Chapter Text
Shane is a man of routine, of careful maintenance; he lives and dies by deliberate attentiveness to the mechanics of his body. He knows just how far to stretch, just how many reps will leave him ready instead of tired. It is a careful cataloguing of twinges, monitoring for even the mildest form of injury so it can be corrected.
So he notices when things start to feel off. A few weeks after they play in Boston, he starts to feel tired. He wonders at first if it’s just the stress of the season. He's careful about his eight hours, about slowly easing himself out of his circadian rhythm with a sunrise lamp, about avoiding screens an hour before bed. But maybe the season is wearing on him differently. It was a long postseason last year and a short summer, and the same the year before that, and Shane would never trade those cups for more energy, but maybe the lost days in the gym are getting to him.
So he tweaks his protein intake to support muscle mass and starts incorporating naps into non-game days. He cuts some of his off ice workout. He naps on the plane.
Then his chest gets tender. He notices first the way the chest pads feel rough against his nipples, even with the compression shirt between them.
His heat shouldn’t come till summer, it’s timed carefully with suppressants and pheromone patches, but he had to push it a few weeks later at the last second this summer in the midst of cup celebrations and media obligations. Maybe the impact of those high dose emergency suppressants is raising its head now with a false preheat or incoming flash heat.
They’re on the road so Shane buys stronger scent cream for the bench and benadryl to help him sleep through it if a flash heat is on its way. He warns Hayden of the impending possibility, and Hayden just shrugs, easygoing, scent-blind beta that he is.
But Shane keeps feeling the tenderness. He takes a clean check in a game against Washington and winces at the contact against his chest.
In the bathroom that night, Shane stands in front of the mirror and kneads his pecs gently, the way Ilya likes to. It fucking hurts.
This is when Shane starts to worry.
He gets obsessive. He tracks his water intake and how often he pees. He writes down every instance of dizziness or nausea — he’s prone to both when he feels overwhelmed, but this is out of the ordinary.
He counts back the days to when he last saw Ilya, when Ilya made him come three times on his knot and then ate him out till he cried. It had been great sex. Really fucking great.
They’d used a condom. They always did. Shane wasn’t stupid.
But things could happen, especially when you knotted. And the timing fit.
Fuck. Shane had only let Ilya knot him for the first time at the All-Star Game last year. It had been a long wait, but Shane had wanted to be sure.
(That’s when he’d gone from Rozanov to Ilya in Shane’s head, even if they’ve been connected for a long time before that.)
There aren’t a lot of omegas in the league. He’s not the first and he’s not the only, but there aren’t many. None of them last long. There’s an unspoken understanding that omegas get bonded and pregnant and retire sooner rather than later, and leave the hockey to the big boys. Not one has played past thirty.
Shane knows that the media has started his countdown. It’s his seventh season, he’s won two cups, what more could an omega ask for? He even wears an A. It should be enough to satisfy a little love of hockey, enough to tide him over till he’s mated and barefoot and pregnant.
Fuck.
Shane has never been convenient for wanting more.
He thinks Ilya understands. That Shane can’t go there, that it can’t be more than just casual sex. He’s tried to make it clear from day one, showing up with his scent gland covered in menthol scent blocker and never nuzzling up against Ilya’s. They don’t scent, they don’t bite.
It’s not— god. It’s not that it’s Ilya. People would understand that, or they would understand a version of the story. Of course the little omega couldn’t help himself from going belly up for a star of an alpha like Ilya, with his swagger and soft hands and big shoulders. A real hockey stud. They’d have such nice pups.
It’s that the second Shane lets on that someone has any kind of claim to him, they’ll be ushering him out of the league without so much as a thank you.
Shane is used to walking this tightrope of perfection: be good at the hockey but never proud of it, support and lead your team but don’t ever presume to tell them what to do, defer to alphas but don’t let them take advantage, don’t challenge, don’t fight, don’t bear your neck the second someone growls at you. Don’t let your scent get out of control, don’t be affected by the alphas. Stick with your beta teammates. Help the alphas feel calm.
It’s all contradiction, and that’s not even considering the delicate balance of being not entirely white, the way they ask him to stand up and smile when they need a face of diversity, and otherwise pretend he’s just like everyone else.
Somehow, that’s why it’s easy with Ilya. Ilya doesn’t expect Shane to be anything. Yeah, he can fold Shane like a lawn chair and get him wetter than Shane knew was even possible, but he also grins when Shane pushes him down, when he gets snippy, when he’s competitive.
But it doesn’t matter. Shane knows what he can’t have. It’s an ever-growing list unfurling in the back of his mind like a fucking medieval scroll.
