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Ilya has a whole speech planned out.
He has to, because being in Hollander’s presence has a tendency to derail his higher brain functions, and then he’s suddenly on the bed, balls-deep inside Hollander’s ass when he’d tried to tell him that it was a terrible idea to get more involved. Or, worse, is asking him to stay and making him lunch and calling him Shane, which is coincidentally how the last time he’d been balls-deep inside Hollander had ended, too.
So he’d gone for a walk a couple of nights ago, phone in hand, and jotted down phrases and words he wanted to say – We cannot continue this, and We both deserve to live without the burden our rivalry puts on us, and I love you too much to watch you tear yourself apart over the secrecy, to watch you hate yourself for not being able to fall for a woman. The words rotate in his mind as he gets dressed in the visitor’s locker room in Montreal, lie heavily on the tip of his tongue as Hollander skates over during warm-ups, turn to dust in his mouth when Hollander blithely gives him the code to his front door, right there in the middle of the ice.
Ilya watches him skate back to his own bench afterwards, both him and Pike looking back at Ilya. If Hollander (Shane, he still wants to call him Shane) were not so deep into the closet you could smell the lavender on him, Ilya could almost imagine the two of them gossiping about him.
But Hollander has made his life in the closet, and Ilya likes its safe walls well enough, and so he tears his gaze away and shelves the words for later, together with the preemptive guilt over pulling the rug out from Hollander’s feet. He will not be expecting it, Ilya knows, but it will be better this way.
For both of them.
Ilya has a whole speech planned out.
Of course Shane ruins it. That’s his first thought, because everything else is too terrifying to think about. One moment, Shane is stealing the puck from Ilya’s stick, grinning fiercely as he takes off on a breakaway, and the next Shane is on the ice, unmoving.
Of course he ruins my plan, Ilya thinks, more than a little hysterically, and then his eyes catch on Shane’s bare hand, glove lost in his fall, and all he can think is no no no no no.
Shane’s fingers twitch while Ilya is still caught in his litany of no, and that is enough for Ilya to draw a breath, enough for Ilya to form words, like is he alright and tell me, though no one does.
He is pushed to observe from the sidelines, because that is who he is: an observer, the opposing team’s captain, a nobody in Shane’s life as far as everyone else knows.
Which is exactly what Ilya was hoping to establish for good tonight, and suddenly seems like a terrifying prospect.
But is that not exactly why he should be doing this? They cannot be anything else; cannot be anything more than Rozanov and Hollander, rivals.
Maybe, Ilya is lucky and the hit will shake all memories of Ilya loose in Shane’s head.
Ilya hates himself for the thought before it’s fully flashed through his mind. And, anyway, that is not at all how concussions work in real life.
“Anything new from Hollander?” Marly asks him as they’re stripping out of their layers in the locker room.
“How should I know? I am not Hollander’s nurse,” Ilya replies, maybe a tad tetchily, as he slides his phone back into his stall. There are no news from Shane anyway, probably because he is not allowed to look at screens. It has to be that. Ilya still fired off a pls let me kno how u r, spelling mistakes and abbreviations and all.
Marly raises both hands. “Just figured maybe ESPN had anything already.”
“Go look yourself.” Ilya clenches his teeth before he can say anything else, because it had been an accident and Marly does not deserve his vitriol, even if he’d like to tear him apart limb by limb. That is Ilya’s mood to deal with, and he can only hope that everyone else puts it down to their embarrassing defeat. The game had been a wash, both teams rattled by seeing someone of Hollander’s calibre stretchered off the ice. But where Montreal had rallied for their injured captain, the Raiders had fallen apart right alongside theirs, even though Ilya had tried not to let it affect his game.
Yet another reason he should never have let this thing with Shane get this far.
Ilya holds out until the next morning before he makes his way to the hospital. It is not unusual for a player to visit an injured opponent, especially as one captain to another, though it may be unusual for Ilya Rozanov to visit Shane Hollander.
Ilya does not give a flying fuck.
He had had his whole speech planned out, gotten reminded why he had planned it out in the first place… and woken up this morning, refreshing ESPN for any word on Shane’s condition, and known he would not be able to implement his plan without hating himself forever.
And Ilya has enough reasons to hate himself without adding one more to the list.
So here he is, making his way through the hallways to the room a helpful nurse directed him to, and it does not occur to him that Shane might not be alone until he slips into the hospital room and is faced with Shane, pale and bruised but awake.
Thankfully, he turns out to be alone.
“Ilyaaaa,” Shane slurs, and, dear god; he’s high.
Talking to a loopy Shane is endearing and painful and heartbreaking. Over the years, Ilya has seen him full of many emotions: panic and desire and snarkiness, confidence and fear and desperation. He had thought, maybe selfishly, maybe overestimating his own impact on Shane’s life, that he had seen Shane in all his emotions.
In that moment, with the world frozen around their little bubble, he realises that he has never, ever seen Shane without a trace of anxiety. Has never seen him completely, unreservedly happy, until Shane’s face had lit up when he had seen Ilya slip into his hospital room.
It is a very sobering realisation.
And so, when Shane asks him to come to the cottage during the summer, Ilya does not say no.
Ilya knows he should be saying no. The weight of all the words he had prepared before Marly knocked Shane out for the rest of the season rests on his tongue, pulling on his chest. But he cannot.
Cannot bring himself to wipe the smile from Shane’s face, just as he cannot stop himself from brushing his thumb over Shane’s cheek, just below the edge of the bruise.
“Maybe,” he says, and though he knows that is not what he is supposed to say, that it is not what would be safe to say – not with both of them captains of rival MLH teams, not with both of them high-profile athletes.
But Shane smiles, and Ilya is aware that Shane is hopped up on pain killers and thus not in his right mind, but right then, he would do far worse things like give a vague affirmative that he will visit Shane in secret during the summer.
He does his best not to think about what exactly he would do, but he does end up deleting the notes on his phone.
Maybe he will redo them later. But right then, with the memory of Shane’s too-still form overlaid with Shane’s soft voice while they’d been on separate continents, he cannot stand the thought of cutting either of them loose.
Even if he probably should be doing so.