Chapter Text
Montreal is warming up on their side of the ice. Ilya should be focused on his own. On his edges, his timing, on the feel of the puck against his blade. On the game. Instead, his gaze keeps finding Shane.
He can't help it. Shane Hollander skates the way most people breathe. Without thinking, without obvious effort, every stride long and controlled and unconsciously beautiful. Like the ice belongs to him. He's powerful and unhurried, every edge cut with a precision that looks effortless but isn’t. He cuts a diagonal across the neutral zone, dark hair damp at the temples and even from this distance Ilya can see the flush across his cheeks. The freckles bright against his skin. Highlighted against the flush of the cold and from the exertion. Ilya watches the way he learns into a tun and feels something shift in his chest, inconvenient and familiar.
It's distracting. Dangerously distracting.
Ilya drags his attention back to his own warmup, to his own stick, his own feet. Boston did not come to Montreal to admire Shane Hollander's stupidly beautiful freckles. Boston came to win.
Still. The corner of his eye has a mind of its own and he looks over anyway.
The anthems finish, the introductions made and the crowd's energy shifts into something electric and coiled as the two teams circle toward centre ice. Ilya glides into his position for the puck drop and looks up.
Shane is already there. Waiting. Already in position, weight balanced forward, chin tilted up, already watching, those dark eyes catching Ilya's the instant he arrives. They are bright with the particular excitement that only lives in Shane's face in the minutes before a game, when everything he works so hard to contain comes briefly loose. His mouth tips into that crooked half smile. The one that means trouble. The one Ilya has absolutely no defence against.
Ilya feels his own mouth pull into an answering smile before he can do anything about it.
God. They are supposed to be rivals. He has been told repeatedly, by coaches and commentators and the whole architecture of professional hockey that he is supposed to hate Shane Hollander. He cannot begin to understand how that was ever supposed to be true.
He leans in, just slightly, pitching his voice low beneath the noise of the crowd.
"You are looking pretty today."
Shane's eyes narrow. "Fuck you, asshole."
"Da." Ilya lets the smile sharpen into something else entirely. "Yes. That will be later."
He winks and Shane’s jaw tightens, which means he’s fighting a smile. He watches the colour deepen across Shane's already flushed cheeks. The official steps between them and the puck drops.
Ilya snaps into motion and wins the face off clean, sending the puck back to Marleau in one fluid motion. The game explodes around him. Skates biting ice, sticks cracking, the noise from the crowd surging before the puck has even settled. Shane is already moving. Already gone. That infuriatingly high hockey IQ of his pulling him toward the puck before anyone else has had a chance to read the play. He strips the puck off Marleau's stick, a clean pickpocket that draws a roar from the home crowd and takes off down the ice.
It’s a breakaway and the arena gets to its feet.
Ilya digs in harder. His lungs start to burn. Ahead of him Shane glances back over his shoulder and their eyes meet for half a second. Those deep brown eyes sparkling with something that is half competition and half pure, undisguised joy. Like this is the best thing in the world. Like they invented this sport, just for each other.
The mischievous grin spreads across Shane's face.
Idiot, Ilya thinks, breathless and can't stop his own grin from answering.
Then he sees it. Marleau. Coming in hard from Shane's right, fast and at the wrong angle. It’s not a play, it’s a collision waiting to happen. Shane’s head is turned the wrong way, his attention all the way down the ice.
Ilya's stomach drops out from under him.
"Shane! Watch —"
The words are still leaving his mouth when it happens. Everything compresses into a single awful second. Skates screaming across the ice, Marleau's shoulder catching Shane fully in the side. The brutal percussion of a body driven into the boards. Shane's helmet flying loose. His stick clattering away. And then the sound that cuts through everything else, through the roar of the crowd and the thud of the hit. The flat, sickening crack of Shane's head against the ice.
The arena gasps as one.
Ilya stops. All he hears is his own heartbeat.
Shane doesn't move.
Ilya stands there for a moment, waiting for what usually follows. The groan, the shove back to standing, the sarcastic squint across the ice that means I'm fine, you can stop looking at me like that. He waits for Shane to move.
