Rating:

Not Rated

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Breeding Kink, Abortion, Miscarriage, ("but it's whatever" - shane), no AI fuck AI christ

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-06-24 Updated: 2026-09-21 Words: 35,498 Chapters: 3/4

do a bad thing twice

Summary

Shane realized the issue later, seeing the condom in the bathroom trash (considerate). How it didn't have the right tip for fucking an omega. Fuck, he thought, but calmly. He was still feeling soft and loose, like something in him had been tenderized. Anyway, he knew exactly what he needed to do.

Shane loves when problems have actionable solutions.

Fund shanebortions, not war.

Notes

- I see your shanebortion and raise you: shanebortions

- Title from CRJ's Bad Thing Twice

- Happy belated father's day, sickos

Chapter 1: 2013 - 2016

2013

The first time, it doesn't even count.

Rozanov fucks Shane hard and wet and good, with what neither of them realizes is the wrong kind of condom. Whoops.

Guys like Shane, omega ones - or, think of it a different way: omegas like Shane, male ones - are vanishingly rare. He can't actually be surprised that even Rozanov, at twenty two years old, hadn't had much experience with male omegas. Didn't yet know everything he needed to about fucking them.

—

The flipped gene is recessive. Kind of. Shane doesn't really get genetics.

In grade four, they made a lot of sense: big R and little r, controlling whether you get angular peas vs. round, or brown eyes vs. hazel, or regular (read: beta or omega) women vs. alpha women.

By grade six, it seemed more complicated, with chromosomal jumping and spontaneous mutation clouding the waters. And those complications pile up with every DNA unit in science class, until grade nine, when you stop going to real school and start playing hockey most hours of the day.

Shane probably ended up as a male omega - a flipper - because his mom is a female alpha. His dad's a beta.

And god, wasn't it so much fun when teachers sunnily pointed out Shane as a teachable example. Grade six: Shane here's probably going to be a beta because of his dad, and he'll be a carrier for the flipped gene because of his mom! Grade nine: Shane here has the flipped gene, which means there must be a relative on his father's side who also carried the flipped gene.

Imagine, if you will - Shane, age fourteen, hardening his face while his teacher calmly invited his classmates to speculate on how he turned out this way; knowing that, as long as he stayed boring and good at sports - and made an appropriately grossed out face at his teacher saying he technically carries both sperm and eggs, just like female alphas do - he was mostly seen as basically a beta who happened to smell a little like an omega and got extra horny for twenty four hours once a year.

A few years after Shane presented, testing at birth became normal and affordable. Shane doesn't know if it's better or worse for kids now, knowing from the start. For him, it seems like it would have been worse - knowing he'd always be set slightly apart, and that there was nothing he could do about it.

Somewhere deep in his dad's family history, there could have been another person like Shane and his mom. He hopes things were okay for them.

Unless, of course, Shane just came out with one of those pesky, irrepressible mutations that happen all on their own.

—

I cannot use latex, Rozanov said apologetically, that first time, when Shane went to open his nightstand. Is okay, though, I brought my own. Can go get things, too.

No, that works, Shane assured him. Like with many things that night, Shane was a little touched, a little wondering, at the care Rozanov was showing him. How tentative he sounded, and how he'd evidently forgotten that it was 2013, they were rich, and last minute latex-free condoms were surely what delivery apps were invented for.

Shane, for his part, was embarrassed that he didn't ask if Rozanov was allergic beforehand - he's usually great at thinking up ways that things could go wrong - and that Shane didn't have the latex-free kind on hand. Wondered if that made it really obvious that he doesn't fuck girls that much.

In hindsight, maybe Shane had built Rozanov up in his head. Made him into a little bit of a sex god, someone who should know everything already.

The fact that you need to use omega condoms to fuck omega men is like, way beyond sex ed pop quiz material. A gotcha, not a given.

Even the box of omega condoms has a linear half-silhouette of a woman on it. There's the cliché porn thing about getting into bed with an omega (a girl, obviously), realizing you're out of omega condoms, and fucking her ass, instead. Girls can't get pregnant that route, obviously.

Okay, sure, most people know that omega men can get pregnant that way. So you have to use something.

But it's not omega pussy. If you wouldn't waste an omega condom - twice the cost of a regular one, for no reason Shane's figured out - on a girl's asshole, surely you don't need to waste one on a guy's, right?

—

During their intermittent summer sexting, Rozanov once said that he was enjoying more casual sex than he'd ever had in Moscow before.

(Well - he said it differently. You can imagine. But that was the gist.)

Shane gathered that getting condoms at all was practically impossible for Rozanov when he was a teenager in Russia, so. There's no way they got around to explaining which condoms to use on a male omega's asshole in Russian sex ed.

—

After Rozanov ate Shane out, after he'd fingered him long enough for Shane to get bitchy, Rozanov crinkled a condom and said just the normal type is fine, right?

And Shane - distracted to all hell - was like, yeah, of course, because the pre-lubed ones were definitely (almost embarrassingly) not necessary, and why would he give a shit about it being ribbed, or whatever?

—

Shane realized the issue later, seeing the condom in the bathroom trash (considerate), how it didn't have the right tip for fucking an omega. Fuck, he thought, but calmly. He was still feeling soft and loose, like something in him had been tenderized. Anyway, he knew exactly what he needed to do.

Shane loves when problems have actionable solutions.

By this point, it was late, like late late. Delivery apps were going to take at least an hour. He just went and picked up levomegastrel himself. Two packs, enough to add up to the tweaked dose for male omegas. (They did have Levomegastrel For Men next to the regular kind on the shelf. For obvious reasons, Shane preferred to have the normal one, the one girls take, on his card statement.) He was still in Montreal, so getting it was awkward, but easy.

He took it immediately. Official descriptions of levomegastrel side effects are so wide-ranging they're useless. Shane poked through the male omega corners of the internet (disjointed, often quiet spaces) and found anecdotes, mostly about nausea and fatigue.

So maybe he should have skipped optional skate, claimed a last-minute business meeting. But that felt conspicuous. Better to puke on the ice like a man, then get sent home, than to look like a shirker.

Anyway, turned out he was worried for nothing. Literally, nothing. He was fine. No spotting, no fatigue, no stomach cramps. He was just mildly relieved - good thing I caught that before it became an issue - and ready to put it behind him. Psyched for the motherfucking Olympics.

That's all it should have been. It was stupid on both of their parts, but it was easily fixed, and it was an honest mistake.

That time, at least.

2014

So at the NHL awards. In the hotel room. On the bed. After Shane begs. When Rozanov turns him around -

Shane says, "Oh, um, I brought - you need to use one of mine, sorry."

Talking about condoms doesn't fit with the mean, torrid atmosphere in the room, but it would be irresponsible not to say it, and Shane (tongue still sore from deep-throating his competition) is nothing if not responsible.

"They have latex?" Rozanov asks, sounding kind of pissy.

"No, it's - they're latex-free, it's fine, just do it," Shane says. "They're -" he gestures to his jacket, the inside pocket.

Rozanov retrieves them. Looks down at his hand. "These are omega condoms, Hollander."

"Yeah, I'm an omega, is that fucking news to you somehow?" Their script from the show earlier that night played into it, even: give me your number, so I can send a copy to the best omega in the league.

"We did not use one before," Rozanov says.

"Uh huh," Shane says, not getting why Rozanov isn't pushing his shoulders down onto the bed again.

"Why?"

"What?"

"If we need to use omega condom now, why did we not do that before?" Rozanov asks. Patient, dangerous.

"Well, I thought we used one."

"We did not."

"Yeah, I know that. I figured it out later, so I brought the right ones this time. Like I said, they're latex-free. It should be fine."

"You figured it out. Later." Rozanov's back behind Shane; his hand is trailing from the base of Shane's spine to the nape of his neck.

"Nn," Shane says.

"Hollander," Rozanov says, giving Shane a little shake.

"Nn," Shane says again, but louder this time. He wants his tongue to loll out of his mouth like a dog's, to show how the squeeze and shuffle quells everything aggressive in him.

"How did you figure it out, Hollander."

Shane makes a rough sound meant to approximate I don't know and who fucking cares and put it in.

Rozanov sighs. Pulls Shane up by the shoulders. "Tell me, Hollander," he says into Shane's ear. "How. Did you. Find out."

His cock is so close to Shane's ass and way, way too far away from Shane's insides. "I don't know," Shane says. "I don't - I saw it in the trash?"

Rozanov gusts out a sigh Shane hadn't realized he was holding. Drops Shane back down onto the bed. "So was not - because something happened."

"What?"

"Did I plow your virgin ass and leave you pregnant, Hollander, fuck, is not that fucking hard."

"Oh. Oh, uh," Shane says. "No. I don't think. Can you please fucking -"

"You don't think?"

"I took the fucking pill, I don't know, maybe." Pissy at the lack of dick in his not-totally-virgin ass, he adds, "Is this a Russian thing? Do you have a fucking problem?" He didn't absorb a ton of the local culture in Sochi, but he grasped that the politics there were conservative and trending worse, not just with gay people but all sorts of shit; still, he'd have thought, with Rozanov being so willing to stick it in Shane right up until this conversation, that Rozanov would see past that stuff.

A pause. "No," Rozanov says. "No, I do not have problem. And I will use this." He holds up the condom. "Now shut up," he adds, pushing Shane's face mostly into the pillow.

Shane, finally feeling wanted and valued, complies.

—

"Do you like it there?" Shane asks after. "Is it safe?"

"Does not matter," Rozanov says brusquely. "It is home." Then, abrupt, pulling his phone off of the nightstand: "What money app do you use?"

"Why?"

"So I can send you money for fucking morning after pill."

He used the condom - Shane saw it - so this is about last year. "We're millionaires," Shane says blankly.

"You think I am the piece of shit type of alpha who makes someone buy their own Plan B?"

"Actual millionaires," Shane says. "Multi-millionaires. Also, levomegastrel costs, like, nothing in Canada."

Maybe that's not the case in America, where the cost of medicine seems to be determined by one of those old bingo ball spinning things. Christ, that place is a mess. Rozanov should really consider getting out of there at some point.

Like it pains him, Rozanov says, "Please give me your information, Hollander."

Shane does, because whatever, Rozanov can afford it, too. It literally doesn't matter. Except, apparently, to Rozanov's bullshit alpha male pride.

"Thank you," Rozanov says, only after Shane's phone lights up with the notification.

"You're welcome?" Shane asks.

Rozanov sighs heavily. Scrubs a hand down his face. "You could have been…"

"Yeah, but I took care of it," Shane says. "It's all good." Restrains himself from adding no secret babies here. That's the kind of thing you only say if there are, impossibly, secret babies hiding around someone.

"Should not have had to," Rozanov says. "I am sorry."

Formal, stilted alpha courtesy isn't really what Shane came here for tonight.

"I can handle myself," he says. "I do it all the time."

He means it like how he does everything for himself, has staked his whole career on being different from your average omega. Functionally a male beta, who gets treated roughly the same as everyone else, except for when people are making an issue out of it. Or saying things like Hollander's got that touch of intuition as a player that takes him the extra mile, like Shane's just passively receiving messages from the universe's fucking - womanly omega oversoul, instead of studying other players like it's his job. Which it is.

Rozanov, understandably, does not read Shane's mind on this front. "You do this all the time. Go get yourself Plan B. After some alpha girl runs out on you."

"No," Shane says. Alpha male, just the once, see: exhibit A. Alpha girl, not ever.

Technically, alpha women can get omega men pregnant. During sex where the omega man is fucking them, even. Probably, this is why the male dose of levomegastrel is as widely available as it is.

(Shane did his best to block out the part of sex ed where they talked about the alpha girl's pussy catching the male omega's cock, rapidly fertilizing an egg, and sending it back into the omega through, well, the only point of connection in question. It's fine and heterosexual that Shane hated hearing about it, because so did all the normal beta and alpha guys in his class, and pretty much all the girls, too, as far as he could tell. Gross, they all said. Sick. Just a few sneaking glances at Shane.

Shane really, truly would not want to be pregnant, so it doesn't feel weird that everyone thought it was an ugly kind of thing to have to hear about.)

"You know I haven't -" Shane starts. Stops himself. Of course Rozanov doesn't know, but they'd been on the same page about Shane being brand new to that kind of sex, about Shane keeping away from alphas in general.

Shane's expected to land on an omega or a beta - a woman, it goes without saying - which is why it's possible for Shane to buy omega condoms without expiring of shame: he's going to use them to fuck some girl, of course.

"You haven't," Rozanov repeats. "So it is only me, who is the asshole."

"It was fine," Shane says. "I realized right away. I took it the same night. Nothing happened."

There's a longer silence.

"It could have, though," Rozanov says.

"Yeah, but it didn't. Try harder next time, I guess."

"Try harder," Rozanov repeats. He scoffs. "I would not have to try."

"Let's not find out," Shane says.

And then they sit there in silence.

For, like. A while.

