Chapter Text
Shane’s mind is scattered and it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to pretend that it’s not. He felt the first slip when he tripped, allowing Ilya to score the goal that cost Montreal the game and their playoff run, and it only got worse when he saw the hatred on his teammates’ faces and the absolute unchecked fury on his coach’s.
In that moment he knows they all think he tripped on purpose, and he knows from the way he’s been treated since he was outed that nothing he says will change their mind. There’s a short-lived sense of relief that comes with knowing anything he says will be futile, because at least he doesn’t have to waste his time trying, that is quickly drowned out by the realization he’s about to be punished.
Shane can handle being punished for his transgressions on the ice, he has a decade of experience dealing with them and the drops they almost always induce, but what he doesn’t think he can handle is being punished in the same building as Ilya.
Shane makes it all the way through the handshake line, he even allows himself a small smile at the kind things the Centaurs players have to say to him and reassures Ilya when he sees the concerned look on his face, before his hands start to shake.
For just a moment, he allows himself to hope the coaching staff would respect him and everything he’s done for them enough to not punish him with his Dom in the same building. Even with everything that has happened, they wouldn't be disrespectful enough to do that. Right?
That hope wavers the second he hears the snide comments and feels the first angry shoulder check as they’re walking off the ice. By the time Shane is sitting in the locker room, trying and failing to remove his gear fluidly with shaky hands, that hope is gone and he is well on his way to dropping.
He has always hated the pre-drop experience more than the actual drop itself. He never fully remembers his drops, only the disorienting feeling of being unmoored from his body and the unsettling fear that sometimes takes days to fully leave him, but he does vividly remember the feelings leading up to them.
The chills, the panic, the horrible thoughts he can’t logic his way out of, the overwhelming sense of wrongness that settles deep into his bones and nearly paralyzes him with fear. The feelings that are currently creeping up on him in a way that can only mean he’s headed for a drop. A bad one.
Shane can feel his coach’s gaze on him as he finishes removing his gear, can feel the anger radiating off him and everyone else in the room so strongly it makes tears prick at the corners of his eyes, and he knows he’s not strong enough to stop what’s about to happen.
He’s usually better at hiding this side of him, at gritting his teeth and pretending he’s not actually a real submissive like this club expects of him. But Shane is so tired of pretending, so tired of being forced to hide the aspects of himself these people don’t want to see, and he can’t muster up the strength to mask like he usually does.
He’s not the robot that people think he is. He’s someone who loves hockey more than almost anything and this is the only way he’s ever been allowed to have it. He’s someone who, even after everything, is still desperate to prove his worth to the only NHL team he has ever known.
He’s also a sub surrounded by people who hate him and whose thoughts are becoming more fractured by the second. There is no scenario where he comes out of this unscathed.
Shane desperately wants to get up and walk out of the room without a second glance at his team. He wants to ignore their anger and their hatred and their need to make him pay for the simple act of falling in love with the wrong person. He wants to be strong enough to choose his safety over hockey for the first time in his life. He wants to find Ilya and let him hold him together long enough for them to get somewhere he can safely fall apart.
But that would take a kind of courage he doesn’t have in him, especially not when on the verge of dropping. He just hopes Ilya will forgive him for his weakness.
“Hollander,” Theriault barks with a gesture towards the hallway, “a word?”
Shane is usually allowed time to collect himself before he is called away. When he was younger and more naïve, he believed it was done as a sign of respect. Now, though, Shane is almost positive it was done to create a sense of plausible deniability. Teammates can’t question why their star forward is consistently being pulled outside the room by coaching staff after bad games if there were barely any teammates around to notice. That’s not needed, however, when everyone in the room hates him too much to care about his wellbeing.
So, Shane closes his eyes and gives himself a few seconds to collect himself. It is not nearly enough time to calm his racing heart or quell the tears threatening to spill and he knows this will only make things worse. All he can do is hope it’s enough to get him by because he can’t afford to break right now.
Shane has to keep it together. If he fully drops now, in what is effectively enemy territory with people who would only make his drop worse, he doesn’t know if he’ll survive. He knows for a fact, however, that Montreal would not survive Ilya’s wrath if that happened. Shane has to keep it together, for both their sakes.
Shane can feel his teammates’ eyes on him, can hear the whisper of comments made under their breath, but nobody says anything or tries to intervene.
