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Violence typically solves nothing, except, on the rare and necessary occasions, it solves everything.
The rivalry between Ottawa and Montreal was new and vicious, and made the centuries-old one between Boston and Montreal look like two toddlers arguing over their favourite red crayon.
The air was charged. The fans of each teams were chattering excitedly. They were out for blood, fans of each team pressed against the glass, hurling insults across the divide. Ottawa fiercely defending their new centre, Shane Hollander, while Montreal saw his move as an act of betrayal.
Everyone thought Ilya Rozanov, 'Sexy Russian Professional Menace' would be the one who fulfilled the request for violence after defending his husband, or Troy Barret, 'Reformed Asshole' would be the one swinging for his teammate's honour. So referees and coaches made a silent agreement to keep an eye on them, while fans decided to only encourage the two.
This train of thought was common. Reasonable. Expected. Because Shane Hollander, 'Canada's Golden Boy' doesn't fight.
Throughout his entire career, no one seen it. There was the one incident with Scott Hunter, years back, but no blood, and no injuries occurred so it was considered to be a 'heated argument,' certainly not a fight. The whole thing ended in handshakes and a joint apology so sincere it made the highlight reel for 'playful chirping' So a simple conclusion was made. The 'Prince Charming of Hockey' who made friendly, kind, playful chirps — the kind that made other players laugh, rather than rise to anger — simply wasn't built for fighting. He needed someone else to protect him.
Everyone thought this. Montreal. Ottawa. Coaches. Referees. Even Ilya thought this, and he slept next to the man.
No one expected Shane Hollander to be the reason the new Montreal captain was leaving the ice on a stretcher.
So. What the hell happened?
A week earlier.
Friday morning practice, early in the new season. The warm-up laps became a race (as they always did) with Shane winning by a hair and Ilya loudly accusing the love of his life of cheating.
Coach Wiebe split the team into two. Forwards on shooting and passing drills, defence-men working with Hayes on marking players. Mundane. Professional. Fine.
Except Ilya was furious.
The NHL (bastards that they were) had been scheduled Ottawa against Montreal. Ottawa's first game of the season. They knew exactly what they were doing. The discourse was going to be wild, the ratings were going to be enormous, and the players were going to have to deal with the fallout.
Seriously the NHL were assholes.
They were in position, ready to start the practice drill, when Dykstra piped up.
"If we pretending to be Montreal, does that mean we should be massive dicks to Hollander, and try to beat him up then?"
A few players laughed. Shane himself scoffed and kept his eyes on the ice. But the comment cast Bood somewhere deep in thought, and after a moment he made a sudden and very important announcement.
"Wait, he's right. Montreal is going gunning for Shane, should we teach him to block a punch at the very least?"
The practice suddenly forgotten. Players skated from their positions into a growing huddle, with everyone talking at once. Can you teach a fighting crash course in a week,and what would that even look like? Someone said something about drilling jab techniques. Coach Wiebe, rather than shutting it down, drifted over himself and started nodding along, adding his own suggestions.
Ilya went very still as he realised that in all his frustration about the upcoming Montreal game, the idea of teaching Shane to throw a punch had never once occurred to him. He found himself making rapid promises to the team that he'd run drills at home every night until the game.
Shane, meanwhile, stood slightly outside the huddle with an expression of very patient boredom.
"While I'm deeply touched," he said, raising his voice just enough to cut through the noise, "could we possibly get back to practice? I'd much rather humiliate Montreal with goals rather than with how many teeth we knock out."
The team all turned at once with the sound of his voice like meerkats looking out for danger.
Coach Wiebe coughed once, and everyone turned once again and suddenly found themselves very interested in the ice. Wiebe skated over, Ilya beside him.
"Listen, kid. You're a damn good player, the best I've seen, if I'm being honest. But you probably hold the record for the longest a NHL player has gone without dropping the gloves. Montreal is going to play dirty. Rozanov can show you a few things. Nobody here is doubting you. We're just—" He paused, carefully choosing his next words. "—worried about you."
Ilya found himself quickly nodding his head.
"I agree. Let me. I don't want you getting hurt." He said it simply, because it was simply true.
Shane looked at the two of them, his husband and his coach, and smiled. It was a warm smile, the kind that made Ilya just melt, but had he looked closer and he would have seen there was something behind it. Something knowing.
"We can't sink to their level, and trust me. I can handle myself if they decided to play dirty." he replied with almost something akin to mischief in his eyes.
Ilya opened his mouth to ask what exactly that meant, but Shane had already turned and pushed off down the ice, calling back over his shoulder. "No point teaching me anything if we don't win the game first. Come on." The competitive energy in his voice hit the team like a pistol. Players scrambled back to position.
