Chapter Text
They’re not even two minutes into the game when Ilya goes down in front of Montreal’s goal.
It happens so quickly that Shane initially thinks it’s a trip. He exhales a breathless laugh as he circles the net before coming to a stop in front of Ilya and the refs, a chirp about him being too light on his feet ready to go.
Then he sees the puddle of blood beneath Ilya’s face. He heaves and spits out a few teeth. He looks up at Shane.
His mouth and chin are covered in blood. Too much blood. Way more than blood than just a few broken teeth.
There are tears in his eyes.
His outstretched glove hangs there, frozen, as the noise of the arena mutates into a ringing buzz. Then he’s moving, pushed away by Marlow, and then Boston’s goalie. There’s a flurry of movement, a trainer with a towel, more blood dripping onto the ice, and he just. Stands there. Staring.
Ilya is helped off the ice. Shane doesn’t even tap his stick.
The image stays with him for the rest of the game. Ilya goes down over and over again in his mind and keeps playing through every shift, every intermission, every single second of a game that somehow seemed much longer than any other he’s played before.
It’s a small mercy, he thinks as he waits outside the visitor’s locker room, that the camera wasn’t on Ilya when it happened. That it only caught the turn of his head, his fall to the ice.
It did, however, show who was at fault.
“Where’s Rozanov?” He’s on his feet before the locker room door even closes behind Marlow. He shoves his hands in his pockets because if he didn’t, he might shove Marlow into a wall. The asshole couldn’t even deflect a puck correctly.
“Jesus Christ, the fuck?” Marlow has his hands up. “What the fuck do you want?”
“Is he okay? Did he go to MGH? Royal Vic? What did he—”
“Hollander. Hollander!”
Shane shuts his mouth and looks up at Marlow.
“Why,” Marlow says, his eyebrows raised nearly to his hairline, “the fuck do you care?”
Ah, shit.
It’s not unheard of for captains to visit guys injured badly by their teams. But this was Marlow’s fault. It had nothing to do with Shane’s team. Or Shane.
Except it had everything to do with Shane.
Fuck. Think.
“I do this whenever another captain gets injured here,” he says after a second. “Because. They. May not speak French.”
Marlow is still staring.
“So it could be hard to understand the doctors if they’re injured, uh. Here.” Shane finishes.
“You’re going to go to the hospital to translate?” Marlow finally asks. It doesn’t sound like an actual question.
“We have a…deal, also. An old joke. Between the top three in our draft class. If we got injured in the other’s city, you’d bring the guy. A…” Shane wracks his brain trying to think of something. “…Beer.”
“A beer. You’re going to bring a guy who just got out of surgery a beer.”
Surgery? Fuck. “Not, like. Tonight?”
Marlow shakes his head. “You know what? You both are freaks. He’s at General, I think. I don’t know if he’ll be out of surgery for a while, though.”
Shane nods. “Okay. Thanks.”
Marlow looks. Thoughtful, maybe. “Didn’t Korogyi fuck his knee up here last season?”
Oh, shit, he did. “Yeah, uh, he likes this weird beer. From Hungary. It took forever to find.”
“Sure.”
Okay. Shane needs this interaction to be over. “Right. Yeah, thanks. Again.”
He turns and starts walking down the long hallway back towards their locker room. When he looks behind him, Marlow is shaking his head and muttering something to himself.
Shane doesn’t sleep well that night, lying awake with his hands interlaced on his chest. He thinks about Ilya, whether he’s out of surgery or not. His chest aches at the thought and from a late, dirty hit from Marlow that could’ve taken him out just as easily as Ilya.
Maybe he gets a few hours. Maybe he doesn’t. He’s up at dawn. Sick of waiting and sick of himself, he forces himself into the gym and pushes himself way too hard.
Around 11 his impatience wins out. It has to be a reasonable enough time to go to the hospital.
He gets most of the way to MGH before he remembers last night. He groans and doubles back down Chem. de la Côtes-des-Neiges to the nearest dep and buys a can of beer. Just in case Marlow is there.
Paper bag in hand, he starts driving back up the hill, slowed to a crawl behind…a bus. Of course.
“Come on,” he mutters, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel.
The drive feels like an hour even though he knows it can’t be more than, like, ten minutes.
