Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander/Rose Landry

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Rose Landry, Hayden Pike

Additional Tags:

Time Loop, Post-Episode: s01e04 Rose (Heated Rivalry), The Club Scene (Revisited Again And Again And Again), Internalized Homophobia, Jealousy, Self-Reflection (Eventually), Magical Realism, Developing Relationship, Endgame Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, POV: I Ask You To Hold My Hand Through The Bars of The Time Loop Cage And You Do It Every Time, Communication

Language:

English

Series:

Part 14 of my heated rivalry anon fics

Collections:

Anonymous

Stats:

Published: 2026-06-22 Words: 4,213 Chapters: 1/3

take it from the top of the morning

Summary

It takes living through four iterations of the exact same day for Shane to think, okay. Maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with hockey.

In his defense, it’s not like time loops come with a manual.

Notes

the time loop is not a metaphor this time i repeat the time loop is real and it's a classic time loop shane hollander is trapped in a real actual time loop he does not have depression this is a friday time loop this is not a tuesday time loop i promise

this is a writing warm up exercise i started and ended up having fun writing! i know pretty much exactly what i want to happen and how this story will look and what the end will be, so please don't be afraid of this wip. this is pretty light-hearted for the most part i think

the title is because im currently working on another wip where the two main characters are very american southern, which is great because i know a lot of american southern speaking mannerisms and sayings, but i also know a lot of britishisms and so sometimes i accidentally go to write something like 'to each their own, innit?' or 'fucking hell' (but northern english) and i have to backspace a lot and go nooooo my american southern guy would NOT say innit

Chapter 1

It takes living through four iterations of the exact same day for Shane to think, okay. Maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with hockey.

In his defense, it’s not like time loops come with a manual. Which—to be clear, Shane isn’t entirely convinced that’s what this is, anyway. It’s just the descriptor he’s latched onto because it makes the most sense, and the thought you are experiencing a mental breakdown and/or episode of psychosis feels too heavy to hold. 

Time loop is complicated too, for sure, obviously. But it’s like, well, you escape it, you wake up, it’s not Groundhog Day anymore, and nothing’s changed, no one has to know. It’s just been a day for everyone around you, the normal way of things. Sun sets, sun rises, Thursday becomes Friday becomes Saturday. Etcetera, etcetera.

Psychotic episodes, as far as Shane’s aware, are rarely that polite, you know? They’re more like being slammed up against the boards and breaking your clavicle on impact; if it’s quiet enough in the rink, everyone can hear the snap.

So, time loops.

Shane wastes the first six cycles acclimatizing to the fact that this is actually happening, for real and to him. Mostly that means a lot of panic attacks on various bathroom floors (his own, the Bell Centre’s, the club’s) and two separate trips to the ER for head scans that find nothing out of the ordinary, despite Shane’s sudden onset psychosis-like symptoms. 

But it’s like, no amount of blood drawn or concussion tests walked through explain his current and continuing break with reality. 

It’s also, to be fair, really, really hard to put what Shane’s experiencing into words that someone else can understand. Like: I think I’ve lived this day before. Alright, sure. Well, what about it feels familiar to you, Mr. Hollander? No, it’s like. I think I’ve played this exact game before. Against Boston, here in Montreal. Well, yes, Mr. Hollander, you play hockey games against the Boston Raiders many times throughout the year. It’s understandable if they’ve started to blend together. 

It probably would have helped with the concussion tests if Shane’d been able to really dig into the stuff his head’s making him think he’s seeing, if he could actually explain it all to the doctors, but, like. Imagine that. Imagine telling the team doc in the little medical room next to the PT’s office, ice bathtub in the corner and team gathering in the locker room a hallway away:

No, you don’t understand, it’s like—I’m pretty sure I’ve lived this exact game and day before, down to the minute, no exaggeration. I know everything that’s going to happen. This is the third time it’s happened. We win, right, 1-0, and both of us are terrible and IIya Rozanov won’t even look at me and I’ll spend all of the third period trying to tell myself I don’t notice, but I do and I hate it and it gets into my mind and we win, so it’s okay, but we don’t win by enough that it makes everything else not matter, which is really shitty because it’s not supposed to matter, if I have hockey. That was the deal, right, the big cosmic sort of promise, right, none of it has to mean anything if I keep getting the puck in the back of the net.

