Summary:

His heartbeat was too fast. His chest felt tight. The microphone foam brushed his knuckles and the texture was suddenly unbearable, coarse, wrong. Too loud. Too bright. Too close. Too much. He needed space. or After an intense game and overwhelming post-game media scrum, Shane hits sensory overload and has a meltdown. Ilya finds him hiding away and stays, grounding him through it and reminding him he doesn’t have to handle everything alone. The worst part wasn’t the game. Shane could handle the game. The game had rules. It had structure. It had the clean geometry of the rink, the crisp bite of steel on ice, the predictable rotation of shifts. Even when it was chaotic, it was a chaos he understood. Pucks moved in patterns. Bodies angled in lines. Systems nested inside systems. Shane had been mapping them in his head since he was a kid. Media Day did not have rules. Or rather, it had too many. “Just be yourself,” the PR woman had said with a bright smile that hurt to look at. “Relax. Smile. Keep your answers light.” Be yourself. Relax. Light. The hallway outside the locker room was already too loud. Reporters clustered like birds, their voices overlapping in sharp bursts. The lights from the camera rigs were brighter than usual, hot and white and relentless. Someone had turned the music up in the dressing room, bass thudding through his ribs. Shane stood at his stall, fingers curled around the edge of the wooden bench. He tried to catalog sensations the way his therapist had taught him. Too bright. Too loud. Fabric itchy at the back of his neck. The elastic in his compression shirt digging into his ribs. Sweat cooling too fast along his spine. He inhaled for four counts. Held for four. Exhaled for four. “Hollander!” someone called. “You ready?” He nodded automatically. He was always ready. Except today his skin felt like it was two sizes too small. The game itself was brutal. Fast, punishing, every hit to his body landing harder than it should. It was the kind of rivalry matchup that fed headlines for weeks. Shane scored once, assisted once, and blocked a shot that left a bruise blooming across his thigh. He played well. He played the way he always did, precise, relentless, methodical. But the crowd was louder than usual, a constant wall of noise pressing against his skull. Every whistle shrieked. Every horn drilled straight through him. When he sat on the bench, the smell of sweat and rubber and ammonia stung the back of his throat. By the third period, his thoughts had started to fragment. Too loud. Too bright. Too much. He missed a pass he would normally make without looking. His stick felt wrong in his hands, the tape uneven. His gloves were damp and suffocating. When the final buzzer sounded and the arena erupted, the sound didn’t feel like celebration. It felt like an explosion. They won. Someone clapped him on the helmet. “Media’s gonna love you tonight, Hollander.” The thought made his heart sink just a little. The hallway afterward was worse. The lights hadn’t dimmed. If anything, they were harsher. Microphones were thrust toward his face, logos flashing. Questions overlapped, voices stacking on top of each other until he couldn’t separate them. “Shane, talk about that second-period goal—” “Was that set play something you practiced—” “How does it feel to beat—” “How much pressure did you feel coming into—” Pressure. He felt pressure everywhere. In his ears. In his teeth. Behind his eyes. He tried to answer the first question. He opened his mouth. The words did not come out in the right order. “I—uh—the play, it was—” The lights flickered slightly as someone adjusted a camera, and the motion snagged his focus. “We practiced—no, I mean—” Someone laughed softly, not unkindly, but it sliced through him anyway. His heartbeat was too fast. His chest felt tight. The microphone foam brushed his knuckles and the texture was suddenly unbearable, coarse, wrong. Too loud. Too bright. Too close. Too much. He needed space.