come to rest on Shane's stomach, just below his belly button; he's stroking idly with his thumb. "So, room service, yes?" He presses a quick little kiss to Shane's mouth and stands, leaving Shane suddenly unhappily cold, but he comes back soon enough with the menu in his hands. "You want to choose or I should just order one of everything?"

Shane knows he shouldn't really stay, but — he is hungry, and they're friends; friends can eat together and it's not strange or too much or too intimate, and so Shane picks his food from the menu and Ilya orders it and asks for housekeeping to come in and change the bedlinens, too, if it's not too much trouble which it should be, at this time of night, but Ilya is charming and polite and leaves a huge tip on the dresser. It's from the other side of the locked bathroom door that Shane hears the sounds of someone moving around, stripping the bed with efficiency as Ilya's hands hold firm to his sides and taps questing, restrained fingers against his asshole and Shane turns to scrape his teeth along Ilya's collarbone and his heart races and he thrills at the nearness of the faceless person on the other side of the door and the safety of the bolt thrown across it.

They eat sprawled on the unnecessarily large couch and when they're done and Shane's starting to think he should make noises about leaving before Ilya has to ask him to go, but he doesn't get chance before Ilya tugs him back to the bedroom and tumbles him into the enormous bed with its crisp, fresh sheets and kisses him until there's nothing left in Shane's head but the press of Ilya's mouth — and it's lovely, and it's late, and he's warm and tired and he feels so good just right exactly here, and he doesn't exactly realise that he's definitely going to fall asleep if he doesn't get up until he does.

Sleep.

Shane wakes with the daylight. He is pressed tight against something that's spread down the length of his whole body, his back and his ass and his legs and is warm to the point of too hot, that's making him sticky with sweat and feels grounding and wonderful and is breathing deep and Shane wakes enough to realise that it's Ilya just as the weight on him shifts and Ilya moves off him. Shane finds himself making a little noise, hardly audible even to himself, but most definitely one of unhappiness for the disturbance.

The bed dips as Ilya climbs off of it and Shane hears the padding of footsteps and then the closing of a door — the bathroom; there's the sound of the lock clicking. Shane blinks open his eyes and looks out of the window into a shockingly bright Vegas skyline, strangely unremarkable in daylight.

He has spent the night in Ilya's bed. They have woken very early, it might not have been that many hours since he fell asleep if he were to count them, but it was dark and now it's light so that means he's spent the night.

Through the bathroom door Shane hears the sound of Ilya coughing. He's going to come back out any minute.

While the rules around hookups, around friends who fuck are strange and not instinctual to him still, Shane is sure that spending the night sleeping one on top of the other, pressed together so fully and so wonderfully that Shane can still feel Ilya's skin against his if he concentrates, he can still feel —

Ilya coughs again, and there's the sound of water running — the sink, he thinks, not the shower.

This isn't right; they aren't people that spend the night together — friends of the kind that Shane believes that they are don't cuddle all night in the same bed and he's sure that hookups don't either; that's a key distinguishing feature. They were tired and they'd both had a few drinks and they fell asleep, sure, and now Shane needs to make sure Ilya knows that he understands it isn't what they do, it isn't what they are to each other. He doesn't want them to stop doing this thing they do together just because the boundaries blurred too far one time without the thought to keep them solid.

Shane sits up and looks around: he spots his underwear right where he left them on the seat of the chair in the corner; his suit is draped over the chair's back. He stands and picks up his underwear and pulls them on, and has one arm in a shirt sleeve when Ilya comes out of the bathroom.

Ilya stumbles to a stop when he sees Shane standing, partway dressed, and his face falls into something like disappointment but Shane can't guess if it's disappointment that Shane's getting ready to leave or disappointment that he didn't manage to get gone while Ilya was still in the bathroom.

"I think then that you do not want to order breakfast."

Shane puts his other arm in its sleeve and concentrates very hard on his buttons. "It's ok, I'll get out of your hair."

"You have flight soon?" Ilya asks, and Shane shakes his head.

"Not until later, uh, one-thirty, I think." He pulls his pants up, zips the fly. "You're leaving for Russia tonight, right?"

"Yes," Ilya says, coming closer, walking around the bed to stand in front of Shane as he sits to tug on his socks. Ilya's still naked. "We will not see each other until next season."

Shane slips on one shoe, the other. "You'll text though, right? Let me know you got there all right?"

"Yes, Shane, I will text. I will send boring 'wish you were here' from arrivals at Moscow Sheremetyevo." His voice curls around the Russian, and Shane shivers. Ilya is smiling at him but his eyes look sad, and not for the first time Shane wonders what drives him to keep going back to Russia every summer when he doesn't seem to actually want to.

Shane opens his mouth to say — something, he isn't sure exactly what. There are words piling up in his throat and waiting behind his teeth, and he feels like if he lets them out he'll be asking Ilya not to go to Russia this summer, at least not for all of it. There must be somewhere else Ilya wouldn't mind being for a few weeks that won't put him thousands of miles away in a place that he doesn't seem to actually want to go to anyway, and if by some massively unlikely turn of events Ilya's choices are being in Russia or sitting by himself in his house in Boston, he could always come to stay with Shane for a while; it might be fun, it —

It's a stupid, stupid idea and Shane knows there's no way that he can actually voice it. He's never brought up Russia with Ilya and had a response from him that's better than knee-jerk vitriol and Shane doesn't want them to go their separate ways on a sour note, not when they had such a good night and Shane slept well enough that he feels like there isn't a single tense muscle in his entire body.

Instead Shane takes a step forward, and Ilya welcomes him with a kiss; it's a strange feeling, Shane with all his clothes on and Ilya still all bare skin, and Shane's breath sighs out on a moan.

"I'll see you in the fall," Shane says when they part, and it already feels like far, far too long away. He feels separated; maimed, like he's leaving something important behind as he makes his way out of the bedroom, his suit jacket dangling from his fingers and he thinks it's fine, and it makes sense because they're friends, he's sad not to see his friend until the new season starts, he's disappointed to have to wait months for sex again — sex like this, at least, the earth-moving, incredible kind — and he turns with his hand on the door handle to call a soft, "Bye, Ilya," over his shoulder, and Ilya is standing in the doorway to the bedroom, arms loose by his sides, watching him go.

Ilya nods, slow, and tells him, "Goodbye, Shane," and, with the solid click of the lock unlatching the door opens under the pressure of his hand and he leaves the penthouse without looking back again, however much the prickling of Ilya's eyes on the back of his neck makes him want to.

**

The morning is always the worst: something about the restive state of sleep, the body's processes unimpeded by the demands of the conscious hours. The flowers have time to grow and settle and push their way up and Ilya rarely wakes and doesn't bring up a handful of something.

He has learned, now, all the proper terms in English for the parts of a flower, given that this is the language used for most of the reference articles he can find that seem remotely objective. Petals first, certainly, but he understands the stamen, the carpal, the receptacle, and can recognise them when they are in his hand, dismembered from the violence of coughing. The sepals that he sees as a green mush and would be the tiny leaves at the base of the rose's head were he to be looking at one in a vase, started to appear not long ago, and are a bad sign.

Any progression past petals is a bad sign. He knows that the more extensive the visible structures, the more extensive the root.

He doesn't need a mouthful of flowers to tell him that: he is a professional athlete. He knows how hard he should be able to push himself before he is gasping for breath, and he knows that he can no longer push anywhere near that hard.

He has been pushing anyway, and gasping.

This Vegas hotel bed still smells like Shane, like when Ilya presses his face into Shane's neck, and Ilya determines that he will lie in it until housekeeping arrives to tell him he has to leave: he will lie here and breathe in what Shane has left behind and hate him as hard as he can, hate him for what he has brought Ilya to in case he can hate hard enough to overturn the love that festers in him. Ilya will hate Shane for how much Ilya lives to see him smile for him and for the touch of his hands when there is softness in them and Ilya can pretend Shane feels something in return that isn't a pleasure of convenience.

Assuming that Ilya is still here to see the end of this summer he and Shane will not see each other again until then, and even though that isn't Shane's fault at all, Ilya tries his hardest to hate him for that, too.

**

There's an itch living under Shane's skin and no matter what he does he can't make it go away. He can't settle into the offseason, can't shake the feeling of momentum, of needing to be on his way somewhere, and for the stretch of the first week as the sun starts to burn the air warm he throws open the windows of his cottage, the first summer he's been able to plan ahead to spend in it since construction completed, and sleeps with the breeze from the lake keeping him cool. He hopes it will calm him, will soothe the feeling that he's late, that he's missing something — but it doesn't.

After that week is when he has to acknowledge to himself that the only time he feels like he's in the right place is when he sees Ilya's texts ping through; when they go back-and-forth arguing over the importance of sunscreen or bat between them the news on the summer trades as it starts to come in — or when they call, when Ilya tries to explain to him the ridiculous intricacies of the plot of some Russian tv show that Shane lacks the language and the context to understand, until Ilya gives up and, grinning, tells him to take his clothes off if he wants to give Ilya some different entertainment.

He downloads an app and a podcast, googles when he needs to and practices sitting outside on the deck, and the first time that he tells Ilya, "иди на хуй," the five seconds of silence that follows with his face frozen in shock on Shane's phone screen is pristine, shattered in the end with Ilya's delighted laughter.

"Did you only learn the bad words, Hollander?"

Shane ducks his head against the pleased flush that he can feel rising and tries to put his sounds in order because he hadn't only learned the swear words, hadn't even started there, but they'd been pretty high up the list given the Rozanov of it all. He makes his mouth into the unfamiliar shapes, says the sentence he'd practised, "Нет, но я знаю очень мало."

"Accent is terrible. But very impressive, Shane. I am impressed."

Ilya's voice is soft, then, and Shane smiles and changes the subject and turns over the thought that this isn't something that you do for a sex-friend — this is only barely something you do for a friend, to learn an entire new language that you have no use for except to talk to that one person. To have a secret, just you and them.

He tries to put that thought away, but it surfaces at the most inconvenient times and he acknowledges it alongside the truth that even as his solitude at the cottage ends and he moves into his mom's summer schedule of interviews and photoshoots and promos, it remains true that he has spoken to Ilya every day since he left for Russia; he has spoken to Ilya more than he has anyone else all summer and still doesn't feel satisfied with it — Shane wants more of him.

Shane thinks a lot about Vegas — sometimes the time at the start of summer where Shane had stayed the night and woke up feeling gloriously content, but mostly he thinks about Vegas a year ago. About the emptiness that had gutted him in the elevator, and before that the shining special feeling he'd felt he all but glowed with as Ilya watched him from the chair at the end of the bed.

But before that, standing in the men's room fresh off the stage and still wearing his tux with his heart skipping doubletime in his chest, with Ilya so close and feeling a thousand miles away, like even that few inches were too far for him to touch, and then —

Shane thinks a lot about when Ilya had kissed him, standing together a bathroom door away from half the MLH. About how it had felt like having oxygen in his lungs again after being starved for it, except that he hadn't known that he hadn't been breathing. It had felt like the colour had been saturated back into the world.

He had been waiting for it: six months he had been waiting while he tried to convince himself he didn't care and when it was offered he'd let himself drown in it.

Almost half of summer has burned away before Shane realises — or no, not realises, because he always knew, but he understands — that he feels that way again, now. That the feeling has grown and unfurled and stretched lazily through him until it occupies the background of everything he does.