And then afterwards, after the game, I’ll go and meet my girlfriend at this club, right, and I won’t want to be there but I will be because she asked me to be and it’ll feel wrong and weird the whole time and then I’ll turn around and Ilya Rozanov will be there and he’ll be looking at me and it’ll feel worse, more wrong than wrong, I don’t know if we have a word for that yet, but that’s what it’ll be. It’ll be terrible, him looking at me and me looking at him and both of us just not—it’ll feel like missing a step on the stairs going down, or when you’re about to fall asleep and your nervous system goes all slow and then your brain thinks you’re dying so it jolts you awake for no other reason but to try and save your life, just on instinct. It’ll feel like instinct to look at Ilya Rozanov and his stupid shirt, and then it’ll feel like falling and maybe a little like I’m dying, or at least like my brain thinks I might be.

And then, I’ll have sex with my hot actress A-lister girlfriend. And it’ll be—like, bad. It’s never been bad before, having sex. I won’t know what to do with the empty condom that, like, almost slips off inside of her. It’ll be really fucking embarrassing, but it won’t matter because I’ll go to sleep with her next to me in bed, and I’ll wake up to the alarm I use for Friday mornings, even though it’s supposed to be Saturday morning, and it’ll be Friday again and we’ll play Boston and we’ll win 1-0 but it won’t feel like a win.

So, time loops.

That’s basically the first handful of cycles of the loop right there: just freaking out and pretending he’s not, deciding to go to the hospital or deciding to put on his gear and play the damn game and then go to the hospital, or deciding to just crash out in his bedroom with his phone turned off until day faded to night faded to Friday morning again. 

That was pretty embarrassing, that last one, if he’s being honest. It didn’t even really work, either, because too many people need to know exactly where he is at any given moment on any given day to hide from them all in his house, which, it turns out, is the first place most people will check when looking for him.  

So, time loops.

He thinks at first, like. Alright, he’s stuck reliving the same day over and over again. Definitely not optimal, but he’s not an idiot. He’s seen the movies, figures that he’s gotta fix something or change something or do something if he ever wants to get to Saturday.

And he’s not an idiot. He can identify why this day’s the day he’s been tripping over like a speed bump that lands him flat on his face, time and time and time and time and time again. He sort of maybe kind of accidentally asked for it. 

Like, not to victim blame or anything. 

But he sort of maybe did literally kind of technically ask for this. 

For a do-over. 

He sort of maybe kind of laid in bed next to Rose, a foot of space between them like a whole canyon dividing the bed neatly into his and hers, and relived the whole night in his head, rerunning the game tape from just before the puck dropped to dancing with Rose at the club to getting into the Uber behind her.

And he sort of maybe told himself that the sex—the bad sex, the terrible sex, the disappointing sex—was a one-off thing. Like when you lose an edge on the ice. It happens. Probably even porn stars go soft sometimes, right? Like, sometimes, it’s not about want or about experience or about skill; sometimes, shit happens and you’re skating along fine and then suddenly you’re falling on your ass in front of thousands of people. 

And when he was telling himself it was a one-off thing, he maybe sort of also wished, just a little bit, that he could do the whole thing over again. Start from scratch. He’d felt off all day, and obviously that affected his performance. He’d woken up itchy under his skin, couldn’t go down for his nap even if that’s something babies can reliably be trusted to handle, couldn’t force down his standard yogurt and banana snack pre-game, couldn’t force any sort of puck control during the game. Couldn’t figure out what to wear to the club, couldn’t look away from Rozanov when he saw him. Called Rose dude by accident, let her friend put his hands on his waist like a club in fucking Montreal was anywhere close to shadowy enough for that, for Shane Hollander dancing with a dude. 

So, yeah. Shane sort of kind of technically, admittedly maybe asked for it, the chance to do everything over again. 

But he wouldn’t have, if he thought someone was actually fucking listening. 

And he definitely wouldn’t have, if he thought they’d do something about it.

And sure, maybe it’s like, a little egotistical to think that some higher power stopped the forward progression of time and the universe because Shane Hollander couldn’t make his girlfriend come, but, like.

There’s not many other explanations out there. Except for the coma, fake-reality, Matrix-like hypotheses, all of which sort of makes Shane want to curl up on the heated tiles of his bathroom floor again every time he accidentally thinks about them, so.

Time loop it is.

