Chapter Text
“I need you to be honest with me.”
Shane takes a deep breath in through his nose and almost immediately regrets it; the scent of antiseptic is so strong that it almost burns. He exhales slowly through his mouth as he tries to ignore the onslaught of sensations around him; the too-bright white walls covered in monitors with lights that never stop blinking, the rough fabric of the polyester blanket laid across his lap to cover the leg that is wrapped in a brace – blue and white canvas fabric with velcro straps that criss-cross over his knee. Underneath it, his leg itches.
Ilya is seated on the chair across the room – the one that folds down into a bed – and Shane deliberately does not look at him, because he knows Ilya’s eyes will hold answers to questions he’s not sure he wants to ask yet. Instead he keeps his gaze trained on the doctor, who is looking at him with a combination of pity and respect that causes something to twist, deep in the pit of his stomach.
“We won’t know the full extent of the damage until after surgery,” she begins, choosing her words carefully. “But–”
“But it’ll get better?” He can hear it in his voice, the pleading for her to tell him that this is something routine, something they fix all the time, something with well-defined recovery benchmarks and a standard rehabilitation curve and, most importantly, a plan that he can follow to get him back to where he needs to be.
But he’s asked for honesty.
“This is a complicated injury, Shane.” She says this with the practiced tone of someone who says these sorts of things to patients all the time. “But if the surgery goes well, with proper rehabilitation, most patients report feeling normal within a year.”
A year. The thing in the pit of his stomach clenches its fist, leaving him nauseous. He’d known – when they’d loaded him onto the stretcher – that he wouldn’t be making a comeback in time for the Cup finals. Had accepted it, even though it was a difficult blow. But this–
Normal. Shane fixates on the word, not allowing himself to spiral any further about the timeline the doctor has just provided. Normal. She says he’ll feel normal again. And that means…
“Normal,” Shane repeats out loud, forcing the word past the tightness in his throat. “Normal for me, or normal for…”
He trails off, letting the silence finish his sentence for him. Somewhere across the hall, a machine starts beeping. Medical staff pile into the room, a cacophony of raised voices. Shane’s doctor spares a glance out the door before turning back to him, her expression unreadable. “You’re a unique case,” she tells him, and her voice isn’t unfriendly so much as…matter-of-fact. Like she’s delivering him the truth without bothering to filter out the unsavoury details. He should be grateful, he thinks. It’s what he’s asked for, after all. “A normal level of functioning for you is, well…it’s different than it is for others. There’s not much we can do at this point except–”
“Am I going to play again?” The words tear their way from his throat like a wild thing he can’t control, echoing harshly off the sanitized white walls. When he finally allows himself to meet the eyes across the room, Ilya is blinking back tears.
“Shane…” he whispers, moving to get out of the chair, and it’s all too much.
He wants to leave the room, leave the building, go somewhere they can’t find him, the same way he’d always done as a child whenever things had been too much. A copse of trees at the edge of a hidden clearing in the woods behind his parents’ cottage, the roof of his high school, the closet in the basement of his childhood home that smelled like sweat and old hockey gear. But there’s nowhere he can escape to when he’s sitting here with his leg in a splint, still hooked up to monitors, unable to even move without assistance.
He settles for pulling his good knee up to his chest, burying his head in his arms.
Ilya’s hand on his shoulder is warm, solid. Shane hates him.
“Shane,” he says again, his voice soft, and Shane does not want to hear whatever he’s going to say next.
“Go away,” he mumbles, the sound muffled.
The hand withdraws, and Shane hears footsteps receding. He keeps his head down, counting to ten slowly before he finally lifts it to find the room empty. And it’s expected, anticipated, what he’s asked for, even, but it still stings.
His phone vibrates on the shelf beside the bed, and Shane pulls it towards him. A glance at the screen reveals that the incoming message is only the most recent of many; Hayden, Wiebe, Wyatt, Luca, his parents, even Scott Hunter. He swipes the notifications away one at a time without reading them, placing the phone back on the shelf as he adjusts himself as best as he can on the stiff, uncomfortable mattress, and closes his eyes.
Shane hears Ilya re-enter the room. He doesn’t question how he knows it’s him, they’ve spent so long orbiting each other that Shane thinks they could each predict the other’s movements, if they tried. He hears Ilya cross the room. Stop. Hesitate. And then footsteps approaching the side of the bed, knuckles brushing gently across his cheek, and Shane swallows around the lump in his throat – pain and shame and something else he won’t allow himself to name yet – as he allows his eyes to flutter open.
