Chapter Text
Cigarettes:
Shane Hollander had exactly three pre-game rules:
- No caffeine after 3PM.
- No press interviews within thirty minutes of warmup.
- No seeing Ilya Rozanov.
He had broken that third rule exactly thirty-two times since joining the league.
Thirty-three. Or maybe more. He had stopped counting after the math became depressing, because admitting he’d broken the rule only made him want to remove it — and that would make it worse.
It wasn’t superstition. It was survival. Ilya Rozanov got under his skin in a way no one else had ever been able to – before or after the draft.
Shane was a creature of structure. Of lines and systems and routines, all the way down to his road-mapped nervous system that lit up like a switchboard at any sense of change. Letting Rozanov into those routines would mean…
Well…
Shane already knew what happened when he let Ilya into anything.
It meant chaos. It meant loud noise. It meant a thumping in his chest that never seemed to go away, even when he really, really needed it to. And none of that was ideal for a game day. Especially not when that game day meant seeing Ilya on the ice.
So it wasn’t necessarily ideal when the first thing Shane saw when Montreal’s bus rolled into Boston was Cliff Marlow standing outside, smoking a cigarette like it was 1972.
Shane was young, but not ignorant. It was his second year in the league, and he knew plenty of players smoked. He knew players on his own team smoked, and the coaches pretended not to see it. The problem wasn’t the cigarette.
The problem was Cliff Marlow. Because where Cliff Marlow went, Ilya Rozanov tended to follow like a very hot, very inconvenient obstacle. So rule number three was likely going to be broken for the thirty-fourth time.
Great.
Sure enough, the second thing Shane saw that evening was Ilya Rozanov with the startled, guilty look of a teenager who had just been caught shoplifting for the first time. He was aggressively stomping a cigarette into the concrete and flailing his hands through a cloud of smoke. Real subtle, Roz. Truly breathtaking.
And then Ilya bolted ten feet to the left like the Montreal team was the health inspector coming to make sure he specifically was not indulging.
Shane knew why he was doing it. Part of him was stupidly endeared by the idea of Rozanov trying to hide the filthy habit just so Shane would still kiss him later. It was a ridiculous, traitorous flutter in his stomach — because he and Rozanov weren’t anything right now.
They hooked up sometimes. That was it. Kissing wasn’t required — nothing about them was required. They could skip it. They probably should skip it.
But Ilya wanted to kiss him — liked kissing him. Enough so that he was making an ass of himself in front of the Boston arena.
Stupid fucking butterflies in Shane’s stomach were the reason rule number three existed.
Shane still paused at the bottom of the bus steps, bag over his shoulder, despite telling himself not to. It really was a pathetic cover-up, but Ilya had never been subtle a day in his life.
“Smoking will kill you, y’know,” Shane called out, mostly because he could not believe the audacity of Rozanov trying to hide the evidence. The man was a menace. A very talented menace. One that Shane had made the repeated mistake of sleeping with because his talents did not end at hockey.
Also because — he would never admit this out loud — it was fun to tease Rozanov. Sometimes, it was too much fun.
I saw that. I know what you did. I’m still going to kiss you about it later, dumbass.
None of it was said out loud, and yet the challenge still fizzed like static under his skin. The idea that Rozanov might hear him anyway. Might make him follow up on those silent promises when they found themselves alone later.
“I am not smoking!” Rozanov shouted back with all the conviction of a toddler denying he broke a lamp.
Shane just blinked at him. Honestly, it would have been more subtle if he’d thrown a rock through the bus window. The man wasn’t even holding a damn cigarette anymore.
“I wasn’t talking to you, asshole.” Shane meant it affectionately. Painfully affectionately. Which was exactly why he turned away and started walking into the arena before his face had the chance to do something embarrassingly fond.
Even without looking back, he could feel the weight of Rozanov staring at him. He felt the tug of recognition as he pretended not to understand. There was always an impulse around Ilya to make sure he was on his game — that he wasn’t limping or favoring a hand or breathing wrong. To make sure he hadn’t taken a particularly bad hit at practice.