The summer passes in a steady roll, and Shane spends it underwater holding his breath, waiting for Ilya to bring him up for air again.

**

In America there is always a risk — a likelihood — that any medical records Ilya has would find his way back to the team physicians, but Ilya wastes little time after he returns to Russia before making a discreet appointment at an expensive private clinic where they ask his name but take deliberate steps not to check that the one he gives is the truth; he feels that confidentiality is about as assured as it possibly can be.

He hasn't seen it before, only the roses it pushes up and out of him, but sitting in the dark-panelled office of a bland-faced doctor who looks at him with evident pity, Ilya can see the dark winding shape of it on the scans displayed on the screen to his right. The doctor is pointing, indicating the stems and where they're choking him and the roots and where they're suffocating him and giving everything its proper, medical name, and Ilya can't hear it; he tightens his grip on the arms of the chair that he's sitting in until his knuckles turn white and waits until the longing passes, the desperate pointless wishing that Shane were here to hold his hand.

There's a pause in the explanation and Ilya looks back to the doctor, who is waiting, expectant.

"The first petals?" he says, in a way that means he's repeating himself, "When were they?"

Ilya swallows. He can feel it in his throat now, almost all the time. "Last summer. July."

The corners of the doctor's mouth turn down just enough to be noticeable, and he nods. "I see."

"How long?" Ilya asks, because that is the point of this, after all. He didn't need a pretty picture of his chest at a fancy medical centre to tell him that he is going to end, but it would still be useful to know when.

The doctor offers his spread hands, palms up, in a expression universal to mean that he doesn't know. "These things are not exact. They are often unpredictable."

"Try."

"Perhaps six months." His eyes flicker to the pictures of Ilya's chest and the dark tangled mass in the middle of it. "Probably less."

Ilya's eyes close and he nods. Enough time to have his affairs in order; hopefully enough time to see Shane again.

No. It is almost the end of summer and there is nothing left to be accomplished here except to burn up time. He can fly back early: he will make sure he sees Shane again.

"There is of course every chance of reversal even up until the very end stages, if you achieve reciprocation."

Ilya wants to laugh: what an awful fucking term for needing someone to love you back. He coughs instead, which turns into a wet hacking thing and the doctor passes him a cloth to bring up his roses into.

The doctor looks at them, after, spreads out the cloth on his desk and turns over the bloody mess of petals and pistil and stem with the end of a pen that he takes from a drawer. He frowns as he does, then in the end sighs and sits back in his chair.

"Six months?" Ilya asks.

The doctor tips his head to one side; the other. "Probably less."

**

From the moment Shane had let Ilya into his apartment it had felt different. Ilya's eyes and his hands had been all over him from as soon as the door had closed behind him and there had been wanting there and none of that had been unusual, but there was something else with it; an urgency. A passion; something that makes Shane feel like Ilya is there with him, truly and only with him and the rest of the world might not even be there any more.

Ilya had pulled Shane to pieces before he'd even gotten him properly naked; he knows by now how to treat him just how Shane likes best and as he had taken Shane's clothes off one piece at a time, for every part where their skin newly touched Shane's reason blurred and his desire sharpened and he's been a desperate mess for an age, now, trying to be as good for Ilya as Ilya is to him despite the steady dissolution of his power of thought.

Held safe under Ilya's hands, Shane doesn't know how he made it through the whole long drag of summer without this — and he arches and gaps as his body wakes up and he can breathe again.

Ilya holds his legs open wide and pushes them back towards his chest as he fucks him, as he keeps fucking him and Shane thinks he's going to have fingerprint bruises on his thighs but he can't stop him, couldn't even consider it, just like Ilya isn't stopping. Shane hadn't worked it out the first time, had wondered the second, but as he watches Ilya's mouth drop open now, for the third, he recognises the expression on his face twist almost into pain as he deliberately slows the movement of his hips and Shane is fuckdrunk and split open but still understands that Ilya's stopping himself from coming.

"What —" Shane gasps out but Ilya leans forward to kiss his words away and press their foreheads together after, eyes open wide and blue and looking right into him.

"Not yet, yes? Not yet." He starts to thrust again, shallow little things. "Ok? Shane, is ok?"

Shane is burning up and wants to come but doesn't think he could stand it if Ilya stops fucking him when he's pouring out desperation into him with every single movement, so he says, "Yes, yes, I'm going to come but don't stop, ok, don't stop," and so Ilya doesn't, even as his mouth falls open and he drops his head to watch Shane come which just makes it hotter, knowing that Ilya's looking down at where he's fucking into him and where Shane's coming for him until Shane is whining from it and grabbing for him.

"Ok?" Ilya asks, grinding into him so that Shane's eyes roll back as he nods through the fizzing perfect burn of it and he catches fingers in Ilya's hair to pull him down and kiss him messy and deep.

Ilya fucks him and puts his mouth to Shane's neck exactly where it always makes him shiver and he bites sucking and wet until Shane cries out, and he fucks him and whispers in Russian, making the same mushed and mumbled words over and over, but Shane can't hold a thought so has no hope of remembering to try to understand later, and Ilya fucks him. Fucks him until Shane moans harsh on every thrust back in, until Ilya's shaking and his hips are moving in a constant helpless stammer and Shane can barely tell what sounds from him are words and what are moans and cries and gasps, until his hair is damp with sweat and his arms are shaking, holding Shane's legs open and pressed to his chest, and Shane hadn't understood, hadn't known, has never felt —

Ilya chokes out, "Shane," and tells him mysteries full of unfamiliar vowels alongside rolling r's and says, "ok, is ok?" when Shane whimpers as he gets hard again, and eventually, when Ilya loses himself completely, gives Shane's name to him against his tongue and Shane breathes out Ilya with something that sounds even to himself like awe and Ilya comes with a sob that breaks in the middle, his whole body tense and shaking and wracked with it as it goes on and on and on.

Shane winces at the ache when Ilya lets his legs down and pulls out of him, then Ilya ties off the condom and shimmies down Shane's body and before Shane can form any words Ilya swallows him down with a focused determination and makes him come again in barely a couple of minutes with three fingers stuffed deep and his throat working the head of his cock with the same driving urgency he'd fucked him with.

Ilya collapses on top of him, after; he goes with a soft oof all at once like his muscles have all given up on holding him at the same time. His forehead thumps to Shane's chest and Shane feels Ilya's mouth pressing lightly to his sternum and the wet pant of his breathing; Shane's fingers find Ilya's hair without him telling them to and they hold. Spasming and restless, they hold.

He breathes and he doesn't move and he feels satisfied down to the heart of himself; his body aches in a way that will be a delicious private reminder in the morning, he feels — Ilya shifts, slings his arm around Shane's side to hold loosely on to him, and Shane feels — rearranged. The scattered pieces of what they are that had never quite fit together — being rivals and hookups and friends — it's all true, all of it, and absolutely, completely wrong inside what they actually are, what Shane thinks they are already neck-deep in, which is, oh god, which is bottomless.

The mattress shifts, and Ilya pushes off of him, their skin sticking and pulling from the sweat and the come and the lube that covers them, just enough to be noticeable as they separate. Ilya sits and shimmies to the other side of the bed. He's looking at the opposite wall with a set, determined line to his jaw.

"I will shower now, ok."

It's a question, Shane thinks, although Ilya doesn't say it like it like it is one and he's already standing when Shane replies, "Sure," in a voice that he's fairly certain doesn't shake, and Ilya disappears through the door for the en-suite and closes it behind him.

If this were a hotel room, or Ilya's house, Shane would be the one making quick steps to leave, he's fairly sure, but he's lying in his own bed with the sheets ruined with bodily fluids and his heart is beating harder than it had been while they were fucking — while Ilya was fucking him, making Shane feel like he was all Ilya wanted in the world and what Shane had felt back had been too big to name, too big fit in him — and still is awfully, unforgivably familiar, like it wasn't new at all — only kept squashed into the corners of his mind.

Shane throws his arm across his face and tries to calm his racing mind with rationality, with justification that makes this not what it feels like, this well of emotion that hasn't so much opened up in him as that he's taken his blindfold off to see it, to recognise what he spent all summer circling around and —

Ilya doesn't touch him like that. Only he does, he does, he's always touched him with care even if this was closer to reverence and Shane is consumed by how much he wants to do it again, how much he needs to pull Ilya back into bed and press his mouth to his neck and taste and breathe and keep him there, and moreso now that wanting is impossible.

When Ilya comes out of the bathroom he's already dressed, hair still damp and skin flushed from the steam of the shower; Shane is sitting in exactly the same place, somehow, although he feels like he's travelled miles and is spinning around a million times a minute.

"I need to get going," Ilya tells him, "curfew," and Shane nods, absentminded, and won't even realise until hours after his front door closes behind Ilya that preseason hasn't even started yet, that this was a visit of fortuitous timing, a spare day before Rozanov needs to show his face at training camp and there's no curfew that he's going to need to skirt the edges of for weeks. Shane makes to get up, but Ilya shakes his head and comes to stand by the side of the bed. "No, stay. I remember where the door is."

All of this feels wrong; Shane wants to grab Ilya by his t-shirt and drag him back into bed or else he wants this last couple of hours to not have happened so that the ground feels steady under him again, and instead he's being kissed goodbye so sweetly he wants to cry.

Ilya looks at him from very, very close when he pulls away, and his mouth is smiling but his eyes are pinched and horribly sad and Shane understands that he did that, somehow, he made Ilya make that awful face, but Ilya's only telling him "Goodbye, Shane," tone just-slightly mocking as if this is all normal.

So Shane says, "Goodbye, Ilya," and Ilya steals another kiss before he turns and leaves the bedroom.

Shane listens to the thud of his footsteps down the stairs, shuffling sounds that he can barely hear that have to be shoes and coat going back on at the front door, then the door opens and closes and there are no more sounds to hear, and Ilya's gone.

**

Opening the door of his cab and getting inside, resisting the urge to slam his fists against the seat in front of him and scream as they pull away from the curb, Ilya can't even think it was a stupid thing to do. It would only be stupid if there were fallout to come from it, if there might be an upshot that mattered. But if he is realistic with himself down to the dark terrified place at the heart of him he believes that he might not get to see Shane in person again; might not have the opportunity to touch him after today before Ilya's love for him finally finishes him off.

It had seemed like the only thing he could do — a gift to himself, horribly selfish — to throw all his pretence aside and just this once give everything over and let himself touch Shane like he loves him. It fast became impossible not to drag it out as long as he could stand it, speaking his devotion into the hollow dip of Shane's shoulder in broken language, complicated and slurred, that Shane wouldn't have a hope to understand, until he could no longer stop the wanting of his body from overcoming him.

The fact that Shane hadn't understood, had looked at Ilya afterwards with disbelief in his eyes, with wariness, with a fundamental incomprehension hurts as much as the rose will that he can feel clawing it's way up the back of his throat.

Stupid or not Ilya can't make himself regret it, but it's the first time that he's felt it — really honestly let himself understand — just how badly he wants to have his feeling be returned, and for the sake of his self and his heart and his head as much as for his life; how much he wishes he were good enough for Shane to love him back.

**

It's isn't that Hayden's a bad friend. Hayden is great, he was Shane's first real friend on the Metros and things are easy with him; he doesn't make Shane do things he doesn't want to, doesn't push too hard when Shane needs to hide behind his walls — he's always let Shane keep his secrets, even if he doesn't always like it. It makes him easy to spend time with and they've always got on, right from the first time he invited Shane over to dinner.