After the problem’s been identified, it takes four iterations of the loop for him to reluctantly come around to the idea that maybe, the problem—his…performance (in bed) (with Rose)--is not related to the hockey.

In his defense, Jackie told Hayden who told Shane that it’s a well-known and well-documented-via-text-message fact how intimately tied together a hockey player’s performance on the ice is with his performance in bed. 

They even have a little name for it, all the WAGs: goalhorny.

What it boils down to is: the team wins, the hockey player’s raring to go the second he gets home. He notches a point, makes the highlight reel, he’s trying to kiss her neck in the car at the stoplight, hand all up on her thigh. And when they lose, it’s not uncommon, Jackie had said delicately after two glasses of wine and the kids put to bed for the night, for other kinds of performance issues to pop up.

Or, like. Not pop up as it were. 

It’s sort of gross, the things Shane’s learned from Jackie about the rest of his teammates, but it’s not like—well, it’s not like he’s immune to goalhorn-iness or whatever the fuck. When he was fucking around with Rozanov, that’d been half the fun of it. Winning had made him horny. Winning against Rozanov had made him horny. Losing had made him—

Well. Horny, but that was only because he was losing to Rozanov, and Rozanov winning had made Rozanov horny, made him touch Shane all the rougher, like the hockey game was a winner-take-all kind of situation and Rozanov had won the right to have his way with Shane too, along with the points in the division standings. 

So it makes sense, right, that the bad sex with Rose stems from the bad hockey he’d played that night. Sure, they’d won, but it hadn’t felt like it. Shane’d shown up to the club feeling like shit and everything’d just gotten worse from there.

Because of the hockey.

So fix the hockey, fix the sex. Fix the time loop.

Except he does. Fix the hockey, that is. It doesn’t happen immediately, but it does only take four games, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but sort of is when you’re talking about playing intensive hockey games, back to back to back to back, and then having very important, intense sex with your girlfriend before going to sleep. Or—trying to, at least. Go to sleep; have the sex.

Problem is, he fixes the hockey on the fourth game; he nets two goals, one pretty enough to make the highlight reel for sure, and the Metros stomp the Raiders into the ground.

And he still—with Rose, that night, in his bed, he still—it doesn’t—it isn’t….

It’s fine. He makes it work, makes himself—work. Comes. Thinks he makes her come, even, which feels a little like a desperate bonus and a complete afterthought in a way that makes his stomach churn with guilt.

But, like. He does it. It feels as thankless and bitter as that first win against the Raiders, the one from the original day, when they’d scored only the one puny goal and Shane’d launched himself into a time loop about it.

He’s pretty sure sex isn’t supposed to feel like that. Be like that. 

Okay. He knows it isn’t. He has years and years of experience telling him exactly how sex is supposed to feel. How it’s supposed to make you sort of dumb with how good it is, how it’s supposed to make everything else feel a little bit further away, harder to reach and impossible to focus on, like being stuck in traffic on a rainy night in the city, when the water against the windshield makes the lights halo out and the world blur and then begin to run in drips around you, but you’re warm and dry and everything else can wait just a little longer for you to arrive.

So, yeah, like. Having sex is like being stuck in traffic and bad weather or something, which is probably the most insane thing Shane’s ever fucking thought and the biggest piece of evidence he has so far that this time loop shit is actually just one big psychotic break.

Having sex is like—being lit on fire. That’s better. It’s all—passion and heat and desire, the kind that starts at the small of your back and rushes up your spine, lighting up every one of your nerve endings as it goes. Being touched with rough, confident hands is like being struck by lightning. Being kissed slow and cocky, hand wrapped around his chin to keep him where he wants him is like stoking smoldering embers, waiting for them to catch. Spark, spark, inferno. 

Having sex with Rose is like—being lit on fire, but like—at the stake. Like he’s been hunted and then caught, and now he’s tied and trapped and burning alive and he can’t breathe right and his skin feels like it’s trying to crawl off of him. He kisses her and it’s just so she can’t see the way his hands are shaking. It’s just all smoke. Smoke and fucking mirrors, and it makes him feel terrible, for making it complicated. For not making it good.

But the hockey’s been good. The last hockey game was fucking stellar.

So when Shane wakes up to his Friday morning alarm, he has to lie in bed for a few seconds and stare at the ceiling. The hockey was good. He was good. The sex was terrible. They both came. It wasn’t—it’s just.