Hockey was more fun when Ilya Rozanov played his best game against Shane. At least, that was what he told himself to avoid admitting the truth. He didn’t want to think about the other reasons he might feel a pull to check on Ilya.
Shane hated that impulse.
He also never ignored it.
Fine. So he broke rule number three again. Sue him. One more violation wasn’t going to kill him. Probably. As long as Ilya still played a good game.
By the time he got to the visiting locker room, he already had five messages from Rozanov. Each one was a different variation fuck off. There was even one in Russian, though the only word Shane actually recognized was idiot.
He pushed off responding for longer than he should have. The teasing was fun, but he knew Ilya would be a disaster on the ice if he felt ignored. And he — both of them — wanted to strap nothing but their best, boldest, and meanest selves into skates. So ten minutes before he was supposed to hit the ice, Shane was grinning at his phone like an idiot and telling Ilya Rozanov to make sure he brushed his teeth after the game.
And that — that was why rule three existed.
**
The Injuries
Shane couldn’t tell you when it started. Maybe after the draft. Maybe in that hallway in Montreal. Maybe the first time he’d checked Rozanov into the boards while Rozanov chirped in Russian, laughing into Shane’s ear like the whole league didn’t hate them for stealing the spotlight.
But sometime in their second or third year as “rivals,” Shane noticed that Ilya watched him as closely as he watched Ilya.
It wasn’t the kind of watching people thought it was. Not the “I’ve studied every game you’ve ever played so I can destroy you on the ice” kind of watching. Not the rivalry kind.
It was… softer. Delicate. Dedicated.
It was the kind that meant when Shane took a hit to the ribs and pretended he wasn’t hurting, Ilya skated around him in half-circles like a shark that could smell it.
At first, Shane didn’t know how to deal with that. It felt too big for whatever the two of them were doing. Back then, Shane wouldn’t have even called them friends. He barely knew anything about Rozanov besides the way he kissed or the way he laughed against his throat.
When it first started happening, he didn’t know if Ilya had siblings. He didn’t know Ilya’s favorite color. He didn’t know whether Ilya preferred carrots or peas.
After a while, all those things felt like easy answers, and the watching stopped feeling so monumental. He wasn’t exactly sure when the shift was, only that it happened. They went from strangers who had sex to something more than friends, and the watching wasn’t Shane’s biggest concern on the ice.
Ilya was.
So Shane learned how to answer those unspoken questions whenever he got hurt, because it meant Ilya got his head back in the game.
He would nod if he was okay, tap his stick if he wasn’t. He would flip Ilya a very enthusiastic middle finger if he needed him to stop looking at me before someone notices us, you lunatic.
He shouldn’t have done it. He definitely shouldn’t have kept doing it.
But some rules broke themselves, and he wasn’t just going to ignore it after responding for years on end. At this point, the check-ins from Dr. Rozanov, M.D. (Medical Disaster) were basically part of the routine Shane had so meticulously crafted for himself. If he didn’t respond, he had no doubt in his mind that Ilya would do something stupid like skate over to the bench and ask out loud.
He told himself it was safer to keep the routine going.
Besides, the only person close enough to notice was Cliff Marlow. If he expected anyone from Boston to notice Ilya’s bizarre behavior, Marlow wouldn’t be it.
Marlow was a good player — reliable, tough, deceptively observant of plays — but he was also the kind of guy who named his dog “Dog.” He was not going to notice what Ilya was doing, and if he did, he wasn’t going to jump to oh, those internationally famous hockey rivals, best players in the world, are totally sleeping together and have been for seven years just because he noticed Rozanov circle the ice a few times.
Shane figured it was fine. They were fine.
**
Face-Off
Shane didn’t speak Russian. At least, not well.
He knew Ilya’s chirps. He knew the vocabulary with a cadence of river-over-rocks that came out between clenched teeth and hot breath at the face-off. He knew the tone of Ilya’s voice when he was angry versus when he was… something else.
