Chapter Text
There was something wrong with Shane Hollander.
He had known it since he was young.
Most people—most kids, in general—had different hobbies and interests. Their attention drifted from one thing to another. They became fascinated with something for a few weeks, only to abandon it for the next shiny obsession that caught their eye.
Shane had never been like that.
When it came to him, there was only ever one thing: hockey.
Obsessive.
That was the word most people used when referring to his temperament.
When he was a child, they said it with a certain unease. Teachers exchanged looks during parent-teacher conferences. Other parents smiled politely while subtly steering their children elsewhere, while his peers found him strange.
He was the intense and a little unsettling kid of Asian descent that was all but ostracized by his peers.
Shane remembered all of it.
He remembered the way people looked at him when he spent hours memorizing statistics for no reason other than the fact that he wanted to. The way he could spend months focused on a single skill, a single goal, while everyone else moved on.
Back then, it had been considered odd.
Concerning, even.
But people were funny.
As Shane grew older, taking after his beautiful mother, and became the golden boy of Canadian hockey, their perception changed.
The obsession remained exactly the same.
The only difference was that now it was backed with success.
He was the captain of the Montreal Voyagers, who had two Stanley Cups won back-to-back. He was the face of luxury campaigns his mother carefully selected, and the athlete every analyst called a once-in-a-generation talent.
Suddenly, the same obsession that had once made people uncomfortable became admirable.
His rigid routines were no longer strange, instead they were considered discipline. His fixation was no longer unhealthy, if anything he was commended over his dedication. His inability to let things go was no longer concerning; it was the mindset of a champion.
People called him a prodigy and an example to follow.
The best thing hockey had seen in decades.
The first player since the dynasty teams of the eighties to lead his franchise to consecutive Stanley Cups.
And through it all, Shane had come to a simple realization: People's perceptions were hopelessly skewed. When he had been a skinny, awkward child, they had looked at him and seen something wrong. Now they looked at the handsome man he had become and saw greatness.
The obsession had never changed.
Only the trophies had.
Shane found that oddly ironic.
Another thing he discovered as he grew up was that his reaction to other people's opinions was quite different from what most would expect. There were people whose opinions mattered. His parents, Hayden, Jackie, and their kids. And as he grew closer to Rose and she became one of his closest friends, her opinion mattered too.
Other than that?
Not really.
People respected and admired him. They wrote articles about him, talked about him on television, and treated him as some sort of symbol. The poor kid with Asian heritage playing in an almost entirely white sport in Canada. How difficult it must have been. How brave he was. How important his success was for inclusivity and diversity in hockey. How he was paving the way for future generations of Asian hockey players.
Honestly, Shane never cared much about any of that.
Maybe he should have.
Maybe that made him a bad person.
There was a part of him that understood why it mattered, mostly because he saw how important it was to his mother, and because he wasn't stupid enough to ignore the fact that representation had value. He understood that.
He really did.
But at the end of the day, all he had ever wanted to do was play hockey.
That was it.
He liked hockey, so he played hockey. He happened to be good at it, so he kept playing. Then he became very good at it, and suddenly people started assigning meaning to everything he did. He became captain and led his team to victories. People looked at those accomplishments and saw something bigger.
Shane just saw hockey.
As for what people said about him, whether it was in interviews, online, or behind his back, he couldn't bring himself to care very much. Why would he? Why would the opinion of someone who couldn't even score a hat trick matter to him?
That sounded arrogant.
It probably was arrogant.
He didn't particularly care about that either.
The only reason he had never publicly come out wasn't because of homophobia. It wasn't because he was ashamed of being gay, and it certainly wasn't because he cared what strangers thought about who he slept with.
It was hockey.
It had always been hockey.
Some instinctive part of him was terrified of the one thing he loved being taken away from him. Not because he thought the league would throw him out, legally they cannot fire him because of his sexuality. But the Voyagers could trade him to a shitty team, and he could not let that happen.
He loved playing at the highest level. He loved competing and he especially loved winning.
The idea of doing anything that might threaten that, no matter how small the risk, had him on the edge of a panic attack any time he thought about it. If someone traded him to a team that spent every season rebuilding and hoping for a miracle, he might actually lose his mind.
Oh, Kami-sama, can you imagine Shane Fucking Hollander playing for the Ottawa Centaurs? He would jump off a building before ever letting that happen.
So, he kept certain things private and carried on with his life. People talked and speculated, creating stories about him. But Shane mostly ignored them. It wasn't even an active decision. He didn't wake up every morning and chose not to care. Their opinions simply never mattered.
They were like flies buzzing somewhere in the distance.
Occasionally annoying, but easy to forget.