There was no spark. There was no haloing effect, no blurring. No forgetting himself, not even for a second.

Okay. It probably—the problem isn’t related to his performance on the ice.

That’s alright. 

It’s important, he thinks, as he makes himself get out of bed, to take a rest day. To repair muscles and let the brain breathe and recover. So he gets dressed and he grabs his wallet and leaves his phone behind on the table.

It’s ten in the morning. The closest movie theater is a forty minute walk away from his townhouse; he stretches it out, wanders down along the river and then up towards a coffeeshop he’s been meaning to try for going on a year now. 

The coffee sort of sucks, but he tips two one-hundred-dollar banknotes anyway. It doesn’t really make him feel better. Mostly because he doesn’t think it counts if everything’s going to reset tomorrow anyway. It’s easy to spread the joy when the bill never comes due, or whatever.

He resolves to come here the first day after he escapes the loop. He’ll order something else. He’ll indulge, get a fucking hot cocoa to celebrate the Saturday morning. He’ll tip double that, all the cash in his wallet then. He promises.

It’s starting to feel a little like the intent will never fucking be tested, but he can’t let himself think like that. 

He spends the rest of the day watching movies in the dark, quiet theater until his eyes water. Twelve hours of trying to escape into other people’s fictional lives, he’s nowhere further away from his body.

It’s not exactly a good day. It’s not really a bad one either. 

Technically, it probably hardly counts as a day, given the time loop and all. It’s hard to measure twenty-four hours out if it’s just the same twenty-four hours, over and over and over again.

He wonders, idly, tearing a gummy worm in half with his teeth, if Rose went to the club with Miles. 

He wonders if Ilya did.

Rozanov. 

If Rozanov did.

Shane’s phone buzzes in the cubby above his locker. It’s eleven minutes until they get out on the ice for warm-ups, which means Shane definitely shouldn’t even consider looking at it. 

Especially because he knows who has texted him. He knows exactly what she’s sent, even without looking at it. This is his sixteenth time sitting here in the locker room, lacing up his skates before facing down the Raiders. It’s his nineteenth day in the time loop.

She’ll have said: still shooting :( sorry I won’t make it.

She’ll want Shane to meet her and Miles at Ciel. She’ll want to dance. 

She always wants to dance, and Shane thinks he likes that about her. Doesn’t want to join her on any kind of dance floor ever, to be clear, but he can appreciate it anyway. The need for movement and the freedom found within it. It’s like how he feels on the ice, maybe. 

So Shane doesn’t have to look at the phone because he knows, down to the emoticon, exactly what Rose will have texted him.

It’s just—it’s embarrassing, a little. 

Every time, starting today and going back all the way to the original day, when his phone buzzes against the wood of the overhead cubby, Shane thinks—for a millisecond—that it will be Rozanov texting him. 

Even if Rozanov hasn’t texted in weeks. Even if they haven’t spoken since the—since Shane—since Boston. Shane’s phone buzzes, and every time, his heart jumps up in his chest like Pavlov’s fucking dog, right, tail wagging and muzzle drooling.

And it’s even more embarrassing that this has happened sixteen times now. 

It’s never not Rose. It’s never not: still shooting :( sorry I won’t make it.

It’s getting really fucking difficult to pretend Shane doesn’t want it to be Rozanov, even though it never is. That’s how the time loop works though. It’s the same day, over and over again. Shane’s the only thing changing, so of course it’s never Rozanov texting him. No matter what Shane does in his own life, Rozanov’s day isn’t impacted. They don’t even see each other until they get on the ice for warm-ups, and then Rozanov doesn’t even look his way. Not once. 

Not until Ciel.

Shane’s phone is very quiet in the cubby. It draws the eye anyway. 

He could text Rozanov.

He hasn’t, obviously, since Boston. Hasn’t wanted to almost as much as he has. When he thinks about that day, his insides get twisted up into knots and he can’t breathe right and all he can hear is the way he’d said Ilya, like it’d meant a thousand different other things, and the way Rozanov had said Shane, like it’d—like he’d—

He thinks about Boston and it’s like he’s dodged a bullet, what the memory of it does to his heartrate. Except he isn’t sure which one of them fired the gun and he isn’t sure, actually, if he ended up dodging the fucking bullet at all, in the end, because it’s been sixteen times that Rose has texted him before the game to say she can’t make it to the arena tonight, and every single time, a part of Shane thinks it’ll be Rozanov.

