Archive of Our Own ^beta

Ilya can’t stop watching these videos this animal rescue uploads on YouTube. He checks and refreshes the page regularly. If there are no new ones, he’ll just start from his position on the playlist of all of them, cycling through. 

Dogs being brought into the vet’s office, sick looking, in pain, ears pinned back and tails curled protectively around themselves. Sometimes Ilya cries before they even really start, presses his thumb to the computer screen and pretends he’s petting them, comforting them. I’m sorry someone did this to you.

Clips of the dogs lashing out. Clips of the dogs curling in on themselves, bracing for pain. Longer clips, of the dogs tentatively accepting a hand on the shoulder, then back. Tails beginning to wag when they see the camera, see people coming up to them. Learning to seek comfort. Playing with other dogs. Playing with people. Gaining weight, no longer skeletal. Sometimes there’s a note about them getting adopted at the end of the video.

He thinks about Shane fleeing his house like it was on fire.

Ilya checks in on their Instagram page as often as he remembers to, anonymously fills out all of the Amazon wishlists. He doesn’t tell anyone, doesn’t want the gesture to become misconstrued into a publicity thing, or an image rehabilitation thing, or for anyone to ask him about it. It makes him hopeful. That any kind of recovery can be possible. The body can replace anticipatory behaviours that expect pain. One day Ilya will not shut down when he feels like it is coming.

There’s an earnestness to the dogs that have worked so hard to allow in love. How terrifying it must be, to be a creature at the mercy of something stronger, something that could decide to come down like a fist and prove their apprehension correct, their defensiveness necessary. It’s very hard to accept that the world will always be cold, and it must be so nice to be warm and safe and protected, and as much as Ilya has tried to strangle out the hope that lives in him that one day he’ll have what he wants, he’ll be happy beyond measure and this emptiness will be nothing but a foreign feeling, it stubbornly clings on. 

He watches the German Shepherd on his screen wag its tail as one of the girl trainers coo at her from behind the camera, until her tail raises tentatively, and begins to swing side to side. His eyes well up. She had been so timid, so despondent, so sure of cruelty, and it didn't come. 

His heart thuds in his own chest. He hopes that something good comes for him too. 

+++

The Apple News alert on Ilya’s phone when he’d gotten off the plane in Miami had made him want to smash the damn thing against the pavement.

Theresa May openly offers to lead the charge against Brussels. Hockey rivals Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov call for a truce, team up together for MLH All-Stars. And what you need to know about France’s ban of killer whale and dolphin breeding in captivity.

A laundry list of things going on. The wreckage of Ilya’s heart unbeknownst to the billions of people who would see it. Hockey fans excited to see the two of them in forced proximity, people who couldn’t care less swiping it off their screen in annoyance. 

Ilya couldn’t bring himself to delete the notification when he got it. He likes the way their names look together. He liked the way they moved together on the ice. He liked playing wing, didn’t feel it was so dishonourable to be re-delegated if it was for Shane. Not that it’s something he would have admitted a week ago, or even last night, or even now, when they’re both naked in the same bed.

“I like you here,” Ilya mumbles into Shane’s hair after he collapses onto his chest.

He’s breathing heavy, tries to push himself up but Ilya pulls him close so he can’t.

“Don’t run away,” he mumbles.

“I won’t,” Shane’s voice is soft, gentle. “I’m sorry. I won’t again.”

Shane possesses ten times the strength and forgiveness Ilya does. He admits that he likes him and holds him tight even though Ilya denies their connection in the same breath he all but admits he died every day knowing Shane was seeing someone else. Shane forgives his transgressions like he knows Ilya’s heart is a good thing, even though Ilya knows that it is a selfish thing.

They’re mouth to mouth again, and Ilya is going to make it up to him, make up every mistake he’s ever made in this hotel bed, and then when the sheets are washed and covering another mattress in a different room, it will be like they’ve never happened.

Let me earn it, he wants to say. Do not give your forgiveness to me as easily as you are giving it to me now. Make me work for it.

He pins Shane’s wrists down with one hand, sucks at the side of his neck and digs his fingers into the flesh of his thigh. 

“How is it?” he asks into the skin, breathing in.

“Good,” Shane gasps as he drags a hand over his stomach and rubs below his belly button.

“Can you feel it here?”

Shane doesn’t respond so he stops, asks the question again even though he knows what the answer is. Just to remind Shane that he remembers, that he gets it first try.

“Yes,” Shane answers, breathy.

