Work Text:
“What do you want, Hollander?”
It happens in slow motion first.
Ilya—Rozanov, Rozanov wins the face-off. Instead of the usual frustration Shane would feel bubbling with him at the loss, all he can do is smile as Ilya flies down the ice. He is never more dangerous than he is now—with the puck in front of him, and a short expanse of ice the only thing keeping him from scoring. There are Shane’s teammates, yes, of whom he thinks the world of. However, he can see it in Ilya’s eyes that nothing will stop him from this goal.
Matches between Boston and Montreal are always electric, they have been even before the Hollander-Rozanov rivalry. Shane’s teammates will be playing the best they ever have, but it won’t be enough. There are few in the world who can stop Ilya Rozanov when he has that particular look in his eye. He is captivating to watch on the ice, and Shane can’t help but slow his speed down so he has time to simply take him all in.
Except, Ilya makes a rare mistake.
Something powerful and too difficult to name swirls in Shane’s chest as Ilya turns his upper body to look back at him.
Ilya looks at him, that carefree smirk pulling at his lips, and time slows.
JJ is barreling toward Ilya, and it’s obvious he hasn’t processed that Ilya’s turned away from him. And Ilya, oh God Ilya can’t see, and the world is moving at a snail’s pace around Shane but there’s no time, he can’t open his mouth to warn him and—
—and JJ collides harshly with Ilya, sending him ricocheting harshly into the boards, and Shane's world stops.
Ilya hits the ice with a sickening crack, his helmet flying off of his head and sent skidding across the ice toward Shane’s feet.
Get up, please get up.
Everyone gets their bell rung eventually. It’s the unfortunate nature of the sport they play, it’s impossible to avoid. It wasn’t even the first time that Ilya had been hit, nor the first that he hit the ice like that.
It is the first time he doesn’t get back up. He doesn’t try to pull himself to his knees, he doesn’t even try to move. Ilya is motionless on the ice, a crumpled heap of gear and limbs bent at awkward angles. Shane counts the seconds and still Ilya is unable to move himself from where he’d fallen.
“Ilya!”
Shane is moving before he can think better of it, skating most of the way and dropping to his knees when he reaches him.
Ilya’s eyelids are mostly closed, and his eyes are moving rapidly underneath them. There’s blood on the ice, slowly spreading out from his head. Shane hadn’t noticed it before. He hadn’t noticed, how hadn’t he noticed there was blood?
“Ilya, Ilya,” Shane says like a chant, like a prayer. His gloves are quickly abandoned, tossed somewhere behind him as he reaches for the only person who can make him this lost. He’s seen enough of these injuries to know not to jostle his neck—oh fuck, and what if his neck is hurt?—but Shane still clings to him where he can, desperate to find any proof that Ilya will be okay after this.
Somewhere over Shane’s shoulder, he thinks he hears fighting. He hears JJ’s voice, loudly shouting that it wasn’t on fucking purpose, okay, Marlow? Still behind him, but even closer, Shane thinks he hears someone calling his name. The world around him is blunted, though, like there’s a bubble around him and Ilya’s near-lifeless body.
“Ilya, you have to be okay,” Shane pleads, his fear and dread mixing dangerously with the adrenaline still pumping through him from the game. It feels like he might pass out too, like his heart might give out under the strain of the nightmare playing out in front of him. “C’mon, you asshole, get up. Get up!”
Ilya doesn’t move. He doesn’t smirk at the way Shane calls him an asshole. He doesn’t look at him with that piercing expression that makes Shane think the other man can see straight through to his very core, that he could never hide anything from Ilya because he understands him in a way no one ever has before.
“Hollander, back to your bench!”
“Hollander, we need to move him. You have to move.”
“C’mon, man, they gotta work on him, let the medics check on him.”
It’s Hayden’s voice that pierces the bubble, so close that he may as well be shouting in Shane’s ear. The world suddenly clicks into place then, speeding forward so quickly it has Shane’s vision swimming with motion sickness.
There are medics on the ice, gathered around Ilya. They’ve brought out the stretcher, and are ready to strap him into it. The referee is there too, trying to grab at Shane to pull him away without much success. There’s Hayden, too, leaned over Shane’s shoulder with an arm around him, pulling back on his chest in an attempt to pull him away from the scene.
“Let them take care of him, Shane,” Hayden says again, and that’s what finally makes Shane snap into motion again.
Because Ilya still isn’t moving, even as the medics begin to tend to him. This is serious, more serious than Shane’s seen on the ice in a long time. His pleas aren’t enough to get Ilya to move.