Shane knows what he's thinking about.

He wants to know what Rozanov's thinking about.

If it's the same thing Shane's thinking about.

Rozanov lights up a cigarette. He knows Shane doesn't like kissing him when he tastes like smoke, which is a pretty clear signal that he doesn't give a fuck about doing that tonight.

Shane, dismayed, realizes it's a precursor to a verbal cue to leave. Rozanov is so done with Shane and Shane's omega touchy-feely conversation bullshit that he's literally smoking Shane out of the room.

Ouch, but fair; that's not what this is, and Shane still got probably the hottest sex of his life to date out of it.

(Is it? The hottest? Last time with Rozanov was… your first's not supposed to be good. Not like it was Shane's first first, but it felt… he'd been nervous and eager and it shouldn't have been good but it was, it was. Shane really couldn't say which was better. Not like he's got anyone to talk to about it, anyway.)

"I have early…" Rozanov says. Trails off before the last, final word, flight.

Shane nods. "I'll - yeah."

Rozanov says abruptly, "Would you want."

"Want what."

"What you said earlier. Want me to -"

"To knock me up?" Shane finishes for him.

"Try, you said."

"To try to knock me up," Shane says, staring at him.

"Is - never mind," Rozanov says. "That is, no, forget it."

"We used the right condom," Shane says. "So you couldn't have." They're really 100% effective if used correctly; that part of sex ed stuck.

"We could do again," Rozanov says, a touch too quickly.

"We could fuck bare," Shane repeats. "So you could knock me up. Just in time for summer conditioning. That's your suggestion." He sounds right: dry and pissed and a little bit incredulous.

There's a flitter in his stomach, if not a flutter. Just at the thought of it. Just the idea.

Rozanov opens and closes his mouth. Visibly searches for words. Comes up empty. "Sorry," he says again, smaller. Realer.

Shane laughs. He can't quite believe it. "What, you want to see me with a fucking baby?" With babies, Shane is awkward and a little scared. He likes them. Holding them. Talking to and playing with them. But he doesn't want to change them, or feed them. If they cry and can't be soothed, it stresses him out more than he thinks it's supposed to: he's sympathetic but also, uncharitably, annoyed. He always looks around for their parents, feeling like he's a child seeking out an adult.

Maybe one day, he tries to think to himself, sometimes, past the doubt and the apathy. Maybe. His parents would like it.

Even though his body acts gayer than the average male omega's does, he can still find a girl. A nice, understanding beta or omega. She would be the one to do the scariest part, of course. That would be… okay. Would be better, at least.

"I would not. Is not - would not," Rozanov says softly, tripping over himself. "I know. I know."

It's nice how abashed he looks, recognizing that Shane's not about that, and that he sounds crazy. Despite the fact that Shane does, it's increasingly clear, fucking love taking it up the ass.

Shane sighs. "It's okay. I thought about it, too."

Rozanov sneaks a glance at him. Hums.

"Like. Wondered if you could."

"If I could…" Rozanov says, because he is, actually, an asshole.

"Get me bred," Shane says blandly. He knows how to get a guy back.

Rozanov's mouth does something wobbly. Antsy. "I could," he says. So firm, with zero evidence to back it up. "I would."

"You think so," Shane says.

"Yes, Hollander." He takes a drag, seeming to find his place again. "Would not be hard."

"It actually might be," Shane says. "I don't know if you know this, but I'm a professional athlete." It's less likely for someone like him, the same way it's less likely for someone with an eating disorder. The body needs raw material to work with. Shane's using most of his already.

Rozanov shrugs.

There's a precipice.

Away from the cliff, a safe plateau: sounds like your flight is early tomorrow? Have a safe trip, I'm headed out.

Over the edge, something insane: "So what, like a bet? We fuck again, see if you can breed me?"

Rozanov's hips move minutely, Shane's certain.

"If you want," Rozanov says, careless. Taking one last hit of his cigarette and blowing smoke away from Shane before stubbing it out, barely smoked.

"What do I get if I win?"

Rozanov says, "You will think of something."

"So you agree I'll win."

"We will see." Rozanov leans in close. In forty, fifty years, if life after hockey really exists, it's possible Shane will hear about Rozanov dying of lung cancer and feel very guilty for this moment, when the not-yet-stale smoke scent hit Shane's brain and he thought fuck, that's kind of sexy, right before he leaned in and asked, "So you gonna do it, or what?"

—

Shane - he doesn't look like the type of male omega who gets wet. He doesn't think he's met many; consensus is you'd know if you did. That the male omegas who look and act like betas, guys like Shane, really are basically betas. Just ones with extra plumbing it's best to forget about. Who, if not on suppressors, spend a day once a year jerking it. Manfully. Not touching their very dry asses at all.

Of course, despite appearances, Shane does get wet.

Maybe all male omegas do, and most of them are just lying about it. Shane doesn't think so, though. He's left room in his infrequent conversations with other male omegas, once or twice. Space for someone else to leave room, too. For them to mutually agree, out of earshot of other guys, it's just not that big a deal, right?

But the other guy's always closed the gap with something like it's weird to think some guys turn out like that, right? And Shane says yeah, and they move on.

So Shane's just unusual in like, every possible way, apparently. Male omega. Likes fucking guys. He wants to pretend it's just his body wanting something inside it, genetically confused and hungering after a fabled, decently-hung female alpha (who's also into putting it in guys, which Shane suspects is even less common), but it's really, really not. He'd even like to believe that it's just Rozanov, but Shane, at thirteen, took his first heat in grim, quiet bliss, slicking up for the first time halfway through it, thinking about Scott Hunter and an older boy on the soccer team. He hadn't even met Rozanov yet.

—

It's faster, the second time they fuck that night. Rozanov doesn't give him any of the drive-him-out-of-his-mind lead-up, but it doesn't matter. Shane's so wet from the idea of going bare that he can hear it when they fuck, the sound sloppy and a little gross. Or maybe it sounds like that because there's no condom. Or because it's a second round, so he's looser. Or because Rozanov feels it more - Shane is "Oh, god, Hollander" again.

Rozanov doesn't knot Shane, but it feels like he could. Shane doesn't even know what that feels like, he just feels it. That his back is at this steep angle that he might regret tomorrow but feels perfectly natural, completely correct, right now; he has to make himself into this shape to take Rozanov's cock all the way, take it perfect, take it right.

He doesn't notice if Rozanov gives him a reacharound or not. If he does, that's a first, too. It's maybe a sign of how stupid Shane is for this already that he feels smug about not getting one. Rozanov doesn't have to work to get Shane there. He knows Shane's good for it.

Shane does notice that right after Rozanov comes - following Shane, which is how it went that first time, but now Shane wonders if he's doing it on purpose to get it to take - Rozanov grabs Shane at the nape of his neck and cranes his head to the side for a deep, sloppy, fairly uncomfortable kiss.

Rozanov's inside him still, so. No hiding that Shane likes it.

—

Rozanov seems to go a little alpha-dumbbrained after. Insists on putting three pillows under Shane's hips and keeping him like that for a good twenty minutes.

"Does this even work?"

"Obviously, yes," Rozanov says, though there's no way he knows that, has to be working off of, like, old wives' tales, if not pure, idiotic urges.

Shane wishes he didn't like, quite so much, the idea of Rozanov having urges about him.

—

Three weeks later, Rozanov texts Shane, ?

Not yet, Shane sends back.

Six days later, Shane has the irritating pleasure of sending Rozanov, You win.

—

Most of Shane's healthcare routes through the team.

Over a one-on-one lunch right before Shane started playing MLH, his agent passed him some numbers. "Your manager would do this, in a lot of cases," she said. "In yours…" she shrugged. An acknowledgement that Shane's mom would probably not connect him with a guy who, in one of the totally hypothetical scenarios she tossed out there, makes embarrassing photographs disappear.

Shane, nineteen and flustered, said he didn't think he'd use any of them. She told him she'd sleep better if he kept it in mind anyway.

And look at that - turns out Shane did need the information of a heftily priced, highly discreet on-demand NP who would come to his condo in Montreal, prescribe him abortion meds, and vacate the premises without personal comment.

On his way out the door, the NP mentions mildly, "We have telehealth now, if it's more convenient to do this online next time."

Shane says, "Good to know," instead of there won't be a next time. After all, he was confident there wouldn't be a first time, either.

—

Shane reads the mifegymiso-mega box. Then he goes on the website to learn more. See, Shane's being so responsible about his planned, unwanted pregnancy.

The drug basically works, apparently, by kicking in the body's pre-heat purge.

There's this longstanding porn trope about omegas unexpectedly going into heat. The kind of tired joke guys tell over golf, if they momentarily forget about Shane.

In real life, you can't go into heat if you don't shed some stuff first, and the shedding is pretty fucking noticeable across the board: women say it's different from a period, and men, well. For male omegas, your uterine lining sticks around for about a year, if you're not on suppressors. Your body builds the new one underneath it. Then, just before heat, it sheds the old one all at once via the only route it has, leaving the new one in its place.

It would be pretty hard to miss the sensation of your dissolved uterine lining exiting your asshole in one go.

(The first time Shane heard the term "male uterine acidity" was in grade nine health education. As if on cue, everyone turned to look at Shane. If he never hears it again, it'll be too soon.)

—

Taking mifegymiso-mega feels a little worse than taking the levomegastrel, but on the plus side, Shane doesn't have to negotiate it around any games.

An hour after Shane takes the second pill, he gets this weird feeling in his lower abdomen. This kind of cramp has been theoretical to him up to this point - his now-suppressed pre-heat shed was a short, hot burn, whereas this is cold. Thick. Dull. He looks around online and finds stuff about doing yoga for them; he can't say it helps with the pain, but it takes his mind off of it.

He starts shedding it soon after. (Long enough time to get in a nice vinyasa.) It's different from the pre-heat shed, which makes sense, since he's not at peak - ugh - uterine acidity.

With mifegymiso-mega, omega men don't, like, bleed bleed a ton. They mostly just get tarry stool for a day or so. Weird and embarrassing, but easy to hide. Like many things about Shane.

For about a day, he's fatigued. He might have a tiny fever, too. No big. Hockey teaches you to push past more than that. He lets his usual mid-day nap run twice as long for two days in a row, a welcome offseason luxury that makes up the difference.

In deference to the direction don't do hard exercise for several days, he only hits his home gym for three hours that day and the day after. Plus yoga. Since it's for the cramps, it probably doesn't count.

—

Rozanov sends Shane the cost of his meds. Again, really unnecessary, but apparently important to Rozanov, and it's not like Shane cares what Rozanov does.

—

When it's over - Rozanov had asked Shane to let him know, which Shane figured was reasonable, since he'd be biting off his own hands with anxiety if he got some girl on another continent pregnant and had to just wait and see if she actually took the stuff - Rozanov also sends a fucking fruit basket to Shane's condo.

This is inexplicable, and Rozanov will not explain himself. Just says I hope you like and is it good?

It is, yes, good. Or much better than: all berries, red and purple-blue, organic, at the height of their seasons. Strawberries and blueberries on top, saskatoon berries and honeyberries underneath. Just four perfect baskets, the fruit tiny and unbelievably fragrant. Not too much for Shane to eat by himself. (At least in the offseason, when he's trying to put weight back on, and doing enough cardio to welcome the fructose.)

Nestled at the bottom of the crate, there's also a small jar of rhubarb jam, pink and smooth and opaque. Shane dabs at it with dubious curiosity, then guiltily eats a half teaspoon of it every night, straight out of the jar, until it's late August and the whole thing's disappeared.

—

"You're starting to sound like him," Hunter says to Shane on the ice.

Shane's first thought is oh, fuck, he knows, does he know? And the second is, how the fuck do you know what he sounds like, old fucking man. Beta with an inconsistent wrister.

Hunter doesn't know fucking anything about Rozanov, or about Shane, or what it's like to be either of them.

In hindsight, the fight is a bit of a territorial display. Hunter spoke about Rozanov like he knows the first thing about him. Like it's common knowledge that Rozanov and Shane associate in their off hours.

Years ago, Rozanov - joking, but getting Shane's back up anyway - said: He is hot. We should let him listen. Would be like mating call. Unwittingly planted a seed that erupted from the ground here, now. Shane spoiling for a fight, and Hunter responding in kind.

Shane's not an alpha, though. He's not the emotional, reactive kind of omega, either. Everyone just thinks it's a one-off thing that happens when you put a bunch of guys on skates and tell them to have a proxy war with sticks. Even Shane's mom just cautions him against a repeat. Doesn't ask if Shane needs to see a sports therapist, or a doctor, or - god forbid - if there are any nice girls he's been hoping to see more of, lately.

