Chapter Text
Ilya cannot sleep. The room is dark and warm, his breathing steady, his body aching only in the way that has become familiar. His face is nuzzled deep into Shane’s shoulder, his thigh is slung over Shane’s hip, he has a comfortable handful of Shane’s chest — and yet, no sleep. It is Shane’s fault. Perhaps fault is not fair, not exactly, but Ilya is not feeling fair when it is two a.m. and they have game five of the conference finals tomorrow and he cannot sleep because Shane is not asleep either, and instead of doing something reasonable about it, like asking Ilya to suck his dick, or taking a melatonin, or doing his yoga breathing exercises, he is lying in Ilya’s arms stiff as cardboard taking long, deep, entirely unconvincing breaths.
“You are not asleep,” Ilya informs him, when the regularity of the in-out, in-out has become unbearable. Shane is not even pretending to twitch. Doesn’t he know he twitches in his sleep? Ilya must have forgotten to tell him. Unacceptable.
There’s a brief pause in the annoying breathing, and then Shane starts again. Ilya squeezes his chest, hard. It is a very satisfying handful; Shane has been working on his chest. As far as Ilya can tell, he is the greatest and most direct beneficiary of this.
“You are a terrible actor, moy spyashchaya krasavitsa.”
“I’m trying to sleep.”
“You are trying terribly.”
Ilya trails a hand down Shane’s stomach, slips one finger underneath the waistband of Shane’s boxers. Shane’s breath shudders: satisfying, predictable. Ilya waits.
“I was thinking.”
“Mm? About the game? We will beat them. We only did not already because Hazy missed game four. He is our luckiest charm.”
“He feels bad about that.”
“He does not need to. Lisa was in the hospital, so he missed it.” Ilya scratches at the sparse hair just below Shane’s waistband. “Were you thinking of the game?”
“No. Yes. Kind of.”
“We are going to win.”
“Not just tomorrow.”
“Mm.” Ilya gives up on the waistband, lays his palm flat on Shane’s stomach, rubbing it in firm, soothing circles. “Tomorrow is the hard match, the Caps are somehow good again. But the Western Conference is shit this year. We will beat whoever wins.”
“Right.”
“Our second cup together. Will feel good.” A cup their first season together, and then a lull — not a complete failure, they’ve always at the very least made the playoffs — but a long time where they weren’t quite as good as they are again this season. Hungry young players in other division rival teams, a hole in their own defence, Troy out for almost a whole season with ACL complications. But this time — it is like magic, again. Perhaps even better than when Shane first came to Ottawa, and they were still scrapping for enough decent players to make up the third line.
“Don’t jinx it,” Shane says, even though he was the one asking. Ilya shrugs. It is not a matter of jinxing. If they don’t win against either one of the Western Conference possibilities, they deserve all they’ll get in the press. He’s not convinced Marcus even knows left from right; and Conrad is definitely playing with a fractured wrist, his slap shot has lost all its power.
“Alright. But, we are going to win. So you can sleep now.”
“Ilya.” Shane lays his hand on top of Ilya’s, stilling it. A warm, heavy press. “I.”
Ilya waits, but he doesn’t say anything else. He raises an eyebrow, wiggles his fingers under the weight of Shane’s hand.
“Yes?”
Shane swallows. He closes his eyes. Ilya cannot see much, but he can see the dark line of his eyelashes, the thick shadows they cast.
“Is it bad?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” Shane says. His voice sounds as it always does, but his hand presses down hard against Ilya’s, holding it there. “I think I have to say it.”
“So, say it. And if it is bad, we will deal with it.” A long beat of silence. “Is it your knee?”
“Kind of.” Shane flexes his foot, as if just now remembering it. “Kind of, yeah.”
“It is bad.” Not a question, this time. Shane has been playing on a fucked MCL since second round of the playoffs. Each time he takes to the ice, it is worse. He is not talking to the doctors, not yet, and everyone is pretending it is just a sprain, something that can be braced, because without Shane perhaps they don’t win. Perhaps they do. But perhaps they don’t. And with him, they will.
Ilya has put ice on his knee every night. He has helped Shane apply compression, to strap up his braces, to elevate it. He has kissed the tender skin, and fetched Shane his soda and pressed down on his thighs so that he does not move too much when Ilya blows him. He is not a doctor, but he knows hockey injuries, he knows broken bodies. There is a meniscus tear too, perhaps. Shane’s poor, overworked cartilage giving up. He will need surgery. That is not a question in Ilya’s mind, not any more.
