Archive of Our Own

Ilya tried to bury his feelings so hard for so long that at some point he even believed he could get rid of them, ignore them, walk away from them. But then, the only one who managed to walk away was Hollander. Shane.

Fuck. He’s been so stupid to call him Shane. So stupid to break their routine and beg for more, more, more. He’s been stupid when he stocked his fridge with Ginger Ale and prepared ingredients for a fucking sandwich so carefully that one would think it was a gourmet, Michelin-star-worthy meal. He’s been stupid when he kissed Shane’s shoulder so tenderly and then begged him to stay, not to leave him (like everyone else has done), whispering the words straight into his mouth, brushing those soft lips. 

Ilya has been stupid and now he is heartbroken, because something that has never been his has been taken from him, so he can’t even mourn it. He can’t let himself wallow in his grief because he is not supposed to feel it. He can’t cry now that he has lost Shane, because Shane has never been his to begin with. 

But, and this is the crux of Ilya’s affliction, but— if Shane has never been his, why is he shaped like the rest of Ilya’s life? Why is Shane’s chin shaped as if Ilya’s nose belongs there, and why does his forehead slot so perfectly beneath Ilya’s lips? Why, why, why?

He doesn’t remember the last time he was so nervous, honestly. He tries to ignore the feeling— he’s getting better at it, he swears (he’s really not…)— and presses the send button.

Ready to play on the same side?

All-Star weekend is in less than three days, and for the first time he and Shane will play for the same team. And Shane has a girlfriend. And he is contemplating leaving the country, disappearing forever in a secluded cold town in Russia. They wouldn’t find him. Not even his brother would find him. His father wouldn’t remember him, to be concerned.

Truthfully, he wouldn’t be concerned about him even if the illness didn’t impair his intellectual capacity, but that’s a thought for another time.

He can’t quite get the image of fucking movie star Rose Landry wearing Hollander’s jersey out of his mind. Jesus Christ, he would pay to be the one in the stands with a Metros number 24 jersey, Hollander plastered in big, bold letters on his back. Jesus fuck, he thinks. He’s screwed beyond repair.

And Shane doesn’t answer, and an ugly, suffocating feeling is creeping up his mouth. Maybe he’ll throw up before he gets a text back, or maybe he will never get a text back. 

Maybe Rose Landry — he needs to shout from the rooftops that he hates her and she is a horrible person— stole Shane’s phone and blocked his number and Ilya’s texts aren’t going through. Maybe Ilya is losing his mind, because he doesn’t even know poor Rose Landry whose sole fault is getting to be everything Ilya wants to be. He’s an asshole, but in the privacy of his own mind, he is sure he is allowed to. After all, he is in love. 

Shane doesn’t text back for fucking hours and it’s literal agony. He would call Alexei and suggest this very specific thing as a brand new torture technique. Find an Ilya Rozanov, find his Shane Hollander, make sure that the Ilya Rozanov is in love with the Shane Hollander, then give the Shane Hollander a girlfriend and make him ghost the Ilya Rozanov. The Ilya Rozanov in question would cave in less than two hours and give you whatever you want. 

He can’t. He obviously can’t ring his brother and tell him about his matters of the heart. For several reasons, among which there’s the fact that they simply… do not talk.

Ilya often tries to ignore the way he is technically alone in the world. It’s honestly a panic-inducing feeling. Imagining that if he were to disappear tomorrow, no one would care. 

Maybe Shane would have cared. Before. When Ilya provided great sex. 

Maybe Alexei would care because Ilya wouldn’t be sending any more money. 

Who knows. 

Fucking hell, he needs a drink. He needs several drinks. Maybe a whole bottle of vodka and something else too. He needs to pass out. That’s what he needs. 

No.

What he needs is a fucking text.

What he needs is a slow fucking hockey player with beautiful freckles and—

He unlocks his phone before even connecting his brain to his fingers.

Pity your backhand is very weak he types. 

Christ. What is wrong with him?

He has never missed his mom more.

He wonders what she would tell him. Would she be disappointed because he fell in love with a man? Would she love him nonetheless? Would she help him get Shane back? Would she love Shane? Yeah. That’s not even a question. Everyone loves Shane. Shane is extremely lovable.

And Shane is also, apparently… not going to be at the All-Star? What the fuck?

The relief of getting a text back is short-lived. Because said text says: can’t be there, I’m sick, sorry. 

And Ilya scans the screen for a while before his brain comes back online to process. What does this mean? Shane Hollander won’t attend the All-Star weekend? Is he dying?

Ilya certainly might be dying soon.

What? You are sick? Sick how? He starts typing. 

Then he deletes everything and types back two different strings of words, trying to conceal how desperate he is. 

What do you mean? In the end he sends. 

Easy. It should show enough neutrality. Fuck, Ilya huffs. Neutrality. What is he? Fucking Switzerland? Ridiculous.

Also, should he ask about Rose? He doesn’t want to ask about Rose. 

He waits patiently. Or rather, impatiently.

I’m sick, throat hurts. Can’t even talk.

Dread settles in the pit of Ilya’s stomach.

Is Shane really sick? Could he… be dying? While Ilya worries about his stupid girlfriend? He feels so stupid, and also a bit scared.

Shane can’t talk? What does that mean?

He’s scared that Shane will block him if he asks too many questions. But how many questions, how many texts are too many? How far can Ilya go before he finds himself walking alone?

He takes a breath and tries to focus. Shane is talking to him so he doesn’t hate him. That’s good. That’s… comforting. He can ask more questions.

How long? He settles on.

The reply comes almost immediately, as though Shane had been waiting for him to text, just to have the chance to talk some more.

It’s been 3 days. I’m stuck in Montreal. Can’t even go home.

What? What does Shane mean that he can’t go home if he is home in Montreal? Ilya feels drunk. Maybe home means two different things to these stupid English-speaking people? Ilya sighs. 

You are alone in Montreal? Nobody helps you?

There. That’s a safe way to ask about stupid Rose Landry. And why the fuck Shane is apparently alone. Ilya hopes he really isn’t, if he’s so sick. Even if the person who takes care of him isn’t Ilya himself.

My parents are on a cruise. It’s been booked for months, I didn’t want them to stay here for me or come back now. 

Ilya’s heart sinks in his chest. Fuck this stupid, self-sacrificing man. And fuck him for falling in love when he shouldn’t have.

Your girlfriend can’t stay with you????

Maybe the four question marks are giving him away but anger is slowly overtaking the heartbreak, because there’s no way anyone on this fucked up planet would be lucky enough to be loved by Shane Hollander and stupid enough to ignore him.

Shane takes a bit longer to reply. Not so long. Enough to make Ilya panic, though. Or maybe it’s just the way Ilya feels things are always over-amplified when they are about Shane.

Eventually the text comes, however. And it is enough to turn this day into the best day of Ilya’s life. 

Rose and I broke up, we were not compatible 

There isn’t even a period at the end of the sentence. Ilya can feel the stress radiating from Shane just by reading this text. 

He debates whether jumping up and down a couple of times, running a few laps around the dining table, and ordering one of those obnoxious party poppers that Marlow seems to love for some reason might be too much. 

After all, Shane did break up with his girlfriend, but that doesn’t mean he wants Ilya. 

Any celebration must wait, Ilya tells so to his galloping heart.

I’m sorry you are not okay he says, and that doesn’t take much debating to send. He won’t say he’s sorry Shane and Rose broke up, though. He doesn’t lie.

It’s fine is what he gets in response. And Ilya is sure that he’s fumbled his only chance at getting Shane back, because he honestly doesn’t know how to handle the giddiness that has taken over his whole being in the face of Shane’s newfound singleness. 

But Shane texts again.

I was looking forward to playing with you, instead of against you. 

Ilya looks at his phone for so long that by the time his eyes find their focus again, he’s afraid he’s aged a few months. Maybe years.

I wanted to play with you too he sends, then, grinning at himself, adds: I would even play wing for you, Hollander. 

Because he’s never been good at being normal, if normal means not letting your heart take the lead. Because he’s fucking gone for Shane Hollander and he would even cheer for him from the sidelines if that meant having him in his life. That’s the truth. 

He hopes Shane hears it all.

I would play wing for you.

I would come out for you.

I would leave Boston for you.

I would be no one, to be someone to you.

Shane doesn’t reply immediately. 

Shane takes almost a full hour to text back and it’s almost agonizing to Ilya. He needs a week of rest, after waiting for Shane’s reply, (im)patiently, for an hour. 

Sorry. He reads. I fell back asleep.

Ilya frowns. Something in his chest loosens but something else tightens. 

How bad is Shane really feeling?

He does something that they’ve never done before, even though, knowing Shane, this isn’t something he will appreciate.

Can I call you? He types and sends, in half a second.

I have no voice, can’t talk Shane explains and Ilya is more and more worried by the minute.

And you wouldn’t play wing for me

Asshole

God, Ilya is going to explode—death from too much joy. 

He smiles fondly, eyes burning with relief. Shane is talking to him, Shane is bickering with him, Shane is calling him an asshole. Ilya hears birds singing.

I would

You would know if you didn’t get sick

He tries to keep a light, teasing tone because he doesn’t want his worry to reach Shane, but Shane is not helping him calm down. 

Didn’t think it was so bad he tells Ilya, and Ilya blinks once, then again, wonders what the hell happened. 

He desperately wants to hear Shane’s voice, at least he wants to see him, see that even if he is sick, he’s alive and breathing. 

Checking for people’s pulse has become a habit, for Ilya, after he found his mother, unmoving, no heartbeat. Clearly, he only observes the people he loves, and mainly when they’re sleeping—despite knowing that it’s probably creepy—but he would check Shane’s pulse twenty-four seven if the man allowed him. He’d probably make a home on the right side of Shane’s heart. Shane would keep him safe, warm, and constantly updated on his heart’s status. 

But Shane’s voice isn’t cooperating, so Ilya has to settle for texting.

You were sick before???

Maybe he should stop with the question marks. He doesn’t. He needs something to convey his urgency. 

How long before the 3 days?

Luckily for Ilya, Shane quickly answers.

I don’t know, upper back hurt after last game

Thought it was just a sore muscle or something 

I don’t know, I’m just so tired I hate it

Ilya gulps, tries to swallow down the idea that has been forming in his mind for some time, at this point.

Fever? He asks, because he needs to know where he is on the freaking out scale.

No, nothing 

He breathes a sigh of relief but then Shane sends: not yet, I think. 

And it’s over again. 

Okay, he is in Boston. He’s supposed to fly to Florida in more or less twenty-four hours. 

When are your parents coming back? 

He needs this particular information before he fucks everything up for real. 

Shane replies three minutes later, he is counting. 

On the 20

Fuck. That’s more than one week from now. 

So Ilya starts thinking, pretends that he’s evaluating the situation, despite knowing exactly what’s going to happen. What’s one more bad decision, after all? 

His coach will be pissed, he knows he will be. But Ilya has never been good at telling his heart to shut up.

He sends the email to his coach and to the GM right then. Well, at least he thought about the whole thing for ten minutes. That’s not nothing, right? He has thought this through.

It turns out that he has absolutely not thought this through. 

And that doesn’t register with him when his coach yells in his ear for fifteen minutes straight, or when a GM email tells him that he will have to skip the next regular season game. After all, he knew these things would happen. 

The reality of this shitshow that his idea was registers with him when he lands in Montreal. 

He has talked to Shane, still texting because Shane’s voice is apparently still too hoarse to speak, and Shane’s condition hasn’t improved since the first time they texted. 

This morning, he was sure that he was coming down with a fever because he was particularly cold— shivering, even — and that served to further motivate Ilya to get on a plane.
The problem is, now, that Ilya hasn’t heard from him since before boarding, and that is slightly concerning, because he is worried about Shane’s health and he’s worried that Shane won’t appreciate his presence. 

On the other side of Montreal, Shane is miserable. Absolutely, desperately in need of help. This is not the first time he’s sick, clearly, and ever since he left home, he’s always taken care of himself on his own. Rarely have his parents stopped by to bring him soup because he’s always managed on his own and he didn’t want to inconvenience them. 

