Chapter Text
Shane was fast. That was the thing people forgot about him because everything else—the discipline, the hockey IQ, the boring interview answers—overshadowed it. But Shane Hollander was fast. Ilya knew because he had spent a decade chasing him and catching him and losing him again across every rink in the league.
Tonight Shane was faster than usual. First period, twelve minutes in, and he had already stripped Ilya's defenseman twice and put a shot on net that their goalie had no business stopping. The crowd in Boston was loud and unhappy about it and Ilya was on the bench watching Shane's line cycle back to the Montreal bench and thinking what he always thought when Shane played well against him.
Gorgeous.
Not the word he would use in English. Not the word he would use out loud. But in Russian, inside his own head, where nobody checked his vocabulary—великолепный. Shane in full speed was the best thing in hockey and Ilya hated playing against it and loved watching it and could never separate those two things.
Second period. Montreal was up by one. Ilya tied it on a breakaway and pointed at the Boston crowd and did the thing he always did—the show, the celly, the arms out, the grin. He looked at the Montreal bench on the way back. Shane was drinking water and not looking at him. Shane never looked at him after a goal. Ilya had asked him about it once. Shane had said "I don't want to react wrong on camera." Which was the most Shane answer in the history of answers.
Faceoff at center ice. Ilya lined up across from Shane. Close enough to talk. Close enough that the cameras would catch whatever they said and the lip readers on Twitter would have it translated in twenty minutes.
"Lucky goal," Shane said. Not looking at him. Looking at the ref's hand.
"Skill goal."
"You went five-hole on a goalie who's been cheating left all night. Everyone in this building saw it coming."
"And yet he did not stop it."
"He will next time."
"There will not be a next time. I will do something different next time."
"You always say that."
"And I always do."
The ref dropped the puck. Ilya won the draw, pushed it back to his defenseman, and drove wide. Shane matched him stride for stride down the left side. Fast. Ridiculous fast. That gear Shane had that shouldn't exist on a player his size but did because Shane Hollander trained harder than anyone in the league and never let anyone forget it.
Ilya dumped the puck into the corner. His winger chased it. Shane peeled off and swung back to the slot. Standard coverage. Textbook Shane—always in position, always where the play needed him, never a wasted stride.
The puck came back to Ilya at the point. He faked the slap shot—watched Shane drop to block—and passed cross-ice to his other defenseman. Shane was up instantly. Not fooled. Already recovering. Already reading the next pass before it happened.
"Predictable," Shane said, skating past him.
"I moved you out of position."
"For half a second."
"Half a second is enough."
The play cycled back to Montreal. Shane's line controlled the puck for forty seconds—cycling, moving, working the perimeter. Ilya backchecked hard and tied up Shane along the boards. Close. Shoulder to shoulder. The kind of contact that happened fifty times a game and meant nothing to anyone watching.
"Get off me," Shane said.
"Win the puck."
"I have the puck."
"You have the puck against the boards. This is not having the puck. This is being stuck with the puck."
Shane drove his shoulder into Ilya and pushed off and fired a pass to Hayden at the blue line. Ilya lost an edge, recovered, chased and the play moved on.
They were lining up for another faceoff when it started. Not them. Behind them. Boston's fourth line and Montreal's third line had been grinding on each other all night—small stuff, sticks in the ribs, gloves in faces after whistles. Ilya had noticed it building the way he noticed everything on the ice. He just had not cared because it was not his problem.
It became everyone's problem when Kowalski—Boston's six-four enforcer—cross-checked Montreal's Dubois into the boards and Dubois came up swinging.
Gloves off. The linesmen were late. The crowd was up. Both benches were standing. Dubois got a hand free and caught Kowalski above the eye and blood opened up fast and bright against the white ice.
Ilya watched from the faceoff circle. Didn't move. This was not his fight. He had been in enough fights to know which ones mattered and which ones were pressure valves. This was a pressure valve. Two guys who had been shoving each other all night finally running out of patience.
Shane was next to him. Also watching. Arms crossed over his stick. That expression he got during fights—assessing. Reading. Calculating.
"Your boy started that," Shane said.
"Your boy answered it."
"Kowalski's been dirty all night."
"Dubois has been asking for it."
"He cross-checked him from behind."
"And now they are fighting. Problem solved."
"That's not how problem-solving works."
"In hockey it is."
The linesmen pulled them apart. Both guys went to the box. Blood on the ice. The zamboni crew came out with scrapers. The crowd was still buzzing. The arena had that energy—the charged-up, loud, unpredictable energy that came after a fight. Everything dialed up a notch.
