Chapter Text
Ilya used to think he knew what tired meant. He’d once played a grueling game at the Garden, gotten rip-roaring drunk to celebrate the win, and ended the night in Chinatown drinking beers hidden in coke cans, barely making it onto the plane the next morning for a roadie. But that didn't even begin to measure up to how he felt right now.
A kind, discreet nurse had helped clean him up, gently washing away the thick layer of road grime caked onto his skin. He was clean, but he wasn't refreshed. Instead, the lack of dirt just made him hyper-aware of how raw he felt underneath it, his body throbbing with a deep, sharp ache that he couldn't escape. He had never felt so entirely, hopelessly down-to-his-bones exhausted, but he refused to let himself sleep.
Embarrassing, he couldn't help but think.
It didn't help matters that the emotional tidal wave of Shane leaving had barely settled before Cliff walked in—Cliff, with his massive bulk and an aura of anxiety floating around him like a cartoon speech balloon.
"Rozzy," he breathed out, hustling into the room. "Holy actual fuck, my man."
Cliff was large and imposing, but he was also the eldest brother to so many sisters. He took the concept of brotherhood impossibly to heart, and at some point between Ilya being an annoying rookie and becoming captain, Cliff had adopted him as just another younger sibling. Ilya didn’t mind. It was nice to have a brother who reached out with open palms instead of closed fists.
Ilya watched Cliff drop his bag and come bedside, gently cupping the back of Ilya's neck to press their foreheads together.
"Hi," Ilya weakly replied.
Hollander kissed me on the forehead, he wanted to tell Cliff, the thought looping through his exhausted brain before he remembered that Hollander was a secret, and a forehead kiss was an even deeper one.
"Do not ever do that again," Cliff muttered, his head still pressed against his. He didn't pull away, just held him there in that heavy, stubborn hockey-player embrace, as if he could physically anchor Ilya to the bed and keep him from breaking any further.
"What, walk?" Ilya croaked.
Cliff didn't laugh. He just let out a long, shaky exhale, the hot breath puffing against Ilya’s cheek as the tension finally drained out of his massive shoulders. He gave the back of Ilya’s neck one final, anchoring squeeze before pulling back, wiping a hand aggressively over his face as he dropped heavily into the plastic bedside chair.
The chair groaned under his weight, a stark, normal sound in the quiet room. Cliff looked like he’d aged five years on the flight over, his face pale under his beard, but his hands were steady as he reached out to tuck the edge of the scratchy hospital blanket around Ilya's shoulder.
"Scare me like that. Jesus."
They hadn't had long before the nurses walked in, softly asking Cliff to make himself scarce for half an hour. Armed with a sticky note detailing where he could find a decent cup of coffee, Cliff was out the door, leaving Ilya to their ministrations.
Now here he was. Maybe not squeaky clean, but fresher. Still, the temporary comfort did nothing to ease the guilt; he felt bad that Cliff had been rushed out, and even worse that Shane had been forced to leave. But overriding all of it was the rising, vicious heat in his stomach and the relentless, deep ache in his arm.
His shooting arm.
Holy actual fuck, this was a disaster. Organs come and go, but his arm? His arm was everything.
The train of thought was cut short by a familiar vibration in the floorboards. The thing about Cliff was that he couldn't help but be loud. He was a loud left wing who had spent years yelling for the puck, delivering chirps that could be heard from the opposite rafters, and moving with thundering steps, as if his feet had never learned how to walk without the extra weight of hockey skates.
Which was to say, Ilya heard him coming from a mile away—Cliff clomping like the Budweiser horses down the sterile hospital hallway.
What was interesting to Ilya was that Cliff was chatting—again, the man was impossibly, without malice, without control, loud as fuck. How Cliff had already found a friend in the hospital at 7:30 in the morning was a mystery.
Unless.
Oh fuck.
This day.
Maybe the car should have killed him. It would be easier than this.
Cliff opened the door, holding it wide as—yep, just as Ilya had feared—Shane walked in right behind him.
"Rozzy," Cliff announced, "you are looking mighty fresh and clean."
Shane was staring at the linoleum like a badger. Or a beaver. Whatever dumb, nervous North American animal was always terrified of its own shadow, that was exactly what Shane looked like right now.
"And look who I found," Cliff continued cheerfully, entirely blind to the frantic, light-speed ping-pong of panic passing between the two of them. "Brought Hollander right back so he knew when the coast was clear. Which is good, because I'm the only one here who actually knows when the team doctors are arriving, and when certain people might need to... go visit their grandmothers."
Ilya’s exhausted brain stalled out entirely. "Your grandmother?" he asked, looking past Cliff straight at Shane.
Shane looked like he wanted the floorboards to swallow him whole. "Yeah. My grandmother."
"Please do not ask," Shane added quickly. He finally looked up, his eyes meeting Ilya’s, and despite the ache in his side and the terror in his arm, Ilya couldn't help the small, weak grin that tugged at his mouth. Oh, he was absolutely going to ask. But later.
Cliff clapped his hands together, effectively shattering the moment. "Good! Now that that's settled—Ilya Rozanov, what the actual fuck? Are you a complete idiot? Who gets hit by a fucking car?"
Cliff Marlow, ladies and gentlemen.
Sometimes things will always feel awkward. Like when you sleep with a girl and then sleep with her sister, and then they both end up being the sisters of a mediocre hockey player who gets sent back down to the AHL. Or when you are new to the country and keep forgetting that you cannot tip zero percent, even if the service was genuinely terrible, because Americans take it very personally.
But for some magical reason, Cliff Marlow and Shane Hollander sitting with Ilya Rozanov in his hospital room was not awkward at all.