But Hayden has no filter between his brain and his mouth, he has a face that gives away his every thought and he has never, ever been able to reliably keep a secret.

Jackie, however, is a fucking steel trap, and won't spare his feelings over giving him honesty.

It takes some manipulating to wrangle a couple of hours with her when Hayden isn't around, but he hedges around wanting to talk to her about Hayden's birthday even though it's not for another six weeks and they never even exchange gifts at each other's birthdays anyway, have never made much of a big deal about them. Shane thinks about this in hindsight when he's spinning the falsehood to her, about Ilya's birthday and the gift Shane had sent, about how natural it had felt to do it with the justification of friends that he knows now doesn't match the definition,

It's almost certain that Jackie sees through him from the get go. Most likely if she'd believed that he actually wanted to discuss birthday plans she wouldn't have gone to the trouble of carving out an evening for him, but as it is the twins are at her mother's and the baby's asleep upstairs, Hayden has been banished to JJ's for the night and although she's working to a single glass of wine limit in deference to baby number four, she's making sure that Shane picks up her slack.

He's only been wine drunk with Jackie once before and he thinks it's probably for the best that he only has blurry memories of half of the evening.

Jackie loves hockey and joins in as she lets him ramble about his plans for the preseason and his thoughts about the rookies coming in this year; he knows he's talking for the sake of talking, to put off what he's actually here for, and he knows she's letting him and is about to force his hand as her responses dwindle from sentences to words to nods and smiles and noncommittal sounds.

Shane shuts up, then. Fiddles with the stem of his wineglass and looks at the couch in between them, covered over with a soft blue throw that's been graffiti'd by one of the twins with ballpoint stick people.

He breathes and lines up his thoughts and Jackie sips her wine and watches him; waits.

It's a couple of minutes before he manages to make the words and Jackie gives him his space to sit in them, to lay out his thoughts in his head and second guess himself and set himself right again; to bolster his courage and decide not to back out and to tell Jackie the thing that he's never said out loud, and with a voice that wobbles just a little, he says, "I've been seeing someone."

He can almost see Jackie's eyes light up although her face doesn't seem to move at all. She doesn't blink as she sips her wine and between them the baby monitor gives a gentle crackle. "Have you?" She sounds interested, innocently so, and Shane knows it's an act designed to keep him comfortable and he is grateful to her for it.

"Yeah. Kinda."

She raises an eyebrow. "Kinda."

Shane shrugs. "Kinda."

The moment stretches and Jackie lets him stew in it before she prompts, "You want to expand on that?"

The impulse to shake his head and just say no, no not really, to leave the baring of his secrets there for tonight, is crushingly strong, but he can't stop here, not now he's started.

"It's been a long time. A few, uh. I guess it depends how you count it but really, it's been a few years."

"Years?" Jackie spits out through a mouthful of wine and then holds up her free hand in apology. "Sorry, sorry. I'm listening, go on."

"It's just been a casual thing," Shane continues, and across from him Jackie makes a quiet sound in her throat that holds in it about a hundred thousand questions. "But lately it doesn't feel like that any more."

Jackie smiles softly. "No? What does it feel like?"

Shane looks down into his wineglass and runs the tip of his finger along the rim. "You've been in love — that is, you are in love, you love Hayden?"

"I do." It's a simple answer, and without hesitation, and Shane marvels at it a little.

Shane nods and turns his wine glass between his fingers. "How did you know? That you loved him?"

She sighs and sets her wine glass on the coffee table. "Shane, we can play this game all night but it's not going to help you for me to list off what I see in Hayden."

"It isn't?"

"You don't want to know what I see in Hayden or how I knew he was the guy I wanted to spend my life with. You want to know whether the person you're crazy over is the one for you."

It's not that easy; can't be nearly that easy, even if she's right. "I — yeah. Yeah, I do."

"Then I have one question for you: What happens if you imagine never seeing them again? That person, specifically, not what they do for you. Hayden brings me breakfast in bed every Sunday he's home, maybe some other guy would do that, but do I want someone to do that who isn't Hayden? No. I don't want Hayden to ever not be in my life, it makes me sick to think about it."

It's a way of thinking about it, Shane supposes, only it's surprisingly difficult; he tries to imagine someone else's body on him, someone else's voice in his ear and someone else's smile. He imagines going to the effort of trying to learn another language for someone else, pictures someone else giving him stupid thoughtful sentimental half-horny birthday presents and a touch that isn't from Ilya's strong, calloused hands with their deft fingers and — it's useless. It's like his brain whites out, like his imagination's failed and there nothing to picture if Ilya's not there.

He blinks Jackie back into focus, and makes a soft, devastated, "Oh."

"Got your answer?" she asks, conspiratorial like she knows what it is already. He doesn't trust his voice, and nods. "You don't look thrilled about it."

"It's — complicated."

Jackie shrugs easily. "Does it have to be?"

"I don't know how it could be simple."

She reaches out and takes his free hand. "All you need to do now is find out if he loves you back."

Shane has already nodded before he hears the words, and his terror-drenched stillness is punctuated by Jackie holding on to his hand harder.

"It's ok, I won't tell."

"How did — how did you —"

"Just a guess, I swear."

"Really?"

"Shane, you are the only one of Hayden's friends," she lays her hand on his arm and leans forward to make sure he catches her emphasis, "the only one that I've never caught looking at my tits."

"Oh. Oh, well, I — ah —" Shane stops and tries not to pull a face. He feels like now he's supposed to look at Jackie's — to try to look down her top, to prove her wrong.

"I have good tits, Shane."

Shane winces and focuses somewhere a few inches to the left of Jackie's left ear. "Yep, yes, uh. Definitely."

"Would you want to sneak a look down my shirt, Shane?" she asks, and the fact that she's very matter of fact about it is the only thing that stops him dying from mortification.

Still, he's choked out a horrified, "No!" before he can think about it and Jackie raises her eyebrows, recovers her glass from the coffee table and and sips her wine in a very clear expression of victory.

"Tell me about your guy," she says instead, and Shane is insanely grateful for the pivot, "is he hot?"

Shane thinks about Ilya's chest, about the heavy muscled breadth of him, about pecs and delts and obliques and the definition of them, of how skin skates over muscle as he moves, the perfect shape of his ass and how his body moves as he fucks him, as —

"Still with me over there, honey?"

Shane's face feels warm. "Yeah, sorry."

But Jackie's right. He really doesn't want to look at her tits.

**

It hasn't helped, although it also has — he has a conspirator, now, in his own feelings, and although he gave Jackie absolutely nothing — as best as he can convince himself from turning the conversation over in his head again and again and then again, just in case — someone else out there knows that he's in love.

Oh, god, he's in love, and he can't even lie to himself and say it's shallow or ignorable or even new.

It's thrilling and it's awful and it's unbearable in both of those ways, but Shane can't stop himself thinking that the last time him and Ilya fucked, when all the pieces of who they are to each other had come together and made sense to him, finally, it had felt — and not just to Shane, he's sure — like they really were something; could be something. It hadn't felt like Shane was alone in the overwhelm of his heart, and he wonders if perhaps the sadness in Ilya's eyes when he'd left Shane sticky and astonished in his bed is proof that Ilya knows it, too.

The preseason has barely gotten started, and Shane's already got the schedule memorised. Montreal will play at home next week while the Raiders head to New York, but the week after Montreal goes to Boston.

Which gives Shane a fortnight to work out what he's going to say — and whether he's hoping more for Ilya's reciprocation or his dismissal, and a clean heartbreak.

**

Vaughn's shoulder to Ilya's breastbone is hardly anything — it's barely even contact and less than a minute after the first buzzer, and on the rebound of it Ilya doesn't hit the boards as much as rest against them; Vaughn's already turning away from him when Ilya feels his body mutiny, when he breathes in on a wheeze and can't find space to exhale.

This game had been a bad idea from the start; he'd been all but rasping in his breath like an asthmatic when he'd first taken position for the puck drop. He'd known better and carried on anyway, and now he knows that he gets to pay for it.

Ilya drops his stick and slams his hand against the boards and gasps — tries to, but his throat doesn't have much room in it. He's trying to cough it all up, the petals in his throat, but he can't breathe in enough to cough out. Sinking to his knees Ilya drops his gloves and scrambles for the strap of his helmet; it feels like it's cutting into him, like it's the thing responsible for cutting off his air even though he knows that his not being able to breathe has nothing to do with his gear — with anything outside.

His helmet clatters to the ice and he's retching; play has stopped around him and he can hear Vaughn's protests, his, "Hardly even fucking touched him, man," and the ref's skates in his periphery. Someone's asking what's wrong, if he's ok.

Ilya has to get off the ice.

He tries to rise and can't, tries to breathe and fails, tries to cough and his chest stutters and a spray of red comes out of him: blood with congealed little pieces that he recognises as petals although they look like the flesh of him in soggy red, but that's not all of it, there's more that's stuck.

He has to get off the ice.

He can't breathe.

Ilya stands, forces himself to his feet with the control of one muscle at a time. There are medics heading to him and, although the edges of his vision are starting to fuzz he recognises that there's a crowd around him, black and red jerseys both watching in horror, the refs urging them back as the medics close in on him. Ilya focuses on them, their blue uniforms, and takes two steps towards them, then four, unsteady on skates he should be able to navigate better than solid ground. The medics can get him off the ice, away from the cameras and out of view so that if this is it, if this is the one that does it —

Ilya would rather not die on live TV.

He falls as the medics reach him; they catch his arms on the way down and ease him onto his back; someone is calling for a stretcher. They're talking to him, he can hear questions, but he can't answer because he has no air and they see that, are trying to help him.

There's a thought that comes and flies away that there is a chance that Shane is watching this game live.

Kneeling on either side of him, the medic on his right tells the other, "There's something in his throat, I can see it," and then her fingers are reaching behind his teeth, plastic glove sensation on his tongue to the back of his mouth where the flower is and she takes hold of it as the other medic tips his head back; she pulls and it hurts, it's his lungs on fire and his throat torn out and she swears, a, "Jesus fucking Christ," that falls into stunned more than worried or horrified, but it's working, she's getting it out.

"Holy fuck," the other medic hisses, as Ilya feels it start to tear loose, "is that what I think it is?"

There's a little, "Uh-huh," from the one on the right, the one who has hold of the rose, and she tugs one last time and it comes free and Ilya gasps, heaves in air, feels his back arch off of the ice with the force of it and he coughs on the exhale, sputters up copper and turns himself onto his side to spit the mess of it out onto the ice so he doesn't choke. His chest heaves and his head starts to swim from the influx of breath instead of the lack of it.

The roar in the arena isn't the crowd, today, only the rush of blood in Ilya's head, of his breath returning to his lungs and when he turns his head he sees the shocked paramedic on his right side holding a full bloom, bloody and dripping, leaves and stem and shapes that, next time, will likely have grown into thorns.

One of the medics is failing to find soothing in her tone but has the vocabulary ready to go at least and tells him, "You're gonna be fine, steady in and out, we'll have you in the ambulance in no time." Ilya drops to his back and stares up at the lights of the rink.

That's the end of it, then. Of the secret, yes, but of his time, too. There's very little further to progress to from complete, fully formed roses; this is the last ice he's ever likely to set foot on.

Someone is pulling at him; they are shifting him onto the stretcher, and Ilya closes his eyes against the brightness of the arena's lights.