Now, however, things are different. Shane feels like this is different from any other time he’s been sick. He’s been feeling fatigued, nauseous, and sometimes dizzy for three days, or maybe five now. This morning, however, he woke up shivering and sweating, and feeling like when he doesn’t want to vomit, he is about to choke on his own tonsils. It feels like his throat is constricting by the minute, and that is not promising, considering that he doesn’t remember the last time he was able to breathe through his nose. 

He must be running a high fever but he won’t find out because the thermometer is in his bathroom cabinet and he doesn’t have the strength to sit on the edge of the mattress, let alone leave the bed. He’ll lie still, waiting for this to pass, ignoring that sooner or later, his bladder will force him to confront his dizziness and general fatigue.

His phone chimes more than once but he can’t bring himself to reach for it. Getting his phone means extracting his arm from the duvet, and then being blinded by the screen. He is too fucking cold to move. The only indication that someone is lying in this bed is the human-shaped blob protruding from the duvet mess, topped by Shane’s head, with his disheveled hair. 

And that won’t change because his phone keeps ringing. Truth be told, if every single bone in his body didn’t hurt, Shane would take it and throw it across the room, maybe down the hallway outside the bedroom completely. But his body aches in ways that Shane didn’t even think were possible and all of his energy is spent on coughing.

That is also the worst thing of all this mess, probably. He hasn’t been able to go even half an hour without coughing his lungs out, and he’s tired. But he can’t panic. If he panics, it’ll be harder to breathe and he really doesn’t need that. He closes his eyes, his muscles contracting in spasms around every single shiver that rips through him, feeling them through his bones, and prays that whoever is calling him will soon stop.

Time goes slow and simultaneously too fast for Shane to understand what is happening to him and around him, and waking up, despite never having fallen into a deep slumber, feels like swimming through molasses, minus the sweet connotation. 

He has to pee. That’s why he woke up. Why can’t his body let him rot in peace? He can sleep whatever this is off, he’s sure. If only he didn’t have to function still. Fuck. 

The only course of action to follow is getting in a sort of upright position, before standing up completely. This room has an ensuite, he can reach the toilet without faceplanting and breaking more than one bone. He can do it. He walks on razor-sharp blades for a living. 

Sitting up takes an indefinite amount of minutes. His head is spinning and he needs some time to stop coughing. He has to abandon the idea of leaving the bed with a blanket draped over his shoulders because he can barely move as it is, he can’t balance a piece of moving clothing on top of that.

He suffers through the extreme cold that seems determined to freeze his bones and stands up, taking a few moments to gather his bearings. 

When he manages to reach the toilet, it’s like he’s scored the winning goal at the end of the last period. He even washes his hands after. He’s a fucking champion. 

The victory is short-lived, though. Because as soon as he gets back on the bed, his stomach swarms and he is sure he’s going to vomit all over his mint green sheets. God. He’s going to throw up all over his bed and then the vomit is going to touch him. He’ll get vomit all over his clothes and then— oh, fuck. What is he going to do? There’s no one he can call. He is alone and he’s feeling so bad. Maybe he should call an ambulance.

But then— then what would he say? Please help me I don’t want to vomit all over my bed? Please I can’t breathe anymore? Please my lungs literally burn when I try to breathe? 

He’s so caught up in his spiral that he takes a while to figure out that apparently there’s someone at the door. Someone is knocking on his door and he has no idea who it could be. He also has no idea why someone might be knocking on his door right now because Hayden is in Florida, his parents are out of town and nobody from the team knows that he’s apparently on death’s door. 

Also, he wonders how to get to the fucking door. That’s a pretty relevant point, all things considered. 

It seems that vomiting has to wait. He has another mission— mission get to the front door without breaking anything. 

And it’s hard. The stairs are moving. It’s fucking unfair. This is not Hogwarts, for God’s sake.

Ilya has been an anxious wreck since he boarded the plane in Boston, even if he would deny that until his last breath. Russians do not blush, Russians do not panic, Russians do not fall in love with boring Canadians— well, that must be the flaw, right?

He’s been wondering whether or not he did the right thing, whether or not Shane will see him, whether or not someone will spot him in Montreal and make his life extremely miserable. 

But right now, in front of Shane’s front door, all of his worries increased tenfold. 

He only brought a backpack, and he’s clinging to one shoulder strap like his life depends on it. It’s unsettlingly cold in Montreal and he forgot his beanie, so he would appreciate it if Shane could let him in so that he could have this little freak out inside, preferably in front of a fireplace. 

He doesn’t even know if Shane has a fireplace. Does he? Do people still have fireplaces these days? He remembers a lot of them from Russia. But… why is he thinking about good old Russia anyway? Who knows. What he does know is that Shane is not answering the door.

He keeps knocking but nobody seems to be inside. 

Ilya has never been here before. Shane just randomly talked about his neighborhood over the course of their encounters and it didn’t take much to find his house because this is something like a weird, isolated (in a super exclusive way, not a creepy way) area where all the rich people of Montreal live. So Ilya really doesn’t know this place but he can see two cars down the road and one must be Shane’s (it’s boring), so Shane must be inside. 

He waits, patiently, for Shane to appear, while freezing to death in the dear Canadian winter.

He’s fantasizing about hypothermia killing him and his body being found on Shane Hollander’s doorstep— how would that look for Shane? Not good— when he hears noise coming from inside the apartment.

Then finally, finally Shane opens the door and the moment their eyes meet, they both recoil, audibly gasping at the same time. 

“What–” Shane blinks, rubs his eyes — too adorable for Ilya’s liking— and tries to understand whether or not this is a fever dream. Is he totally delirious? Maybe he really should have called an ambulance. 

“Can I come in?”

Ilya’s voice and the fucking cold wind hitting his face assure him that no, he is not dreaming or seeing things. Ilya Rozanov is on his doorstep and patiently waiting for Shane to usher him inside. 

Shane silently moves, allowing Ilya to get inside, closes the door, and then stands next to it like someone has screwed him to the floor. Despite how cold he is, he can’t bring himself to move, because he can’t even begin to process what the hell is happening.

“Are you…” he hoarsely says, before having to clear his throat, but then can’t add anything else because he starts coughing so violently that his eyes water. 

Ilya is next to him in a second, rubbing his back as if this were a normal, completely ordinary occurrence, as if he weren’t supposed to be in Florida, right now. 

“Hey, hey, shh,” Ilya tries to soothe him. And fuck, he’s so warm Shane wants to cry. He wants Ilya to wrap his arms around him and never let go. Oh God. 

Ilya is here, Shane is not alone anymore. Ilya can help him. Ilya will help him. He can relax. 

“How– how are you here? What are you doing? I– I mean–” 

Ilya manages to hear him just because he’s close to Shane, feeling him radiate so much heat that it’s concerning. 

“I was worried, you were alone, I came,” Ilya says, shrugging calmly, as if that weren’t altering Shane’s brain chemistry, and his whole world. 

Ilya makes it sound simple and Shane wants to cry, curl up in a blanket and cry. It’s not fair, how much he wants this. 

He stands straight, momentarily free from the unrelenting coughing, and pressure builds in his lungs and his sinuses. He’ll probably really cry, or throw up, or pass out. 

“Y– You– you have the All-Star, what– I–” Shane tries to get words out but he’s really feeling the fever taking a toll on him. He can barely stand, and he’s confused, as well as tired and struggling to breathe. 

Ilya frowns, gets rid of his backpack, and then moves closer. “Can I give you hug?” He feels like he has to ask. 

He has never been uncertain around Shane. He’s never had to ask. He took whatever he wanted because he has always been sure that Shane would do the same, they would take and give, like everything between them was a dance only they were privy to. But now everything seems fragile, Ilya doesn’t know where they stand. He knows where he stands, where he wants to stand, that is next to Shane, but he still doesn’t know what Shane wants. 

So he asks, and then sees Shane’s face crumple in real time. The first thing he notices is how Shane’s lower lip starts wobbling, then he sees his nose scrunch up and then his eyebrows pinch close, in a sad frown. 

It is actually relief, but Ilya doesn’t know. He has no way to know. He thinks he has fucked everything up.

He only sees Shane fall into his arms, uncaring about the fact that Ilya is still wearing his puffy jacket. Shane simply lets go and goes limp in Ilya’s arms, burying his face in Ilya’s neck. It’s so warm here, Shane thinks deliriously, while his nose burrows further into the space between Ilya’s hoodie and his jacket. 

Ilya’s heart skips several beats. Maybe he’ll get the Boston doctor to check him out before next game, maybe he’ll die here, with Shane in his arms. 

He squeezes Shane’s sides affectionately, and buries his nose in Shane’s hair. Fuck how has he missed this. Shane’s weight on him, Shane’s skin against his, Shane’s scent, his black hair soft and sweet.

“It’s too cold,” Shane mutters, with chattering teeth. And that makes Ilya’s worry spike absurdly. Because he’s sweating in this apartment. The heat must be turned to a concerning temperature and yet Shane is shivering in his arms, stating that he’s freezing. And he’s also hot— like alarmingly hot. Ilya’s heart is in his throat for several reasons at this point.

“You have fever, let me–” he wants to get rid of his jacket, maybe his hoodie too. He’s sure he’d be okay in a T-shirt alone, but Shane doesn’t seem too keen on letting him go. He doesn’t.

“No, wait,” he hoarsely begs. “Just one more second.” 

He tightens his hold around Ilya’s torso, under the open jacket and Ilya is sure that he’s hiding his hands behind his back to gain a little warmth. 

“I will not leave, but you need to lie down, yes?”

He tries to reason, then places the back of his hand on Shane’s forehead and realizes that whatever reasoning he may use, Shane wouldn’t fully comprehend. 

Ilya is really, truly worried now.

At least he can breathe a little, considering that he is here now. Shane is not alone anymore. He can take care of him.

“Shane,” he carefully whispers, lips against Shane’s temple. Praying that saying his name doesn’t cause him any distress. 

It doesn’t. Shane just hums. 

“You need medicine, I will get you to bed, give you medicine, and then we will cuddle, okay? Please.”

Shane grunts, so Ilya thinks that he got this, but then Shane starts coughing and Ilya realizes that he doesn’t know what to do. He’s been taking care of himself for so long that he doesn’t remember when the last time he had someone else to help him was, but this feels different. Shane’s coughing fits sound different. Maybe he’s paranoid and in love and scared, but maybe something is terribly wrong and Ilya can’t pinpoint what, exactly. 

He keeps rubbing Shane’s back, as if that might actually help; then, when Shane seems better, he gets rid of all his layers and gently guides him upstairs. He’s never been here but Shane silently walks toward his room, so Ilya doesn’t have to guess. 

“Okay, I will help you, it’s okay,” he murmurs, while gripping Shane’s bicep with his right hand. He even squeezes, twice, to get his point across, but Shane’s eyes are glazed and a little bit unfocused, so he wonders how much he’s really hearing. 

Shane’s room is a bit of a disaster. Ilya will never say that out loud but there’s a quite unpleasant smell in the air, a stale smell that usually accompanies sickness, and the sheets are rumpled in a way that Shane would never allow if he were okay. There’s an empty water bottle on what must be Shane’s bedside table and his phone is haphazardly thrown on the opposite side of the bed.

“Here,” Ilya murmurs, while gently depositing Shane on the mattress by gripping his shoulders. 

Shane only nods, and then tries to get back under the covers. Ilya wraps the duvet around him before disappearing into the ensuite bathroom. 

He takes a moment to wash his hands and splash some water on his face. He hates the feeling of being stuck in airport clothes but this is not the time to think about his clothing situation. He quickly opens all the cabinets, because he has no idea where Shane keeps his stuff and finally calms down when he spots a thermometer and a bottle of paracetamol pills. 

Quietly he shuffles back to Shane, humming softly when he sees that Shane’s brows are furrowed, and he’s slightly thrashing around. He must be in real pain, if the discomfort makes itself known even during sleep, and Ilya’s heart aches. 