There was talk about games, and talk about players, and talk about who had better stats in NHL 14. It was Ilya, obviously—he was on the cover.
Shane even appeared to relax, softening within the space. They weren't touching, but Cliff had strategically taken the seat furthest away from the bed, leaving the gap open so that, if they needed to, they could reach out and touch one another.
But there was only so long before Cliff's phone buzzed again. He grabbed it and grimaces.
"Right," he said, looking up. "Dr. Petrov says he's about thirty minutes out with traffic. So what I'm going to do is go find a bomb-ass breakfast sandwich from a bodega nearby, and then meet him in the lobby. Unfortunately," at this, he looked up and locked eyes with Shane, "the room should probably be empty when he gets up here."
"Yeah," Shane nodded. "Yeah."
Cliff stood to leave, looking at both of them. "I'm gonna say this once, even though I hope you know it already. I don't care. I love you, Rozzy, and that doesn't change, okay? And Hollander, whatever this is, I don't care—unless you break my boy's heart, and then all fucking bets are off."
"Jesus, Cliff," Ilya barks out a laugh.
"The shovel talk. Nice," Shane smiled, reaching out a hand to shake Cliff's. "Marlow, thank you. For it all."
"Nothing to thank."
And with that, he was gone.
Ilya wishes he could say that the next thirty minutes were monumental or dramatic or life-changing. Instead, all that happened was Shane went back to holding his hand while they talked about what proposed recovery plans looked like—and also absolutely nothing at all. And then Shane left for good, another forehead kiss left like an icy burn on his soul, echoing even as his back disappeared behind the door frame.
The pain medication top-off had been a blessing. It efficiently dulled the many pings across his body and let him relax enough to grab some sleep. Cliff had turned on the early morning news and kept up a quiet dialogue about the bullshit of what it must be like to live in New York City while Ilya dozed in and out for the next few hours. He and Cliff had roomed together many times over the years, and Ilya was more than used to falling asleep while Cliff rambled on and on near him—often to one of his many sisters back home in Connecticut. Ilya worried he had become dependent on the background noise of Cliff Marlow, and he would go to his grave before he ever said it out loud.
Petrov reappeared after a few hours, and he didn't come alone. He was joined by two other doctors: Dr. Okafor—"call me Dr. O"—and Dr. Chen, responsible for his spleen and his arm, respectively.
Dr. O was a lanky man who started off his update with another reminder of how lucky Ilya was that they had been able to save his spleen. Ilya just nodded, wondering if there was a minimum number of times they had to say it. Maybe for insurance reasons?
Dr. O then proceeded to say many words that amounted to: spleen still in body, the drain—which Ilya was actively trying not to think about at all—could probably come out in a day or two, spleen very important, Ilya will feel tired for a while.
Ilya nodded like a good boy and mentally subtracted at least two weeks from the proposed timeline.
But then, it was arm time.
Dr. Chen pulled up a tablet with his X-ray on it and kindly but factually explained the situation. Ilya didn't like it one bit.
Surgery, she said first. The fracture was displaced in a way that wasn't going to resolve itself; they needed to go in with plates and screws to give it the best possible chance at a full range of motion. Ilya nodded. He had gathered this. What he had not gathered, or had gathered and was refusing to fully accept, was what came next.
Three to four months minimum before a return to play.
"No? No. I have seen—" he started.
"Different fractures," she said simply, the rainbow badge on her lanyard catching the light as she shifted the tablet toward him. "I know what you're going to say. For some fractures, yes. Not this one."
Ilya looked at the X-ray. Two clean pieces of his radius. He looked at them for a long moment.
Dr. O cleared his throat gently. "Can I jump in here?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Look, if it was just the arm, we might be having a different conversation. Six weeks, maybe eight, we push hard in rehab, see what happens. But Ilya," he said his name like they'd known each other for years, which Ilya found he didn't mind, "you also have an organ healing. A slightly less important organ—"
Ah, Ilya thought. So someone finally admits it.
"—but an organ nonetheless. Your body right now is essentially being asked to run two construction projects at the same time with half the usual workforce. Something has to give. We don't get to choose what."
Ilya absorbed this. It made sense. He hated that it made sense.
"So," Petrov said, pushing off the wall and coming to stand at the foot of the bed, switching into the tone he used when the plan had already been decided and he was simply delivering it. "Here is what happens. Tomorrow morning, we bring you back to Boston. Our ortho team comes in, they do the surgery there—our guys, our facility, best possible outcome for range of motion. And then, Rozz," he met Ilya's eyes, "we take it day by day. Maybe your body surprises us. It has before." A pause. "But we do not rush this."
The playoff math ran through Ilya's head whether he wanted it to or not. February. Three months was May. Four was June. Playoffs ran through June. The rest of the season.
He was nodding. He was being a good patient. He was listening and asking the right questions because that was what you did. You nodded and accepted the sentence and didn’t ask for Cliff to hold his hand like Shane had just so he didn’t feel like the world was spinning away from him.
Dr. O and Dr. Chen said the right things and left. Petrov lingered at the door.
"Get some sleep, Ilyusha," he said in Russian. "You're going to need it."
And then he was gone. Cliff turned the television down, the room settled into its quiet, and Ilya lay in the middle of it. He looked at the ceiling and thought about three to four months, and June, and his arm, and Boston. And Shane—always Shane—in whatever corner of his mind he was currently occupying.
Home, he thought.
Home sounded like it was going to be a bitch to get to. And home meant conversations. About the Bears’ salary cap with a useless captain.
The trade deadline was in five days.
Ilya slept two hours.