Chapter Text
It only took one bad hit.
By the time Shane registered his body had made impact with the ice, the seething pain already had him in a chokehold. Intermittently, it burned brighter or harder (like pressing down on a bruise), until his vision turned to dazzling stars, but it never went away. There were no rippling waves of agony passing through the injured area, rapidly waxing and waning, like when he broke a bone. Instead, this was a constant, white hot throb which consumed his whole body. Suddenly, Shane knew what it meant to be burned alive, engulfed in flames, every inch alight.
Hours seemed to pass before he realised he was no longer upright, skating circles around the rink, but laid out flat on the ice. That explained why the world around him, lurching violently from the left to the right, didn’t make sense. His field of vision shrunk to a collection of different skates, all lying on their side. No, that wasn’t right. Everyone else couldn’t be standing on the wall, these blurry and looming figures attached to their giant boots. Gravity hadn’t been altered.
Shane must be lying on his side.
When shoes he didn’t recognise came into focus, he heard voices coming from underwater. These were closer to him than the muffled background noise, overshadowed by a loud and sharp ringing, but equally impossible to make out. Vaguely, Shane was aware someone was calling his name in the distance. His attempt to respond came out grizzled and nonsensical, like he was half-asleep. Inside his mouth, his tongue was thick and furry, like he hadn’t brushed for a month.
“We need you to stay awake, Shane.” Said a voice he recognised, but couldn’t place.
Automatically, Shane tried to nod his head and got no response from the muscles required for the movement. His neck seemed to be immobile. There was a flurry of activity at the other end of his body and Shane wondered why nobody was bothering to help him up. He waited for the inevitable feeling of hands on his legs, arms, back. Nothing. Why wasn’t anybody helping him? Were they going to leave him there on the ice?
Someone had removed his helmet — or, perhaps, it had fallen off when he took the hit. Shane wasn’t sure. However, alien hands were fitting him with a new one, which they strapped securely under his chin. It didn’t feel tight enough. Shane worried this one would come loose and slide off when he got to his feet. Childishly, he wanted his Voyageurs helmet back.
Like magic, Shane was slowly but suddenly floating up, up, up towards the ceiling. Now, he was staring at the lights of the stadium and they were impossibly bright. They were blinding. He wondered if his soul was leaving his body, the way he read people who died temporarily had described their out of body experiences. For a second, he allowed his heavy eyelids to fall closed.
“Shane!”
In a fog, he opened his eyes blearily and squinted at the ceiling again. It was sliding rapidly away from him now, moving too quick towards his feet for him to process what he was seeing. Gratefully, Shane noted the lights were dimmer here. A strange face hovering over him was blocking them, like a tree he was using to shelter from the sun. The man’s lips were moving. It took Shane a while to realise the voice saying his name was connected to the same person’s mouth, repeating a string of other words he didn’t register.
It took a strenuous effort for Shane to focus. He wanted to go to curl up under a blanket and go to sleep. Perhaps he was exhausted from flying away from the rink without setting a single foot on the ground. The sound of intermittent clunk-clunk-clunks underneath him made Shane flinch.
“Shane.” The man said, staring down at him intently, “Listen to me. We really need you to keep your eyes open. It’s really important, okay?”
Finally, his brain made the jump and realised the familiar voice belonged to one of the medics at the rink, who shared this man’s face. He strapped up Shane’s arm once, when he fell badly and broke it. His big and intense eyes were scaring Shane. But he made a concerted effort to widen his eyes further instead of shutting them. See? I’m awake. I’m so awake. Hopefully, they would let him take a nap soon.
It was only when Shane’s entire body tilted upwards and he saw the other medics by his feet, he realised he couldn’t fly after all. They had been pushing him along on a trolley, his body strapped firmly into place to stop him escaping. Shane felt mildly disappointed. He was lifted into a new room — no, not a room, a vehicle — and was relieved when the intrusive lights disappeared. Somewhere far away from them, an emergency siren started to wail at full volume.
