Chapter Text
May 2025
Ilya Rozanov awoke to the grating sound of the default iPhone alarm. He blearily peeked from his cocoon of blankets to search for the offending sound.
“Fucking hell,” he groaned, slapping around for his phone on the bedside table.
It wasn’t often that Ilya had to set an early morning alarm. That was his husband’s job. His beautiful, neurotic husband’s job. Ilya’s job was to press languid kisses between Shane’s shoulder blades in an effort to convince him that his daily ten-kilometer run could wait thirty minutes.
Ilya rolled over to resume cuddling with Shane, but was met with an expanse of cold sheets. This wasn’t odd. Shane was always the first to get out of their bed in the morning. However, it was bizarre that Ilya couldn’t remember why the hell he needed to be up so early today.
“Moya lyubov, come back to bed!” Ilya called out.
“Shut up, Rozanov! It’s too early for anyone to be decoding fucking Russian.”
Ilya jolted up. With his heart thrumming a million meters an hour, he turned to face Brad Hammersmith rolling out of the queen-sized bed beside his. Ilya had the oddest sense of déjà vu.
Why am I dreaming of being on a roadie?
“You mind if I shower first? I wanna hit breakfast before the boys tear the buffet apart.” Hammersmith was already making a beeline for the hotel bathroom.
“Uh, sure?” Ilya said as he watched his former Boston Bears teammate close the bathroom door with a click. “Asshole. Whatever.” Ilya threw himself back into bed and closed his eyes. “What a weird fucking dream.”
Ilya Rozanov was being shaken awake. “Rozy! Get your ass up. You slept through breakfast. We need to be on the bus, like now.”
He was dreaming of Hammersmith again. “Let me fucking sleep, man.”
“You can sleep on the flight back home, Cap.”
Ilya opened one of his eyes to stare down the apparition before him. The people in his dreams didn’t usually reply. “Flight back?”
“To Boston. Come on, I know Jalo didn’t ring your ass that hard last night.”
Whatever was happening here was beginning to piss him off. The phone alarm went off again. Ilya cursed under his breath, flung off the blankets, and swiped off the alarm.
He paused, blinking dumbly at his phone’s lockscreen. It was supposed to be a picture of himself pressing an obnoxiously sloppy kiss to Shane’s cheek at the Cen’s practice rink. Instead, it was a picture of one of his old Ducatis. White font stared back at him.
06:45
12 May 2017
Ilya concluded that this wasn’t a weird dream. It was definitely a prank, and he was waiting for the inevitable moment when Bood and Dykstram would jump from the hotel closet and scream, “You just got punk’d!”
That moment did not come.
May 2025 May 2017 – Ottawa
Shane Hollander woke up feeling like he’d been run over by a bus. Twice. He felt like his head was stuffed full of cotton, and that the left side of his body was on fire. On the dresser next to him, his phone buzzed with an incoming call.
Whoever was calling this early would have to wait until he could form a coherent thought.
As soon as the buzzing stopped, it started again. And again. Then again.
“Jesus Christ,” Shane muttered, reaching for his phone with the arm that wasn’t strung up in a sling–wait, why is my arm in a sling?–and answering the call.
“Hello?” he snapped. Shane usually liked to answer the phone with more tact, but he really wasn’t in the fucking mood.
Ilya Rozanov let out a shaky breath he didn’t know he was holding. “Shane?”
A million terrible scenarios raced through Shane’s mind.
“Ilya, baby. What’s wrong? Where are you–”
Shane abruptly stopped and took in his surroundings. Last night, he and Ilya had fallen asleep in their bed in Ottawa. Now, Shane was in his childhood bedroom.
“Oh my God, Hollander,” Ilya sighed, relieved that it was his Shane that answered the phone, “Sweetheart. I–I don’t have a lot of time to explain; we’re about to board for Boston. I–”
“Boston!” Shane squeaked.
“Listen, Shane, listen,” Ilya’s words became softer, almost a whisper, even though he was a distance away from the rest of the team at the airport. “For some reason, we are back in 2017. I’m in playoffs with Bears. You are probably with Yuna and David at their cottage.”
Shane sputtered, “You’re not making any fucking sense. What do you mean it’s 2017!”
“Da, it is like I said. May 2017. Playoffs season,” Shane could literally hear Ilya pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration, “Your collarbone is broken from that dirty check from Marlowe.”
In his periphery, Shane spotted a carafe of cool water and an orange bottle of prescription pain medication on the nightstand. He looked down at his immobile left arm, fixating on his ringless finger. Fuck. Well, that would explain the sling and the splitting fucking headache. Shane felt nauseous.
“What’s going on, Ilya? How did we get back here? Why–”
“Deep breaths, moya lyubov. Try to calm down.” Ilya didn’t like the panicked octave Shane’s voice had risen to. He wished he were there to rub circles into the small of his husband’s back.
“Why do you sound so fucking normal about this, Ilya!”
“I already had time to panic; I woke up to Hammersmith’s ugly mug.”
Shane lifted his arm to rub his face, then winced at the sharp pain that shot through his shoulder. “What are we going to do? Play pretend until we get back to the future?”
Ilya stood silently. He watched his old teammates’ raucous behavior as they waited at the gate. He envied their excitement. With the Eastern series tied 3-3, they believed they were one win away from another Stanley Cup playoff.
“If I am remembering correctly, tomorrow is Game 7, and we lose our playoff spot to Admirals.”
“I can’t believe I have to watch Scott fucking Hunter knock you out of the playoffs again.”
Ilya made a non-committal sound and watched as his A’s rounded up the rookies to board their flight. “You might not have to.”
Shane narrowed his eyes, “Ilya. Grigoryevich. Rozanov-Hollander. No. Absolutely not. It’s like you’ve never seen a time travel movie before. It’s the butterfly effect! If the Bears advance to the finals, it might set off fucking World War 3!”
“Butterfly…effects?”
Shane laughed. This conversation almost felt normal. “Butterfly effect. Like, a small action today could lead to a huge, unpredictable consequence in the future.”
“Maybe nuclear war would be worth it to wipe that boring grin off Hunter’s face. I don’t even remember how we lost, he’s not even good player! Pike is better player than fucking Hunter,” Ilya grunted.
Shane didn’t know what he would do without his husband. His beautiful, chaotic husband. “Ilya. Please lose your game like you’re supposed to.”
Ilya’s coach yelled at him from across the terminal to get his ass on the plane before they left him in New York.
“Okay, kotenok, whatever you say,” he chuckled, imagining the angry scrunched-up face Shane would make if he accidentally-on-purpose led the Bears to victory in their upcoming game. “Coach is screaming for me to get on plane. I have to go now, I love you.”
Shane grinned despite the strange circumstances, “I love you too.”
The call disconnected. Shane flopped backwards onto his mound of decorative pillows. He missed Ilya.
In the years since Shane had signed with the Centaurs, there had never been a reason for he and Ilya to be apart for more than a day or two. Perhaps their relationship was overly dependent since his move to Ottawa, but Shane didn’t care. They had squandered eight years with secret (albeit hot) rendezvous, and a mutual unwillingness to communicate. And as much as Shane hated to admit it, he was terrified every single day for all those years. Terrified that he could lose the support of his parents, terrified that he could lose hockey, terrified at the possibility of losing Ilya.
Hindsight often brought things into perspective. Shane believed that if he were ever handed the keys to a time machine, he wouldn’t change anything about his life. But now that he was metaphorically sitting in the driver’s seat, keys in the ignition, he realized that was a fucking lie.