“It’s bad. I can still play —” he says it quickly, like he thinks Ilya might stop him, like Ilya could. Perhaps that would be the only thing that could shatter them: Ilya being the one to stop Shane, to take this cup from him. He will not. He doesn’t understand how Shane loves hockey, but he understands not stopping. He understands wanting to hold a solid thing in your hands and say this, this is greatness.
“We will win,” Ilya says again.
“One last go at it.” Shane’s fingers flutter, and he turns his head away from Ilya, and Ilya — Ilya understands.
“Ah.”
“Don’t.”
“I am not anything. I am only ‘ah’, because, yes. OK. So you want to retire after we win the cup, OK. Five cups, Conn Smythe, Art Ross, Lady Byng, Hart — only once, not like me, but that is OK, I am the best, Ottawa proved it. You are a generational player, they will put you — and me, yes, obviously — in the hall of fame, and we will have to go to a very boring long ceremony about it. They will retire our numbers and hang them from the rafters and we can wave at them when we go to games, and complain about how the rookies are tiny baby children now.”
“We?”
“Yes, yes, we. What, you think I want to play without you? You think I want to be on the power play with anybody else? We will retire, we will spend a year just fucking and — and swimming in the lake, and eating many carbs, and then…”
Ilya runs out of steam slightly, here. He knows what he’ll do. Not that he’s been thinking about it, not exactly. Retirement hadn’t really crossed his mind, not until Shane brought it up and everything suddenly became very clear, laid out in front of him just the way Shane had laid out his life in Ottawa all those years ago. He doesn’t want to play hockey without Shane, not anymore. He loves his team, but the thought of — what, saying goodbye to Shane, and Shane at home, and Ilya on the ice with his aching body and his drifting thoughts and nobody to look at him and understand exactly the tick of his brain without having to say a word? No, no thank you. He’s been spending more time with the Foundation anyway, and retirement will give him the opportunity to immerse himself completely. Run a new set of camps during the season itself, expand their outreach, maybe into some of the LGBT+ specific work that Yuna keeps hinting at. He wants to work with the Ottawa Charge, now they’ve got a proper PWHL base in the city, because they are cool, and he thinks Sveta has a crush on their goalie, so if Ilya has an in perhaps she will visit more often.
But Shane — that is not so clear to him. Shane is hockey. He lives it, he breathes it. When he’s on the ice, it is one of the most beautiful things in the world. Ilya thinks Shane could one day coach — he has become a little better at it, with the children at the camps, and at least with NHL players he would not so often have to fall over himself trying to explain concepts that have become basic, engrained, almost muscle memory to him. But Shane is awkward and embarrassed about his lack of ease with the children, and perhaps if Ilya says and then you could coach he will think Ilya is making fun of him. Perhaps, ordinarily, Ilya would risk it. A lot of the time he is making fun of Shane, and Shane doesn’t mind. But Shane’s head is turned away, his hand trembling minutely. And so Ilya says only —
“And then, we can do whatever we like.”
“We should have a plan.”
“That is what the year is for. Fucking, eating, and also planning. And talking to Yuna, who will already have a plan, and deciding together if it’s a good one.”
“Ilya.” Shane turns in his arms, and bends his head to Ilya’s. Ilya kisses his perfect nose, his freckled cheek. He cannot see the freckles, but that doesn’t matter. One of life’s most wonderful truths is that Shane’s freckles are always there, regardless of whether or not Ilya can see them. “Do you want to retire?”
“Do you?”
It is a real question, and he thinks Shane can tell that, because he rubs his face against Ilya’s, takes a deep breath before answering.
“In a perfect world, I’d have another five years of good hockey in me. Another six, seven, even. But my shoulder is still kinda fucked from last season, and surgery is gonna —” He takes another breath. It is the first time he’s said it out loud: that he will need surgery, and that recovery will not be simple. “It’s not gonna fix everything, not with how I’ve played on it. I don’t know. I don’t know, maybe I finish up, we take the summer, I feel good. I go back. But I don’t want to go back to play bad hockey.”
“It would not be bad.” Shane is not capable of bad hockey. He is not Hayden Pike, who has thankfully already retired, freeing Ilya from ever having to watch him fumble a pass again.
“Bad for me, then.”
“You want to go out on a high.”
