Chapter Text
The Water Filled My Lungs.
(I Screamed So Loud, But No One Heard A Thing)
Of all the worst times to get sick, the last bit of summer downtime before training camp could have been the best.
Or the worst.
The thing was, summer downtime left too much time to think, and thinking was all Shane could do. Think and think and think on the most cutting words Rozanov had ever spat in his face. After the Olympic Games ended. After being ignored for half the summer. After a sort-of-apology he probably shouldn’t have accepted, and an invitation he definitely should have turned down.
Overthinking aside, the one thing Shane had not managed to overthink was the quality of the food in his refrigerator, because it seemed to slowly be souring his stomach to even the thought of food.
It had started with mild upset weeks ago, which had slowly, frustratingly graduated to actual upset when he finally got to his cottage and everything smelled horrible, nothing he cooked turned out edible, and his stomach refused to retain anything at all.
Food poisoning or virus?
He figured it would be best to work from both angles, to assume everything in his refrigerator was spoiled, and that he’d caught something intent on turning his digestive tract inside out.
What a way to lead up to pre-season training; exhausted and ill.
Except…
Viruses didn’t last for weeks.
Food poisoning from fresh produce was rare, and he cooked his meat safely.
And that realization was when Shane allowed himself to panic.
And after that hazy stretch of time after, where his lungs felt like cast iron and his heart tried to pound through his ribcage, and once his eyes and head cleared enough to drive safety, Shane was out the door to a drugstore.
The drought was the very worst. When the flowers that we’d grown together died of thirst.
Four positive tests on the bathroom counter. Four sets of bright, unmistakable double lines.
One might have been enough, but his brain insisted on another, then another, because one positive could be a fluke. Two could be a mistake. Three was more solid. But four? Four seemed like the crack of a gavel- a nine month sentence to something he’d never quite considered before.
Male carriers were rare. Rare enough that testing was optional, and nobody had thought to test him.
The first thought that coalesced into words wasn’t one of the doom-filled and panicked ones, but and irrational, “I’ll have part of him with me,” as though that wasn’t the scariest thought to cross his mind since the moment he thought he’d give the biggest asshole he’d ever met his room number and blurted it out while failing to tie his shoes. As though a baby would slot right into his life without any problem. As though nine months and recovery was nothing that could disrupt his career in the top tier of the hockey leagues.
The longer he stared at those four plastic sticks, the more wordless, heavy anxieties spun up… and then that thought broke through the stones in his stomach and turned them into butterflies.
Shane would have a part of Ilya Rozanov to keep.
Days and numbers slotted into place; ten weeks and two days since the last time they fell into bed. Ten weeks and a day of ignorance. Nearly two and a half whole months before the strangest saga of maybe-but-not food poisoning that ended with his whole fridge emptied and refilled days before a late-night run to the drugstore fueled by a day of anxiety and sixteen different internet blogs and articles and medical association studies for a box of tests he hadn’t meant to empty within the same half-hour.
That tenth week crept by in a sickly stretch of wild hope and anxiety and fruitless attempts to eat without hurling it all back up... because since the first positive test, his brain had begun to count each day without any of his intention or permission.
Ten weeks and six days, and then pain and spotting. Nine days before the first optional practice days before training camps started in earnest the next week. The internet said it was normal, not to worry. Eleven weeks and a day. Then more blood, more pain, and clots.
The internet said that was not normal.
I hung my head as I lost the war, and the sky turned black like a perfect storm.
But, there was nothing the emergency room could do except give him painkillers and drugs to speed up the process and a bed to wait it out in. Which seemed like too much trouble to pry himself out of his own bathroom at home for nosy photographers to sniff out and harass him as he bled out the sum of all the dreams that had sprouted in the last five days.
So he didn’t.
He waited it out between the bed, the tub, the floor, the toilet, and vomited into the trashcan whenever thoughts penetrated the physical misery as eternity stretched on and on… until all there was left to do was to shower and numbly scrub away the clammy sweat and blood.
Five days of knowing, six days to bleed it out, and that was the end of that.
There was nothing left to do, when the butterflies turned to dust that covered my whole room.
Shane notified Coach Theriault that he had caught something and would miss the first optional skates of the season scheduled for the early couple days of the week, but that he’d be up at training that Friday for camp like always.
Then he curled into bed and slept the sleep of the wrung-out and miserable. Fourteen hours of dreamless exhaustion in what would be the first stretch in a very long time that his body didn’t function in the rigid schedule it had run on for decades.