"Five minutes each," Shane said, reading the penalties on the board.
"Fair."
"Kowalski should have gotten an extra two."
"Dubois threw the first punch."
"Dubois responded to a cross-check."
"First punch is first punch."
"That's a terrible interpretation of the rules."
"I am not an interpreter. I am a hockey player."
Shane looked at him. Quick. That micro-second where the mask slipped—the smallest crack, nothing anyone on camera would catch, but Ilya caught it because Ilya always caught it.
Then Shane turned back to the faceoff circle and the mask was back.
Play resumed. Four-on-four with both enforcers in the box. More ice. More space. Ilya loved four-on-four because it opened everything up—more room to skate, more room to create, more room to be the player he knew he was without traffic clogging the lanes.
Ilya knew Shane loved it for the same reasons. He shifted gears the second the puck dropped—faster decisions, quicker releases, that extra half-step of speed he saved for open ice. They traded chances for two minutes. Shane hit the post. Ilya forced a save. Shane stole the puck from Ilya's defenseman and went in alone and the goalie robbed him blocker side.
"Good save," Ilya said to his goalie on the way past.
"Stop letting him through," his goalie said back.
Fair point.
The clock hit fourteen minutes. Penalties over. Full strength. Montreal cycled the puck down low. Shane was behind the net. Puck on his stick. Head up. Looking for the pass. Moving east toward the half-wall.
Shane sent it up to Hayden at the blue line. Hayden one-touched it back down to the corner. Shane was already moving to retrieve it—full speed, cutting behind the net on the short side, angling toward the half-wall where the puck was bouncing off the boards.
Kowalski was out of the box.
He came from the blind side. Shane was reaching for the puck. His head was turned. His weight was forward. Everything open. Everything exposed.
Kowalski did not slow down.
And then—
The sound carried across the rink: not a normal hit—not the thud of shoulder into chest, body absorbing body, two players separating and skating on.
No—this was wrong. High. Hard. Kowalski's shoulder into the side of Shane's head and Shane's head into the glass and then fast to the ice.
The whistle blew.
Shane did not move.
Ilya stopped skating. Ilya stopped everything; breathing, thinking, heart beating.
He was at center ice. Sixty feet away. He could see Shane on his side against the boards. The puck sitting two feet from his stick. His gloves still on.
Shane did not move.
Ilya’s heart hammered back to life fast, his body hot and mind racing and nothing else around him registering as his eyes stayed trained on Shane, not moving. Not moving an inch. Not moving at all.
The trainers came. Two of them, then three. Running on the ice in sneakers, sliding, grabbing the boards for balance. They crowded around Shane and Ilya could not see him anymore. He could see the trainers' backs and the ref talking into his radio and Hayden standing three feet away with his gloves off and his helmet pushed up and his face doing something Ilya recognized because Ilya was doing the same thing behind a mask.
The arena was quiet. Twenty thousand people and nobody was making a sound. Ilya gripped his stick with both hands and stood at center ice and watched and did nothing because there was nothing to do. There was nothing he was allowed to do.
One of the trainers stood up and waved toward the tunnel. The stretcher came out.
Ilya's legs went numb. He did not move. He did not skate forward. He did not drop his stick or pull off his gloves or do any of the things his body was aching to do.
He stood at center ice and watched them roll Shane Hollander onto a stretcher and strap him down and Shane did not move.
Shane was not moving.
Shane was—
Ilya swallowed, his hands starting to shake, then his arms, his legs—one skate slid forward on the ice without his permission; he stumbled, straightened fast.
Shane was not moving.
The crowd started clapping. That sound—the slow, heavy applause that meant a player was hurt and everyone in the building knew it was bad. Ilya tapped his stick on the ice. Two taps. He heard other sticks around him. Both teams. Tapping.
They carried Shane into the tunnel. His eyes were closed. His arm was hanging off the side of the stretcher until a trainer tucked it back. The tunnel swallowed him and then he was gone and the ice was empty where he had been except for the puck and the scuff marks and a small streak of something on the glass that Ilya was not going to think about.
Shane was not moving.
The ref skated to center ice. Five-minute major. Game misconduct for Kowalski. The ref said something to Ilya. Ilya did not hear it. He nodded because nodding was the correct response when a referee spoke to you and he had been playing hockey long enough that his body knew the correct responses even when his heart had left the building on a stretcher.
"Roz." His winger grabbed his arm. "Roz, we got a power play. You good?"
"Yes," Ilya said. "I am good."
He was not good. Because Shane was not moving.