Chapter Text
2026 Ottawa
“Help me, Mama. I can’t do this alone. I can’t do anything alone after knowing what it’s like to be with him. How do I get up each day if someone else leaves me?” Ilya mumbled to himself and to his mother as he slid her necklace back and forth on its chain and held Shane’s limp hand, studying his face for any change. Yuna and David were sitting beside him, Yuna’s hand resting gently on his shoulder. He was not in this alone, but he hadn’t felt this depth of fear and isolation since his mother died. This was the second time in a week that Ilya thought Shane was about to die, and he didn’t know how to carry the terror inside him anymore.
They had pulled through the past eight months leaning heavily on each other. First Shane’s energy had lagged. His hockey had started to suffer. A seemingly unrelated cough and rash wouldn’t go away. Shane had resisted talking to anyone about it until Ilya dragged him out of the house and stuck him in front of a doctor.
First they were told it was likely just a virus that would clear up on its own. His immune system was probably weakened from the constant intense athletic activity of the hockey season.
It didn’t clear up.
Shane started to miss games in favor of appointments with specialists who all gave different answers, but he insisted that Ilya keep playing.
Fortunately Ilya was home recovering from a long roadie when Shane got up early one morning to walk to the bathroom and nearly collapsed on the floor. Ilya had leapt out of bed to catch him before his brain was even fully awake. Within an hour they were in a private room in the emergency department at Ottawa Hospital. Shane hadn’t even argued about going, which was probably the worst sign. During intake an exhausted nurse on hour 10 of a 12 hour shift treated them like spoiled celebrities who needed to be placated over a non-existent problem, but with each new test they ran, everyone’s faces grew more serious.
The doctor never even used the word cancer that day. It was mid-afternoon by the time Ilya found himself sitting on the germy floor of Shane’s hospital room, leaning against the wall and trying to google “lymphoma” phonetically to figure out what it meant. That was when David and Yuna had appeared and pulled him into their arms for a long hug. When he told them the word the doctor had used, their faces were ashen. After they did some research together and made calls, they all felt a bit less terrified. Lymphoma seemed to be one of the least scary cancers a person could get. Easily treatable. Easily survivable. People had it, got some chemo, and then went back to normal life.
Just to be safe, Shane was admitted and testing began immediately. There were advantages to being golden boy Shane Hollander in a Canadian hospital, and his symptoms did seem a bit worse than usual.
A week later the diagnosis was upgraded to “very rare and very aggressive form of lymphoma with concerning odds.” The night they got the results, Ilya climbed into Shane’s hospital bed and they held each other until they cried themselves to sleep. Ilya woke with a pain in his neck and a light shining in his eyes when the nurses did rounds. He climbed out of the bed so that the nurses could draw blood and check vitals, told Shane he was going home to sleep, walked out of the hospital, and started weeping.
This happened many times in the following weeks. He would drop off Shane at the entrance to the oncology center, drive around to the parking lot, and cry. He would get Shane settled in at home, get in the car to go pick up a prescription, and cry. He didn’t know he was capable of producing this many tears.
Shane was mostly stoic through it all, so Ilya was strong alongside him. They hadn’t cried together since the night of diagnosis. They didn’t cry when Shane began chemo, when he vomited up everything he tried to eat, when his hair began to fall out. But Ilya would get in his car alone to run an errand and suddenly find tears flooding his cheeks.
They held hands and held back tears together through multiple rounds of chemo with little improvement before the doctors said they needed to change the treatment plan. Ilya found himself taking notes and then going home to google Russian medical sources that he could understand a bit better, though even then the medical terminology was overwhelming. He researched the types of stem cell transplants and their risks. He looked up the concerning numbers for finding a matching stem cell donor for someone of Japanese and Dutch heritage. He smiled at Shane and brought him his fancy electrolyte drink with three cubes of ice and a straw whenever he woke from a nap, then he searched some more.
David and Yuna were there for them both through it all, even as they dealt with their own fear. They brought meals and took turns driving Shane to appointments when Ilya could be convinced to take a break.
Once the donor registry found a “close enough” match for a stem cell donor and Shane was deemed healthy enough to face a transplant, everything started moving full speed all at once. It was a blur of additional testing, tentative schedules, packing lists.
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Fourteen days ago, Shane had checked into the hospital and begun conditioning chemo to wipe his slate clean and prepare his body to receive the new cells.