He’s given directions to Ilya’s room by the woman behind the visitor desk, who seems to be tripping over herself to help him.
He needs to be cool. He can’t sprint down the hallway like he wants to. So he plasters his stupid visitor sticker to the front of his shirt and forces himself to walk at an only slightly abnormal pace through the maze of hallways until he gets to the room Géraldine insisted on writing down on a scrap of paper.
He takes a deep breath and pushes the door open and—
“Holy shit,” he exhales, his heart sinking. “Ilya, fuck.”
Ilya eyes him from his bed. He doesn’t say anything. He can’t, his—his teeth are wired together, and the entire right side of his face is a bruise, angry purple and red fading into sickly green and yellow the further it stretches beyond his jaw.
Ilya tries to say—something. Whatever it was is lost to a groan and a wince.
“Don’t, shit, don’t—do anything.” Shane crosses the room to the side of Ilya’s bed. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t even know what to say. “Jesus fucking Christ, Ilya.”
Ilya rolls his eyes.
“What?”
He lifts his hand, the one without the IV, and points at Shane’s dick.
Shane’s brow furrows. He doesn’t understand. He opens his mouth to ask again when Ilya shakes his hand, still pointing.
He looks to his left and then fully turns around. Ah. There’s a whiteboard and marker next to a teddy bear wearing a Boston sweater.
He picks up the whiteboard and marker and hands them to Ilya. Ilya starts writing. After a few labored scribbles, he turns the whiteboard to Shane.
? Bag?
Shane looks down at the paper bag in his hand. “Oh. It’s, uh. Beer. For you, I guess. It’s a long story.”
Ilya raises his eyebrows. Like he’s not impressed by that answer.
“Okay, I made up a story because Marlow wouldn’t tell me where you were, so I said I was coming to help you translate what the doctors say, and he still wasn’t buying it, so I said that you, me, and fucking Gábor Korogyi made a deal during the draft that if one of us got injured in the other’s city we’d bring a beer to the hospital.”
Ilya exhales what could maybe be a laugh and starts writing again.
Stupid story, the board reads. Then below it, dr english.
Shane realizes that he’s never seen Ilya’s handwriting before. It’s big and blocky, and it doesn’t look like he does uppercase and lowercase letters, just…smaller uppercase ones.
He’s about to ask another question when a woman in scrubs enters the room and seems to pause at the sight of Shane. “Ah. Mr. Rozanov. I was just coming over to discuss your vitals, but I’ll come back.”
“No, no, I’ll go,” Shane says, dumb and out of place. He sets the bag down on the table beside Ilya and turns to leave when Ilya grabs his wrist with a grunting noise that could maybe be understood as stay.
“Oh.” Shane stops and looks at Ilya, his hazel eyes wide and desperate like they were last night. Then he looks back to the doctor.
“…Okay,” the doctor says. “Mr. Rozanov, lift your right hand if you’re okay with Mr. Uh. Hollander. Hearing about your health and care plan.”
He watches as the hand with Ilya’s IV lifts. Damn. That’s a good system.
“Okay then. Well, Mr. Hollander, I’m Melanie Dupuis, and I’m the attending maxillofacial surgeon on Mr. Rozanov’s care team.”
“Oh,” Shane says. He extends his hand, and she shakes it. “I don’t really know what all that means.”
Dr. Dupuis smiles. “It means I helped reconstruct Mr. Rozanov’s jaw.”
Ilya taps the whiteboard with his marker, and Shane looks down to see that he’s written ILYA and underlined it twice.
“Right, he wants me to call him Ilya,” Dr. Dupuis says. “Old habits. Anyway, Ilya, I came to say that your vitals are looking good. Your temperature did elevate slightly overnight, but it’s down again. Just to be safe, we’re going to start you on some antibiotics to get in front of any infection.”
“When will he be able to play again?” Shane asks. He probably shouldn’t interrupt, but apparently, it was the right question because Ilya nods.
“Ah, try not to nod so much. We want to allow your jaw as much time to heal without jostling anything.” Dr. Dupuis turns to Shane. “I’d say six to eight weeks, depending on how much additional oral surgery he wants to get done before returning to the ice.”
“Oral surgery?”