“Shane, Shane, hey,” he gently shakes his shoulder and then sits on the edge of the bed so that he can uncover him and get the thermometer under his arm. 

Shane protests but he doesn’t even open his eyes and Ilya doesn’t know whether he should be worried because Shane is clearly sick or delighted because Shane trusts him blindly. Literally.

“Yeah, I know you’re cold. I will get you the laser thing, yes?” He tries to soothe Shane, despite his heart breaking at these pained sounds. 

Then he brushes sticky hair out of his forehead and sighs, waiting for a beeping sound. 

“Fuck,” he exhales, when some seconds later he checks the thermometer screen.

“Thirty-nine point one? Shane, fuck. How long have you been so bad?” 

Ilya’s blood pressure spikes. One thing is handling his own fevers, which have never gone over thirty-eight point five, another thing entirely is handling whatever this is. 

Shane’s voice is small, when he speaks— his throat hurts like a bitch, Ilya is sure of that.

He has to lean down, put his ear where Shane’s mouth is. But Shane’s words are not helpful. “I don’t know,” he says, but he’s hot to the touch. Too hot. 

“Okay, okay,” Ilya murmurs, even if nothing is okay. 

Shane coughs again, and then again, and Ilya barely has the time to retrieve some water and come back before Shane finally vomits all over the bedroom floor. 

Jesus Christ.

His eyes immediately dart to the floor but then, when he lifts his gaze, he finds that Shane is crying. 

He almost drops the water bottle, then he quickly gets on the bed on the other side and reaches for Shane, awkwardly taking him in his arms.

“Hey. Hey, hey, hey, you’re okay, everything is okay, you’re good here, okay?” He says to Shane, while Shane settles between his legs. 

He knows he has to clean up the floor, especially since the smell is pretty disgusting, but Shane is his priority. So he pats his head while Shane drops on his chest, and with the other hand grabs the pills and the water. “Take this, then you can sleep again, yes?” 

He helps Shane sit up a little, and hands him the pill and the water. 

“Sorry,” Shane blurts out. Luckily, he stopped crying but Ilya’s chest is still constricting. 

“No sorry, do not worry, try to sleep. I will clean up the floor,” Ilya immediately replies. 

“No, I will do that, that–” another coughing fit interrupts Shane, and Ilya winces. “It’s gross.”

Ilya has to physically push him back on the bed. He’s sure Shane would really get up and try to clean this mess himself.

“I want to do it, you are sick. Rest. Please. Is okay.”

“Okay, sorry,” Shane slurs again, sleep claiming him fast. 

Ilya nods, to himself. I love you is right on the tip of his tongue. He swallows the words down and goes downstairs to find something to clean the floor with.

While he scrubs the floor clean with a fancy pink sponge, he wonders why no one has been here to take care of Shane. Do his parents really know how bad he is doing? There’s no way they would leave him to fend for himself in his condition, is there? 

Maybe Shane lied to them, underselling how serious this thing is. 

Ilya is glad he is here, even though it cost him a game and a whole afternoon of anxiety. He is happy to be the one to take care of Shane, even if he’s worried that he won’t be able to make things better.

As Shane sleeps, he decides to make something to eat. He wonders when the last time Shane ate was, what he likes to eat when he’s sick, what foods are best when your throat feels like you’re eating glass every time you swallow— he knows nothing. So he googles in Russian, because he has to be sure of what he’s doing, and finds what should be an easy recipe for soup. 

He laughs at himself when he starts chopping vegetables, wondering what the tabloids would think if they knew that he voluntarily skipped the All-Star weekend for this. 

He regrets nothing.

He changes out of his outside clothes while Shane sleeps. The soup is ready and he is dressed comfortably in sweatpants and a thin undershirt, because the house feels too hot to wear a sweatshirt. But then he realizes that he needs to check on Shane’s temperature, so there he goes.

“Shane, hey, Shane,” he shakes Shane’s shoulder, grabbing the duvet and uncovering him. 

He can see shivers along Shane’s neck and frowns, because he still feels hot to the touch and he whimpers while Ilya tries to wake him up.

“Shane, you have to open your eyes, lyubimyy, yes? Look at me,” he informs Shane like it’s a formal notice. 

He slips one hand between Shane’s face and the pillow and the heat is almost concerning. 

He goes straight to the refrigerator and gets back to Shane with three ice packs.

Then he focuses on taking Shane’s temperature as if his life depended on it. 

“I’m sorry, but I can’t let you die,” he announces. Maybe a little dramatic, he thinks, but still. 

Taking the duvet off of Shane’s torso, he sneaks the thermometer back under Shane’s sweatshirt, lifts his arm, and then puts it back on top of the thermometer. 

While waiting for the beeping sound, he places one ice pack on the back of Shane’s neck, and another one on top of his head, balancing them precariously on the pillow. 

Shane winces at the sensation but doesn’t protest. And that alarms Ilya. 

The number that Ilya reads on the small screen sends jolts of panic through his system.

Forty. 

Fucking forty.

That is bad. Real bad. 

Ilya can’t breathe. He can’t do this. He can’t take care of Shane. What if he messes it up? He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. Does he bring Shane to the hospital? Temperature is supposed to go down, not up, when you take pills. 

He can’t be the only one responsible for Shane’s health. 

And yet here he is. He has to do something. 

He unlocks his phone and googles remedies to bring fever down, and that brings him to this new predicament: getting Shane out of his clothes. 

Shane blinks but doesn’t seem to fully register Ilya’s presence or fully grasp what’s going on around him, which further proves Ilya’s anxiety right. 

“I need to get these clothes off,” Ilya calmly tells him, and decides that the best approach will start at the bottom.

He fully removes the duvet and slowly pulls Shane’s pants down. He’s done this so many times he can’t count them but Shane has always been excited, eager. Now Shane is barely present, and whimpers because he’s cold and wants to sleep.

“I’m so sorry, moya lyubov, I’m sorry,” Ilya grimaces while his heart breaks. 

“Ilya?” Shane frowns, looking up at him while Ilya tries to get him to sit up, so that he can get clothes off of his upper body too. 

“Yes, it’s me, you’re good,” Ilya wants to reassure him, to comfort him. It’s all he wants, but Shane seems to be so confused, borderline delirious, that his face crumples and he begins apologizing.

“Ilya, I’m so sorry, I should have–” Dry hiccups make him pause and then make him cough.

Ilya wants to die, or, if that isn’t possible, he wants whatever Shane has to attack him and leave Shane alone. 

“Shh, shh, no apologies, yes? I’m here,” he says to Shane, while crouched over the bed, beside him.

His hands leave Shane’s body to take his face instead. Ilya brushes his thumbs over the freckles. Shane’s cheeks are too pink, he’s flushed all over because of the high fever and Ilya grows more worried by the minute. 

“Shane, listen to me, okay? You’re good, we’re good, is go–”

“I left, Ilya!” Shane sounds distraught, even if his sore throat doesn’t allow him to scream, Ilya can perceive the sentiment behind Shane’s uneasiness. 

“What? Where–”

“I left you, in Boston, and–” Shane slurs. The words are confused and Ilya struggles to understand them at first, but then everything clicks into place and he shakes his head, his own features darkening with knowledge.

“No, no. Shane, Shane, I’m not mad, I am here. I am worried for you, I want to help you, you’re too sick.”

I love you.

Ilya’s words mix together, maybe don’t make sense, but he can’t be bothered with perfect grammar when the situation is so dire. 

“Shane, we need to cool you down, yes?” He repeats, wile shane seems to be battling against his own mind to grasp the meaning behind these words.

Then he sits up and takes Shane with him, so that he can take everything off of him. That leaves Shane in his boxers, sitting against the headboard with the most confused and distraught expression Ilya has ever seen on him. 

“My head hurts, but you can go,” he mumbles, eyes half closed and head lolling to the side.

Ilya almost snorts. “Go? I’m not going anywhere, Shane, you’re sick, I stay with you.”

He caresses Shane’s cheek and then pulls back to retrieve the ice packs, placing one on Shane’s head, and two beneath his knees, whispering apologies and sweet nothings when Shane complains and whimpers because everything is too cold and Ilya must make it stop. 

It kind of shatters Ilya’s heart, if he’s honest. 

Eventually, he sits on the bed, next to Shane, and his heart skips a beat or two when Shane puts his head over his shoulder and grabs his arm, not letting it go. Ilya just readjusts the ice packs on Shane’s head and then closes his eyes, sighing internally.

How can he help Shane?

For the time being, he settles on stroking his knuckles with his free hand, the one that Shane isn’t holding hostage.

He drops a kiss on his forehead too, the next time he has to rearrange the ice pack. 

They sit in the dark for some time. Ilya won’t leave Shane’s side. He wouldn’t leave even if Shane weren’t clawing desperately at his arm. An indeterminate time later, however, Ilya is forced to move, because Shane starts coughing violently, his back spasming almost convulsively, and it seems never-ending. To the point that Ilya’s hands start shaking. What if Shane dies? What if Shane dies because Ilya couldn’t save him? Because he didn’t know what to do?

His hands are cold and sweaty when he reaches for Shane. “Shane,” he uselessly repeats, as if that could shake Shane out of whatever this is. 

“I need to call someone,” then he says, to the room, to no one in particular, gripping Shane’s shoulder like a lifeline.

“No.” Of course that is what makes Shane talk again. Ilya mentally snorts. “I’m fine, it’s just–”

“You do not sound fine, Shane,” Ilya carefully tells him, trying to conceal his panic. “Let me see how hot you are,” he says mostly to himself, mainly because he needs something to go right before he drops everything and calls a goddamn ambulance.

He has become a pro at taking Shane’s temperature without Shane’s cooperation, so it takes barely three minutes, and Ilya sighs a small breath of relief when he sees that they’ve gone from forty degrees to thirty-eight degrees. 

“Okay, okay. Thank fuck,” he exhales, taking Shane with him, leaning against the pillows, and hugging him close to his chest for a few moments. 

“What?”

“Fever dropped a little.”

Shane nods, then settles again, and drifts off. 

Ilya closes his eyes and thinks. Maybe he should call Shane’s parents? His mom? Would his presence be weird?

He tries to extricate himself from Shane’s death grip — someone this sick shouldn’t be this strong, Ilya is astonished— because he needs a trip to the bathroom and has to get some new ice packs, but that appears to be a bad idea. A very, very bad idea. 

The sounds that leave Shane will haunt Ilya for the rest of his days. He’ll put this afternoon in the box labeled trauma that sits at the back of his mind, carefully holding the day he found his mama lying lifeless in his childhood home. 

Shane is not breathing, there’s no other way to put it. No way to sugarcoat it. He’s wheezing, his eyes are watering with the effort of it, he keeps coughing, hoping that suddenly something will snap and he’ll breathe again. 

Ilya uselessly offers him water, then a numbing spray that he found in Shane’s cabinet, then keeps whispering sweet nothings, praying that things will get better soon. 

“Shane, please,” he pleads, but he’s whispering (and trembling), so Shane has probably not even heard him.

“Okay, okay, I’m calling an ambulance,” Ilya decides, sitting down on the bed and distractingly stroking Shane’s skin wherever he can touch. 

His insides twist while he talks to the dispatcher and explains what is going on with Shane, but he is relieved when they tell him that an ambulance will be there in less than ten minutes. 

Ten minutes is good. Ilya can manage ten minutes. Shane will survive ten minutes. 

He gets up to grab something for Shane to wear while Shane complains. He has stopped coughing his lungs out but he still can’t take a proper breath, at least not without sounding like an old, malfunctioning lawnmower. Ilya gets some honey too. It was suggested in one of his researches.

“That really wasn’t necessary,” he tries to say, anyway, but the fact that he is not breathing properly— and Lord help Ilya or he’ll have a heart attack if he thinks about that for too long— forces him to split the sentence into a million pieces.

Ilya clicks his tongue and tries to act nonchalantly, even if his heart has unceremoniously relocated to his throat. “That would be more convincing if you did not sound like dying hare, Hollander,” he says, while manhandling Shane to put clothes on him.