That wasn't to say Shane was cold, despite what many people assumed because of his composed behavior on the ice or the calm, measured way he answered interviews. Nor was it to say that he wasn't grateful, because he was.
His parents had raised him to be grateful. To be polite. To understand that nothing was guaranteed and that success did not excuse arrogance. Those lessons had stayed with him long after he became famous. Not simply because they were part of the structure he had built his life around, but because he genuinely believed in them.
So, when Rolex gifted him one of their expensive—and, in Shane's opinion, ridiculously overpriced—watches, he accepted it with a smile and made a point of wearing it whenever appropriate. He took care of it and appreciated the gesture. What he didn't do was wave it around and tell everyone to look at the Rolex on his wrist.
Once upon a time, owning even one of those watches would have seemed absurd.
His family had never been poor, but they certainly hadn't lived the kind of life where people casually collected luxury watches.
Shane remembered that.
He remembered a lot of things.
That being said, gratitude and politeness didn't mean he was incapable of recognizing opportunities when they appeared.
While hockey remained his priority above almost everything else, he had spent years making sure that he was as difficult to replace as possible. Part of that meant being the best player he could be. Part of it meant winning. Part of it meant making himself so valuable, both on and off the ice, that nobody would want to get rid of him.
Because Shane had always known he couldn't stay in the closet forever.
Accidents happened.
Mistakes happened.
Someone could see something they weren't supposed to see. A photograph could be taken at the wrong moment. A careless comment could spread. The possibilities were endless.
And homophobia wasn't the only thing stacked against him.
There was also racism.
There always had been.
He was half Japanese in a sport that still struggled with diversity, no matter how much the league liked to congratulate itself for progress. So, he had let his mother do what she did best. She built relationships and negotiated contracts for him. She turned Shane into the face of more luxury brands than he could keep track of.
Rolex.
Reebok.
Speedo.
Ray-Ban.
And dozens of others that had taken an interest in him over the years. He was a very popular choice as ambassador. Part of it was obvious; he generated money because people liked looking at him and companies liked selling products using attractive athletes.
But that wasn't the whole story.
He was reliable and professional.
He never got involved in scandals or got caught drunk outside a club at three in the morning. He showed up on time, smiled for photographs, remembered people's names, and did exactly what was expected of him. From a company's perspective, he was probably the perfect ambassador.
The fact that he was Asian only made him more appealing. Fans praised brands for becoming more inclusive and journalists wrote articles about representation. All while, marketing departments congratulated themselves on their progressive campaigns.
Everyone benefited.
Including Shane.
Because all of those partnerships created something far more valuable than money.
Influence.
Powerful people had invested in him. Powerful companies had attached their image to his. The more successful he became, the more difficult it became for anyone to touch him without creating problems for themselves.
Which was precisely the point.
Because while Shane's carefully maintained public image had become one of the strongest brands in professional hockey, the same couldn't necessarily be said for organizations like the Montreal Voyagers.
And that mattered more than most people realized.
It was almost childlike how easy it had been to bring the Montreal Voyagers to their knees.
Honestly, after almost a decade playing for the team and winning them two back-to-back Stanley Cups, Shane would have expected some kind of loyalty. Not blind loyalty, because he wasn't stupid enough to expect that, but at least enough loyalty to survive one injury.
Then again, Shane had never been under the illusion that the Voyagers cared about him. His position as captain had always been dependent on one thing: results.
As long as he brought results, everybody loved him.
As long as he scored goals, won games, sold jerseys, and filled seats, he was the face of the franchise.
The moment he stopped doing that, things changed very quickly.
All it took was one accident on the ice.
One bad hit.
One season spent watching the playoffs from home.
And suddenly administrators were calling him and asking why he hadn't been more careful. Why he hadn't seen Cliff coming. Why he had put himself in that position in the first place. Almost as if the hit had somehow been Shane's fault.
Almost as if the fact that the Voyagers failed to make the playoffs without him was somehow his responsibility.
Which was honestly ridiculous.
They had eight years.
Eight entire years to build a team around him.
Eight years to find players capable of carrying some of the weight instead of expecting Shane to be the one scoring every goal, making every play, and dragging the entire organization forward.
I mean, seventy percent of the goals over the last few years had been scored by Shane.
And fifty percent of those goals hadn't even involved an assist.
At some point you would think an administrator would look at those numbers and conclude that maybe the problem wasn't Shane. Maybe the problem was that they needed better players.
Instead, they kept making the same decisions.
Trading for people like Comeau and Drapeau because they fit the image they wanted. The kind of hockey players management loved. The kind who helped maintain the carefully manufactured all-white no-homo image the organization wanted to sell.
The fact that some of them happened to be racist homophobes never seemed to bother anybody.
Which, honestly, was bullshit.