Shane made a decision a long time ago: he wants hockey, needs it, and he wants it for as long as he can get it. He's going to play till he can’t anymore, and he’s going to do all the right things so no one can ever argue otherwise.
But also: he knows his body well, and he’s worried about an emerging pattern.
Shane has been up to his gills in scent blocker since he presented at fifteen. Don't distract, don’t tip your hand, let them all forget that you’re not just one of the betas.
But once a month, he scrubs himself raw with unscented soap and then meditates for half an hour. It's a trick he learned from Joe a year after they both presented, when the scouting was getting really serious and Shane felt like even he wasn’t allowed to get to know his own smell.
“You have to sit in it sometimes,” Joe explained when he found Shane in the omega locker room dissociating two hours after practice ended. Joe’s was starting in five minutes, but he took the time to talk Shane down anyway. “Let yourself smell it, feel it. Your body knows how it’s feeling better than your brain does. You have to let it speak to you in the ways it knows how.”
They get back from a roadie on a Thursday afternoon and Shane knows what he has to do.
He’s meticulous in the shower, scrubbing himself down twice over so he won’t miss even the faintest change. He lays a hot washcloth over his scent gland to help his blood flow, then dries the rest of his body with his softest, fluffiest towel that he keeps just for days like this. He dresses in a soft shirt and boxers, then goes to his home gym. It smells like him here, just him, from sweat and hard work.
Being surrounded by how things are supposed to be helps pick out what might be wrong.
So, Shane settles down on his yoga mat, legs crossed, closes his eyes and just breathes.
It’s always comforting to find himself again: the nearly-burnt sugar that feels like childhood, the candied ginger that reminds him of winter at his grandmother’s house, the sharp fruity green of the red currants that grow near his parent’s cottage.
There’s a bitter note of anxiety threading its way through his scent, but it begins to fade as Shane breathes, slow and deep, the way his mother taught him. She knew how to breathe for different reasons—alphas run hot and need to know how to bring it down. But what calms anger calms anxiety too, and when she saw her son losing his breath, Yuna Hollander knew what to do.
Shane sinks deeper into it, and there’s Ilya, ever faint but always clinging just slightly, like Shane himself can’t bear to let the smell of spruce forests and warm clove leave him entirely, even when it’s been weeks since they’ve seen each other. They never scent. But Shane has tasted the sweat off Ilya’s chest and the spit in his mouth. His own body can’t forget it.
That’s the other reason for his religious use of scent blocker.
So: Shane’s own nostalgic scent. A hint of anxiety. The aftertaste of Ilya. Laundry detergent. All-purpose gym equipment cleaner. And—
And a whisper of something else, something turning his own burnt sugar softer, almost cloying. A blush of honeysuckle that he gets sometimes right before his heat, but stronger now. And something faintly like wet forest floor, lush and ripe and verdant. Fertile.
Shane rests a hand over his stomach, then tears it away just as quickly, his eyes blinking open. Fuck. Fuck.
Well, he knows now. Or, suspects.
(Knows.)
He’s on his feet before he’s thought about it, tearing through his bedroom to pull on sweatpants and a hoodie and slather scent block cream across his neck, and then he’s out of his apartment and into the elevator to the parkade.
There’s a 24-hour Pharmaprix not far from him.
His mind keeps racing ahead, plotting out what he needs to end this fucking complication, except what the hell is he going to tell the team doctor? Just dump a positive pregnancy test on his desk and tell him to fix it?
But what if he doesn’t? What if this is the weapon they finally use to bring Shane to heel. Thanks for the Cup, sweetheart, now stop making us think so hard about locker room dynamics.
All his life, Shane’s been convinced that all it’ll take is an excuse. Why else has no omega lasted?
So. Maybe a clinic. What’s another secret? But he needs something to bring beyond his own scent shifting slightly.
Shane pulls up his hood as he stumbles out of the car. The fluorescents inside the drug store feel like they’re threatening to expose him. He can already hear it. Why’s the only omega who regularly appears at NHL All-Star games standing in the fucking family planning aisle past 11 pm?
Usually, Shane doesn’t even risk buying condoms in person.
He stops in front of the shampoo first and grabs a bottle at random, just for something to hold. He swings by first aid and stocks up on advil, because you can never have too much. He looks at greeting cards for a full minute and a half, but no one he knows has a birthday coming up. Every extra second spent in this Pharmaprix is another second someone might recognize him.
He breezes through the family planning aisle like it’s a drive by, snatching the most expensive pregnancy tests marked for omegas off the top shelf and hiding them in his arms behind the bottle of shampoo. Expensive means effective, right? He should’ve done his research before he got here. Doesn’t matter.
Shane already knows the result.
