Archive of Our Own

1.

Shane was 6 and his classroom was far, far too loud. Chairs scraped against the floor, other kids talked over each other, and the too-bright fluorescent lights buzzed in a way that began to slowly build up behind his eyes. He was sitting alone, now, because the other kids had decided long ago, back in kindergarten, that he was no fun to be around when he was overwhelmed like he was now. The rest of the kids didn’t mind the noise or the lights, so why should he? Why was he so different than them?

He didn’t fully notice when his hands started to move, almost on their own, hands shaking and flapping in front of his desk, small, steady movements that made the noise feel a little further away, a little more manageable. He was focused on the feeling, the rhythm of his movements, until a much larger hand closed around his wrists and pressed them into his lap.

“Hands still,” his teacher, Miss Kennedy, said, looming over him. “We don’t want to distract our classmates, do we?”

Shane’s face heated up. He ducked his head and went painfully still as many of his classmates began to snicker. He assumed that she did not require an answer, assumed that this was a “rhetorical question,” a concept that his mom had explained to him recently, but Miss Kennedy said nothing and, when he found the courage to look back up, she was still standing there, watching him expectantly.

“Do we?” she asked again, her hands settling onto her hips, her eyebrow raised.

Shane felt impossibly small as he nodded, wishing desperately that he could just run out the doors and leave this classroom full of strange people behind.

Miss Kennedy sighed, ruffling his hair in what should have been a moment of comfort, but the gesture just overstimulated him even more. “Let’s use our words, please,” she said quietly, but not quietly enough.

The snickering was getting louder, a crushing crescendo of building shame that tasted bitter on his tongue and felt heavy on his chest, an elephant of embarrassment climbing on top of him, crushing him into his seat.

“Yes,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry.”

His teacher smiled and spun back around, her skirt billowing around her as she walked back to the front of the classroom to continue her lesson on clouds and weather patterns. Shane had been so interested before, but now he felt heavy, like he would sink into the floor at any moment. Honestly, he wished he would so that he would no longer have to feel his classmates’ eyes drilling into his back and hear their voices as they whispered to each other about what had happened.

Shane was so strange, so unusual, so odd, so bizarre.

He was not like them.

He was different in a way that he could not understand no matter how hard he tried.

He was painfully still now, concentrating all of his energy on not moving, even when the fluorescent lights somehow began to buzz even louder. He fought to keep his hands on his lap for the rest of Miss Kennedy’s lesson, fingers digging crescents into his palms. The next time they twitched, he forced them back down again, glancing around to make sure no one had seen him slip up.

With all of his attention focused on staying still, staying unobtrusive, staying invisible, he could not hear the lesson as it continued.

