Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Missing Scene, Spoilers for Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), POV Ilya Rozanov, Near Death Experiences, Emergency Landing, Instagram DMs, Phone Sex, Power Dynamics, Wrist Pinning, Riding, Depression, Passing suicidal thoughts, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Russian Orthodox Christianity, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-10-13 Words: 4,694 Chapters: 1/1

the furthest one

Summary

You did not say last. Pilots did not say it. You said krainii, the furthest one. Then you came back, and there was another one after it.

The Long Game, Ilya, the plane, the messages, and the one he takes back.

Notes

ok so. i posted a fic about a cab driver and went to sleep like a normal person and woke up to a deluge of comment threads, multiple people crying on public transit, and one person who now drives the speed limit with great feeling. thank you, genuinely, i’m being so normal about it.

confession: this one isn’t new. i wrote it a while ago. i’ve been writing these two like it’s a coping mechanism since the show aired (it is a coping mechanism) and now there’s a whole drawer of half-finished fics i keep fiddling with at 2am. you guys gave me a reason to open the drawer.

PA PWOCHE though. do not come near unless you’ve read the tags. this is not wilner’s world. it’s book canon, the plane from the long game, and ilya’s head when he thinks he’s about to die. there’s fear, there’s his mother, there’s depression (handled with care, i promise). there’s also explicit sex because i contain multitudes and most of them are horny. if you came for patties, they’re back in the other fic, wrapped in foil, waiting for you.

also (!!!) there’s a third book coming. heated rivalry, the long game, and then mine. soon. it’ll be fully written before chapter one goes up because i have read WIPs and i have been hurt.

They beat Carolina 4-2. In the hotel lobby at eleven Bood was still singing about it, a song he had written himself in the shower, with two words in it: "Carolina" and "no."

Ilya sat down on his bag by the revolving door.

He did not decide to. He had done it before every trip since he was old enough to carry his own bag, which in his father's house had been about five. You sat for a moment before the road, on whatever was there, so the road would know you meant to come back. His grandmother used the arm of the sofa. His father did not sit. He stood in the hall with his coat already buttoned and timed the rest of them.

Luca Haas stopped beside him with his headphones around his neck. He was holding his duffel in both arms like a laundry basket.

"Sit," Ilya said.

Luca looked at the floor, the bag, the door. Then at Ilya.

"On the bag," Ilya said.

Luca sat on his bag. He sat very straight, knees together, like a boy at a stranger's funeral.

"Is this hazing?" he asked.

"Yes," Ilya said. "Very old hazing. From the czar."

Luca nodded slowly, like he had read about it in a book about the czar. After a few seconds Ilya stood. Luca stood a beat later, checking first. Outside, the bus honked twice. Bood came past them through the revolving door, still singing, carrying a sandwich in a clamshell box that he had not eaten at the rink and would not eat on the plane either.

*

A team charter was a used airliner with half the seats taken out, so it looked like business class and smelled like a hockey bag. Coaches up front, then staff, then the room in the back by seniority. The captain sat where the captain sat: left side, window, just behind the wing.

Wiebe had put Luca next to him in November. Wiebe said it was mentorship. It was also that Luca drew for the entire flight with the tray table down, so the veterans did not want him, because he took up the armrest with his elbow.

Across the aisle Wyatt was texting Lisa. Two rows up Troy had chosen the seat from which he could see the back of Harris's head, and he was looking at it now with the face of a man reading the same paragraph for the fourth time. Harris had his laptop open, as he did on every flight.

Ilya leaned his head on the window. It was cold. He thought about Shane, who would be asleep by now in Brossard, phone face down on the nightstand, Do Not Disturb on since ten like a monk.

The last time Ilya had touched him had been Boxing Day. Ilya had put his hand flat on the wall beside Shane's head instead of on Shane, because his hand had wanted to go somewhere worse. Since then there had been FaceTime. On FaceTime Shane had said he would give up more, and Ilya had said okay, and they had looked at each other through two cameras for a long time without anyone hanging up. It counted. It was not the same as a room.