“Who’s hurt? Is it Ilya?” Shane slurred, “Hey… where is Ilya?”
His words, clear in his mind, came out as nothing more than a series of elongated groans. Neither his tongue nor his mouth were willing to cooperate, flopping about uselessly. Shane realised he no longer had control over either. He expected a surge of panic to slam into his body, like a wave, and was surprised to find he felt oddly calm. Wherever he was going, he hoped Ilya was on his way to meet him there. Maybe Ilya was taking his own car. He had a very nice car.
Someone else was talking to him, their voice humming indistinctly in his ears. Privately, Shane wished everybody would speak normally, rather than purposely being so difficult to understand. How was he supposed to understand what anyone was saying?
Somehow, he forced his head above the water.
“Your toes, Shane.” The woman, who he didn’t recognise, said, “Can you move your toes?”
What a weird question, he thought. Little babies could wiggle their feet. He was a world-class athlete, faster and stronger than the average person. Of course he was capable of one of the first conscious movements humans learned to do.
Like most fans he met, however, Shane decided to indulge her. Had someone removed his skates? He had no idea. Maybe his toes were obscured by expensive synthetic leather. Shane flexed his feet, only to find they were completely disconnected from the rest of his body. Scrunching his nose up in concentration, he tried again. Nothing. He couldn’t move his toes.
Sinking back into his mind, Shane — the perfectionist, the one who spent hours practicing tricks until he perfected them — suspected he had disappointed the woman. Oh, well… His muscles were fatigued, his bones were made of cement. The pain was too much to bear.
Closing his eyes, he let the weight of his useless body pull him down into the ground. The nothingness swallowed him whole. Shane was gone.
-
His sleep was deep and dreamless, as if he was floating endlessly through outer space. For a while, he existed outside time and space. Every now and again, a sensation would bring him back to his body briefly. There would be the sound of people he didn’t understand talking in gibberish somewhere high above him. Robots made foreign beeps and clicks, which made less sense still. He became aware of an unpleasant, metallic taste in his mouth. But Shane was scarcely aware of these sensations before he felt himself slipping away into darkness again.
Hearing unfamiliar voices again, Shane pushed himself upwards. He was swimming to the surface of the ocean, kicking against the oppressive weight of the water pushing him down. Forcing his eyes open was a serious strain. When he surfaced, he was in a white and grey room, which seemed vast and endless. If Shane stretched his arms out as far as possible, he would never reach either wall. His immediate thought was this isn’t my bedroom.
There was movement at his side. His next thought was Ilya?
“Shane? Oh my god, Shane. He’s awake again.” It was his mom’s voice.
His vision was hazy, the way which usually meant he had a smudge on his glasses. He tried to wipe it clean and found he wasn’t able to lift his arm. Somebody had strapped it to his chest. The other arm was attached to a long line, which trailed up to a bag of fluid hanging above him.
“Don’t overwhelm him, honey.” His dad was there too.
After a minute of squinting against the shine of the overhead lights, Shane managed to bring them into focus. He wanted to burrow under his blanket and return to his peaceful sleep. Not only was he more tired than he had been in his entire life, this room was far too bright. It made his stuffy head sting, as if someone was shining a torch right into his eyes.
His parents looked equally as tired, like they hadn’t slept in several days. Beside his bed, his mom was seated on a plastic hospital chair and holding his hand between both of hers. She was careful not to disturb the IV drip taped below his knuckles. His dad was leaning forward, elbows resting on his knees. Shane recognised the pose from when Ottawa played badly and his dad cradled his head in his hands with despair.
Why were they looking at him like that?
“Is someone sick?” Shane tried to say.
The words came out slurred, so he had to say them slowly and overemphasise every syllable. He sounded ridiculous. Despite his efforts, it took three attempts to get his parents to understand the question, like they were playing a terrible version of charades. His mom took a breath, rubbing circles into the back of his hand with her thumb.
“Shane…” She said, purposefully, “You took a nasty hit to the head.”