Shane doesn't move.
Something cold spreads through his chest.
Somewhere to his right, Pike drops his gloves and goes for Marleau. Ilya doesn't look. He is already moving, closing the distance between himself and Shane, dropping to his knees on the ice.
"Come on, Hollander." He can hear his own voice, low and tight. "Get up."
The medical team is on the ice in seconds and the linesmen start pushing players back. Ilya doesn't move.
"Shane."
He doesn’t mean to say his first name out loud. He reaches out and cups Shane's face between his palms, turns his head, gently, the way he has done a hundred times in the dark of their shared hotel rooms and his fingers slide into Shane's hair to find something wet.
He pulls his hand back. His fingers are red.
The blood is running from a gash at Shane's hairline, tracking down his temple in a thin bright line, warm and sticky against Ilya's skin. The white ice beneath Shane's head is already beginning to colour.
No. The thought is flat, wordless, the way fear arrives when it comes in too fast. No.
Ilya is used to Shane melting into his hands. Used to those dark eyes opening slow, amused, that brief softness that Shane only lets out when he's sure nobody else is watching. He is used to Shane making some dry comment about personal space and then immediately closing the distance himself.
Shane still doesn't move.
"Shane." His voice has gone wrong somewhere. He can hear it. "Shane, look at me."
Nothing. The blood keeps coming. Ilya presses his fingers back into Shane's hair, uselessly, as though pressure could help, as though he could hold the stillness at bay with his hands.
"Please." The word comes out rough and small. "Please open your eyes."
His thumbs move across Shane's cheekbones without him telling them to. The same way they always do, the same instinct, the same gesture, but this time he is smearing the blood across Shane's face. Red is now marring those beautiful freckles. He makes a broken sound in the back of his throat.
"Moy solnyshko." His voice barely makes it out. "Come on. Wake up. I need you to wake up."
Hands close around his arms.
"Rozanov. You need to move."
He pulls against them. "Wait—"
But the medics have already surrounded Shane completely, moving with practised efficiency. Neck brace, stabilisation, someone pressing a folded towel hard against the gash at his temple. They shift him onto a stretcher. As they lift him, Shane's hand slides free of the stretcher and falls, open-palmed, limp, toward the ice.
Ilya lunges forward, breaking the linesman's grip for one second, one arm reaching toward's Shane's hand.
Almost. He almost reaches it
The linesmen catch him again, harder this time and start hauling him in the other direction toward the Boston tunnel. Away.
"Please." He is not in control of his own voice. "Let me go with him. Please—"
Across the ice, the trainers are carrying Shane through the Montreal tunnel. Someone's hand is still pressed to his head. The white towel going red.
There is blood on the ice. Not a smear, not a scrape. A pool, spreading slowly outward from where Shane's head had landed, vivid against the white. It does not stop spreading.
Ilya stares at it as the linesmen drag him down the Boston tunnel. He keeps staring until the door cuts off his line of sight. Until there is only the concrete of the corridor and the fluorescent buzz overhead and the door slamming shut behind him.
They put him on a bench. One of them says something. Then they're gone.
The room does not stop moving for a long moment.
His ears are ringing with a high, flat note that swallows everything else. He looks down at his hands, spread open on his knees. There is blood on them. Not his. It has dried into the creases of his knuckles, settled dark at the edges of his nails. Shane's blood. On his hands.
His fingers are shaking.
He stares at them and cannot make himself look away. He turns his hands over once and then back again. He stares at them as though they belong to someone else. His thoughts have collapsed into something formless. No words, no sentences. Just the ringing and the images of the accident that will not stop playing behind his eyes. Then Shane's hand, falling open and empty from the stretcher, reaching for nothing.
He presses both palms flat against his thighs. He takes a shuddery breath in.
And then be breathes out. The thought in his chest has no shape yet. It is just cold and large and very quiet.
He sits in the buzzing silence of the Boston locker room with Shane's blood drying on his hands and he waits.