It must be one of those things that never leaves him because it’s stored in a fundamental, stubborn part of his brain. Skipping. Riding a bike. Language. Where to touch Shane Hollander to make him feel good.

“For me?” Ilya asks, to indulge himself.

“For you,” Shane echoes, an elastic snapping back.

“For me, Shane,” Ilya’s voice trembles, asserts, pleads, begs.

“For you, Ilya,” Shane accepts, receives, bestows.

“I’m going to have you again after this,” Ilya promises, kisses his ankle and slips two fingers into his own mouth before sliding them into Shane’s. “I’m going to make it so good for you.”

Shane sucks down so hard that Ilya almost cums right then and there, so he takes them out to drag them down the dark stubble on his chin, down his neck, watches it glisten against the gold of his skin.

“Good,” Ilya’s voice comes out high pitched as Shane’s hand makes a fist in his hair. “So good, you just know.”

“I do,” Shane’s expression is sly as he tilts his mouth up for a kiss and Ilya imposes on him like a storm. 

Thank you, he wants to say.

He watches Shane’s face as he squeezes a dollop of lube into his palm, watches his tongue dart out to wet his lips as he presses in one finger, two fingers.

“I need you,” Shane confesses as he props himself up onto his elbows, pressing their foreheads together. “I always need you.”

“I’m here,” Ilya promises. 

When he’s inside of him he lets himself settle for a second, peppers kisses on both sides of Shane’s cheeks. He splays out his left hand right over Shane’s heart, and interlocks their fingers with his other. Shane reaches out to touch his cheek. 

“Missed you,” he whispers, mouth wet and dark hair damp against his forehead. “Want you.”

“I’m here,” Ilya promises. “Take me.”

“I’ll take you,” Shane groans as Ilya rocks against him. “I’ll take it.”

They’ve been speaking this language to each other for years. Even if Ilya has barely had the privilege of Shane’s company outside of sex and games and press, it’s symmetrical enough with the important stuff to know that this is something worth protecting. Who we are when we’re alone. What we work for, how bad we want it. What we pretend to be.

This waltz that they’re doing for everyone else. This thing that they have is only for them. Built on trust and respect and the knowledge that they are the only people in the world that understand what it is like to be the way they are, so different, so innately great. 

What can anyone say that matters about this? Nobody else is touching greatness like this, not the way Ilya is.  He knows that down the line, Shane will be an untouchable thing in sports history, and Ilya’s name will be next to his, but right now he’s flesh and blood and skin and muscle, right now he’s asking Ilya for what only Ilya can give him, and knowing this has ruined everyone else for him. There really only ever has been Shane.

I’ll give it to you, Ilya promises in his head as he watches Shane bare his neck like an animal. If you can take it, any way I can, I’ll give it to you.

Afterwards, he lies on his side and stares at Shane as he shuffles into his shoes. Shane looks back over at him and turns red.

“You look like you’re going to ask me to draw you like one of my French girls,” Shane is visibly proud of himself as he says it.

Ilya grins because it’s cute, but also because he’s not nearly as easily flustered as Shane is. “Hollander, I don’t want you to do anything to me that you have done to girls.”

He goes tomato red. “Asshole.”

“Goodnight Shane,” Ilya practically sings, even though he wants to curl up and fall asleep together, but tonight feels like a precursor, not a finale.

“Goodnight Ilya,” Shane says back, lip curled up in a smile, sated, relaxed.

Ilya is satisfied too. This is all I want for you.

+++

Everything Ilya was so afraid of last year cannot touch him now. His father is dead. His brother is no longer his concern. Still, he’s being haunted. Still, there is something between him and what he wants most, in this impossible uphill battle of a life. He's trapped. This should be familiar by now, giving something he wants to make sure everyone else gets what they need. There are nicer guys out there for Shane, probably. But Ilya can’t let that happen, selfishly sits at this crossroad that Shane is willing to meet him at. He feels like a kid, reduced to elementary needs. I love you. I want this. I can’t. I’m scared.

+++

When he gets back from the hospital, he collapses. He wishes a gas leak had happened the night before the game and the whole thing had been cancelled. He could have had Shane in his bed, in one piece. Instead he’s borrowing time at the hospital, slotting in where he can and fucking off to avoid suspicion.

He slips under the covers.

Hours later, he can’t get out of bed. He can’t get himself to move, even though his body begs him to. He’s angry at himself, even though he knows it’s not the answer. 

For a very long time, Ilya was determined not to become like his father. Nobody that knows him would draw that comparison. He can feel Svetlana slapping his arm, hissing khvatit, soothing over the spot with her palm, enough, Ilya, understands that it does no good to give power to those thoughts. Ilya’s father has been put to rest, and his ghost doesn’t even bother to come for him. 