“Yeah. Not just. Linger. And everyone knowing Ottawa feels too bad to get rid of me, and riding out my last years on the fourth line, or healthy scratched half the time, and —”
“Yes, I understand.” Ilya, too, would hate that. He feels restless, itchy with the thought of it. Something is either done, or it isn’t. Riding the bench is no way to go. “Shane. I have done everything I ever wanted to do. It will not be fun without you. So, we will retire together. Ottawa will have a fit, but the new rookie — Härkönen, I know his name, don’t look at me like that — he is very good, and Cherny is getting better every day. And owners are a little complacent, maybe, will be good to remind them that winning hockey games is very hard. We are just very good at it.”
“The best.” Shane kisses him, gentle, and then not. Draws back panting to look Ilya in the eye. “I wouldn’t retire if you did first.”
It isn’t an apology. Ilya doesn’t take it as one.
“I know. You love hockey very much. I love winning, I love you. Hockey is. Ah —”
“A means to an end.”
“No, more than that. But not the only thing for me. Not. Not top five, probably.”
“You’re — you’re number one. For me, too. I mean.”
“Oh, that is awkward. For me, I meant Anya. Then your parents, Sveta, no, Troy—” he breaks off as Shane pushes him hard, sending him rolling towards the edge. Ilya grins into the cool of the sheet, stretches. Rolls back slowly, relishing the way Shane grows impatient, closes the final inches first, grabbing Ilya’s waist and pulling him in.
“Asshole.”
“Hollander.” He kisses his ear, which. Well, not what he was aiming for, but he gives it another kiss anyway. “We have to sleep.”
“You’re not —”
“No. Whatever you are thinking, I am not.” He thinks about it, properly, for a moment, because Shane deserves that. “I am happy, I think.” He prods Shane back into position: Ilya’s nose against his neck, Ilya’s hand on his chest, thumb just resting against Shane’s nipple. Good. “But I will be more happy when we are asleep.”
“Alright. Alright.” Shane kisses the top of Ilya’s head. “I love you.”
“I love you.” It is more breath against Shane’s skin than it is words, but Shane pulls him in a little tighter all the same. Eventually, his breathing goes deep, his fingers twitching against Ilya’s back. And Ilya follows him softly into sleep.
—
They win the game. It is harder than it should be, because the Caps’ first-line switch-up has suddenly clicked, and because Haas gets a 10-minute misconduct penalty for laying into McManus for tripping Härk. So it goes. Ilya scores two, Shane scores one, Haas scores one once he’s back, furious and flushed and out for blood, taking them to the win in regulation time. Ilya kisses him on his visor, kisses Shane on the torn seam of his jersey. Afterwards, in their bland DC hotel room, Shane tips sideways on the bed with a cushion between his knees, one hand braced on Ilya’s thigh, and sweetly mouths at Ilya’s cock until he comes.
The break is not a break at all. It is rehab and practice and video and practice and video and video and video. Look at their defence here, Wiebe says, and Ilya watches Shane and Härk nod their twin nods, and when his eyes blur he sees the patterns their defence make on the ice, and the ways he will slip past them. Vegas won the Western Conference, which is sad for them because Ilya is going to crush them. He would crush them if it was not Shane’s last chance at a cup, and he would crush them if Dallas Kent had not been traded there, but both of those things are true, and so Ilya will crush them double. He swallows his painkillers and he ices his ankle and Shane’s knee and he thinks, longingly and often, of the time where they can properly fuck again, their bodies owed to no-one but themselves.
Sveta flies up the day before the first game of the finals. She offers to take them for dinner, but Shane’s visceral panic at the idea of any deviation from their established playoff routine is clear, and Ilya persuades her into takeout on their couch, as he steals bites from her leftovers and Shane rigidly munches through his allotted macros. Anya pants on the floor, looking longingly at Sveta, or at least Sveta’s foods. It is perfect, almost.
But Ilya runs a hand down Shane’s back, and Shane leans into it, and Ilya can tell by the way that he is chewing that he is elsewhere, perhaps running plays in his head, trying to escape the texture of the food in his mouth.
“Do you need crunch?” he asks. Shane looks at him, startled. Ilya rolls his eyes. “The texture, do you need crunch? We have tortilla chips. Not even any salt on them.”
Shane nods, short and sharp, and then looks guiltily at Sveta. Sveta ignores him. She is used to hockey players.
“Did Wiebe talk to you about Brody’s tactics on the PK?” she asks as Ilya stands, Anya clacking after him.
