Chapter Text
Okay. This isn’t about coming out yet – it’s about setting things up so you can.
The ideas you had make sense. A charity to give you a reason to be seen together is a great idea. Even Ilya switching teams makes sense, I suppose.
(Yes, alright - I care about hockey too much. We’ve established this.)
The problem is – that doesn’t undo the story. It doesn’t undo the rivalry. People aren’t going to know what to make of it, and they aren’t going to accept it. And until they do, your problem isn’t solved.
Starting a charity together is too big, too fast — people won’t know where to put it. Start smaller. Start with your teams.
September 2017
The game was over – a narrow but pleasing win to the Metros – and Shane is sitting in a bar beside JJ and Hayden, fidgeting with a beer glass and wishing his Mom hadn’t convinced him this was a good idea.
It’s a nice bar, at least. Shane tries to distract himself by taking it in. Modern, clean lines, but not echoing like a museum. They’re seated in a nook off to one side, giving them the chance to talk in relative privacy, but – and Shane tries not to cringe – there are sightlines enough that if someone wants to take a sneaky photo of Shane out with his buddies, they have every chance.
“Are you actually going to spit it out any time soon?” Hayden asks in exasperation.
“Yeah, Hollander. Tell us what the big favour is. The game is over. We could be partying with the team but we are here with you to meet your secret girlfriend or whatever.”
“We are not meeting my secret girlfriend,” Shane immediately retorts. He can feel the flush already climbing onto his face. He’s only glad Ilya’s not here to hear it; he’d not be able to hold back from at least six terrible jokes. “Don’t – don’t repeat that.” He turns his beer glass in a quarter circle, then figures it’s probably easier just to drink it. Takes a long swallow, sets it down, and says “We’re here to meet Ilya Rozanov.”
Hayden and JJ just stare at him.
“…weird joke, dude,” Hayden says eventually.
“Not a joke,” Shane sighs. “It’s – look, it’s a long story, okay? But my Mom wants us to put the rivalry story to bed, and came up with this whole plan for it. And I want your help. So, if you’re not up for that, you can just go. I won’t hold it against you.”
“Your mom wants the rivalry put to bed,” Hayden repeats slowly, like he thinks he might be dreaming and is examining the words for minute inconsistencies.
Shane tries not to fidget. He really hates this part of the plan. “Yeah. She and – and Rozanov have this weird friendship, ever since that time they got stuck in the elevator…”
“Capitaine, please say Rozanov will not be your new beau-père,” JJ says, half-joking but screwing up his face.
“Fuck! No!” Shane says, almost choking. “JJ, that is so fucking gross.” He can feel his shoulders bunching, and he gives JJ a flat look. “Don’t ever say that again.”
JJ spreads his hands. “What else am I meant to think?” he asks, as if wounded.
“Not that! Jesus. It’s fucking gross, JJ.” JJ doesn’t seem to get it, more pouty than penitent, so Shane lets his anger bubble through for once. “It’s gross to my mom, but even leaving her out of it… they were stuck in an elevator. A tiny box. For two hours. They had to have the door pulled open by the fire service. She was just about having a panic attack. You think Rozanov is the kind of creep who would hit on someone like that?” JJ hesitates, and Shane can feel his glare ratchet up from ‘tense’ to ‘furious’. “Really, JJ?”
“He is always saying shit,” JJ says defensively.
“Yeah? What kind of shit? He ever talk about Jackie, Hayden? He ever call you a slur, JJ?” Shane is fully pissed off now. “He talks a lot of trash and he’s annoying as hell and yes, he’s an asshole, but don’t tell me you wouldn’t trust him with your sister more than you’d trust Dallas Kent. Or Troy Barrett.” Shane’s eyes flatten further. “Or Gil Comeau.”
Hayden recoils at that. “Shane! Buddy! He’s our teammate!”
Shane stuffs down the horrible feeling of disloyalty and brazens it out with a shrug.
“Are you saying Rozanov wouldn’t make a move on my sister?” JJ says, sounding incredulous and oddly insulted.
“I’m saying that if he did, he wouldn’t tell her that his wife doesn’t put out because she’s a frigid bitch who doesn’t understand him and they’re really going to separate this time,” Shane says flatly.
He sees the surprise in JJ and Hayden’s faces, and tries to drown his grimace with another mouthful of beer. Then he breathes in through his nose, out through his mouth, and tries to get a hold of himself. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be running down Comeau.” He shouldn’t, he knows; he’s the Captain, and he’s not there to judge his teammates on their personal lives. It just… rubbed him the wrong way, that Hayden and JJ had both been in the bar last week when Comeau was chatting up some girl with that horrible line, but they’d have thought nothing of getting a beer with him after a game. Rozanov, though – the man who shut down reporters looking for a sexist quip and broke Dallas Kent’s nose after he insulted Yuna – gets a side-eye.