Something more sinister has happened. There is always that deep dissatisfaction, that hangover that follows a moment of pride, of softness. It’s frustrating and hard to understand. It makes him feel like a helpless young boy again. At night, when the other side of the bed is cold and the darkness settles around him like a noose instead of a blanket, he can feel something very small pounding at the walls of his ribcage, crying and screaming and begging for what it needs.

Ilya has always been petrified of perpetrating some kind of evil cycle, becoming the kind of man that destroys kind people, good people, naive people who wouldn’t think to assume the worst. 

Somewhere along the lines, Ilya realizes bitterly that he doesn’t have to fear becoming like his father, because he’s absorbed him entirely. No grief comes for him because it’s more than feeling, runs deeper than a generational curse or an ancestral pain. There’s a graveyard inside of him for all of those feelings, but his father walks the halls of his body, a physical presence, a physical ache. His voice weaves in with Ilya’s, a polyphonic spirit that takes his hand and joins him to revel in his failures. 

Or maybe it’s not his father’s voice at all anymore. Maybe it used to be, but it’s been absorbed into him now. Fundamental, intrinsic to him, and now inescapable. Ilya hates this thought maybe more than the first one. What does it even matter? The consequence is the same.

He rolls around and tries to get comfortable on the mattress. He can’t decide if he’s running too warm or too cool. He beats down on the thing in his chest that pleads for understanding, for comfort, to be believed. 

Shane is in a hospital bed with a broken bone, asking sweetly if he can give Ilya peace after Ilya has told him there is no chance that they could ever have it. Shane gives him blind faith, but Ilya is afraid, still haunted and ruled by something he can’t even mourn correctly. 

Ilya knows he loves Shane, maybe more than anyone else in the world has ever loved anyone. When Scott Hunter kisses a man on live television, Ilya knows that the bravery he’s looking for exists. 

Here is my heart, he’d all but offered up in Moscow on the phone. You bear it even if you do not understand it yet.

“I’m coming to the cottage,” he says.

I am going to give it to you.

+++

Ilya is on his best behaviour at the cottage.

He can’t remember the last time the sound of a door unlocking loudly didn’t lead to the feeling of dread and disgust and anticipatory bad news. Every morning he’d wake up in Russia was a different shade of exhaustion, but in this little pocket of nowhere, Ilya feels like he can rest.

Shane wakes up earlier than him, but he lingers in bed, waits for Ilya to wake up before he goes on his run. Sometimes Ilya will accompany him, but sometimes he’ll wake, and Shane will turn to look at him, sun hitting the freckles on his cheeks and the microscopic lines by the corners of his eyes, and they will lie there together until consciousness settles down on the both of them comfortably.

Shane’s cheek to his chest. Shane's mouth on his pulse. Everything inside of him humming with want so violently he doesn’t dare express it until he’s invited to, fears that the intensity of it will destroy the fragile thing between them.

“I put the Cokes in the fridge, but some of them are already cold because I kept them in the cooler on the way here,” Shane had said, on his knees by the window.

“Let’s be honest about how we really feel,” Shane had said from over him on the couch.

“I love you so much,” Shane had said from under him on the bed.

Everything deliberate, intentional, an act of care. Ilya wants to do all of this for him too, but he wants something worse, something that he can feel in the bone of his jaw.

When Shane’s father had driven off without a word and Shane had trembled at his feet, Ilya wants to say don’t worry. Ilya wants to say whatever is the worst you can imagine from this, I will take for you.

When they’d stood shoulder to shoulder in the foyer as Shane’s mother had looked between the two of them in shock, he wants to pull Shane behind him, square his shoulders, clench his teeth. I will take it for him if you are angry. I know you are angry, and I know you are important to him. I will prove to you what I am willing to do for him.

The need never arises for any of this, but it’s an itching in his teeth, something he craves in some kind of sick way, something Shane fundamentally should never have to come to understand. Shane is lovely as is, focused on creating a space where they can be safe. Ilya thinks about bleeding for it, fantasizes about aching proof that this is something he loves and cherishes and aims to protect.

I would take it, Shane. The blinds cast shadows across the smooth skin of his back. Anything that wants to get to you will have to get through me.

+++

“I read online that people in Russia take their tea with jam,” Mrs. Hollander, Yuna, tells him the first time she invites him over without Shane. 