Shane knew most of the Russian Ilya used in bed. He knew the terms of endearment pressed to his neck in the morning when Ilya was still bleary-eyed and waking up. He knew playful phrases that Ilya had taught him over breakfast when they had an entire day to lounge around in nothing but their socks and underwear.
So when Ilya leaned over the dot at a Montreal face-off and muttered something that absolutely did not belong on the ice, Shane felt his ears burn. Because those words were meant for Shane alone. Those were socks-and-underwear words.
And Shane did the single dumbest thing he could have done in that moment: he started fucking blushing. On the ice. At a Montreal home game. In front of both of their teams, thousands of fans, and God himself.
Ilya had never been subtle, but Jesus Christ, he could have given a guy some warning. There was always some kind of flirting between them at a game, but usually it wasn’t that.
Cliff Marlow was staring at Shane over Ilya’s shoulder, wide-eyed, and Shane knew he’d heard something. Luckily, Shane also knew Marlow didn’t speak Russian, which was the only thing currently saving his life.
Ilya had the audacity to smirk at him, half proud and half smug, as if he’d scored a hat trick without even lifting his stick. It should’ve been annoying, but Shane hadn’t found Ilya annoying in a long time. Even when he was annoying, Shane never actually felt irritated. Not anymore. Sometimes, he wished the irritation would return in moments like these.
Shane shook his head and snapped, “Asshole,” because there were cameras and teams and rules that they kept breaking. Not just his own rules, by that point.
But the damage was already done. Marlow was looking at them like he’d just been handed the answer key to a very stupid test.
Shane could already feel his stomach dropping. He had felt that before, and he knew what it meant. They — read: Ilya — had never been subtle, but it felt particularly awful that it had been Cliff fucking Marlow to figure them out next.
The puck dropped half a second later, and Shane didn’t have the chance to spiral about what he was pretty sure had just happened. There was hockey to play, and if Marlow had any plans to say something, it wouldn’t be until after the buzzer.
Ilya could tell something was off that night. Despite months apart, they didn’t even have sex. They ate dinner and then crawled into bed because Shane felt sick about it. He couldn’t even bring himself to tell Ilya why he was panicking.
Marlow never said anything. Not that night, not the next day, and not months later. If he had seen something, he would’ve said so. That’s what Shane kept telling himself.
You didn’t need to be a genius to know Rozanov was an asshole. If he muttered something in Russian, odds were good it was something snarky. So Shane let himself believe Marlow hadn’t noticed anything — and that his own reaction hadn’t confirmed it.
**
The Fighting
Shane wasn’t a fighter. He didn’t even look like one. Fans had made entire meme compilations about how little he fought during games. Ilya’s favorite was a picture of Shane on the bench labeled “WARNING: will cry if punched.”
Fair. Embarrassing as hell, but fair.
It was the one part of hockey that Shane didn’t obsess over. Other players fought each other. Once every few games, a fight would break out and someone would get a black eye. It was normal, but that didn’t mean it had to be him. Shane was perfectly content with his bruised ribs from checks against the board, or his broken nose from taking a puck to the face.
He let Hayden and JJ do the fighting, and he stayed out of it. He was the brains of this operation. He was the speed that got them two Cups. As much as Shane liked to claim he was a well-rounded player, he just wasn’t the muscle of this team.
He had muscle. Could probably use it if he asked Ilya to teach him how to throw a punch and land it. Fighting just wasn’t his thing. He didn’t like it. Didn’t want to. It wasn’t enough of a rule to make The List (because it was hockey, come on), but if there was an unwritten version…
So when a Tampa player clipped him in the jaw that season and he’d immediately popped back up to swing back with an impulse buzzing along his bones that was very much not in the book, the entire arena assumed he had lost his goddamn mind.
He had.
Taking on a guy of that size was just dumb. Shane left the stadium that night with a black eye, a gash on his chin, and only a vague idea of how many of the punches he’d actually thrown. All he knew was that he’d landed at least one, because his knuckles hurt like a bitch and Hayden had spent the entire night hovering with an ice pack.