He whips through the self-checkout. He doesn’t scan his loyalty card, like somehow Galen fucking Weston might investigate Shane Hollander’s purchase history himself.
The drive home is impossibly long, which is to say about fifteen minutes.
The wait in the bathroom once he’s peed on the pregnancy test is only three minutes, but that feels like a million years too.
Shane knew what it was going to say. The confirmation doesn’t make it better.
Shane lets himself hyperventilate in the bathroom only briefly. Then he straightens up, closes his eyes, and breathes deeply the way his mother taught him till his heartbeat slows.
Then he makes a plan.
Shane calls the clinic Friday. The Metros play Saturday and Sunday, but no games Monday or Tuesday. The clinic has a free time slot on Monday morning, an hour after Shane gets out of practice.
It’s not ideal. He probably won’t be able to hide that something was wrong after the fact, but as long as they can’t stop him, it shouldn’t matter.
He tries not to think about the fact that the Raiders will be in Montreal the week following. It’s not like he was going to tell Ilya anyway.
He goes to practice. He works hard like normal, dresses and showers like normal, laughs with Hayden and tolerates the others’ ribbing like normal. Shane is cool, Shane is collected, Shane Hollander has nothing exceptional going on in his life.
(He keeps getting out of breath faster than usual. He’s still tired, no matter how much he naps.)
They play Vancouver on Saturday, a punchy all-Canadian matchup that the Canadian broadcasters love. They win, because the Metros are the defending champs and Vancouver are good but desperately young.
Shane goes on the after show in his under armour with a towel slung round his neck, a picture of poise, like he didn’t spend the morning staring in the mirror terrified that a bump was appearing to give it all away at the last second.
“You’ve achieved a lot in the last six years, Shane. Have you given any thought to your future?” the host says near the end of the interview. He has that leading tone that Shane’s heard more times than he can count.
He smiles anyway. “Well, I always figure there’s more to come on a team like this. Lots of good hockey left in me, you know?”
“Of course, and we look forward to it, as well as whatever comes after,” says the host with a paternal indulgence. He, Shane, and the audience at home all know what he meant. It’s a shame. Shane had sort of liked him.
It doesn’t matter. Monday can’t come soon enough.
Sunday, they play St. Louis, which is one of those games no one gives a fuck about.
Late in the third period, when they’re four goals ahead and just trying to close out the game, Shane takes a big hit against the boards from one of St. Louis’s defensemen. It’s an awkward hit because he sees it coming and nearly gets out of the way instead of fully squaring up for it, and the defenseman’s elbow goes hard into Shane’s stomach above where his padded pants start. It leaves Shane winded, bent over and eyes teary.
He lets himself have a second, like always, and then hauls himself upright and keeps skating. Like always.
He can already tell it’s going to bruise.
As Shane skates to the bench, a thought intrudes into his steady mantra to just keep breathing. What if something happened to the baby?
Shane stumbles but catches himself before he goes down. Jesus. First, he thinks furiously, it’s not a fucking baby. It’s a parasite that’s going first thing tomorrow.
It would be sort of inconvenient, though. Like, not that this complication would be over. Shane’s counting down the hours for that. But… fuck, how would he explain the blood? They’d find out, the team doctors would figure it out, and then they’d all know he was bouncing on alpha knot during the season.
Shane spends the rest of the game shifting uncomfortably on the bench and glancing behind himself on the ice, feeling and looking for blood.
It doesn’t come. It doesn’t come during the game, or after in the showers once the alphas are through, or even later when he gets home.
Thank god, thank god, thank god.
It’s hard not to connect the relief to tomorrow’s appointment. Shane lays awake that night, hand resting low on his stomach, and lets himself wonder very briefly what would happen if he… kept it.
He’d lose hockey. Period. It always starts there. It has to.
But after that—what if he let it happen? If he let his stomach swell?
There’s something a bit existentially horrifying about the way this blip has impacted his body already. The way it has started to shapeshift out of the machine Shane has made it with hard work and deliberate control, into something alien, something rebellious, a vessel that serves someone other than Shane.
If a baby was wanted, this transformation might be welcomed or at least accepted. As it is, even for the little that is changed, Shane feels half a stranger to himself.
But he might want it. Some day. With the right person.
If he kept it, he’d have to tell Ilya. It’s hard to imagine how Ilya would even react.
Shane has been so closed off to him for so long. Their relationship is an intricate maze of boundaries and rules, half of them arbitrary, many of them shifting.
Shane knows that he never feels more at home than when he can smell Ilya on his bedsheets. He knows that something of Ilya has been blossoming in his scent since he was nineteen.
He knows that they’d have pretty babies, with his dark eyes and Ilya’s sharp cheek bones.
