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  1. What is hell? I maintain as follows: by

    Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid
    • T
    • ?
    • ✓

    2026-01-10

    Shane remembers Ilya telling him once that hell is the suffering of being unable to love anymore, and Shane hadn’t understood that then. He couldn’t imagine being unable to love, because they were freshly married and blindingly happy and there was no force in the world that could take it away. But Shane thinks he gets it now, as he thinks about that grey December afternoon and beautiful blond boy in a toque with no one to love and no one to love him. That’s hell, he thinks. That’s hell, and he can barely speak around the swell of emotion in his throat, around the grief he feels at having held Ilya’s young hand for only a moment, for how he can never go back and hold him like he deserves to be held. They’re out - they’ve been out - and Shane can hardly stand it sometimes, how fucking good it feels to see Ilya enter a crowded room and meet his eyes and not feel that cold shock of terror zip down his spine. How plainly he can show love on his face after a decade of closed doors and frantic, not-enough stolen moments and being too terrified to let even his phone know he loves Ilya Rozanov. How he can reach out and tangle fingers with the love of his life and this new world they live in doesn’t try to cave in, or make them leave it, or make them leave each other. It drives him out of his mind daily, thinking about the life they lived together - apart, too fucking apart - for nearly ten years. Sometimes he looks at the slope of Ilya’s shoulders peeking out of a dark cotton tank top on their couch or the point of his toes tapping Shane’s across the space between their chairs or the soft swirl of golden curls darkened in the shower they designed together. Sometimes he looks at those things and his chest wells so full of love he feels like he might burst. Sometimes he looks at those things and feels like he might burst, yeah, but it’s not what drives him crazy. What drives him crazy is the memory of baby-rounded cheeks outside a rink in the prairies in 2008, in the dead of a bitterly cold winter, his first look at the face that would wallpaper his twenties, his whole life. Pinked by the wind, softened by youth, eyes sharp with interest but not familiarity, not yet. Eyes so icy grey they could have been carved from the pavement beneath their feet. A cigarette dangling from lips Shane hasn’t felt yet, but thinks about for months after. It’s the cheeks, though, when he really considers it. Ilya’s eyes are the same, still that same ice-cold grey, but softened around the edges by love and warmth and being loved. His lips are the same too, still full and pink, and they still stick in Shane’s mind like a very lovely thorn, all these years later. The cheeks, though. Soft and round, like a child on the brink of manhood, pink from the wind and maybe a blush - although Shane knows, he’s heard it a thousand times, Russians do not blush, even though Shane’s seen it happen a hundred different ways. They’re different now, sharper and angled in a way that makes air stick in Shane’s chest every time the light catches Ilya’s perfect cheekbones just so. Shane knows the world looks at Ilya Rozanov, a study in curls and cheekbones and mouthwatering iliac furrows, and sees someone dangerous and hot. Shane looks and sees a mouth softened with warmth, a divot between pecs that holds the dangling gold remnants of the only other soul who ever loved Ilya more than Shane does now. He sees a scar low on a golden stomach where doctors took Ilya’s appendix three years ago while Shane waited alone and terrified in Ilya’s Boston penthouse, feeling like a bird in a cage he built for himself. He sees calloused feet, scarred and blistered and worth millions of dollars. And he sees those cheeks. Shane’s life is a montage, or a flipbook of all his greatest hits, all still life images of Ilya Rozanov’s beautiful face growing thinner and stronger and sharper with age right before Shane’s eyes. It drives him crazy. Sometimes he thinks he’s at peace with it all, the years that passed them by and the youth and time and fear they wasted. He doesn’t feel old, really. They’re both thirty-one, they both have many years of hockey and their life together ahead of them. But he thinks about those soft cheeks on Ilya’s seventeen year old face and he knows he will never forgive himself for the years he spent looking at Ilya as anything but the other half of his soul. What he wouldn’t give to go back, to stretch his hand out to the beautiful, pink-faced boy lighting a cigarette against the chill of a Saskatchewan wind in December and tell him he loves him. Too many years passed between that moment and their tearful, overdue profession of love at the cottage. Too many years where it was true and unsaid and only thought about with panic, or denial, or the desire for it to stop. Years ago, a gentle soul stood in the cold with no one to love him, and Shane didn’t fix it for far too long. It drives him crazy. It keeps him up at night, often, just like it does tonight. The house is dark, and Ilya is asleep beside him in their bed, one they’ve shared every single night for a year now - thank god, thank anyone, thank everyone - and Shane watches him like he still can’t believe it. He can’t, not in moments like this when Ilya is still and peaceful and relaxed in a way that makes Shane’s chest ache with love. It feels like a cosmic joke that Shane has ended up here, loved and in love, with someone who eases every ache that’s ever settled itself in his mind, heart, and body. He doesn’t feel special enough for a gift like this - he’s already been given

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