Chapter Text
I Rewind The Tape But All It Does Is Pause
(On The Very Moment All Was Lost).
In the aftermath of having crumbled into a quaking pile of sorrow, sick regret, and exhaustion-heavy bones into a puddle of bitter tears on his own kitchen floor, Shane had picked up the pieces and held a sort of shaky truce with the situation contained inside his skull.
He focused on his game. He brought all the turmoil to the rink and poured himself out every time his skates touched the ice. The game was what he’d built himself up for, and the game was what he would rebuild for here. Momentary distraction couldn’t shake all the hard work he’d put in for his whole life. Every skate, Shane put in the work.
He showed up early to practice shot positions on the empty ice, ran drills when the team showed up, honed his edges on turns sharper and sharper to just shy of the points of failure, pushed to catch improbable passes, shaved away at response times and turnarounds. Everyone drilled shots on the goal, everyone worked for speed and more controlled sprints when they came suddenly, refined their edges, practiced passing in narrow lanes and making lanes where there were none, drilled old patterns and new, over and over, until Shane could see the systems unfold in his sleep because the team had done them so many times. They could probably do them in their sleep by midseason.
Riding the line between working hard and overworking was a delicate balance, but the team seemed to be doing okay. It had felt like dragging a bunch of high-schoolers, enormous ones who groaned and cursed the whole time, through a single suicide drill for only the first month or so. By November everyone had stopped groaning so loudly going into practice, because they were winning. Consistently. It was hard to argue with results, no matter how miserable the process, so no one really tried.
As long as Shane led from the front, the rest followed behind with only a minimal curses on the day they first put on skates. Throughout those rough weeks, Hayden showed over and over again how he’d earned his A; by being the first to jump into a drill, by sticking close to Shane’s heels at the head of the pack, and with his cheerful attitude that blew into the arena with him every time he stepped through the door.
So, Shane led. Every drill, he poured himself into it, pushed for better times, cleaner edges, sharper movement, more pressure on pushing plays, more resilient setups, smoother regathering when the defense fell apart. He knew their foibles, the weaknesses of each pattern, where J.J. would drift on breakthrough sprints, where Comeau would drag on sudden turns in a shift, when Taylor would crash into the attacking zone too soon and get himself in too deep alone, how tight they could run a penalty kill, and how fast they could cut through and score on a power play. He knew their weaknesses, knew his own, and pressed hard to shore them up.
Shane turned the variables over and over in his head, and on the ice, and worked out the pattern equations on a whiteboard. He camped in the tape room and filled page after page on what he could see from his own team, until he had the most complete picture he was capable of capturing for where and when and how and who he could rely on to wheel through the plays Coach Theriault called. And then he turned his attention to the next team they were slated to play, rinse, and repeat.
Pre-season games saw to it that their patterns were refined in response to the strategies and talents the other teams brought to the ice. Once the regular season began in earnest, the Voyagers were sharp and ready to work.
If he studied the tape from the game against Philadelphia that produced Rozanov’s first hat trick of the season a little closer than the rest, it was only reasonable to keep a sharp eye on their division rival. He’d done a slick job with that third goal; a Michigan slipped in from behind the net while the pileup at the front was still trying to figure out where the puck had gone. That deserved acknowledgment. So, Shane opened his messages and sent the only thing he knew for sure how to say, after all the acid he’d spat in Rozanov’s face a month ago.
Jane: Congratulations on the hat trick.
And really, Shane’s anger hadn’t been directed at Rozanov, not back then and not now. He’d just pushed on an open wound in that stupid hotel room, and Shane had struck back like a cornered animal, defensive and desperate to escape so he could crumble alone in safety. The next time they crashed into each other in Boston, he’d know whether he could add one more thing to his pile of broken things.
Grey November, I’ve been down since July.
Some days, the thought occurred to Shane that it was the total lack of control over the whole situation that had grated against him so painfully that it chased sleep away. That there had been no warning, no inkling of the risks, no time to choose what to do. Just illness, then surprise, and then loss. No time to brace for the crash.