The truth was, he’d done it because he’d watched Ilya take a brutal hit the night before — he hadn’t been able to talk to him about it yet. He had gotten a text saying everything was fine, but as much as he loved Ilya, he didn’t fucking believe him.
Even through the screen, Shane had seen the signs: stiff shoulder, tight jaw, the way Ilya started favoring his right side. Ilya had hidden it well, but the hit was nasty. No matter how many times he lied about being fine, Shane knew he wasn’t.
He had taken that fight because Ilya hadn’t been able to. Which was stupid, and dangerous, and exactly the kind of thing he kept telling Ilya to stop doing.
Shane had been on edge the entire game. Everyone could see it. He was playing harder than normal, and one of his goals had been sloppy enough that he wasn’t entirely convinced it should’ve counted. By the second period, he was downright aggressive.
Aggressive Shane was new. Everything he did that night was retaliatory, but Shane Hollander had never done a retaliatory thing in his life, so everyone noticed. Especially Tampa. It was like they specifically started targeting him just to see how far he’d bend before he broke.
Turns out, he didn’t have much room to bend that night.
Hazard had slammed him into the boards, and Shane shoved back without thinking. The absurdly large Tampa player had grabbed him by the jersey before he could skate away, and the next thing he knew, he was on the ice with an ache in his jaw.
The only thing he could think about was: this is how Ilya felt.
And suddenly his gloves were off, and he was back on his feet, and the arena had exploded because Shane Hollander, infamous pacifist, had just started the second fight of his entire career. He knew other players had joined in. He could feel Hayden trying to pull him away by the back of his neck like one might do to a feral cat. Shane never stopped swinging.
Two weeks later, Ilya broke Hazard’s nose.
When he saw the replay of the Boston-Tampa fight, Shane felt a stupid, involuntary warmth in his chest. He wasn’t supposed to like that. He definitely wasn’t supposed to love it. But he knew what it meant, even if the rest of the league didn’t.
Later that night, Ilya had called to tell him he was suspended for two games. He had instigated the fight out of nowhere, and there weren’t any more excuses Boston could make for their captain. Probably because their captain’s only excuse was, “I just felt like punching him.”
It was a light punishment, given the circumstances, but it still meant Ilya had to be careful if he didn’t want to end up on probation. The league was lenient, but not stupid — Ilya Rozanov had made himself a liability that night.
When the fight broke out between Montreal and Boston, Shane’s mind immediately went one-track. It was too soon. Ilya had been a perfectly good boy since Tampa. He played every shift with almost painful restraint because he literally couldn’t afford to screw up again, and Shane was not about to let him screw up now.
Shane could afford to get involved. He hadn’t been suspended — he hadn’t even started his fight with Hazard. If he jumped into this one, most people wouldn’t look twice, but they would absolutely notice if Ilya did.
Shane might as well have gone blind to everyone else around him. He just saw Ilya, who was doing his very best not to get involved and was absolutely about to do it anyway. Those signs were as obvious as his injuries: the twitch of his eyebrow, the roll of his shoulders, the way his lip pressed against his front teeth.
Getting Ilya out of the mess was surprisingly easy. Shane planted a hand against his chest and kept skating, while Ilya half-heartedly pretended to resist. They both knew it wasn’t convincing, but at least the fight caused somewhat of a distraction. It was better if Ilya wasn’t fighting too hard anyway — there was no reason to punish him if he never threw a punch.
**
Cliff:
The second Shane saw the news, he knew where Ilya’s head would be: nowhere near Boston’s locker room.
The loss wasn’t unexpected, but expected pain still hurt. Boston—Ilya wanted the Cup that year more than anyone alive, and losing to LA only rubbed salt in the wound. He must have been devastated.
Privately, Shane wondered if he’d be able to catch a red-eye to Boston. It was only a forty-minute flight from New York, which meant he could be with Ilya by two in the morning. It would take a great deal of lying to his own team, but at least he’d be there to comfort Ilya in person.
Texts never felt like enough in moments like this, and calling only made it worse. Over the phone, he could hear the hurt in Ilya’s voice too clearly. Even when Ilya insisted he was fine, it only made Shane ache more.
