Chapter Text
The ice was supposed to be the one place where the world made sense.
For Shane Hollander, it was a sanctuary of geometry and physics—clean lines, predictable friction, the rhythmic scritch-pad of steel on frozen water.
But today, the ice was betraying him.
It started as a shimmer at the edge of his vision, a glitch in the matrix of the Bell Centre. Shane shook his head, trying to clear the fog, but the movement sent a sharp, glass-like shard of pain through his temples.
Push through it, he told himself. It’s just the diet. Just the stress.
He’d been perfect. His macros were balanced, his yoga sessions were consistent, and his sleep schedule was surgical. Yet, as he pivoted for a routine backhand, his left leg simply… vanished.
There was no sensation, no muscular failure—just an absence. He hit the ice hard, the impact jarring his spine, and for a terrifying five seconds, he couldn't feel his toes.
"Hollander! You okay?" Coach’s voice echoed, sounding like it was coming from the bottom of a well.
Shane scrambled up, his face flushed. "Caught an edge," he lied, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Ten minutes later, it happened again. This time, there was no recovery. His vision tilted forty-five degrees to the left, the overhead lights strobing into a blinding white glare. He went down backward, the back of his skull meeting the ice with a sickening thud.
The world went black, then a hazy, bruising purple.
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The team medic, Henry, was shining a penlight into Shane’s eyes in the infirmary. Shane pushed the light away, his stomach rolling with nausea.
"Just stop and sit still Shane. I think you should get an MRI" Henry focused the penlight again into Shane's eyes.
"I don’t have time for an MRI," Shane muttered, clutching his head. "Just need a saline bag and some high-strength ibuprofen."
"You lost consciousness for thirty seconds, and your pupils are sluggish," Henry warned, his face etched with professional concern.
"That fall wasn't normal. The leg numbness isn't normal. Since when do you feel the numbness?" Henry touched the back of Shane's head and pressed his fingers all over his scalp.
"I’m fine," Shane snapped, the irritability of a brewing migraine making him uncharacteristically sharp. "Just give me the IV. It's just my diet I think. Don't tell coach about this"
He sat there for an hour, watching the clear fluid drip into his vein, convinced that he could out-discipline whatever was breaking inside him.
He had to get to Ilya. Ilya was his North Star, the man who had uprooted his entire life, left the powerhouse Boston Bears, and moved to the mediocre Ottawa Centaurs just to be in driving distance.
Shane owed him everything. He couldn't show up late. He couldn't show up broken.
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The two-hour drive to Ottawa was a descent into a private purgatory. The headlights of oncoming traffic felt like physical blows to his retinas. By the time Shane let himself into Ilya’s house, his coordination was so frayed he nearly tripped over the doorstep.
"Shane?" Ilya appeared in the hallway, his face lighting up with that rare, genuine warmth he reserved only for the man he’d traded his career for.
"You look like shit, Malenkiy."
"Long practice," Shane croaked.
They sat together on the couch, holding hands in silence. Sometimes, silence is good and Shane loves it.
Shane opened his bag and sat at the kitchen island, opening his laptop to look at game film, but the numbers ran together like melting wax. He grabbed a protein shake, his hand trembling so violently he had to use both palms to hold the bottle.
Ilya came again and sat close, his presence usually a balm, but tonight, the air felt charged with a different kind of tension.
"The guys are having a party tonight," Ilya said softly, his thumb brushing Shane’s wrist. "Centaurs staff, a few friends. I want you to come. Not as a 'friend.' As my boyfriend."
Shane felt the blood drain from his face. "Ilya, we talked about this. Not until retirement. It’s too much—the media, the Montreal fans—"
"I am tired of being a secret, Shane!" Ilya’s voice rose, the frustration he’d been bottling for months finally cracking the surface.
"I left Boston for you. I left a Cup-winning team to play for a basement-dweller so I could sleep in your bed more than twice a month. And you still want to hide me?"
"It’s not about hiding you," Shane whispered, his head pulsing with a rhythm that felt like a hammer on an anvil. "It’s about survival. Our careers—"
"Career? I already gave mine up!" Ilya stood, his shadow looming large and jagged against the wall.
"Would you ever choose me? Truly? Over the 'Hollander' brand? Over hockey?"
"Of course I would," Shane said, but the pain behind his eyes was so intense he had to squeeze them shut.
"Would you?" Shane asked standing closer to Ilya, squinting his eyes, why is the light so bright..
Ilya roared.
In a flash of blind, hurt-fueled rage, Ilya lunged. He didn't mean to hurt him—it was an explosion of energy, a need to be felt. He shoved Shane back against the wall, his forearm pressing firmly against Shane’s throat.
Shane’s head cracked against the drywall—the exact same spot that had hit the ice hours earlier.
The world shattered. A sharp, hot spike of agony flared behind his left ear, and then, a strange, cooling sensation.
Ilya saw it, Shane's eyes flickered with fear. His anger evaporated instantly, replaced by a cold, soul-deep horror, Shane is afraid of him?
Shane’s eyes were unfocused, drifting apart, and a thin, steady stream of clear fluid tinged with bright red blood was leaking from his left ear, trailing down his pale neck.
"I already chose you, Hollander," Ilya whispered, his voice breaking as he stepped back, unable to look at Shane—or what was happening. He was drowning in his own guilt, the ghost of his mother’s tragedy suffocating him.