Chapter End Notes

See you next week for part the third and final :)

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Chapter 3: Three

Chapter Summary

The coverage is extremely respectful. It almost always is, when a player's receiving medical intervention on the ice; the players still standing make a barrier of bodies, if it's needed — and with the Raiders in what seems to be an uncomfortable, glance-sharing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Admirals they certainly found it to be needed, for Ilya — and the cameras cut away and don't glorify the details.

It's frustrating as shit.

Chapter Notes

The coverage is extremely respectful. It almost always is, when a player's receiving medical intervention on the ice; the players still standing make a barrier of bodies, if it's needed — and with the Raiders in what seems to be an uncomfortable, glance-sharing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Admirals they certainly found it to be needed, for Ilya — and the cameras cut away and don't glorify the details.

It's frustrating as shit.

Watching the rest of the game becomes instantly impossible, as Ilya's carried to the tunnel leaving a puddle of thick-looking red behind him, and Shane turns straight to his laptop looking for replays. He texts Ilya once, short and to the point, an are you ok? that is completely insufficient — and also, he knows, pointless, even as he has to hold himself back from sending half a dozen more in the same vein. Whatever that was, Ilya's on his way to hospital, now, and isn't likely to be picking up messages tonight; even if Shane knew where to go — where in New York, which hospital — they wouldn't let him in.

Shane hates, suddenly and fiercely, that no one there will contact him. That Ilya will be alone and something is wrong, and there isn't a person in the world that would even consider that Shane cares — except for Ilya, and quite probably even he would underestimate the ferocity with which Shane wants to be sitting in an uncomfortable plastic hospital waiting room chair.

He scrolls through endless newsfeeds and twitter threads, starts seeing pictures being posted by people who were in the crowd with not even a minimal respect for the privacy of a person's medical care and Shane hates himself even as he looks at them all, zooms in to try to decipher what the blurry pixilated images are showing him — pictures that show Ilya apparently coughing up a mouthful of red; Shane isn't squeamish, but it still turns his stomach to see. People are guessing, gleeful in the morbidity of it, with baseless theories starting to rise as the game marches into its third period. Ilya's in rehab and relapsing, Vaughn hit him in the throat even though no one saw, Ilya's got some sort of condition, a disease and he's coughing up a literal lung.

Shane doesn't believe a word until another picture starts to circulate, one taken from closer to the boards at an angle that gave almost a clear view between two Raiders jerseys to a paramedic on her knees and her hand in Ilya's mouth, and she's pulling free what looks like a — a flower.

It's immediately being decried a fake, but Shane's blood has frozen in him. He fumbles for his phone as the final buzzer sounds, irrelevant, on the TV on his bedroom wall, the glow of it remaining the only thing lighting Shane's bedroom with the daylight having long since slunk away although Shane hasn't noticed to get up and turn the lights on.

The recap of Ilya's dramatic departure from the game plays again as the teams start to file off the ice: Ilya — poor form and tired-looking, even though it's the start of a game at the start of the preseason — fighting over the puck with Carter Vaughn; there's a check, not a hard one, that sends Ilya to the boards, and then there are some shots of the crowd, of the rest of the players standing in a jumbled line, and then Ilya is stretchered off to scattered respectful applause and both teams move to resume play with skittish, wide eyes.

Shane has Carter Vaughn's number saved, from Sochi or maybe from the All-Stars before it and they've exchanged exactly three messages to date, more than a year ago and confirming the address of a bar Shane's sure he hadn't actually shown up to in the end. Confident that there is no subtle way to ask this, none at all, and barely even caring past the panic that's starting to dig its claws into the back of his brain, Shane types and retypes and aims for casual but can't actually remember how to do that and has to backspace out Ilya to write Rozanov instead and in the end sends:

Shane: Hey man, what happened tonight? Didn't even look like you got Rozanov that hard, it was so weird he had to be carried off?

Shane is not friends with Carter Vaughn. Outside of an odd North American camaraderie at the Olympics he's not sure they've ever actually had an entire conversation, and there isn't a single chance that Vaughn doesn't read that message and not think Shane's being incredibly weird and invasive, sticking his nose into something that's absolutely none of his business, and —

Carter Vaughn: ikr?? its crazy no way he keeps that quiet long

Shane: People are guessing a lot online, there's a picture of the paramedic with a flower?

Carter Vaughn: yeah i never knew anyone with that before. dudes actually coughing up roses

Shane's vision blurs and the world tilts sideways and doesn't want to right itself. He looks back to his laptop screen, to the picture of the medic and what looks like a flower. A rose. Shane knows in theory but it's rare and he's never met anyone who — he's never even known anyone who knew someone, but he recognises what it means.

It means unrequited love.

Unrequited.

Ilya loves someone who doesn't love him back.

Thinking of sitting on Jackie's couch and understanding that he's been naive and self deluding and loves Ilya to a depth that he still can't quite bring himself to examine too closely, Shane lies back in his bed and thinks long and horribly about the way that Ilya had touched him the last time they'd been together; the way that Shane had looked into Ilya's face and thought the word devotion, how Ilya had dragged Shane into acknowledgement of how he feels with shaking desperate touches that felt like belonging.

And he thinks, until the clock on his bedside table shows the small hours, about Ilya's love being unrequited.

By morning Shane is bleary and red-eyed and exhausted and has read enough about the flower disease to know that no one really, truly understands how it works, why it affects some and not others, exactly why the sufferer's understanding of being loved back causes the rose to be dissolved; reabsorbed, expelled, the assumed hormonal triggers that have never been empirically verified.

He has very little more understanding of how it all works than he did before he saw Ilya choking and a blurry photo of a paramedic with their fingers in his throat, but he knows two things that might be true and is afraid of them both.

Either Ilya loves him, and doesn't understand that Shane loves him in return — or Ilya doesn't love him. Ilya loves someone else and is going to die because of it, and on the night that brought Shane to awareness of his own heart — maybe that's why Ilya looked so sad, when he left. Maybe that's why he had pulled away when they were done, sat rigid on the side of the bed and then went to shower without looking Shane in the face.

Maybe, Shane considers with a sinking horror and a hollow growing in his chest, although Shane was there with exactly who he wanted to be with, what if Ilya wasn't.

Maybe that's why Ilya has never breathed a hint of this to Shane; not a single glancing word.

Shane remembers the look in Ilya's eyes when they'd kissed goodbye that night — the emptiness in them — and understands now the force behind it — the roses sitting underneath skin and bone and muscle — and, horrified, Shane wonders whether when Ilya touched him it was with the image of someone else printed on the insides of his eyelids. He can't decipher from the image in his memory, coloured as it is by the tidal wave of emotion that had, in that moment, been drowning him, whether Ilya's sadness might have come from believing that Shane wouldn't save him because he didn't love him back — or that Shane couldn't save him, because he was the wrong person entirely.

**

The Raiders' management team has been, most awfully, understanding. They have met with him in his house so that he doesn't have to strain himself by leaving it, talked to him in sombre tones with pitying faces and promised him privacy, as far as it is theirs to give, for as long as they are able.

None of them said out loud, although Ilya knows it is in all of their minds, that when they are able will run out in a few weeks when he is in the ground, when Ilya is sure that the potential of posthumous Rozanov jersey sales will be tempting enough that a promise to a dead man will not hold meaning.

They have insisted that he sees the team doctor — properly, and not one of the rushed, avoidant flying visits that he has gone to so much trouble to engineer since before the season broke for summer — even though Martin is notably a physician exclusively attached to a professional sports team and by his own admission has never seen a person in in Ilya's state in the entirety of his career. Still, he takes the requisite scans of Ilya's chest and afterwards looks at him with so much pity it almost turns Ilya's stomach.

"You have not found cure, then?" Ilya asks him, voice rough from a perpetually shredded throat, and wishing he could scrape the unasked for condolences out of Martin's eyes.

Martin laughs dryly, and shakes his head. "I can give you information about the surgery, although I'm no expert on whether it's too late for that —"

"No," Ilya tells him, softly, looking at a scale model of a knee joint on the desk over his shoulder. Possibly Martin had expected more fight and Ilya wonders for a moment if this is why management insisted he come here, so that someone could try to force that pale scar on him, but Martin backs down without needing any more encouragement, nodding like he doesn't like it but knows it's decided anyway.

"And you know that there are various protections, under the law?"

Ilya makes himself refocus on Martin's face. To think, he could be at home drinking his end in at pace and damn the waiting for it. He should have refused to come: what, after all, can management do to him if he didn't show?

"Protections?" he asks instead, bland.

"Of both of your legal statuses in this country. If you or the object of your," he waves a hand vaguely at Ilya's chest, "would encounter difficulties acknowledging your situation on grounds of religion, previous marriage, gender." There isn't a hesitation, Ilya doesn't think; no emphasis. Martin isn't making any particular guess. "In case that's holding one of you back."

Ilya shrugs a shoulder. "That does not make a difference." It is not news to him that the United States and Canada are both in agreement that they probably would not allow Russia to have him deported on grounds of indecency when Ilya's own body is, quite literally, wasting itself away for want of someone that the Federation declares he should not be allowed to want. When Shane doesn't want him — when it is a death sentence on either side of the ocean — it does not help him at all.

"If your relationship with whoever it is falls under a protected category neither of you can be made to leave the country, you have a proven medical —"

"Matty," Ilya snaps, harsher than he means to be, "it does not make a difference."

Martin sighs and the air of doctor-patient, of advice leaves him along with a line of tension in his shoulders that has kept him uncomfortably upright since this hideous session began.

"But you've told them, right?" he asks, pleading, "Whoever it is, tell me they know, at least?"

"It does not make a difference," Ilya repeats, softer. Martin's eyes are damp and Ilya feels strangely touched. He marvels a little that this man cares so much, being as he is not even Ilya's friend, and wonders what Marly would have to say to him if Ilya had answered any of his calls since he was taken off the Admirals' ice halfway conscious on a stretcher.

Martin hugs Ilya before he leaves, sniffles a little into his shoulder, then steps back and tells him, "I'm sorry, Rozanov. Really, I am."

Ilya turns the doorknob and pulls the door open before he sinks under the weight of someone else's concern.

"Yes, Matty. I am sorry too."

He can hear the sounds of practice echoing down the corridors from the rink, so he takes the back stairs out of the building and gets into a cab when he's a block away. He would have walked further, but he's already out of breath and his fingers are trembling even from the short walk.

Ilya had known going in that he shouldn't have tried to play in the Admirals game, but he'd hoped — he'd hoped. Hindsight is a terrible thing, though; this he knows, making most clear to him that at first touch of Shane Hollander's handshake he should have turned and walked away, although if he is honest with himself, which is a habit that he has become forcibly familiar with over the last year and change, he thinks that to live a life and not know what Shane Hollander's laugh tastes like would not have been worth much living, anyway.

There is a text sitting on his phone from the day after the Admirals game — two days ago now, and to which Ilya has yet to reply, which in itself is outside of their routine; their messages rarely go without a reply for hours, let alone days and it's been effort not to say something back, not to probe and press and find out what Shane knows, even though Ilya has spent hours staring at the screen and wondering. This morning two more had come through, though, Shane starting to pester, and Ilya finds their thread again now, and considers:

Jane: That didn't look like that bad of a hit, I hope you're ok?

Jane: hey, what's happening?

Jane: are you back from New York yet?

It is warming, this most basic of worry from the man who Ilya is dying for the lack of, and he despises how much so little means to him. His thumbs find the keyboard, finally, and as the cab arrives at his house he sends his reply.