“I brought you coffee.” Ilya presses a styrofoam cup into Shane’s hand, the flimsy lid already leaking, small drops staining the stark white of the blanket across his lap. Shane wonders, absurdly, how much laundry the hospital needs to do every day.
“Decaf,” Ilya clarifies, as Shane stares at the cup, and he realizes that he’s completely lost track of what time it is.
It had been an afternoon game. Saturday afternoon, game five of the conference finals. The Centaurs had been up three to one in the series and looking to end it early on home ice.
It hadn’t been a dirty hit, not really. Just a series of ill-fated circumstances; Shane’s knee twisted in just the wrong way as Pittsburgh’s defenseman had caught him at just the wrong angle, slamming him into the boards at a speed strong enough to…
Well, to shatter a bone, sever two ligaments, and rupture a tendon.
Shane suppresses a shiver as he recalls the sensation of his knee joint twisting completely around itself, the pain as intense and immediate as he’s ever felt. His hand tightens around the coffee cup, causing the lid to pop off of one side. He pushes it back on, lifting the cup to his lips. It tastes like burnt plastic, with that pervasive chemical undertone that sticks to everything in the hospital, and Shane grimaces, setting it aside.
“Doctor says you can go soon.” Ilya places Shane’s jacket gently beside him on the bed. “She is just checking one more thing. Timing of next appointment to talk about…surgery, I think.”
Shane doesn’t miss the way Ilya’s voice wavers, just slightly, on the word surgery, and he wonders – not for the first time – if this is something much worse than anyone is telling him.
“Did we win?” he asks. Not that it matters, but he needs something to say.
“We won,” Ilya confirms, with a nod of his head. (It matters.)
When the doctor finally comes back into the room, with a set of crutches tucked under one arm, she’s pushing a wheelchair. Shane takes one look at it and shakes his head. “No.” She doesn’t react to this beyond depositing the chair in a corner of the room, leaning the crutches against the side of the bed, within Shane’s reach.
“Someone will be in touch within the next few days to confirm your next appointment. For now, you’re free to go. Take care of yourself, Shane.” She says it all easily, like she does this every day. Like every single one of her words isn’t delivering him a fresh death sentence.
“Thanks,” Shane mumbles, not meeting her eyes as he swings his good leg over the side of the bed.
They maneuver slowly through sparsely-populated hallways as Shane struggles to use the crutches, tilting his weight onto his right leg so his left foot – with the brace forcing his leg to stay straight – doesn’t drag along the ground. Tiny shocks of pain reverberate through his body every time he moves, and tries not to let any of it show on his face. He’d waved away the prescription for oxycodone when the doctor had offered it to him, hoping that maybe the sharp, stabbing pain in his leg would distract him from the hollow ache in his chest, the one he doesn’t want to think about yet. Ilya had taken the scrap of paper out of the doctor’s hand instead, slipping it quietly into his own pocket as they’d left the room.
Shane is grateful for the mostly empty hospital. The few medical staff hurrying down the hallways don’t even stop to look twice at him and Ilya as they make their way back to the lobby at an agonizing pace.
“Wait here,” Ilya murmurs once they reach the doors, “I will get car.” And so Shane sinks into a seat outside the Tim Hortons that is already closed for the night. A tired-looking employee is wiping down tables and Shane averts his eyes, pulling up the hood of his jacket to hide his face.
Ilya pulls around with the car, helping Shane into the passenger seat, and they don’t speak for the entirety of the drive home. Shane fumbles his way through the front door that Ilya holds open, swearing when one of his crutches catches on the mat at the entryway. And then he looks up at the stairs, and his heart sinks.
“Here.” Ilya wraps a steady arm around his waist, and, out of nowhere, a white hot rage flames up in Shane’s chest.
“I don’t need your help, Ilya.” He shoves angrily, knowing even as he does it that he’ll regret it later, but in the moment there’s a sick sense of satisfaction from this damage, at least, being something he can control.
Ilya steps back wordlessly, melting into the shadows at the base of the staircase, and unshed tears burn at the backs of Shane’s eyes as he struggles up the stairs alone. He doesn’t even bother to change his clothes or brush his teeth once he gets there, just falls fully clothed into bed, dropping the crutches on the floor beside him. He keeps his eyes resolutely shut when he hears Ilya enter the room, and then the slide of clothes on skin as he changes. The bed eventually dips under his weight and Shane doesn’t move, lying flat on his back as he feigns sleep.