“The damage to Mr. Rozanov’s lower teeth is…extensive.” She gestures to her jaw. “The puck hit his mandible, fracturing at the body and symphysis, and many lower teeth were chipped as well, in addition to losing his lower right lateral and cuspid.”
He turns to Ilya, his eyes wide with disbelief. Ilya shrugs. Jesus Christ.
“This is why you’re not supposed to catch pucks with your mouth, Rozanov,” Shane says. He can’t think of anything else to say, but he’s sure that behind whatever nonchalance Ilya thinks he’s displaying, he’s just as freaked out as Shane feels.
He thinks he’s right because Ilya just shrugs, avoiding Shane’s eyes.
“I did mean to ask…” Dr. Dupuis says, and Shane turns back to face her, trying to school his face into something normal. “Ilya, do you have any family coming?”
Fuck.
Ilya makes an expression as if to say, go ahead, and Shane wonders when he became so good at reading expressions. He’s usually terrible at it.
“I don’t think he does,” Shane starts, his words careful. “His father passed away a few weeks ago.”
“Ah. A…partner, maybe?”
He can see the frustration written on Ilya’s face. He still won’t make eye contact.
“He has a girlfriend here,” Shane invents quickly. Didn’t Ilya once say that Marlow already thinks that? “Um. Jane, right?”
Ilya’s eyes move back towards Dr. Dupuis, and he nods.
Dr. Dupuis looks between them. Opens her mouth and then maybe decides against whatever she was going to say. “Well,” she says, bright and belated. “That could make things easier! If you could stay with Jane, you could continue your care here. Of course, it wouldn’t be too much trouble to transfer your care back to Boston, but you won’t be able to fly for at least a week, and by that time we could potentially start looking at dental reconstruction plans.”
“I can call Jane for you,” Shane says. “I’m sure she’ll be able to have you once she gets back from. Um. Halifax?”
“Great. Well, I believe your next dose of morphine should be pretty soon, so I’ll leave you, um. Two.” Dr. Dupuis smiles and shakes Shane’s hand again before leaving and shutting the door behind her.
Shane finds the seat behind him and slumps into it, rubbing his hands over his face. When he looks back at Ilya, a smile slides off his face with a wince.
“Stop smiling, idiot.”
Ilya taps at the board. Halfax?
“You’re missing an I in there. And if you have a girlfriend, why isn’t she here?” Shane crosses his arms. “I’d like to see you try to make all this shit up.”
Ilya tilts his head, like, fair point. At least, that’s what Shane’s going to go with. He doesn’t get to win arguments with Ilya very often.
Something dings on the chair beside him. Ilya’s phone. He holds it out for Ilya to take, but he starts writing instead.
Concosion
Then:
8114
Shane looks down at the lockscreen. It looks like a photo of Boston during their cup parade, except Ilya has zoomed in on a sign covered in pink and gold glitter that says THANK YOU MR. ILYA in a child’s handwriting next to a very inaccurate drawing of the cup.
It’s cute as fuck. Shane’s is just a picture of the lake at his cottage.
He types in the password and pulls up his texts. “I think it’s from Marlow,” he says. “Is his contact Daddy tongue emoji tongue emoji 7 dollar sign eggplant emoji?”
Ilya nods.
Shane shakes his head a little. “Uh, he says that if you’re up for visitors he can come by with the medical staff before they head to the airport.”
Ilya hesitates and then shakes his head.
“Okay, how would you write back no?”
Ilya stares at him and then writes.
No.
“Okay, well. I don’t know!” Shane carefully types it and then reads it twice to make sure he hasn’t accidentally written: this is Shane Hollander who has been sleeping with Ilya for years. No he’s not up for company right now. Instead of no.
He’s being stupid. He hits send, and before he locks the phone, he realizes that—
He could read every message in Ilya’s phone right now. He won’t, he wouldn’t, but that didn’t even seem to cross Ilya’s mind.
It’s probably just the morphine.
He should say something. It’s so quiet, quiet in a way things never are with Ilya. And, and of course, it’s quiet; his fucking mouth is wired shut. And what would Shane even say? That he was—
Ilya’s phone starts vibrating in his hand—a call from Jake - Med Staff.
“I think it’s someone from the med staff. Want me to…?”
