theslowyearn

@amillionsparks on Threads until they nuke me. https://archiveofourown.org/users/theslowyearn/works

[theslowyearn]

Happy birthday, Shane. I hope Ilya destroys that cake for you, baby boy. You deserve it.

[theslowyearn]

Rating: Explicit

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: M/M

Fandoms: Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationship: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters: Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Rose Landry, Hayden Pike, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Svetlana Vetrova, Jackie Pike, Jean-Jacques Boiziau | J. J. Dagenais, Grigori Rozanov, Sasha | Ilya Rozanov's Coach's Son

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Work In Progress, Reality TV, Rookie Year, Secret Relationship, Sneaking Around, Sneaking Out, Non-Penetrative Sex, Penetrative Sex, Blow Jobs, First Time Blow Jobs, Consensual Sex, Anal Sex, Top Ilya Rozanov, Bottom Shane Hollander, POV Third Person Limited, Pre-Relationship, Rivals to Friends to Lovers, Idiots in Love, Video Cameras, Sex Tapes, Masturbation, Sexting, Dirty Talk, POV Alternating, Slow Burn, Complicated Relationships, Flirting, Canon-Typical Behavior, Ilya Rozanov is a Menace, Smut, Yearning, Texting, Mutual Pining, Porn With Plot, Mixed Media

Language: English

Shane’s name is supposed to be called tomorrow. First, his mother keeps saying — his agent, technically — like it’s already decided, like all Shane has to do is show up and let it happen.

The NHL Draft, a day his whole life in the making.

He’s been on this track since he could skate, the pressure really picking up since he was sixteen — watched, measured, ranked. Talked about like the future before he’s had the chance to grow old enough to really have a past. The last two days in LA have just been more of the same: interviews, media hits, stepping in front of cameras and then away again, able to breathe once they turn off. His social battery, charged and then depleted, over and over.

He barely has anything left as he cuts through the lobby toward the elevators and looks up to see a full setup already waiting, lights on, cameras fixed, a space cleared out like it belongs to them now — and realizes, with a slow drop in his stomach, that these are the cameras that won’t be turning off.

“Ready?” Yuna asks, a hand on his elbow.

“I kind of have to be, don’t I?” he says, smiling without looking at her.

The commitment spans more than a year, embedded media tracking him from Draft Day through his rookie season — including whether he even makes the roster, or burns out before the show ever airs. The First Shift won’t premiere until the start of the 2010–2011 season — slated for primetime on a premium network in both the States and Canada, A-list narration, press tour, the whole thing. There are options, depending on how he performs — whether his team makes the Cup, wins it.

But first, he has to get drafted.

And he’s only one of three players they’ll follow.

He didn’t ask who the others were.

So when he finds Ilya Rozanov standing at the center of the film crew, mouth curling into a wry smile at something a cameraman has said, he’s both surprised and not.

Ilya Rozanov — Russia’s number one export, and, if things go the way they’re supposed to, the player drafted right after him. Of course he’d be at the top of their list alongside Shane — their budding rivalry already a recurring theme in every interview he’s done today.

“Hollander,” he says, low, as Shane approaches. Not a greeting exactly, but more than Rozanov gave him back in Regina when Shane introduced himself the first time.

“Rozanov,” Shane returns, just as even. He can feel the shift as a camera — and everyone around them — locks in on the space between them, on the moment their hands meet. A firm shake. Once. No more. “Good to see you again.”

“Will not be when I am drafted first and you are crying into jersey of a team no one wants to play for.”

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[theslowyearn]

Rating: Explicit

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: M/M

Fandoms: Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationship: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters: Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander

Additional Tags: Complete, One Shot, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Humor, Comedy, Comedy of Errors, Anxious Shane Hollander, POV Shane Hollander, POV Third Person Limited, Oral Sex, Rough Oral Sex, Showering Together, Secret Relationship, Blood and Injury

Language: English

Shane Hollander has always known the risk wasn’t going to be zero.

Sneaking into a rival team’s hotel late at night to meet Ilya Rozanov comes with a margin of error. Doing it for years practically guarantees one will eventually happen. But it’s a calculated risk — same as playing his beloved sport. What, with the knives strapped to his feet and all.