 —

They fuck after games for the rest of the year, all four, plus a quickie after the Winter Classic, and while they use condoms when it's that kind of sex, they also talk about not using them: Hollander, so fucking hot, you taking me, got me in you, let me have you - fuck you, Rozanov, you goddamn asshole, you bred me up and you're bored with me now, is that it, put your fucking back into it - oh, bored, is this bored for little slut, are other people who fuck you so good, is [Russian, lots of Russian, totally unintelligible to Shane, so he can fill in his own nasty imaginings] - fuck off, no one else, no one's bred me but you, you, you.

2015

They do the stupid thing again at the 2015 MLH Awards.

Shane thought it might be too much to actually do it twice. Now that they confirmed Rozanov can, there'd be no point in revisiting it.

Rozanov is right there with him, though, whispering in his ear while they make out against his hotel suite door, "You want it, yes? Yeah? Want me to breed you?"

Shane doesn't precisely say yes. Makes him wait until Shane's on the edge of the bed and Rozanov's standing in front of him.

"Do you want to know what it feels like?" Shane asks, calling back to last year.

He can't replicate Rozanov's haughtiness, the cold reserve and total focus that made - makes - Shane want a reaction so, so, so bad. But he can issue a challenge to Rozanov, the best competition he's ever had.

"What what feels like?" Rozanov asks, pushing his hair back with one hand, playing along. He's the same size as Shane, which means he's so fucking big. Thick armed, strong. More than half hard, too. Shane would pay easily a thousand, ten thousand, for a safe way to take a photo of him like this and keep a copy somewhere.

"Breeding up a Cup winner."

Rozanov groans, actually groans out loud, and pushes Shane back onto the bed.

—

Shane stays on his back this time. Rozanov makes sure he's kissing Shane when Shane comes, like he can't handle the idea of Shane going half unfilled in that moment. Likewise, the second round, Shane, getting fucked on his side, puts his thumb in Rozanov's mouth and keeps it there, while Rozanov shakes and shudders and grunts.

They have all night, they already decided, arranged it like that ahead of time. It wasn't even hard. Shane's mom seemed happy that he was going to "go out with the guys" that night. (Which guys? It's not like most of his own team was there.) She shouldn't want her son gambling tens of thousands, or going to strip clubs, or whatever the fuck semi-famous hockey guys do in this city. But Shane gets it - the strip clubs, especially, would be very male beta of him, and isn't that what everyone - himself included - wants?

Rozanov half-knots outside of Shane's hole, just the rest of his cock buried safe inside, which is more courtesy than Shane really knew MLH players were capable of. Shane knows, logically, that knotting a male omega isn't the kind of thing you do without warning, but he does feel a little bit like. Okay. Rozanov's knot would be safer still if it was all the way inside, and he'd really like Rozanov to consider that, next time.

"So this one is a given, that I will knock you up," Rozanov says after, smug. And yet, he again goes a little alphabrained and puts a couple of pillows under Shane's ass. Sucks Shane off with a couple of fingers inside him, "Just in case, just in case," and jerks off onto his stomach after.

—

People, Shane included, feel weird about male omegas having kids. As in, having the kids.

Shane's never knowingly met anyone whose birth parent was a male omega. The most it's ever come up is, like, TV: on Scrubs, when JD considers becoming a surrogate for extra cash, or on Friday Night Lights, where there's apparently a minor male omega character who bravely makes the sacrifice of carrying a child for his sickly beta wife.

Or there's everyone's go-to example, Titanic, where the heart of the tragedy and the thing that makes it all kind of okay is that Jack would have died no matter what - pregnant male omegas, one way or another, never made it in those days.

It's uncomfortable to think about. Not the body part, really. Shane's used to his body growing and shrinking and hardening and softening in rhythm with hockey. Plus, he has enough money to pay for whatever post-birth vanity surgeries he wanted. (Omega men supposedly need a lot of them, to get back to normal.)

It's more that Shane imagines you'd have a lot of eyes on you. Like, a lot.

And then, at the end, you have a baby. Like with the surgeries, Shane would be able to pay for people to care for it full-time. He could drift in and out at will.

You're probably not supposed to imagine parenthood as a fleet of nannies handling the whole thing for you.

Anyway, what he and Rozanov do isn't about reproducing, for Shane. Not for Rozanov, either, Shane doesn't think. In a way, it's about Shane-and-Rozanov.

Shane is a generational hockey talent and a flipped-chromosome fluke. Both are undeniable, unavoidable. No matter how beta-like he comes off to people, no matter how unrecognized it goes, he's still open territory. Unoccupied. Waiting.

And Rozanov - Rozanov is hot to the touch, thick-bodied. Brave enough to try Shane over and over. And eager to cover Shane's body with his own. To mark out some part of Shane for himself.

It's not about pregnancy, or babies. Furthest thing from.

It's about Shane getting, in a word, bred.

—

Whether or not the extra pillows and the extra orgasm were necessary, it takes again.

They text that summer, almost for real. The same mifegymiso-mega exchange from before - literally an exchange, given the money transfer - followed by fruit. Three jars of the jam this time, probably because in the very late hours after the MLH Awards, Shane shamefacedly admitted to eating it spoonful by spoonful, secretly, spread out over months. Rozanov, lying prone in bed, turned towards Shane's shoulder and worried at it with his teeth until Shane bruised.

—

If you're an alpha or an omega, then the space you occupy, mostly wherever you sleep, becomes your territory. There's social stuff happening there, obviously. When Shane was in school, a couple of guys would bullshit about being territorial over their desks or the stairs they hung around on between classes. Losers, Shane always thought.

But there's a kernel of reality to it. A fixation Shane didn't fully understand until it started happening to him, his first year in the show, when he'd worry faintly about his condo on longer road trips. He'd catch himself thinking he might come back to find it occupied by some other guy. Full awareness that this wasn't possible didn't assuage his concern. Shane could almost picture the interloper: someone who wore Shane's jackets and ate his snacks and napped on his couch.

He stopped tapping his way into the building with his shoulders up around his ears as years went on and no doppelganger Shane appeared, but he didn't forget feeling that way.

And the cottage - Shane is territorial about it without ever having slept there, before it's even done. Daydreams about getting an extra, secret day off - like if they were supposed to be playing Ottawa, but Ottawa's plane crashed, something crazy like that - not lethally, but enough to disrupt the schedule - so he could drive up to Lanaudière and prowl around the worksite. He wants to scent mark the area in the ways that alphas and omegas still feel driven to do, even though the modern human nose, weak and nonspecific, mostly can't pick up those marks, or identify them as belonging to a particular person.

If he really loses himself in it, he can practically feel tree bark under his fingers, his wrists, as he brushes his scent over the perimeter. Thinks it would make a lot of sense to go way out into the woods somewhere and piss into the dirt. Wants to roll around a little in the LEET-qualified eco-whatever insulation before they pack it into the exterior walls.

Top to bottom, back to front - no matter how little time he gets to spend in it - the cottage will be all Shane's. Anyone else will be lucky to enter, and just as lucky to leave.

—

The following season, even through playoffs, all bets are off; they're fucking raw every time they see each other, and Shane - despite his stock of levomegastrel at home - is letting it run a day, even two days, before dealing with it, trying not to radiate smug, broody pleasure in the locker room in the meantime.

2016

Shane's in his mid-twenties now, and everything you run into about male omega gestational health - very little - says pregnancy is easier the younger you are. Says you can't assume it'll just work on its own as you get older.

Some of the WAGs are doing IVF. These are omega and beta women Shane's age.

Shane doesn't know what to think about that. He's never seen this thing through. Maybe if he had an end goal, he'd also need IVF.

Plus, at the big family-photo-op team Cup win celebration, Shane heard one twentysomething WAG say to another that she went straight to IVF because she wanted a boutique experience. Shane regards this as essentially an alien language, so. He can't guess why anyone does anything.

Point is, Shane's sort of thinking it won't work, that year. He's officially in his mid-twenties, and coming off back-to-back Cup wins. He's fucking exhausted, he's got absolutely no body fat, he's starving all the time, and he tweaked his back for the first time two days after the win from just getting up off of the Pikes' couch the wrong way. Doesn't add up to highly breedable conditions.

And yet: 2016 MLH Awards. Penthouse. Wet, nasty sex. And boom: pregnant.

Knocked up.

Bred.

—

His cottage is totally finished, finally, synthetic ice rink and sustainable landscaping and smoked bamboo countertops included. It's an excuse to take more time off than usual. What's all of this been for, if I don't feel grateful for what it's brought me? he tells his parents. They like that line.

He treats the cottage like a home base that offseason. Goes back for four (four!) full weeks over the course of the summer, two at the start, plus two scattered later on, between endorsement shoots, business meetings, real training, and the weeklong, semi-real, highly publicized, sponsored training camp in fucking Winnipeg he's contracturally obligated to take part in, among other things.

High on the feeling of having his own space - safe territory to return to - he goes a little insane. Lets it - it - run a full two months before calling it quits this time.

Rozanov texts, a month in, a week after his cash-transfer-and-berry delivery, You good?

Yep, Shane sends back, with no specifics.

They have that kind of exchange a few times.

Shane understands that they can't put certain things in writing during the offseason, when Rozanov's mostly using his Russian phone.

Rozanov mentioned this restriction casually and adheres to it only loosely, but just the fact that it's in mind at all - that he would bother to say it - makes Shane think that it might be serious as fuck, actually. Stuff surrounding male omegas and female alphas in Russia is… not so good. Not that it's perfect in Canada, but Shane at least understands it here, finds it predictable and less alarming.

Cross-breeding, it's called there, he learns online - for male omegas to pair up with anyone but female alphas, and vice versa. By some Russian standards, Shane should only ever touch alpha women; it's apparently almost gayer for Rozanov to fuck a female alpha than it would be for him to fuck a male alpha, and confusingly, Rozanov fucking Shane - a man and a flipper, off limits in two ways - is gayer than either of those. (Though none of them are, to be clear, kosher. Or whatever the Russian word is for kosher.)

During longer cardio sessions that summer, Shane tries and fails to wrap his brain around that mindfuck.

In Canada - in real life - Shane isn't anyone's first choice: because he's a man, he's disappointing as an omega, and because he's an omega, he's disappointing as a man. His saving grace is that he doesn't come off as omega as he might, so he's still attractive to women, just… in the same way some bald guys are still attractive to women.

To wit: money helps.

With men, Shane always figured it was at least theoretically an advantage that he's an omega, in that it seems maybe a little less gay for another guy to fuck one who gets wet for it. But he also figures that men who want to fuck men must really want alpha men, stereotypes, as male as they come. Like Shane very much does.

So what does Rozanov get out of Shane? Out of any of this? Is it the breeding thing, which he's almost certainly not finding women to play along with - or at least ones he can trust not to keep it, at the end of the day? Is it the rivals thing, the tension that moves seamlessly from the ice to a bed (or a wall, a floor, a shower)? Just that, like he said the first time they fucked, Shane's a safe guy to do this with?

Shane can't quite figure him out.

Not that that's anything new.

—

Shane evades Rozanov for a week, for two, past where he did the previous two years. Stretching it out. He's a little broody about his condo and his cottage. Hayden comments that the second Cup unlocked some new self-assurance. "Just promise to still come in next year fighting hard," he says. In another situation, Shane might be hurt by that; in July in Montreal, with sweat pouring down his face, he laughs. He has more energy, right now, than makes any sense.

All in all, Shane is… indefinably smug. He's the best and his body took - of everyone it could have had - the very second best, after him - inside, claimed it as his own. He's both of them, together.

Though - when Rozanov was the first best and Shane was second, that was also appallingly appealing.

Anyone could fuck Shane right now - Scott fucking Hunter could fuck him right now - and it wouldn't matter, because Shane's body is still - just for now, a little while longer - spoken for. Clasped closed, holding its prize, marked up somewhere deep no one else can get to.

—

He pushes it until Rozanov - thrilling, more so than it should be, much more - actually calls Shane and says, "So what the fuck, are you - is stuff okay? Things are okay?"

"Yeah," Shane says, immediately chagrined. He sits up on his oddly comfortable hotel room couch in New York, where he's staying for one night while he shoots a Reebok thing. "Yeah, sorry, I've just been busy."

"Busy."

"Yeah, I haven't had time to - you know. But there's tons of time left."

"You are too busy to get that done. You."

"Yeah? Or, I just. I haven't. Wanted to."

There's uneasy silence. "Not because - not because you want - um, to continue - it. Keep it?"

Shane stands up, trips over himself. "What? No. Oh my god, no."

"Would be, um, your choice, but you should know things about… there are problems in my family, genetic, you… I would not want you to find out too - too late."

Oh, fuck. "Rozanov, no, shit, I'm sorry. No, I'm not doing that. I don't think I want kids ever, not really. I definitely don't want them when I'm - you know, while I still -" have an interesting, fulfilling life - "while I'm playing hockey."

"Oh. Okay. That is - good."

"Good, yeah. I'm not. I wouldn't." Chagrined, Shane arranges the whole mifegymiso-mega thing right there while they're calling. For some reason, neither one of them hangs up while he does it.

"So you have been - this whole time." Grit in Rozanov's voice.