“Stop talking about fucking hockey!” Ilya calls from the kitchen, where he shakes the chips into a small bowl, because Shane doesn’t like the feeling of his hand brushing against the inside of the chip packet, and because Ilya is a good fucking husband who will not even complain about the fact that this nice bowl Yuna and David bought them is not dishwasher safe.
“I’m saving your team!” Sveta yells back, rude and offensive because Ilya’s team does not need saving, Ilya’s team will destroy the Knights like they are tiny bugs on his windscreen, splat splat against the boards, their stupid fucking goalie with his ugly helmet falling on his face. Ilya imagines the shots, bam bam bam, lining up neatly whilst whatshisface gapes stupidly and the crowd goes wild, and only when he hears Anya make her little gobbling sounds does he realise he has shaken too many chips out and they are beginning to spill onto the floor. He shoves some of the excess chips into his mouth, and brings the bowl back into the lounge, where Sveta and Shane are using a nest of cables and remotes to play out Vegas’ pitiful attempts at the PK.
Ilya is not worried about Vegas’ PK. Ilya is not worried about either of Vegas’ main goalies, although he thinks their third stand-in might be actually OK, it’s just that the idiots who run that team haven’t noticed that yet. He is, if really pressed, a little bit worried about their PK, which is — it is a little bad. It is getting better! But too many of their players forget about the gaps left by being one man down, and there has been more than one occasion where the other team has sailed straight on through and Hazy has been left to fight it out on his own. Ilya is hoping it will not come to that. Ilya is hoping that Dallas Kent does not open his big mouth anywhere near Haas, who is a sweet perfect baby angel still, seven seasons in, but is taking emulating Ilya perhaps a little too far this playoff run.
He hands Shane the chips, leans against his side and munches loudly in his ear until Shane gets an arm around him and pets his hair.
“Keppler may actually be good enough to keep you out, if they’re smart enough to bring him in,” Sveta tells him.
“Yes, yes, I know. But they are not smart enough, and their fans love Hughes and his helmet picture that looks like a dick.”
“Oh,” Shane says. “Fuck, it really does. Why the fuck did he get that on it?”
“Because he is an idiot. He does not have Hazy’s artistic sensibility.”
“Hazy’s helmet looks like a comic book threw up on it.” Shane stops, looks vaguely guilty. “Hughes’ is worse.”
“Yes, it’s not even a pretty dick.”
“Hughes probably doesn’t know what one of those looks like.” Sveta stretches, yawns. “Ilyusha.”
“Yes, yes, you should go. I need to fuck Shane for good luck before tomorrow.”
Shane swipes at him, Ilya grins. Sveta leans over to slap Shane’s shoulder, which is the kind of physical contact it has taken them several years to work up to. She stands, shakes out her beautiful hair, and kisses Ilya softly on the forehead.
“Destroy them.”
“We will.”
Ilya watches Sveta collect her things, head for the door. Her easy, careless movements, the way she doesn’t look back. He thinks of her small form pressed next to his mother’s, one of the only times they really spent together, his mother reading fairytales to them both. Sveta impatient, squirming, asking when they could go to the rink. Ilya already a little tired, his eyes beginning to close, his head resting on his mother’s shoulder.
He knows, already, that he will dream of her tonight. He puts Anya into her cage, and holds her tight in his arms, whispering to her softly in Russian. Her warm body, the steady thud of her heart, big trusting eyes that ask nothing of him except to be there to let her out tomorrow, to take her to the dog hotel where she will stay for the rest of the Finals. He takes his pill, even though they make his dreams more vivid, will make the cold touch of his mother’s hand as real as the solid warmth of Shane’s sleeping body. He goes to bed, because it is time to go to bed, and tomorrow they play. He puts his arms around Shane, and he thinks — not now, to whoever is listening. Not now. Give me a few more weeks to win this, just one last time.
His mother’s hand. The white sheets, messy, untucked at one corner. A little blood on the pillow, one sock half-scuffed down her foot. He runs through the house, he cannot speak. Shane rings the doorbell, and it rings, and it rings, and Ilya cannot answer it. He cannot open the door. He can only run circles around the house, his throat raw with the words that won’t spill out of it.
—
They win the first game. It is easy, almost, or as easy it can be when they are all so tired. Their lines flow, the puck feels almost magnetised to Ilya. The shots go past Hughes and his somehow-shocked face, bam bam bam, just as Ilya imagined. He crows in the changing room afterwards, spinning little Härk the Herald around, I love you, you are a god of hockey, we are all gods of hockey, and Shane is grinning and bright. Second game, too. Easy. Third game — it is almost embarrassing. Ilya is beginning to think they will do it in four. The Vegas supporters are looking glum, as they always should.
