Chapter Text
Shane’s no stranger to hospitals.
Anyone who’s played hockey all their life is intimately familiar with receiving medical care. Pulled muscles, broken bones, concussions, split skin, you name it. The routine of it all does nothing to ease Shane, though. Even though his brain works in careful patterns, he’s up to his ears in anxiety. He’s tapping his fingers against the back of his mother’s strong hand. She’s not supposed to be here. Shane’s supposed to be handling this by himself, but he’s scared. He’s fucking scared, and, yes, he’s a grown man, but he still needs his mother sometimes.
Yuna’s assured him no less than three dozen times that she and David have no qualms about standing next to their son and letting him alternate holding their hands. Yuna’s been pressed close to Shane for 15 minutes. She’s stroking his hair, too, an absent-minded act of affection and care and worry. She’s, of course, not thrilled about the circumstances. It’s not even that Shane was missing a few games (which was Shane’s primary concern); it’s that Shane’s in serious shit. His health is currently under the biggest risk it had ever been in his life, even past all the on-the-ice injuries and the horrible case of the flu he’d gotten when he was barely three years old.
The door slides open. “Mr. Hollander?”
“Yes. That’s me. Hi.”
It’s Hanahaki.
“How is that possible?” Yuna squeezes Shane’s hand. David stands up from where he’s been sitting along the edge of the room, and he comforts his wife and his son with one hand each.
“He’s not in love with anyone.” Yuna’s hair — still brown; Shane hasn’t stressed his mother out enough for it to grey, yet — falls over her shoulder as she looks at Shane, searching for confirmation. “Right?”
Shane doesn’t lie to people. He doesn’t lie to his parents, and he doesn’t lie to medical professionals.
But he does, about some things. Things that, arguably, aren’t anyone’s business but his own—but they still matter.
And he doesn’t do well when he’s put on the spot.
Instead of saying anything, Shane stares at the back of his hand. His thumb is still tapping his mother’s hand in a steady, random rhythm, like a kid with a new drum set who’s just trying to stay on a beat he made up in his head. Yuna squeezes him.
“Shane?”
“There is someone,” he admits as quickly as the flower petals escape his throat on particularly sick days, when it’s been months since he last saw Ilya Rozanov.
He thinks of all their memories, the way he always does when the petals escape. Shane and Ilya met years ago, before they were even rookies. They were careful back then. They were flirty, if not awkward. They dipped their toes into the water. They beat around the bush. They shared careful glances and short clips of conversation. There were smiles, winks, fleeting handshakes, a water bottle that touched both of their fingertips and their lips.
Before they knew it, and before the two of them could decide to be anything but two men who happened to play the same sport, they were pitted against each other as rivals.
It was no one’s fault. Ilya was, and is, good at hockey. He’s one of the best. Shane is, too. They were drafted to and still belong to opposing teams, always competing to see which one could secure the chance for another Stanley Cup win. They’re natural rivals.
Beneath the surface, though, they’re . . . something. It started with tension, which Shane often mistook as Ilya sizing him up, back then. He had his own, complicated feelings about the way Ilya looked at him. Ilya was a cocky asshole who took up more space than anyone else in any room he was in. But he was also a gorgeous man with a charming accent, and Shane couldn’t get enough.
Ilya, sweaty and exhausted from working out, offering him water. Ilya, staring at him in the shower, hard as a rock and full of desire. Ilya, with a towel tied around his waist, inviting himself to Shane’s hotel room. 1410.
Ilya’s lips on Shane’s mouth. Ilya’s body on top of his. Ilya’s voice crawling into his ears, leaving an ear worm that would never go away. Hollander—his name never sounded so good in someone else’s voice.
Ilya’s hands all over his skin, his fingers on his jaw and around his neck, his palms pressing Shane into another unfamiliar bed. 1220, next to Scott fucking Hunter. Penthouse 1, a handful of floors off the ground in Vegas. A secret buried so deep in the dark that only their smiles shined through it—and even that didn’t always work.
They weren’t something, but they weren’t nothing.
“Someone?” Yuna presses. She hasn’t looked away from Shane for a solid minute. Her grip is even tighter, concern and confusion written into every blink of her eyes and the deep furrow in her brow. Shane knows his mother. He knows she’s not going to let this go. He knows she’s going to dig the truth out of him. Of course she is. Her life is on the line.
“I like . . . someone.”
Shane isn’t a liar (he’s not, he’s not, he’s not), or he would make up some bullshit excuse about still being in love with Rose Landry. He was never in love with her. He loves her, but he’s not . . . he’s tried so hard, but he’s not . . .
Yuna doesn’t know that. David doesn’t know that. No one in the world knows that Shane is into men, only men—that he has these deep desires that only a man could fulfill. These days, it seems only Ilya is capable of scratching the itch. Shane wants no one, and nothing, the way he wants Ilya.
It makes sense, why the flower bloomed when it did. The last time they were together, it was . . . different. Ilya was different. Shane felt different. Things were so intimate. There was ginger ale in his hand, a tuna melt in his stomach, his own name in his mouth—first and last—tangled up in Ilya’s breath.