Oh. That might be the reason they didn't hang up. "Yeah. That's how it works."

"Long time."

"Yeah." Breathy.

"You think anyone can smell it?"

"No," Shane says. That's right at the end, nowhere near where he is now. "But I wish," he says, the words escaping slowly.

"Hm?"

"I wish they could." He's sitting back onto the bed as he does so, having somehow worked his way there from the couch without really noticing.

"Too bad. I bet you would smell good, bred," Rozanov says. "Knocked up. Claimed."

So they have phone sex. Shane likes it more than he would have thought, doesn't feel awkwardness on top of pleasure like he does with sexting. Could be the circumstances, the offseason and the positive tests. Or Rozanov's ragged breath, his low grumble, the slick sounds of his hand on his cock.

"And you have not - you are feeling okay?" Rozanov asks after, an afterthought.

"Yeah? Oh, you mean like because - because?"

"Yes, Hollander."

"Yeah. I feel good. Really good, actually. Maybe pregnancy just agrees with me."

"Agrees with."

"Like, maybe I'm just good at it, so it makes me feel good."

"This is true of many things for you, Hollander."

Shane shivers, all the way down to his toes.

—

When Shane finally takes his mifegymiso-mega that year (fatigue, tiny fever, nausea for the first time, which could be random, or could be because he took twice as long to get around to it) Rozanov sends him money and asks where to send the fruit.

You don't have to, Shane says.

Where, Jane.

Shane could, of course, give him the date he'll be settled back in Montreal for long enough to receive a package, instead of the single days scattered between shoots and training intensives and all the rest of it.

Saskatoon berries will probably be out of season, at that point.

And - in a way Shane's really not looking at too hard - the idea of Rozanov having Shane's address, the cottage address, is… interesting.

If they were two different people, it could almost be like Shane's saying, Here I am. Come find me.

—

A few days later, by courier - Shane didn't know there were couriers for such purposefully remote parts of Ontario - Shane receives four jars of the rhubarb jam again, along with an embarrassing amount of fruit.

When he treks to Montreal for a week of filming Metros promotional material, he swings past his parents' home to leave them two baskets of tiny, lumpy, candy-sweet strawberries. The Pikes get a couple of baskets of dusty cobalt blueberries. Jackie claims a basket for herself right there in the entryway and wastes no time descending upon it.

The haskapps and the saskatoon berries, though - Shane mows through them methodically. Tells himself bullshit about antioxidants and vitamin C and whatever else he needs to believe to let himself eat them. His right thumbnail stains faintly blue-black along the cuticle from the juice. He freezes the couple of baskets he can't get to in time. And, of course, no one gets any of the jam.

Those things are all for Shane.

—

They play one preseason game against each other in September. Shane, struck by a totally arbitrary and innocent desire to experiment with nothing in particular, for no real reason, brings up condoms, that time. His schedule sucks, he says; he's got about eight different things hitting in the next two days; he doesn't want to add another thing to the list.

Rozanov is understanding, easygoing. Uses a condom, no problem - brought his own, actually, latex-free omega ones, which is interesting. It's a data point, that he brought them.

He puts one on and teases Shane about how much he hates using it, needling until Shane mumbles, hearing his own pout, it's just not fair.

Rozanov mouths at Shane's hairline before pushing him down to swallow his cock, and Shane forgets about fair, stops caring about anything else at all.

—

Shane thumbs the implant mark on Rozanov's left shoulder. Rozanov probably needs to get up soon. Make his way back to his hotel. Not yet, though. "Did the KHL have you on cycle suppressors?"

"No. They are… not normal, in Russia."

"Do you miss it?"

He shrugs. "Rut is fun. But no problem."

Shane nods.

"Does it… make problems for you?" Rozanov asks.

"Suppressors? No, no way. It's the same as for alphas, just gets rid of heats. No side effects."

Last year, Comeau's beta wife tried to tell Shane about a podcast where some doctor from NYU said suppressors, birth control, all that stuff fucks with omegas long-term. On a hunch, Shane looked up the doctor; her degree was a PhD in English.

Jackie Pike was a nurse for a year, before she started having kids. She and Shane exchanged the judgiest eye contact over the whole episode.

"My friend says they make you want to fuck ugly people," Rozanov says.

Shane laughs. "What the fuck?"

"Is what she says! That they make you want to fuck people you would not want without suppressors."

"That's crazy."

Rozanov grins at him a little. "Maybe is true, maybe is what Shane Hollander is doing here."

Shane pretends to think about it.

"Is where you say no, I want to fuck you so bad, Ilya Rozanov, I wanted your cock at World Juniors."

Shane hesitates.

"Okay, wow. So - so must be true, then."

"No, no, I - I mean, not like that, but. I hadn't started suppressors yet, that first photoshoot."

Rozanov looks intrigued. "Really. So you could have…"

Shane snorts. "What, gone into heat in the locker room? You know we know they're coming, right? It's not like cheesy omega porn, where they - where we're always surprised?"

"I like the ones where they do not know they are in heat and the alpha has to show them."

"How would that even work?"

"Who cares?"

Shane doesn't kill the mood by pointing out the alpha - and beta - fantasy of that. Omegas whose only warning is a little moodiness. Snappishness that alphas can fuck out of them. Nothing gross, nothing tangible. Nothing left behind.

"My point is. I wanted it," Shane says. "Before suppressors."

Rozanov looks him up and down. Cocky. Annoying. God, he's so attractive, it's the fucking worst. "Yes." He tugs Shane a little closer. "And the other ones. Still no problem?"

"Other what?"

"Drugs. Abortion ones."

Shane shakes his head. "It's just like the suppressors. No harm. They don't actually affect fertility long-term, or anything."

Rozanov nods slowly. "But when you take them. Does it - hurt?"

"Oh. No, it's fine."

He's still looking at Shane.

"What? It's fine."

"Okay. Good."

—

"So when are you going to join me in all of this?" Hayden asks Shane at the aquarium, gesturing at the growing Pike peewee hockey team. Another kid?

There's a blank, bizarre minute where Shane wants to ask how the fuck that's supposed to work with hockey, before he realizes Hayden must be asking about Shane settling down with a woman who would have the kids for him.

If Shane was a beta, or an alpha, he could deflect with a joke. Wow, Hayd, you want to get me pregnant, too? I don't think I'm ready. I think I still have some good hockey left in me.

It would be weird for Shane to say that, though. Too close to what's technically possible.

Hayden tries to herd Shane into meeting someone Jackie knows. "She's seriously hot. Beta. She just got back on the market, like, three days ago. And her last boyfriend was an omega." He says this part like she's a real find. A great opportunity for Shane.

Beta and alpha guys get like this - are so convinced they're the better options that they don't even see it. Best case, it goes this way, where they try to pump Shane up. Needlessly.

Shane has literally millions of dollars. Girls tend to get over the omega thing.

He's saved by, in order, the Pike kids and some teenage girls who want pictures. They ask Hayden to hold Shane's baby, meaning the babiest Pike.

For a second, he wonders: do these girls think Arthur is literally Shane's? There's no way they do, right?

As another experiment, Shane tests himself: if it had taken that first time, and kept, Shane would have had a baby. It would be three by now. It would be a little like him and a little like Rozanov, and his parents would love it. He prods at it like a loose tooth. Baby, his, nonexistent: no response in him. Does it change if he thinks about it like baby, his, missing? Or baby, his, gone?

If Shane said it out loud, he'd sound like a cold motherfucker, but: not at all. None. Baby never existed. Who cares. Moving on.

Rozanov, he muses absently, would think Shane's I still have some good hockey left in me joke is funny.

—

Rozanov texts him a picture from the airport in Columbus, a big backlit poster: one of Shane's ads for a brand of protein bar he's never willingly eaten.

Lily: Why do you need to be shirtless to hold a square food

Jane: Don't know

Jane: But I was still bred when they shot that ad campaign

Jane: Try not to get too hard about it

Lily: JANE

—

That fall, Shane goes to Rozanov's house for the first time. He's slightly psyched out before he even leaves. Hayden hassling him on his way out the door, I know you text some girl named Lily, doesn't help.

"Lots of reasons a guy -" he makes a guy sound like there's a like you attached - "might not want to, like, make something public," Hayden says.

Hopefully, he's only alluding to the possibility that the fictional female Lily is an alpha.

Shane doesn't like Hayden thinking that Shane's secretly dating an alpha girl. It's a little too close to the truth, and like, Shane's mom is an alpha, right? It's not - sure, Shane's supposed to settle down with a beta, an omega, but. It gets tired, the way people are always weird about flippers. When Shane was sixteen, his girlfriend's parents liked that he was an omega because it made him seem like a nice boy. And a couple of her friends kind of giggled about him when they thought he wasn't listening, because - well, he'll never be sure if it was the Asian thing or the omega thing, but he's guessing the omega thing, because one of the friends was Filipino or something.

Shane doesn't really like that Hayden thinks he knows anything whatsoever about this, but. Tough luck.

—

In the rideshare there, Shane is horny but not too horny, and he doesn't hyperventilate, either. That's good. He's doing good. This is going well. He's fine. He's fine. God.

Rozanov's been inside of Shane's condo a bunch of times. Why does it feel so intense to go to his house?

Well - if Shane was a regular omega. Like, a girl, or the other kind of male omega. Then, it would be… big, to go to Rozanov's house. A big deal. To enter his territory. Breathe his established scent. Roll around in his bed. Sleep there. Eat his food.

But Shane's not that type of omega. He's the beta-alike kind, who just happens to like the things he likes. If something went wrong - like if he was doing this with a different alpha, one he couldn't kind of count on to be cool - he could fight back. If anything happened.

And Rozanov's not that kind of alpha, so. Shane is - he's -

He's safe.

—

Rozanov tucks two packages of Plan B into Shane's inner jacket pocket basically as soon as Shane gets in the door. It's so fucking sleazy, so fucking hot.

You do that to a girl, you're treating her like absolute shit. But Shane's not a girl, Shane's a man. And Rozanov is, too.

Shane likes it, sometimes, when Rozanov treats him a little bit like shit. A slut. A hole.

A sure thing.

"If you want," Rozanov says softly, fingers still hooked in Shane's pocket.

It was nice that he was good with Shane needing to skip it, last time. Shane's curious about that. Sometimes, with Rozanov, he just - he wonders.

—

Here in Rozanov's house, though, they fuck bare. Obviously.

"We have to stop doing this," one of them says. Not Shane. Rozanov. He says it into Shane's mouth, though, while he works his bare cock inside of him.

"No," Shane says, a clean refusal. Meaning no, no stopping the fucking, and no, no stopping the fucked up way we're doing it.

—

"Can I - can I try, like -"

"Oh, on top?" Rozanov has no reason to know that's what Shane was asking for. "Yeah, is good that way."

He helps Shane with it, then lounges back and watches with those eyes that track everything on the ice, every movement, every breath. It gives Shane the same broody, preening feeling he gets when he's knocked up. He keeps the feeling when Rozanov rolls them over and fucks Shane's come out of him in five short, hard thrusts. Maybe it's just fucking in Rozanov's house that does it.

Shane's real territory is his cottage. What would it be like to fuck Rozanov there?

—

Rozanov gets him to stay - what, is Hayden Pike your mother? Your caveman alpha? - and drags Shane into his side in bed in this incredibly alpha way that makes Shane feel stupid and valuable, like one of Rozanov's cars.

Then he makes Shane food. Granted, it's the kind of food a teenager makes when left alone for the weekend, but Shane's never cooked a day in his life, so he's not judging. An alpha made food for him. He brought it out on a fucking plate. Presented him with a ginger ale and watched Shane toy with it, pretending to only consider it for a moment. Maybe the most coy omega bullshit Shane's ever done.

When he takes a sip, Rozanov ducks his head, smiling.

Granted, Rozanov talks about his friend, Svetlana, a female alpha, more than Shane would necessarily like.

"Good to have a regular woman like that," Rozanov says.

"Even though she's an alpha?"

"Is a little different in Russia, right? You remember, from Olympics?"

Shane nods. Mostly, he remembers that from increasingly dismal internet searches like Russian alpha gay and Russia cross breeding crime and Russia cross breeding prison Chechnya, but yeah.

"But," Rozanov says. "Is not problem. For me."

Shane nods.

"I like best when I already know person I am fucking. Is easy. Fun. I am lazy, so."

"I don't know that side of you at all."

Rozanov blinks. Looks forward to the game in front of them. Back again. Then he asks Shane about girls, which is excruciating.

"Well, female alphas aren't ideal," Shane says awkwardly. "Obviously."

"Why obviously."

"Because - people would think there's a chance I'd let them, uh. Let them knock me up."

Rozanov looks between himself and Shane.

"Well, I'm not telling people," Shane says.

Rozanov nods. "But this would be, um, best? If you could?"

"What would?" Shane asks, caught out.

"Alpha girl."