She places three little jars with brown sticker labels in front of him; cherry, raspberry, strawberry. Three little spoons with the names and crests of different Canadian provinces engraved into them. Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Manitoba. Ilya chooses raspberry and Nova Scotia.

“Yes,” he says. “Thank you.”

She cuts the stems of the pink carnations he bought as a gift in an angle, drops a penny at the bottom of the vase before placing them in gently. Ilya had Googled flowers that mean gratitude and are pink carnations appropriate to gift your boyfriend’s mother.

It’s nice to know that they are both a little confused on how to handle this, but they’re looking for answers in the same way.

For Shane’s father, he had Svetlana send a bottle of good Russian Vodka that isn’t available in Canada. Fathers he understands. Good fathers, he understands, even though there is an assumption that he wouldn’t. Ilya understands good fathers better than anyone with a good father ever could. He knows what the worst looks like. He’s spent many nights fantasizing about the inverse.

His mom is a tender spot in the heart of his heart. He doesn’t think of good mothers or bad mothers or anything outside of I miss you.

He looks at Yuna, who looks at him back, seeming like she wants to say something but doesn’t know how.

“Shane says you have been a Metros fan for your entire life,” Ilya offers.

It’s a good starting spot. Things they both know. Shane. Hockey. 

“Yes,” she pulls forward a plate of little sandwiches with the crust cut off, and then drags it so that it sits right in front of Ilya. “All my friends’ parents were hockey fans when I was a kid. They’d have it on, and sometimes if a bunch of us were over at the same time, I would watch hockey with their parents instead of playing. Or sometimes I’d play, but then I’d wander off to go watch hockey.”

Ilya laughs as he places two sandwiches on his plate.

“I loved it,” she continues. “So I’d make my parents put it on at home too, and then they’d ask me a bunch of questions, and sometimes I’d know, and if I didn’t know I’d write them down and ask my friends or their parents at school the next day during drop off.”

“My father did not like American hockey but he would make us watch sometimes. Mostly Russian Superleague with my brother and me,” Ilya tells her. “I liked watching it a lot when I was a kid. Then I liked playing more.”

“Did you always know you would play hockey?” Yuna reaches for the Manitoba spoon and dips it into the cherry preserve.

Ilya nods, watches her stir. “Yes. I knew I wanted to play in America or Canada. I know my father wanted me to play in Russia, but I knew I wanted to— I knew I liked to play because it meant I could go somewhere else.”

Yuna nods, pushing a plate of bagels cut into fourths with different spreads on them towards him. “How did you like Boston when you got there?”

“It was quiet compared to Moscow,” Ilya remembers. “I could not understand what anyone was saying. But guys from my team helped a lot.”

“So young,” Yuna says. “To be moving across the ocean alone.”

“Yes,” Ilya says back. “I guess so.”

He reaches for a piece of bagel, takes two sips from his cup of tea.

“Ottawa is quieter than Boston,” Yuna tells him.

“I have read online,” Ilya replies, shrugging. “But I don’t mind. Is nice to be closer to Shane and I want to see him more.”

Ilya likes Yuna, not just because she’s Shane’s mom, but because he respects determinism, and he respects love, and she’d found a way to bridge that gap much better than anyone that had mentored him. He wants her to like him too, but he’s not sure how to earn that through anything other than his devotion to her son.

I love your son. He is taking such good care of me. He has never met my mother and wants to honour her as our first public act together. I would live in a cornfield if it came to it. I would sleep on the mat by the door.

He knows this kind of devotion is not the answer. He looks at Yuna who is looking at him not sadly, but like she is feeling some echo of his pain and his loneliness. He can see Shane in her face, almost.

“Were you born here? Or outside of Canada, in Japan?” he cringes in his mind as he says it, not sure if it is the right way to ask, but Yuna does not look offended.

“I was born in Japan, but I came here with my parents when I was very little. Barely three,” she tells him. “My parents were fluent in English when they came, but it was still not easy for them.”

Ilya nods, swallows down another mouthful of tea. “It is very… it is different here more than it is different anywhere else.”

Yuna laughs, pours herself more tea before passing over the pot to Ilya. “Yeah. I mean, yes. My dad would say something like that often.”

“I was lucky there are other Russian players who want to help. Boston was happy to have me, so I got support from my coach too. I tried to copy his accent when practicing English. Helped a little,” Ilya shrugs. “Do not have to repeat myself at McDonald's too often now.”

“My parents used to do that too,” Yuna tells him. “But with the TV. With my TV shows, the news, hockey.”

Ilya smiles.

“What?” Yuna asks, but she’s smiling too. 

