Chapter Text
The hit absolutely flattens Shane. Like a scene out of a horror film, he feels his body crunched into the boards before slamming down on to the ice, registering faintly that his former teammate, Comeau, is skating away from the scene of the crime. It's been a while since he’s taken a hit like that, not since Marleau had broken his collarbone years ago. It's an odd departure in that there is no pain. He can hear his husband, Ilya, yelling his name, asking if he’s alright, offering words of reassurance in muddled Russian and English, but there’s no pain. He's kind of numb, maybe. There's a ringing in his ears and in his peripheral, he can see the shock of the crowd. Usually, they’re up in arms at the prospect of a fight, but the hit must have been bad enough that the ice had been cleared almost instantly.
Apart from Ilya, who has thrown his helmet to the side and is crouching down next to Shane, holding his gloved hand in Ilya’s own shaking palm. Even with Shane’s gloves still on, he knows that Ilya’s hands are larger. He lets out a faint groan, a faint sign of life, but it’s like nothing even resonates. Where are the medics? They should be here by now. He can feel himself start to drift, his conscienceness pulled into a different direction. In a startling parallel to his last bad hit, he thinks very clearly that this is it. This is his career-ending hit. Possibly his life-ending hit. The last sensation he has is Ilya’s chapped lips brushing against his heated forehead, and then everything goes dark.
When Shane awakens, he feels good. Better than good. All of his old play injuries, like his collarbone, which usually aches in the morning, feels normal for the first time in years. His bum knee, which he broke two years ago by taking a hit from an errant puck, isn’t bothering him at all. And his cock...well, that’s tented proudly in his pants. That perhaps is the oddest thing of all.
Not to say that Shane isn’t a man with a healthy libido and sex life. But after spending upwards of a decade with the love of his life, now turned husband, the urgency isn’t the same. He's mellowed now, even if he had to hit mid-thirties to do so. It feels uncharacteristic of him, somehow, to wake up immediately horny. Like, if he brushed a wet finger over his rim, he’d cum right then and there. Resisting the urge, he turns to the source of his untimely wake-up. And all of a sudden, things are much weirder.
His alarm clock is blaring from the corner of his desk. Not his phone beeping it’s charming wakeup song, but a full-on digital alarm clock flashing the time 6:00am in red neon lights. Said alarm clock is perched on his childhood desk. In his childhood room. And Shane is in his bed, his full-sized bed with navy sheets and oh my fucking God, his Nightwing fuzzy blanket that he had begged his mom for when he turned fifteen. Flinging off the covers, Shane goes to mute the alarm and instantly overbalances himself, gawky and awkward on stick-like legs. Pre-NHL legs. Shane’s teenage legs. He crashes to the ground in a heap of adolescent limbs and confusion. It's hardly a minute before his mother appears in his door frame.
“Are you okay? We heard a noise.” Yuna looks younger than Shane has seen her in years. Obviously, she’s aging gracefully in her sixties, but the woman standing before him can’t be older than early forties, not a hint of grey coloring to her hair.
“Mom?” Shane croaks, trying not to blush at the teenage voicecrack that emerges from his mouth.
“What happened, honey? Why are you on the ground?” She circles the bed to turn off the alarm, silencing it with a deft motion. “You’ve got to get ready, we’re going to be late.”
“Late for? Shane asks meekly. He is so lost right now, stuck inside some sort of comatose age-regression bullshit head injury. His mother’s face twists in confusion.
“Are you still sleeping? Up. Up!” She motions frantically, already pulling his sheets back into their place, smoothing out wrinkles and fluffing his pillows. It's too many pillows, but she had insisted that it would be good to have options. “Shane, come on,” she said, sounding exacerbated. “World Junior Hockey Championships? We’re getting to the rink early so we can practice before anyone else gets there. You love skating on fresh ice.”