"Oh. No, I don't think it matters that much, with girls." They all make him feel the same way.

"So alpha, beta, omega, is all same?"

Shane shrugs. If he puts it like that. Looks at much broader categories. "I mean. I guess alphas are a little more, um, interesting."

It's not a scent issue. He doesn't have the thing where alphas smell incredibly good, betas smell boring, and omegas smell bad. He's pretty sure like no one actually has that. That it's an alpha-manufactured idea of what it's like to be an omega: you're led through life by your nose, and the most mediocre alpha dick bowls you over.

It's just that if Shane imagines the most attractive woman he can - if he's being very honest with himself - yeah, she might be an alpha. Things with omega and beta women haven't gone so hot, long term. (Or, uh, short term.) And it would be nice, probably, to date a girl who isn't leery of female alphas; who doesn't act like meeting his mom is equivalent to encountering a caged shark. Or (ugh) a tamed tiger.

(On the other hand, if Shane imagines a world where Ilya's an omega or a beta, he doesn't think he'd be any less into this. He's not thinking about that, though.)

Rozanov leans back. Not quite smiling. Thoughtful, maybe.

"What about you?" Shane asks. It seems like the thing to ask.

"Is all same for me, mostly," Rozanov says, which is a frustratingly vague answer from a guy who just drilled down into Shane's particulars. "Alpha, beta, omega, is all same. And I like girls. But I also like you. Not as a person, of course."

"Of course," Shane echoes. Rozanov had called him boring earlier, teasing, annoying, exciting.

"But you have good mouth." Something he definitely knows Shane likes to hear, since last time he said it, Shane came humping his leg.

It gets him now, too. Again. Sometimes, being treated like shit really works for Shane.

—

Rozanov ducks out for a call. They stick closer together when he gets back, Shane melting downwards towards Rozanov's lap. Then, straddling him. It's heady, to draw Rozanov's attention back to Shane. To make him feel good.

Rozanov says Shane and Shane says Ilya, and for a second, Shane wants to run out of the room. He's deep in an alpha's territory, a technically-rival-alpha's territory, inside of his actual home. Shane let Rozanov feed him, watch him while he slept, fuck him bare, breed him. But Shane's already done the stupidest possible thing he could do with Rozanov - to wit: breed him - barring maybe, maybe keeping it, or telling people, or something equally insane - so it's a little late to bitch out now, isn't it?

—

"You have a good time with Lily?" Hayden asks the next day.

Shane shrugs. Puts his hands in his pocket, feeling the shape of the meds tucked away inside his jacket. Reliable. A gift.

—

Rose Landry is beautiful. And personable. Maybe Shane should have expected that? He's just so used to semi-famous and highly successful people who got there by virtue of anything but charm. Meeting someone more famous who's genuinely likeable is novel.

Something else that's novel: Shane doesn't often meet alpha women in his day-to-day.

One of Rose's brothers is an alpha, too, she tells him. The rest are betas. "My dad is a flip-flop," she says sheepishly. "So I kind of, you know, upended that part of the family legacy."

"A flip flop?"

"Oh, like, a non-flipper child of a flipper. So his mom was a flipper, and he's the flopper. Back to normal."

"Until you came along."

"Until I came along," she agrees. "Not that - I mean, I think we're normal."

Shane follows her. "No, I get it. I don't feel like I'm weird." He's not lying, even. Nothing inside of him feels like a contradiction. Everything that's in contradiction to Shane Hollander, Male Omega is outside of Shane. Expectations (of men, athletes, hockey players, Asian guys) coming from a thousand different directions, none of them totally satisfied by Shane himself. Or at least they wouldn't be, if they knew about him for real. "It's other people who think it's weird."

Rose looks, mercifully, charmed by him saying this very basic thing. "Or even - unusual things are weird, I guess. But weird doesn't have to mean bad."

Shane doesn't know if he feels that in his bones, but he admires the sentiment.

Rose goes on to tell him, "I took this class in college called Bio in the Humanities. Basically a way to knock out my life sciences requirement without taking something hard. There was a unit on the flipped gene, how it works. We all have the beta chromosome, and the alpha and omega ones are on top of that. Kind of. Like I said, I was a drama performance major."

Shane shrugs. It's not like he's an educated guy.

"They said that some people call the flipped gene the bonus gene, because society gets extra alphas and omegas out of it, without needing to pass those genes along first. Plus, you know, double the sex cells."

"But… female alphas. And male omegas," Shane clarifies.

"Yeah. I don't know, I thought it was cool. To think about us like an extra thing. Instead of an… inversion."

"That is cool," Shane says dutifully. He might even mean it.

—

Shane might have worried about letting Rozanov know he's fucking someone else. This would have been stupid and embarrassing, since Rozanov isn't running any of his hookups past Shane. Ultimately, after a lot of agonizing, Shane would have decided against it; figured it wasn't worth the humiliation just to get Rozanov's reaction.

So it's good that they are literally immediately public, thereby rendering all of that potential agonizing moot.

Connors says you are fucking Rose Landry, Rozanov sends him.

Jane: I'm seeing her, if that's what "Connors" means

Lily: Is she good at it

Jane: What

Lily: Breeding a Cup winner

Jane: That's gross, Rozanov

Lily: That answers my question, thank you

—

JJ, for his part, is over the fucking moon about Rose; he seems to think he found Shane true love. Shane sees why. For one thing, they really fucking get along. For another -

Hahaha ik we're supposed to just pretend we're betas, Rose sends him, when he tells her about JJ crowing his success.

But I think sometimes people think female alpha + male omega cancel each other out

Like we're both a little weird

So if we're together, no one normal has to adjust

Shane tells her that that is, actually, how it works in Russia. Elides that he knows that not from the Olympics so much as from the aforedescribed online research.

—

"Oh my god, I love Rose Landry," Jackie says, the first time they see each other after the pictures start cropping up. "She's seems so down-to-earth, you know? Like such a normal kind of person."

"I guess," Shane agrees. She's a multimillionaire lifelong actress who gets painted blue for a living, but sure. Normal.

Nonthreatening female alpha syndrome, Rose calls this.

Guys say the same kind of thing about Shane when they want to smooth out their own outlook: Shane's cool. Good guy. A real guy's guy. You'd never know about the omega thing.

He asks Rose what the reverse would be. After some serious thought, Rose hazards, Just one of the (omega) guys syndrome? We'll workshop it.

—

You are having a nice time? Rozanov messages Shane.

Feeling each other out, Shane sends.

Rozanov gives him a thumb up reaction. Nothing else.

 — 

Rose has tried seeing a lot of different types of guys. Alphas, betas, omegas. "Does that bother you?" she asks.

"God, no," he says.

She smiles, warm and sweet.

Shane gets the brief, terrible impulse to tell her that he has this embarrassing habit of getting bred by a rival colleague. Asking her the same question: does it bother you?

Better to deal with that… never.

—

The club is hot and sweaty. Rose's friend Miles is a beta. He hits on Shane pretty brazenly.

It's not soft and comfortable, like when Shane and Rose asked each other out.

But not soft and comfortable doesn't mean bad. It's inconvenient and obviously can't go anywhere, but Shane… doesn't really want Miles to stop.

Then Rozanov is right there, glorious, ruining Shane's tentatively okay night.

Shane was only theoretically jealous of Svetlana, a specter from Rozanov's homeland who Shane's at least got this outlier thing in common with.

Actually seeing Rozanov touch this blond girl? He's just this side of fucking furious.

Logically, it's fine for Rozanov to fuck other people. Illogically, Shane wants to yank Rozanov away from this omega skank, stick his tongue in his ear, and shove his hand down his pants in front of this whole club. Let them watch him half-knot Shane's palm. Eyes shut tight, hips moving, mouth open. Just for Shane's hand, he's like that.

Rozanov's bred Shane at least three times, now. Surely Shane has first dibs on his cock. He doesn't make the rules.

—

Late, late that night, after doing what he could with Rose - not very much - he gets a message. It's fifth in his inbox the next morning, when he gets out of bed alone.

Lily: Is she breeding you

Lily: Or is the other guy doing it

Lily: Do you let both of them have you at once

What a shitty thing to say.

Shane's hard immediately.

Have you knocked anyone else up, Shane sends back.

There's the typing bubble for a long time. Like, a long time. Then the response comes in.

Lily: No

Jane: Then no

Jane: I've only ever been bred by Cup winners

Jane: Got my eye on Hunter this year

Lily: Oh okay

Lily: I will just kill him then

Shane, despite himself, giggles.

—

Nodding yes to "Have you ever been with another guy?" is tough enough; explaining that the guy in question is an alpha who Shane lets breed him - begs for it, plans his fucking life around it - is a simple impossibility.

"I think I prefer being the hole, rather than the peg," Shane admits.

Rose gives him the world's most absolutely fucking condescending little yeah in response.

Shane doesn't laugh the same way he laughed at Rozanov's message, but he does laugh.

Chapter 2: January - June 2016

Chapter Summary

"We weren't compatible," Shane says of Rose Landry, beloved of stage and screen. It covers a lot of ground: mutually weird eating habits that made dates awkward. Fundamentally misaligned MLH team loyalties. Simple geography. A tendency to talk long into the night, rather than have unbelievably mediocre sex.

(Shane got hard - enough, anyway - but he also got a little slick. He told Rose that he just ignores that. He doesn't think she believed him even before he cracked his joke about being the hole.)

Everyone's in a decent mood about All Stars this year. Tampa is a nice place to be at the tail end of January.

Shane, for his part, has never looked forward to it like this before.

As soon as he sets eyes on Rozanov, he's drawn to his side like a magnet.

"We weren't compatible," Shane says of Rose Landry, beloved of stage and screen. It covers a lot of ground: mutually weird eating habits that made dates awkward. Fundamentally misaligned MLH team loyalties. Simple geography. A tendency to talk long into the night, rather than have unbelievably mediocre sex.

(Shane got hard - enough, anyway - but he also got a little slick. He told Rose that he just ignores that. He doesn't think she believed him even before he cracked his joke about being the hole.)

She did say they had to stay friends. Do you know how few flippers there are in Hollywood, Shane? And they're all, ugh, directors. It's unbearable.

So far, they actually kind of have.

"So it's over?" Rozanov asks.

Shane nods.

Just before Carter fucking Vaughn plunges between them to kill the mood, Rozanov is smiling.

—

God, do they play some beautiful fucking hockey together.

—

In Rozanov's hotel room, Shane gives up. Admits it. "I think I'm gay."

Rozanov laughs, like an asshole. "What, um. What makes you think that?"

"Fuck off, you're not gay."

"Not completely, no."

"Yeah, well. I am. Completely." So completely that his body echoes it, begs for it, eases the way as best it can.

(Okay, yeah, that's not how it works. It still feels that way, sometimes.)

"Seriously? Like only guys?"

Shane nods.

"Hollander…"

"What."

"If letting me breed you didn't do it, I am afraid of how you learned."

"Rose -"

"Oh my god," Rozanov mumbles.

"- kind of had to let me know I wasn't fooling her."

"Wow."

"Fuck off," Shane says again.

"No. Tell me. Her cock was too small? Or her tits threw you off your game."

"You're such an asshole," Shane says, but he's kind of laughing despite himself.

It's just the way Rozanov says it. Like he's really begging for the answer.

"Okay, if you do not tell me, I know it's her cock."

"She doesn't have one of those."

He holds up his hand. "Only one of us fucked her."

"That's barely a thing, female alphas don't - come on."

"Uh. Yes, they do. Some of them. Svetlana, sometimes."

Thrown, Shane goes, "Sometimes? How the fuck does that work?"

"Intermittently."

"Wow. Intermittently. That New Yorker subscription is really paying off."

Shane presses his case about this being - something - or not nothing, at least?

Rozanov tries to push back, but Shane's persistent when it counts.

He finally gets the infodump about whatever the hell is going on with Rozanov's family.

"That's awful," Shane says, stroking Rozanov's hair. Remembers Rozanov - awkward and serious - saying Shane should keep it if he wants, but you should know there are problems in my family, genetic, I would not want you to find out too late.

Shane's not much of a sweet talker, but he must do something right, because Rozanov shoves his tongue down Shane's throat.

—

They fuck bare, Rozanov - "Ilya, you pussy" - sucking Shane off for way, way too long first, until Shane's face is wet and his lips are salty.

He keeps a hand on Shane's stomach the whole time. He's pressed down just above Shane's cock before, a weight that'll sometimes get Shane to see stars. This is different. His index finger is level with Shane's navel. It's less pressure, more - petting, stroking, first just his thumb and then his whole hand. It's mostly in time with his mouth, his other hand.

He pulls off, mouth lax. "Did she do this?"

"What?"

"This." He doesn't explain further.

"You mean Rose?"

"Yes. Her."

"Don't…"

"Don't?"

"Don't talk about her, I don't want - I want you."

"I want you, too." Ilya noses into Shane's hipbone. Bites it lightly. "And I want to know if she touched you here. How much she touched you here." He strokes Shane's stomach again, slow and deliberate.