Ilya shakes his head. “Just makes a lot of sense. How Shane is able to talk about hockey so much. He told me his dad used to play, but whenever he talks hockey he is always talking about you.”

Ilya’s mother liked that Ilya liked hockey, but that was where it ended. When Ilya thinks of what he carries of her now, it is something that only people that had met the both of them know. Sveta says they are the same kind of funny; theatrical and silly in a way people do not expect. If what Ilya carries forward from his mother is the way she would bring joy, it is the biggest blessing to be able to do that.

Shane admires his mother. He wants to make her proud. He looks back over his shoulder like a kid learning to ride their bike, making sure that someone’s bearing witness.

“Is sweet,” Ilya adds when he sees Yuna looks deep in thought about something, not meaning to offend. “I just was not like that with my parents, it was very— we had different things we all cared about. But Shane is— I mean to say he cares the same way you say you care. It is nice you share that.”

I wish I could share that, he wants to say, but he knows it will sound jealous even though he doesn’t mean it to be.

His heart is thudding in his chest, and he wonders for a second if he’s fucked it. 

Yuna starts again, voice cracking with emotion. 

“I wanted to be like everyone else a lot,” she is being intentional with the way she says things. “I didn’t even want to give anyone else a chance to point out anything different about me or my parents when I was a kid. But there’s a limit to how much you can…”

Ilya understands. She knows he understands. 

“How well you can protect your parents when you are a kid,” Ilya offers softly, and they share a look of knowing.

It runs deep, this sense of duty. Ilya to some degree thrives on it, but no child of his will ever be bound by it. 

Yuna reaches across the table and takes his hand. He tries not to get the cream cheese on his fingers on her skin, but fails.

“I worry that I tried so hard to protect Shane from something that I was afraid of,” she says softly. “Maybe I made him do all of this stuff because I didn’t want anyone to ever be able to hurt my son, that I ended up hurting him anyway.”

Ilya waits for her to continue, watches her thumb smooth over his knuckles.

“But I like that— I like that after his— after David accidentally saw you both, he came down here to talk to us first instead of running away. I like that you came with him. That’s a hard thing to do. And I— I always think about— I like to see you with Shane. I like to see Shane with you. I just wonder if there is anything else I could have done better then. I could do better now. And you see him— you do the same thing he does, so you understand what he goes through.” Tears are welling up in her eyes. “If there is anything I can do to be better for him—”

“Shane loves you,” Ilya says it automatically. “He does not blame you. He always— always nice things to say about you and Mr. Hollander. David. It is just hard in this game, with all the love in the world or without. It is hard to be a parent.”

It killed his mother. It rotted his father.

“I want him to know he has all the love in the world,” she starts, and Ilya knows, Ilya knows Shane is so beloved, by him, by his parents, by the city and the country and the world, cradled in the hand of the universe very gently. 

“I want you to know,” her thumb swipes across his knuckles again. “I have never— Shane has always put hockey first, and I don’t know if he— I am happy he is with someone who understands where he is, but also someone who just understands him. What he needs.”

I have not been perfect, Ilya wants to confess. 

“But Ilya,” she starts, and Ilya knows that it is her duty as a mother to threaten the man who holds her son’s heart, and he’s eager to say he would never, that it is not something they ever have to worry about, prove that he won’t be scared off, prove that he can stand where it’s hard to stand and take it, but she says something else entirely. 

“You are dealing with all of this too, and if there’s anything you need— with your papers, or furniture shopping— I know you and Shane haven’t been seen together in public yet, but— anything you need. We are behind you too.”

Ilya inhales sharply and looks down at his plate, tries to blink back the immediate tears that come to his eyes. Yuna lets go of his hand, and he hears a chair push back, and there’s a hand cradling the back of his head, the same way Shane holds him.

“Thank you,” the words come out in a croak, and he wills his jaw to stop trembling so he does not cry like a baby into this woman’s stomach the first time he is alone with her.

“You have given me a gift I can’t ever say thank you enough for,” her voice sounds thick. “You are still so young, and you’ve moved from there to here, and you think you can do it alone but you can’t. You don’t have to.”

Her hand reaches for the last clean spoon, Prince Edward Island dips into the raspberry preserve and makes an identical-sized dent in the clean surface of the top as Ilya had made earlier. Of course the woman that has raised Shane exercises the same level of care and observation as Shane. It clinks against the sides of the cup as she stirs. Ilya swallows down the balloon swelling in his throat. It would almost be easier if she had threatened to set a flock of geese on him if he dared to break Shane’s heart. Instead, she hands him this trust that his own father did not afford for him. 

