okay but LISTEN—
there’s just something about the meticulous, color-coded spreadsheet guy. the man with a TEN YEAR PLAN™️. the one who has tabs for his tabs. conditional formatting. backup copies. contingencies for his contingencies.
shane hollander does not do mess. he does not do overlap. he does not do “it’s casual.” his whole thing is restraint—precision—keeping everything in its proper lane.
so the moment ilya gets into that lane? that’s it. closed system. no outside variables allowed.
because for shane, wanting is already a breach of protocol. but wanting ilya specifically—his rival, someone chaotic and excessive and impossible to pin down—means that wanting becomes absolute.
this is the guy he's supposed to beat. the guy he's been competing against for years. someone who represents everything shane is NOT. and now shane has to be doubly careful because if he can't control this, he loses in every possible way. professionally. personally. emotionally.
once something matters to shane hollander, it’s his. in the same way his plan is his, his discipline is his, his future is his. this is a man who has probably scheduled his own future midlife crisis for a tuesday in 2038.
so yeah. ilya with someone else? that’s not jealousy. that’s system failure.
except—okay, fine, it IS jealousy. but it’s not even the loud kind. it’s worse. it’s the quiet internal kind where he’s still calm on the outside while his brain is doing threat assessment loops like ohmygod why is this happening how do i make it stop who authorized this feeling
what if the spreadsheet stops working. what if the formula doesn't balance. what if the problem isn't that he didn't plan enough—it's that the variable is ilya fucking rozanov and he cannot be quantified, optimized, or filed away.
so now shane's out here:
experiencing feelings without prior approval
acting on impulse????
fully derailing his plans over one (1) chaotic hockey gremlin who he's supposed to be BEATING not WANTING
and the appeal isn't just that he's spiraling. it's that he's losing it specifically because he's never had to before. he did everything right. followed the rules. trusted the system.
and then the spreadsheet betrayed him.
anyways god bless emotionally repressed overachievers getting absolutely wrecked by love. we should study this in a lab.






