The medics make quick work of it, stabilizing Ilya’s neck and strapping him into the stretcher before Shane can even process that they started doing so. He can hear them say Montreal General and Shane moves into action again, following quickly behind them as they guide the stretcher off the ice.
“I won’t tell you again, get back to your bench now, Hollander!” The referee shouts after him, clearly only thinking about the fact that this is Boston and Montreal, that this is Rozanov and Hollander. He knows how this must look to the outside world, but all Shane cares about is seeing Ilya’s eyes open again. He can’t miss it, he can’t keep going until he knows they will again, until he knows that Ilya is safe.
Shane’s fingers quake as he haphazardly unlaces and drops his skates at the side of the rink. He can’t even feel the cool concrete beneath his socked feet. He can’t feel much of anything beyond the dread wrapped tightly around his bones.
This isn’t how the night was supposed to go. Shane had a whole vision—Montreal would walk away with a close win, then he’d go home and wait for Ilya who would walk through the front door this time, because he’s too important to be sneaking in from a side door connected to a dark alleyway. They’d spend the night together, and then Shane would find the courage to ask for what he wanted.
“What do you want, Hollander?”
It took far too long, but he knew now. Watching as the medics tended to Ilya’s bleeding head, Shane knew with complete certainty that all he wanted was Ilya Rozanov. He wanted Ilya to spend the summer with him in his cottage, and he wanted to say everything that he’d previously been too terrified to admit. He wanted to put a name to the feeling rattling in his chest, the one that’s been there for years but he’s never been ready to face.
He wants to love Ilya Rozanov, and he wants Ilya to know what it feels like to be loved by him.
The medics are saying a lot of things, and Shane can only catch every other word around the blood pulsing in his ears. He hears concussion, head trauma, laceration. He hears loss of consciousness, and then–
“It’s okay, Mr. Rozanov, we’ll keep your teammates updated. You’re going to be okay, just stay still for me.”
“Любимый. Shane.”
It’s faint, slurred almost beyond recognition but it’s there.
The words surge through Shane, sending him hurtling forward so he’s walking beside the stretcher, as close as he can without being in the way of the medics. “I’m here, Ilya. You’re okay, you’re gonna be okay.”
Ilya’s eyelids are still only partially open, and it’s not totally clear that he’s even heard Shane from the way he keeps repeating the words over and over again. Любимый. Shane. Любимый. Shane. Still, it’s the most Shane’s heard from him since the sickening crack of his head against the ice. Ilya’s limbs are strapped securely to the stretcher, but Shane reaches in and grabs hold of his hand, holding on tightly as though it were a lifeline.
Maybe it is, now. He’s aware, distantly, that the game coverage would have shown this. That everyone around the world would see him, distraught over the man who was supposed to be his arch rival. He’s aware that this changes everything, but in the moment Shane can’t bring himself to care.
Let the world know, as long as it means he won’t lose Ilya.
He expects to have to fight for his right to ride with Ilya in the ambulance, but the medics simply give him a quick stare then nod for him to follow the stretcher in. Shane doesn’t let go of Ilya’s hand, even as he moves out of the way of the medics’ work. He’s let go too many times in the years they’ve been…well, as long as they’ve been ShaneandIlya. Shane has stepped back, tried to distance himself before he got hurt, before he was inevitably left behind. But now, watching as Ilya moans against the harsh lights of the ambulance and tries to weakly fight against the straps of the stretcher, Shane knows with complete certainty that he can’t do it. He can’t let go, so he doesn’t.
The doors shut, and the lights flash on the outside of the ambulance, but Shane doesn’t let go.
He never lets go.
Hayden: are you okay?
Hayden: i grabbed your things from your locker. i can bring them to you when you get home.
Hayden: fuck i have your phone too. you wont see this.
4 missed calls from Mom
Dad: Please answer your phone your mother is worried
Dad: I am too
1 missed call from Rose
Rose: Let me know if you need anything, I'm here for you two <3
The hospital is a blur of people in scrubs and various waiting rooms. First in the ER, as Shane is promptly guided away from the trauma room Ilya was brought to. He sat in a cold, uncomfortable chair in the ER waiting room—not the main one, but a smaller room where a woman with a badge that reads ‘Social Work’ sits with him and tries to talk him through what they’re doing to Ilya.
Shane doesn’t hear a single word.
He’s brought to another floor then, where again he’s asked to sit in another room while Ilya undergoes various scans that Shane can’t keep track of. He thinks the doctor might’ve spoken to him, explained that Ilya has a concussion, that they’re trying to rule out even more serious brain injury in light of the extended loss of consciousness.
The words swirl in through his ears but don’t last, floating away as Shane waits.