He was searching round-trip flights before he’d even taken off his gear. It was dumb, but they had tomorrow off. He could spend the day in Boston if he could come up with a convincing enough reason to abandon his team for twenty-four hours.
Shane didn’t text Ilya first. He never did after a loss. It was easier to wait — to give Ilya the space to make his peace with it, instead of pressing him with questions he couldn’t answer yet.
Even then — even though all of this was normal now — Shane felt a chill crawl down his spine. Something felt wrong. Off-kilter in a way he couldn’t name yet.
And then he got the text:
Lily
Cliff knows.
Shane’s heart promptly stopped beating in his chest, and he looked over his shoulder as if his teammates might be reading it. Logically, he knew none of them would figure it out. There had to be a million Cliffs in the world, and surely none of them would put together that Lily was actually Ilya.
Still, he glanced over his shoulder. Twice.
Cliff. As in Marlow. As in Boston’s alternate captain. As in one of the last people in the fucking league that Shane wanted to find out about this.
Logically, Shane was aware that Ilya Rozanov must have still been hurting from his playoff crash-and-burn against LA. But logic had absolutely nothing to do with how fast he answered in a panic.
Jane
WHAT DID YOU SAY?
The answer took a full three minutes, and Shane stared at his phone as each one of his teammates made their way to the shower. He couldn’t care less that the world was moving on without him — he was here. Stuck on this phone in this shitty locker room in New York, having a minor mental breakdown.
Lily
“He is mine.”
Shane plopped down on the bench behind him, chest tight and throat burning. He stared at the message until the edges of his vision started to blur. He didn’t know if he wanted to scream or laugh or book the next flight to Boston in the other tab. He didn’t know if he should be furious that Ilya had said it or relieved that he finally had.
What he knew — what he’d always known — was that when Ilya Rozanov said something out loud, he fucking meant it.
And Shane Hollander had spent the better part of eight years pretending like he wasn’t in love with the one person in the league that scared him more than any goalie, fight, or playoff game. Eight years of pretending. Of circling Ilya like a planet orbiting the sun, caught in his gravitational pull and just as equally unable — unwilling — to break free of it.
Clearly, they hadn’t been pretending very well — not if Cliff fucking Marlow was the first person in Boston to figure them out. Cliff Marlow, the guy who had literally named his dog “Dog.”
He typed his reply carefully, his fingers trembling too much to move any faster.
Jane
Ilya.
Jane
You didn’t have to do that.
Ilya’s reply came almost immediately, which meant he had definitely thought about this, even if he’d only been sitting with it for a moment.
Lily
I did. Cliff asked. I told truth.
Shane felt his breath catch in his throat, and he had to get it together because he could not be caught sobbing on the bench of this locker room. There was no universe in which he explained that to his teammates. So he sat there, staring at the ceiling while fighting tears, and pretended his world wasn’t pitching below his feet like some kind of Edmund Fitzgerald, Part II.
To Ilya, it was the truth. Not a chirp, or joke, or mistake. Just the truth. One that had probably always existed between them.
For the first time since he’d last had Ilya in his arms, Shane felt himself smile. A small, slightly terrified, real smile. The kind of smile only one very specific, very dramatic Russian man ever seemed capable of pulling out of him.
Shane’s hands didn’t shake as much when he typed his reply this time.
Jane
Okay. We’ll figure it out together.
When he received Ilya’s reply of always, Shane breathed out slowly. Sometimes it was difficult to be with Ilya — to hide and sneak around and pretend he wasn’t seconds away from booking a flight and throwing himself into those arms. But most of the time it just felt like this. It felt light and warm, and those stupid butterflies in his stomach refused to settle.
He didn’t have to even pretend to think about it when he switched back over to the airline’s website and bought his ticket to Boston that night. He would ask Hayden to take him straight to the airport after he showered, and he’d land in Boston just after eleven. Ilya would still be awake by the time he got there — undoubtedly brooding, definitely waiting for Shane’s goodnight call.
Shane broke a rule. Again.
No regrets.