“Come here,” he says at the same time as Shane frowns and says: “How do you know the word hare?” 

Ilya fondly thinks that he won’t make it to midnight without blurting out the words I love you, at least in Russian. 

He carefully takes Shane’s hands and guides his arms into the sleeves of a grey sweatshirt, one at a time, until Shane huffs and tries to retract his hands. “I can do i–” 

Another coughing fit doesn’t let him finish the sentence. Ilya would be so smug and it if only his hands weren’t sweaty because of the fear. 

Suddenly he hands Shane a spoon of honey, leaving him quite flabbergasted. Where has Ilya even gotten it from? Does he walk around with a pot of honey in the back of his pants?

Shane slowly eats it, but Ilya can see in his eyes that he wants to ask more than one question, and his stomach flips when he spots the cute angry kitten face on him. 

Ilya has missed him so much. God. If only they were not waiting for an ambulance because Shane has apparently forgotten how to breathe, Ilya would feel like he’s blinded by sunshine.

He grins when Shane’s throat seems to find reprieve from the spoon of honey, and then pats his head as if he were a scared puppy that did a good job at the vet.

“Good,” he even says, before resuming his activity, that is getting clothes on the other man. “Now come here.”

“I am here, Ilya,” Shane huffs again, but diligently follows his instructions. 

Well, at least that’s one full sentence. Shane seems more coherent, more alert, maybe his temperature is further dropping. Ilya is a bit relieved. 

Also, his heart skips a beat at hearing his name falling from Shane’s lips. He’s so in love he feels embarrassed. Honestly. 

“You are too smug for dying hare,” he mumbles, even if his furrowed brows are not enough to conceal his concern. 

Shane’s lips are turning a concerning shade of purple. They are not completely purple, obviously, otherwise, Ilya would be dead. But he can spot a purplish tinge and that makes the uneasiness in his stomach grow exponentially. 

He doesn’t even reply to Ilya’s comment, and that only serves to worsen Ilya’s discomfort. 

“Shane?” He asks, even if he’s asking nothing. 

Shane’s eyes close on their own accord, Ilya freaks the ever-loving fuck out, so to speak.

“Shane!” 

He slaps Shane. He literally slaps him twice. Until Shane wakes up and bats his hand away as if Ilya were an annoying mosquito ready to bite him. 

In his defense, who the hell falls asleep while sitting upright on the bed? 

“Shane! What the fuck, do not fall asleep like this! You’re giving me heart attack!” 

Ilya thinks he’s been too harsh, maybe; even if he is terrified of losing Shane, that doesn’t mean he has to take it out on him. “Sorry,” he adds, sincerely. 

“Ilya?” Then Shane blinks at him, eyes half lidded, looking so confused that it’s making Ilya’s stomach fall out of his body. “What–”

“What? Shane, what is it?”

Maybe Ilya should work on concealing the urgency, the panic that wraps itself around his words without permission, but he won’t manage now. 

His hands are on Shane’s shoulders, then he moves them on Shane’s cheeks, making their eyes meet. “Hey.”

Shane’s head drops on his stomach, and his arms end up loosely wrapped around Ilya’s thighs. Ilya’s throat constricts, his heart hurts. In response, he can only hold Shane’s head with one hand and rub his back with the other one.

“You will be better soon,” he whispers, to the silence of the room, to his own panic, maybe. 

Shane nods, then proceeds to get up, without informing Ilya, and that’s when things go south. Because he can’t, for the life of him, stand up on his own. 

As soon as his body leaves the mattress, he sways forward, so fast that, had Ilya not been there, he would have face planted right there, in his bedroom.

“Shane, lyubimyy, what’s wrong?”

Ilya deserves a fucking medal, if you ask him. Because every instinct is screaming at him to cry, and yet he is being brave, for Shane. 

“Head,” Shane starts saying, “uh…”

“What?”

Shane makes a noise, like he’s ready to throw up again, but he doesn’t.

“Dizzy. Very dizzy.”

Oh. Okay. Ilya can work with that. At least Shane isn’t dropping dead, despite the way his chest rises and falls with the effort of breathing.

“Okay. Okay,” Ilya braces himself and takes him in his arms, taking him in his arms as if he were a small child and not a huge, grown-up professional hockey player. Perhaps he just needs to hold him, to make sure that he has not lost him. 

He never wants to lose him.

“I will hold you and we’ll get you to the couch, yes?” 

Shane’s face looks whiter and whiter, his lips a concerning color, and his breathing situation doesn’t seem to improve. But it’s fine, Ilya tells himself. Help is on the way. They just have to get downstairs.

“Ilya?” Shane hums, from where his mouth is squished against Ilya’s chest. 

“Yes?”

Two fists grip Ilya’s tee. They shouldn’t have this much strength, for a man this sick, but they do. And Ilya is glad.

“Thank you, I am– scared, maybe.”

There are so many muscles in the human body, and yet Ilya’s heart is the one doing all the work today. It is working to keep him alive, upright, strong, and it is working to absorb all the hits, the blows that a sick and vulnerable Shane is throwing at him. It’s a very strong muscle, but Ilya is not. 

He doesn’t feel so strong. He feels pretty weak, actually. He is in love with a man who doesn’t know how much he’s loved, he is in love with the only person he probably shouldn’t have fallen in love with and he’s holding said man while he is sick instead of fulfilling his NHL contractual obligations. He feels all kinds of weird about his situation.

But he is sure that there’s nowhere else he’d rather be. So he makes sure that Shane knows, too.

“You don’t have to thank me,” he says to Shane. I love you, he doesn’t say. “I am here, you don’t have to be scared. I want to be here, with you. I won’t leave.”

He kisses the top of his head because he can’t help himself. And then his stomach drops because Shane sniffs, and then pulls away, and soon they’re face to face and Shane’s eyes are full of tears. 

The fever and God only knows what else is clearly making him overly emotional, Ilya is certain that regular Shane wouldn’t be crying right now. However, he needs to know what happened. Did he say something wrong? Is Shane this scared? Is he feeling so unwell that it guarantees tears? Should Ilya worry even more?

“Shane–”

“I love you.” 

Ilya feels the words before hearing them. They’re like a sucker punch in his gut. Nothing could have ever prepared him for this. Ilya doesn’t get to have everything he’s ever wished for, he’s sure. Good things don’t happen to him without him exhausting himself to get them. Truthfully, the only thing he’s ever wanted is to be happy, and there isn’t much he can do about that. Hockey was just a way to leave Russia, to get away from his terrible father, it has never been his childhood dream, never what it means to Shane. 

Ilya used to play on a frozen pond with his mother, with worn-out skates and those are the happiest memories of his life, and all he wanted was to be that happy again. He’s spent all his life looking for that feeling of pure, unadulterated happiness without ever finding it. It’s something that only unconditional love can grant him. And now Shane Hollander is handing it to him on a silver platter. 

Shane fucking Hollander loves him. The best person Ilya has ever met is in love with him. 

“I– sorry,” Shane says, though, because Ilya has been silent for too long, staring at him with his mouth slightly agape and his eyes full of unshed tears. 

“What? Fuck. Shane. I love you too. I love you so much.”

Ilya hugs him again, hides in the space between Shane’s neck and his chest, grips him tightly, as though if he let go, Shane might vanish. 

“Oh my God,” he brokenly breathes out, squishing Shane so hard that eventually he has to let go because Shane can’t breathe. “Sorry, sorry,” he says when Shane reluctantly voices his discomfort with an annoyed grunt, “Ya tebya lyublyu, ya tebya lyublyu.”

“Shane.”

Ilya sounds desperate and Shane laughs, but then starts coughing because they both can’t forget why they’re here, after all. The universe has to remind them.

“Hey, hey,” Ilya rubs his back, leaving his side to get the numbing spray. “Here, take this, slowly.”

Shane calms down some seconds later, and then proceeds to go back to Ilya, back in his arms. 

“I was scared I lost you forever,” Ilya softly admits. He’s never been more scared and sadder than when Shane left his apartment in Boston. But now feels safe enough to admit it.

“I’m sorry, really sorry, Ilya,” Shane hoarsely and sincerely tells him, despite Ilya’s attempts at shutting him up, saying that it’s okay and he should not talk right now. 

“Come on, let’s go downstairs, the part– the ambulance people will be here soon.”

“The paramedics?” Shane chuckles so fondly that Ilya rolls his eyes and then touches his stomach through the shirt because it flips. 

“Yes. That. They will make you feel better,” he replies.

“Okay.”

Ilya is glad he brought the thermometer with them when they went downstairs because he can get Shane’s temperature again and immediately report it to the paramedics— he’s been repeating the word to himself in his mind — and feel useful. 

Even though he would have preferred it if he didn’t have to be useful, because as soon as the paramedics arrive, and learn that Shane’s fever doesn’t seem to go down, they immediately give him oxygen and start an IV. And Ilya wants to explode. 

Shane’s lips color comes back to normal while he breathes through the little mask and the paramedics reassure Ilya that fluids will help him, before they find out what is happening to Shane, so Ilya can at least unclench his jaw. Not relax, obviously, but not feel like he’s dying either.

Then another problem arises. 

They have to take Shane to the hospital. Because his blood oxygen levels aren’t good and his heart rate is too elevated, and Ilya would rather have his legs cut than leave Shane’s side. 

But— but, how will he manage to do that?

Shane provides a solution to his internal issues as soon as he sees the stretcher in his living room. 

“Would you come with me?” He asks Ilya. “Please, I– no, never mind, people might see you.”

This is the most words Shane has uttered since Ilya arrived at his house and Ilya should be relieved that he must be feeling a little better but he can’t feel relieved when Shane is looking so bad. He follows him without any hesitation, only grabbing their phones and their wallets. “Let’s go,” he nods to the paramedics. 

Shane is conscious for the whole ride, despite the elevated temperature, and Ilya is thankful for that, but he seems to be very confused and that makes Ilya worry. 

He did his best to keep his mouth shut in the ambulance, but the moment he finds the doctor who’s treating Shane, he stands up from his uncomfortable chair and starts asking questions that he probably has no right to ask. 

“He is… weird,” he says, smacking himself internally because weird is certainly not the word, but Ilya is tired, exhausted even, and Shane doesn’t seem to be doing so much better than he was at home, after all, so he is stressed. 

“I mean, what’s wrong with him? He doesn’t concentrate,” Ilya tries to explain.

Still not right. Ilya huffs, resigned to sounding stupid in this stupid language.

The doctor smiles, then looks at Shane who has been watching Ilya speak like it’s an interesting hockey game, silently enjoying it, and asks. “Shane, do I have the permission to share information with–”

“Ilya,” Ilya quickly offers.

Shane doesn’t even let them finish. He faintly smiles. “Yeah, he’s my boyfriend,” he mumbles, eyes almost completely closed, and chest doing some complicated movements. 

Ilya’s face goes up in flames. He’s sure Russians started blushing today, in this luckily-private hospital room in Montreal, because he feels hot all over, at being someone’s boyfriend, at having Shane trusting him so completely that he’s just fallen asleep, leaving Ilya to talk with his doctor about his condition.

Ilya could cry. Fuck.

“Okay,” the doctor cuts in, probably sensing some teenage-like embarrassment. “There seems to be something wrong with Shane’s lungs, that should be what is causing the fever and the respiratory distress, so we’re doing some scans to rule out pneumonia.”

Some part of Ilya understands before he can fully comprehend. “Sorry, what– what does that mean?” He asks. 

Dread settles strong in his chest. A weird, unwelcome sensation of cold runs through his veins.

“All the symptoms make us think of pneumonia. If he didn’t have trouble breathing then we wouldn’t be discussing that, but since his oxygen levels don’t look good…”

“Will he… die?” 

Ilya flinches at the doctor's barely concealed chuckles. 

What the fuck? Where are his Canadian manners? Maybe he is from the US?

“No. If we find pneumonia, we’ll treat it with antibiotics and send him home as soon as he’s stable, now he’s dehydrated, and the high temperature isn’t helping him.”