In a heartbeat, Shane is up, moving shakily on Bambi-esc limbs to get to his desk. His calendar rests in the same spot it did for years, the smiling face of the famous Maxim Lapierre, center for the Montreal Voyagers looking back at him. The graphic over Lapierre’s face reads, December 2008.
Shane thinks he’s going to pass out. Like, immediately. Right now. Instead, he takes a calming breath. Maybe this is what all of the songs and books say about people’s lives flashing before their eyes. No way out but through. His heart aches for his husband, who must be losing his mind right now, still crouched over his husband’s battered body. Still, there’s nothing he can do about it now. Years of therapy guide him through his grounding process, looking around for five things he can see, four things he can feel, and so on and so forth. Yuna leaves the room without another word, laying out his outfit for the event. Shane shrugs it on without complaint before joining his family at the kitchen table.
It takes about half an hour for the Hollander family to get out the door. They're at the rink by 7:15, leaving plenty of time for Shane to get on the ice by 7:45. There’s an odd sense of deja vu as Shane shrugs on his old gear. Technically, he supposes that it’s new gear, bought to impress scouts at the WJHC, but to him it feels ancient.
He takes his time on the ice slowly. There's a lot to readjust to. He doesn’t have the bulk of an adult hockey player, nor the same power that his muscled legs usually offer him. There's something very vulnerable about how he picks his way across the ice. Eventually, after his finishes his drills, skating up and down and around the length of the rink, he moves on to shooting drills. That comes back to him more instinctually. In fact, he even tries one of his husband’s moves, winding up for a backswing before shifting the puck behind his stick and changing its angle entirely. The puck glides seamlessly into the upper left corner of the goal. Ilya loves pulling that one. It's a real crowd pleaser. He thinks about the cheeky grin that splits his husband’s face in two whenever he scores a goal with that technique. God, he misses Ilya so much, it’s like a physical ache.
From the stands, he can hear Yuna’s clapping and David’s hollering. Channeling some of Ilya’s confident energy, he skates over to his adoring fans.
“Where the hell did you learn that move?” his mother asks, planting a kiss on the top of his helmet. His father makes a brief argumentative sound about her cursing but forgoes any argument to give his son a high five.
“You’re going to be the first pick in the draft. I can feel it.” David says. He's rarely ever so outspoken about his son’s performance, leaving the flattery and critique to his wife. The compliment means all the more to Shane because of that.
The Canadian Junior Team has the first slot on the ice, bright at early at nine am. Most of his teammates are in the locker room as Shane comes off the ice. He's played with quite a few of them before at past tournaments, but to him, it’s been decades. He can’t remember a single one of their names. Luckily, the coach comes by and has them do one more round of introductions, and Shane plays along like he knew the information the entire time.
His locker room banter is definitely smoother than when he was actually seventeen. He remembers the feeling of isolation, sitting in the corner tightening his already laced skates as his teammates frolic and roughhouse around him. This time, he joins in on the chirping, ragging on kids for their hair or their youthful anecdotes. It may be the only time (at least since the Centaurs) that Shane seriously feels like a part of the team.
That feeling transitions well to their practice on ice. His teammates rely on him, passing frequently and well, and Shane relies on his decades in the NHL, scoring point after point on his own goalie. The small crowd in the stands is enamored, he can tell. There's an electricity present in the rink that he doesn’t remember being there the first time. After their thirty minutes of practice time wraps up, the Canadian Juniors are ushered off of the ice to their locker rooms. There's a palpable change in the energy, shifting from raucous to heavy as the Russian team makes their way to the bench.
The Zamboni’s loud whirring drowns out any of their conversation, but even from the back, Shane can spot him. He's got his shoulders rolled back, his spine positioned aggressively, with a casual arm over one of his teammate’s shoulders. The light of the rink catches on his halo of curly blonde hair, and Shane knows without a doubt that the man—the boy—sitting in front of him is none other than Ilya Rozanov, his husband-to-be.