Luca was drawing the seat in front of him. Only that: the little pocket, the safety card, very carefully.

"Is boring thing to draw," Ilya said.

"I'm practicing," Luca said, and kept going.

*

Forty minutes out, there was a bang.

It was not loud. It was a short flat sound, like a car door shutting in a parking garage, except it came from under the floor. The plane shuddered once. Then the left side of the cabin went orange.

Ilya looked out the window.

There was fire coming out of the engine. That was all it was. A long, steady orange tongue of it, pointing backward toward Raleigh, very clean, as if it had been designed to do that.

Someone behind him said "What the fuck," quite calmly, as if a waiter had brought the wrong thing. Then everyone was saying it, much louder.

The plane tipped. Not much. Enough that the sandwich box went sliding down the aisle from Bood's seat, and nobody picked it up.

The flight attendant was a woman in her fifties named Denise, which Ilya knew because she had told them over the intercom when they boarded and he had been half asleep and thought, Denise, like a name from a sitcom. Now she was standing in the aisle with one hand on a seat back, saying, "Heads down. Heads down. Stay down," in the voice of a woman who had practiced the voice. Her face was perfectly still. She was concentrating on keeping it that way, which was what Ilya did at a faceoff.

He put his head down.

The brace card said to put your head against the seat in front of you. Luca had just drawn it. The drawing was still on his tray table, which was still down, which was against the rules. Ilya reached over and folded Luca's tray table up with the sketchbook inside it. Luca let him. Luca was saying something in Swiss German, fast and low, maybe to God, maybe to his mother. Ilya couldn't tell the difference in Swiss German. He suspected the Swiss had the same problem.

The pilot came on. His voice was very calm. He said they had a fire indication on the number one engine. He said they had shut the engine down. He said they were diverting to the nearest field. He said emergency services would meet the aircraft, and that this was standard, and to follow the instructions of the cabin crew.

You did not say last.

Pilots never used it. Neither did his father's colleagues, the ones who flew helicopters over things they would not describe at dinner. Last was the word for the dead. You said krainii, the furthest one: the furthest flight, the furthest shift. Then you came back, and there was another one after it.

Ilya got his phone out with his head still down against the seat in front of him.

His texts with Shane were saved under a girl's name, and he deleted them every Sunday out of habit, like other men cleaned their guns. Instagram was where he had been keeping the real thing. Half the team didn't know it had messages.

The Wi-Fi still worked. That seemed insane to him. The engine was on fire and the Wi-Fi had two bars.

He typed:

Hollander. If this is the furthest message I want you to know that in Regina in the parking lot I already knew, I didn't have the word yet, I had a cigarette, you told me where to smoke it like a hall monitor, I thought, this one, this is the one I will have trouble with, I

He looked at it. It was too long. Nobody gets to the end of a message like that. They read the first line and cry. The rest sits in the phone for years, like a coat nobody could give away.

He deleted it.

He typed Hollander and autocorrect changed it to Hollandaise.

He looked at Hollandaise for a moment. He thought, if I die, this is what they find on the phone.

He deleted that too.

The plane dropped. Not far, maybe the height of a man, but everybody's stomach went up into their teeth at once and the whole cabin made one sound. Bood said, very clearly, "Lord, I'll go to church. I'll call my mother back." Cassie would have something to say about that. Bood had not called his mother back since the summer, for reasons that took him forty minutes to explain at team dinners.

Luca had Ilya's sleeve in his fist. Across the aisle Wyatt was reading Lisa's texts out loud to nobody. She wanted to know if anyone had chest pain. She wanted their oxygen saturation. Wyatt did not know what that was.

Ilya sent the one about the parking lot. Short, this time. He sent the one about Shane being the best thing. He sent one he had been thinking for six years in hotel showers and had never once said out loud, because saying it out loud would have made it a thing you could lose.