He’s still in his gear. The hospital is cold but underneath all of the pads and layers, a thin film of sweat gathers on Shane’s hairline. He doesn’t have anything to distract himself, his phone left back at the arena. He’d left everything behind, desperate for any confirmation that Ilya would be okay.
So far, he’s gotten a lot of nothing.
Just wait, and wait, and count the ceiling tiles because if he doesn’t think of anything else, he’ll think of the way Ilya crumpled after the hit. He’ll think of the disorganized eye movements, and he’ll think of Ilya calling out for him, even as he stood right by his side.
So he counts. When he finishes, he counts again, and again, and again until even the numbers don’t sound real in his head anymore.
By the time someone in scrubs brings Shane into a patient room, he’s sure he’s going to leap right out of his skin. It’s a harsh adrenaline crash, not too dissimilar to when he and Ilya spend time together and then one of them has to leave soon after. It’s abrupt, giving no time for him to get used to the sudden calmness.
“He’s resting for now, please don’t try to wake him,” the woman tells him gently as she guides Shane into a room.
He nods, his throat feeling too tight with all of the tears he’s tried to hold back since Ilya first went down to speak.
His first thought is that Ilya looks out of place in the hospital bed. Over the years, Shane has memorized the way Ilya looks when he sleeps. He’s always loved the way the other man completely relaxes, looking at peace as he lays tangled up with Shane in one of their hotel rooms. It’s always been one of the few times that Ilya is at peace, for once not having to analyze everything as it comes to him.
Ilya does not look peaceful now.
The woman told Shane they’d given him plenty of pain medications after setting his fractured collarbone, but he still looks tense with discomfort. His eyebrows are drawn together even in sleep, and his lips tensed. Already there is deep bruising under his eyes and across the left side of his face where he’d collided with the ice. There’s a plaster on his temple, covering the stitches that the woman explained they’d needed to place to close the laceration on his head.
“Ilya,” Shane breathes, not daring to speak any louder so as to not interrupt Ilya’s precarious rest. They’ve already set up a chair beside the bed for him, and though he barely fits in it with his gear he sinks into it anyway, resuming his post watching over his love. Shane reaches out, gently holding onto Ilya’s hand with his own.
Rest is important, the most vital thing for Ilya now, but even still Shane selfishly hopes he’d open his eyes. He just needs one look, one moment where Ilya realizes that Shane is there, that he stayed. He needs tangible proof that Ilya is okay, beyond the attempted reassurance from the hospital team that he’d gotten lucky.
It sure doesn’t seem like Ilya had gotten fucking lucky.
“You had to upstage me, didn’t you?” Shane whispers, eyes trained on Ilya’s resting face. “Tonight, I was going to ask you to come to the cottage with me. I was going to tell you I was tired of running away. I finally figured out why it’s felt so different lately, and then you go and do this.”
A sharp laugh punches out of him then, wet with the tears he hadn’t realized had started to fall. “You were supposed to tell me that it was a bad idea to spend the summer together, and I had this whole speech prepared to convince you. I’d tell you that the cottage is private, and we’d get weeks completely alone together.”
“Fuck,” Shane hisses, wiping harshly at his eyes in an attempt to clear his vision. “It doesn’t matter, you just have to be okay.”
Just be okay.
Time begins to blend together. Shane doesn’t move from his chair, doesn’t let go of Ilya’s hand. He sits vigil beside the other man, intent to stay until he eventually wakes.
At some point in the night, there’s a soft knock on the doorframe of the hospital room. Though the sound barely carries, it startles Shane out of his trance.
Before tonight, the thought of Hayden and Jackie Pike seeing him hold Ilya’s hand would have sent him spiraling. Now, he doesn’t move, simply watches as the couple steps into the room.
“How is he?” Jackie asks, breaking the silence first.
“I don’t–” Shane’s voice cracks around the word, dried out from all of the tears he’d shed that night. “They said he has a concussion and a fractured collarbone. He hasn’t woken up yet, I don’t know if he’s okay.”
“He will be. The bastard’s the toughest guy out there,” Hayden reassures.
Neither of them ask about the obvious. They must’ve put it together by now, exactly how important Ilya is to Shane, and yet they don’t ask about how long or why him or any of the other things that Shane can’t bear to think about right now.
“We brought your phone. Hope it’s okay we stopped at your place, to get you a change of clothes,” Hayden continues. Their friendship has always been easy. It’s strange to hear him so unsure now, so careful as he deals with this precarious situation.
“We’ll watch him, Shane,” Jackie promises when he doesn’t move from his chair. “You should change out of your gear.”
“I will when he wakes up.”