"My stomach?"

"Yes, Shane."

"Not - I don't know, I don't think so?"

"So you lie to me, now." It's funny, he's being funny, but also not.

"I don't - she didn't do that?" Shane tries again. That's not, like, a typical thing in girls' repertoires. Unless it's something they do when you're good in bed. In which case, maybe they do it all the time, Shane wouldn't know.

"Yes, she did." Ilya bites a little harder. "I saw her."

Shane laughs. "When?"

"The club. You were dancing." He pauses. "She was dancing." That's fair. Shane mostly moves vertically on a dance floor. "And you were kissing her neck. And she went -"

The hand on Shane's stomach moves to his hip. Ilya grips it, like girls do when they dance with Shane, and slides it slowly up, up, to where it was before.

"Under your shirt," Ilya clarifies.

"Oh. Yeah." It'd be nice if Ilya wasn't spending their time in bed bringing up Shane's ex-girlfriend who he led on, but then Shane wouldn't get to hear Ilya's voice.

If Ilya's not going to suck his dick, Shane would like him to keep talking, at least.

"Did she have a reason to?"

"What?"

Ilya strokes Shane's stomach again. It's really nice. It's really distracting. "Did she. Have. A reason."

"What do you mean?" Shane tries to move his hips. It's sort of half satisfying, with Ilya's hand around his cock still.

"Did she have a reason to, Shane." At Shane's blank look, he rolls his eyes. "Was anything - there."

Shane blinks. "Oh my god, no."

Fake-casual, Ilya goes, "You took morning after pill, with her?"

"No," Shane laughs. "I didn't - I said, she doesn't have a dick, jesus."

"Doesn't need dick to knock you up."

"Oh. Right." Wow, Shane forgot that for a second. Dick's just such an integral part of it for him.

He should have figured this out earlier. He had all the pieces already.

Ilya's smirking at him.

"Shut up. No." He swallows. "You really think I found someone else who would - you know?"

Ilya tilts his head. Moves the hand on Shane's dick a little bit. "Breed you?"

God, Shane could listen to him say it forever. If he'd pay ten thousand to have a secure, well-composed nude of Ilya's, he'd pay twenty for a voice note. Just those two words on a loop.

"… Shane. Many people would breed you. So many girls. Guys, too, fuck. You could find someone so fast, probably on your fucking street. Would be so efficient."

"I don't want girls. And I don't think I care about efficient. Or convenient." Also, Ilya's drastically overestimating how eager people would be to stake a claim in Shane's body.

Overestimating, or - Shane hopes - projecting.

Ilya looks down, to where his hand is still on Shane's stomach, stroking, stroking. Back up. "No?"

Shane shakes his head. "I don't want easy. I want… I want the best."

"And this is why you come to me."

"Yeah." Shane wiggles again. The hand on his belly is, like, doing something. Making him all fluttery inside.

Ilya nods seriously. "Okay. I don't believe you, that she didn't want to knock you up, but it's okay."

"She didn't! Doesn't."

A shushing noise. "You didn't notice. It's okay. If you didn't notice you were gay, why would you notice Rose Landry planning to breed you?" He's laughing at Shane.

It's an annoying thing for Ilya to think. Shane would be annoyed, if it was someone else.

That's always the story, the implication, with omega men who get knocked up. That they're airheaded. Dumb.

People think you'd have to be stupid to let that happen. Lacking the foresight to recognize that you'd lose respect - from coworkers, strangers, family, who knows.

And ignorant of the longer history of it - the thing that's no longer much of an issue, but still looms large. Without modern medicine, pregnancy is about as safe for omega men as hopping into an active volcano.

But Ilya smirking gently at Shane feels different from that type of judgement.

Or… maybe it just turns Shane on, to think of it like that. Like Shane's just not that clever. Cock-hungry, emptyheaded. Opening up for it with just a little grope, or a hand petting his stomach, and it's okay, because Ilya will look out for him. Take care of him.

God. Shane doesn't want that. He wouldn't trade being kind of smart for sexual gratification. But doesn't it sound nice? Wouldn't it be a fucking relief?

"She didn't," Shane throws out there one more time, for dignity's sake. "You do." He kicks his heel into the back of Ilya's thigh.

"Oh, right." Nodding like he just remembered.

"So what are you fucking doing?"

"Nothing," Ilya says, grinning, shaking his head. "Nothing, nothing." Then he bends down and fucking finally licks a stripe up Shane's cock again.

—

It's not even a question, the condom thing. Not this time. Of course they're going to do it like that. Future Shane can handle almost-nonexistent levomegastrel side effects if This Weekend Shane gets to reassert the thing he and Ilya have had going for years, have done over and over. It's Shane's right, maybe more so than anyone else's. He hopes.

"When do you take it?" Ilya asks him.

"When I get back to Montreal, I guess?" Not worth trying to get hold of a double dose of morning after pills tomorrow or the day after, around all of these random MLHers.

Ilya nods. Brushes a hand over Shane's neck. Kisses the top of his head.

"You know," Shane says. It's a terrible idea. He's saying it to the exact wrong person, too. They've never held each other back with this shit. "We play each other again pretty soon. Six weeks."

Ilya nods absently.

Shane catches his eyes.

Ilya's brow wrinkles.

Shane widens his eyes significantly.

"Fuck," Ilya says. It hits like the MLH Awards in 2014, the most memorable of the rare times Shane's caught him off guard. "You mean."

Shane shrugs.

"You are serious."

"We've never done it while I'm bred up for you," Shane says dreamily.

Ilya swallows. There's a wet sheen to the corner of his mouth. "Would it fuck you up, though?"

"I don't think so."

Ilya's silent. Doubtful.

"We left it about two months this summer," Shane says softly. "And I was fine. Been even easier when it's only a month."

"Fuck," Ilya says again. "Shane fucking Hollander. You will kill me."

"You wanna?"

"Yes, I fucking want to, Shane, fuck."

"Playing against each other while I'm bred up for you."

"Beating your ass while you're bred up for me."

"It's cute how wrong you are."

"You will see."

"You think you could come over after?"

"I will stage my own murder if I have to, to get out of there."

Neither of them can go again. Not yet, anyway. But they look at each other. They know.

Shane swallows. Looks to the ceiling. "Do you like the breeding stuff the most?"

"Is pretty crazy," Rozanov says. Hedging, but gratifyingly.

Okay. Fuck. Shane swallows. "If we weren't doing that, would you still be into it? Enough to risk it."

"Yes. Obviously," Rozanov says, fast. "We did not last year. You think I need to knock someone up every time I fuck?"

Shane shrugs. "I really like it."

"Me, too."

"But like. All of it. Not - just the breeding part."

"Hollander. I did not just suck your dick for twenty minutes because I thought I could breed you that way."

"Not twenty minutes."

"I timed."

Shane blinks. "You timed?"

Ilya tips his head toward his phone on the nightstand. "What did you think alarm went off for?"

"Long time."

"I know. I am best at sucking cock," Ilya says, perfectly unbothered. Right at this moment, Shane doesn't even want to fight him on it.

"Was that part of - were you trying to get it to take?" Shane asks.

Ilya persists in these ideas about how to breed Shane that seem to crawl directly out of his brainstem, then retreat back there when the afterglow dissipates. There are three pillows under Shane's hips right now.

(Once, he begged Shane to do that after phone sex. Phone sex.

About half an hour later - which is as far away from sex as they ever get, just logistically speaking - Shane asked him if he thought that stuff actually worked. "Why would I know," Ilya said, nonchalant. But catch him five minutes after they've both come, and he'll be nudging Shane around, repositioning him, whispering come on, we need to, come on.)

Ilya shakes his head, shrugs. "I wanted to."

A beat of silence where they're just touching, and nothing else happens. Bliss.

"Could we call tomorrow," Shane whispers.

And Ilya says, "Yeah."

—

There's something - a space - inside of Shane that no one likes to think about. Still, they make it hard for him to forget about it: he's an intuitive player, he's just like a normal guy, you'd never know he's a fluke, he's Rose Landry's bitch, he's the polar opposite of #81, Ilya Rozanov.

Honestly, he's thought about getting his scent glands removed. Eliminating the thing that tells people what he is. You hear about omega women who do it because their husbands get migraines. (Well - you hear about Nicole Kidman getting it done because Tom Cruise got migraines.)

But everyone Shane meets knows who he is already. (Okay, kind of an exaggeration. Everyone he meets through hockey, though, which is most of the people he meets, period.) And who knows what they'd think? He'd probably come off like he was trying to hide it, like the players in the League who pretend they didn't get hairplugs over the offseason.

This is Shane, and Shane's an omega. Never been any real point in wiggling away from it.

 —

Across the world, amid funeral arrangements, Ilya tells Shane for the second night in a row, "Take off your shirt. Glasses on."

There's calculus here. On the one hand, Shane wants to keep exploiting whatever nerd fantasy Ilya's harboring to its fullest capacity. On the other hand, there's been a development.

It's a time-limited development.

"You know, it's good," he muses out loud.

Ilya takes the bait. "What's good."

"That you're not one of those guys who loses interest after he breeds someone."

"Yes, I think we have proven that."

"Prove it again. Get it out."

A pause. "You mean -"

"What can I say, man? I'm very fertile."

"What the hell, you are."

Shane shrugs. Doesn't try to shut down his grin. He likes being good at things.

"Is that… fast?"

"Yeah." He tested positive at a few weeks this time. The box cautions you that earlier results are likelier to be false positives. Whatever. For him and Ilya, that doesn't really matter.

"You will let me know? When you take it?" They've done this so much they don't need to dance around it.

Shane nods. "I'm thinking. Best time will be the twentieth, we don't have a game the day after."

Ilya's studying him. "And we play on the ninteenth."

"Yeah."

"So you will still be -"

"Yeah," Shane says again.

"On the ice -"

"I know." The words come from Shane's chest, breathy.

The call quality isn't perfect, but he can see Ilya's throat move. "You are so desperate to beat me. And so slow. You must distract me with - ?"

"Are you distracted?"

"Little."

"Good."

"You know what would distract me more?"

"You'll tell me."

It's the right answer. Ilya's grin goes wolfish. "Legs up. Show me the hole I bred."

—

It turns out Shane's the distracted one on the ice. First time in his life.

Thanks to Cliff Marleau slamming into him like an abrupt, inevitable refrigerator, Shane picks up a concussion, a broken collarbone, and some facial bruising.

Something else, too, but it's not apparent for another twelve hours or so.

—

Early, early in the morning, Shane miscarries. Whoops.

It's not actually that bad, just - the blood's hard to miss on the sheets, and the way his stomach's turning suggests that - thanks to some combination of concussion, painkillers, and whatever's going on in his lower body right now - puking is likelier than not.

He has to press the button for the night nurse and tell her what's going on.

The nurse, a bright-eyed, zippy omega, introduced herself earlier by claiming that while she's a Nutcrackers fan by birth, Shane's her favorite player in Montreal.

If getting his abortion meds from a mild-mannered, aggressively discreet concierge provider feels like telling someone he's shit the bed, imagine how much fun Shane's having now.

Alone, in pain, exhausted, and high, he throws himself on the mercy of a kinship he's never fostered. (Omega guys can't really claim it, anyway.) Tells her what's happening. That it's whatever, but it absolutely can't make it into his medical record. "The Metros have access to all that stuff. If they find out, they'll get rid of me." He tries, against most of his nature, to make his voice soft. Gentle. "You know they will."

She's surprisingly relaxed about that part. Says he's not the first person to ask. That it's not even against policy - whose, he doesn't know, but he's glad it's permissive - to stretch the truth if the patient requests it. Tells him she'll code it as a stress-induced uterine purge.

"Gross," he says, which makes her smile as she takes his vitals.

—

When Shane's mom gets there, he tells her to arrange a gift for the nurse's station. Names a budget that briefly seems to make her think he's still high.

—

They re-up Shane's fentanyl or oxy or whatever it is about an hour before Ilya slips in the room, so Shane's feeling halfway terrible and halfway awesome again, and a lot less sharp than he was that morning.

He barely remembers it later. Just that he gets to hold Ilya's hand. Ilya's worried face. Ilya cautioning Shane to be quiet. Asking how he feels.

His shoulders slump with relief when he learns that Shane's no longer knocked up.

"Not currently," Shane adds, feeling sly.

Ilya shushes him again, for some reason.

Well, Shane knows the reason. It just doesn't seem that important, right now. "This is good stuff," he says, probably not for the first time.

Oh the other hand, inviting Ilya to his cottage doesn't go as well as Shane had secretly hoped it would.

In the third X-Squad movie, when Rose's omega snake girl character formally invites the alpha guy with three arms (the extra now mechanical, following a terrible laser beam accident) into her extradimensional fortress, he falls to one knee with theatrical alpha courtesy and pledges fealty to her space army.