“Is your ugly helmet blocking secret communications from your coach?” he asks Hughes, skating past him, stick over his shoulder. “Serious question. Or maybe it is blasting messages into your head? Do not listen to it. Seriously. You have to remember how to play hockey again. It is no good, winning like this.”
Kent overhears, and lunges for him closely followed by some third-liner Ilya hasn’t bothered to learn the name of. He grins, and lets himself topple beneath their combined weight, lets the refs blow their whistles and drag them both off to the penalty box. They score on the power play, obviously. Shane grits his teeth as the puck slides neatly over the line, and Ilya whoops aloud, crashes into him, kisses him wet on the side of his helmet.
“Too easy, huh?”
“Don’t jinx it,” Shane says crossly, but he can’t resist a quick look back at Ilya. “Way too easy. It’s embarrassing.”
Before the start of the fourth game, Shane gets a supportive text from Scott Hunter, and, presumably, that is why they lose. Ilya says as much in the second period break this fucking old man is so close to death he is practically a ghost, his ghost energy has cursed us, Hollander although that is not what he says to the team, of course. He can feel himself dragging his body through the third period, and he falls badly, humiliatingly, on a line change of all things, has to be dragged up by Troy and plonked on the bench. It is fine — a little stretch in the muscle, nothing he cannot play on, but on top of the throbbing ankle, and the fucking obvious mistakes on the fucking PK, and the obnoxiously good snapshot Kent gets off right before the clock runs out, Ilya is spitting mad by the time they get onto the plane. They’re back at home for game five, three days between to tend their wounds and to try and drum into everybody’s heads that you cannot just leave gaps for Vegas to skate through, that even pieces of shit like Dallas Kent can spot when they are not being covered.
Shane watches the game again and again and again. Shane eats his food and makes Ilya eat his and strokes Ilya’s hair and says — “Look, see that, we did that better in game one, we need to lean into Haas’ dynamism on the wing.”
Ilya thinks about a Shane unanimated by this, a Shane who is not driven forward at every moment by this need to improve, to win, and he cannot imagine him. He will love him, he is not worried about that. Loving Shane has always been irritating and inconvenient and Ilya will happily march through the irritation and inconvenience of loving a Shane who does not know what to do without hockey. But still he cannot imagine him, and he has been able to so perfectly imagine Shane’s every reaction for years now.
He spots Yuna, David, and Sveta in the crowd the moment they skate out. They’ve been at every game, but Yuna doesn’t normally like sitting with the rest of the families, that close to the ice you can’t always see clearly what’s going on the other side of things, and she likes to have the birdseye view. But today, clearly, they have decided that it is worth it to be close. Ilya does a big wave, blows them a kiss, nudges Shane until he does the same. Well, he does the wave. Not the blowing a kiss. Has Shane ever blown a kiss? Has Shane ever blown him a kiss? Ilya can’t remember him doing so.
“Blow me a kiss,” he demands.
“What? You’re right there, Ilya. I don’t need to blow you any—”
“No? Nothing. Nothing at all?”
“Oh for — you’re an asshole.”
“I know. Blow me. A kiss, Hollander! Don’t look at me like that. We can do that later, I promise, after we win. Bl—”
Shane blows him the world’s most exasperated kiss. Ilya snatches it from the air, holds it to his chest. “You have terrible aim, you know that? Went flying straight over my head. Aim better than that tonight, please. I don’t want to go to Las Vegas again, the flight is very boring.”
Shane rolls his eyes, Shane elbows Ilya, Shane looks up and sees them on the jumbotron and goes a beautiful shade of red that really makes his freckles pop. Their names are announced, and the crowd roars. Shane’s mouth twists, that tiny almost-flinch he always makes when the crowd announces itself in the in-between moments, before his absolute focus on hockey kicks in and everything else fades away.
“And Ilya Rozanov!” Ilya says, along with the announcer, so that Shane will look at him, and not the distant moons of his parents’ faces. “Best player in the league, most MVPs…”
“Biggest head.”
“Not the only biggest thing.” Ilya can’t stop smiling. He can feel it, the way he felt it that first time with Boston. It’s in the air, in the bodies around him. The ice smooth under his skates, no stupid text from Hunter, Vegas starting their reckless second goalie who is always skating back behind the net right when Ilya is waiting to pounce on the puck.