Ilya stood there for a second, watching his husband skate, turning those words over in his head. I can handle myself. He decided Shane meant he'd score so many goals that fighting would be irrelevant. Ilya would find out he was wrong to dismiss those words.
The night before the game. Their house.
The house was quiet. Anya was snoring in her little adorable dog bed. Yet, in the still-lit kitchen, nervous muttering and pacing could be heard. A cup of chamomile tea, long forgotten. Ilya walked in, and briefly considered scaring his husband out of his trace before he realised this required a serious conversation.
"Shane."
He paused, blinked. "Hey."
"You've been in here for forty minutes." Ilya came around the counter and stood beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched. "Trying to get your steps in or something?"
"I was thinking."
"Yes. This I could see." Ilya took the mug, set it in the microwave, pressed thirty seconds.
"Talk to me." Shane was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, he kept his eyes on the counter-top.
"Do you remember the first time you played against Boston? After you moved?"
Ilya did remember. He didn't particularly enjoy remembering. "Yes."
"What was it like?" Ilya thought about how to answer honestly. "Like I didn't care that I had moved from best team to worst team. Like I had to prove I could make this team the best as well. Both at the same time. It was exhausting."
Shane let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that's—" He stopped. "Montreal didn't even fight to keep me, Ilya. They made it very clear that they thought I was the problem. That the team would be better without me."
He paced once more and then took his position next to Ilya again. "What if they were right? What if I go out there tomorrow and I'm…ordinary? What if I'm ordinary and everyone sees it?"
Ilya stared at him. "You," he said slowly, "who won the Art Ross two years running. Who has more assists last season than anyone since…I don't know, someone old. You are worried about being ordinary."
"Statistics don't—"
"Shane." Ilya turned to face him fully, put both hands on his face. "Listen to me. I am not saying this because I am your husband and I love you, although I am your husband and I am very much in love with you. I am saying this because I have played against you, and I have played with you, and I have watched you take a game that was lost and then win by simply deciding that it wasn't over yet." He searched Shane's face. "They didn't drive you out because you were ordinary. They drove you out because Montreal are idiots who couldn't recognise what they had. And tomorrow, you are going to make that very clear to everyone in that rink."
The microwave beeped. Neither of them moved. Shane looked at him for a long moment. Something in his expression shifted. Something calm.
"Okay," he said quietly.
"Okay?"
"Okay." He almost smiled. "Thank you."
Ilya pulled him in, pressed a kiss against Shane's forehead.
"Also, if anyone touches you, I'm going to make it a personal mission—"
"Ilya."
"—just a minor personal mission—"
"We talked about this."
"You talked. I listened politely." He saw Shane's shoulders shake, just slightly. There it was. "Come to bed. You need to sleep, and the tea is a lost cause."
Shane glanced at the microwave. "It really is."
Ilya took the cup out of the microwave, poured it into the sink and gave it a rinse (it would bother Shane if he didn't) and steered his husband up the stairs towards their bedroom.
A few hours before the game. The locker room.
The energy in the locker room was palpable. Everyone excited, everyone buzzing, everyone at least partially considering a crime.
Like bees in a hive who were excited at the prospect of making honey.
Ottawa vs Montreal. First game since Shane's move. Their ice, yes, but Ilya was not naive enough to think Montreal hadn't sent their fans in advance. The fans may have been out for blood, but the Centaurs were already making plans to bury the Montreal team members in a ditch, with a few exceptions of Hayden and JJ.
Comments that toed the line between joke and promise were being thrown around. There were no words to describe how much Ilya adored this team.
"If I were to fall and the blade of my skate just happened to make contact with an artery," Bood mused, with great philosophical calm, "do you think I would be thrown in the box?"
"Hmm, no, but the medics might sink their teeth into you searching for a concussion and so you might be out of commission for a bit." LaPointe quickly answered
"Damn, any more ideas?"
This opened the floor to increasingly creative suggestions, all of which occupied a cheerful grey area between team bonding and conspiracy.
Ilya laughed with the rest of them, but he kept one eye on Shane. Shane was in full gear, apparently on autopilot, his fingers moving through familiar pre-game motions while his mind was somewhere three steps ahead of the room. Ilya gently tugged at his husband's arm, letting him know he was there, and watched as Shane suddenly sprung to life, giving Ilya his perfect media smile that may have fooled others, but Ilya knew better.
"Моя любовь," His voice low, underneath the chaos of murder plans.
"Talk to me."
"I'm fine."