Ilya: Am fine. All just too much being careful.

Ilya: You watched my game?

He can't quite resist the question, partly because he likes the idea that Shane seeks out his games and partly because he wants to know how much Shane might have seen; how much he could have put together from that given that he also knows more of Ilya than he has ever allowed anyone else to see. The first message suggests not a lot, but — his phone vibrates again as he's closing his front door behind him and he's surprised to see it's Shane, already, so Ilya lets himself believe that Shane really had been worried.

Jane: Yes, don't let it go to your head. Was a decent game, after they took you off.

Jane: I'm glad you're ok.

Jane: are you back in Boston now?

Jane: there's a flight tonight, I can be there around 10pm.

Ilya stops walking, halfway up the stairs. The sudden, unexpected thought that he could have Shane here and with him in a bare few hours is intoxicating. He wants that, even though it won't help him at all.

Ilya: what? Why? You have practise

Ilya: you are here in four days for game anyway

He stands, chewing on a ragged thumbnail as he watches Shane's three dots bounce until a sharp flare of pain from his cuticle forces him to move on to his other thumb.

Shane: you had to be carried off the ice 37 seconds after the buzzer then went radio silent for two days, I've been fucking worried.

Ilya's heart floods with something dangerous and his thumbs are hovering over the keyboard, trying to think of a reason not to just say fine, ok, give me your flight number so I can watch you get closer on the little map, I'll be waiting for you, I'll —

Shane: I'm still your friend, aren't I? I want to see you're ok.

Ilya's thoughts trip over themselves into a sudden ice-cold stop and he closes his eyes, squeezes them shut as hard as he can. He stands there, halfway up the stairs, trying for too long not to be so irrevocably in love with someone who is friends with him, and his phone starts to ring in his hand. He doesn't want to answer it but would give up much to hear Shane's voice, and settles instead on continuing his slow trudge up the stairs so that he can at least sit down first; the call rings off as he reaches his bedroom.

Sinking into his bed gratefully with his clothes still on, Ilya pulls the comforter up over his head; he can't seem to get warm, this last couple of weeks, and there's a pressure that he can feel behind his breastbone that's uncomfortable, depending how he lies. There's a congealing feeling in the back of his throat and he knows from the stickiness of it and how his inhale needs him to suck his breath in hard that he'll be retching up his flora in a couple of hours. Soon — not for a couple of weeks, if he's lucky — there will be thorns with wickeed points that will catch and tear, and that will be that.

His phone screen glows at him in the artificial nighttime he's made for himself under the covers, and he doesn't know what to do. If Shane saw the game — Ilya's seen how they edited that down with their respect for his privacy, for however long that may last and even though he's sure that it'll get out regardless — and yet for all that the pictures of him are out of focus and unclear he's seen what people are posting about it online, some theories entirely accurate that are so far still being shut down as crazy things.

But to tell Shane not to come, or to tell him to come — or even, not to wait four more days, get on a plane tonight? Ilya is on injury reserve and won't be playing next week and one look at him gives tell that he is sickly and wasting and so it doesn't matter what Ilya says — whether Shane sees him now or later or not at all it will lead him to demand reasons, because they are friends — something that frequently would make Ilya laugh himself sick if it didn't also make him want to scream the unfairness of it into Shane's beautiful face.

Thinking of Martin and his earnest — so very earnest — you've told them, right?, Ilya closes his eyes and thinks of what else he has left to lose. There isn't much: dignity, the contradictory hope that maybe Shane could love him back that wars daily with the knowledge that if that was true, Ilya wouldn't be in this mess. He considers whether he would rather die nursing a tiny modicum of self-delusion that, with time, Shane could have loved him — or whether he would rather go out knowing that he tried everything and had no choice and never would have. 

It can't be tonight, though. This day has been too long and he will be asleep whether he likes it or not in a handful of minutes — and he doesn't think he can face having to make the words when his head is so full of cotton and believes that trying anyway really might lead to some awful situation where Ilya throws himself at Shane's feet and begs, which is not acceptable. Nothing will have changed in four days except perhaps that he might have devised any idea at all what to say, and perhaps the strength of heart to say it.

His phone starts to ring again, and this time Ilya slides his thumb over the screen to answer.

"The fuck, Ilya," comes through the speaker as soon as the call connects, "you are ok, right, you're," there's a pause, long enough Ilya has time to wonder which thoughts Shane is trying to get in order. "The hospital did release you? You're home?"

"I am home and I am fine."

"Good, that's, that's good." Shane stops, and Ilya waits; lets his eyes close so that he can strain to hear Shane's breathing. "Are you really? Fine?"

"Shane, you do not need to worry about me."

"Ilya," he says, like it's a warning.

Ilya sighs and ignores how much he likes that Shane worries for him. "You think fancy New York hospital would have let me come home if I was not getting better?"

There's a pause again, long. Ilya wishes he could see Shane's face, to understand even a little why he he sounds small when he asks, "You're getting better?"

"Of course I am," he lies, flippant, rubbing the heel of his hand against his breastbone.

"Right. Ok, right. Of course." The sound of Shane drawing in a breath, deep, letting it out sharp like he's bracing himself. "This flight, though, I can be at the airport in two hours, I can still —"

"Shane, no, you have practise and I do not need looking after. I will see you in four days. I am fine, I swear it. I will not be at game next week but only because doctors are being careful."

"They had to carry you off the ice, Ilya."

"Shane. There is nothing you need to worry about. What could you do if you were here, hm, think you can make me better," there's a tiny pause, a fraction of a fraction of a second that sounds to Ilya big enough to fit worlds inside, and he knows he should not have taken the conversation here, "with — with protein smoothies and egg whites?" There's only silence, damning. "Come in four days. And I want maple candy, bring please."

There's a long silence, and Ilya tries to picture Shane, to imagine where he might be, where he might have gone to shut himself away from the world to call Ilya without being overheard. There is a short sigh, eventually, and then, quietly, "I'm pretty sure you could just buy that. But ok."

"See you soon, Shane."

"Ok. But, Ilya, call me. If you need anything, if I can do — anything. Really. Call me."

Ilya smiles, and loves him, and says, "I will. Bye, Shane."

He waits for Shane's, "Bye, Ilya," before he hangs up, and lets his heavy eyes start to close.

Sliding his phone under his pillow Ilya decides to see if he can sleep, for a little while. Everything feels soft and inevitable in this moment, his anger and his fear all burned out to leave something that isn't an acceptance, not really, but only is that — at least until he will wake later — he is too exhausted to spend this moment being rageful and afraid.

**

Shane cannot sleep. He tries and he worries instead and he thinks of Ilya's voice saying do you think you can make me better and fears for the implications as much as he hopes for them. Every day he looks at commercial flights out to Boston and makes himself leave it alone and text Ilya instead, even if it's with the most inconsequential shit he can come up with. Ilya always replies to him, anyway.

When his eyelids finally drag down, Shane dreams of roses.

**

By the time the Metros are boarding their plane in Montreal four days later — three and a half, if Ilya counts it in hours, which he has and does — Ilya has given no interviews to anybody, hiding behind the Raiders' official statement that his absence is under the instruction of physicians following his unfortunate departure from the ice in New York, and leading at least a couple of partially respectable journalists to pick up the speculation that he's in rehab. He has also sat on his couch next to Cliff Marleau watching as Cliff's mouth twisted up and his lip wobbled and he cried fat unapologetic tears that Ilya does not think that the situation was particularly worth, and then spent two long, tedious hours arguing first about the extraction surgery — which Ilya is on the borderline of too late for now, even if it weren't entirely off the table for him from the start, and then about who. Who, who, who, like Ilya spitting out the name of the person in question would somehow solve the problem.

After he's dead and the how if it is spilled into the tabloids, probably people will make a game of the who; the guessing of it. Women will come forward and insist it is them that Ilya Rozanov loved enough that it killed him; interviews will be had, stories sold and money made.

Shane has asked why he isn't playing, and Ilya has given him useless non-answers that may have purposefully implied he's had some sort of hideous flu, but that afternoon Shane had sent him a picture of an obscenely large bag of maple candy in his suitcase and texted him once the plane landed in Boston and Ilya still has absolutely no idea what he's going to say when Shane arrives: whether or not he's going to have it in him to confess.

It is too hard to decide, to predict, what will make it easier on Shane when he sees the news break, after, and Ilya doesn't want him to hurt, not really. Would it be better for Shane to wonder if the roses were for him and, having no way to be sure, at least know that it would have made no difference — or would it bother him less to know the truth of it even though Shane is a good person, the kind of man that feels guilt for things that aren't his responsibility or within his ability to fix — and Ilya would spare him that, if he could.

It's circular and unhelpful and Ilya will never know how it goes anyway, but it doesn't stop him from spinning it around in his mind like a hamster on its wheel up until he hears the sound of his doorbell, and he hauls himself up from the couch with a sigh.

He is wearing a hoodie and track pants that cling to his hips for the weight that he's lost rather than the visual effect of it; it's still his best effort to hide the state of him, the fact that when he looks at himself naked in his bathroom mirror he thinks the word frail even though he is still muscled and imposing, with bluish circles under his eyes and his cheeks which are sinking into his face which is quite awfully approaching ashen; then there's the lessening of body fat that suggests starvation, because it's harder to eat when your throat is full of flowers. It's a fairly depressing statistic that Ilya wishes he had never had cause to know that, lacking medical intervention, he is equally as likely to die of dehydration or malnutrition than asphyxiation.

The second he opens his front door Ilya knows that he hasn't done enough to hide that he looks different — less well — than he did the last time Shane saw him even though it wasn't even a month ago. There's shock and concern that flickers across Shane's face in the space of a heartbeat, and his mouth falls open just a little with his surprise.

"I gave you door code so that you did not need to press the bell," Ilya drawls, stepping back so that Shane follows him inside, "and still I have to get up and open the door for you."

Shane doesn't say anything for a couple of seconds that Ilya counts slowly in his head, during which Ilya knows Shane is noticing him; Shane knows Ilya's body better than any other person alive other than Ilya himself — and even that is probably open to some debate — and behind Shane's eyes Ilya imagines he can hear his brain turning, cataloguing the differences; the deficiencies.

"I thought it would be weird," he murmurs in the end, still looking more than thinking about his words, it seems, "to come right in when I knew you were home."

Ilya snorts a little laugh and walks into the house; he hears Shane kicking off his shoes and then socked footsteps following. "So you think it would be less weird to come in when I am not here and make yourself at home, hm?"

Sitting on the sofa in a movement that is a little more of a collapsing than Ilya would like it to be, he finally lets himself look at Shane's troubled expression, and raises his eyes in question, expectant. His heart is pounding and he still has no idea if he's going to say it or not: if the words could you love me are going to leave his mouth, and if they are whether he's going to be able to say them without begging for Shane to try even if the answer is no. When Ilya dies anyway, it would mean something for Shane to have wanted to try.

"I see why half of twitter thinks you're in rehab," Shane tells him eventually, then startles like he hadn't expected himself to say that. "Sorry. Only, you look, ah," he shrugs, awkwardly. "How are you doing?"

That is not a question Ilya intends to answer. "You read about me on twitter, Shane?"

"Fuck off," Shane tells him, absentminded, and sits down on the edge of the coffee table facing Ilya. Their knees bump together, and Shane moves his foot so that his leg is pressed lightly against Ilya's. Ilya tries not to think about it too much. "The guys were talking about it. People are saying all sorts of shit."