A part of Shane wants it to be Rozanov. 

Every fucking time.

Shit.

He could text Rozanov.

It’s not like it’d count. It’s not like he’d have to deal with the repercussions, the fallout, the consequences. 

He could just—just to see. Just to talk with him, ask him how he's doing, ask him—

Hey, he types out. He sends it to Rozanov, before he can talk himself out of it. What does he have to lose? Nothing, nothing. This doesn’t matter because it won’t change anything. 

He feels a little like he’s going crazy. Like maybe if he wasn’t crazy before, this is going to be the thing that really makes him snap. He can’t believe his own—daring, maybe. Stupidity. 

But it doesn’t count. Texting Rozanov now. He can—like, this time loop shit has been hell from the beginning. But this feels—like, maybe a little good. At least, this feels like a win. Sure, he can’t fucking stop reliving this random Friday in November, but hey, at least he can text his–-what, ex-fuck buddy? 

At least he can talk to Ilya Rozanov, no consequences. It’s like the gummy worms at the movie theater; it’s like the movie theater itself, skipping the game, walking around the block twice before making himself walk into the club. Tiny little indulgences he’s taking because, like, fuck it. Right? Fuck it.

At the bottom of the chat, a gray typing bubble appears.

Hayden says something into his ear, slapping at his shoulder with a grin that creases his eyes into little crescents. 

Hayden is responsible for concussion checks #5, #6, and #7 and hospital visits #2 and #3. After the last hospital trip, Shane decided to stop trying to tell him. About the time loop, about the repeating day, the game against the Raiders, the club later. 

He doesn’t know which is better, being believed or being worried about. To be fair to Hayds, it’s a hard sell. Time loops and everything about them. It’s sweet in its own way, Shane figures, that no matter how he tries to tell Hayden, his eyes get all tight with concern and then he nods and then he hums and then he calls the doc, which is like, one of the kindest things a hockey player can do, because it's basically saying, Hey, I'm so worried about you, I'm getting medical involved, even if it means not having you on the ice with me later.

The gray typing bubble disappears.

Shane swallows. It’s not like anything Rozanov says could fix the loop; it's hard to remember this past the ringing in his ears.

He only sees Rozanov now when he wants to. At the club, he’s always dancing in the same spot, always up near the stairs to the second floor, blonde girl in his arms, her ear between his teeth. 

He doesn’t ever move, so Shane could decide to not look at him so fucking easily. It’d be as simple as turning the other way. Going to the other side of the bar. Leaving early with Rose, buying a round of drinks instead of letting Miles get them.

It'd be so easy. Still, Shane sees him every time he goes to the club. It's instinct. After all this time, his heart has started racing just stepping onto the dancefloor. It's instinct. It's his brain worried he's dying. It's the beginning sparks that lead to an inferno. It doesn't matter, so it doesn't mean anything. Or—it doesn’t mean anything, so it doesn’t matter. Or—

The gray bubble is back. Ilya is typing again, somewhere in this building, hunched over his phone in the visitors’ locker room maybe. He is thinking about Shane. Has he already decided to go out tonight? Cliff Marleau is always there too; is it a planned social night for the Raiders? Will tonight be the night Shane looks the other way? Will tonight be the night he manages to get the sex right, kiss Rose and mean it and feel it down to his bones, curl his arm around her waist and feel giddy to be allowed to touch her? Will tonight be the night he breaks the loop? And so will it matter, tomorrow morning, that Shane has texted Ilya hey? No, no. It's just a hey. 

It doesn’t even really matt—

The gray bubble disappears and then it reappears just as quickly, and then suddenly Ilya’s texted him. 

Wrong flower, is all it says. 

Shane blinks at the text until it's time to read out the lines and skate out for warm-ups.

The Raiders win, 5-1. Rozanov plays like a man possessed, scores three goals and doesn’t even smile. He only looks at Shane once the entire game, in the aftermath of his third goal, with hats raining down on him from eager visiting fans and begrudging Montreal ones. His eyes find Shane’s easily, even from halfway across the ice.

Shane looks away first. He doesn’t go to the club. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. There’s always tomorrow. Or, rather, there’s always today, again, repeated. Again and again. And again.

Tonight, instead of fucking Rose, Shane stares at the ceiling above his bed and wonders which is worse: unshakeable certainty or the certain unknown.