Eight days ago, Shane had gone through full body radiation to finish off that process.
Seven days ago, he was reborn. It felt anticlimactic. Shane had received countless blood transfusions over the preceding months, and the stem cell infusion had looked a lot like that, just with a bigger audience and lots of cheering. Yuna brought birthday cupcakes, but Shane could only bring himself to eat a couple of bites.
Five days ago, Shane started to feel pretty terrible.
Four days ago, Shane had grown even sicker. The doctors said it was all very normal for a partial match transplant.
Three days ago, Ilya was sitting on the uncomfortable hospital room couch trying to figure out what to do with himself while nurse techs did things for Shane that would have horrified him if he felt well enough to care, when everything went wrong. Thirty minutes later Ilya was still backed into a corner of the room as the number of doctors and nurses gradually decreased from as many as would fit in the room to eight, to five. At that point the oncologist on call finally moved out of crisis mode enough to realize that Ilya was still there, frozen. Not crying. Not calling David and Yuna to update them. Not moving. She was a foot shorter than Ilya, but suddenly he found himself being wrapped in her arms and comforted. He held himself as stiffly as he could so that he didn’t fall apart, even as he soaked up her words: the worst was over, Shane was stable, a machine was supporting his breathing so that whatever had happened wouldn’t happen again.
Ilya still wasn’t quite sure what it was that had happened. One moment the tech was laying the hospital bed flat, the next a nurse was sprinting across the room to hit the emergency call button and people had flooded into the room like his teammates clearing the bench for a big fight after a particularly bad hit. Ilya didn’t even know that a human face could turn that shade of blue. It shouldn’t. Now Shane was conscious but not quite coherent as Ilya packed up their things to move to the ICU.
Fourteen hours ago Shane was still not fully himself, but he was stable enough that Ilya went home for the night.
Six hours ago, Ilya got a phone call asking how quickly he could be back to the hospital.
Five and a half hours ago, Ilya experienced the incredible discomfort of looking into Shane’s eyes and not seeing Shane there at all.
Four hours ago, David and Yuna had arrived to hold vigil with him.
Two hours ago, Shane was taken back for brain scans to assess what might have happened during the night.
Now they waited. Shane woke up again, but his eyes were unseeing, uncomprehending, and no one knew whether this was temporary.
David, Yuna, and Ilya startled when the ICU room door finally opened, but Shane didn’t react.
“Please just tell us. I have to know.” Ilya begged in Russian, then repeated in English when he realized what he had done.
“Well,” Dr. Patel began, “The good news is that we do not see any signs of brain damage.”
“Oh, thank God,” David gasped, pulling Yuna into his arms. “Why is this happening then? When will he wake up?”
“Well.” He paused.
If this doctor said “well” one more time, Ilya might scream.
“We aren’t completely sure. About either of those. His body is going through so much right now, and the ICU can be very hard on patients’ mental state.”
Yuna went straight to productive mode. “Then let’s get him out of here.”
Dr. Patel shook his head. “It’s complicated because this is the safest place for him to be right now.”
“But you just said it’s making him worse!” Yuna argued.
“It could be a contributing factor, but in his current medical state, Mr. Hollander needs constant monitoring. We are very relieved that we are not seeing brain damage, but he is not close to being in the clear. We are having to juggle his oxygen levels, his kidney function, his heart, his brain…”
They talked for a few more minutes, but Ilya didn’t feel like he learned anything new. They had one less thing to be afraid of, but Shane was still in terrible shape.
Ilya followed the doctor out when he left and pulled him aside after the door was fully closed so that David and Yuna wouldn’t hear.
“How can I help you, Mr. Rozanof? I know these are very stressful times.”
“I need to know.”
“I’ve told you all that I know right now.”
“I need to know,” Ilya searched his mind for the right words. “I need to know just how terrified I should be right now.”
Dr. Patel made a sympathetic grimace. “Well.”
Goddamn that word.
He continued, “If nothing else goes wrong, he could heal and everything could get better.”
“And if…”
“If one more thing goes wrong, it will be too much. His body is at its limit.” Dr. Patel patted Ilya on the shoulder. “We are all here rooting for Mr. Hollander and doing everything we can, and we are here to support you as well.”
The next day Ilya told Shane stories until his voice gave out. His eyes remained blank.
The day after that Ilya played him special music they had listened to together over the years. He didn’t respond.
And then somehow, his numbers finally started to improve.