Shane doesn’t think any of them are aware of what happens when he gets called away by the coaching staff after bad games. His contract makes it very clear he is never to showcase his sub side in the locker room and that all correction done by coaching staff when it comes to his dynamic is supposed to be kept away from the team. They were always very careful with keeping his punishments to a need-to-know basis and made it clear that Shane was not to tell anyone. And he hadn't. Not ever.
Montreal’s policy has always been no dynamic expression in the locker room, especially when it comes to their submissive captain. In their eyes, Shane’s submission has always been a weakness he had to suppress if he ever wanted to be successful and that idea only grew stronger when he became a captain.
Shane is usually able to hide how much this franchise’s aversion to his submission has fucked him up. He’s done a very good job of keeping his dynamic locked away from his team and a very good job of hiding how the coaching staff has elected to handle his mistakes. But tonight, with the weight of everything that has been said and done to him in the weeks since he’s been outed, Shane is struggling to hide it.
So even if they aren’t aware of what is about to happen, he knows his teammates see the signs he isn’t okay. There’s a tremble in his fists, a shakiness in his steps, and a watery blankness in his eyes. He would have been able to sense that in any of them and they should be able to sense it in him in return. And yet, they say nothing. They do nothing. They watch him go with gleeful smiles and hatred in their eyes.
And that, Shane thinks with the last shred of logic his dropping psyche has, is the final nail on the coffin for him. Deep down, he already knew things would never be the same for him and this team. He lost their respect, if he ever had it at all, and there’s no coming back from that.
But he realizes, as he follows his coach out of the room and down the hall, he doesn’t want to try and fix it anymore. He put his blood, sweat and tears into a franchise he loved and he thought loved him back. He has given them enough. He has given them everything, actually. And now he’s done.
Shane has put up with so much pain and suffering for this team. He ignored his dynamic for so long it almost irrevocably damaged him and he almost lost Ilya because of his selfish need to keep hockey.
And Shane is tired.
He is tired of hurting, he is tired of being afraid, he is tired of barely surviving. He is tired of others forcing him to sacrifice pieces of himself and being told that's the only way to achieve greatness, to be respected, to be worth anything at all. All Shane wants right now is to be safe and he doesn’t have the capacity, in his pre-drop mind, to unpack the fact that he has never truly felt safe in his own locker room and he definitely won’t be safe moving forward.
Shane the hockey player with the generational talent was safe, Shane the submissive was not. If you have to sacrifice a part of yourself for the comfort of safety, you’re not actually safe. Shane knows that now.
There's a way that Shane can keep hockey and Ilya and find that safety, there has to be, and Shane vows to find it. It will be hard, it will probably hurt, but he will be free. Shane desperately wants to be free.
He makes a mental note for after-drop Shane to remember these feelings, to remember these thoughts, to be strong enough to confront everything he has realized tonight. But most importantly, to stop bending over backwards for a team that has never deserved him and to put himself first.
He doesn't have the capacity to unpack everything now and he doesn’t have the courage to turn around and flee, but he doesn’t think that makes him weak and he thinks Ilya will understand. Probably. Because Shane knows there’s no chance Ilya doesn’t find out about this, about everything.
A small, terrified, part of him fears his reaction. The part of him that has spent the last decade terrified of what submitting would do to him. The part of him that fears how people would react if they knew. The part of him that is still a little terrified of Doms and the power they hold over him.
The traumatized part of him that Ilya has slowly been unraveling with his soft hands and gentle voice and his protective dominance. The part of him that is slowly, but surely, being replaced with the fact that this is Ilya.
Ilya, who has never, not even in their early days, taken advantage of his submission. Ilya, who slowly coaxed him out of his protective shell and built the unwavering trust Shane has in him brick by brick. Ilya, who has always been so incredibly careful with Shane and his submission in a way that has never felt demeaning or infantilizing. Ilya, with his patient understanding that Shane still doesn’t fully believe he deserves.
That Ilya wouldn’t be angry with him. He would understand. He wouldn’t hurt Shane. He loves him enough to handle this rationally and not blow-up Shane’s career in a way he can’t come back from. Right?
Even though that’s what he deserves, thinks a tiny part of him. Shane’s the one that kept something this important from him their entire relationship. He’s the one who is too weak to go find his Dom and trust that everything will be okay instead of following his coach’s orders. He’s the one who, even if it’s in a small way, is still putting hockey and this team before his relationship.