But Ilya likes women. Shane knows he likes women. But he cooked for Shane; he said Shane, not Hollander; he changed. But he likes women. He changed, but he’ll never love Shane. And if he kept up the same pattern of changing, Shane would only love him more. And loving without having is probably the worst feeling Shane’s ever felt.
Rose was a rebound, and now she’s a good friend. Shane still feels terrible for what he did to her. He imagines the flower is karma from the universe, for running away from Ilya and into Rose Landry. He made a mess of two hearts. Three, if he counted his own.
“Rose?” Hearing her name hurts. Yuna notices the way Shane flinches, and she touches her free hand to his cheek. “Yeah? It’s Rose?”
“It’s not Rose,” Shane admits. He can’t continue. He hangs his head and he just breathes. His heart is beating a little too fast because the truth is clinging to the base of his throat, clawing to get out, but Shane’s swallowing it down —
“Look at me.”
— and he’s panicking.
“We’ll figure this out,” Yuna says quietly. She drums her fingers against the back of his head, a stuttered, un-practiced rhythm that makes Shane laugh, after a moment.
“Are you tapping the rhythm to Itsy Bitsy Spider?”
She is—because it was Shane’s favorite nursery rhyme as a kid, the one Yuna quietly sang or hummed into his hair when he just needed to relax. To Shane, Itsy Bitsy Spider is the calmest of all nursery rhymes, and it has the best message. He, too, always stood up when he was knocked down. He, too, will weather the rain to get to his destination. He, too, feels like a man too small for the vast world of hockey and junk food and love he can’t have. But he keeps trying. He studies and plays and eats well and works out and falls into Ilya Rozanov’s arms again and again and again, a broken record and a working clock. The rain comes, but Shane climbs that water spout again.
Yuna gets through one round of the nursery rhyme before the doctor—Plumenrue, is her name—is asking, “May I speak with Shane alone for a moment?”
Yuna is hesitant, but one quick whisper from David is enough to get her to leave the room with her husband on her arm.
“I didn’t want to say this in front of your parents,” Dr. Plumenrue says. Shane internal monologue defaults to doomsday, I’m dying. I’m going to die. Ilya Rozanov is literally killing me.
“I’m going to ask you something that seems out of the blue, but there’s a good reason I’m asking,” Dr. Plumenrue prefaces.
“And please keep in mind, there is absolutely no way to prove that this theory is true, but it’s important for us to keep trying to understand how Hanahaki acts as a disease,” Dr. Plumenrue says, like a movie reaching its climax, a build-up of mystery with a dramatic soundtrack in the back. Shane feels like he’s been hunted by a lion or by Michael Myers, whichever will do the most damage.
And then the knife or claws or teeth sink into his back, and the music blares—a jumpscare, by definition. “Are you in love with a man?”
Shane’s heart explodes in his chest, with so much force he feels as though he’s about to projectile vomit all of the blood and bits of his heart that are now grossly independent of each other. Is it obvious? Did he say something to suggest that? Were he and Ilya caught somehow? Is this doctor a mind-reader, a stalker? Shane will believe anything, at this point; there’s a flower in his chest, and it’s growing.
“I only ask because all recorded cases of Hanahaki disease exist in cases of same-sex attraction,” Dr. Plumenrue says, which doesn’t make Shane feel any better at all. There are others—great, that sucks. More gay people went through this. Not only is Shane gay, sick, and in love with someone who doesn’t love him, he’s also a fucking statistic.
“There is no science behind it, but those are the facts.” Dr. Plumenrue is talking casually, like she’s not a lightning strike repeatedly hitting Shane as he stands in an empty field, alone, amongst all the other gay people who have already been struck. “It is very odd, to say the least.”
Her voice is light, as if she’s telling a joke. Shane feels like the butt of it. He feels like he’s the odd one. He’s a man in this big, huge world, and yet he’s so small—a spider hiding from sunshine in a drain so he doesn’t get burned. The rain keeps washing him out. He feels like it just happened, and he’s completely exposed to the elements, wet and cold with all eight of his little legs suspended in the air because he doesn’t have the strength to roll off of his back. He’s disoriented. He’s terrified. He wishes his mom and dad didn’t leave the room, but he’s so happy they aren’t here to hear this. He can’t lie to his doctor. Unfortunately, he can lie to his parents.
“It’s okay,” Dr. Plumenrue says after a prolonged silence. “I personally take doctor-patient confidentiality very seriously, not to mention the laws and NDAs that will protect your rights. I wouldn’t even tell my wife about things that are discussed between myself and my patients.”
Shane’s shoulders drop an inch. He only feels marginally better, but he carefully nods. For the first time, he says, out loud, “Yes, I’m in love with a man.”
Dr. Plumenrue nods like it’s the most normal thing in the world. She doesn’t even make a physical note of it, and, if Shane can trust her, she doesn’t make a mental note of it either.
Shane crawls back into the water spout, safe in the shadows, while the sun shines outside. He can feel the warmth, but he’ll never be burned. He should stay there for the rest of his days, even if those days are limited by the lily—how stupidly, fucking ironic—growing next to his heart.