So he runs through the possibilities the way he runs through drills before a game: getting recognized in the lobby by a fan; turning a corner and running into a player; security asking why Montreal’s captain is on the opposing team’s floor in the middle of the night.

Each one has a prepared response, and all of them center around the same well-rehearsed lie about his parents.

“Oh, THE Boston Raiders are staying here, too? What are the odds, eh? Welp, my mom’s waiting for me,” he’d say, with a generous helping of Canadian golden-boy charm.

It’s not perfect, but it’s worked for years — the same way a slap shot to the top shelf works: a lot of skill and just enough sleight of hand to pull the goalie’s attention somewhere else.

The lobby is as quiet as he expects around 10:00 pm on a Tuesday, the late-night traffic of guests and staff thinning to just a handful. Shane keeps his head down anyway and walks the well-traveled path past the front desk and down the hall to the elevator bank as if he belongs.

He used to rush through the lobby, beeline for the stairs so he didn’t have to accidentally share an elevator with Marleau or Varkov or Kane and explain himself.

Now he knows the slower he walks, the less people pay attention. No one stops him, no one even looks twice. After that it’s just timing, corners, and sight lines.

The elevator ride up is uneventful, though he panics almost every time that this will be the one-in-one-hundred-thousand chance he gets stuck between floors and has to explain to God and the media why he’s in Boston’s hotel the night before their last matchup of the season with a handful of condoms in his pocket.

But the elevator dings gently and the doors slide open on the twelfth floor, and Shane lets out a quiet breath of relief.

He will live to get fucked by Ilya Rozanov another day.

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[theslowyearn]

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: M/M

Fandoms: Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types, Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationships: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov & Irina Rozanova

Characters: Irina Rozanova, Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Anya | Ilya Rozanov's Dog, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander

Additional Tags: Loss of Parent(s), Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced S**cide, S**cide Notes, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Past Character Death, Post-Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), Canon Compliant, Healing, Sad with a Happy Ending, POV Ilya Rozanov, POV Third Person Limited, Complete, One Shot, Established Relationship, Married Couple, Angst, Happy Ending

Language: English

There’s a calendar in the kitchen, tacked to a cork board beside the pantry. It sits alongside a notepad where they keep a running grocery list that’s mostly just Ilya writing things down and Shane crossing them out, glaring over his shoulder each time while Ilya smirks into his mug.

Gummy worms

Pizza rolls

Not boring food

The calendar, though, is an actual joint effort — both of them scrawling in water therapy appointments for Anya’s hips, when she’s due for her flea and tick prevention, David’s next book club meeting, a weekend at the Pike’s, birthdays, practices, media obligations. Most days are filled months in advance, notes squeezed in and rewritten in the margins, arrows pointing to wherever something’s been moved.

Shane flips it at the start of the month without fanfare, a protein shake in one hand, while the other turns the page over with a soft sound. Ilya glances up out of habit more than anything else.

August.

His eyes land on the twelfth without meaning to. It’s empty in a way the rest of the month isn’t — no note, no reminder, nothing written over or crossed out, just the number sitting there on its own while everything else crowds in around it.

He looks at it a second too long before it registers.

It’s been twenty years.

He stopped counting twelve years in — when he was twenty-four, and his life had stretched on longer without her than it ever had with her. But he’d never forgotten his mother. He wouldn’t.

He told Shane about her in the time since, went through how he’d found her — how he’d lost her — in therapy more than once, made it a point to make her favorite tea on her birthday each year, tried and failed to recreate her medovik last New Year’s Eve. But he hasn’t read her note since the year he first found it, too scared to press on the bruise.

Now it sits in the bottom drawer, at the back of their closet — the once crisp pages, now softer, folded inside a manila envelope, tape pressed evenly across the flap. The last time he looked at it was two years ago, when they bought the house in Ottawa and moved in, merging their lives in a way Ilya never let himself believe could happen until it did. But he didn’t read it. He just pulled it from one drawer, put it into a box, then slid it into another.

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