Ilya is going to be furious. Shane wants to believe that anger will only be aimed at the people who put Shane in this situation, but what if he’s wrong? What if that anger turns towards him? He’d be justified in that anger, wouldn’t he? He’d be right to want to hurt Shane, to make him pay for his weakness, to punish him for not trusting his Dom.
Oh god, what if he’s wrong?
His spiraling is cut off abruptly when he hears the door slam shut and he realizes they somehow made it into the dynamics room without him even realizing. The room is dim and the usual screen is set up in the corner of the room like it always is. He watches as Theriault walks towards it and picks up a remote.
“Has it been so long you’ve forgotten what’s expected of you, Hollander?” his coach asks, and the animosity in his voice makes Shane involuntarily shiver.
Muscle memory has Shane falling to his knees with a crack so hard he can feel it in his teeth. It has been a while since they’ve been in this position, actually, but Shane doesn’t think he’ll ever forget what's expected of him.
“Glad to see you’ve retained some of our lessons, I was starting to worry Rozanov had fucked all the sense out of your head.”
Shane fights his flinch with every muscle he has because reacting will just make things worse for him. He is expected to kneel here in silent reflection, anything else is seen as disobedience. Shane can’t afford to be disobedient, not tonight.
“I’ve thought long and hard about how I was going to handle this little situation you’ve found yourself in,” Theriault says, starting to pace back and forth in front of the screen. “It was a little tricky because I can’t punish a player just for being in a relationship and your contract states you can only be punished for on ice infractions. But the disrespect you’ve shown everyone – me, your teammates, the fans, management – by daring to get on your knees for a rival cannot go unpunished. So, all I had to do was wait for you to slip up and slip up you did.”
Theriault moves again, but this time he’s heading towards Shane. “I need you to understand something very important,” he says, bending down so his face is only inches from Shane’s. “I have never been more disappointed in a player than I am in you right now and I don’t think anything will top what you’ve done. This club gave you everything, every achievement you’ve ever had is tied up here, and what did you decide to do as thanks? You spit in our fucking faces and, if that wasn’t enough, tonight you decided to throw a game and cost us the playoffs. You were too much of a stupid fucking slut to put your team before your Dom and it cost us the playoffs.”
“I didn’t throw-” the rest of Shane’s sentence is cut off by Theriault standing up and throwing his remote at the wall hard enough it shatters. It is only years of disciplined practice that keeps Shane from flinching. Theriault lets the sound reverberate through the room before he speaks again.
“You speak only when directed to do so. This is your only warning. Nod your head if you understand.”
Shane does the only thing he can do; he nods his head.
"If I have to hear one sorry excuse come out of your mouth, I will make you regret it. Though," Theriault says with a nasty smirk, "given recent revelations, maybe you want things to go differently tonight. I can't imagine Rozanov is an easy person to sub for, maybe I should have been punishing you differently all these years."
Shane feels ice cold dread start to spread through him. Theriault has threatened a lot during their sessions, but he has never threatened anything as dangerous as what he is insinuating now.
Theriault laughs at the look of horror Shane is sure just crossed his face. "Relax, we haven't reached that level of anger. Yet."
Shane's body is frozen stiff in pure, unadulterated, fear. He doesn't want to know what will happen to him if they ever do reach that level of anger.
The room is silent while Theriault moves to get a new remote. “For now, we’re going to watch some game tape that I spliced together specifically for this moment. We’ve been here before, you know what is expected of you. You will watch it, you will listen to my critiques, and if I think you’re not paying close enough attention you will not like the consequences. Do you understand?”
Shane does the only thing he can do; he responds with a quiet, “Yes, Sir.”
“At least you haven’t forgotten your manners, though Rozanov probably has more to do with that then anything else,” Theriault says as he sets up the video. “This one is a little different because it has a theme to it. I know you’re not all that bright, Hollander, but I think even you will be able to pick up on what that is.”
Shane does the only thing he can do; he doesn’t respond at all.
The video starts and Shane almost instantly realizes the theme. These are all mistakes he’s made while playing against Ilya. He’s not sure how far back it goes, but he knows it’s several years because in some of the clips Ilya is playing with the Bears.
Shane does the only thing he can do; he watches and he listens while his coach berates him for every tiny fumble the Shane on screen makes.
He loses a face off because he’s not good enough. He blows a tire because he moves too fast and is too full of himself. He gives away the puck because he has a rookie understanding of stick placement. He takes a shot that is blocked by a defenseman because he’s too selfish to pass the puck instead of trying to score.