Then he switched the keyboard to Russian. He typed something to Shane that Shane would not be able to read, about his mother, about the hand over the side of the bed, about whether it was in him. He did not read it over. He sent that too.

Delivered. Delivered. Delivered. Delivered.

Then there was nothing else to do.

The plane would land or it wouldn't. He was not flying it. He was not the captain of anything that mattered here. He had his head on a seat back, a rookie on his sleeve, his phone in his hand. Whatever happened next was going to happen without him.

For maybe four seconds that was the best he had felt since October.

He noticed it late and all at once, like a defenseman coming from his blind side. He did not look at it again.

He put his free hand on his chest and found the cross through his shirt. His mother's. The chain was warm. He pressed it until the edges hurt.

"Gospodi, pomiluy," he said into the seat back.

Three times, because that was how many his grandmother said. Then a fourth time, for Shane, which was not a number anybody had taught him.

The plane was coming down. He could feel it in his ears. He counted, because counting was something to do. Odin. Dva. Tri. He got to forty-one. On forty-two the wheels hit the runway so hard his phone flew out of his hand into the footwell, the plane bouncing once before it came down again and stayed down, roaring, shuddering, braking so hard he was pressed against his seatbelt like a hand had shoved him.

Out the window there were red lights. A lot of them. Trucks racing alongside them on the grass, spraying white foam at the engine, which was no longer on fire. It was just black, dripping, ugly. A thing that had been on fire.

The cabin cheered. It was higher and stupider than anything you heard at a rink, with several people crying inside it, including, possibly, Bood, who would say later that he had been laughing.

"Captain," Luca said.

Ilya looked at him.

"You can let go now," Luca said.

Ilya looked down. He was holding Luca's hand. He did not know when he had taken it. Luca's knuckles were white where Ilya's fingers had been.

He let go.

"Was not hazing," he said.

"I know," Luca said. Luca flexed his fingers. Then he put his tray table down to see if the drawing had survived.

*

The rest of the night was chores.

Buses to a terminal that was closed except for one Hudson News with its grate down. Terry going down the line with a blood pressure cuff, asking everyone if they'd hit their head, writing down numbers on a clipboard with a pen he kept having to shake. The league on Wiebe's phone. The airline on Harris's phone. The NHLPA on someone else's phone. A replacement charter, scheduled for 1:40 a.m., because the game in Tampa was the game in Tampa, and the schedule was the schedule.

Ilya found his phone in his jacket pocket, where someone, probably Luca, had put it after fishing it out of the footwell.

Harris came down the row with a laptop open on his forearm like a waiter's tray. He had been up since five in the morning. He had a dog at home, a team dog that had become his dog, and somebody was supposed to have walked it at nine, and Ilya could see Harris wondering whether they had while he went down the list.

"Wyatt. Lisa. Done," Harris said to himself. "Boodram. Cassie. Done. Haas. Mother, Zurich, I'm going to email her, it's six in the morning there." He stopped at Ilya. "Rozanov. Your emergency contact is listed as Yuna Hollander."

He said it the way he said everything. No change at all.

Ilya had filled the form out two years ago, at a kitchen table in Ottawa, with a pen from a bank. He had sat with it a long time. Andrei was not an emergency contact. Andrei was an emergency. Svetlana was in Boston. Farah was his agent, and agents found out anyway. Then he had written Yuna's name, and her number from memory, and he had felt like he'd done something illegal, which in Russia it would have been, more or less.

"Yes," Ilya said.

Harris looked at him for one more second.

"You want to call her, or you want me to?" Harris said.

"You," Ilya said. "Tell her is fine."

"Okay," Harris said. He made a check mark on the screen with his finger. He did not ask anything. He moved on to Barrett. Troy looked up at him with his whole face; Harris didn't look back.

Ten minutes later Ilya's phone buzzed.

Are you hurt. Y/N

N, Ilya typed.

Good. I have not woken Shane. He has a game tomorrow.