There’s a long stillness. And then the bed creaks softly as Ilya shifts his weight, and Shane feels the soft press of lips against his hairline, right above his forehead, and then he feels nothing else as he drifts into sleep.
He wakes to a stabbing pain in his left knee that is quickly becoming all too familiar. Ilya is still asleep, snoring softly, and Shane realizes with a pang that he must be even more exhausted than Shane is, after yesterday’s game and then half a night spent waiting in the hospital.
Shane slips out of bed as quietly as possible, wincing with each click of his crutches against the carpet, but a glance behind him confirms that Ilya is still asleep when he reaches the doorway. Gripping the railing tightly, Shane hobbles downstairs and into the kitchen.
He manages to transport the empty coffee pot over to the sink, hand wrapped awkwardly around its handle and the handle of one of his crutches, simultaneously. It’s only once he has the pot full of water that Shane looks back at the distance he now has to cover, realizing that he won’t be able to cross the kitchen again in the same way he just has. Irritated with himself, he rearranges the crutches so that they’re doubled up under his left arm, supporting his bad leg, and grips the coffee pot tightly in his right hand as he begins to shuffle across the kitchen. Water sloshes over the edge of the pot, soaking his pant leg, splattering the floor, and Shane breathes through clenched teeth as he takes slow, cautious steps.
And then his sock slips on the slick tile of the kitchen floor and he shifts his weight to catch himself, and the fraction of a second that he forgets is enough for his knee to buckle underneath him and send him crashing to the floor.
“Fuck,” he grunts out, cradling the coffee pot to his chest as he falls to prevent it from shattering against the tile.
“Shane?” Ilya’s voice, floating down faintly from the top of the stairs, is laced with concern.
For a moment he debates trying to stand to his feet, pretend he’s done nothing more than spill water on the floor. But Ilya enters the kitchen as Shane is reaching for his crutches, eyes widening just slightly as he takes in the sight in front of him, and there’s no use in hiding.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he whispers, his voice breaking as he sinks to his knees at Shane’s side and pulls him tightly against his chest.
“You’re gonna get your pants wet,” Shane mumbles, and Ilya’s only response to this is to hold him even tighter, and there, sitting in a puddle on their kitchen floor, Shane finally lets himself cry. Ilya rocks him back and forth as Shane’s body shakes with helpless sobs, his tears soaking into the fabric of Ilya’s shirt, saturating it.
“Come on,” Ilya says finally, once Shane’s breathing begins to even out. He stands to his feet, pulling Shane with him, keeping a firm hold of him until he stops swaying.
“I’m okay,” Shane tells him eventually, gripping the countertop tightly, and Ilya nods, bending to retrieve his crutches from the floor.
“Couch.” His voice is firm, but gentle.
By the time Shane is situated on the couch, Ilya is returning with a stack of dry clothes. “Do you want help?” he asks, as he presses the pile into Shane’s hands, and Shane doesn’t miss the way he says want instead of need, and he feels something slide back into place inside of him. He shakes his head all the same, that stubborn part of him still determined to prove that he’s capable of all the same things as before, and Ilya nods in acknowledgment of this, turning back towards the kitchen.
Soft noises begin to emanate from the kitchen as Shane quickly pulls off his damp shirt, shrugging on the old Raiders hoodie Ilya has brought him. It’s soft and a little worn, the cuffs fraying slightly, and it carries a thousand memories that make Shane wonder if Ilya has chosen it, specifically, for a reason. Like he knows that the Centaurs logo would be too much for Shane, in this moment.
The pants are harder. He has to lie down across the couch, shimmying his wet pants slowly down his legs, pausing each time they catch on the brace. He dumps the wet pants unceremoniously on the floor next to his shirt and then slides the dry ones on, bad leg first, followed by the good one.
The next time Ilya comes back into the living room, he has his phone in his hand and a cautious expression on his face. He approaches Shane slowly, like he’s a wounded animal, holds out the phone, says, “Terry wants to talk to you” like it’s an apology.
“Can you put it on speaker?” Shane asks quietly. It’s the first thing he’s asked Ilya for since snapping at him last night. It’s not his version of an apology, not exactly, but it’s an admission that – despite all the ways he knows he’s been pushing Ilya away since the hospital – he doesn’t actually want to do this alone.
Ilya nods, and Shane shifts on the couch to make space for him. He places his phone on his thigh, tapping the speaker button. “Shane is here.”