"You said that last night too." Shane stilled and looked at his husband, opened his mouth and then closed it, as if torn between telling him or not. His shoulders relaxed, and Shane leaned over and buried his head into Ilya's shoulder. Shane had decided to let his true feelings show, and it was moments like these that made Ilya's hatred for the Montreal Voyageurs flare up once more.
"I just need them to go home humiliated," he said, quietly. "Not just beaten. Humiliated. I want them to regret it. All of it." A pause. "And I'm scared I'll mess up. That I'll be…off. That I'll prove them right in front of our home crowd."
Ilya was going to kill the Voyageurs. He was just about to reassure his husband and say that Montreal was going to leave Ottawa, scared to come back when Hayes piped up:
"Sorry to interrupt this beautiful lovely, straight out of a romcom moment, but Shane, you were, genuinely, the only thing that made Montreal a threat. You could play in a blindfold with your hands zip-tied and still be the most dangerous person on the ice."
This comment was met with a chorus of agreement, and a 'Hell yeah, Montreal sucks now," from somewhere in the echoey locker-room. Shane lifted his head and blinked. And then he finally laughed and smiled at his team. His new hockey family. Ilya would do anything to have his husband only make that sound for the rest of their life.
He also decided Hayes was his new favourite.
"Hayes is right. But you forgot, we are awesome team who won against Montreal even when you were still with those assholes. With you here now, tonight we become their nightmare. We become the thing they check under the bed for." He caught Shane's eye. "We make them scared to hear Ottawa." Shane looked at him. Full of something Ilya didn't have a word for in English, or Russian. He planted a quick kiss on Ilya's cheek, and turned to face the rest of the team.
"Alright," he said. "But no fighting. I need my team on the ice, not in the box. We win this clean."
"But mum, not even one punch?" Haas teased.
"No, not even one." Shane replied seriously.
Coach Wiebe appeared in the doorway. He looked around at them all, this loud, devoted, slightly unhinged group of people, and something like satisfaction settled in his face.
"Now boys, I know we are all excited for today's match, but I would prefer a nice clean game where we don't make Haris have a heart attack trying to clean up your messes on socials, but if an accident or two happens…well we can offer our sincerest apologies."
"No can do coach, Shane made us all pledge to be pacifists this game." Bood teased with a glance over to Shane
"Well, that's a first. Probably first hockey game to never have a punch thrown." He looks at Hollander with a look of determination, like a general about to send his prodigal solider to war. "Hollander, I want you centreing the first line."
A beat of surprise crossed Shane's face. Then it was gone, replaced by something Ilya couldn't name. Wiebe moved into strategy, voice dropping. The team leaned in. Ilya looked at his husband one more moment. He had a sinking feeling that Shane was hiding something from him.
Something he couldn't figure out.
Apparently, Ilya Rozanov was now teaching a masterclass on how to swear in Russian.
He hadn't planned it. It was just that Montreal kept doing things that required commentary, and the commentary kept coming out in Russian, and his teammates kept skating past asking what that one meant, and now Bood could say ублюдки (bastard) with perfect pronunciation and was using every opportunity to practise.
Montreal weren't just playing dirty. They were just being full on violent. Ilya had never seen this level of anger from the Voyageurs, and that was saying something, given that he'd personally been responsible for a huge part of their fury over the years.
They were shoving. Slashing. Pulling at Shane's stick. Throwing elbows and not even flinching when the referees called it. The penalty box was becoming a second home for them. Every time Shane touched the puck, two of them closed in on him like he owed them money.
It wasn't working. Shane was everywhere. He moved through the chaos like he was operating on a completely different frequency. Calm, precise, a half-second ahead of everyone. Every time Montreal crashed into him, he'd already gone. Every time they thought they had him cornered, the puck was somewhere else. Ilya had played against Shane for long enough to understand his game, and he still occasionally lost track of what he was doing and why, only to watch the play develop and think 'Oh. Of course'.
The Centaurs, for their part, were keeping their promise. Every shove that went unanswered seemed to confuse Montreal more than a punch would have. The commentators were apparently beside themselves. Ilya could imagine the broadcast, "remarkable restraint from Ottawa, truly unprecedented" and wanted to laugh. He was pulled back four times. Once by Troy, once by Bood, once by Haas, and once, memorably, by Shane himself, who simply appeared at his elbow, gripped the back of his jersey, and said very quietly, "Not yet."
Not yet. He should have paid more attention to the phrasing.
Shane's jaw was set. He'd been chewing his gum shield since the second period with the focused intensity of someone who was making a decision about something, and hadn't quite finished making it.
The third period was finishing up. The score was 11-2. Ilya almost felt bad.
Almost.
