Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Hayden Pike, Svetlana Vetrova

Additional Tags:

Ilya Rozanov Needs A Hug, Hurt Shane Hollander, Major Character Injury, Happy Ending, Angst with a Happy Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hurt/Comfort, Anxious Shane Hollander, Injury Recovery, Penetrative Sex, Oral Sex, Anal Sex, Slow Burn, Coming Out, Career Ending Injuries, Good Parent Yuna Hollander, Good Parent David Hollander

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-02-27 Words: 1,301 Chapters: 1/?

If This Is the End

Summary

A hit is a hit.

This one ends Shane Hollander’s career.

Without hockey, there is no rivalry. No opposing locker rooms to build distance. No automatic goodbyes to make loving Ilya Rozanov survivable.

For years, the game decided for them. It set the terms. It gave them an excuse.

Now there is only choice.

As Shane stares down early retirement, rehab, and the terrifying blank space where his identity used to be, the one thing he can’t avoid anymore is Ilya — not across the ice, not in another city, not at the end of a season.

If the rivalry is gone, what are they?

An alternate path in the Heated Rivalry universe where the injury is career-ending, the loss is deeper than bone, and the happily ever after has to be chosen without hockey to hide behind.

Moody. Intimate. HEA.

Notes

Chapter 1

April 2017

It takes a lot to keep a hockey player down. There’s grit in spades, a bullish and often prideful persistence to push through the pain. Sometimes sheer stupidity at best to those on the outside. But sometimes a hit is a hit and the damage is done. Really done.

Shane knew when he heard the snap.

It wasn’t the sharp sting that told him. It was the sound — deep and wrong — like a branch splitting under too much weight. For a split second he thought it was his stick.

Then he tried to stand.

His left skate was still pinned against the boards, toe jammed into a rut in the ice. His upper body had twisted with the hit, Marlow driving through his shoulder at full speed. The rest of him had followed.

His leg hadn’t.

The torque had nowhere to go.

He saw the jut immediately — not just the sickening angle of his fibula bending where it never should’ve bent, but the way his knee sagged beneath it, unstable, disconnected. Forty-five degrees off true. His thigh already swelling beneath the pads where the distal femur had taken the crush of the boards.

He’d taken hits before. Gone down with non-contact tweaks. Hyperextended a knee. Strained a groin. Flirted with IR a time or two and come back meaner for it.

This was different.

He didn’t try to get up again. Didn’t pound the ice. Didn’t curse.

He just lay there, staring at the lights while the arena noise dissolved into a low, distant hum. Trainers were on him before he could form a thought, hands steady, voices clinical.

“Don’t move.”

He wouldn’t have if they’d asked.

In the hospital, the words came in layers.

Comminuted fracture of the distal femur. Complete ACL and PCL rupture. Joint surface involvement.

Surgery that night. A rod down the length of his thigh bone. Plates and screws near the knee. Ligaments to be reconstructed later, once the swelling went down.

They never said career-ending outright. Not in the room. Not with him awake.

But his mother’s hand tightened around his father’s, and his dad stared at the floor like he was watching something break all over again.

Season-ending, at a minimum. Career-ending, most likely.

Shane had always believed pain was something you could outwork. Out-lift. Out-skate.

Bones heal. Ligaments can be rebuilt. But cartilage doesn’t grow back. Explosiveness — that split-second edge that separates first line from former player — doesn’t forgive damage like that. It buries you. 

He understood it before anyone else said it.

A hit is a hit.

And sometimes, the damage is done.

***

All Ilya could do was stand back and watch.

On the ice. In the hospital. It didn’t matter.

Everyone else who should be there — talking to Shane, worrying over him — moved closer. Ilya moved back. Back toward the bench when Shane cried out on the ice. Back down the hall when Yuna and David Hollander pushed through the hospital room door. Receding instead of reaching.

He wasn’t family. Wasn’t next of kin. Wasn’t anything he could name out loud. So he stepped back.

Not because he didn’t care. Because he cared in a way that had already slipped loose once — late at night, voice unsteady over a transatlantic phone call after his father died. He’d said the words in Russian without thinking, the syllables heavy and honest.