“We’re making chicken parmesan for dinner,” she says. “David always prepares too much chicken. You should stay.”

“I would like that,” Ilya says, staring at a framed photo of the three of them placed on a little table by the backyard door. 

Ilya does not take her trust for granted with her son, and it at least puts him at peace to know that she knows this. There’s a hand with a little finger sandwich being raised to his mouth, and he looks up at her face to see her smiling down at him softly, like this is something natural for her to give, something he does not have to earn even though he wants to earn it badly.

“Mrs— Yuna, I just want you to know that…”

I would accept much worse than this. I would do it so happily. 

“I know,” she says, even though Ilya does not know how to say it himself.

He opens his mouth and lets himself be fed.

+++

There is a perversion that lives inside of him. 

Ilya dreams vividly. He doesn’t always remember, and they’re not always necessarily nightmares, but it feels like he is always in a state of unrest.

In his dreams, his father is never the one delivering cruelty. Sometimes, his father will sit in front of him, tight-lipped, and Ilya will try to say hello. He won’t respond. Sometimes it drives Ilya to tears. If it were really his father in front of him, he would watch with narrowed eyes, refusing to console him. He is very good at self-soothing, runs his hands up and down his arms, flexes and unflexes his fingers. This dream-state-father watches him sadly. Sometimes Ilya will lay on his lap like he did when he was a kid, and his father will card a hand through his hair, saying nothing. When he wakes in the morning he’s disturbed.

The violence often possesses people that he holds very dear. When he was a teenager, it was often his mother, throwing silverware and dishes out of rows and rows of kitchen cabinets. The kitchen would flood, and lobsters would crawl out from under the floorboards, and Ilya would be paralyzed. A handful of times Svetlana, staring at him with a coldness, accusing him of things he hasn’t done, would never do, but when he opens his mouth to speak his tongue gets heavy.

Once, last week, it was Shane. His lovely Shane, kind and patient and stable, desecrated by him.

Shane’s eyes will bleed and then his mouth takes a cruel shape. Ilya is four years old and he’s trying to run but his legs are cemented to the ground. Shane is lunging towards him, and Ilya cries and begs and screams but it doesn’t stop. He says sorry and then please and then I love you but he might as well have been silent. 

He can’t understand the feeling in its entirety, but he feels like he is the embodiment of something evil. An imposition. A violation. He doesn’t want to be that.

It’s what he’s doing to Shane. Shane’s body, a vessel for the evil Ilya cannot kill inside of himself. He cannot fight back against the shape of the man he loves. Not in this dream state, not anywhere. He has taken it from people that would not care if he dropped dead in front of them, if it meant the money stopped. He can take it in this liminal space from the man who loves him. 

Shane’s hands are around his throat, and the skin of his neck is tight, bulges. Ilya can’t breathe. He keeps his eyes on his Shane. It is not a bad way to go, Ilya can’t help but think it numbly. Shane screams and shakes him, turns cartoonishly red, and they’re outside now, snow biting at the lobes of his ears.

I love you, Ilya thinks as he tries to fight his body to wake up, even in his terror, in any frantic state he could conjure up. He doesn’t know what that means, so he just repeats what he does know over and over. I love you I love you I love you. 

+++

Preseason starts and Shane is in Ottawa whenever he can be, and Ilya is in Montreal when he can’t.

Late September, they book separate hotel rooms in a town in between called Montebello, and they let the golf course they visit in the early morning publish photos of the two of them golfing together.

Shane pushes him up against the door of Ilya’s hotel room as soon as it shuts, and they kiss hungry and clumsy like they did during their rookie season.

“They don’t know,” Shane whispers into his ear as he presses his hips into Ilya’s thigh, giddy. “But it’s— they don’t even know. God, they don’t even know.”

“Yes,” Ilya mumbles back to his mouth, eyes closed as Shane’s hands slip into the familiar divots of his body.

“I don’t know how they don’t,” Shane laughs, almost deliriously, but Ilya is thinking the same thing.

Maybe the media has done them a service by labelling everything as hateful and competitive, because those are passionate things, and anyone that has seen anything promotional with the two of them goes into it knowing that they’re passionate, chalks up the knowingness to something you get by having a long time rival. Not like most people have long time rivals, not the way he and Shane have been positioned to be.

All Ilya sees in Shane’s face is love. All Ilya sees in his own face is love. Ilya knows what hate and disdain look like. Ilya knows how disappointment and fury and the glint in someone’s eye when they want you hurt, want you gone look like. Never has he felt that way about Shane, would not even dare to think it in a wicked dream. How does anyone else not know?