(Shane might be confusing a few details, there, but also: those movies really are that stupid.)

Ilya didn't need to swear to exterminate alien space Nazis for Shane, but a thank you might have been nice.

It's okay, though. Shane's not the army-commanding-snake-girl type of omega. He can fight his own fights.

And a tense maybe isn't a no.

— 

In juniors, after he'd presented, Shane billeted in a few different houses.

They had to move him around a couple of times. The omega thing was inconvenient for everyone.

Hockey moms and hockey dads are two different things. When his parents met the couples he billeted with, Shane's dad and the billet dad would get to talking, Shane's dad feeling the guy out; sometimes he'd text Shane stuff after like Robert bought a hybrid last month and doesn't know how he feels about it. Say it's cool and you'll be set!

It always worked, too. The dads would clap Shane on the back and call him son conspicuously, uncomfortably. Say their (uniformly beta or omega) wives were really nice women and they were going to love having him there.

Shane's billet moms were bolder. They'd look between Shane and his mom and sigh gently, sweetly. Say things like well, it does happen in families, like Shane was a fucking alcoholic, or a pregnant teen.

His mom would give them this frown-smile. Apologetic eyes. (A nonthreatening female alpha, or her best effort at it.) But her jaw was always tight, and she'd squeeze Shane's hand before letting him go.

— 

"My parents keep asking if you're gonna come by this summer," Shane admits to Rose over the phone.

"Well, I still might. They can't keep me here until September. I'm gonna lose my mind."

"I don't think that's what they mean."

"Well, just tell them."

"Rose."

"Just do it. Tell them I'm gay and you got sick of being my beard."

Shane's parents met Rose once. Said she was so refreshing, which they all understood - without talking about it - to mean that Rose and his mom weren't fucking weird about each other. They liked it, liked her.

"I can't lie to them."

"Um?"

"More than I already have."

"I think they'd love it. And then they'd have to keep my secret. My big lesbian secret."

"They probably would love that," Shane says. His parents liked them together, but they'd happily settle for having insider information about an incredibly famous, successful, beautiful actress.

On the other hand… there's the flipper thing. Shane's dad probably wouldn't care, but his mom honestly might, on some level, feel disappointed in Rose.

Not that she and Shane aren't getting back together. (Though that, too, would be there.)

It's more that Shane's mom has spent her entire life working alternately against and with others' ideas about alpha women. She's tough but not too tough. Assertive but not annoying.

She taught Shane to do the same thing with expectations for omega men: show everyone he's flexible, not weak. (Literally, figuratively.) Let his teammates know he expects good behavior like a man would, not like their mommy.

She might be a little less impressed by Rose, or just less charmed, if they tell her that Rose is a stereotypical alpha dyke.

Like, not - they wouldn't hate her. But they might think she took advantage of Shane, or something. And then they'd be disappointed in Rose and Shane, and Shane might die.

So he can't tell his parents yet, he doesn't think. He needs more time to figure it out.

— 

While recuperating in his childhood home, Shane fills his time doing infuriatingly gentle PT and not pushing it, Shane. Watching the rest of the MLH season zoom along without him. Not texting Ilya too much.

That last one requires almost as much willpower as the first one.

Ilya hasn't said anything about the cottage. Shane hasn't, either. (Don't push it, Shane.) He increasingly thinks Ilya won't mention it. Will just… let it pass by. Which hurts. What's Shane going to do, though?

Just gotta hope Ilya's still up for nasty MLH Awards. -

Oh. Right. Shane's not going to be there.

It's become a touchstone of the end of the season, but his season's been over for a while already.

So Shane glues himself to the end of everyone else's season in its stead. Watches with his mom, every game, which he hasn't gotten to do since he was fifteen and they were confident enough that his heat cycle was regular to finally billet him out in Manitoba.

He doesn't text Ilya during what turns out to be the final game. Hayden, sure; JJ, some; even in the all-players Metros group chat, Shane chimes in as much as he thinks they'll tolerate. The larger group doesn't really go for commentary more substantial and interesting than cocksucking SF refs.

(Shane's heard the alpha Metros chat takes it more seriously than the all-players chat; gets into stats and performance in the same way Shane and his mom like to. Good for them.)

(There's no omega Metros chat. Obviously.)

The Admirals take it. The Admirals.

Meaning Scott fucking Hunter wins a Cup.

This is unthinkable. Unprecedented. Hunter's always approaching the finish line, never getting past it.

"How did you do that," Shane complains at his mom, who shrugs elegantly.

Then, well, a buff, sweet-faced, beta-looking guy's coming down, and Hunter - well, you know. Everyone knows. The all-players Metros chat is blowing up, mostly variations on uhhhhhhhh and wtf and do you think that's at least an omega and how the fuck would any of us know and crazy either way. America's jackass president is tweeting about it ten minutes later.

Shane already knows his dad's going to send him several public radio snippets on the topic over the next week. Kind and thoughtful analyses. It's still going to hurt every time.

But right after, Shane's taking a call in the other room, and Ilya's saying, with easy formality: "I wish to accept your invitation to the cottage."

—

Before he can make his way to the cottage (his cottage!), to spend time alone and then with Ilya (his Ilya?), Shane heads back to Montreal.

He needs to tie up a couple days' worth of loose ends he couldn't while he was hurt, like the season's concluding exit interview with Theriault. It lasts longer than normal, dwelling on Shane's injury. ("You're not the first player to look up or down at the wrong moment, Hollander. But I expect more from you than other players.")

Then he drops in on the Pikes. Jackie and Hayden are home. Arthur, too. The twins are out somewhere.

Jackie's eight months pregnant, so they have the necessary back-and-forth about how they're both feeling.

"Normal by now," she says. "Done this a few times."

Shane nods along.

"This is your first concussion, right?"

"First since I got to the show," Shane says. He took a few before then. Sometimes the potential ramifications of that keep him up at night.

"You feeling okay?"

"Yeah. PT's good, no PCS detected."

"None detected, or actually no PCS?" she asks. She's smart. She knows hockey players, too.

"None yet," he says.

"You want me to take a look at your chart?" she asks, which is her way of asking to see it.

Hayden's policy is to give eight-months-pregnant Jackie pretty much whatever she asks for. Shane follows suit by emailing her his after-visit summary, which she reads through like Shane reads nonfiction about Canadian sporting life: intent, leisurely. One hand comes to rest on her belly.

(She's bored, Hayden said of the decision to have this next kid. Shane wonders if it would be so outlandish for Jackie to just go back to work. Surely nurses can go part time, or something? Volunteer somewhere?)

For an energetic but aimless span of time, Shane and Hayden shoot the shit about the end of the season, not talking about Scott Hunter at all. (Why would they be talking about him? Except that, you know, it's crazy.)

"Hayd, go get the girls from dance," Jackie eventually directs.

Hayden hops to, even though they have nannies to do that for them. "Shane, you wanna -" he starts.

"No, Shane, you stay here," Jackie says. "I'm stuck so close to home. Let me talk to any adult who's not my beloved husband, please? I have a bottle of shitty, alcohol-removed white in the fridge. We can crack it open."

They don't usually do that, but she demanded weirder stuff right before Arthur came along. Once, she had Shane and Hayden assemble a bunch of Ikea furniture for Arthur's room, even though the Pikes already had perfectly nice West Elm stuff set up in there. (And despite the fact that a gig worker could have done it faster and better for like… no money.)

Then, a week later, she got annoyed with how overcrowded it was and had them call someone to take most of it away.

Shane has nothing to do for the rest of the day except pack up a few things and get to sleep early enough that he can hit the road tomorrow morning. He can hang around.

After Hayden's gone, and following some pleasantries about the third-guest-room-turned-baby's-room, Jackie - catty-corner from Shane on the Pikes' sofa, so they can watch Arthur do stuff with his trucks - gets very serious.

"So. Your notes."

"How's it look?" It's not that there's anything she could tell him that the doctors didn't already. She just likes medicine, likes thinking about this stuff.

"Oh, fine. You know that." She's pressing her lips together, a deliberate thinking pose.

He nods slowly. She'll get around to whatever it is or she won't.

"It's just - it looks like some stuff occurred alongside the concussion."

Well, yeah. "Collarbone's okay. They don't foresee any issues. Barely any actual rehab. PT's going good."

She nods. Shakes her head. "So, but. I mean, that's - I'm glad. But there's also this, um. Stress-induced uterine shedding?"

He winces. Pulls it back. (Don't be a pussy, Hollander. She's going to go through stuff a lot grosser than hearing the words uterine shedding.)

"Oh, Shane," she says, understandably misinterpreting his distress. "Did you - do you want to talk about it?"

"About what?" There's a lot of it in his life, and he wants to talk about almost none of that.

"That part. The… shedding."

He shakes his head. "Nothing to say. It didn't hurt."

She opens her mouth. Closes it. "Okay. I just want to - I feel like I should. Um. Sorry. I'm not…"

Last time a girl talked to Shane like this, she told him he's gay. He's not sure he can take any more relevations along those lines.

"Maybe just spit it out?" he suggests. It's not elegant, but it usually works.

She nods. "It's just that - stress-induced uterine shedding for omegas usually spans about twelve hours. Like, after a serious operation or something, they might keep you in the hospital to make sure that if it does happen, it's not uncontrolled."

"Okay."

"How long did yours last?"

He shrugs. "I was pretty high."

She nods. "I - your chart says it was immediate. And total. That's… unusual. Did you know that?"

Aw, fuck. "No."

"Stress-induced uterine shedding that lasts so little time happens with uterine cancer," she tells him gently. "Or, sometimes, irregular, uncontrolled heats."

Her eye darts to the spot on his arm where they inserted his suppressor implant. One time, he let her poke at it. She noted that it was different from Hayden's, deeper. Apparently, the alpha ones can be embedded in fascia instead of muscle.

"In nursing school, they teach you to look out for it in omega - in men who are omegas?" She's using the PC men-who-are-omegas phrasing. Shane doesn't know if that feels nice, or sort of - too much. "Sometimes, doctors… make assumptions. And code an episode as a fast stress-induced uterine shed. When it's actually something else." Then she just stops. And stares at him.

"Okay." He just looks back at her, waiting.

She breaks. "Well. Sometimes, if it's not uterine cancer or unsuppressed, uncontrolled heats, it's… actually a miscarriage? And the patient doesn't get properly informed. Because of those assumptions."

Shane nods.

"So just. If there's anything you want to talk about. I'm here for you, okay?"

That would be a really nice offer, if Shane needed help. If he wanted his fucking - uterine condition scrutinized.

Unfortunately, that's actually the last thing he wants in the world, barring maybe a trade to Phoenix. "Um. Thank you. I'm fine, though."

She hesitates. "It's just - it's really unusual. For uterine shedding to complete in so little time. So maybe you should get screened? I don't want to dump this on your summer. But it's important to be proactive about this stuff. Uterine cancer moves fast."

"Oh. Okay."

Unfortunately, she knows him well enough to spot when he's waving something off. "Shane, I'm serious. They didn't order any tests along those lines, so. It's important to be safe. And. Informed. If you think anything else could be going on. That they failed to tell you about."

"I don't think so, no."

"Just. If you have any spotting, pelvic pain, back pain -"

Huh. "Back pain?"

"Sometimes."

"If anything like that happens, I will definitely tell a doctor immediately." He'd be organizing an appointment right the fuck now, if he didn't know exactly what was really going on.

She nods. "And… just so you know." Tentative, now. Careful. Like breaking the news of the death of a relative to a child who doesn't quite understand the significance. "The - the first month or two of pregnancy, they don't feel exactly like you might think? It's different, from person to person. So… I just - if that happens to someone, they deserve to know about it." Big eyes, wet and sympathetic.

This is so nice of Jackie, and also. Also.

There's this idea that flippers don't know a lot about their bodies, right?

Like, people think that if an alpha woman gets an omega man pregnant, it might be that the two of them didn't realize what was happening.

Or even that it was possible. That one's very funny to Shane, because it's not like anyone lets flippers forget.

After all, pregnancy used to be deadly for omega men, right? So couples who let it happen must be dumb.

(Except it's really uncommon for an alpha woman to get an omega man pregnant.

Historically, pre-oral contraceptives, if an alpha woman and an omega man wanted to have a baby in the nice, normal way, where the girl gets pregnant and no one is all grossed out by it? There was always a small risk. And it still barely ever happened. Or at least - people didn't talk about it much, when it did.

So you can forgive people for being a little surprised by the rare inverse outcome.

Also, from what Shane's read - which, again, really not a lot - it's not like anyone knows the man's getting knocked up in real time. No one feels the fertilized egg go from the girl's cunt into the guy's dick. Like. It's fucking microscopic?)

There's other stuff, too. Alpha women don't know how to control themselves in rut. Okay, but alpha men supposedly don't, either, and no one acts like they're stupid for it. Omega men think they're dying at the onset of their first heats. How about you try unexpectedly shitting blood and see what your first thought is?