From the tone and pace she was using, Shane could tell she had rehearsed what she was going to say beforehand. He was too distracted by that thought, imagining her practicing in the mirror ahead of time, to process what his mom told him. Shane hated when she talked like that. It made him feel small and stupid, like a child who didn’t know anything about the world.
His parents were looking at him expectantly. Had they asked him a question?
“I’m sorry, what?” Shane frowned.
Everything was starting to look fuzzier than before. Sleep yawned wide open, ready to take him the second he stopped actively fighting it. There was a weird taste in his mouth. There was a faint ringing in his ears, like the screeching sound tires made when a car screamed around a corner at top speed. Although his eyes were open, his brain was off-line and he was drifting away.
Leaning closer, his dad started to say something else. Whatever it was, the jumble of words didn’t make any sense to Shane. They were nothing more than sounds falling from his mouth. When Shane blinked, eyes closing momentarily, he didn’t have the energy to force them open again. Sleep was devouring him. He stopped struggling and let it take him away.
-
Life continued to pass by in brief, drowsy moments. Shane’s world was compressed into snapshots of time, taking place in the same hospital cot, with his mother or father perched anxiously beside him. Sometimes, it was a nurse. He had no idea how long this period of sleeping through life lasted. A few days, he suspected. Hoped. It couldn’t be longer than that, not in the middle of hockey season. He couldn’t wait too long before returning to the ice.
His key doctor, Dr Noguchi, wouldn’t talk to him about hockey. Instead, she used phrases like “diffuse axonal injury” and “damage to white brain matter”. Shane was too sluggish to grasp what she was trying to tell him. Dr Noguchi showed him a scan of his brain, pointing out the affected area. The patch was dark and shadowy, as if there had been a blotch on the lens of a camera when the scan occurred. Shane had no idea when they had stuck him into a machine to scan his brain. Had he been awake for it? What other memories was he missing?
His conversations with the doctor usually went something like this:
Dr Noguchi: Hello, Shane. How are you doing?
Shane: I have a headache, but I’m fine. Will I be able to finish the season?
Dr Noguchi: I think it’s important we pay attention to your health rather than your career.
Shane: So, I’m benched? I’m out of the playoffs?
Dr Noguchi: Let’s focus on your rehabilitation for now.
Soon, he learned nobody was supposed to talk to him about hockey. The nurses who regularly checked his vitals, repositioned his limbs, and emptied his bedpan (humiliating) refused to answer his questions. Shane couldn’t look at a screen without feeling dizzy or like he was going to throw up. Only Yuna dropped hints about how his team was doing. He gathered: not well. Frustratingly, she refused to talk about the Boston Bears and, consequently, Ilya Rozanov.
Aside from hockey, Shane exclusively wanted to talk about Ilya. He couldn’t even text him to let him (except for being bedridden) know he was doing okay.
After a week in the hospital, he estimated, his dad dropped into conversation casually that Ilya visited him. It took everything Shane had to hold himself back, forcing himself to ask with faux casualness when it happened. The day following the game, David informed him, but he hadn’t been allowed into the intensive care unit. Shane fought an urge to throw an uncharacteristic meltdown and, instead, sunk into a wordless depression. He stared at the white wall, unspeaking, until his determined parents gave up prodding and left him alone.
Eventually, Dr Noguchi decided to take a more direct approach when talking to him.
Shane: I’m ready to start rehabilitation. I want to be training again by the Stanley Cup game.
Dr Noguchi: I don’t think you’re listening to what I’m telling you, Shane. I don’t think you want to listen to what me and your parents are saying. You’re burying your head in the sand.
Shane: What?
Dr Noguchi: Do you remember when we talked the damage to your left cerebellum? It’s the part of your body which controls conscious movement, balance, and speech.
Shane: Yes. It’s why my speech sounds so… drunk.
Dr Noguchi: Damage in this area can result in difficulty with movement. In your case, the damage on the left means it will affect the right side of your body.
Shane: I don’t understand what this has to do with me training?