He looked at that for a while. It was correct, which was most of what Ilya liked about Yuna, that and how she would not let anyone win at Yahtzee.

Okay, he typed.

Eat something.

He looked around. Bood's sandwich was still on the plane, sliding around in the aisle of a plane covered in foam.

Yes, he typed, and did not eat anything.

*

They landed in Tampa at 3:15. Nobody cheered for that landing. Everyone was asleep or pretending to be.

The hotel had warm cookies at the desk, the kind with a paper sleeve, for guests who had been through nothing. Ilya took two upstairs, set them on the nightstand, and did not eat them.

He sat on the edge of the bathtub with the bathroom fan on. The fan was for the noise. Wyatt was in the next room, and the walls were the walls of an American hotel, which meant he could hear Wyatt's television, the infomercial channel, a man very excited about knives.

He opened the thread.

Delivered. Delivered. Delivered. Delivered.

None of them seen. Shane was asleep. Yuna had made sure.

He scrolled to the last one. The Russian one. The letters looked smaller than they had on the plane, like something written by another man, one who had been sure he would not have to be around for the answer.

What you owed, you paid before you died. He had not died. That changed the arithmetic.

He pressed down on the message with his thumb. The menu came up. Unsend. Instagram asked if he was sure.

His thumb was shaking a little, which was new.

He pressed it.

The message was gone. On his side, on Shane's side, everywhere. There was the one about the parking lot, the one about the best thing, the one from the hotel showers. Underneath them was nothing, as if that was all a man thought about while he was falling.

He sat on the tub a while longer. The man on Wyatt's television sliced a tomato so thin you could read through it.

He did not sleep.

*

At 5:51 the phone rang in his hand. FaceTime. Jane.

Shane's face was very close to the camera and it was the color of the bedroom before the lights came on, gray and blue. He had his glasses on. He had obviously put them on to read, and then read, and then not been able to take them off yet. His eyes were wet behind them.

"You wrote that on Instagram," Shane said. "You wrote me that on fucking Instagram." Then: "Are you hurt?"

"Your mother asked already," Ilya said. "With Y and N."

"She what?" Shane said. Then: "Don't do that. Are you hurt?"

"N."

Shane breathed out through his nose. It fogged the edge of his glasses for a second.

"What happened?" he said. "Was it a bird strike? Do they know which engine? Is the TSB involved, or is it the American one, it'd be the NTSB, wouldn't it, if it was over the States. Did they say what kind of plane it was?"

Ilya listened to him go. Shane had a list. He had woken up to three messages from a man who thought he was going to die, read them, then gotten up to find out which agency would investigate.

"Shane."

"I just want to know what..."

"Put phone on pillow," Ilya said.

Shane stopped.

"What?"

"On pillow. Lie down. I want to see your face."

Shane looked at him for a long second. Then the picture swung, bedroom ceiling, a slice of the lamp, the navy pillowcase, and settled. Shane lay down on his side, facing it. His face filled most of the screen, glasses crooked against the pillow.

"Take them off," Ilya said.

Shane took off his glasses. He put them on the nightstand, folded, lenses up.

"Shirt."

Shane pulled his shirt off over his head without sitting up, an awkward wrestling thing. His hair was pressed flat on one side. The freckles on his shoulder were very dark against him in that light.

"Hand in your shorts."

"Ilya..."

"You are going to do it slow," Ilya said, "because I say."

Shane's breath caught. His eyes went to the side, then back to the screen. His arm moved. Ilya watched his face change, the frown going out of it, his mouth falling open a little.

"Slow," Ilya said.

Shane made a sound that wasn't a word.

Ilya leaned back against the headboard. He was hard, had been half hard since the phone rang, maybe, or since Shane said are you hurt with his whole face. He put his own hand on himself through his sweatpants and pressed, and it was like pressing on something a few rooms away. His body was there. He was not all the way in it. Part of him was still on the plane with his head on the seat back, counting.

So he talked. Talking was something that wasn't shaking.