2-0 at the end of the first period.
3-1 at the end of the second. Vegas got lucky, bad call. Shane spitting with rage after that one, his snarling outraged face that Ilya loves so much. We are going to fucking win, Ilya tells the team. We are going to fucking destroy them, and send them home crying and too embarrassed to ever play this game again, yes? If someone puts an ice cube in their drink they will cry because it will make them think of how completely we have kicked their asses. We are going to bring. It. Home.
4-1 by minute three of the third, 4-2 by minute 10. But they are going to win. They are going to win and they are not letting up, not a single one of them, and Ilya leans forwards from the bench as the second line flies up the ice, a beautiful speeding arrow, spinning around one defender, passing up to Herald, backshot, Shane — Shane with the puck now, the crowd roaring, Ilya’s hands gripping the side of the rink, so close, so close
He comes out of nowhere. Brick shithouse of a d-man, shoulder check straight into Shane, and on a good day, on a perfect day, Shane would take the hit and bounce back, stone-faced and ready to go, but Ilya knows almost before it happens. The twist of his knee as it hits the ice, his body crumpling, bending in on itself, a useless instinct of protection. Ilya knows Shane’s face will be closed, his lip bitten through, as Shane fights not to scream.
He is leaping over the boards before anybody can stop him. Shane’s body against the ice. His hand still outstretched, his glove half-off.
“Shane,” Ilya calls, desperate. “Shane, moy lyubov,” and Shane turns his head — the medics are crowding him, now, but in the gap between their shoulders Ilya can see a perfect slither of his strained face, the movement of his head towards Ilya’s voice. “Don’t move. Don’t move, sweetheart, let them take care of you.”
Someone is saying something about a stretcher, and Ilya sees Shane shake his head, struggle to sit up. At least this time, when Ilya kneels on the ice, nobody tries to drag him away.
“Ilya, the stretcher. I can’t —”
“I know.” He knows. He knows. He has seen this story before. Twisted limbs and the ice splashed with blood, and the hush of a crowd who has remembered the cost of this game. Shane is done. So either he is carried off the ice for the last time, or he walks. “I will help you stand, come on.”
“Rozanov —” one of the medics starts, and Ilya whips around, and whatever is on his face is enough to make them stutter, take a step back. “I don’t advise…”
“I know. But he wants to skate, so he will skate.”
They step back. Ilya almost can’t believe it, but they do. That makes it worse. If they thought Shane had any chance of bouncing back, they’d insist on carrying him out. But they know what this is just as much as Ilya does, just as much as Shane does. His jaw is clenched tight, his grip on Ilya’s arm bruising as Ilya hauls him up.
“Just to the bench,” Shane says. “I want to watch.” He fists his hand in Ilya’s sleeve, and Ilya meets his gaze, helpless. Those fucking eyes. Ilya would do worse things than hauling Shane across the broken glass of his own agony for what’s in those eyes. “I want to see us fucking win.”
“You will see it, moy lyubov.” It is as sacred a promise as anything in his marriage vows. They move across the ice slowly, the crowd still almost-silent. Ilya looks up, and he meets Yuna’s eyes. She nods, just once. Ilya looks away.
There is some fighting. It is to be expected. But in the moment, Ilya sees nothing but Shane. It is only when he realises both teams have penalty minutes ticking down that he notices Haas in the box, and Kent pressing bloody tissue to his mouth.
He doesn’t let himself smile. Not then.
They play like men possessed. Even in the middle of it, Ilya can feel the headlines being written. They score twice more — Haas with Ilya on the assist, then Ilya off a spinorama pass from Cherny — and both times Ilya turns to Shane on the bench, and blows him a kiss. The second time, Shane catches it, grinning through the haze of his pain, and Ilya feels his heart thump hard in his chest.
“You think you can beat my beautiful fucking husband?” Ilya asks the stupid d-man, whose name he will never learn, whose name will only ever be a footnote on Shane’s Wikipedia page. “You think your team knows how to do anything but lose?”
The player lunges, but he is too slow. He would never have beaten Shane if Shane were not playing injured. He is nothing. He is nothing at all.
They win. Some things are as they should be.
“Shane, I have to get Shane,” he says to Haas, who is trying to maybe eat Ilya’s visor he is hugging him so hard and so sobbingly open-mouthed, but Yuna and David are already there, Wiebe too, helping Shane up from the bench, propelling him into Ilya’s arms, and when Shane lifts the cup, Ilya grips his waist so that his legs don’t fail. And both of them are crying, Ilya’s tears dripping into Shane’s hair, his beautiful hand against the white ice but then him still standing here, still standing here and holding the cup that they won together.