Ilya shakes his head and starts writing.
Jake is back 12
Time??
Shane checks his watch. “11:45. I should go then, eh?”
Ilya almost looks—disappointed.
Shane stands, and before he can think better of it, he brushes a kiss against Ilya’s head. His curls don’t smell like they usually do. He smells. Sterile. Wrong.
“Have someone text Jane when she can come back to see you, okay?” he says. Ilya nods, his curls tickling Shane’s nose. He presses another kiss to his hair and turns to go.
Ilya grabs Shane’s hand. His eyes look. He looks.
“I’ll be back,” Shane says, squeezing Ilya’s hand gently. “I promise.”
He’s halfway down the hall when he hears something clatter to the ground.
It’s a hospital. It’s probably not—
He forces himself to keep walking.
—
He feels like an idiot when Jake stops in the doorway and then stoops to pick up the whiteboard and marker.
Now the whiteboard has two long cracks in the plastic. Ha ha, just like Ilya.
“I’ll…” Jake hands over the whiteboard and marker. “Ask the nurses if they have another one, I guess.”
“Are any of them in love with you yet?” Marly booms, too fucking loud as he pushes his way into the room. He stops at the sight of Ilya. He sees that glimpse of Marly he gets every eighteen months or so—the real, serious Marly. Then it looks like he forces a smile to his face. “Aw shit, not so pretty anymore, huh?”
Ilya wonders if it’s too late to pretend he’s asleep. He must be on some pretty fucking good drugs if his pain isn’t increasing. Marly is headache-inducing on the best of days.
“Christ, Marlow, you’re worse than my kindergartner. Did we or did we not talk about inside voices?” Jake says. “He’s concussed.”
Concussed and increasingly annoyed that, apparently, Marly can’t read.
Jake rounds his bed, probably to check Ilya’s swelling for the four hundredth time since Ilya woke up two hours ago, but he stops short.
“Is that a…can of beer?”
“Oh shit, so Hollander did come.” Marly’s across the room and picking up the beer can too quickly for Ilya’s tired eyes to track. He examines the label in the light. Like he’s a fucking appraiser of beer instead of a moron. “Ugh, Molson. The kid is, like, fucking in love with you or something, and he can’t even find you Sam Adams?”
Ilya fucking hates Sam Adams. He fucking hates beer.
Marly pops the tab and takes a swig.
He fucking hates Marly.
Marly wipes his mouth with his hand and says, “So, get this, last night? I’m ready to get the fuck out of dodge, and then all of a sudden, Hollander’s on me, wicked whiny and bitchy asking where you are, and I was like, Jesus, why’s he all up on my dick and yours?”
Isn’t Ilya’s next dose of morphine supposed to be here by now.
“Marly, what the actual hell are you talking about?”
“Shh, Doubting Jake, I’m spinning a tale. So then he makes up this story about giving you and that Korogyi kid beer if you get injured, and I’m like, sure, that’s a funny Valentine, but whatever. He’s all neurotic anyway.”
Ilya’s halfway through writing fuck off when he adds, deal real.
He turns the board around. He’s exhausted. He doesn’t want to write anymore. He sure as fuck doesn’t want Marly in here.
Jake must see that somewhere on Ilya’s face. Or he’s a mindreader because he says, “Marlow, the plane is going to leave without you. I said ten minutes. Time’s up, dude.”
“Alright, Christ, fine.” Marly puts the beer down, and he looks—sincere. Again.
Jesus Christ, here we fucking go.
“I did want to say, like, sorry,” Marly says, finally. “I know we wanted to get the cup, and now you’re all like, fucking brace-faced and shit, and I know it was my fault. I mean. It was an accident, but it was still my fucking shot and—”
Ilya shakes his head and starts writing. He thrusts the board at Marly.
Is fucking fine. Sorry is weird on you. Stop pls.
Marly reads it. It takes forever because he’s a fucking idiot, but he finally nods. “You rest easy, Roz,” he says, handing the whiteboard back to Ilya. “I hope your Montreal girl gets here soon. You should get her a costume so she, like, looks extra hot nursing you better.”
Ilya flips Marly off, and he finally leaves with a wave, but Jake doesn’t go with him.
His brow furrows. He starts writing, this time in Russian. You’re not going with him?