Dr Noguchi: Okay, let me put it like this. Lift your left arm.
Shane: Okay.
Dr Noguchi: Lift your right arm.
Shane: …
Dr Noguchi: Lift your right leg.
Shane: …
Shane. No.
Dr Noguchi: We should talk about your temporal lobe too.
Dr Noguchi: … Shane?
Dr Noguchi: Shane.
-
Two weeks passed in a blur, during which Shane alternated between sleeping and pleading with the nurses for more medication. Previously, when hurt, he was desperate to taper off painkillers as quickly as possible. Often, he bore a lot of pain and lied through his teeth about it, since it meant getting back to hockey faster. Facing a potential career-ending injury, Shane’s drive to recover took a fatal bullet. He wanted to be conscious as little as possible. His head was full of sand.
When he was granted the privilege of watching television, provided he kept the volume down and his eyes shut, Shane didn’t bother tuning in to any hockey games. There wasn’t enough energy left in his body to produce tears. Instead, he listened to baseball, which he didn’t understand before taking permanent damage to his brain. His aching head lolled to the side.
The day before his discharge, the door to his room swung open and clicked softly closed. No doubt it would be his mom with more questions for the nurses about his outpatient care or news about the private occupational therapist she hired. Shane wasn’t interested in talking about either, especially to his mom, who had put on an obnoxious mask of false optimism.
“You like baseball?”
Shane’s eyes snapped open so fast, the room started spinning in a blur. When his vision focused, Ilya stood at the end of his bed, wearing a beanie and a Boston Bears sweatshirt. From here, Shane could smell the ugly stink of nicotine. He must have been smoking in the parking lot. The scent was so reassuringly familiar, he forgot to chastise Ilya for it. Lethargically, Shane noticed the creased lines of his forehead and penetrating worry in his blue eyes.
Body sagging heavily to the right, Shane dragged himself up and rested against his pillows. Moving hurt, as if the strenuous effort it took wasn’t humiliating enough. Reaching for the remote, Shane switched the TV off with a trembling hand. In that moment, he wished Ilya never came.
“You are shaking.” Rozanov observed acutely.
“It’s involuntary.” He said.
Shane hated how the words dripped slowly from his lips, obscured by his heavy tongue and slow mouth. Every time he spoke, the sentence was perfectly clear in his mind. But it got snagged between his brain and mouth, turning into the drawn-out slur of someone who couldn’t handle their beer. Dr Noguchi was optimistic about it getting better with rehabilitation.
Recently, Shane learnt ‘optimistic’ was doctor speak for ‘maybe your condition will improve eventually, but it’s unlikely you’ll ever be the same as you were before’. It also meant ‘there’s a chance you aren’t going to improve and will be like this for the rest of your time on earth’. Most importantly, in Shane’s case, it meant ‘you will not be playing next season’. In fact, Mr Hollander, there’s a chance you will never play professional hockey again. Right now, it’s too soon to say.
The carrot and the stick. His upcoming rehabilitation was the carrot and the stick.
“I came to see you before.” Ilya said, checking to see where his leg was under the blanket before perching on the end of the bed, “But they said you were too bad. No visitors.”
“I wouldn’t have remembered anyway.” Shane reassured him.
He didn’t seem to find Shane’s words particularly comforting, especially when he needed to repeat them twice for Ilya to understand. Quietly, Shane contemplated how much morphine it might take to kill a person. If only there was one way of stashing it in the nightstand.
“Marlow feels very bad. He didn’t mean to hurt you so badly.” Ilya added, “He wanted me to tell you ‘sorry’ until he can come and say it himself. He is… not doing good.”
Where Shane expected to feel anger roar up inside of him — furious at Marlow for putting an end to his hockey dreams — there was a strange emptiness. It was like a black hole existed in his chest, swallowing any emotion he might feel. Perhaps a symptom of the painkillers. Still, he had no desire to stop taking them. Shane finally understood why regular people drank alcohol and took drugs. If he felt the despair or rage buried under the heavy blanket of morphine, Shane suspected it might be unbearable. He might take extreme steps to escape it.