Three more days of hazy back-and-forth from the bed to kitchen to couch, watching for the last of the bleeding to slow and eventually stop, reading the last of the latest book of hockey strategy on his list that he remembered almost nothing of by the end.
And then Wednesday came, he showered, meal prepped for the week. Thursday saw all the daily detritus of life from his summer cottage to his apartment by the rink. He set his thing in order, and went to bed. Training camp began on Friday, after all.
Friday dawned, Shane autopiloted through practice, fought lightheadedness like it was an ancient titan to outlast and not the Titanic that tethered his body to the bottom of the frigid Atlantic (because his body was still catching up on replacing all that blood that went down the drain). He pushed off the ice with all the usual power and none of the joy, ground through drills and inched his way from the top line to ahead of it, and he slapped the puck where it needed to go as though every article comparing his play style to a machine built just for hockey had been true.
When Hayden squinted at him and asked how he was doing, Shane breathed what could have been a laugh, but felt more like the gasp of a deflating flotation device, and repeated what had been the broken record off his tongue to coach and the team doc that morning when he showed up to camp with less color in his face than usual. Some variation of spoiled food and a virus steam-rolling him just before camp. “I’m fine, just a little tired still. But I’ll be fine.”
And fine he would be. He'd only vomited once, after and it had been at the rink. Hayden had been walking in with him, normal and easy, filling the quiet with the morning's shenanigans with two toddlers and Shane had listened as best he could with nausea heavy in his stomach.
He'd felt the sick as it began to roll up his throat and bolted to the nearest bathroom. Hayden had followed and hovered and worried as Shane hurled up what must have been his stomach and small intestines at least, though he'd accepted an explanation of Shane's stomach still being sensitive.
Nausea had lingered for days and days, but it had only overwhelmed in public once, which he'd been infinitely grateful for. For how bad he'd felt those past few weeks, the taper off of those symptoms had not been as bad as the internet had said it could be. It made getting shaped up marginally easier than it could have been.
The longer training camp stretched out, the less heavy and wrung dry his body felt. Strength returned, the lightheadedness faded away, and the stone that had begun to live on top of his lungs rolled away in time for the team to gel together like always. They ended camp like a well-oiled clock, striking on time and whirling their circles on the ice in every scrimmage.
And most importantly, Shane reclaimed the ice as the place where his mind did not fight to focus. Instinct and skill reigned with the scraping of skates and tapping sticks. Thoughts didn’t drag with the dry heaviness of every dragging moment outside the rink. It was hockey, and hockey was the thing his body knew best, the only thing tattooed onto his very bones.
It helped that the team this year looked really, really good by the end of camp too. The less superstitious players murmured things about a run for the Cup this year. That sounded nice. It sounded plausible alongside with how well they’d gelled together, how smoothly they’d been running plays together after a summer away.
When his phone pinged in the locker room before their first game against Boston in the Centre Bell, he only spared it the glance of a few moments.
Lily: 832
The Fairmont.
Shane didn’t answer the text. Didn’t intend to go, just left it on read and finished lacing up his skates. Whetted his tongue on the hum of a team geared up for a rivalry game, ready to take Centre Bell ice and show the league that the home of modern hockey still staked its address in their arena.
Warmups pounded out to the excited buzzing of a crowd ready to cheer and boo in turns for the Voyagers and the Raiders: distant and unintelligible to the Captain of the home team before the clock struck with the puck from the linesman's hand.
The first three games of the season had felt like playing through someone else’s body, like he wasn’t totally in his own body. Like autopilot, inputting pre-formulated responses to plays and positions, like an android in a TV show. An android built for hockey and programmed with all the dusty books ever written on the sport.
It seemed to work okay, because they’d won the last two of the three.
He… didn’t think about the first.
Shane’s skates carried him to center ice for the first puckdrop. His head felt both wooden and whirring like the guts of an antique calculator, like an ancient watermill, a clockwork creature weighing and gauging and measuring moments and meters and breaths as he crouched.
Set. Primed. Wound and ready for the key to be let go and the game to begin.
The linesman was talking, but Shane’s ears felt blocked up as he blankly met Rozanov’s eyes.
And then “Hope you play better than you look, Hollander,” cut through the buzzing more clearly than anything else had since he’d stepped onto the ice to warm up.
Shane squinted down, faintly annoyed. Then the next breath of icy air turned the world’s resolution back into hard clarity. The crack of the puck as it hit the ice was the next thing in his ears, and then his legs were moving as colors whirled out of his vision, as he drove the puck down the ice to Pike.