The video is never-ending and the longer it goes on the meaner Theriault gets.
He loses another face off, but this time it's because he can’t stop thinking about sucking Ilya's dick. He loses control of the puck because Ilya's pressed up behind him and he’s distracted by thoughts of getting fucked. He’s too slow to score on a breakaway because he’s hoping Ilya will call him a good boy if he fumbles the shot.
Sometimes Theriault makes Shane repeat what he’s been told, just to make sure he’s paying attention. There are a few clips he makes Shane critique himself and berates him if he doesn’t say exactly what Theriault would have said.
Clip after clip after clip of mistakes. There are big ones that lead to the other team scoring and smaller ones that didn’t have any impact on the game. There are even mistakes that aren’t even mistakes at all, just how the game goes sometimes, but are being treated as such because of his and Ilya’s relationship.
Shane does the only thing he can do; he internalizes everything.
Because the thing is, Theriault is kind of right. Shane has made a lot of mistakes, mistakes that someone like him should not be making. The idea that it’s okay to make mistakes has never applied to Shane, his coach has always made sure he understood that, and the fact that he has failed his team in a million different ways is being made crystal clear right in front of his eyes. His failure is undeniable.
Shane knows they will never believe it, but none of those mistakes were made on purpose. He has never let Ilya win and that somehow makes all of this worse. Shane didn’t fail because he fell in love, he failed because he is simply not good enough. He has never been good enough.
They get to the final clip and Shane can’t even be relieved it’s almost over because it’s the one he thinks will hurt the most.
“Now this one, I want you to pay close attention to. I don’t even want to see you blink. Nod your head if you understand.”
Shane does the only thing he can do; he nods his head.
Shane watches as the clip plays of him tripping tonight. There are five different angles and three different speeds and Shane watches every single one of them.
Theriault has a lot to say about this clip and Shane does the only thing he can do; he listens as the coach he’s had for the last ten years rips him apart.
When Shane thinks it’s finally over, Theriault goes for the jugular.
The next clip that plays is not one of Shane’s mistakes, at least not technically. The next clip that plays is made up of his teammates’ reactions to him tripping. The disappointment and the hatred burning through them is clear as day. The video ends on a still of several of his teammates and they all have hatred on their faces as they look at Shane.
Theriault is finally, blessedly, quiet, but Shane thinks being forced to watch this is worse than anything he’s heard tonight.
Shane’s gaze is fixated on the screen like it has been since the videos started playing, but he can see Theriault out of the corner of his eye and the look on his face is wicked. It’s mean. It’s soul crushing.
“Make no mistake, I am disgusted by your behavior and the fact that you've been slutting yourself out to your rival," he says, pausing to let his words really sink in before he continues. "There is no excusing the disrespect you've shown us by giving into your weakness even after everything we did to prevent that from happening."
Shane’s eyes leave the screen only when he realizes that Theriault is coming towards him again.
“More than anything, though, I care about that,” he says, gesturing towards the screen. “I care that everything we did to make you into the player you are is worthless now because you are worthless to them.”
Theriault bends down so his face is once again inches away from Shane’s and Shane doesn’t think he’s ever been more afraid of his coach than he is now. “A player that is worth his achievements, that deserves his captaincy, wouldn’t have that many people looking at him with pure hatred. Regardless of why or how it happened, you did that. Your actions put that look on their faces, Shane Hollander, and that is unforgivable.”
Shane does the only thing he can do; he closes his eyes and tries not to fall apart.
He keeps them closed as he hears Theriault’s footsteps walk across the floor. He keeps them closed after the door slams shut. He keeps them closed as he counts to sixty in his head and waits to see if he will come back.
After the fifth time Shane counts to sixty, he thinks it’s safe enough to open his eyes. He counts to sixty three more times before he finally feels safe enough to let himself react.
And Shane does the only thing he can do; he breaks.
Shane knows he should get off his knees. He knows he should go find Ilya and beg for his forgiveness. He knows he should pull himself together so he can safely leave this room.
There are so many things Shane should be doing instead of wallowing, but he can’t muster the strength to do any of them.
He wills his limbs to move, but they’re stuck in place. He wills his thoughts to quiet down, but instead they get louder. He tries to stop his tears, but they just get worse. He tries to dispel the fear laced panic taking over, but instead it grows stronger. He is stuck in place with everything his coach has said to him tonight playing on a loop in his head.
Over and over and over again.
And he is powerless to stop it.