"Stop," he said.

Shane stopped. He made a noise, high in his throat, and pushed his face into the pillow.

"No. Look at me."

Shane looked at the camera.

"Again," Ilya said. "Slow."

He kept Shane there a long time. Slow, stop, again. He watched Shane's face come apart by degrees: the pink coming up from his neck into his cheeks, his teeth catching his lower lip, his eyes going wet again for a different reason. When Shane said, "Please," it was in the small voice, the one he used for nothing else, not even for his mother.

"Yes," Ilya said. "Now. Go on."

Shane's arm moved faster. His mouth opened. Ilya could see it coming in his face, the way his eyebrows pulled together like he was trying to solve something.

"There," Ilya said. "There, Hollander. I see you."

Shane came with a sound like he had been hit, his whole body curling toward the phone. Ilya watched every second of it. His hand had stopped moving a while ago. Nothing had happened in his body. It was fine. It was a thing that would or would not happen.

Shane lay there breathing. After a while he reached for something off-camera, tissues, and dealt with it out of frame with the deep focus of a man doing a chore he disliked. Then he came back to the pillow.

"Good?" Shane said.

He said it very quietly. He was asking. Shane Hollander, three Stanley Cups, the Conn Smythe, lying on a navy pillowcase asking if he had been good.

Ilya opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

His voice was just gone. It had done everything he'd asked of it for nine hours, the jokes in the bus, tell her is fine, slow, again. Now he had asked it for one more thing, and it was not there.

Shane watched him on the screen. Ilya didn't know what his own face was doing. Something that made Shane's face go soft and worried at the same time.

"Sorry," Shane said. "That was stupid. You almost died and I..." He didn't finish it. Ilya couldn't tell him he was wrong.

He had to go to morning skate. He said so, and then didn't hang up. He propped the phone against the lamp, and Ilya watched him get dressed, which took Shane four minutes because he folded his sleep shirt into thirds before he put it in the drawer. Ilya had seen him do it maybe three hundred times and had never once said anything about it, because the first time he had seen it he had understood that it was the kind of thing that, if you mocked it, you would never see again.

Shane picked up the phone at the door. His keys were in his hand.

"You're not allowed to die, Ilya," he said. "Not before I do."

His voice came back, a little of it, enough.

"Is not up to me."

"I don't care," Shane said. "You're not allowed."

Then the call ended, and the phone said 2%, and Wyatt's television next door was selling a vacuum that could pick up a bowling ball.

*

The road trip ended on Thursday. They lost in Tampa and beat Florida. Bood went to church in Fort Lauderdale on Sunday morning, alone, in a good shirt, and did not tell anybody, and everybody knew. He still had not called his mother back.

Shane drove up from Montreal after his game on Friday. Two hours on the 417 in January, in the dark. He texted at the gate: Here. Ilya opened it from his phone and stood in the front hall in his socks, waiting, listening to the car on the gravel.

Shane came in with snow on his good coat and a duffel over his shoulder. His cheeks were red from the cold and from the drive and from whatever he'd been thinking about on the drive. He put the bag down by the stairs. He looked at Ilya.

Ilya went to kiss him.

Shane stepped back.

"Ask," Shane said.

Ilya stopped. He laughed, a short bark.

"Is my house, Hollander."

"Ask nice," Shane said.

It was Ilya's line. He had said it to Shane in hotel rooms in four countries. Shane had always said it back to him, fuck you, Rozanov, red in the face, and then asked anyway. Shane said it now with his hands in his coat pockets. He sounded like a captain explaining a drill to a fourth-liner who should already know it.

Ilya looked at his mouth.

"Kiss me," he said.

"That's not asking," Shane said.

The house was very quiet. The fridge hummed. Somewhere outside, the river was doing whatever the river did in January, under the ice.

"Please," Ilya said, in English, which Shane understood.

Shane took his hands out of his pockets and kissed him.