"Oh? What sort of shit?" There is a smattering of actual curiosity in the question, for all that Ilya's mostly asking to see what parts of anything Shane might have heard that he lends any credence to.

He doesn't even give Ilya a hint of an answer, though, only reaches out to press a thumb gently under Ilya's eye, four fingertips resting on the side of his neck. Ilya knows he looks bad; not having to expend the energy needed to play hockey doesn't help that much when he can barely eat or sleep more than a couple of hours at a stretch.

Still, "You look tired," Shane tells him, with a downturn to the corners of his mouth. "How long are you scratched for?"

Which is interesting, and strongly suggestive that Shane doesn't know that Ilya has a rapidly upcoming end date — so he shrugs, loose, and doesn't lie — although he answers a different question.

"Doctor says I have two weeks. Three, maybe."

Shane's mouth makes a little oh. "That's not long, that's — it's that long?"

"It is worse that I had thought at start of season."

There's a noise that comes from Shane's chest, either surprise or hurt. His hand is still on Ilya's face, thumb against his cheekbone. "You shouldn't have played if you were that sick, how did medical even clear you?"

Ilya grins, as wicked as he can manage and fears that it might be more of a grimace. "I did not tell team doctor all of truth, Shane. I make many promises to come see him as soon as possible. Blood tests still all good, I am very healthy, always have been reliable, what could be wrong?" It hadn't been quite that easy and the avoidance had pissed off a lot of people who were trying to just do their jobs, and there had been no avoiding that his chances would have run out the moment he made it home from New York in any case, being as he had been scheduled in for a full physical the next day — mandatory-no-excuses-we-really-mean-it — but there had been no point doing it, in the end.

"That's really irresponsible," Shane tells him, and his voice sounds thick. His hand finally drops from Ilya's face back into his lap, and Ilya sees that Shane's hands are carrying a tremor. Ilya must look worse than he'd thought, and in an effort to break the surface tension of the mood that seems to be turning the air between them thick and sour he opens his mouth to ask where the fuck his candy is, but Shane moves forward just at that moment, slides to his knees in between Ilya's spread thighs so that he can kiss him.

It's awful. Open-mouthed and wet and thorough like Shane kisses him when they're fucking but soft and careful, restrained; asking for something, or maybe apologising. Shane's hands rest on his thighs and don't wander, and when he breaks off for breath there is a hitch in it that sounds like the inhale that comes before tears. It's a kiss that tastes like goodbye, and Ilya can barely bring himself to return it and has to nudge Shane away after a few seconds, keeping his eyes averted.

Ilya can't look straight at Shane, afterwards, because he knows, Ilya realises. Whether someone who had been there told him or whether he put it all together from blurry photos from the crowd and how horribly, painfully unsubtle Ilya was the last time they were together, it doesn't matter. If he looks at Shane now, his face will be a study in fucking pity and Ilya absolutely could not bear it.

Ilya takes his hands off of Shane's waist and crosses them over his chest. "You do not have to do that."

"Do what?"

"No, no pretending to be stupid. You know." He risks a glance at Shane's face, and wishes he hadn't.

Nothing for a count of two, three, four, five — "Yes, I know."

"Then why are you here?" It's harsh and it was meant to be, but Ilya still hurts when Shane flinches.

"Of course I'm here. Ilya, this is serious, it's —" he stops talking like he had been planning to keep going, like he was intending to say more words but he has found suddenly that he doesn't know how, and — fuck, his eyes are starting to fill. Ilya cannot sit here and let Shane cry for him; it's unbearable. Shane puts his hands on Ilya's face and tries to turn him to look at him, but Ilya pushes his arms away.

"I know it is serious. Do you think that what happened in New York would have happened if anything could be done about it?"

"The surgery —"

"No." Ilya is sick to fucking death of being talked to about the surgery, and he is selfish enough to not want to have to explain himself, not even to Shane.

"But you'll die," Shane says, high and breathy and like he's scandalised.

"Ah, see, I did not need to go to doctor, could have just asked you instead."

"Fuck you, Ilya, this can't be —" he stops talking on a hiccup, and Ilya makes himself look at Shane. There are tears in his eyes that seem to not be falling by sheer force of will. He sounds empty when he starts again, quiet and small. "I can't save you, can I?"

Ilya winces. He'd known it was coming, but — he presses his lips together, tight, and says nothing.

"I think," Shane starts again, then stops, mouths some words that don't make it into being, then carries on. "I don't think I can save you."

There it is, then; unequivocal. Shane knows, and had come here to see if he could make himself fall in love for the sake of saving Ilya's life and found, unsurprisingly, that he couldn't.

"I can't save you," he says again, and his voice wobbles and sounds like disbelief and devastation. His welling eyes finally spill over.

It's what Ilya expected from any situation where Shane were to find him out, but he still finds to his surprise that it comes with a sharp breaking hurt that he thought he was far past. Something pushes up the back of his throat and he tries to swallow it away. It will not go.

"I never thought you could," Ilya says, and he sounds bitter. Saliva is gathering in his mouth and he needs to pull what's fighting its way up out of him before he chokes again with Shane here to witness the indignity; he pushes past Shane to stand, and Shane lets himself be pushed. "Get out, Shane. This is a bad idea, I should not have said to come."

"Ilya, wait." There's the sound of Shane moving; standing, maybe walking towards him, Ilya wonders, but he doesn't look back to see.

"We already agree you cannot save me," he throws back over his shoulder, words couched in bitterness and sharp edges, "so why the fuck are you still here?"

There's no sound from behind him as Ilya makes his way to the bottom of the stairs, and he reaches the top of them without stopping or looking back although the pull to do so tugs at him harder with every step. He waits at the top, leaning on the bannister and listens until he hears Shane's footsteps, the door opening, closing; the faint crunch of footsteps fading away down the driveway.

It is barely midafternoon but Ilya has had enough of this day, and he trudges to the bathroom to fetch up his roses and so buy himself another reprieve from asphyxiating today, then he retreats to the cool sheets of his bed and, trying to pretend that he has never set eyes on Shane Hollander, sleeps.

He's answered his phone before he's properly awake, a semiconscious reflex to stop the irritating buzzing from his bedside table.

"Someone's losing their job for this, Rozanov, I swear to god."

Ilya is not awake, and he feels strongly that talking in foreign languages should not be required within thirty minutes of both ends of being asleep, but manages anyway to croak out, "What?" His voice is ragged, and talking scrapes at the raw skin of his throat and hurts. He glances at his phone screen with enough bleary-eyed focus to read that it's the Raiders' main office number. There's a voice talking again, and Ilya recognises it as LeClaire and puts the phone back to his ear, wincing away the last remnants of the late afternoon daylight. He feels like an infirm old man for how much sleep holds on to him, now.

"… tracing it through now, they can find out who downloaded the file."

"Coach. I have just woken up. What — what file?"

There's a silence that might only last a few seconds but it's long enough for Ilya's heavy eyes to close again, so that he's jolted awake once more when LeClaire speaks, and he forces himself to sit up.

"Your medical file. It was downloaded out of our systems this afternoon. Shit, Rozanov, I thought you would have seen it already."

Seen it, which means it isn't just stolen, but — "Is on internet?"

"No one's leaving this building until we find out who leaked it, our tech guys —"

Ilya hangs up. He flips to twitter and it takes him about five seconds to find the pictures, black and white and with ROZANOV, I. G. printed damningly in their corner alongside the timestamp that proves these to be the scans that Martin took of him; his chest and its tangling, grasping roots, sunk deep. It's only been up for twenty minutes but he scrolls past reams of speculation that he doesn't want to read and, as the notifications start buzzing in to his phone he throws it across the room where it impacts the wall with the cheerful tinkling sound of broken glass.

A sharp-spiked anger roils in Ilya's gut, that he cannot even be allowed to die quietly without the speculation and chatter of thousands of strangers — but part of him hopes that Shane sees it; that he sees it and looks, that he looks and tries to make out just exactly how the twining of the roots of Ilya's rose around his heart spell Shane's name in swirling calligraphy. He hopes Shane looks, and he hopes the sight guts him.

**

It seems, in the moment, that the least fair part of all of this is that Shane has nowhere to go but back to a hotel room that has another hockey player in it. It doesn't matter that it's Hayden, who knows the most about Shane than anyone in the world except for Ilya; Shane can't face having to share four walls with anyone, doesn't want to have to breathe air that's being exhaled by another body, cannot stand to be looked at or thought about or forced to explain why his eyes are watering and his breath won't calm or what this chasm is in his chest, this mortal wound that's gushing out his heart onto his shoes.

The worst case that he'd imagined when he'd gotten up off of Jackie's couch was that Ilya didn't love him back. That no matter what it might have felt like when they were together and Ilya's hands on him were careful and possessive and perfect it was only Shane feeling it, and he would have to survive Ilya breaking things off between them with pity in his eyes; he had imagined watching Ilya through press scrums and faceoffs and highlight reels and TMZ articles, and having to try to not be in love with him any more.

Shane watches the numbers as they crawl their way up to eleven on the hotel elevator and tries to imagine instead what it will be like for Ilya to die: for Shane to breathe in and breathe out and feel his own heart beating in his chest and know that Ilya doesn't do any of those things any more; that because Ilya loved someone who wasn't Shane, someone who didn't want him back like Shane does, Ilya died. Shane has only just worked out what Ilya means to him and he's already lost him.

His hands are shaking enough when he fumbles his keycard from his pocket that he drops it on the floor twice trying to get the door to his room unlocked.

He's meant to play hockey tonight.

Nothing has ever seemed less possible.

With the door closed behind him Shane listens to the clicking hum of the air conditioner in the otherwise silent hotel room and could cry for the relief of it, that Hayden's out somewhere and not here to witness as he kicks off his shoes and lets his jacket drop to the floor and crawls into bed with all the rest of his clothes still on.

By the time Hayden comes back to fetch him to the the rink for warmups, Shane's staring at the ceiling with a horrible twisting feeling pouring through him black and thick and ugly, like standing next to Ilya at eighteen years old holding up two fingers for the camera instead of one, only blown up to a thousand times the size. Envy so strong it makes him think he might be sick, makes him clench his hands into fists at his sides with the rage of it. All he can feel is Ilya's mouth unmoving under his, not kissing him back for the first time in all of their times together; all he can see is Ilya's face unable to look at him afterwards, eyes downcast and to the side like he couldn't bear to see Shane's face, damning of Shane's withering hope that he might be the one Ilya needs.

All he can hear is Ilya's voice, scratchy and flower-damaged and confirming all of Shane's worst thoughts, throwing I never thought you could in the face of Shane's naive wishfulness that when Ilya had been inside him he'd had no one to think of but Shane.

Shane had never thought that Ilya had been just for him in his body, but Ilya's heart — Shane has let himself entertain the fantasy that Ilya's heart might belong to him — if not quite yet, then some day, maybe soon. The idea that it doesn't and never did; that it can't and never will — the anger of knowing that someone else has had it all along, someone who doesn't care back enough to save Ilya's life, someone who doesn't deserve it — it seethes in him. He tries to imagine what that person looks like; if it's a man who looks like Shane, and that's what keeps Ilya coming back to him even though Shane's not the person he wants.

"Are you, ah. Okay?" Hayden asks him, standing at the end of Shane's bed, wearing his walk in suit.