Hayden stares at him. “I thought you hated Rozanov,” he says slowly.
Shane sighs. This is the bit that his mom had seen coming; the bit she said would happen over and over again, the biggest hurdle before all their plans. Bigger than coming out, she’d warned him, and insane as it had seemed at the time he’s now realising that perhaps she’s read it right.
“Hayd, I’ve known him since I was seventeen,” he says, trying for patience. “We played in two junior world cups. We were in the same draft, in the same hotels, working out in the same gyms. We’ve done ad campaigns together, we’ve been in I don’t know how many stupid interviews or award panels. We see each other every year at All Stars. I’ve played on the same line as him at All Stars! Outside of the Metros, there is no single player in the league that I have spent as much time with as Rozanov.”
“But he always fucks with you on the ice!” JJ complains.
“Yes, he’s an asshole, we’ve covered this,” Shane says.
“You love it, Hollander,” says a familiar voice, and there he is; smirking smugly, looking relaxed and arrogant as if he’s in a hockey bar in Boston, fully assured of his welcome, rather than in a city that has a special hatred for him, about to sit down for a drink with two people who look like they’d like to punch him.
Ilya slides into the seat next to Shane without hesitation, and despite everything else – the thrumming tension, his frustration with JJ and Hayden, his desire to check Ilya into boards that don’t exist here for that particular chirp – Shane can’t help but smile at him.
“Uh, hi,” says a second voice, and Shane forces himself to look past Ilya to the significantly more discomposed man half-heartedly following behind. “Rozy dragged me along, said it would be okay…”
Hayden makes a frankly outraged noise under his breath. “Fucking Cliff Marlow, too?” he says, and Marlow looks even more uncomfortable.
“Sit, Marly,” Ilya orders.
Shane glares at Hayden and JJ, gives Marlow a small smile, and says “Yeah, of course, I told Rozanov he should bring whoever. As long as everyone can play nice and we don’t end up having a bar fight.”
“No promises,” mutters Hayden, staring balefully as Marlow sits.
“I really am sorry about the hit,” Marlow says to Shane directly. “I was glad to see you back on the ice today.”
“Rozanov passed on your apologies,” Shane says easily. “It’s fine. It’s the game. We all get our bell rung eventually, right?”
Under the table, Ilya slides his foot so it’s touching Shane’s. Shane moves half an inch closer to him, angles his foot so the whole length of it is pressed to Ilya’s.
There is a strained silence, while JJ and Hayden glare suspiciously at Rozanov and Marlow, Marlow mostly stares at his beer, and Ilya just grins as if he personally finds the awkwardness to be hilarious.
“This was such a bad idea,” Shane mutters. The tension at the table is coming from too many directions, now, and he feels it like an itch over his skin. Even the pressure of Ilya’s foot against his isn’t enough to counteract it.
“All Yuna’s ideas are good ideas,” Ilya contradicts him immediately. “You are just very bad at this.”
Shane gladly focuses on glaring at him. “Suck-up,” he retorts.
He shrugs. “Not my fault I am favourite son,” he says innocently.
“Fuck off.”
Ilya smirks again. “Like I said, Hollander, you are bad at this. I just arrived. The point is we all stay for a while, yes? We are all good friends who have a good time together.” Like an asshole, he raises his glass and holds it theatrically up. “To friendship!” he says. No one responds, and he pointedly continues to hold his glass. “No, I know how this goes. We all tap glasses now.”
“I will murder you,” Shane tells him between gritted teeth, and lifts his own glass to match. Marlow obligingly follows along, and Shane glares at JJ and Hayden until they reluctantly do the same. They clink the glasses together and drink.
“I don’t get it, Capitaine,” JJ complains. “He is still fucking with you, why are you trying to help his image?”
Shane can feel a headache starting to build from all the tension in his jaw. He closes his eyes for a moment in a bid for patience. Ilya moves so their knees are nudging together.
“He fucks with us, too,” Marlow says resignedly. “I think it’s some kind of birth defect. He opens his mouth and it just comes out.”
“So you’re saying Shane isn’t special?” Hayden asks.
“Hollander is very special,” Ilya objects, and Shane tries to brace himself. “He is more fun to fuck with then the Raiders.” Shane can’t stop himself glaring at Ilya, wondering exactly how hard he’s going to push it and trying to communicate wordlessly exactly how much revenge he is willing to exact. “Puffs up like angry kitten when I chirp at him.”
It isn’t what Shane was expecting – he was steeling himself for some innuendo that would fill him with a mix of fury, arousal, and anxious dread. Instead he’s caught by surprise, flushing and off-balance. “I do not,” he retorts.
