hollanov time travel-au and plane-crash!au with a twist
shane is the one who remembers everything. the flint, the heat, the competition, the handshake in regina on a cold december morning. the chirping, the fondness, the ice, the way rozanov became ilya in his mouth and how effortless the switch was. the years spent in limbo, the cottage in july, the fights and makeups and sex and everything in between. the plane crash. he wakes up the morning of December 20th, 2008, and spends the day sobbing his eyes out, hysterically crying. he gets it all out, the panic, the gut-wrenching pain when he realized ilya was gone and wasn’t coming back. his parents are frantic, but he can’t explain any of it because he’ll be committed. he spends the day in bed, gives himself one day, no, two days to grieve. and then he gets up and goes to practice, eyes red, nothing else giving his pain away. on the 23rd, he stays in his hotel room and waits for the game. canada loses the finals to russia. when the teams shake hands he keeps his eyes trained in front of him because he’s scared what will happen if he meets ilya’s rozanov’s gaze.
ilya wakes up the same day, head fuzzy, tears rolling down his cheeks. he figures the weird dream that shook him awake in the middle of the night was from the shitty american vodka he drank the night before. there’s an ache in his chest but he doesn’t know why. a few days later he smokes a cigarette in a no-smoking zone and a creeping feeling of déjà vu hovers over him. he’s expecting someone something to approach from behind him. no one nothing does. he puts out his half-finished cigarette and doesn’t know why. after russia’s victory, they’re in line shaking the hands of the losing canadian team, and the captain’s gaze is steadily avoiding the eyes of all the players on ilya’s team. for some reason the same creeping déjà vu feeling comes back, he knows something should happen, he’s supposed to say something when he shakes the captain’s—shane hollander, he remembers, from the game tapes he’d watched, and why is his heart racing, why does he feel that ache from a few days ago so deeply now?—hand. what was it, what was it that he’d said that day after that first game, why hadn’t shane come to find him behind the rink, where was he, is he okay—
“see you at the draft,” ilya rozanov murmurs to him, and the world shifts for shane, staring wide eyed at ilya’s retreating figure.