But Shane had never cared enough to fight them over it. And that was the funny thing. Because all of that stupidity ended up giving him exactly what he needed.
An opening.
Not because he suddenly discovered that the Voyagers didn't care about him. He had known that for years. It was just that now they had finally crossed the line. And once they did that, it became very easy for Shane to stop pretending otherwise.
You see, Shane had only ever been obsessed with one thing in his entire life.
Hockey.
Everything else came after hockey.
Everything.
Then he met Ilya Rozanov.
And somehow, without Shane noticing when exactly it happened, he found himself with a second obsession.
Ilya Rozanov, unlike Shane, cared too much.
Most people wouldn't know it at first. Hell, Shane hadn't noticed it at first. Ilya was a good actor.
The funny thing was that the media had somehow managed to get the two of them completely backward. They liked to portray Shane as the caring one, the thoughtful one, the golden Canadian boy of hockey who always said please and thank you and gave the perfect answers during interviews. And to be fair, Shane did say please and thank you. He was the polite, respectful Canadian boy his parents had raised him to be.
The thing was that most of the time his words were just words. They were polite words, certainly, but they rarely carried any particular emotional investment behind them.
Ilya, on the other hand, was always on fire.
He was constantly chirping, throwing insults around like candy, and got into many fights on ice. And yet he cared so much.
Every time he threw a punch, there was usually a reason for it. Somebody had said something about a teammate. Somebody had mentioned his family. Somebody had crossed a line that Ilya had decided was worth defending.
While the media painted him as some rebellious problem child and Shane as the respectable face of hockey, the reality was almost the opposite.
Most of the time Shane didn't give a fuck what other players chirped about.
If they talked shit about the Voyagers, fine.
If they talked shit about his teammates, also fine.
Shane didn't particularly care about most of his teammates. Now, if somebody went after Hayden, that was different. You did not get to talk badly about Hayden.
Hayden had made Shane the godfather of his children. As far as Shane was concerned, those kids were his nieces and nephew, and anyone stupid enough to go after them was going to have a very unpleasant conversation.
Other than that, however, Shane's emotional investment in hockey-related drama was remarkably low.
The difference in how the media portrayed him and Ilya sometimes bothered him, mostly because it was wrong, but at the same time it was also incredibly useful. Because, you see, Shane could do no wrong.
Well, that wasn't entirely true, obviously, but for most people it might as well have been.
He was the golden boy of hockey. Canada's sweetheart. Sponsors liked him, fans liked him, and even journalists liked him, which was honestly impressive considering journalists rarely seemed to like anybody.
So, when his leave suddenly needed to be extended, people were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The Voyagers, however, were less enthusiastic.
They could tolerate half a season. They didn't like it, especially because it meant missing the playoffs, but they could tolerate it. But a whole year?
Oh, the administrators were not happy about that.
They tried very hard to hide it, but Shane had spent enough years dealing with executives to recognize when somebody was smiling through clenched teeth.
So, being the polite and respectful Canadian boy he had been raised to be, Shane met with them, apologized for the inconvenience, and very kindly informed them that if his absence was creating such difficulties, he would be willing to waive the no-trade clause in his contract.
And oh boy, they were happy.
Not immediately, of course. First came the concerned expressions, the assurances that they valued him, the speeches about how important he was to the organization.
Then came the relief.
Because in their minds, the Voyagers had made Shane Hollander.
The Voyagers had given him the captaincy.
The Voyagers had given him a platform.
The Voyagers had turned him into a star.
And now they had two Stanley Cups sitting in their trophy case. The franchise was healthy, successful, and profitable again. They didn't need an Asian-descent captain anymore. They could finally put a proper white Canadian in the position and continue pretending hockey was changing while making sure nothing actually changed at all.
The problem with that line of thinking was that it required believing the Voyagers had made Shane Hollander.
They hadn't.
Not even close.
The Voyagers did not make Shane Hollander.
Shane Hollander made the Voyagers.
And Shane knew that all too well.
It didn't take much for the backlash to start. After all, everybody loved Shane Hollander. That was the funny thing about becoming Canada's sweetheart. People tended to take your side.
The sponsors certainly did.
Rolex, Reebok, Speedo, Ray-Ban, and all the other brands attached to Shane didn't specifically sponsor the Voyagers, but they were powerful companies with a lot of influence, and influence had a way of spreading. A recommendation here, a warning there, a conversation over dinner, and suddenly people started questioning whether investing in the Voyagers was such a good idea after all.
Especially now that Shane was gone.
Because that was another funny thing.
A lot of people had invested in the Voyagers because they had Shane Hollander. Without Shane Hollander, the organization suddenly looked a lot less attractive. So, money became a little tighter.
Then a little tighter still.