He looked at the scoreboard and thought: Yikes. Five of those goals were Shane's. Hat trick for Ilya. Two for Troy, one for Haas. Embarrassing didn't cover it. This was the kind of score that got discussed at the end of seasons. The kind that got your highlight reel cut for compassion.
The final whistle blew. The Centaurs converged at centre ice, a tangle of gloves and helmets and shouting. Someone, Bood, probably, deployed ублюдки at the Montreal bench for no real reason except that he could now. Ilya was laughing, arm around Shane's shoulders, when the crowd noise shifted. Not louder. Different. A ripple of something sharp moving through the arena.
He turned. Everett Hardy. New Montreal captain, twenty-three years old, jaw set like a man who'd decided he had nothing left to lose had dropped his gloves. Everything after that happened very fast, and Ilya processed it in fragments.
Hardy wound up his hand and threw a punch at Shane.
Shane moved. Not stumbled, not flinched, moved, with the unhurried shifting of someone who had done this before, had drilled it until it was reflex, had been waiting the entire game for exactly this. He pulled back just enough. Hardy's fist caught air. And then Shane Hollander, 'Canada's Golden Boy,' 'Prince Charming of Hockey,' the man who chirped opponents into laughing at themselves, pulled off his own gloves.
The left jab caught Hardy above the eye. Fast. Clean. A punch that knew exactly where it was going.
The right hook took him across the jaw.
he crack was audible even in the noise of the arena. Then the arena went quiet, because no one knew what to do with what they were seeing, and silence was apparently the only available response.
Hardy went down. Shane followed him. He had Hardy's collar in one fist and was saying something. Low. Rapid. Vicious. None of it in English, some of it French, some of it Russian, definitely learned from a certain source. Ilya stood absolutely still and watched his gentle, patient, endlessly kind husband translate anger of being treated like he was a problem into two precise hands and a vocabulary that would have made Ilya proud under different circumstances.
The knee to the face was perhaps slightly beyond what the situation strictly required.
The second hook to the ribs was almost certainly unnecessary.
The referees reached Shane at roughly the same moment Ilya remembered how to move. They pulled him back. Two of them, struggling with it in a way that Ilya found, against all reason, impressive. Medics appeared from the boards and moved toward Hardy with the brisk, practised urgency of people who'd seen worse, but not often.
Ilya stood between Troy and Bood. He could not have spoken if he'd tried.
"Did you teach him that?" Troy said, eventually.
"Nope."
"Did you know he could do that?"
"Nope."
"Huh."
Shane shook free of the referees and skated over to his team. His expression was still set, the fury not gone. He looked up. Saw the wall of faces staring back at him, shock, pride, and at least in one case something that Ilya recognised as a very specific species of attraction. The fury collapsed into sheepishness with remarkable speed. Shane rubbed the back of his neck. Looked at the ice.
"Guess I took it a little far?"
For a moment, nobody said anything. Oh the locker room was going to be very loud after this.
The locker room. Immediately after.
Loud was not a good enough word to describe the noise.
Ilya had been in loud locker rooms before. He'd been in locker rooms after Stanley Cup wins, after the kind of games that got written about for years. He had never been in a locker room quite like this one, where approximately fourteen people were all trying to have different conversations at the same time and none of them were willing to wait their turn.
Dykstra was re-enacting the fight using his stick as a prop. Haas was somewhere in the middle of a sentence that had started as a question and turned into outrage at this secret being kept from him.
Shane sat on the bench in the middle of it, still half-geared up, and had the expression of a man who had made a choice and was now living with the consequences and finding them louder than expected.
Coach Wiebe appeared in the doorway. The room didn't go quiet. It was incapable of going quiet at this point, but the buzzing was lessened, the way it always did when Wiebe walked in with that particular set to his jaw. He looked around at all of them. He looked at the re-enactment. He looked at huddle of men. He looked, for a long moment, at Shane. He pulled up a chair, turned it backwards, and sat down on it like a man settling in for something.
"Hollander," he said "what the actual fuck? Hardy has a broken jaw, nose and four ribs. I thought you were a pacifist or something."
The room found a hush from somewhere.
"I'm not going to pretend I'm not going to get a very interesting phone call from the league tomorrow morning, because I am." He paused. "I'm also not going to pretend that Hardy didn't throw the first punch, because he did, and every camera caught it, and frankly the boy had it coming for about sixty minutes before that." Another pause, longer. Pride shown through his face. "You played one hell of a game tonight, kid. All of you." His eyes stayed on Shane. "You proved something out there. I hope you know that."
Shane looked at him. Something moved in his throat. "Yeah," he said quietly. "I think I do."
Wiebe nodded once, stood up, replaced the chair. Nodded. He was gone before anyone could respond.