“I love you,” Shane says, and then he wobbles — “Oh, shit —” and someone is taking the cup from him, someone is slinging an arm over his shoulder, we’ve got the ambulance waiting, Rozanov, and Shane is saying no, no, you’re the captain, you have to stay as David and Yuna hurry after him and Ilya is stood there on the ice, whilst other people’s families pour onto it.
Everybody else is kissing, and Sveta is in his arms, her big eyes filled with tears and speaking so quickly that in the rush of everything Ilya can hardly understand her. “OK, OK, you love me very much, I know,” he says, trying to pretend like his voice isn’t breaking, and he has no idea if she can hear him either.
He stays, because there is nothing he can do. He stays, because someone needs to speak to the press, and say the things that Shane would want said. He stays, because he is a coward, because he thinks about hospital beds and flatlining monitors and words like prognosis and never again. He skips the party — have fun, Shane, no, OK, Shane would not care if you have that kind of fun, I know, I know, but I want you to have fun, so make me proud, party the hardest, get Haas fucking laid, go, go, GO, come on, I will text, go — but it’s still late when he arrives at the hospital.
Shane is sitting in a wheelchair, in sweats someone from the team must have brought over, David reading a pile of pamphlets beside him. He is wan under the horrible hospital lights, and his playoff beard looks especially scraggly and pathetic, and Ilya is struck by the hollowing, guiltfilled feeling he gets sometimes when he looks at Shane and thinks he is the person he has loved most of all ever in the entire world.
“Babyyyyyyyyy,” Shane says, grinning wide and gormless. And Ilya doesn’t have to hide at all this time, can betray himself completely, stroke his thumb against Shane’s soft skin without checking the door behind him.
“Oh, they have given you the good stuff.”
“He’s been asking for you every five minutes,” David says, and Ilya must flinch, because he reaches forwards, clasps Ilya’s arm. “No, don’t look like that. He wasn’t upset. He’d have been more mad tomorrow if he’d realised Haas had to talk to the press in your place. That kid cannot hold a soundbite in his head.”
Ilya strokes Shane’s hair back from his head, checking his temperature with the back of his hand. He looks flushed, but he feels fine, normal-warm, so maybe it’s just the starry-eyed giddiness of being off his face on painkillers.
“They’ve already seen him?”
“Yep. They move fast with you hockey guys, huh? We were whipped straight through. Yuna’s just in talking to the doctor now, but scans are looking — as expected. They’re aiming to bring him in for surgery next week, got this thing and some heavy-duty braces for now. But soon as she’s out, got the rest of lowdown, we can head out.”
“OK.” Ilya sits down on the floor and rests his head on Shane’s uninjured knee. “Congratulations, moy chempion, Cherny says they are toasting you across the city.”
“You’re a champion too.”
Shane’s hand is heavy in Ilya’s hair, clumsy, but he doesn’t mind. He lets himself close his eyes, rub his cheek against the bony protuberance of Shane’s kneecap, grounding. His ankle is throbbing badly, unignorable now the rush of adrenaline is fading. He unlaces his shoe, flexes it. He can move it, so nothing is broken. Perhaps a bad sprain. That is fine.
“Ilyusha, your ankle. Dad, we gotta call the doctor, Ilya’s ankle is hurt.”
“We don’t need to do that, it is fine.”
“I’m gonna call the doctor.” Shane makes to stand up, and David and Ilya reach for him with one yell.
“Sit down, kid. You’re gonna give one of us a heart attack.” Shane frowns at him, and David sighs, stands up. “Let me go get a nurse to look at that ankle, OK? You both stay here. Neither of you move, you hear me.”
“OK,” Ilya says, a little surly, flexing his foot again pointedly. Shane huffs a little, and hooks his uninjured leg over Ilya’s shoulder, pinning him in place. Ilya feels himself flush, feels his mouth drop open before he can stop it, and looks at the uneven patches of paint on the ceiling until the urge to flop over, to curl up at Shane’s feet, disappears.
“Alright.” David picks up the sheaf of pamphlets, dumps them in Ilya’s lap. “Read those, keep yourself busy. I’ll be back as soon as I can find someone.”
“OK,” Ilya says, and then, “Thank you,” because David is kind, and good to him, and they raised Shane to be polite.