He did not learn about clouds that day.

~~~

2.

Shane was 9 and one of his classmates was crying. It was a loud, grating sound, yet the teacher, Mrs. Carter, seemed like she hadn’t noticed, her back turned as she wrote something in chalk on the board. Word problems, Shane noted—she was writing word problems.

“Jack has 84 potatoes and gives the same number of potatoes to each of his 4 friends. Once he has given that amount to all of his friends, he has 4 potatoes left. How many potatoes did he give to each friend?”

Shane didn’t know, and it made him feel like crying too. Why would one person have that many potatoes? Was Jack a farmer? If he was a farmer, why was he giving them away instead of selling them? If he wasn’t a farmer, how and why did he have 84 potatoes? He knew the word problem itself wasn’t what he should be focusing on; he knew that he should focus on the numbers themselves, but his brain was caught on the absurdity of the scenario. He wondered if his classmate was upset about the word problem too.

He watched her for a moment, wracking his brain in an attempt to figure out what he should do. He’d seen people comfort each other before—they didn’t just stand there when someone was crying; he thought that might be some kind of rule. He gathered some bravery he wasn’t sure he actually had and approached the girl. Her name was Sarah and she was new to their school, so she didn’t have many friends. He wondered if she felt lonely like he did. He wondered if he could possibly be her friend, if the other kids hadn’t already told her about how weird he was. Maybe she wouldn’t care about his weirdness. Maybe she was weird too.

“Sarah?” he whispered quietly, so that he wouldn’t disrupt Mrs. Carter. “What’s wrong?”

Sarah looked up, sniffling as she rubbed her sleeve against her red-rimmed eyes. “Isabel was making fun of me,” she said. “She said my voice was funny and it made me sound stupid.”

Shane nodded, understanding what she was saying. Sarah had a noticeable lisp, the ends of many of her words cutting off with a ‘th’ sound that didn’t belong. “You said s’s differently,” he stated, a simple observation of fact. “That’s probably why she noticed. Maybe she wouldn’t be mean anymore if someone taught you how to fix it? Then it wouldn’t sound weird anymore.”

He had been proud of himself for a moment, feeling like he had succeeded, for once, in attempting to comfort someone else whose emotions he himself was not experiencing. But then Sarah began to sob harder, her shoulders shaking as she buried her face in her hands. Shane’s eyes widened, his hand reaching out so he could place it on her shoulder, but Sarah curled away from him as if his hand was flaming hot to the touch. If Mrs. Carter hadn’t noticed Sarah crying before, she did now, her mouth set in a firm line as she approached the two of them.

“Shane, what did you do?” the teacher asked, crouching down to check on Sarah as the little girl continued to cry. “Did you say something to her?”

Shane shook his head frantically, not understanding where this had all gone wrong. “No!” he insisted. “I was just—”

“He was mean to me!” Sarah sobbed, cutting him off. “He said my voice was weird and I had to fix it!”

“What? No I wasn’t!” Shane protested, rocking back and forth on his heels as he grew more and more distressed. “I wasn’t mean! I didn’t mean it like that! I was just trying to help!”

Mrs. Carter fixed him with a stern gaze, her mind already decided on who was at fault. “That’s enough. Go sit in the time-out corner until I call you back up to talk.”

All eyes were on Shane now as he clenched his fists at his sides, curling in on himself. “But I—” he began.

“Shane, stop it,” Mrs. Carter snapped, pulling Sarah into a hug. “You’ve done enough damage already. I’m not going to say it again—go sit in the time-out corner.”

Shane obeyed, this time, chest heaving in an attempt to avoid sobbing and embarrassing himself even further. He sat down in the corner, rocking back and forth in an attempt to push his rising dismay back down. Curious eyes looked back at him. He wanted to escape their gaze, but he couldn’t. He never could.

In his mind, he cycled through responses he could have given that would have been better, but he couldn’t think of any.

He was just trying to be nice. He was just trying to help. He was just trying to fit in.

~~~

3.

Shane was 16, he played for a major junior league hockey team, and his teammates were his friends. At least, he had thought that they were his friends. Now, though, listening to them whispering amongst themselves on the bus on their way back from an away game, he was beginning to doubt that.

He could hear them gathered in the seats behind him, talking in hushed voices. They were probably under the assumption that he couldn’t hear them, but he could. He listened as they talked about their adventures over the weekend, about how they had gone to an arcade together, about how they had gotten pizza afterwards, about how they had hung out at one of the players’ houses to watch movies and sleep over. Shane had never heard about this, had never been invited to it, had never even heard anything vaguely related mentioned even in passing. It sounded like they had all, every last one of them except Shane and the other Asian kid on the team, Tommy, been together for the whole weekend.

At first, he assumed it was a race thing. Usually they forgot to tease him because his last name was American, in contrast with Tommy’s last name, Yamada, but maybe they had decided to change that. Maybe Shane was, in fact, too Asian for them after all. It might have sucked but maybe, now, he could convince Tommy to be his friend—they were on the same playing field, after all.

“I’m glad we didn’t invite Hollander, he’s way too fucking weird.”

All at once, the narrative Shane had constructed shattered like glass, replaced by the same heavy, sinking feeling that he had felt so many times before. It wasn’t a race thing, it seemed, which only left one remaining reason—who he was as a person, at his very core. He was too much for them, or maybe not enough. He had been trying so hard to cover it all up, a careful mask of normalcy slipped over his face, but it must have been cracked.

Another voice spoke up. “Yeah, I don’t know what his issue is. All he ever wants to talk about is hockey. His entire personality is hockey, nothing else.”

Someone laughed. “I wonder if he even has a personality under all that hockey trivia.”