"You should leave. I don't want to see your face right now." Ilya doesn't want to escalate things, doesn't want to say things that he might regret later, Shane needs to leave because he can't trust himself on holding back the words that are threatening to come out without permission.
"Ilya... I feel..." Shane reached out, his fingers fumbling in the air.
"Just stop! Don’t say anything!" Ilya grabbed his keys, his chest heaving. He was spiraling, the trauma of his past colliding with the rejection of the present.
"I gave you everything, and all you did was break me!" Ilya grabbed his phone from the couch.
"I.. Ily.." Shane's eyes closed, a single tear dropped from his eyes.
"Loving you is destroying me" Ilya wiped his tears. He just can't continue living like this, like a ghost in his own life. Like a secret his boyfriend feels ashamed to share to the world. He is losing sleep everyday, he is losing part of himself day by day. He can't continue to do that.
Shane doesn't even bother to talk now. He could feel the warm wetness dripping from his ear to his neck, he could feel the terrible pain behind his eyes but nothing matters anymore, Ilya's words are more painful than thousand knives in his head.
"I wish we had never crossed paths.. I wish we were strangers " Ilya had always been kind to Shane. He was rude and blunt to everyone but never to Shane. He can't be that person anymore, he is tired of the one who always had to give up something for love. He feels pathetic to even want to ask for it every other time, only to always find the rejection.
Shane's hands shook, everything feels too heavy. Is he dying? Should he tell Ilya that something is really bad happening to him. His hands wouldn't move, his lips and tongue rebelling against him and stayed quiet.
"Sometimes I wish I’d just married Svetlana. I wish I never met you, Shane. Life would have been easy." There! He said it. A final blow to their relationship. If Shane really loves him, he will fight for him, he will come after him.
The front door slammed with a force that vibrated through the floorboards. Ilya walked away leaving Shane alone in the house.
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Shane collapsed. He didn't fall so much as fold, his muscles turning to water. He slumped against the baseboard, the room spinning in a sickening kaleidoscope. With a hand that felt like it belonged to a stranger, he pulled his phone from his pocket and fumbled for the emergency dial.
"911... what is your emergency?"
"I need... ambulance, can't.. feel my legs.." Shane whispered. He could hear Ilya’s car roaring down the driveway, the engine fading into the distance.
As the darkness closed in, one thought echoed in the silence of the empty house, sharper than the physical pain: He wishes he never met me. He thinks I ruined his life? He wished he never met me... He wished he married Svetlana?
Where did I go wrong?
When the EMTs burst through the door twenty minutes later, they found the captain of the Montreal unconscious in a pool of blood and cerebrospinal fluid, his phone still gripped in a hand that had finally gone completely numb.
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The recovery room smelled of ozone and antiseptic, a sterile vacuum that seemed to swallow sound. For Shane, the world was no longer a frantic rush of skates on ice; it was the rhythmic, mechanical hiss of a ventilator and the steady, mocking beep of a heart monitor.
The surgeons had been blunt. The fall on the ice had caused a slow-leaking subdural hematoma, and the final impact against the wall in Ilya's kitchen had turned it into a catastrophic pressure cooker. The numbness in his legs are also because of an existing nerve damage in his brain, Shane should have followed up on his checkups.
They had drilled into his skull—a burr hole procedure to save his life—leaving a jagged line of staples hidden beneath a bandage that felt like a lead weight.
When Shane finally woke, the first thing he did was reach for his left leg. Or he tried to.
He looked down at the thin hospital blanket. He could see his foot. He could see the pale skin of his calf. But when he commanded his brain to wiggle a toe, the signal hit a brick wall.
"The nerve compression was significant, Shane," the neurosurgeon had told him, his voice devoid of the hero-worship Shane usually received. "You’re lucky to be speaking. You’re lucky to be alive. But the physical toll... the repeated concussions combined with this trauma..."
"Hockey?" Shane had croaked, his throat raw.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing Shane had ever heard.
"If you take another hit to the head, you won't just be retiring. You'll be learning how to breathe on your own again."
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Shane didn't call his parents. They were in London for a vacation , finally enjoying the tour they’d earned. He couldn't bear to be the reason their world collapsed.
He sat in the dim light of the ward, a ghost in a gown. He had called Coach and Henry, the team medic. The conversation had been clinical. Henry’s voice had cracked, but Shane had remained a statue.
"One month," Shane whispered into the phone. "Give me a month of silence before you announce the retirement. Tell the press it’s an 'injury' happened during practice. Keep the media away for a month.?"
He was a captain protecting his team one last time, even as his own ship sat at the bottom of the ocean.
On the third night, the physical pain was finally receding, replaced by a cold, hollow ache. Shane reached for the remote, his right hand shaking, and flicked on the sports news. He expected to see highlights. He expected to see his own name in a "Day-to-Day" injury report.
Instead, he saw Ilya.
The screen flashed with grainy paparazzi shots from a high-end lounge in Boston. There was Ilya Rozanov—the man who had sworn he couldn't live in secrecy—standing in the center of a bustling crowd. He looked vibrant. He looked alive.
And next to him, her hand tucked firmly into the crook of his arm, was Svetlana.
The headline scrolled across the bottom: ROZANOV SPOTTED IN BOSTON: REUNITING WITH OLD FLAMES?