“It’s okay.” Shane mumbled, “Only takes one bad hit, right?”
Again, Rozanov didn’t look reassured by the sentiment. With his good hand, the one which didn’t lie limply on top of his cot like a dead fish, Shane reached for him. Despite everything that had happened, his fingers still slipped seamlessly into Ilya’s, as if they were made for each other. It reminded him of the Ancient Greeks, who thought all humans were split into two at creation and were doomed to spend the rest of their life searching for their other half. Their soulmate.
Shane felt a foggy frustration at being able to remember history lessons from middle school but unable to recall what his dad said to him yesterday afternoon. What was the point?
“You will be okay, though?” Rozanov asked, sounding like he was trying to convince both of them.
Soothingly, he rubbed his large thumb over the bumps of Shane’s knuckles. Unlike the clinical touches of the nurses, Shane felt a tingling spread across his skin. Given his body resembled a stiff corpse and his brain was offline, it was heartening to know he could feel anything at all.
He didn’t know the answer to Ilya’s question. Even Dr Noguchi and his team of experts seemed clueless on what the extent of the damage would be in the long-term.
Instead, Shane murmured: “I was going to invite you to my cottage.”
Tears began to form in Ilya’s eyes as he looked at him, fixated on the bruising Shane’s helmet had left on his face, and he didn’t lift a hand to wipe them away. One of them formed a large drop and rolled down his cheek, falling onto the ‘N’ of ‘BOSTON’ printed on his sweatshirt. If Shane didn’t know better, he would say it looked like Rozanov’s heart was breaking.
Seemingly overcome by emotion, Ilya leaned over his body and pressed a long kiss to his forehead. Shane hoped to feel the same flutter he experienced when his hand was touched, but was disappointed to find he remained numb. Before, he was always the one in their relationship who cried. When Ilya was upset, it made his own eyes leak with empathy. But today, for whatever reason, seeing Ilya’s grief hardened him. He simply didn’t have the energy to sob.
All Shane wanted was to go back to sleep. This world was exhausting and relentlessly cruel, making him desperate for an escape. He wanted to go back to his reoccurring dream: the one where he was skating, endlessly, on a frozen lake in the midst of winter. He was alone on the ice, but free to glide across it forever. As long as he didn’t look down. If Shane dared to look down at what he was doing, he wouldn’t see his feet stuffed into skates, the way he expected to. He would realise the ice was a rolling treadmill and he hadn’t moved at all.
So, when he dreamed, Shane never looked down. He believed the lie he told himself.
“I have to go to Russia.” Ilya said, softly.
No! Shane wanted to cry out, pleading, don’t go to Russia! Not this summer, not now that your father is dead and we might never play together again. Stay with me. Come to my house. We can tell my parents… what, exactly? It was a fruitless fantasy.
“Okay.” Shane’s voice was small.
Before he stood up to leave, Ilya leaned over him and planted another kiss to his forehead, his lips lingering against Shane’s skin for close to a minute. He whispered something in his mother tongue, which would’ve meant little to Shane if it wasn’t for the longing infused in it. Then, Ilya squeezed his hand and set it carefully on the bed, getting to his feet. He walked towards the door and reached for the handle, lurching back when the it opened before he could touch it. To their joint surprise, Yuna was standing in the doorway and holding the door wide. David was visible over her shoulder, mirroring her stunned expression.
“Rozanov.” She nodded, curtly, then directed a confused look at Shane.
As his mom ushered towards his hospital cot, bursting with questions she wanted to ask, his dad stepped forward and held the door open for Ilya. Judging by the way Ilya’s lips moved, he murmured (or mouthed) a ‘thank you’ as he passed. The door dropped shut, locking him outside. Turning back, Ilya cast a look through the panel of glass and made eye contact with Shane.
There was only way to describe the expression on Ilya’s face. He was broken.