The group dissolved into laughter and Shane stared forward, eyes brimming with tears as he fought not to lose his mind. He didn’t understand. What could he do to make people like him? How much of himself did he have to hide in order to be loved, to be wanted? He was already trying so hard, but nothing worked.

Maybe he was just broken in a way that truly could not be fixed.

~~~

4.

Shane was 21 and he played professional hockey for the Montreal Metros.

For once, he thought he might actually be friends with some of these people. JJ, maybe, and Hayden definitely. He couldn’t really tell, couldn’t pick up on their emotions, but they invited him places and talked to him. They actively chose to spend time around him; that had to mean something.

He was at Hayden’s for dinner that night, JJ was too. They were all sitting around the table and someone mentioned real estate, Shane didn’t really remember why. No one asked, but he was given the opportunity to talk about something he loved, so he did.

He didn’t notice how long he had been talking until he suddenly came back to himself, realizing that everyone else had cleared their plates in the time he had spent rambling about fucking real estate of all things. The room felt different, quieter, like something shifted when he was too caught up in his excitement to notice it. He had really only meant to explain something about land zoning, just the part that mattered, but then he had realized that that concept was connected to something else that he thought was important and necessary context, and then suddenly he was explaining everything, all of the information he had spent the past few years collecting because it made sense in a way that most things, other than hockey, did not.

He looked around and realized that no one was really looking at him. Hayden was playing with one of his daughters, Jackie was slowly collecting plates, and JJ was on his phone. None of them looked even remotely interested, just tolerating him and his rants for some unknown reason. The words caught in his throat. He hadn’t meant to talk that long. He hadn’t meant to make it obvious how deeply he cared about something as silly as real estate.

“I’m sorry,” he said, voice quiet as he tried to avoid eye contact with the three adults at the table.

Hayden looked up, confusion written on his face. “Sorry for what?” he asked, sounding, somehow, genuinely confused.

“For rambling,” Shane said. “I know you guys don’t care about this stuff.”

“Buddy, it’s no big deal,” Hayden said, sitting up straighter. “You care about it, so I care about it.”

Shane gave him a small smile, the kind words not stopping his retreat back into his shell. He knew the truth after all these years—Hayden was just being nice because he felt bad for Shane. He had seen it before and he knew what it looked like when he was exhausting those around him. He didn’t want to be a bother. He didn’t want to be a burden on the people he cared about.

So, he fell silent, washed his dishes, and went home to sit in his empty apartment, wishing he could just, for once, be normal.

~~~

+1.

Shane was 26 and his husband was driving him home from an appointment with a psychiatrist.

He was silent, shrugging off Ilya’s attempts at engaging him. For once, he was still. He stared out the window, trying to come to terms with what he had been told. Ilya reached out and held his hand, but Shane didn’t hold his back. He wasn’t overwhelmed, really, just empty. He had felt so much at the office and now he felt nothing.

There were words for it all, he had learned. Words that explained every aspect of his life, everything about himself that he had ever hated, ever resented, ever wished to rip out of himself with his bare hands.

Autism. That was what was wrong with him. Autism, a disorder that came with so many words to describe so many aspects of himself, a cut and dried case that the doctor told him was rather obvious, yet no one had ever noticed. Not until Ilya had seen a TikTok about undiagnosed autism and got it into his head that Shane was autistic too. Shane had been so, so sure that he wasn’t, sure enough that he had agreed to get tested just to prove Ilya wrong. But, of course, Ilya had been right. His husband, who had known him for longer than he hadn’t, was right in his theory.

“Your husband knows you quite well, Mr. Hollander-Rozanov,” the psychiatrist had said, Shane’s file open in his hands as he pointed out the pieces of Shane’s assessment that had confirmed his diagnosis.

Yes, Ilya knew him better than everyone else. And now, Ilya knew that Shane was unworthy of his love.

It wasn’t that Shane necessarily thought there was anything wrong with being autistic. It was just that he knew himself too, knew how annoying and weird and boring he could be, and this diagnosis meant that those things could not be changed. Ilya deserved so much better.

When he finally opened his mouth to tell Ilya that, his husband pulled over on the side of the road, put the car in park, and sat there for a moment, staring straight ahead with his knuckles turning white from his tight grip on the steering wheel.