Shane wonders, sometimes, how it would feel to let Ilya pin him down and sink his canines into Shane’s neck. Shane doesn’t belong to anyone, can’t belong to anything but hockey, but something in Shane still longs to let Ilya stake his claim.
He doesn’t know if Ilya would even want to. But Shane imagines sometimes that he can smell himself on Ilya too.
None of it matters. Shane can’t have… that, any of it, and the hockey, not at the same time. Hence why he almost never lets himself think about it. But for once, one night, Shane lets himself wonder and, worse, lets himself want.
On Monday morning, Shane spends ten minutes vomiting bile into the toilet. Then he goes to the rink.
Shane drives straight to the clinic after practice. It’s on a quiet street. The day is sunny, cold and clear.
The waiting room is nearly empty, just him and a girl with scared eyes and a tear-stained face. He smiles at her weakly, the fear of being recognized fizzing into nothing. It’s hard to imagine that she wants to admit to being here any more than he does.
The doctor is a beta woman in her forties. She goes over the medication instructions, potential side effects, and signs of things gone wrong carefully. She asks a little delicately if Shane wants to talk about it, if he’s sure, if anyone’s pressuring him.
Shane tells her very firmly that he’s certain of this. He can’t have a baby right now. He doesn’t even want one, not for at least ten years.
He does want Ilya, but that’s different. He doesn’t tell her that.
In the end, it’s one pill at the clinic and another he’s supposed to take when he gets home. Simple as anything.
He takes the second pill standing in his kitchen with a glass of water. It goes down easy. He doesn’t even think. Just knows the way out, the way to keep hockey. A choice he’s made a hundred times, a choice he’ll make again.
And then it’s a waiting game.
He bleeds a lot. It hurts a lot.
But Shane has bled and hurt for hockey before. This is just another sacrifice. He’d do it again in a heartbeat.
A sacrifice of pain— not the other thing. Maybe Shane’ll want kids someday. He dreams, sometimes, of dark curly haired children, with laughing mouths and sticky hands. But not now.
Children require a kind of selflessness he’ll never be able to mesh with hockey. Hayden, god love him, is a good hockey player, but he’s a dad first. He shows up tired to practice, he leaves team hang outs early, he facetimes the kids every day on the road.
Shane needs a more singular focus than that.
From that perspective, the choice has always been very easy.
Tuesday morning, Shane wakes up bone tired, still cramping, still bleeding. Normal, according to the doctor at the clinic.
He rarely misses practice. He’s not weak. He can’t let them think that.
But he can’t turn up like this either, or they’ll know. So he calls up the team doctor, spins some tale about undercooked chicken and a night spent vomiting, and gets told to stay home today.
“Listen to your body, Shane,” the doctor tells him in that placating voice Shane hates. They don’t talk that way to alphas, and not even to betas. Shane is something soft to be coddled, not driven to new heights.
“Sure,” Shane says. “I should be good for morning skate tomorrow.”
He’ll be there, even if he shouldn’t be.
Things start to go back to normal. Shane plays the game against Anaheim. He’s tired after, a little more dehydrated than usual. J.J. keeps pressing Gatorade into Shane’s hands on the bench and during intermissions, his alpha instincts piqued even with Shane slathered in scent blocker.
When Shane gets home, he showers with fragrance free soap and meditates for ten minutes, just to make sure everything is in place, nothing out of order.
It’s as expected, his own bouquet, the hint of Ilya that he tries not to think about. A tiredness. A coppery hint of blood that’s characteristic of illness and injury. None of the honeysuckle or lush forest.
Good and right.
His scent is a little emptier like this, maybe, but it’s familiar. Normal.
Shane goes to bed like that, without the scent blocker. He wants to be able to tell, if he wakes up in the middle of the night from a nightmare, that his body is still his.
Life resumes. Shane wears scent blockers, plays hockey, takes his daily suppressants. He works hard, he eats right, he pays attention to his body. He doesn’t snap when an alpha who works for the Montreal Gazette insinuates that maybe Shane’s presence on the penalty kill is distracting his teammates. He minds the skin-to-skin contact in cellies. He tells his teammates well done when it’s deserved.
Careful. Proper. Well-behaved.
It’s worth it when he’s racing down the ice with the puck on his stick, dodging defensemen and outthinking the goalie. It’s worth it when he sees the gap in his opponent’s defence the moment before it appears and is ready to take advantage. It’s worth it when one of Brooklyn’s alpha forwards tries to knock him off the puck and Shane holds his ground to lay a reverse hit instead.
Forget whatever the fuck they say about omegas and heat and childbearing — this is what Shane was made for.