The room exhaled. Troy, who had been quiet through all of it, leaned forward from his spot along the wall.
"So," he said, in the conversational tone of someone asking about the weather.
"The fight." Shane looked at him.
"The fight."
"Yeah." Troy gestured loosely. "Where did that come from, exactly? Because I've played against you, seen you play many, many games and you have never…I mean, you literally made us swear a holy vow of pacifism and then you—" He stopped. Seemed to search for the right word and give up. "Where did that come from?"
Every head in the room turned toward Shane. Shane had the grace to look slightly embarrassed. He unclipped his helmet, set it on his knee, ran a hand through his hair.
"My mum," he said. Silence.
"Your mum," Troy repeated.
"She's a big hockey fan," Shane shrugged, Ilya had expanded his arms out to his full wingspan as if to provide a visual aid. "She knew what hockey was like, and as soon as I told her I wanted to play hockey professionally, she wanted to make sure I could handle myself if someone came at me. Boxing classes. Every Saturday morning from when I was eight until I was sixteen." He paused. "She was very firm about it."
The silence held for another moment. Then the room absolutely erupted. Ilya sat in the middle of it and laughed until his chest hurt, because what else was there to do, really. His husband, gentle, diplomatic, chronically polite Shane Hollander, who once spent ten minutes apologising to a stranger for an accidentally bumping into him, had been quietly carrying eight years of boxing training his entire NHL career and had simply never mentioned it to anyone.
She was very firm about it.
He was going to love Yuna Hollander until the day he died.
Eventually, the noise died down with teasing remarks being thrown Shane's way. Gear came off. Showers running. Plans were being made for afters celebration, and for a fight club hosted by Shane. Ilya showered and changed and waited, and when Shane finally emerged, damp-haired and quiet, Ilya fell into step beside him without a word.
They walked to the car together through the cold.
Their house. Later.
The kitchen light was on. Not like the previous night. Tonight Shane had turned it on deliberately, moving through the kitchen with the expression of someone who was expecting an interrogation.
Ilya sat at the counter and watched him make tea and waited. Shane set a mug in front of him. Sat down across from him. Curled both hands around his own mug and looked at Ilya, waiting.
"Go on, then," he said.
"Your mother," Ilya said.
"My mother."
"Eight years of boxing classes."
"Every Saturday." Shane's mouth curved. "She drove me herself. Watched them. Made notes on weaknesses. Never missed one." Ilya looked at him.
"And you never told me."
"You never asked if I could box."
"Shane."
"I know." He wrapped his hands tighter around the mug. "It never came up. It's not something I wanted to use. I never wanted to be someone who used it." He looked down. "I wanted to beat Montreal with goals. That was the plan. That was always the plan."
"And then Hardy threw a punch."
"And then Hardy threw a punch." A pause. "And I was sick of everyone thinking that I was an easy target in a fight, and so I wanted to give Hardy a 'taste of his own medicine.'" He stopped. "And I thought about my mum driving me to a boxing club every Saturday morning so that no one could ever make me feel small on the ice." His voice had gone quieter.
Ilya was quiet for a moment. Then he couldn't help it, because it had been building since the moment he'd watched it happen. He started laughing. The real, loud, kind, from somewhere deep, the kind that had Shane looking up sharply and then catching it like a spark, both of them laughing in the quiet kitchen while Anya lifted her head from her bed in the corner.
"I am," Ilya managed, eventually, "going to call your mother tomorrow and thank her personally."
"She already texted me," Shane said, wiping his eye. Ilya put his face in his hands, trying to suppress giggles.
"She saw the—"
"The knee, yes. She mentioned the knee specifically." Shane's voice was full of laughter. "She said the follow-through was excellent."
Ilya looked up at his husband. Bright-eyed, loose-shouldered, the last traces of tension finally, visibly gone and felt something settle in his own chest. He loved learning something new about Shane everyday and fall in love with him over and over again.
"You're okay," he said. It wasn't a question. Shane looked at him.
"Yeah," he said. Simply, completely. "I really am." Ilya reached across the counter and took his hand. Shane turned it over and squeezed it.
Outside, Ottawa was probably still talking about it. The sports channels would be running the clip on loop. Someone was already writing the headline. Tomorrow there would be calls from the league, and a fine in all likelihood, and a press conference where Shane would have to explain how he learned to fight, why he never did before, and Ilya was already looking forward to watching that. But that was tomorrow.
Tonight, the kitchen was warm, the tea was hot, and Shane Hollander , 'Canada's Golden Boy,' 'Prince Charming of Hockey,' and apparently boxing champion was okay.
Ilya decided that was more than enough.