“Can I come with you?”

“Where?” 

“To do the scans,” Ilya almost rolls his eyes before remembering his manners, but maybe he is funny, because this doctor keeps chuckling at him. What is he? A clown? His patience is running thin.

“No, I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait here, it’ll be quick.”

Ilya’s hands start sweating again. “What if something happens to him and I’m not there?”

This time, the doctor’s features turn into something fond and understanding. “He’s surrounded by medical professionals,” he gently reminds him.

“Okay, I will wait here then.”

Ilya kisses the top of Shane’s head before sending him away to do the scans, painfully noticing that he’s still uncomfortably hot to the touch. They need to give him something to break the fever, he should tell them. 

And then he’s left alone with his thoughts. 

He tries to close his eyes, rest a little— he feels like he hasn’t breathed since the moment he called his coach to call out of the All-Star and worrying about Shane only served to stress him out more. He also misses Shane. And it is utterly ridiculous, and heartbreaking at the same time, because all the times he’s fantasized about them exchanging love confessions, they would usually be followed by sex, or a sweet make-out session at least, and not by a rushed hospitalization. 

He’s tired and kind of the happiest he’s ever been, but also sad and worried— all these feelings wrapped in one single person are exhausting.

It is pneumonia. Of course it is. Because every time something goes right, something has to counterbalance. Ilya would be angry if only he had the mental space to feel anything other than pure fear.

Realistically, rationally, he knows that there are really a few chances of Shane dying, but knowing something on a rational level and feeling it emotionally are two entirely different things. And Ilya has lost enough in his short life to know that he can’t bear the loss of another person he loves deeply. 

So he sits at Shane’s bedside and waits, while Shane sleeps.

At least it’s bacterial pneumonia— something that Ilya had to eventually google in Russian because it’s late and he’s stressed and he can only handle so much medical terminology in a foreign language before his head explodes— so they have to wait and see if the antibiotics work. Then they’ll send Shane home. 

Ilya also suspects that they’re keeping Shane under observation because he’s Shane Hollander. Maybe had he been just any random Shane, they would already be home. And he doesn’t know how to feel about that. 

He waits. He went to grab a disgusting sandwich from the vending machines in the ER while Shane was taken away for the scans so now he just sits, grateful that they let him stay, unable to even think about sleeping. 

Shane’s fever should break soon, everyone is optimistic— Shane is young and an athlete and he treats his body with the utmost care— but Ilya won’t relax until he wakes up able to breathe without his eyes watering from coughing, and no longer burns to the touch.

After watching him like a hawk for hours, alone with his thoughts, Ilya notices the slightest grunt coming from Shane, then hears the beeping sound indicating Shane’s heartbeat getting louder and in less than one minute, two nurses enter the room. 

Ilya wishes everyone looked more distressed, because he feels like someone is clawing long nails into his heart. But then he supposes that someone must keep a clear head to keep Shane alive so… he mentally shrugs. 

“What is happening?”

He doesn’t care that he sounds panicked and slightly pathetic, maybe. He is feeling all these things.

The nurses don’t answer him and he’s holding back a scream at this point, or tears, or both. 

He’s already catastrophizing, maybe planning what to wear at Shane’s funeral, wondering what he could possibly say, to honor him, that he fails to realize that the nurses have calmed down. Their work isn’t frenetic or rushed and they don’t seem worried. 

“Hey, hey, Ilya?” 

They gave him a visitor badge with his name scribbled on it in cheap black ink, that’s how they know his name, he supposes. 

“Yes? Why are the– the machines making noise?”

Ilya wants to formally file a complaint against this hospital staff who keep smiling at him condescendingly and seem determined to constantly brush off his concerns. Why aren’t they as worried about Shane as he is? Incompetence.

“His fever is not going down, so his heart rate is pretty elevated–”

Ilya cuts them off, he’ll feel bad later. “You gave him the wrong antibiotics?”

They almost wince. It’s barely there. Ilya’s hanging on by a thread.

“Probably it doesn’t work with his infection, we’ll have to try another one in the morning if the fever hasn’t gone down by then.”

“And what? We leave him to suffer?” Ilya gestures wildly around and then settles on Shane, who’s been frowning a lot in his sleep and letting out little grunts and groans that make Ilya wish he could disappear entirely.

“Unfortunately we’ve already given him paracetamol for the fever, he’s breathing properly now, so we can’t do more than that.”

Ilya musters all his energy to not be a really disrespectful person, and reluctantly agrees with a flick of his wrist, dismissing them. 

One of the nurses pokes in the room with just his head, barely two seconds later. “Oh, maybe you should call his parents,” he tells Ilya. And Ilya’s first instinct is to scream Who the fuck cares about what you think, huh? But then… then he thinks about it, and concludes that maybe, yeah, Shane’s parents would want to know that their son is in the hospital (surrounded by incompetent idiots, according to Ilya’s very unbiased opinion).

Ilya spends one hour, or maybe more, sitting in an awkward and uncomfortable position next to Shane’s bed, his knees painfully digging in the bed frame because he can’t stand being further away from him. 

He feels like he’s suddenly gotten everything he’s ever wanted and yet nothing at all. 

“Moya lyubov.” Whispering, he talks to Shane. “We should be playing together now, not in hospital with stupid doctors…”

He sniffs, then takes Shane’s hand, carefully avoiding any wire that he truly does not want to dislodge. 

“I miss you,” he wetly chuckles. “And it is stupid.”

Shane doesn’t move, Ilya doesn’t want to wake him up when he clearly isn’t feeling well. So he keeps whispering.

“I have never had so much time with you, yes?” He strokes Shane’s hot cheek with the back of his other hand. “I wish we had all the time in the world.”

“And now I wish you were awake and feeling good.”

He leans down, presses a few kisses on Shane’s arm, so that he doesn’t have to get up from the chair, nor does he risk waking Shane up.

“I was serious. I would play wing, for you, Shane,” he also says. 

“I think I would do anything for you… and that is very scary for me.”

Eventually he gets up because he has to kiss Shane’s forehead. It is hot and a bit sticky and his hair doesn’t smell as good as it usually does and that makes Ilya’s chest go through several stages of grief because he wonders how long Shane has been so sick without telling anyone. 

He stays there for a few moments, just his lips brushing Shane’s forehead, before he trails down, placing one kiss on his cheek, where the face meets the ear, before going back to his place and doing something very, very scary.

He calls Shane’s parents.

By some miracle, they answer, so Ilya doesn’t have to call the MSC headquarters to have them locate Mr and Mrs Hollander for him — yeah, he spiraled a bit. But now, that Yuna Hollander is waiting for this mysterious person to answer, Ilya’s hands are sweating again.

Maybe he should have called straight from Shane’s phone, maybe he shouldn’t have called after all. Or maybe he should have checked the time. God, he’s stupid. It must be the middle of the night no matter exactly where they are. 

“Mrs Hollander?” He shyly says, sitting alone in an empty hallway outside of Shane’s room (because he didn’t want to wake him up). 

Belatedly, he notices that he is trying his hardest to hide his accent and cringes at himself.

“Yeah, who’s talking?” Yuna Hollander asks, and Ilya— God, Ilya thought he was ready, he psyched himself up before stealing the number from Shane’s phone for ten minutes straight, but, no, he’s most definitely the furthest thing from ready.

Why is his mother dead? Fuck. Ilya could really use some motherly support right now.

“I am– uh,” Ilya winces— strong start, buddy, he thinks— “I am Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov, Shane’s friend?”

“Uh, what?”

Ilya didn’t think adults were able to squeak like dog toys and yet he’s pretty sure that is the sound Yuna Hollander has just produced.

“I’m Shane’s friend,” Ilya says again. How can he explain what they are? How can he choose to out Shane without knowing anything about his parents? What if the Hollanders are like his father? Well, now it’s too late to back out. Ilya will protect Shane, if protecting is needed.

“You are Shane’s… friend?” 

In any other circumstance, Ilya would huff, call the other person stupid, and hang up. But this is Shane’s mom, this is his boyfriend’s mom. He can’t fuck this up.

“Yes. We are, we met before rookie season, and the league, uh–” Ilya pauses because he doesn’t need to explain their relationship right now. There are more pressing matters.

“I am calling because we are in hospital. Me and Shane.”

Wrong choice of words, probably. 

The panic is immediate on the other side.

“What? Why? What did you do?”

“Nothing! What– I did nothing to Shane. Shane was sick, you don’t know?” Ilya sounds bewildered. Are they seriously accusing him of… what? Ilya is too tired for this.

“Oh, no, no. Of course,” Yuna says, but Ilya isn’t so convinced she believes what she’s saying. 

“Shane has pneumonia, and they are giving him antibiotics,” Ilya does his best to focus on the right terms, “he did not want to disturb you, but, uh– maybe you want to know?”

It’s a man who answers, now, and Ilya imperceptibly flinches. Old habits die hard etcetera etcetera. 

“It’s David, Shane’s dad. Hi.” He sounds kind, Ilya thinks. Maybe that’s where Shane gets his boring, he fondly wonders.

“Hello, uhm, I’m sorry if you are upset, but–”

“No, son, thank you for telling us.” 

Ilya knows that son is just a friendly way to address young boys, he learned that during his first year in Boston. He was weirded out but he accepted it, so he now knows that he has no right to feel emotional over it but his eyes still sting a little.

“Shane didn’t say it was this bad. We would have come back, obviously–”

Against his better judgment, probably because he’s exhausted and still scared, Ilya cuts him off, chuckling bitterly. “Yes, he said it was just a cold, and then it was not,” he says.

David Hollander, bless him, laughs. “He does that, yeah.”

“Doctors are waiting for the antibiotics to be– uh, they should work soon. But I am here, with him. I am observing, so you don’t have to worry, yes?”

Ilya wants to smack himself. He’s certain that the verb observe isn’t what he was looking for, but he thinks his message was received loud and clear. He wants Shane’s parents to know that he’ll keep watch, they don’t have to rush to Montreal.

“Maybe you do not have to come back? I can call you back when Shane wakes up?”

He doesn’t know that, amidst all the worry, David and Yuna Hollander are smiling, despite the worry and the extreme confusion. 

“Yes, that would be nice, while we figure out how to come back.”

“Okay.”

“Also, uh,” Yuna sounds hesitant, Ilya wonders why. “Could you please text us updates? If it’s not too much trouble…”

“Of course, yes. I will do that.”

Ilya nods and deflates a little when they just thank him and then say goodbye, promising him that they will be in touch. 

Then, he slowly turns around to go back to Shane. He takes a little detour to retrieve a cup of disgusting coffee and takes a moment to step outside, as it is night and there’s no risk of journalists catching him. 

He sits on a bench outside the ER and thinks. He should probably see a therapist, because being so terrified that everyone is going to die at the first sign of an ordinary illness probably isn’t exactly the poster picture of a stable person.

Then he also looks back on all the times he’s helped rookies, as captain, whenever they were sick, and he doesn’t recall being this terrified, so maybe he should tell his non-existent therapist that his problems are linked to his loved ones. Which may as well translate into loved one, because he doesn’t care about anyone else as he does about Shane. 

Obviously he loves Svetlana, she’s family, but he doesn’t feel a bordering-on-morbid attachment to her, so…

Nonetheless, as he currently doesn’t have a therapist and Shane is alone in his room, he gets back to him. 

And he’s surprised when he finds him awake.

Shane is confused when he wakes up, he needs a few moments to remember where he is and how he got there. His fever-addled brain isn’t working at its normal speed, and he also feels irrationally emotional, and he hates this. Why is he alone? He remembers Ilya being with him at all times. He can’t have imagined that, can he?

So why isn’t Ilya here anymore? Maybe — oh, Shane blurted out that he is in love with him, so maybe Ilya was angry and left? 

But— but, Shane thinks that he remembers Ilya saying it back. 

Fuck. Why is he so exhausted? He can’t even think without feeling tired. Everything hurts.