“I love you Shane, my Shane,” Ilya tells him sincerely in this hotel room the way he has felt in hundreds of others, running the back of his palm over his cheek.

Shane is looking at something on his phone, swapping between different messaging apps and notes, and then he’s looking up at Ilya and smiling softly. 

Later, he lies on his front and Shane is tracing lines across his shoulder blades with his nail, the touch almost a ghost.

“My mom and dad really like you,” Shane says, pressing a kiss to the back of his neck. “You’re giving my dad a run for his money with all of those flowers you’re bringing by.”

Ilya feels himself flush red, doesn’t expect for that to ever be a topic of conversation to reach Shane. “Yes. I am intruding in their kitchen a lot.”

“My dad was telling me he was watching the mic’d up videos of you on the MLH YouTube and it was like watching a baby swear because you’re so polite when you’re over,” Shane teases, pinching at his cheek.

“Your dad is watching my mic'd up videos,” Ilya is horrified.

“He’s allowed to laugh now that my mom’s allowed it,” Shane presses his warm palms flat across Ilya’s cold skin. “You’re not playing for Boston anymore, so that helps.”

“I want your parents to like me,” Ilya tells him. “I don’t want them to see me on TV and think that it is the same man fighting people there in their kitchen.”

Shane’s expression drops. “Is that what you think?”

Ilya senses he’s said something wrong. “Not— No, I don’t think.”

“Ilya,” he says it the same way he does when Ilya accidentally jokes about something that seems to somehow reveal a deep wound, even when it’s not what he’s meaning to say.

“Was just joking, Shane,” Ilya waves off. “I know your parents do not think I will slam them into the boards.” He tries to sound lighthearted. “Just mean that it must be hard for them to see a man who is so aggressive on the ice towards you hold your hand and stay in your house. It is not even like you fight me back, it is me who is doing all of that. I would think it was weird if I was them.”

“Well, that’s hockey,” Shane says like it’s obvious, and yes, Ilya knows it’s hockey, and Shane’s parents thankfully know that it’s hockey, and soon, the rest of the world will see pictures of them golfing together and brush aside the years of alleged animosity with it was just hockey.

The same way his father would push him and push him when he was younger, and afterwards see his sulking face and gather him up in his arms and tell him it was just hockey. Then, as he got older, informed him that it was just hockey. After it had become his career, it was never just hockey. It was about his discipline, his strength, everything on the ice intrinsic to his value, and it’s that attitude that protected him from falling into a pit of self depreciation after the Olympics and let him lead his team to his first cup. But Ilya knew when he left Sochi and returned to America, when he’d cut Shane out and put his nose to the grindstone, it was not just hockey, and he knew that he had damaged something about that trust and respect that they’d always had for years between the both of them.

“Ilya,” Shane’s cheek is pressed into his back now, and he’s pressing Ilya down into the mattress with the weight of his entire body. “What are you thinking about?”

“It is still me doing it,” he says quietly. “Even if is just hockey. I just mean to say that I understand if your family was skeptical. I think they have been more than kind so far.”

It’s not just hockey to Shane, he knows this. Shane loves hockey the way other people love breathing, and he approaches it like a monk. He doesn’t care for the fanfare until what he’s set out to accomplish is done. He’s tactical where other people are trying on showmanship.

“I don’t think it can ever really be just hockey, even though we treat it like it is,” Shane admits. “Maybe if it were two other players—”

“Like Scott Hunter and Hayden Pike,” Ilya blurts out before he can stop himself. “Old and mediocre. Not serious.”

“That’s not happening and you know that, Ilya,” Shane scolds.

Ilya laughs.

“I’m being serious,” Shane continues, voice softening to speak to Ilya with care, “Yeah, I mean, there’s always— hockey is there, but it’s me and you, and we make it work with the hockey. Nobody else is doing that.”

“I don’t know, Shane. Maybe a cheating scandal is going on. I saw the way Hunter was looking at Pike when—”

There are teeth in his spine, and he’s rolling over to pin Shane underneath him, smiling as he twists to bury his face in Shane’s chest.

“Nobody trusts anyone the way I trust you,” Shane asserts, tangling his fingers in Ilya’s hair. “You can laugh all you want.”

It’s just the sound of the two of them breathing.

“I want,” Ilya lets himself be serious for a moment. “When we tell people, for them to think I am someone who deserves you. I want everyone in your life to be happy for you.”