Not once had he considered that he would pay for hooking up with his rival with this kind of physical toll and emotional upheaval. The only risk that had crossed his mind about hooking up with Rozanov was maybe an STD. On that front they had been careful, so those were unlikely. They’d been safe. So far as acting out such a bad idea from that very first hookup onward could be safe, anyway.
Except…
Except for the one thing that hadn’t crossed his mind to worry about if a condom failed.
And now, to be so unbalanced still- halfway through the season? It felt both like too long and the blink of an eye, for all the rolling rage and frustration and confused sadness that chased each other around and around inside his skull like angry dogs.
The only place he felt like he had any stability at all was the ice.
As opposed to the beginning of the season, where everything felt dull and cold and muted, it seemed as though all the color and sound had roared back in a few ticks louder, grating and insistent. The moment he’d ground to a halt on cold tile floor of his apartment, the tidal wave crashed over him, and it tossed up all the wreckage in his ribs and his skull into a vast landscape of hurdles to clear and damage to sort through… all while also playing professional hockey. Instead of a soulless, clockwork machine fit for ice, Shane felt like a devouring beast, a leviathan snapping at its own tail, at anything to sate the riot in his heart and head.
It followed him through airports, sat with him outside the gate as nineteen athletes sat or milled around with aimless energy before they crammed themselves into seats that never quite had enough room for hours and hours. The heaviness made a home in his stomach that made the thousands of grams of protein he consumed into something that felt twice as heavy and laborious to choke down. The forceful quiet claimed its territory on the long bus rides and filled his brain with useless static that joined the noise of a coachline behemoth as it rattled down the highways. It buzzed in his bones on the miles he ran on the treadmills in hotel gyms and ached in his lungs with every weight he picked up. No amount of plates he stacked on seemed to match the weight that he carried behind his ribs.
Outside windows and above the winds on city sidewalks and parking lots, the bluest skies took on grey hues. The freshest, most crisp winter air cut through any warmth he’d gathered and swept it all away. That temporary warmth from summer had been so short-lived, five days in distant memory, the motion-capture sunlight that played on a cold, grayscale lense where frost crept in at the edges.
It slipped into changing rooms and traced the line of tape around his stick. In every moment, Shane watched out of the corner of his eye, as he did for power defensemen when he had the puck on his tape, wary and bracing for the moment it caught him off his guard and crashed in to break his soul again.
On the ice, though, it couldn’t catch him. On the ice, it was the game, the snappy air, the scraping of steel and composite across the ice, shouting and the roar of the crowd.
On the ice, Shane breathed and played the game.
On the ice, the Voyagers chewed through every game with a vengeance.
In Colorado, they ground their way into double overtime and won it on a goal that probably shouldn’t have worked, but Shane had been pressured by a set of overzealous defenders into a pass to Pike in a and that was barely there, who had slapped it at the goal, and it had gone in through a space that was nearly not there between the goalie and the post. The look on Hayden’s face had been priceless when he saw that it had gone through.
Shane gritted his way through day-by-grueling-day, forced his brain to bend into studying new film that came with every game, catching out patterns in the next team they were set to play, wracking out new plays to run with the team, new tricks to puzzle and misdirect, digging up old and forgotten plays to widen their options on the ice.
On off days they eked by to pull respectable losses, so said the Assistant Coach. Theriault was effusively pleased on winning days, irritated at the end of losing games, but in his lines everyone could hear the undertone of the playoffs already in his mind. The first team with a chance to contend for the Cup in decades.
Can’t not think of all the cost and all the things that will be lost.
At night, Shane laid down with all the thoughts he’d chased away during the daytime, and he prayed that sleep would find him sooner rather than later. Not that sleep was a reliable escape, but at least dreaming meant the circles under his eyes didn’t get too much worse. Which in turn kept people off his back with more questions about his personal life. At night, he turned that weird hopefulness that he’d felt in those five days over and over in his mind, searched out the whys for all the excitement over something that could have only complicated hockey. Something that would complicate the thing he’d worked to be the absolute best at for his whole life.