He doesn’t know if the front office hired Jake because his parents immigrated from Georgia after the dissolution, but it’s always a relief when he doesn’t have to deal with fucking English when he’s injured.
Slowly, and with the weirdest fucking Georgian-Bostonian accent, Jake responds, «No, I’m staying with you until you can get on a plane.»
Fuck, he fucking forgot how much frowning hurts. He writes, the doctor said it could be a week or more. Are you staying all that time?
«God, your handwriting is terrible,» Jake says. «It’s a week. It’s fine.»
What about Maria? And your kid.
Jake squints at the board. «You’re really testing the limits of my literacy with your cursive.»
Ilya rolls his eyes and writes in big, blocky, obnoxious Cyrillic:
CAN YOU READ THIS YASHA?
MARIA. ANNA. REMEMBER THEM?
«I could smother you with a pillow right now, and nobody would know,» Jake says. «The team isn’t going to leave you alone to recover in Canada.»
He gets halfway through writing, I’m not, when he erases it and starts over. Starts writing My and erases that too. The tip of the marker is still hovering there when a nurse knocks on the door.
Her name is Kate, and she helped Ilya piss earlier, so they’re bonded for life now.
“I’m here to check on your next dose of morphine,” she says, and Jake nods, moving away from Ilya’s IV drip. Ilya can’t turn his head in that direction right now, so he just waits until Kate starts writing something on the board on the wall that lists Ilya’s medical team and dosage times.
“Okay, you should start feeling that in a couple of minutes. Do you need anything else?”
Yeah. To go back to yesterday morning and never get on the stupid flight here.
Ilya shakes his head. He doesn’t know if the morphine is hitting him, or he’s just exhausted, but everything’s starting to feel slow and sluggish and helpless.
Jake looms overhead. «What were you going to write?»
Ilya tries to say something, and it doesn’t even hurt when his jaw goes nowhere. His eyes close, and the last thing he hears is Jake sitting back down and saying, «Sleep. I’ll be here.»
He always has the weirdest fucking dreams when he’s on drugs. He’s a pretty lucid dreamer regardless, but this is another level. He’s in the showers at some hockey rink, and he can tell instantly that he’s younger. The scar on his hand from breaking a glass last summer isn’t there, and neither is the weird mole below his belly button that Svetlana’s always on him about getting checked.
And he’s—smaller. He can tell, somehow, that he’s not as bulky. There’s an ache that he remembers from being seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty; an oppressive combination of growing pains, hunger pangs, and homesickness that he doesn’t miss.
He knows where he is. He doesn’t even have to look to his right to know that Shane is beside him, pretending not to look at him.
But it’s not nineteen-year-old Shane. It’s his—this Shane, the one that was at his bedside this morning, the one he stared up at from the ice, helpless and mute in his desperation.
This Shane is watching him. This Shane is stroking himself. This Shane knows.
Shane nods, his free hand gesturing to himself, then back to Ilya. Ilya doesn’t feel lucid anymore; he can’t be with the way he’s drawn toward Shane, helpless to resist.
They’re the same height now. Ilya hasn’t hit his second growth spurt. Shane has.
Shane presses his free hand against Ilya’s face. Pinches at the last of the roundness there that he’ll lose in the upcoming season. Then he slides that hand down Ilya’s neck, tracing his collarbone, the line of his trap, until his palm is heavy against his shoulder.
He pushes. Ilya goes.
From his knees, Shane looks like a god, smug and haloed in the fluorescent lights. Nothing about him is awkward or hesitant. Maybe this isn’t—this Shane. Maybe this is the Shane he’ll never see—Shane at thirty, maybe. At ease with himself and his sexuality and his desire.
Shane traces his cock over Ilya’s lips. His free hand tangles in Ilya’s wet hair.
The trace turns to a slap. The hand turns to a fist.
Ilya is burning with it, virginal and seconds away from shooting off at the barest hint of degradation, at what he’s never told Shane.
The glint in Shane’s eye changes from smug and settled to something sharper. «You’re useless,» Shane says in Russian. «Now you can’t even suck cock. That was all you were good for.»