Maybe Ilya took him to the hospital and then went away? Maybe— oh, Ilya is here, hair tussled and bags under his eyes, expression pinched, brows furrowed. A cup of coffee in his hand? Is Shane seeing things?

“Shane? What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

Oh, no. Ilya is very much real and— Shane is crying, apparently. He doesn’t know when he started. 

“Ilya? Oh, I thought you had left,” he admits, drying his eyes with the hand that isn’t attached to the IV.

Ilya’s face almost crumples completely but he doesn’t cry, he simply strides forward and carefully sits on Shane’s bed. 

“Of course I’m here, Shane. I don’t want to leave, I will not leave.”

For some reason, Shane decides that this is a good time to have that conversation, the conversation that he has been dreading since Rose, kindly, basically told him that he’s gay. 

“I didn’t want to leave, Ilya,” he slurs, looking anywhere but in Ilya’s eyes. 

Honestly, he didn’t think he’d ever get the chance of doing this, so he hasn’t thought much about the words. He’ll just go with the flow, praying that Ilya hears him. 

“What? Shane, you have high fever, maybe you should rest now.”

Ilya seems genuinely worried, and Shane’s heart wants to do a little happy dance.

“I got scared, in Boston, I thought I had it–”

“Shane, you already said sorry and I forgive you–”

“But you shouldn’t forgive me Ilya, I was… a dick.”

That makes Ilya laugh, and Shane would feel offended if it were anyone else.

“Yeah, well, people do not know that you are secretly asshole, but is okay,” Ilya jokes, and for a second Shane thinks that he is serious, but then he lifts his head and sees that the only thing that is hiding in Ilya’s eyes is unconditional fondness and affection.

“Ya tebya lyublyu, Shane,” Ilya tells him and Shane can’t stop the smile that lights up his face. He wants to hear Ilya saying that he loves him in Russian forever. Maybe he wants to marry Ilya, but he can’t tell him. Not now. Not when it hurts to breathe.

“I will learn that,” he says instead.

And Ilya smiles so brightly that his cheeks are squished with joy, and Shane has to touch, needs to touch. He lifts his hand and reaches for it, caressing it with a shy movement of his thumb.

Ilya takes it in his hand and kisses it, before simply holding on. “You would probably learn Russian in a week, perfect, no accent,” he teasingly says, and despite knowing that it is not possible, he truly believes that Shane is perfect.

“Ilya,” Shane then says, a little bit more serious, worried, eyebrows scrunching in confusion and something else that Ilya can’t quite figure out, “I really don’t feel good.”

He is a bit nervous, if he’s honest. At first he was sure it was just a cold, then he realized it wasn’t, and he would have to skip the All-Star weekend, and then the fever hit him, but he still didn’t think it was so serious. And now here he is, in a fucking hospital bed. And he doesn’t feel better. Why doesn’t he feel better?

“I know, lyubimyy, I’m sorry,” Ilya uses the hand that is not holding his to brush some hair off of his forehead and Shane instinctively closes his eyes.

“Maybe I should have called my parents,” he mutters, words brushing together because of his slurred speech. “My mom would help, maybe. Do you think she could help?”

Ilya’s chest constricts for different reasons. Because he knows better than anyone how much it hurts to wish for your mother’s presence and knowing that you can’t get that, because he will never be able to simply call and talk to his mother, even if she can’t physically be there, and because he’s scared shitless that Shane will hate him when he knows the truth.

“Listen, Shane,” he begins, with a trembling voice— something that normal Shane would have picked up immediately, but this is high-fever Shane— and sits up a bit straighter. 

“I– I called your parents, before.”

He waits for a hurricane to hit the hospital— Montreal can’t be hit by hurricanes, right? He should check that, to see if Shane is safe enough, in general — or for Shane to send him away, or for Shane to have a panic attack and then send him away.

He braces for the worst but what he gets is Shane’s eyes filling up with tears while his lips curl into a soft smile. 

“You really did that?” He slurs, with bleary eyes, and Ilya is confused, so confused that he checks Shane’s forehead with the back of his hand, flinching when it comes back hot. Scorching hot. Definitely worryingly hot.

“Y– yes, I–” Ilya stammers his way through the explanation. He didn’t think Russians did that. Apparently Russians do so many things when Shane Hollander is involved. 

“The nurse said that I probably should call them, and I was scared because I did not know what to say, and I– I am still worried that you are angry.”

Shane thinks that Ilya has just cured his illness. He feels like he’s floating on a cloud. He feels high. Even though he never really tried any kind of drugs. But, aside from the constant pressure in his chest, where his lungs are situated, and the need to vomit that has been plaguing him, he thinks that Ilya has found the cure for whatever he has. 

“Oh, no. I love you,” he grins, like an idiot, so much that his eyes crinkle and Ilya has to lean down and kiss those wrinkles that appear around Shane’s eyes when he smiles happy and wide and that remind him of cute kitten whiskers. 

“I promised them updates. I’m sorry that I stole number from your phone, but maybe you want to– to send photo? Of you? They were worried about you.”

Shane is still grinning, planning his wedding in the back of his mind. “Okay,” he agrees, despite feeling like he has to throw up again. He doesn’t tell Ilya, but he feels really like shit. That is why he wanted to call his parents in the first place.

“You feel bad.”

Oh. It seems that he doesn’t have to say anything. 

“Yeah.” He even closes his eyes. Apparently Ilya knows exactly what’s going on and what to do. He’s safe with Ilya.

It would also be great if he could stay awake for longer than twenty minutes at a time, but, well, it is what it is.

Ilya sighs. Yuna— Mrs Hollander— will forgive him for the lack of updates.

Shane sleeps through the night, luckily. That is good, Ilya learns, because it means that he’s getting the rest he needs to get better. Ilya, on the other hand, doesn’t remember the last time he slept so badly. 

He’s been waking up constantly, as though his body had learned that if his eyes weren’t on Shane at all times, he could disappear— or worse: die. 

But Ilya would do it all over again, especially to get the smile that Shane throws his way when he wakes up, in the morning. 

“Hi, good morning,” Ilya whispers against his shoulder, lips touching the hospital gown Shane is wearing in a kiss. “You’re feeling better?”

Shane’s cheeks are a cute shade of red. Ilya wonders whether that’s because of the fever or because he is here. He hopes it’s the latter.

Shane nods. Ilya’s chest is hit with a sudden wave of yearning, and longing, and simply… wanting, needing. He needs to see Shane first thing in the morning. He wants to see Shane’s face when he wakes up, when his eyes are still shiny and bleary from the sleep. He longs for the moment he’ll be able to sleep in the same bed as Shane, through the night, until morning, holding him just because, sex the further thing on his mind.

“Not like I wan’ta throw up,” he says, words garbled together so much that Ilya wants to squeeze him until it hurts. He loves him so much it is fucking ridiculous. He needs to make sure that no one, ever, reads his mind— as if that were a thing. “Not good, though…”

“Okay, but I think you have…” Ilya thinks about the words, then remembers that Shane doesn’t care about his English. Shane has never cared about Ilya’s performance, on and off the ice. Not in the wrong sense of the word, obviously. “Less fever, yes?”

Shane keeps nodding, looking at Ilya like he is a gift from heaven, and Ilya doesn’t know how to handle that.

“Shane?”

“You’re pretty, Rozanov,” Shane cheekily mumbles, with only one eye open.

“I am Russian, Russians do not look pretty, don’t you know that?”

Shane snorts, with great effort he moves his hand around as if to dismiss Ilya. “Shut up,” he says. “Pretty,” he doubles down, awkwardly reaching for Ilya’s curls. Ilya is incredibly pretty, according to Shane. He’s always known that, but it became increasingly difficult to ignore over time. Now he doesn’t have to ignore that anymore. He can appreciate that Ilya is pretty, bask in the fact that he can tell Ilya is pretty and relish how devastatingly cute the word pretty sounds in Ilya’s accent.

“I will call the nurse, they give me update and I give it to your parents, okay?”

Shane hums, eyes closing again and a smile on his lips.

The fever has actually broken through the night, so both the doctor and the nurses agree that they can still keep the same antibiotic. Ilya still isn’t convinced that they know what they are doing, but he lets it slide because they say they’ll keep Shane for another night, so he will be fine. 

He’s still suspicious, though. Maybe he should ask them where they got their degree. Maybe he will, if Shane doesn’t get better, maybe he will admit that he’s acting like a delirious, crazy man. Who knows.

Eventually, Ilya’s anxiety levels spike again because Yuna calls him. 

He has texted her through the night, but Ilya wasn’t expecting her to actually call him. 

“Hello, Mrs Hollander,” is out of his mouth before he can think about passing the phone to Shane so that, maybe, she can talk to her son. 

Now he can’t simply shove the phone at him.

Shane, on his part, seems to be delighted by the scene unfolding in front of him. Ilya is pretty sure that if he weren’t so shaken because of the whole pneumonia thing, he wouldn’t be so calm about it, though.

He can’t hear the other side of the conversation, but he’s happy to listen to Ilya. 

“Yes, Shane is better today. His fever is going down,” Ilya tells his mom, “and he breathes better.”

Ilya meets his eyes and Shane delightfully notices that he is blushing. Oh, he is so happy to have Ilya. Thinking that Ilya is his as much as he is Ilya’s makes him feel giddy. 

“He is awake, yes.”

If Shane were a little more alert, he’d probably notice Ilya’s stiff back, and nervous stance, but he is exhausted, and feeling the effects of the medication, and still is running a fever, so he simply stares at Ilya with a lovesick expression on his face. 

Tilting his head, he gets Ilya’s attention. He decides to wave at him. Then he shrugs. Honestly he’s a bit out of it. Maybe they gave him some good stuff during the morning rounds. Maybe his body temperature is still too high. Who knows. 

Ilya keeps talking with his parents and a part of Shane knows that he should be panicking, but he… doesn’t feel like it right now.

He tunes out of the rest of the conversation. Then Ilya reappears next to him. “They’re coming tonight,” he announces, lips curling softly. 

“Your mother was very worried, but I told her that you are better.” Shane nods, he doesn’t care about what Ilya said to his parents, he wants Ilya to hold him. He thought he had lost him forever; every time he kissed Rose, he wondered what was wrong with him because he couldn’t stop wondering whether or not he would ever get another chance at a life with Ilya.

He has never enjoyed physical affection, or contact in general for that matter, but now that he is feeling so poorly, he craves Ilya’s touch. 

In reality, thinking back to their encounters over the years, Shane can see, now, that he has always searched for Ilya’s hands, always yearned for his touch, for his skin to meet as much of Ilya’s as possible. 

“When can I go home?” He loudly wonders, instead of asking about their parents getting back earlier from their cruise. He’ll feel bad about that in a few moments, probably. 

Right now he only wants to be in his bed, with sheets that don’t feel like cardboard, and his boyfriend wrapped around him.

“They said they can let you go tomorrow morning, if you keep getting better,” Ilya tells him, stroking his left cheek with a soft finger.

Shane nods, relaxing into the pillow , melting under Ilya's touch. 

“You scared me…” Ilya admits, so softly that he isn’t even sure Shane heard him. 

“M’sorry,” Shane blurts out though, slurring a little.

He heard him. 

“No. Is okay. But please do not stop breathing again.”

Shane chuckles, even if he’s all clogged up so it ends up sounding like a snort. And Ilya wants to eat him whole.

“Ilya?” Shane calls, some time later when Ilya has been playing on his phone, some game that Shane has never heard of. 

“Yes?”

Despite enjoying Ilya’s company and the way he is within arms reach all the time, he now feels better, so he doesn’t want to be selfish.

“You should go home, to sleep for a while, I’m feeling better,” so he says to Ilya. To his boyfriend. It still sends butterflies all over his chest to think that Ilya Rozanov is his boyfriend. Maybe they’ll never leave.

“No, I’m good here,” Ilya retorts immediately. And Shane sighs. He expected this.

“Please, I don’t feel like vomiting all over the floor, I’m awake and I’m not boiling, just sleep, shower, rest, whatever, but you can’t live on this chair.”

“Watch me.”

“Ilya.”