*

Upstairs Shane pushed him down onto the bed by the shoulders. Ilya let himself fall back. Shane took his wrists, one, then the other, and put them on the mattress above his head.

"There," Shane said. "Leave them."

Ilya left them. Once, he pulled, just to see. Shane's hands didn't tighten. Ilya wanted them to. He did not know how to ask for that, so he didn't.

Shane had driven two hours already ready for this. He said so while he was taking off his jeans, the same way he would have told Ilya there was construction near Rockland. He folded the jeans over the back of the chair. Then he climbed back onto the bed and onto Ilya, straddling his hips, and did not kiss him.

He kissed his neck instead. His collarbone. The bear on his chest, which made Ilya laugh, which made Shane bite him, gently, on the bear's nose.

Ilya lifted his head to catch his mouth. Shane leaned back out of reach.

"Ask," Shane said.

"Hollander."

"That's not it either."

He ground down, slow, through Ilya's sweatpants. Ilya's hips came up off the bed by themselves. He heard himself. If a teammate had made that noise in a hotel room, Ilya would have told the whole bus about it for a year.

"Please," he said. "Give me your mouth."

Shane kissed him. He held Ilya's wrists down the whole time, loosely. He didn't need more than that. Ilya could have moved them at any moment. They both knew it. He didn't, and that was the thing they were doing.

Shane got Ilya's sweatpants down with one hand, cursing at the elastic. He reached back, took Ilya in his hand, and sank down on him slowly, his mouth opening, his eyes closing. He was so tight and so warm that Ilya's whole body tried to sit up into it. Shane put his free hand flat on Ilya's chest and pushed him back down.

"No," Shane said. "I do it."

He did it. Slow, at first, his thighs shaking with how slow, lifting almost all the way off and sinking back down. Ilya watched Shane's face go red from the throat up, the freckles disappearing into the flush, his frown the one he made on the bench over a whiteboard.

"Again," Shane said, when Ilya made a noise. Like it was Ilya's job. Ilya did his job.

At some point Ilya noticed his own body. It was here. It was all the way in this bed, in his own house, under Shane, not counting anything. It had not been anywhere else for twenty minutes. He noticed it flatly, a number on the board late in a game.

Shane leaned forward and ground down hard, just rocking, keeping him all the way in. Ilya felt it build in his thighs, his belly, like the pressure in his ears on the way down.

"Shane," he said. "I..."

Shane didn't answer. He kept rocking.

He came with his hands still on the mattress where Shane had put them, his whole body lifting off the bed. He said something in Russian that was mostly swearing and partly Shane's name. Shane rode him through it, slower, slower, watching his face like it was game film. Then Shane took himself in hand and came a minute later on Ilya's stomach, with a small, surprised sound, as if his own body had gotten there before he'd scheduled it.

Afterward Shane lay on top of him, heavy and damp. Ilya moved his hands for the first time. He put them on Shane's back.

"Liked it?" Shane said into his neck.

"Mmm," Ilya said. It was all he had. This time it was enough. He felt Shane smile against his skin.

*

Later Shane got up to use the bathroom. On the way back he stopped at the duffel, which he had carried up with them at some point, and crouched, and checked the zipper. He pulled it closed the last inch. He stayed crouched a moment, his hand on the bag. Then he got back in bed.

Ten minutes later he got up and checked it a second time.

Ilya watched him from the pillow.

He had an early skate. Probably. He would leave at five without waking Ilya, so Ilya could sleep. That was the kind of thing Shane planned. It was considerate. It was organized. He had probably had it in his head the whole drive up, timed to the minute, the whole visit, start to finish, the way he did everything.

Ilya thought about asking.

Shane got back under the blanket and fitted himself against Ilya's side. His feet were cold. He sighed like a man who had finished a long list.

"Go to sleep, idiot," Shane said.

"Yes," Ilya said.

When Shane's breathing went slow, Ilya reached over him for his phone on the nightstand. He set an alarm for 4:45, so he would be awake when Shane left.