“Very cute,” Ilya assures him.
“Oh, fuck you, Rozanov!” Shane replies.
“No, thank you. Am meeting Jane later,” he says with a grin.
Shane shuts up tensely at that, though Marlow lets out a little guffaw. “Jane is Rozy’s Montreal girl,” Marlow explains easily as a server comes, depositing on the table various fries and small plates of snacks. Ilya waves them all to eat; Marlow takes a fry without hesitation, though JJ and Hayden look profoundly suspicious. “I can tell he’s serious about the weird PR stunt because otherwise he’d have ditched this to go hook up with her.”
“Sounds familiar,” Hayden mutters, and Shane feels a cold line down his back even as his shoulders tense further. He leans away from Ilya, into Hayden and JJ’s space.
“You will stop right there if you don’t want a full practise of bag skates tomorrow,” he mutters direly.
Ilya reaches over and casually digs a finger into his ribs. “Hollander, your teammates think I am trying to poison them,” he complains. “Eat something, so they know that I’m not trying to take out thirteenth and fifteenth best Metro.”
Shane hesitates; Ilya casually rearranges the snacks on the table so the small plates of olives and roast vegetable pieces are closer to him, the fries further away. Ilya has a point about the worry about poisoning, he reasons, and accepts an olive.
“Happy?” he asks sarcastically. Ilya just grins at him.
Hayden hesitantly reaches out and takes a fry, then after eating it seems to surrender, and take another. JJ isn’t far behind him, though he mutters a complaint about Ilya not having ordered the charcuterie that this bar apparently is known for.
Shane’s takes another mouthful of his beer. His tension is starting to ebb, though its absence doesn’t help his headache any. JJ’s flagged down the server, and Ilya tacks on an order for ginger ale on top of the request for some kind of fancy selection of cheese and cured meats that JJ is giving.
“What is the PR stunt, anyway?” Hayden asked. “All we got out of Shane was that his mom doesn’t like the rivalry.”
Ilya spreads his hands like a showman. “Is true,” he says. “Yuna is very concerned for me. I am like long-lost child of her heart. She wants to have family Christmas with matching ugly sweaters. But rivalry gets in the way of her happy family dreams.” He looks at Shane, and calculatingly adds, “Alas.”
Marlow eats more of the bar snacks, looking unperturbed. Hayden and JJ look at Ilya like he’s crazy, then swivel to look at Shane.
“Horrifyingly, that’s more or less true,” Shane says with a sigh, shoving away his instinctive, rueful warmth at the image of it. “The ‘alas’ was over the top, though.” He narrows his eyes at Ilya. “As was the Christmas sweater thing. Don’t put that idea in her head.”
“Was David’s idea,” Ilya says, and Shane has to bite back a groan.
He can see JJ and Hayden looking somewhere between baffled, stunned, and freaked out, so he tries to salvage the situation. “Ignore him. I know it’s hard, but try. Uh, mostly Mom wants to do a bunch of brand deals with the two of us. She’s been talking with Rolex and stuff. They like the ‘competitive edge’ but want to know that their two brand ambassadors aren’t going to strangle each other.” Shane shoots Ilya a dark look. “Though I still might.”
“You love me,” says Ilya cheerfully, and Shane rolls his eyes.
“Yeah, yeah, sure. I love you,” he replies sarcastically. Under the table, Ilya’s leg moves to press against his own, and his sarcastic smile softens into something warmer.
It goes… alright. They share the snacks between them. Everyone gets another beer, apart from Shane who with relief drinks the ginger ale Ilya ordered for him, giving Ilya a smile as he does. Marlow, after a moment, leads them into familiar conversations – complaining amiably about hotels and roadtrips, talking about the pre-season, recent games, new rookies who don’t know a stick from a puck.
Shane suspects – strongly – that JJ and Hayden would quite like to ambush him and interrogate him about Ilya, but he can still feel the headache lurking at the base of his skull. So he finishes his ginger ale, checks his watch, and says to them as calmly as he can, “Thank for coming out and doing me a solid, but I’m beat, I’m going to call a car.”
“Come on, Capitaine. Don’t go yet. Let’s lose the Raiders and have another drink,” JJ suggests, with an expansive gesture at Shane and Hayden.
“If you think I’m going to take responsibility when Jackie yells at him for being late home, you’re wrong,” Shane tells them, shaking his head. “If you’re having another drink, I’m claiming ignorance.” He taps on his phone, calling a ride, and nods to Marlow. “It was good to spend time with you.”
Marlow gives him a grin back, markedly more relaxed than he was at the start. “Especially without the paramedics getting involved, huh?”
“As long as you don’t undo all my hard work by starting a brawl,” Shane cautions them.
Ilya gives a smirk. “Boring, Hollander,” he says. “Leaving early and leaving rules.”