“Shane?”

Ilya’s raised eyebrows tell Shane that he won’t easily win this fight, but he’ll try his best.

“Please. If you go home, you can rest and come back with things for me? Please, I would like that… having clothes, maybe.”

Ilya squints and points at Shane with a (not at all) menacing finger. “I know what you are doing, Hollander.”

“What?” Shane feigns nonchalance, innocence. 

“You want to trip me to guilt, and that is not nice.”

Shane laughs, and Ilya is sure that he’s said something wrong, because he remembers that there’s a thing with trip and guilt but he can’t remember exactly how it goes, so he patiently waits for Shane to stop and explain to him.

“Come on,” he mutters, rolling his eyes. Privately, he is loving every second of this, with Shane laughing with him, as beautiful as ever. God, he has missed him so much and this is everything he could possibly have wished for.

“Guilt-trip, I was probably guilt-tripping you. Did that work?” Shane chuckles, before a fit of coughing interrupts him, sending Ilya into instant panic.

“See? Your throat does not work, I cannot leave, Hollander.” 

Ilya tries to hide behind jokes but Shane sees right through him. Maybe that is exactly why they are in this situation. They see each other, outside and inside, and somehow ended up loving it all.

“Ilya, come here.”

Shane makes a version of grabby hands that gives Ilya cuteness aggression, encouraging him to sit on the bed. So Ilya can only comply.

“There are doctors–”

Ilya shakes his head, can’t help himself. “Yes! And they know nothing, Shane! They told me that they didn’t know if the antibiotics worked!” 

Shane frowns. Ilya radiates worry. “Yes, okay, but I’m okay now. The antibiotics work, so I will be fine, the fever isn’t gonna come back, alright?” He says, as softly as he can while still being convincing. 

“I should see if there are better doctors…” Ilya murmurs, trying to hide his face by looking over at the rest of the room. 

He doesn’t want Shane to see this irrational, vulnerable side of him, but probably the ship has sailed— that’s how these weird people would say, in his place.

And he’s proven right. Shane lifts himself and places a gentle hand on his face so that their eyes can meet. “Hey, hey,” he whispers before Ilya breaks down. 

Shane wastes no time in dragging him down with him on the bed, hugging him as best as he can while in the hospital bed. “Ilya, hey, shh, we’re okay.”

“Baby,” then he adds, unconsciously, and that’s when Ilya starts sobbing. 

Shane suspects that this is the first time Ilya has allowed himself to actually let go in a long, long time, and if he thought Shane is safe enough to do so, Shane is more than happy to welcome him.

Ugly sobs make Ilya tremble, while Shane holds him, whispering sweet nothings and comforting words while showering Ilya’s head with tiny little kisses. 

Eventually, Ilya calms down enough to catch his breath. Shane is glad. He keeps stroking Ilya’s head while he rests on his chest. “I’m fine, I’m sorry for scaring you,” Shane says in a very small voice.

“I thought ‘t was jus’ a cold,” he slurs, lips softly brushing Ilya’s hairline.

Ilya shakes his head, Shane feels a puddle of drool and snot pressing against his skin and if it were anybody else, he’d be horrified, maybe disgusted, but the fact that it was Ilya makes his heart swell with love.

“My mama… she died when I was twelve,” Ilya suddenly says, completely out of the blue, leaving Shane completely shocked. 

“I found her…”

“Ilya–”

“She was not moving, I– you did not seem very alive.” He ends the sentence with a sound that seems like a self-deprecating chuckle, and Shane hates it and hates himself for being the reason behind this.

“Thank you for telling me about your mom. I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry, Ilya.”

Shane squeezes him tighter, his lips press a kiss on his head and then they stay there, until Ilya is ready to speak again. 

“I’m sorry, Shane. I should not be–”

Shane clicks his tongue, musters all of his strength to force Ilya to sit upright, so that he can look straight into his eyes. “Hey, no. Absolutely not. You don’t apologize for this, okay? I love you.”

Ilya sniffs, moves a little so that he is not weighing on Shane and then kisses his forehead. “I was really worried. I thought I found you again and then was losing you…”

Shane wants to disappear. He feels like someone is stabbing him in his gut. 

“I won’t leave again, I promise, trust me, please. I don’t know if– I don’t have a plan, but– but I wanna find one, with you, if you have me.”

Ilya pulls away, eyes red rimmed and wide. “If I have you? Hollander. I kidnap you,” he seriously declares, making Shane laugh. 

Jesus, Ilya is so in love it feels impossible. 

“What about resting a little before kidnapping me?” Shane suggests eventually, when they both calm down.

Ilya groans. 

“You are a baby, Rozanov.”

“And you are not fair, Shane Hollander.”

Yuna and David Hollander arrive in Montreal when it’s too late to find a hotel and get settled and then go to the hospital, so they text Rozanov, still bewildered, and say they’ll visit in the morning, and head to Shane’s house.

Their son won’t be bothered by their intrusion. He always reminds them that they are always welcome, after all.

The problem, however, is that when they put Shane’s door code in, the door turns out to be unlocked. But Shane is in the hospital, Rozanov confirmed that barely an hour before, so there must be someone else. 

Yuna suggests that they call the police, David brushes her off, certain that there must be an explanation. Maybe both guys forgot to lock the door on their way to the hospital? And isn’t that a thought? That Ilya Rozanov was at Shane’s house, with Shane. 

It turns out that Ilya Rozanov is still at Shane’s house. Right now. He is in Shane’s kitchen, more specifically. And… he’s wearing gloves and— washing Shane’s dishes? What the actual fuck? Yuna must be hallucinating. 

He is wearing one of Shane’s first hockey camps shirt, faded, threadbare, and his curls are held back by a barely visible, thin headband, and he’s focusing on scrubbing a particular mug as though his life depended on it.

She has a silent conversation with David before deciding they should make themselves known. 

So she clears his throat and while politely saying hello, she witnesses the moment Ilya Rozanov jumps out of his skin, clutching his chest like a Victorian widow, and dropping a dish in the process. 

“Jesus Christ,” he hisses, closing his eyes for a moment to catch his breath. 

“Sorry, we’re sorry!” Both Yuna and David exclaim, feeling pretty bad for scaring him.

“No, no,” Ilya says, “is okay, I was not expecting you.”

He says that as if he lived there, as if Shane’s house was his, too. 

He gets rid of the gloves and approaches them, offering each of them a hand. Because he is well mannered and he wants to make the best impression to his boyfriend’s parents. 

Maybe he’ll have a heart attack and die in front of them, but until then, he tries to be as polite as possible. 

“Hello,” he says, clearing his throat and while beads of sweat trail down his neck, under Yuna’s scrutinizing and perplexed stare. “I am Ilya.”

“Rozanov,” he clarifies, as if his face hadn’t been plastered next to Shane’s for the entirety of their careers. 

“I am Shane’s friend,” he adds immediately. 

Yuna, for some reason, has a feeling that this is not all he is, but she won’t push. 

She is, however, so incredibly confused. Because this is the NHL terror, professional chirper, full time menace, and now he is in her son’s apartment looking like a sad version of Pooh bear.

She doesn’t even know where the analogy comes from—maybe it’s the blonde hair— but she realizes she’s been silent for a little too long when the boy gets antsy, and his eyes turn a shade too scared. 

“Oh, yes. Hi, nice to meet you,” she says, while David nods, next to her and shares the sentiment. 

Ilya feels like he’s aged twenty years in the last three days. He hopes his smile doesn’t make him look like he’s had a stroke.

“I was just– uh, cleaning, because Shane was sick and he does not like mess.”

“Yeah, okay. Uh–” Yuna says at the same time as David says: “we didn’t know you and Shane were… friendly.”

Ilya physically winces. What now? How does he get out of this? 

“Yeah, we are… friends. Even if the league likes rivalry.” 

“Oh,” Yuna hums. “I wonder why we never met. Shane could have… introduced us.”

David puts a warning hand on her shoulder and seems ready to speak, when Ilya beats him.

“I can… find hotel if you prefer.”

They are having this conversation while Ilya— what a wild concept it is to call him by his first name— is standing at the kitchen sink, looking like cleaning up Shane’s apartment is his personal mission and responsibility. Yuna wouldn’t ask him to leave, but especially she wouldn’t do it now.

“Absolutely not, stay, son.” David speaks on her behalf, apparently.

She nods. Ilya looks visibly more relaxed. 

“Can I make you tea? Is late for coffee,” he asks them. Then seems to think about it and frowns. “Did you eat?”

They both chuckle. Wow. Ilya Rozanov is a very polite host. 

“No, thank you, we’re good. We’ll just crash in the guest room if that’s okay.” 

If that’s okay? Ilya’s eyes go wide. They’re asking him? Acting like he is the house owner? What the— “of course, I will clean up Shane’s room and then sleep.”

Then, Yuna gasps, looking at Ilya as if she were struck by lightning. Ilya freezes. Now what?

“Wait.”

“Yes?”

“You should be in Florida! The– the All-Star!” She agitatedly exclaims.

Ilya scratches his neck, a rosy tint to his cheeks. “Eh, yes. I did not go.”

No, shit. 

Well, what is he supposed to say?

“But– but they won’t let you play the next game!” Yuna, bewildered, says, as if Ilya could have missed the memo.

“Yes, I know. Is just a game, is okay. Shane did not feel good, so I came here.” Ilya shrugs. He doesn’t know what else to do, to say, that is not your son is the love of my life, who cares about hockey?

David gulps. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. 

“Is your team good?” He asks. 

Ilya shrugs again. “They were not very happy but…” 

“Well, thank you, then. For taking care of Shane. We mean it.”

Ilya smiles. He can’t talk. He’d say something that maybe Shane wouldn’t want him to say. All chocked up, he just adds a “no problem,” and hopes that it’s enough.

Ilya doesn’t sleep well, which fundamentally defeats the whole purpose of leaving Shane in the hospital to rest, but at least Shane will find the house clean. He had cleaned up before leaving in the ambulance but he supposed that it wouldn’t hurt to deep clean the bedroom floor, so he did. 

But knowing that Shane’s parents are right down the hall made him nervous, so he wakes up probably more tired than he was before. 

Anyway, it doesn’t really matter; what matters is that soon, David and Yuna decide to go to the hospital, taking Ilya with them. So Ilya finds himself in the back of an Uber with his boyfriend’s parents who don’t know he is their son’s boyfriend and that probably despised him until the last few days. Probably they still do, but Ilya doesn’t want to entertain the possibility.

When Shane sees them, his eyes widen on the spot. Could it be that the medication has worn off and he is much more alert and he hates Ilya because Ilya outed him to his parents? 

“Oh fuck,” he mutters, eyes darting frantically from Ilya to his parents and back again. Until Ilya steps in and sits on a chair on Shane’s left, so Yuna and David follow him and take the chairs on the other side.

Then there’s a collection of greetings before Ilya steps in.

“I told your parents that we are friends,” he explains gently, looking at Shane and then glancing back to the other two occupants of the room. 

Shane frowns, seems to mull over the fact. Then he shakes his head subtly. And Ilya knows immediately what he wants to do.

His parents beat him to it, though. 

It’s David who speaks first. “We thought you hated each other.”

He’s gentle, but everyone in the room hears the confusion loud and clear. 

Ilya, truthfully, is at a loss for words. They haven’t even talked about how Shane feels yet — which Ilya is only allowing because they’ve been texting nonstop since Ilya woke up and found out that Shane was waiting for him to text— and they’re already under scrutiny.

Eventually, he doesn’t have to rack his brain, because Shane gulps, then takes his hand, and then, “no, Ilya is my boyfriend, I– I love him,” he says. 

That takes everyone by surprise. Everyone in the room, except Shane, is left quite a bit speechless, breathless by that statement. So certain, so real and safe. Ilya’s eyes fill up with tears on their own accord. 

He puts one hand over Shane’s so that now he’s holding one of Shane’s hands with both of his, and squeezes. 

“I love Shane, too, obviously,” he tells Yuna and David.