One weary 2am after a knockdown-dragout, regulation win against Tampa, Shane figured he might have uncovered the answer. Or maybe part of the answer- 2am thoughts weren’t always the most reliable after all. It was only in those dark, quiet, exhausted hours of sleeplessness that pieces of a lost future formed as partly-assembled puzzles in his mind.
It may have been as simple as the thought of having something solid and reliable from Rozanov to love, since the man himself seemed determined to confuse and dazzle by mercurial turns. And Shane was incapable of not wanting to be in his orbit, perhaps in spite of this, or perhaps because of it. Who knew?
But having a baby with half of Ilya Rozanov to form its soul would give him a more reliable position in relationship with it than he seemed to have gotten with Ilya himself. Those lines would be solid, a knowable outline of relationship for where he stood, like with his parents, except with a little person with Rozanov’s vibrancy and sharp wit and zest for life. A little wild thing with curls and a big laugh and long bones made for running and jumping and playing, ready to soak up all the sunshine, and deserving of every good thing Shane could offer them. A life full of love and adventure, with swingsets and swimming in the lake during the summer, taking them out on the ice in a tiny set of skates, teaching them how to fly across a fresh rink, how to hold a stick and hit a puck, skating with them on days off, dropping them off at school, seeing them with his Mom and Dad in the stands at games…
They would have been grandparents.
He… hadn’t thought about that part.
They would have made amazing grandparents.
Shane’s eyes stung afresh.
In the other bed, Hayden shuffled and breathed deeply in sleep.
He’d been quietly, consistently, as carefully concerned as a rough-handed hockey player could be for the past months. He hadn’t pried, though he probably wanted to, curious as a cat. He hadn’t pushed, even though he probably wanted to haul Shane back into more lively currents of life. Hayden had simply been himself, maybe dialed down one on the enthusiasm, and up a few on the attentive front, and he seemed to always have a reason to hand Shane a Gatorade. Even though it had been months since he’d been sick.
Unfortunately, and corroborated by six research hospital reports and three different Reddit threads, hormones took time to regulate again no matter how a pregnancy ended, which explained many things. And that one very memorable bolt to the bathroom on the way to the locker room one morning seemed to have made a lasting impression on Hayden that his best friend could be on the brink of vomiting and subsequent dehydration at any given moment. Not every moment, just many of them. It was kind of him.
Hayden had carried much of the weight of hyping the team up, and team spirits seemed high, despite how flat Shane felt every time they looked to him, though he did try. He had not shirked responsibilities as captain for morale and engagement or anything, but it took no great deal of self-reflection to see that his manner had been… less.
Somehow they’d taken his serious attitude and matter-of-fact review of their successes as the confidence of a man who could see into the future, like a highlight reel bestowed before the game of how hard they’d worked and how it had been paying off so far, so of course they could do it again. It wasn’t clairvoyance, like J.J. had joked. It was the work. The Voyagers hadn’t lagged in the standings at all, had advanced with a good shot at playoffs, kept good cohesion every game. They’d been doing well. Really well. They worked like they wanted the Cup.
Shane had set his sights on taking the Stanley Cup as he’d sat on Hayden’s couch and watched Rozanov take his victory laps with it raised above his head, grinning and vibrant. He’d decided that very moment that he wanted to taste that very same victory for himself and see whether it was as sweet as it looked.
Now, it felt like the only course open to his reeling soul, to prove that he hadn’t lost everything, that hockey was still his at the end of this misery, still his in the way no other thing in his life thus far had had proven to be. He’d come to this league to win cups, so that was what he’d do. He’d carve out a place for himself to belong, to fulfill the dreams of the little boy who sat on the living room floor and consumed every game that broadcasted like a religious devotee, to play like the next Gretzky, the next Joseph Richard, to be the one to set records and win enough awards to fill a room… and maybe that old dream could fill the new hole carved out behind his ribs.
It was what he had left.
I had a feeling so peculiar, that this pain would be for evermore.