“Have I ever told you about the moment I think maybe was when I fell in love with you?” he asked, finally breaking the tense silence.

Shane was confused. “I don’t think so,” he said, unsure what Ilya’s question had to do with what he had said.

“It was before we had sex for the first time,” Ilya said, finally unwrapping his hands from the steering wheel and placing them in his lap. “I tried to sext you, but when I asked you how many times you could cum, you just… answered. You didn’t try to be sexy. I don’t know if you even knew I was trying to sext until I told you.”

“I’m—” Shane started, an apology on his lips, before Ilya cut him off.

“No, let me finish,” he said, reaching across the center console to take Shane’s hand in his. “I loved it. I loved everything about it. You were, you are, different from everyone else. I’d slept with so many people, but you were something different. You fascinated me. I had to know more, and the more I learned, the more of your strange I got to see, the more I fell in love.”

“But—” Shane started, wanting to point out all of the other things he did and would continue to do that could be too much for Ilya.

Ilya waved him off with his free hand. “You folded your clothes whenever you had sex,” he continued. “And when we hooked up next to Scott Hunter’s room, you had to take off your shoes before you kissed me. You’re so different from me in every way and I am obsessed with all of it.”

Shane was silent, staring down at their hands, intertwined with one another.

“You don’t understand sarcasm, so I get to explain jokes again. I get to laugh at them again, this time with you,” Ilya told him. “You never cut recipes in half, so there was extra food left for me later. It made me feel loved. You’re so blunt, I think that is the word?” He waited for Shane to nod before continuing. “I never have to wonder what you are thinking, you will tell me. And I have to explain my thoughts to you or you won’t understand, you can’t read my face, so I can’t keep my thoughts secret either. You made me better communicator.”

Ilya was looking at him now, his gaze so undeniably fond that even Shane could see it. His thumb rubbed circles into Shane’s hand as he spoke, the repetition and soft touch slightly soothing.

“I love it when you tell me things I did not ask about,” Ilya laughed, leaning his head back against the headrest. “I do not care about real estate, but I care about you, and it makes you happy, so it makes me happy too. I will listen as long as you want me to, because I like your voice and I like you.”

“I’m boring, though,” Shane whispered. “I only care about a few things. You say I’m boring all the time.”

“Yes, you are boring. But boring does not mean boring,” Ilya told him. “Boring means safe. Boring means comfort. My husband is boring because he is my safety and my calm. I think, after a while, boring started meaning ‘I love you,’ because I couldn’t say it for so long. Shane, you are my peace. We sat on couch and read, we were still. Your lights were dim, you were quiet and warm. You were peace that I did not have before you. Before you, everything was loud and cold. This thing, this disorder, made you that way. It was because of disorder that you were man I love.”

“It’s just…” Shane started, sniffling as tears began to well up in his eyes. “I’m… strange, I guess. And it’s not something I can change. I thought I could, but I can’t.”

“If I didn’t want strange husband,” Ilya said, “I wouldn’t have married strange man. I knew you were strange from beginning, but I still wanted you. You were oblivious to me flirting and I knew I had to have you. You are strange, that is why I wanted you then and why I love you now. I don’t want you to change.”

Shane was silent for a few moments. “Do you really not mind?” he asked, gripping Ilya’s hand tightly enough that his husband winced. “You’re sure that this is okay?”

Ilya reached over and brushed across Shane’s cheek with the palm of his hand. “You are same as you were yesterday,” he said, smiling. “And the day before, and the day we married, and the day we said we love each other for first time, and every day before that too. Shane, what you are is beautiful.”

“You still love me, then?” Shane asked, so anxious that he needed to make sure nothing would change.

“Yes, moya lyubov,” Ilya assured him. “It is why I love you. When I fell in love with you, I fell in love with every part of you—including autism, because it was always there.”

Shane was silent for a moment, looking out the window of their car at the forest they were parked beside. “Okay,” he said, smiling softly at his husband. “I think… I believe you.”

Ilya smiled back, shifting the car back into drive and pulling back onto the road. “Good,” he said, still holding Shane’s hand. “Is important.”

Shane nodded, then turned his head, looking out at the evening sky as they drove back to their home. Looking up at the sun, he swore that it looked ten times brighter than before.