The hand pulling his hair hurts, and tears prick in the corner of Ilya’s eyes. He hated this about himself at nineteen—that his emotions were always too close to the surface. He noses at Shane’s cock, tries to be good, tries to open his mouth, but he can’t. It’s wired shut.
«Useless,» Shane says again, and Ilya doesn’t know if it’s the shower water or precome or the tears on his cheeks, but he just wants to be good. He just wants to be good for—
«Ilya? Are you awake again?»
Ilya blinks awake, his eyes gritty and crusted with sleep. Jake is looking up from his phone, and the room is darker now, the sun almost fully set beyond the curtains. He doesn’t remember being awake before.
He fumbles around the thin hospital bedding, trying to see if he’s hard, or if he had a wet dream, to cover if he did.
In his periphery, Jake reaches for something, and then the whiteboard and marker appear in the corner of his eye. Ilya is confused at its appearance, and then he realizes that Jake probably thought he was looking for it.
Bleary, he writes, time?
«Just after five,» Jake says.
Have you been sitting here the whole time?
«No, strangely, you sleeping isn’t that interesting. I got food and some work done. Called Maria.»
Right, that’s what they were talking about.
«And someone named Jane texted you.»
Ilya exhales and waves his hand.
Jake hesitates. «You’re not supposed to be looking at screens.»
Well, he sure as fuck isn’t letting Jake look at his texts with Shane. He writes, I’m not going to get less concussed from not looking at screens. Is there any actual evidence behind that?
«Boy, you’re a fucking novelist in Russian, aren’t you,» Jake says, squinting again. «Fine. Just a few minutes, though, I don’t want that nurse yelling at me. She’s little, but she looks scary as hell.»
Kate is scary. Ilya said he could piss on his own, and she threatened to reinsert his catheter if he didn’t let her help.
There are a few texts from Shane.
Jane:
Did you ask when you’ll get out
Jane:
Also, can you ask what your diet is going to look like?
Jane:
You’ll probably need to combat weight loss, so I should stock up on protein, right? Do you have a preferred
Ilya puts the phone down. It’s too much English, and his head is starting to ache. But there’s also nothing scandalous or incriminating, so he doesn’t lock the phone before he hands it back to Jake.
Jake looks surprised. «You want me to respond to her?»
Ilya nods. As Jake starts typing, Ilya looks down at the whiteboard. In the glint of the bedside lamp, he can see the grease marks of what he’s written today and erased. Just beside one of the cracks is the outline of what he wanted to tell Shane before he pussied out.
Three words. He’s such chickenshit.
«So, uh.» Jake clears his throat. «Things are serious with this girl?»
Ilya doesn’t react, wary as he watches Jake.
«It just—it seems like she expects that you’ll recuperate here in Montreal. With her.»
He could say no. Jake would wait here for a week. They’d transfer his care back to Boston. Dr. Dupuis said it wouldn’t be difficult.
He hesitates, then starts writing, I’m out for the playoffs.
«Yeah, but you don’t want to be around the guys? Our team at Mass Gen is great.»
Does it make him a bad captain if he says no?
The next few weeks are all West Coast trips. I can’t fly. Maybe it makes sense to stay here for the worst of it.
Then, he adds, you’re not a babysitter. You’ve got a family in Boston.
He erases where he wrote I don’t before turning the whiteboard back around. This is fucking exhausting.
Jake must sense his exhaustion again because he doesn’t say anything for a few minutes. «Look, I’m not going anywhere until you’re cleared to leave, so we don’t have to figure this out tonight. And they’re bringing you dinner.»
He wonders what dinner entails. He’s not enthusiastic about the idea.
But he doesn’t want to go back to sleep, either.
What he really wants is a cigarette. Jake’s just as bad as Shane about his smoking, though. And he doesn’t even know how that would work with half of his jaw wired shut.
I’m not hungry, he writes eventually. I do need to piss. Where’s Kate?
Jake’s watching him. Too closely. Ilya itches under the focus. He hates when people are careful with him. Ever since he was twelve people have been careful with him.
Maybe Jake relents at the way Ilya closes his fist around the marker. Or how it doesn’t match the exhaustion he’s sure is clear as day in his eyes.
«Alright, I’ll hit the call button,» Jake says.
Ilya closes his eyes and nods, and before anything else happens, he slips back into sleep.