Ya lyublyu tebya.

Shane had let him speak. Let him grieve. Let the language sit between them without pulling at it.

Ilya had meant every word. But meaning something in the dark was different than living it in the light.

Their relationship had rules. Distance. Separate exits. No lingering touches in public. Two bodies in orbit, close enough to feel the pull, never allowed to collide. And he wasn’t allowed to blur that now. Not in a hospital room with parents and staff and reporters who would start asking questions and never stop the second they looked too closely.

So he stayed where it was safe. Far enough away that no one would ask why he looked wrecked. Until he couldn’t.

Shane’s eyes were glassy when he came to — unfocused, drifting between whatever dream the opioids had given him and the sterile reality of the hospital room. Then they found Ilya at the bedside and held there, wild and searching.

“Ilyaaa.”

Shane reached for him, the vowel stretching too long, sing-song and childlike. Unfiltered.

Ilya felt warmth spread low in his belly and climb straight to his cheeks.

Ya lyublyu tebya.

He stepped closer.

Tangling his fingers carefully with Shane’s, leaving room for the pulse oximeter clipped to his finger, for the wires trailing from it. He squeezed once. Then again.

Shane squeezed back, weak but certain.

This was why he’d stayed. Why he’d hovered at the edges. Why distance had felt survivable.

And Shane had said his name like it belonged there.

“You didn’t go.”

It wasn’t accusation. It was confusion, almost wonder. Soft at the edges, tender.

Ilya felt heat rise along the back of his neck. The team bus would have left an hour ago. The charter would be boarding. His phone had vibrated twice before he’d silenced it.

Instead, he was standing at Shane’s bedside, his thumb brushing faintly across the back of Shane’s hand.

“Don’t go to Russia.”

The words were faint, almost slurred, but deliberate enough that Ilya’s stomach tightened.

“Season is not over,” Ilya replied automatically, his thumb doubling in speed over the back of Shane’s hand.

A small smile tugged at Shane’s mouth, crooked and tired.

“Maybe mine is.”

He didn’t dramatize it. Didn’t flinch away from it. The words landed gently, like they had already been considered.

Ilya opened his mouth to argue and found he didn’t know what to say.

Shane’s gaze drifted, then came back to him.

“Come to my cottage this summer,” he said in a rush.

Ilya blinked.

Shane had never invited him before.

There had been summers. Stories about the lake and early mornings on the dock and neighbors who’d known him since he was a kid. But those stories had always felt adjacent, borrowed not shared.

“Maybe,” Ilya said quietly.

Shane’s brow furrowed, as though he were sorting through something heavier than the medication and the thick of his own tongue.

“You don’t have to leave,” Shane went on, voice thinning as fatigue dragged at him. “We won’t have to keep doing this.” He gestured vaguely between them. “Not if... not if things are different.”

Different how, he didn’t say. But it was there. Not rivals. Not across the ice. Not bound to opposite locker rooms and opposite expectations.

The idea settled somewhere deep in Ilya’s chest — unfathomable, yet inevitable.

“You will rehab,” Ilya said finally, because it was safer than anything else he could’ve said, than anything else he wanted to say — anything he would dare to selfishly let himself hope. “You will be back.”

Shane watched him for a long moment, and there was something almost lucid in his expression, something that felt far less drugged than the rest of him.

“Maybe,” he said. Then, softer, “Come anyway.”

The door opened before Ilya could respond. A nurse stepped in with a practiced smile, eyes locked on her tablet. “Alright, Mr. Hollander, time for your meds.”

Ilya’s fingers lingered longer than was safe, but never long enough.

“Ah, I didn’t realize your family was here,” the nurse added gently as she looked up. “Visiting hours ended at five.”

Sem’ya. Family.

Ilya nodded, stepping back toward the door.

He should have been on the plane by now. Instead, he stood in the hallway staring at the closed door, the word family catching somewhere under his ribs.

He didn’t have one.

And he didn’t know when Shane had started to feel dangerously close to becoming his.