“Hi, Terry.”
“Hey, Shane.” Their team doctor’s voice – invariably calm as usual – allows Shane to relax just slightly. “How are you feeling?”
“Like shit.”
Terry laughs, a burst of static on the other end of the phone line. “I’d say you’ve earned that. Listen, the orthopedic surgeon wants to meet with both of us tomorrow at the Civic, come up with a plan. Can you get there for ten?”
“I will drive him,” Ilya responds when Shane freezes, placing a broad hand on Shane’s shoulder and squeezing gently. Shane nods wordlessly at the phone as Ilya and Terry talk through logistics, realizing only once Ilya hangs up that they’ve had an entire conversation about him, and he’s hardly spoken at all.
“Shane.” Ilya drops his phone on the coffee table before sinking back into the couch, rolling his head to the side until he meets Shane’s eyes. Shane looks away. “No, hey. Talk to me.”
“What the fuck do you want me to say, Ilya?” The rage is back, burning so hotly he fears it might consume him whole and spit him out as ashes. Dimly, he’s aware that when the dust settles he’ll feel sick to his stomach about this, too, but the flame licking away at his soul craves destruction, and so destruction is what he’ll give it.
This time, though, Ilya pushes back.
“Anything!” He punctuates this by throwing his hands into the air in desperation. “Anything so I can know how to help you right now. Please,” Ilya continues more softly, his voice breaking over the words. “Please let me help you, Shane.”
Shane picks at the frayed cuff of his sleeve. There are tiny holes in the fabric from years of wear, the edges almost see-through, and he wonders if this is maybe just what happens, eventually. Time wears everything thin until it breaks, and he is no exception to this rule.
He remembers Ilya recounting something Galina had once told him about grief, about how everyone treats it like a logical progression from denial to acceptance, about how the reality is much more complicated and nuanced. He remembers Ilya saying this like it was a revelation, like learning it had fixed a part of him he hadn’t even realized was broken.
Some wounds never heal, and you learn to live with it.
“I didn’t want it to end like this.” They’re the words that have been balancing on the tip of his tongue ever since the hospital, since the pointed glances and hushed conversations just out of earshot and the way that no one had given him a straight answer to any of his questions. And they hadn’t needed to, not really, because the answers had revealed themselves in the things no one had said.
Shane’s greatest fear during his last season in Montreal had been that he wouldn’t get to leave the sport he loves more than almost anything under his own terms, and now he stares that fear directly in the face for an entirely different reason.
Ilya trails gentle fingers down his forearm, touching him with a tenderness that makes Shane want to cry again. “Who says it is over?”
“You were there,” Shane responds quietly as Ilya takes his hand, slotting his fingers into the empty spaces between Shane’s in the way that always feels like fitting two puzzle pieces together. “At the hospital.” He can feel his barely-suppressed anger bubbling to the surface once more.
Ilya has always been perceptive, capable of picking up on the things Shane isn’t saying. “You think they told me things they did not tell you.”
It isn’t a question. Shane nods once, a sharp jerk of the head. It’s not the entire reason he’s angry, but right now it’s the only part of his anger he’s willing to touch, the only thing he’s able to be honest with himself about.
“Shane.” Ilya lifts Shane’s hand to his lips, brushing soft kisses over the backs of his knuckles. “Is complicated. Doctors do not want to make promises they cannot keep. The only thing they tell me is that nothing is sure, yet.”
“But what if–”
“No what if,” Ilya interrupts firmly. “We go see Terry tomorrow. Maybe he will have answers. One step at a time, yes?”
And Shane desperately wants to believe it can be this simple. But the memory of the way the doctors had discussed his scans – in hushed undertones, while huddled around screens strategically pointed away from him – is still gnawing at him.
Another memory swims to the forefront of his mind suddenly, like his subconscious is making a connection he isn’t consciously aware of yet; standing on the dock at his parents’ cottage, gripped with an abstract terror when faced with the prospect of jumping into the water. He remembers his father swimming to the bottom of the lake, bringing up a handful of rocks and mud and grass to prove that nothing more sinister lurked beneath, explaining that most of the things he couldn’t see and touch were just as unremarkable – just as commonplace – as the things he could. Fear of the unknown.
Decades later, and he’s still gripped with that same fear, but this time there’s nothing Ilya can bring to the surface to assuage it.
“One step at a time,” he repeats, trying to make himself believe in the words.