"I'm fine," Shane answers, and he thinks his voice is steady.

"I don't wanna call you a liar, dude, but," he pauses and waits for Shane to look at him. "You don't look fine, and we've got a game to play in, uh —" he looks at his watch, but Shane makes a frustrated noise and forces himself to sit up.

"I said I'm fucking fine."

He's not convincing anyone, least of all himself, but Hayden holds his hands up in surrender and backs away, lets Shane change his clothes with aggressive little yanks that don't rip any seams by virtue of not much more than luck.

His eye catches the candy in his suitcase as he closes it up. He'd forgotten about it: Ilya's fucking dying and Shane will probably never see him again and the only stupid little thing Shane can give him that he actually wants he forgot.

The suitcase slams shut with a soft, dissatisfying sound and Shane avoids Hayden's eyes as he heads past him for the door, his jealousy and his despair burning sharp and sour in him.

**

Ilya wakes facedown on his sofa and immediately sets to coughing. That mornings are the worst hasn't changed even though the scale of what constitutes 'worst' has slipped fairly dramatically over the last few months, and it's a couple of minutes and a handful of blood, spit and petal-mulch later that he thinks to wonder what woke him. It wasn't the daylight, which is still weak and barely starting to brighten the air; as he stands in the kitchen rinsing his mouth out with water that he spits down the sink bloody there still isn't enough light to read the address labels on the unopened mail on the end of the counter.

The screen of his phone is shattered but when he taps it, slivers of glass clinging to his fingerprint, it still lights up through its spiderweb cracks to tell him that it isn't even six in the morning yet, his battery has sunk below ten percent and he has more notifications that he's ever going to read.

It's still silenced, though. This isn't what woke him.

The front door opens, then; Ilya freezes as he hears the loud click-crunch of the lock disengaging and the handle being pushed down and there's a brief sound of outside, of moving air and early morning traffic alongside shuffling footsteps. The door closes. Ilya holds his breath, his heart racing faster than is probably good for him given its constriction. He picks his phone up from the counter and is wondering if six percent is enough battery life to call 911 when he hears a soft thud, and another, a shuffling noise, something that's almost —

Something that's the sound of a person taking their fucking shoes off. The terror that iced its way down Ilya's spine in a heartbeat leaves him in one rushing breath just as Shane calls out, quiet, "Ilya?"

Ilya closes his eyes and breathes in slow and out slower and replies, "Decided to use door code at five o'clock in the fucking morning, Hollander?"

Sock-padded footsteps approach from the front door and Shane's silhouette appears, backlit by the weak dawn light coming through the windows. Ilya would be able to pick out the span of those shoulders or the shadowed shape of his face from a crowd of thousands, and seeing them again makes his heart hurt.

"I rang the bell. You didn't answer, I was worried something was wrong."

"Ah, yes. The only reason person does not answer doorbell at five o'clock in the fucking morning. Jesus christ." He rinses again, spits, and tips the rest of the contents of the glass out into the sink. It is that strange part of the night that's morning but doesn't feel like it, when it seems like nothing else in the world is awake, and what strength he has to not wrap his arms around Shane's shoulders and breathe in the smell of his hair and wish away the world and the pain in his chest is at its weakest. So, given that it is both too early and too late for it and Ilya is past caring about either of those things, he retrieves a bottle of vodka that he hasn't yet managed to make a meaningful dent in and takes it with him as he turns away from Shane to walk the long way around the kitchen counter and back to the couch. "What do you want, Hollander? I think we said enough yesterday, no?"

He flicks a lamp on so that he can see what he's doing well enough to pour himself a slug of vodka that might at least, if he can make Shane leave him in peace, help him get back to sleep.

"I need to ask you something," Shane tells him, voice low and determined and Ilya can tell from the sound of it that he must be standing close; unnecessarily so. Ilya takes a drink for fortification, for the seconds that it buys him, and the burn of it on his scraped raw throat proves it an unimaginably bad idea, so he takes another one before he turns around, where his thoughts stumble.

"The fuck happened to you?"

Shane ducks his head, embarrassed, but it doesn't hide the purpling bruise on his jawline that Ilya can now see in soft white lamp glow — and he's wearing a suit, Ilya realises, but rumpled and unkept-looking, like he's slept in it. Ilya puts two fingers to Shane's chin and pushes; Shane acquiesces, allows Ilya to turn his head so that he can see the bruise better but Ilya lets his eyes follow Shane's jawline and his freckles and his pinched-tight lips all the same.

Ilya wants very badly to kiss him, and have it not taste like ashes. He wants to kiss him and forget that his opportunities to do so are small and shrinking. He wants to hold on to him and never let go, let their skin and flesh and bone fuse so that they never have to be apart again. He wants to find the person who bruised Shane's face and break their hand.

"It's from the game. Last night," Shane tells him, grumpy, eyes flickering over Ilya's face to his throat to the glass in his other hand and back up again.

Ilya's eyebrows lift. "You got into a fight? You."

"Fuck off," Shane snaps, glaring, and Ilya stops to properly take in the rest of him. He's never seen Shane in a suit voluntarily, only at events and when the League mandates.

"You did not change your clothes," he says, and tugs at the lapel of Shane's boring black suit jacket, "from game last night."

Shane offers an uncomfortable one-sided shrug. "I didn't go back to the hotel. I've just been, uh. Walking."

There's a twinge of unease in it when Ilya asks, "All night?"

"I needed to think."

The fact that the result of this thinking has led Shane back to Ilya's house doesn't necessarily bode well, and Ilya takes a half-step away and another sip of vodka, wincing at the punishment of its burn.

"What about?"

"You know what about."

"There is nothing to say, Shane."

"That's not — you can't — Ilya, you can't just be okay with this."

"Okay, of course I'm not okay with this, fucking christ, Hollander, what do you want from me?"

"There has to be a way to fix it," Shane says, unequivocal, like he's decided that it's something that needs to be made true and there's nothing permitted to stop him, now it's got his attention; it's a depth of determination that's one of the reasons that Ilya loves him but standing in this moment evokes only blind frustration. Ilya is not going to babysit Shane's guilt, is not going to make him feel better for not loving Ilya back, however much he can't bear to see the hurt of it on Shane's face.

"I do not want to die." Ilya tells him in the end; smiles awfully and gestures with his glass so that a little of the contents sloshes out over the rim. "Is very romantic notion, yes? To die for love." he laughs, and even to Ilya's own ears it sounds empty, all broken bleeding edges. Ilya drinks, drains the glass and lets it drop onto the sofa and stares at Shane with eyes that he cannot keep the truth from any more; he wonders what Shane sees in them. "Really, I do not think so, but it seems I will have to do it anyway."

"You can't just say stuff like that," Shane whispers. Ilya thinks that perhaps he'd meant for it to be angry, but it's like there wasn't enough air in him to make it past stunned.

"Why not, am I wrong?" It's harsh, Ilya knows. It's true, too, and he can see the fear of it in Shane's eyes.

"No, no, Ilya. I can fix this. I can. You have to let me try."

"Shane, that is not how this works, there is no fixing this."

"That's not fucking good enough, you're not allowed to die, Ilya."

He laughs, bitter. "Oh, I think probably I am."

"Will you give it a fucking rest?" Shane is finding angry again, and he moves to stand in front of him, looks at him with his face twisted into determination but his eyes give him away; it's always his eyes that say the most, and today they're sad. "Seriously, whoever it is, whoever's the — the person you love, whoever —"

"Shane —"

"No, let me finish, let me — they're an idiot. They're an idiot not to love you back and they're not fucking worth it if they don't."

This just gets worse, and Ilya wishes he were still asleep. Maybe if Shane had gotten here and found him out cold he would have had this little breakdown without Ilya having to listen to it. "You do hear, yes, how funny it is that you say that?"

"Ilya, fucking listen," Shane snaps, and he's starting to actually be annoyed so Ilya crosses his arms over his chest and raises his eyebrows expectantly; the quicker to get Shane and all his temptations away so that Ilya can drink the rest of his vodka in peace.

Shane takes a deep breath, like he's trying to calm himself. "They're an idiot if they don't love you, but — but it's biology, right?" He lets his fingertips rest, five points, on Ilya's chest over where his heart is — where the roots form their knot in him — and his eyes are pleading although Ilya isn't sure what Shane can possibly want from him, now. "It's just biology, we could — we could try and trick it, couldn't we? Convince it you've got what you need, find a way around?"

Ilya wants to roll his eyes. If biology could be so easily circumvented he would already have taken his shot at it — but he'll let Shane play this out, anyway, to run the thought to its end so that he can let it go. "I do not know what you mean."

"Get them to come here. Bring them, bring them here and — and I'll love you enough. I'll love you enough Ilya — they'll be here and I'll love you and all together maybe it'll be enough."

It feels to Ilya as if his heart has stopped, all those words in almost exactly the order he's dreamed of hearing them and he worries and fears and halfway hopes that his English has failed him and he's lost his comprehension. His mouth feels numb when he says, "Shane, you are not making any sense."

Emboldened, perhaps, by Ilya not actually trying to stop him, Shane's hand leaves his chest and moves to his face, flutters at his cheek and rests in the end on the back of his neck. Shane looks at him with eyes that plead. "If you want to be with them after then I'll — then be with them, but you have to let me try to save you. We have to try, you and me and your — your person, that's all the pieces, isn't it? We have to try. I have to try Ilya, please. Please. Bring them here. You'll have their body and their face and — and I'll love you. I can love you enough, Ilya, I love you so fucking much it has to be enough, it has to be. You can't die just because they don't love you when I love you like this. Say we can try it."

Ilya's eyes close, and open, and his hands are shaking at his sides. "Shane. You can't — hm. I am not expert but I do not think it can be pretend. Has to be real."

"It will be real, all the pieces will be — no one really knows the science of it, if you're here with them and you know that you're loved, does it matter that it's only me that loves you?" His fingers tighten for a moment on the back of Ilya's neck, then they loosen and Ilya wishes for them to be firm again. "I don't know — but you don't either. Tell me you'll try."

"Shane," Ilya starts, and his throat closes up — not for his flowers this time; only the tightness of emotion strung so taut in him that it steals his breath. He closes his eyes because they're stinging and he puts his forehead against Shane's and Shane lets him, snatches the smallest kiss and Shane returns it, looks Shane in his eyes and Shane looks back — and Ilya guts himself, takes his last desperate hope and spills it at Shane's feet and says, "They are yours. The roses. The roses are for you."

Shane's mouth falls open and something passes across his face like he has taken an entire step backwards although he hasn't moved.

"I cannot believe," Ilya carries on into their silence, "you ever could have thought they were for anyone else." Still Shane says nothing, although his eyes are open wide, wider, widest, and blink barely two inches away from Ilya's own. All Ilya's secrets are overturned, now; there seems so little left for him to say — except, perhaps, the words that have been clawing their way out from the inside for long enough that they've almost torn right through him. "I love you, Shane Hollander. There is no other person for me to bring here. I have only ever loved you."

There is stuttering warm air on Ilya's lips, which is Shane breathing; there is a flush to Shane's cheeks, brightening the backdrop for his freckles that was perhaps the part of him that Ilya loved first. There is a sound, from Shane's throat, that Ilya thinks might be his relief.

And there is Shane, kissing him, hard press of his mouth and wetness on his cheeks and his words, whispered and desperate. "I love you. I love you, don't die. I love you."