“He’d want you to take care of yourself, too,” Jackie says.
Almost immediately, Shane can feel some of that leftover adrenaline twisting to anger. What do you know about Ilya, he wants to shout. But shouting could wake Ilya up, and the nurse already warned Shane that he needs rest to be okay. So he sighs, and slowly slips his hand out of Ilya’s relaxed one. He takes the bag proffered by Hayden and steps into the small bathroom connected to the hospital room.
Fuck, he looks terrible.
After he’d ran from Ilya’s house, Shane hadn’t slept for two and a half days. He’d developed dark circles under his eyes and his complexion had turned ashy in the days afterward, as he came to terms with the poor way he’d left everything. It was a physical embodiment of just how terrible Shane had felt, in those days when he was sure all of the years they’d spent together were ruined in his panic.
He looked worse than that now, as though he was already grieving a man who by all means should recover from this. Shane looked like he’d gone down on the ice too.
His movements were stiff and robotic as he slipped out of his gear. Just like after a game, Shane tried to tell himself to keep his hands moving. If he closed his eyes, he was in the locker room after the game, unbuckling his pads and pulling on his usual athletic wear. He could imagine he was still looking forward to that night, that he could still spend it holding onto Ilya. He’d even take a damn loss of that game if it meant not having to be here, waiting on any sign that this hit wasn’t enough to rattle something permanently in Ilya.
Eventually, though, Shane has to open his eyes. He’s still here, in the cold hospital room, with his conscious love and his two closest friends whom he’d spent a decade lying to.
“Fuck,” Shane hisses when there’s nothing left to do but step out of the bathroom and return to reality.
True to their word, Hayden and Jackie are still standing behind Shane’s chair, watching over Ilya. They both look up when the bathroom door opens, wearing identical expressions of pure worry for him.
“Who’s watching the kids?” Shane asks, realizing that both of them are here with him.
“Miitka and Sofia are with them,” Jackie says. “We didn’t want you to be alone.”
“Thank you,” Shane whispers, taking his place once more at Ilya’s bedside. “Everyone knows, I’m guessing?”
“Yeah, man, they know,” Hayden says. “I already talked to your mom, so she knew you were here. I bet Yuna’s already coming up with a strategy to address the media when it’s time.”
He holds out Shane’s phone then, the lockscreen lighting up with dozens of messages from his parents, teammates, and acquaintances made throughout his time in the league. There are missed calls too, mostly from his mom but some from others too. Strangely, there’s even a voicemail from Scott Hunter, who Shane had only spoken to off the ice briefly throughout the years.
The entire world knows about him and Ilya. He’d told them, the moment he’d fallen to his knees at Ilya’s side, the moment he’d held onto Ilya’s hand all the way into the ambulance.
When Ilya woke, Shane would have to apologize for making that decision for the both of them. Distantly, he’d known staying back would have been smarter, but all logic halted in its tracks the moment Ilya fell and didn’t get back up.
“No offense, Hollzy, but it really had to be Rozanov?” Hayden jokes. The worry is still clear in his face, but he’s cracking a smile now in an obvious attempt to lighten the stifling dreary mood. Jackie smacks his arm lightly in admonishment, but Shane just laughs and shakes his head.
“It’s a long story.”
“Looks like we’ve got time.”
So Shane tells their story. He tells them about his attempt at friendliness outside the International Prospect Cup final, and how he’d snuck into Ilya’s hotel room after they’re both drafted. He tells them about all of the secret meetings after games, and the texts, and the years of back and forth. Shane tells them everything he’d never thought he’d say aloud, about how at some point a risk taken in a hotel room turned into this, into the greatest love Shane’s sure he will ever experience in his life.
When he’s done, Jackie moves first. She bends down and pulls him into a tight hug. She doesn’t say anything, but the hug says everything that needs to be said between them. She brushes back his hair, a comforting touch from a friend close enough to be considered his family.
Shane hated hiding all of this from both of them. Already, his chest feels lighter now that it’s all out in the open, now that he’s admitted the truth and neither of them ran away from it.
“Wait, Shane, what about Boston Lily? You’ve been obsessed with her for years,” Hayden asks then.
“Hayden,” Jackie groans, staring at her husband pointedly until he gasps and looks between Shane and a still-sleeping Ilya.
“Wait, Rozanov is your Boston Lily?”
Hayden and Jackie stay for most of the night, making sure that Shane isn’t alone as he waits for Ilya to wake.
They force him to sleep for an hour or two in the middle, promising to wake him if anything with Ilya changes. Both of them prove over and over again that they’re the best friends he could ever hope to have, going above and beyond anything he could have expected them to do.