He faintly heard a sharp Russian curse behind him, and the game was on. The machine set free to race down the ice it had been built to own.
Periods passed in a rush and a blur, and in icy lungs and goal horns because Shane was still The Shane Hollander who damn well earned every headline that crowed about his accomplishments on the ice. Because hockey was what he knew better than anything at all, even when he knew absolutely nothing else, and the game was more natural than his very bones and sinew… until J.J. was slapping his helmet after the final buzzer, and shouting in victory, and the rest of the team piled on, wreathed in smiles and raucous laughter.
Distantly, Shane knew his face was pulled into a smile. He knew this because he had seen Pike’s eyebrows crinkle in a moment of worry even as he met Shane’s eyes with the biggest grin, and it had been the effort of a split-second to mirror that grin.
He could feel the cold on his teeth and in the back of his throat as he caught his breath.
For a string of moments, Shane closed his eyes and kept his face frozen in that smile as his team jostled in a knot around him in celebration of a fourth game to add to their win streak only five games in. And for a short time, his heart felt warm in the crush of his teammates.
It couldn’t last. The moments always ended. But beggars could not be choosy, and a moment of warmth was still a moment where the chill didn’t freeze his mind back into the distance between himself and his body.
Later, he would fold back into himself when the fatigue sank into his bones, after a shower, after he put up his gear.
But for a few moments, for the culmination of the spirit of the game he’d thrown himself into since the first day his hands had touched a stick, he listened to his team crow and cheer around him.
For a short space of time, accomplishment elbowed its way to satisfaction from a job well done.
And the rains came pouring down. When I was drowning, that’s when I could finally breathe.
After the game, Shane smiled and demurred his way out of going out with the team. A few good hours of quiet and sleep in his own bed sounded actually divine. His phone buzzed in his bag.
Lily: Come to my room.
Lily: We need to talk.
Maybe it was the uncharacteristic punctuation that moved Shane’s feet away from his own car and into an Uber. Maybe it was the complete sentences that Rozanov had never texted in before.
The Uber stopped in front of a pub a block away from the Fairmont. Shane paid and climbed out, carefully thinking about nothing as he watched it pull away. Then, he turned his feet in the direction of the hotel and began to walk. All the way around the corner and up the sidewalk, through the lobby and down the hall, up the stairs where his legs burned and burned with weariness and exertion and miles of ice that had passed under his feet. Down the hall, past dozens of doors until his eyes hit the right number. Rozanov’s room.
832
He should have known better. Rozanov was always his undoing, his weakness, and this time was no different.
From the moment he stepped over the threshold into Rozanov’s devouring gaze, he felt an new sort of unraveling begin behind his ribs. Like always, those sharp blue eyes saw too much.
“Are you okay?”
Rozanov’s choice of words worked almost like a slap in the face once they registered, an echo of his own earnestness in Sochi, except this time Shane was the one to snap back.
“Don’t start. I’m fine.”
“You do not look fine.”
Of course Rozanov wouldn’t.
“I’ve been fine enough to win tonight. Is this the whole reason you wanted to talk? ‘Cause if it is, I’m leaving.”
Rozanov’s eyes narrowed. “That is not real answer. You’re going to run away? You’re so scared to answer a simple question?”
“Oh, I’m scared now? I’m so glad to know what you think of me.” Shane snapped coldly.
“I don’t know what to think! You play like- like Компьютер in skates, you do not text, you do not talk! Is like you aren’t there, just body walking around and you are away from inside your eyes!”
“I’m sorry you don’t like a taste of your own medicine,” Shane said flintily.
“My own mедицина? I say I’m sorry, you accept it, we fuck, but now you are mad again? That is cheap, Hollander! That is- that is wrong way to be,” Rozanov hissed, lip curled, "-but whatever." Shane clocked the hot frustration like a distant fire through a telescope. Everything felt too far away.
The headwinds of this storm had already bowled over him. He’d felt them, had lived frozen in the space between the first clouds that had gathered months ago and the rest of the hurricane that seemed to bear down on him now. There was nothing to say that came to mind. Every word he knew was lost in the haze of the torrents on the horizon.
Shane stood in the middle of the floor and breathed in the space where Rozanov waited for an answer. He knew this because his knees locked with unnatural rigidness and felt his ribs creak. He registered Rozanov’s face turning the fly-leaf from frustration and anger to the addition of hurt to his blue eyes, only that was distant too.
The only words that came into his head be unhelpful for the situation, only helpful like an escape hatch on a sinking ship, fell off his toneless tongue, “I’m gonna’ go. Good night.”