Ilya kisses him back slow and careful and with all of himself, puts his hands on either side of Shane's face to keep him there and feels Shane's arms wrap around his shoulders, strong and tight and not letting go.

"I suppose I could," he says after minutes have slipped past in a welcome blur, opening his eyes to the sunrise flooding the room bottom to top, Shane's skin golden and eyes bright in the morning light.

"Could what?" he asks, still looking at Ilya's mouth, his own bitten and red.

"Not die. Since you ask me so nicely."

"Fuck off, that's not funny."

"Is a little bit," Ilya insists, starting to smile, to grin, to feel an absolute headrush of delight start to flood him. "You mean it," Ilya says, not a question, not — not really, but he wants to hear it again. Oh god, but he wants to hear it again — and again, and — Ilya coughs, just a little one, a clearing of his throat, and realises that there will be no more roses. There will be no thorns to rip him to pieces, there will be no fucking funeral, Ilya is —

"I mean it, fuck, you believe me don't you? I love you, Ilya."

— is not going to die.

"I believe you," which needs to be bookended with another kiss, and another because Ilya isn't going to die and, somehow he gets to live and to have Shane for himself. His mind is whirlwind, stuck in a victorious churn of possibility that he has never once believed he would get to live out.

Shane pushes him back as their kisses start to heat, as relief turns over into wanting and the passion that comes from the undiluted relief of life, and asks, "What happens now?"

Ilya is about to insist that Shane follow him to the bedroom unless he wants to be fucked over the back of the couch, but has to pause; he feels odd, but not the odd that he's become accustomed to.

He coughs, hauls in a breath, and coughs again.

**

"I want you to know that this is the grossest thing I've ever seen in my life. Seriously, more or less everyone I know is a hockey player and I've spent half my life in locker rooms and I swear to god, it doesn't even come close."

Ilya hacks and chokes and spits out another horrific mouthful of petals and leaves into the toilet bowl, degrading into mush as his body rejects them. The entire bathroom stinks of flowers and putrefaction. "You do not have to be here."

Shane's hand comes to rest between Ilya's shoulder blades, and he passes him a glass of water. "Yes, I do."

The water glass is cool to his touch and Ilya sips, swishes it around his mouth and spits and Shane takes the glass from him just in time for a fit of coughing to tear through him hard enough that something in his chest feels like it has dislodged and there is another awful spattering of spit and mucus and dark green pulp that comes out of him.

"I love you," Shane tells him, and Ilya grabs blindly for his hand and squeezes hard as his body abandons its path to failure, gives up its poison and makes room in Ilya's chest for Shane's heart to live, just next to his own.

**

There had been no plan for the first games of the preseason that technically required Shane to be there — the coaching team is testing rookies and new line combinations that have nothing to do with Shane, for the first few games — but still, Shane had planned to be where his team was going to be. Theriault hadn't raised any real objection when Shane called — while Ilya had slept, exhausted and exactly where he still rests now working on a debt of sleep a year in the owing, with his face pressed to Shane's hip and his arm slung across his thighs, precious and mending and his — and plead a family emergency for a reason to not head on to Florida with them, but the curiosity had been there in his voice, all the same, alongside the clipped instruction that he gets this one week and then he's back to work.

Shane will buy all the time here that he can for the mending of this, and then they're going to need a plan; one where they never have to doubt each other ever again. His phone lights up and his eyes leave Ilya to read Hayden's reply.

Shane: can you just leave it with the hotel? I'll pick it up later

Hayden: fine, they've put all your stuff in the baggage room.

Hayden: you know I'm gonna need details later. I hope she's doing ok, though.

Shane looks down at Ilya, tucked tight into his side as he sits up against Ilya's headboard; Ilya's mouth is loose and open and he looks less horribly sunken than he had even just a couple of hours ago.

Shane: all good. thanks.

Ilya can be his girlfriend, as far as Hayden knows — for now. Maybe for a while. There are too many questions in what happens next, when and how, for Shane to work out by himself, but it's a little rushing thrill to think that he doesn't have to do it by himself. Somehow this man who's become his closest friend has given Shane his heart and his body and his love, too and — critically, wonderfully — isn't going anywhere — and neither is Shane.

They have the time, now, for Shane to make sure that Ilya believes it, unshakeable, to the very heart of him.

**

"Let me get this straight: when I asked you if you'd told your person and you told me there was nothing else anyone could do, what you meant was you're a massive fucking idiot and you hadn't said anything to them at all."

Ilya works hard not to roll his eyes, stares hard at the model of a knee joint over Martin's shoulder and gives him a shrug that affects nonchalance. "Is not that simple."

Martin gestures at the refreshed scan of Ilya's chest — unremarkable, to Ilya's uneducated eyes. "Looks like it was pretty simple in the end."

Ilya twists his mouth down so that he doesn't get caught smiling like a complete fool. The love of this is one thing, and something he had never expected, but sitting alongside it and twisted with it inextricably is a bright, sharp relief; relief that he will be healthy again, yes, but it's greater than that: relief that he was wrong. Relief that in him there is something that Shane — exacting and perfectionist and demanding and brilliant — has seen and found good enough to love back. Relief that his selfish wanting nature has found its perfect partner in this man who does not find him wanting.

"I will need," he starts, and cannot bring himself to look Martin in the eye to ask it, "medical declaration. For application for residency request." Shane has already half completed the critical partner reliance section for him in a way that had been wonderfully, exhilaratingly insistent.

There is a silence heavy with I told you so and Martin proves himself a better adult than Ilya has ever been by not voicing it, only nodding and saying, "Whatever you need."

Ilya nods and forces out a, "Thank you," and Martin snorts a laugh and stands.

"You are not cleared to play," he says instead, and Ilya barely has chance to make a noise of protest before he continues, "You are not cleared for practice, you are not cleared to skate, you are not cleared to train anything harder than a jog around the block, not until I say. You're going to let your lungs heal, you're going to be careful about it, you're going to avoid scarring that means you never make it back to a hundred percent. Do all that and you're playing again for Christmas. You hear me, Rozanov?"

"Sounds boring," he says, his brain starting to turn over what he might to with months of downtime — and how much of that time he might be able to convince Shane to let him spend with him.

Or, maybe, Shane won't need convincing. Maybe Shane, who, most unimaginably, loves him, might be more than willing.

Ilya fetches out his shattered phone and snaps a photo of the new picture of his chest for a souvenir, making sure to capture the bottom corner's ROZANOV, I. G. and its time and date stamp, so that there's no doubting it; Shane will want to see.

"Well, maybe now you've got someone who can keep you out of trouble, hm?"

Ilya grins wide and bright. "I fucking hope not."

When he leaves the arena he feels brighter than he has in months, and not just for the freedom to breathe in all the way to the bottom of his lungs. He knows now what it sounds like and what it tastes like and how it burns through him, wild, for Shane to stammer out little gasped attestations of his love against Ilya's lips as he comes with Ilya all the way in him; understands the difference between touching someone like he loves them and being touched back that same way. Ilya has held Shane's hips as he rides him, settled into Ilya's lap telling him let me do all the work this time in what had been ostensibly deference to the rehab of Ilya's lungs but actually meant that Ilya could lie back in his own bed and watch Shane work himself into a beautiful frenzy of pleasure and I love yous with his head thrown back but his eyes fixed to Ilya's face.

He had never been able to imagine how this after-part might look — had always thought it too ruinous to try — and now he doesn't even have to imagine it.

Ilya takes a cab home, his knee bouncing an impatient quick step until the moment the car pulls over by the curb to let him out. Shane is waiting for him in his house, sitting on his couch with his phone in his hand but it is left to fall away, forgotten, as Ilya crawls into his lap and settles over him, fits them together. Shane's phone gives a cheerful rising chime.

"Hey," he protests, unconvincingly, "I was in the middle of something."

The shape of Shane's neck is perfect for Ilya to put his face there, the inviting hollow above his collarbone begging for Ilya's mouth, so he sets his lips to it, smiling against the lovely purple mark he left under Shane's jaw that morning, the more pleasant counterpoint to the hockey-fight bruise on his face. Ilya hasn't had chance to look up the recap of the game yet, to see Shane drop gloves and find someone to take out his frustrations on, but that'll give him something to look forward to later. "Not important, though, hm?"

Shane clears his throat and in understandable, mis-emphasised Russian says, "Где здесь библиотека?".

It's bad enough to make Ilya take his teeth away from Shane's neck. "This is terrible. Who gives a fuck where library is, why are you learning this?"

Shane is smiling at him and his hands are on Ilya's ass and he loves him. Shane loves him. Ilya is full of helium, lighter than air.

"It's what you learn first, the app starts at the tourist stuff."

"No, this is no good. You need new one. You should learn harder, Ilya and just there, Ilya, and please, Ilya."

"Пожалуйста, Илья," Shane snarks back, and Ilya has to take half a second to accommodate precisely the sound of those two words in his memory for safe keeping. Shane sees it, though, and grins, self-satisfied. "Basics aren't so bad, huh? Besides, maybe I should be learning you're an idiot, Ilya, or maybe tell me how you feel, Ilya —"

Ilya kisses him, the best to shut him up with enthusiastic mutual consent.

"Sorry," Shane says when they separate, when Ilya's lips are tingling and Shane's are flushed pink. "I'll shut up about it." His smile turns maudlin at the corners and he pushes a loose curl of Ilya's hair off his forehead. "I still don't know what I would have said if you'd have told me about this a year ago."

Ilya makes a dismissive little hm, because he doesn't want to have this conversation again; they both know how that might easily have gone and all of their edges are still too raw to walk through the likelihoods of it out loud.

Most likely Shane should still learn how to call someone an idiot in Russian, though, for general usefulness.

"Please is a good word to start with. How about," he suggests, wriggling his way closer to Shane, tightening his thighs around Shane's hips and starting a slow, careful grind, "you learn more like that. Please can I suck your cock, Ilya. Please let me come, Ilya."

Shane is starting to get hard, and Ilya skates his lips across Shane's cheekbone, then leans away just far enough so that Shane gets nothing more than a tease of it when he turns his head to try to catch Ilya with his own mouth.

"I don't think there's an app for that kind of thing." Shane's hands are back on his ass and they tighten, haul him in. "How about," he looks up; looks Ilya in his eyes, "I need you, Ilya. I want to keep you, Ilya." He puts a soft kiss to Ilya's bottom lip. "I'll never leave you, Ilya." There's another kiss, then, and Ilya is grateful to be able to close his eyes for a moment.

"Yes," he whispers, soft, "all right. Maybe I can teach you those."

Chapter End Notes

Thank you all for your lovely comments! I have very much enjoyed putting Ilya through the emotional ringer and I hope you have too.

The scene where Shane comes to Ilya's house in the morning I originally wrote from Shane's POV, and it wasn't working so I flipped it. But there is one paragraph that I loved from Shane's side; it still happens in the scene but it doesn't hit the same, for me - and it makes me sad that it was essentially my favourite two sentences of the whole thing and I had to cut it, so because I can, it was this:

"I do not want to die." Ilya smiles awfully and gestures with his glass so that a little of the contents sloshes out over the rim. "Is very romantic notion, yes? To die for love." Ilya laughs, and it's the most empty sound Shane's ever heard. Ilya drinks, drains the glass and lets it drop onto the sofa and stares at Shane with eyes that are hollow; bottomless and devastating. "Really, I do not think so, but it seems I will have to do it anyway."

 

Anyway, that's a wrap. Thank you for reading 💜

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