And while Shane didn't particularly enjoy watching organizations struggle, he also couldn't pretend to be surprised.
The fans were far more entertaining.
They rioted online for months.
Poor Shane Hollander.
The captain who had brought the Stanley Cup back to Montreal after sixteen years.
The captain who had delivered two championships.
The captain the organization had apparently decided was disposable the moment he stopped being useful.
Comeau and Drapeau were dragged through the mud. So were the administrators. So was the coaching staff. The only person who somehow escaped the collective wrath of the fanbase was Hayden, mostly because Hayden had been the only one publicly defending Shane from the beginning.
Then came the trade announcement.
And that was where things became truly ridiculous.
Because Shane had been traded to Boston.
Boston.
To play on the same line as Ilya Rozanov.
A few years earlier, that news would have caused absolute chaos.
People would have called him a traitor.
A sellout.
They would have spent months talking about how a captain could abandon Montreal for the Raiders. Instead, the reaction was almost universally positive.
Good for Boston.
Good for Shane.
At least Boston takes care of its players.
It was Cliff Marleau who had put Shane out of commission for almost a year and a half, and yet the Raiders were still willing to take him even knowing he wouldn't be able to play immediately.
Unlike the Voyagers, people said.
Unlike the Voyagers.
Shane found that particularly amusing.
The same people who would have burned his jersey a few years ago were now wishing him luck. Of course, it helped that everybody assumed he would succeed.
Shane Hollander was hockey.
That was the general consensus.
He would thrive in Boston.
He would have thrived anywhere.
All anyone had to do was look at what had happened to the Voyagers after he left.
Shane would be lying if he said he didn't enjoy that part a little. Not because he hated Montreal.
He didn't.
Montreal had been his home for years. But there was something deeply satisfying about being proven right. The Voyagers had spent years acting as though Shane needed them more than they needed him.
Reality had been remarkably quick to correct that misconception.
He almost felt bad when he saw a clip from the Bell Centre.
Almost.
An entire section of the arena had shown up wearing Boston Raiders jerseys with Hollander's name on the back. And the funniest thing was that Shane watched that clip from Ilya Rozanov's couch.
Well, technically it was Ilya's couch.
In practice, however, Sofia Alekseyevna Rozanov was currently occupying most of it.
Shane had somehow ended up trapped between the two of them, with Sophia asleep against his chest while Ilya nearly fell off the sofa laughing at the sight of Bell Centre fans showing up in Boston Raiders jerseys.
The Raiders weren't even playing.
Honestly, Montreal fans could be a little dramatic. Then again, Shane wasn't exactly in a position to criticize dramatic behavior. Because the real reason his recovery had somehow stretched into a year and a half might have involved a few decisions that, in retrospect, could be described as questionable.
The thing was that Shane might have paid a certain doctor to say a few things.
Not directly, obviously.
Shane wasn't stupid.
The doctor might have also been influenced by a few emotional conversations involving carefully timed tears and a very convincing performance about how the racism and homophobia inside the Voyagers organization had only gotten worse over the years.
Now, Shane wasn't saying he had lied.
He was simply saying that certain details may have been presented in a manner that encouraged sympathy.
The doctor, being both sympathetic and apparently a very dedicated Shane Hollander fan, might have become somewhat flexible when discussing recovery timelines.
As a result, Shane was declared perfectly capable of living a normal life while simultaneously being completely incapable of returning to professional hockey for at least a year and a half.
A remarkable medical condition, really.
Then again, extraordinary circumstances sometimes required creative solutions. Especially after one phone call from Russia that had changed everything. Ilya's father had died first, which was sad but expected. The man had been suffering from dementia for years.
Then Ilya’s brother died immediately after the funeral.
An overdose.
Also, not that surprising, considering Alexei Rozanov’s habits.
And then, as if the universe had decided that wasn't enough tragedy for one week, Sophia's mother disappeared.
Left.
Vanished.
Shane still remembered listening to Ilya on the other end of the phone. For perhaps the first time since they had met, Ilya had sounded completely overwhelmed. There was no anger in his voice. No fight left in him.
Only exhaustion and fear.
And Shane had discovered something unfortunate about himself.
Namely that hearing Ilya Rozanov break down over the telephone apparently caused whatever remained of Shane's common sense to immediately leave the building. Because from that moment onward, the objective became very simple.
Get to Boston.
Preferably as fast as possible.
As he sat there watching Ilya laugh himself breathlessly beside him while Sofia slept peacefully against his chest, Shane was forced to admit that perhaps he had gone a little overboard.
Not much.
Just a little.
But then again, he had ended up in Boston.
He had Ilya.
He had Sofia.
And if a few administrators, doctors, and journalists had been gently encouraged toward certain conclusions along the way, well...
Bygones would be bygones.