For Ilya to be someone that is not the shape of his father. For the rink to be the rink and for Ilya to separate himself from the barbed wire of what he expects to happen. To be someone who can anticipate good, and he feels like that most when he’s here with Shane.

“I am so happy with you,” Shane kisses the tip of his nose, and Ilya closes his eyes, something precious being bestowed upon him. “I deserve you.”

“Yes,” Ilya will spend every day making sure he is worthy of it.

“Do I make you happy?” Shane asks.

Ilya looks at him, and it feels like such a purposeless question. Everything in his body sings when he looks at Shane.

“I want to deserve you too,” Shane reminds him, always sweet once he’s needled into Ilya’s sore spot. “If anyone is making you feel like you don’t, then I need to deal with them.”

Shane says deal with them with a sparkle in his eye, and then there’s thumbs tracing circles by Ilya’s ribs.

“How are you dealing with these people, Shane Hollander?” Ilya drawls out his name and there’s a mouth on his neck dragging up to his chin.

“I don’t know, is there someone who I need to deal with?” 

“Yes,” Ilya wets his mouth as he looks up at him. “There probably is. He is not available, probably, so I can take a message for him.”

“Okay,” one of Shane’s hands fiddles with the elastic of Ilya’s pyjama pants. “I’m going to show you exactly how I feel, and then you can go and tell him.”

“Okay,” Ilya agrees, smiling with all of his teeth at Shane who is tilting his head to the side as he stares up at him, caressing the skin of his hip bone. “I’m ready. Show me.”

+++

Hockey is about being able to understand how to adjust himself to best move through space, reach where he needs to, where to tense and dodge and where to drive forward. Seeking comfort is hard. His reference points are wrong. He is poorly calibrated. He is trying very hard to undo all of this, but he still has a hard time discerning what’s normal to anticipate, to want, to expect. He does well with what to provide, he thinks. Giving has always been easy. With Shane, it’s the easiest thing he’s ever done.

The nightmares come again one day when he’s tucked next to Shane in his Montreal bed.

He startles awake and the sheets underneath him are damp. His heart is thudding in his chest and his body is on edge but his mind is sluggish. When he looks next to himself, Shane is sleeping on his stomach, hand curled into a weak fist beside his head. At peace. Not angry. In one of Ilya’s old sweatshirts and salt and pepper socks, a blanket kicked off onto the floor beside them. 

The dream is already frayed at the corners, barely anything.

If he wakes him, Shane will grumble, but then pull him close, let him cling if he needs to. Ilya needs to, often these days. Be skin to skin. Cheek to cheek. He’d interlock their ribs if he could. He wants to let Shane sleep, but he wants comfort from him more. Maybe he is selfish, but he is with someone who wants him to be.

He wraps an arm around his shoulders. Squeezes lightly. Brown eyes flicker open, and a confused sound leaves his mouth.

“I want you close,” Ilya says, throat dry.

He’s not ready to voice the entirety of what scares him, just how twisted his love can run when it does so deep, but too much time has been wasted to be shy and coy and try to brave this alone. As much as he fears it, the presence of Shane’s love is stronger than anything his mind can try to conjure up.

Shane’s eyes shut and he rolls over, into Ilya, and goes limp next to him, muscle memory. Ilya pulls him as gently as he can onto his chest. Once they’ve adjusted themselves to be comfortable, Shane falls right back asleep, and Ilya tries to breathe in time with him.

Maybe this is the dance. Ilya will step into danger for Shane without a second thought, but Shane has made his point clear, he would never let any sort of danger find them.

He hasn’t been subject to this kind of protection in a long time, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with the feeling it makes swell up in his chest. But for now, he lets himself think about the way their lives are slowly slotting together, how easy it feels, how right this future unfurling in front of them feels.

+++

He calls Yuna and David to his new place for a housewarming dinner. They bring him a potted plant and a ceramic loon courtesy of Shane, fussing about the fact that his new sofas haven’t arrived yet. When he admits that when he got to Boston, he didn’t bother with mounting the TV for the first three weeks and would watch it sitting cross-legged on the floor, they’re appalled, and then David mounts his new TV for him right away.

It had taken some time for that place to accumulate enough stuff to look like somewhere somebody actually lived. He’d given away a lot of his old stuff from Boston, and didn't want to lug it over. He’s telling himself it’s symbolic of all the things he didn’t like about his life in that chapter, left behind for someone else to make use of, because Ilya doesn’t have use for it anymore.

He’d crossed the ocean into a life of nothing, and then he grew into all of it. He’s crossed a border again, but he has something very special on his side now, and Ilya is sure that he can grow into this life too.