“Stay here,” Shane tells him, as the door swings open and David departs.
“You have me trapped, Hollander.” Ilya tugs at Shane’s shoelace. The heel of Shane’s shoe is digging uncomfortably into his breastbone, but he doesn’t try and move it. “I cannot go anywhere. What is —” He squints at the pamphlets. His English is very good now, but the specifics of some of the surgical terms may be beyond him. “Arth—ross—copy?”
“A baby camera. A tiny baby camera, and then you can see. Inside.”
“Ah, OK. So that is probably what they will do.” Ilya vaguely wonders if they’ll let him see the footage. The scraping through of Shane’s bone and blood and muscle fibre. He leans his head back against Shane’s thigh, hand curled around Shane’s foot. Listens to them both breathe. “We are champions, again,” he says. It still doesn’t feel real. Feels the ending of somebody else’s story.
“You said we would be.” Shane yawns, big aching stretch, and Ilya frowns at him.
“Did you chip your tooth? I didn’t see, before. This one —” he reaches up “Here.” Shane blinks dumbly at him, smiles. “You did. Wow. Shane Hollander, real fighting man, teeth all messed up.”
Whatever Shane would have said to that is lost to Yuna opening the door, closely followed by David, and a nurse. Probably for the best. Ilya cannot think of a reply that would not have got him kissed, injured or not.
“Oh, Mr Rozanov, we could have got you a chair!” the nurse says. Ilya shrugs. He is where he wants to be, it is not his fault she cannot see that.
They check out his ankle. It is a bad sprain, or maybe he has broken a very very tiny bone in his foot. They give him a big boot, which is annoying, but at least means he can still walk. He insists on pushing Shane’s wheelchair into the elevator, and crouches down behind him so that he can rest his chin on top of the top of Shane’s head.
“Are we going home now?” Shane asks.
“Yes, honey.” Yuna has her hand on Shane’s shoulder, her arm brushing Ilya’s face. Her jumper is soft, vaguely ticklish. Ilya wants to lean his head slightly against it, does not. “Ilya’s going to take you home. Ilya — would you like us to stay? Help get him into bed?”
Ilya shakes his head; warm press of her arm as he does so, the smell of her floral perfume. “No, it’s OK. He will just fall asleep. I will call in the morning about the medication, and the pamphlets.”
“Alright. Well, the hospital knows to call you if anything else comes up, and I wrote down his medication schedule so I’ll text that to you now just in case, and let me know if anything doesn’t make sense. There’ll be press commitments this week, but I’ve let Weibe know that Shane won’t be doing anything until at least a week after his surgery, and obviously we’ll stay home with him for everything you need to go to.”
Ilya nods. “Thank you.” He doesn’t say that there will be more press commitments after that, after Shane and Ilya announce they’re retiring together. There’ll already be speculation about Shane’s injury swirling online. “Has the team said anything? About Shane?”
“Not yet. They’re putting together something for us to look at tomorrow, but we’re hoping to keep it vague until after the surgery.”
Until they know the outcome she means. Ilya says nothing. Whatever happens, the outcome is the same.
“I didn’t know it was that bad,” she says, softly. Over Ilya’s head, David’s hand comes across to squeeze her shoulder.
“I did.” Ilya presses a kiss to Shane’s head. Yuna says nothing. Nobody asks why they didn’t stop him — her son, his husband — from playing injured. Nobody asks if there was another way.
The house is dark and quiet. Ilya’s phone lights up again and again with pictures from the party, with congratulatory texts from other players, the Game Changers coaches, with highlights clips. Clipped, over and over again, is Shane holding up the cup, wobbling, his face clenched in a rictus grin. Behind him, Ilya is pale and weeping. He looks like a ghost. He swipes the notifications away, leaving only the ones from Sveta.
Ilya types he is ok, home now, surgery next week probably, i love you and then turns his phone face-down.
Shane collapses, mouth open and ungainly, before Ilya can change him out of his sweats. He’ll be mad about it tomorrow, but Ilya can’t bring himself to care. He curls around Shane’s body, and, half-asleep, Shane pats at him until he finds his hand, takes it.
This is it, forever now, Ilya thinks. There will be no more training, no more matches, no more bruised knuckles and busted teeth. No more beautiful plays, no more ugly ones either. Maybe another dog. A child. Days he can let drift over him.
“We have the rest of our lives, luchik,” he whispers, but Shane is already asleep.