When they leave, Shane risks looking at social media for the first time.
Unsurprisingly, the first five trending tags all have to do with him and Ilya. Most of it is concern for Ilya after the injury, especially since the team hasn’t posted any official updates about his condition yet. Beyond that, though, there is an overwhelming amount of support for them. There’s shock, too, and enough cruel comments to form a pit in Shane’s stomach, but the support outweighs the negativity.
“You’re the most popular man in the world right now and you aren’t even awake to be an asshole about it,” Shane says lightheartedly.
“Они всегда говорят обо мне, я неотразим.”
The words are unexpected, slamming into Shane’s chest and causing his head to snap up. When he does, his eyes meet Ilya’s for the first time since the game. He has no idea what Ilya said, but it doesn’t matter because he said something. The other man looks exhausted, and from the strangely looping tone in his voice he may still be affected by the pain medications given to him, but he’s awake.
“Ilya,” Shane says, squeezing his hand and grinning when he squeezes back. “You’re okay, you’re okay.”
“Должно быть, было плохо, если ты плакал по мне.”
“I should’ve learned Russian years ago,” Shane says to himself, wishing he knew what Ilya was telling him. He’d tried before, but between the busy schedule of the MLH and the time spent with Ilya, he hadn’t had time to truly learn. This year, Shane promised himself, if only so Ilya didn’t have to try to switch to English when he was so exhausted like this.
“The doctors said you have a concussion, and your collarbone is broken,” he tells Ilya. “But it’s okay, you’re okay. We’ll get you home, and I’ll take care of you. I promise.”
“Мы выиграли?”
“Ilya, I don’t understand,” Shane says, holding tighter to his hand. Was something wrong? The other man looked concerned, his expression pinched as he stared back at Shane. He stays silent for a long moment, blinking and shaking his head as if to try to wake himself up more.
“The game. We won, yes?” Ilya asks.
And that–
“The game,” Shane repeats, a startled laugh slipping from between his lips. “You’re worried about the game, of course you are. I have no idea who won.”
“Why not? You should know this. Hollander, how could you not know if we beat pants off your team?”
Seriously? Shane drags a hand over his exhausted face, shaking his head at the conversation. After the worst injury of his career to date, after terrifying the life out of Shane all night, of course Ilya would ask after the game first.
“You scared me, you know that?”
Ilya nods then, a small movement inhibited by what has to be truly terrible pain. “I know this.”
"You weren't moving," Shane gasps then, the realization of everything that happened hitting him all at once. "You hit the ice and you didn't move. I thought, I thought you-"
No, he couldn't even bear to say it aloud.
"I am not glass, I cannot be beaten by Canadian defenseman," Ilya says. "Do not worry for me."
He knows. Fuck, does Shane know. Ilya is known to be a tough player on the ice, due to his own skills but also because he's never shied away from a hit. He's been knocked around more times than Shayne can count. This wasn't the first time nor would it be the last.
But this time he hadn't gotten up.
“I'm going to worry about you, I lo-you're too important, okay?"
Ilya nods solemnly, eyes watching Shane like he knows what he was about to say. But it can't be said, not here. Not in a sterile hospital room, not with Ilya high on pain medications and Shane crashing from the sheer terror the last several hours have brought him. No, the moment would be perfect when he finally told Ilya just how important he was to him.
"I might’ve spilled our secret,” Shane admits. Would Ilya be mad? If the roles were reversed, would he have been able to hold back his fear, if only to preserve the careful balance they’d spent years building? “To, um, to everyone.”
“Okay,” Ilya simply says in return.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” he repeats. “We have time. We figure it out together.”
“We could go to my cottage, when you’re discharged. Just you and I, with no one around to worry about. We could have a couple of weeks together to figure it out,” Shane suggests then, his heart pounding in his chest even though it’s obvious now what Ilya will say. The way he’s looking at Shane now, even through the haze of the pain medications, is deeper than it has been before. It feels important, it feels like the thousands of unsaid words left between them. “What do you think?”
“I will come to the cottage,” Ilya agrees, eyes staring at their intertwined hands. “Only since you asked me so prettily.”
“Fuck you,” Shane laughs. The worry is still there, but some of the fear begins to crack apart and dislodge from where it had wrapped around each of his ribs and lungs. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Ilya admits. His words are tender—a heavy admittance of the feelings between them now. It isn’t something he’d admit under normal circumstances, without the help of the fog he’s in now. Still, it blossoms something warm in Shane’s chest.
Hope, he thinks. For the first time, even through hospital beds and overwhelming fear, and the knowledge that beyond this room the world is in chaos over their reveal, Shane can see a true future for them.
Together.