Yuna’s mouth falls open, while David just stares at them, incredulous. “Oh,” they both, somehow at the same time, sigh. 

“Wow, that’s– uh, certainly a surprise,” David adds, then.

Shane starts to panic a little, Ilya realizes that when the hand he is holding starts sweating, becoming clammy. “Hey,” he whispers, gently nudging Shane. “Is okay, you’re good here,” he says but this time he looks at David and Yuna, pointedly.

“Oh, of course, Shane,” Yuna quickly recovers. She gets up, “we love you so much, baby,” she tells her son. 

Shane’s eyes fill with tears but he manages to keep them inside, manages to not cry. “I tried, mom, I really– and I’m sorry, Dad, Mom, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. That I’m gay, I mean.”

His voice is breaking and Ilya’s heart follows suit. 

“Shane,” he whispers sweetly, shooting a smile his way when Shane looks at him.

“Shane, it’s okay, son,” David says but Shane shakes his head. 

“I– I’ve wanted to tell you for so long, alright? But– at first I didn’t know, I didn’t want to… accept it, I guess. And then, it was impossible to talk about that without talking about Ilya, and I didn’t know how to do that,” he explains to his parents. 

Yuna and David share different words for the same sentiment, that is it’s okay, Shane, we’re okay.

And Ilya’s eyes are crinkling with joy, because Shane’s parents seem so accepting and it’s everything he wishes he could have and everything he loves that Shane has. 

He presses a shy kiss on the back of Shane’s hand. Both of them are blushing furiously but no one points that out, luckily.

“So, Ilya, huh?” Yuna says, smirking and clapping her hands in a way that screams it’s time, buddy. 

Ilya chuckles while Shane groans. 

“Hi,” Ilya says, because he truly doesn’t know what the etiquette is for this kind of situation, and that makes the tension in the room dissipate because everyone laughs affectionately. 

“I still hate Boston.”

“Mom!”

Ilya laughs. “Is okay,” he says at the same time Shane says: “mom cares a bit too much about hockey!”

Ilya’s smile turns into a knowing and teasing grin, all mischief and affection. “Oh I see that, she almost sounds like Shane Hollander’s mom, yes?”

Once again, everybody in the room laughs, even if Shane makes a point of rolling his eyes. 

“Okay, we’ll keep him,” David says to Shane, still teasingly and smiling but with a softness underneath that doesn’t go unnoticed by anyone. 

“Thanks,” Ilya cheekily cheers, before dropping a kiss on Shane’s head. 

“See? Lyubimyy, no chance to get rid of me.”

“Oh God, whatever will I do now!” Shane pretends to be distraught but that would work better if he weren’t smiling so big that even his back teeth are showing.

Ilya patiently waits for Shane to come back from the hospital with Yuna and David. That is, if patiently implied trying to clean every already clean surface, or checking that the bed is well made three times in less than one hour or that each pillow is positioned exactly as Shane wants it. As if Shane’s health depended on these details or Ilya had to earn Shane’s affection.

They discussed that the less Ilya is seen in Montreal, the better it is for everyone, so he agreed, if even reluctantly, and now he is making soup. Because he ran out of things to double or triple check so he is making the soup that he used to eat in Russia whenever he was sick. 

His mama used to prepare it, and then, every time Ilya was sick after she died, Ilya’s grandmother would sneak in and hand him the exactly same meal. 

Even if it never tasted the same, Ilya still appreciated the comfort that that brought him, so now he is doing his best to replicate it in Shane’s kitchen.

That’s how the Hollanders find him—stirring up something in a deep pot, eyebrows furrowed in concentration and the same small headband that he was wearing when Yuna and David first found him.

Shane is bundled up in a huge puffer jacket and a beanie that is hiding his forehead and his ears and Ilya feels the need to bite him all over attack him with a force so powerful that he has to blink a few times to compose himself. 

“Shane,” he breathes out, momentarily stepping away from the stove. 

In a few strides, he reaches Shane and instinctively opens his arms. He nods to Yuna and David acknowledging them, greeting them, and then Shane dives head first in his arms.

It’s so weird, almost funny, because Shane reminds Ilya of an infant who’s facing the cold weather for the first time in his life, bundled up to make sure he’s warm. 

“Are you cold, solnyshko?” Ilya frowns when Shane squeezes him tightly, and buries his face in Ilya’s neck.

“Ilya,” Shane whispers, placing a kiss on Ilya’s neck, where the shoulder meets the neck. 

“Yes,” Ilya murmurs, softly removing the hat from Shane’s head, grateful that Shane’s parents went ahead and left them alone.

Ilya tucks Shane under his chin, cheek squished against his chest and kisses his forehead repeatedly, even if the position is a little awkward. “Fever is still high?”

“Not so much,” Shane slurs, “but I don’t feel great…”

Ilya’s heart wants to catapult out of his ribcage, probably. That must be the reason behind the flutter he is feeling. “I made soup, can you eat?”

Shane pulls away and blinks at Ilya, several times. “You made soup,” he says. It’s not a question. Shane is staring at him trying to make this sentence make sense.

“Yes, if you want,” Ilya explains, while unzipping his jacket and gently getting it off of him. 

Now Shane is left standing in a grey hoodie, covering one of his thermal undershirts, his cheeks are red under the freckles and his eyes glassy because he is still sick, and Ilya is scared, because he is sure that his heart doesn’t belong to him anymore. His heart belongs to Shane Hollander. 

“You made soup for Shane?”

Yuna’s voice makes both Ilya and Shane jump out of their skin.

“Jesus,” Ilya whispers while Shane complains loudly with a “mom!” 

“It was the soup mama made for me when I was child…” Ilya explains when they sit in the kitchen. “It was… nice for me.”

Maybe Shane will go back to the hospital, admitted to the cardiology ward, because there’s no way he can survive the knowledge that Ilya Rozanov, who is his boyfriend, has made him his comfort childhood soup and is now waiting to see if Shane wants to eat it while his parents are sitting at the same table as them. There is no fucking way.

“Ilya.” Shane’s jaw is on the floor, and Ilya, used to a lifetime of rejection and abandonment, immediately jumps to the wrong conclusion.

“I’m sorry. If you don’t like it. I will– I can go, yes? Sorry,” he tries to backtrack, fleeing the kitchen.

Fleeing the house? Yuna is confused. Her son should definitely do something.

But— well, not this. It’s a bit awkward for them to watch, because Shane gets up, grabs a handful of Ilya’s sweater and drags him into a kiss that is definitely not suitable for parents eyes.

“Rozanov,” Shane pants, when he deems that the kiss can come to an end. “Whatever you are thinking– it’s wrong.”

Ilya, eyes shiny and throat constricted, laughs wetly. “That is not very nice, Hollander. You should know that I am always right.”

Shane chuckles, steals another kiss, licking on Ilya’s upper lip when he pulls away. “Shut up, and give me the soup.”

If Ilya’s eyes keep shining throughout the whole dinner, nobody says a thing.

Ilya helps Shane get ready for bed and it’s almost a religious experience. After helping him into the shower, and then patting him dry (despite Shane’s protests because he is perfectly capable, Ilya!), he watches Shane brush his teeth and has to close his eyes because this sight is so domestic that his ribs could fracture with how fast his heart is pounding. He wants this forever, he would trade his soul for this to the darkest devil.

Shane is drowning in clothes, still cold, and he keeps shivering, but the doctors reassured Yuna and David that he is fine, they don’t have to worry so Ilya tries to keep his cool.

He takes his shower in record time, though, especially since any time he wastes in the en-suite bathroom is time that he could be spending in Shane’s bed, holding him. 

And he feels a bit pathetic for the way he is yearning to be close to Shane. But when he does get to the bed, Shane doesn’t even wait for Ilya to get fully under the duvet before wrapping himself around him. So Ilya chuckles and holds him as soon as they situate themselves under the covers. 

“Ily– Ilya,” Shane has to clear his throat and that sends a small jolt of fear through Ilya but then he doesn’t cough once so Ilya breathes. 

“Yes?” Ilya is whispering, caressing Shane’s freckles with a thumb and brushing his hairline with his lips, humming softly when it’s Shane who talks.

Shane smiles, and squeezes one of Ilya’s sides with one hand, over his heart. “I thought I was hallucinating, when you arrived here,” he confesses. 

“Hm?”

“I thought you were– I didn’t think you were real–”

“Oh, yes, too handsome to be real, I know.”

Shane slaps him on the stomach playfully and both of them tremble with chuckles. “Asshole.”

Ilya takes Shane’s hand, playing with his fingers while he talks. 

“You should be in Florida,” Shane tells him seriously.

“Mm, yes, your mom told me the same thing.”

Ilya tries to sound nonchalant but Shane knows him. Knows when he is deflecting.

“Ilya.”

There’s a pregnant pause, rich in silence, that blankets them for a while, before Shane reaches up to Ilya’s cheek so that he can drag him down to him, and kiss his lips. “Thank you, you didn’t have to do it–”

“Shane, if you apologize again–”

Shane laughs, “no, no, I just… I know how much you love the All-Star weekend and I know that they will make you skip the next game and I just– maybe it was… a bit crazy.”

Ilya moves, despite how nice it feels to hold Shane like this. He moves them both so that they can lie face to face on their sides. 

He places a warm hand on Shane’s face, cupping his cheek and caressing around his eye with a finger. “You are right. I love All-Star, I also love hockey, yes? But you are more important.”

It shouldn’t feel like a punch, like a slap shot to the sternum. It shouldn’t feel like a puck to the face. And yet it does. Ilya’s words echo through the room for one second too long before Shane remembers that he has to say something. But what could he possibly say?

“Ilya, I– I don’t– I love you,” eventually he sighs, and prays that Ilya somehow manages to read his mind, absorb the sheer volume of his love and his affection, the way his heart is swelling and desperately trying to escape, to reach Ilya’s. 

Ilya smiles, nods. “I know,” softly he tells Shane. But then his expression turns alarmed, and Shane starts to panic.

“Shane–”

“What? What’s wrong? Ilya?”

“Have you taken your pills, Shane?” 

“Ilya, we were having a moment,” Shane deadpans. “You scared the shit out of me.”

“What? We have many moments, now is moment for medicine.”

Shane laughs, despite himself. Because he was trying to have a serious conversation, trying to thank Ilya even if Ilya doesn’t want to be thanked, and Ilya somehow managed to turn it around and make it about Shane. 

It’s something that, Shane has found out, he is disturbingly good at. Ilya has this habit, Shane has learned over the years (but especially over the last few days), to put his loved ones way ahead of him. And maybe it’s self destructive, self sacrificing behavior, but maybe it is also what got Shane to fall in love with him in the first place. 

Maybe Shane fell in love when Ilya asked “you still want?” and “still okay?” and just took a little bit to catch up. Maybe. He doesn’t really know. But he is certain that he still wants, and that it’s still okay. And that is it were up to him only, he would still want until his death. Which probably should scare him, but truthfully doesn’t even make him flinch. 

He kisses Ilya’s chin and then tucks Ilya’s head under his own chin, making Ilya’s face collide with his chest. 

“I want all the moments, with you, Ilya.”

“Yes, me too, but if you do not take medicine, you will die like sick rat and we will not have many moments,” Ilya says seriously, even if his eyes are saying something else entirely— something mischievous, all fond and affectionate.

Shane laughs. “What the fuck? Now I am a rat?”

Ilya smirks, while leaving the bed to retrieve the pills. “Cutest rat of Canada,” he confirms.

Shane rolls his eyes but he only feels extremely loved, maybe too loved, if that’s a thing. Then he takes his medicine and drags Ilya down so that Ilya is lying completely on top of him, every bit of their bodies touching. 

For good measure, Shane hugs him tightly, and then kisses his head.

“Good night, baby,” he whispers, already halfway down to sleep.

“Good night, Shane,” Ilya immediately says back, but he takes a bit longer to fall asleep, because he’s never been anyone’s baby since his mom died, maybe he can be Shane’s baby, if he is good enough.

(He doesn’t know that he’s always been a whole lot more than good enough, to Shane.)