“I thought you had somewhere you’re meant to be?” Shane challenges him.
“Meeting my Jane, yes,” Ilya agrees. He smiles, toying with his phone. “She will be impatient if I’m late. But sometimes that can be fun, too.”
Cliff guffaws again, and Shane rolls his eyes. “Whatever.” He hopes Ilya doesn’t mean it; thinks he doesn’t. But he can’t ask here, in any case, and his hovering hesitation will start to look strange soon. He gathers himself, checks the timing of his ride.
“Ah, cap, you’ve already kept her waiting,” says Cliff easily. “Let’s call a car, and I’ll drop you at Jane’s on the way back to the hotel.”
Ilya shakes his head. “You think you are smart guy, huh? I will call car, I will drop you at hotel on my way to Jane.”
Cliff drains the last mouthful of his beer. “It was good to meet the two of you,” he says earnestly to JJ and Hayden. “We should do it again sometime. I think we probably have more in common than we guessed.”
“Yeah, maybe,” says Hayden uncertainly. “We’ll, uh, see you at practise, Shane.”
Shane is just grateful to make his escape without any major carnage behind him.
Shane has changed into sweats, turned the lights to dim, taken Tylenol, done some simple yoga stretches, and given up and slumped onto the couch with his face pressed into one of his throw pillows by the time the door opens and he hears Ilya’s familiar footsteps. He doesn’t call out, trusting Ilya to find him, and instead he just listens for the steps that wend their way through the condo, hesitate, and then make their way to his side.
Ilya’s weight settles next to him, and then Ilya’s hands are warm and strong on the back of his neck, his thumbs rubbing soothing lines and circles over the base of his skull, the hinge of his jaw, his fingers fanning out under Shane’s collar to stroke the tight muscles of his shoulders. Shane lets out a low groan of relief, feeling the relaxation ease down his spine from Ilya’s presence as much as his touch.
“Bad?” Ilya murmurs.
“Mmph,” Shane says, having to turn to escape the pillow before he can answer. “Not bad. Already fading.” It’s not a lie; and when Ilya’s lips join his hands on Shane’s neck, the shivers that chase each other down his skin make it even more true. Shane sighs in pleasure and relief.
“I have kissed it better?” Ilya asks. Shane can hear the smile in his voice. “I can do more, if you are hurting from the game.”
“Pff,” Shane says, still half into his pillow. “The game? It was nothing. Easy. Hey!” Ilya swats him on the buttock, and he yelps a protest. “Sore loser.”
“Canada’s golden boy,” Ilya says. “Winner of the Lady Byng. If only everyone knew the truth. You are secret asshole.” Shane smiles and trusts Ilya with his weight as Ilya’s arms come around him, pulling him into his lap, into a kiss.
“I am not a secret asshole,” he murmurs after, cuddling close.
“This is true. Your asshole is no secret to me,” Ilya says easily, automatically pinning Shane’s arms at his sides when Shane tries half-heartedly to elbow him, and kissing him again. “We are old friends.” He gives Shane’s ass a friendly pat, as if to demonstrate this. “You have not eaten since game? Just protein shake and then three olives in the bar? I bet you have boring healthy meals in fridge, yes?”
Ilya stands up holding Shane – a casual display of strength that Shane finds more than a little distracting. “I had more than three olives,” he protests automatically, even as he reluctantly tolerates Ilya carrying him into the kitchen and depositing him on a stool at the breakfast bar.
“Four olives, then,” Ilya says, rummaging through the fridge. “Have a boring healthy meal with me, Hollander, then I will suck your cock very nicely as a reward for being brave and having a beer with me in public.”
“Fuck off,” Shane says automatically. “No, not that one, the quinoa,” he says as Ilya holds up options. “What do I get as my reward for winning, then?”
Ilya puts their choices in the microwave to warm up, pours them each a glass of water, and comes over to kiss him lingeringly. “Whatever you want, moy lyubimyy.”
Shane slumps a bit against him as he tries to activate his general state of mild horniness – now edging back up into moderate horniness as Ilya slips a hand under his shirt and kisses lightly over his jaw - into some kind of plan, but hits the roadblock of cognitive strain that’s been with him all evening. Ilya takes his chin, tilts his gaze up, and Shane smiles at him ruefully. “Coming up blank,” he admits.
Ilya’s gaze softens. “You just want to sleep?” he checks.
In answer, Shane parts his knees, and draws Ilya between his thighs, wrapping his legs around him and rocking against him as he kisses him. “Definitely not,” he says.
“You want me to decide for you?” Ilya asks, and Shane sighs a little with pleasure at the idea of it. Ilya kisses him one last time before disentangling them to get their food from the chiming microwave. “I will choose a very good reward for you.”