It felt like a warning in his heart- 'Find cover; fell winds cometh.'
He wasn’t sure if Rozanov said anything behind him. If he did anything. If he shouted or whispered or said anything at all to his retreating back. There was an ocean in the outer shell of his ears, angry and promising devastation. If he didn’t get out immediately, he might crumble on the floor of Rozanov’s hotel room. Which would be unacceptable in the wake of the vileness that had just come out of his mouth, the rotten flinging of things he hadn’t meant to hold against Rozanov back into his face. "Cheap" didn’t cover it. It wasn’t fair. Nothing about the last few months had been fair.
Shane’s boots devoured the blocks of bitter cold between the Fairmont and the Bell Centre. The drive home passed in vague warmth and turning traffic lights.
The turn of the key in his apartment lock and the deadbolt as it thunked in time with his bag as it hit the floor in the foyer were the first sounds that registered in his ears after Rozanov’s charged volley that he had fled from.
His boots, he toed off in a rush retreat further into the apartment; his coat, he dropped in a heap on the mat.
On the floor of his kitchen, Shane sat against the cabinet doors and quaked like his mother’s China hutch during a thunderstorm; fragile in the perilous shaking, all his ribs rattled ominously, echoing in old breaks and the night’s bruises.
It felt like drowning, like the euphoric release after your lungs filled with water and all you could see was the light on the top of the water. It felt like doom. It felt like the high tide coming in to wash him away.
Instead of drowning in a sea of his own tears, Shane wept a puddle on the floor in a heap from where he'd slid down at some point. Wept for that wretched, fleeting hope that pried its way through his ribs all those months ago that maybe he finally had a piece of Ilya Rozanov he could keep with him.
Rationality had had no part in those five days of wild oscillation between fearful disbelief and frantic hope that clawed its way into his heart to do battle with every anxiety-fueled whirlwind in his mind. That doomed, winged hope that fluttered in his heart for those five days had been the most terrifying feeling. It had almost felt like a cosmic joke. And the punchline was almost poetic in how polar opposite it was to the highs he’d experienced, and almost like he should have expected it. Like he should have laughed in tandem with the crowd of thoughts in his head when the moment of realization hit that he was losing… because of course he could have only one good thing at a time. He had his dream job, and sometimes he had a few stolen moments with Rozanov. More would be greedy. Wanting more was asking to be the butt of the joke.
Except he hadn’t laughed.
It had been the opposite of funny. The moment a little blood crossed the line into way too much- it felt like his heart collapsed into itself like a black hole, like the end of a supernova, like those few days had been the last bright flash before the consuming darkness. It felt too monumental a thing for a simple seeping of blood. And pain. And horrifying things he never wanted to think about again.
The tears that had squeezed out of his hot, aching eyes then had been few and bitter, no more than the watering as he gritted his way through physical pain, and his heart had felt stunned and stupid and numb in the aftermath.
There was a puddle of tears on the floor beside his head as he lay on the cool floor, boneless and exhausted. The kitchen light reflected in it.
Finally, after all those dry-eyed, dull months, he felt washed out. Like permission to mourn a whole life that never got to be lived had finally been granted. For himself, for the loss of something his heart had latched on to far too quickly, for a whole person he would never meet, for all the plans he never even got to make, for all the things he never figured out he needed to buy for a baby… for the awful suspense of thinking of how on earth to tell Rozanov and what it would be like to wait for his response. Except there was nothing to tell. There hadn't been for months. Just five days of eternity encapsulated itself in the sorest spot of his heart.
It was like his heart and mind had been disconnected for all these months, and only just had gotten plugged back together again as he fled Rozanov's hotel room. Everything felt washed out now, like a moment of calm in the eye of the storm. Like a crypt ripped open by the hurricane and everything inside swept away. Or maybe it was over. No way to tell yet.
Shane sniffled. Sighed. Pushed himself up to sit back against the cabinet. He sighed again, and sat there breathing until his eyes struggled to stay open. He took a deep breath and pushed himself off the floor to stand, shuffled back to the foyer and hung up his coat, straightened his boots, picked up his bag and carried it to his room. He brushed his teeth, peeled off his sweats, and rolled into bed without even emptying his bag.
The last thought before sleep took him was that it would still be there in the morning.
Morning could worry about itself for once.
And when he woke again, the days and their duties waited patiently for Shane Hollander to get to work. Work was one thing Shane Hollander knew how to do.
*And by morning, gone was any trace of you… now I think I’m finally clean.*
Translations (according to Google):
Компьютер - computer
mедицина - medicine