Alpha men are extra smug about how little alpha women (supposedly) know. Same goes for omega women about omega men. Can't hack it, you didn't know what you were in for, et cetera.

Shane's (pretty) sure that Jackie - an omega - doesn't mean anything by it.

But you don't have to think Shane's an ignorant slut to treat him like one; it rankles just the same.

(Or, if Ilya's treating him that way, it turns Shane on just the same.)

That's Shane's best excuse for saying, "Jesus, Jackie. You think I'm a fucking I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant case?"

Her eyes widen. "Shane -"

"No, not - I'm not. Fuck." He didn't mean to imply that he'd known - didn't mean to imply she was right - but it's going to be fucking hard to walk back now, isn't it?

She holds her hands up. "You don't have to tell me anything."

"There's nothing to tell, Jackie. Whatever you're thinking, it's - it's not a big deal." The Shane fucking men thing is a huge deal, but that's not the only way Shane could get like this; he could get knocked up by having lightly transgressive but perfectly heterosexual sex with any female alpha, literally including Rose fucking Landry.

Jackie tries, "These things are - hard to process. And I think, um, for omega males, or - men who are omegas - it might not always be a supportive environment - especially being -" she gestures at Shane, like, all of this - "so if you want to talk about it. At all. I'm here for you."

He blinks, unsure what to say.

She leans forward, intent. "You don't have to carry this alone."

"Whoa, no," he says. "Jackie, it's okay. It's whatever, it's totally fine."

"I never - but my friends who have… I know it was horrible, every time."

Was it horrible? Not for Shane.

Shane's mom had some early miscarriages before Shane came along, but she never made it sound like a thing. It was more like, no, we're not going for another, getting Shane was enough of a pain.

Maybe she only had that perspective in hindsight.

Or maybe, at the time, she also got a well-meaning talk from somebody who thought she wasn't adequately upset. Didn't understand the gravity of the situation. Struck them as just a little bit uninformed about it all. Felt she wasn't going about things in quite the right way.

Is Shane doing it wrong?

He thinks of Ilya, in Moscow. Strained by grief and its petty bureaucracy - closing accounts, arranging a funeral, dodging his brother. Asking Shane to distract him, to get him out of his head.

When they had sex on camera, when Shane got on all fours to show Ilya his asshole, Ilya got kind of huffy at Shane for making your back do that without me there. You look like any motherfucker could have you, Ilya said, though Shane was alone. It sounded like the thought hurt him. But compared to the death of his father and the dissolution of his family, it was probably an easier hurt. Smaller. The type that feels good.

Ilya's neck visibly lost tension when Shane shoved three fingers into his own mouth as directed.

And he gave a ragged, gut-punched moan when Shane assured him, it's okay, it's fine, I'll kill anyone else who tries to breed me.

After, Ilya thanked Shane for lying on his back with his knees bent. You are the only person who can do anything right, he told Shane gravely. Who is helpful. The only one.

(Isn't Svetlana helping you? Shane asked.

Ilya, resentful and cute, grumbled, Maybe her, too. I guess.)

… no, Shane decides. He's not doing this wrong. None of it's wrong.

(Okay, fine: it feels wrong, in a hot way, but Jackie doesn't need to know that.)

"I'm fine," he tells Jackie firmly. "Thank you. It's fine."

Politely ginger, Jackie goes, "Can I ask - did you know?"

Shane sighs. Fucking - sure. Okay. Here they are. "Yeah."

Her eyebrows go way up. If that surprises her, if she thought she knew the answer, why did she ask? "Then why - why were you playing?"

"In the game? It's hockey." At her blank look, he says, "I… play hockey?" That's a pretty big thing to know about Shane.

Pursed lips. "Did you have a plan?"

"For the game? Or like - for?"

"The pregnancy."

Does she honestly imagine Shane didn't? That he got knocked up, shrugged his shoulders, and decided - omega himbo that he is - to think about it some other time?

"I was going to handle it," Shane says evenly.

"Handle it like…"

"I mean. It's not like I could keep it, even if I wanted to," Shane says sensibly. "I'm a hockey player."

"Oh, Shane, that's awful." She's gone all wide-eyed and sympathetic.

Yikes, that was a misstep. Time to correct. Shane hazards, "No, I - it's fine. I wasn't being - I mean, it's kind of convenient it happened from the hit? I'd be bummed if I'd skipped an optional skate to handle it and then got knocked out of the season anyway."

"Is that… why?"

"Why…"

"The hit?"

Shane chokes on his grape juice. "Like why Marleau steamrolled me? I was an idiot and looked away for a second. Do you really think I'd get slammed like that on purpose?" That he'd do anything like that on purpose? It basically guaranteed the Metros were out of playoffs.

"I guess not," Jackie says sympathetically.

Shane shakes his head. "There are easier ways to take care of... I wouldn't get myself taken out for the season, fuck."

"Then why…"

He slides his hands over his knees and groans. It is, he realizes belatedly, a very Ilya move. "I was going to deal with it on the twentieth."

After the nineteenth, when he'd planned to have crazy postgame sex about it. RIP.

Jackie still looks lost. Like someone's told her something tragic. Like Shane's been hurt.

"It's really okay, Jackie," Shane says softly, trying to tone-match her. "I… appreciate your concern? I - I know the timing was stupid. It won't happen again."

He doesn't know if he has much intention of following through on that, but. If he has a miscarriage during a concussion a second time, he'll handle it then. She doesn't need to know, otherwise.

"Shane, god, it's not the timing. I'm just worried about you. Is that - did you have anyone to help, or… were you going to take a couple of days off…?"

"No, I wouldn't let it affect the team like that. I timed it out so I could skip optional skate if I really needed to."

"What if something went wrong?"

He nods. "Something did."

"You know what I mean."

Shane doesn't, really. The risks of medical abortions are like, zero. Safer than Tylenol or penicillin, the (reputable) websites say. And the morning after pill, even less; Shane could take it every day of his life, if he wanted. During his last abortion meds telehealth appointment, Shane's discreet, mild-mannered NP said of both: go nuts. (If Shane had been hoping to hear that it's risky, well, that's his business.) "Yeah, I don't know. I wasn't really worried about it."

"It's a serious thing," she says slowly. (Is it? Like, does it have to be?) "Doing that alone sounds hard."

"No, it's - it's just the pills, you don't even have to go somewhere to take them." Shane had honestly been looking forward to it as a cheat day. Working out at home, not going anywhere or seeing anyone.

"Well - yes, but there are still… symptoms. You must've had some during the - the miscarriage, right? Not just the, um, shedding itself. Nausea. Fatigue. Chills, sometimes."

He shakes his head. "No. I don't get any of that." The tiny fever last summer nonwithstanding, but he that's no one's fucking business.

"Shane. I know you guys are tough, but even if you're used to muscling through a cold at practice, you still might -"

"No. Jackie. It's been fine before."

"Before."

"Yeah."

"Before?"

Shane shrugs.

"Okay. Okay. So you… had a sense of what was ahead of you." She's nodding to herself, like she's working to incorporate the idea that, what, Shane's gotten laid enough to get knocked up? He's a fucking underwear model. Rose Landry thinks he's fuckable.

"Yeah. It's fine."

Shane can see her practically physically resisting the urge to ask. She tries hard, but curiosity wins out: "If you wanted to talk about that, I would be here. To listen."

He looks at her. Blinks. She's gonna have to try harder than that.

A few seconds of silence, filled only by Arthur's trucks.

Then Jackie breaks. "This happened before March?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"Um." He swirls his grape juice for something to do. "Well, last summer." For one.

"Oh, Shane, that's so recent," she says. That one's less concerned than the others. More… there's no recrimination in her voice. But a little scandal, sure.

"Yep."

"And that was… how was that?"

"It was whatever," Shane repeats. "Like, it was fine." She looks doubtful, so he tries, "What did you say, earlier? Normal by now. Done this a few times."

Jackie's eyes widen again. She leans forward. "A few?"

He nods.

"How many times?" There it is. She's gone from sympathetic to gossipy.

"Actual abortions?" He darts a glance to Arthur; he's playing, still, trucks going up and down a plastic loop, mostly backwards.

Jackie's brow crinkles. "Are you… you mean as opposed to miscarriages?"

"Well, of course. But - just abortions, or abortions and morning after stuff?" They're totally different things, but some people think about them like they're related.

She puts her face in her hands for a second. "I was only asking about abortions, Shane."

"Uh." Would've been summer 2016, summer 2015, summer 2014. Have there been any others? It feels like more than that. Weird, how fast something kind of fucked up and unbelievably hot becomes a touchstone you can rely on.

Shane and Ilya wouldn't have come up with any of this if they hadn't gotten that first one for free.

It's a sad thought, but also a happy one? Like, accidents don't have to be bad.

"You don't have to say," Jackie says hurriedly.

"Oh, no, I wasn't -" Shane says. "I was just counting. Abortions, just three? And the one miscarriage."

Jackie chokes on her not-wine. "Shane. That's - kind of a lot. At twenty five?"

Hang on, now. "You're three years older than me."

"And I've had zero abortions."

Huh. "Not even a D&C after - ?" Sometimes they do it postpartum, just for the placenta and stuff, even if everything goes well. And he's heard they consider post-miscarriage D&Cs to be abortions in the States now, which is another reason that Ilya should really consider noping the fuck out of that place.

"No."

Shane nods to acknowledge this fact.

Jackie looks at him like, So what the fuck.

What does she want from him, here? "I guess that makes sense, since you have a lot of kids?"

Jackie shakes her head. "I - why - have you considered, um, birth control?"

Shane hums to buy time. "Well, I can't go on hormonal birth control. The League." He's been lucky that the morning after pill isn't on the list of banned substances. Might just be an oversight on MLH's part? They're not known for deep awareness of omega health issues.

Jackie nods sympathetically.

"And the copper IUD is. Like. To get it in, they'd have to open me way the fuck up. At that point, might as well get my tubes tied."

"A tubal ligation," Jackie says. (Shane will sound defensive if he says he knew that.) "Those are reversible, you know. So if you wanted to undo it later -"

Jesus fucking christ. "I know what reversible means, yeah."

She holds up a hand. I come in peace. "So…"

For omega or beta women, getting your tubes tied is a pretty simple: outpatient, laparoscopic. Low risk. Scars small enough you have to be looking to find them.

For omega men, though, it's kind of a big thing. It's still laparoscopic, but for anatomical reasons Shane doesn't understand, they have to go in from both the front and the back. You're supposed to take it easy even just walking around for a few days afterwards, which is fine for lots of people, but incompatible with Shane's everything.

And then at the end of it, Ilya wouldn't be able to breed Shane's ass anymore. Not for real.

So, sure. Shane sees the practical benefits. But since he and Ilya see each other so rarely -

Well, with the limited time they have, it's nice to be able to do something special.

"Maybe one day," he says carefully. "But for now, if I need to, pills are fine. It's not like I'm doing it every week." Even if he could, he wouldn't. It would be way too much to keep track of. And it would get old, after a while, probably.

"Sorry, I just - barriers are so effective, if they're used right. So… are you using those?"

"Yes, Jackie, fuck. Just. Not always?"

"Not always?" Her eyes are wide again. Jesus, the Pikes really planned every member of their child army, huh? Shane thought maybe the new one was sort of an accident-turned-plan. He guesses it would be a big coincidence for all of them to be born in the early offseason, though.

Shane looks at his knees. "Things happen."

"Like what?"

"Things, Jackie." He sips his juice.

"But - I just. Is someone pressuring you?" She leans in closer like someone's gonna hear. "Is it Rose?"

Right, of course.

Because deep down, female alphas are always controlling and irrational. Domineering. Predatory, some might say.

How could Shane forget? Being the child of one, and all.

"No one's pressuring me."

She nods slowly. Doesn't look like she believes him. "Okay. But this doesn't… seem like your usual behavior."

It's been pretty usual for a few years now. Why the fuck does Jackie think she knows shit about Shane's sex life, anyway? Why do people always feel like just because Shane's a flipper, they get to dissect - "Okay. I made a bad call. Everything turned out fine, though."

"But -"

"Jackie. Thank you for looking at my chart. I don't think we need to say any more about this," Shane says. It comes out more firm than he thought it might.

There's the hum of the Pikes' garage door opening.

Shane lets out a whoosh of breath. Thank god.

Quietly, he tells Jackie, "I don't want him to hear about this."

Hayden himself wouldn't be such a big deal, probably. But most of the Metros -

Well, Shane doesn't have illusions. Most of them would probably be uncool about it. Like. If even just girls who need Plan B are skanks, then Shane… yeah.

Some of them they wouldn't have much of a problem if it was Shane's girlfriend instead of Shane, and having a baby would kill her, and Shane seemed appropriately cut up about it. Others, maybe they'd be relieved for Shane, if some girl he picked up casually was getting an abortion, letting Shane off the hook for child support.

Shane himself being knocked up? Or even his hypothetical girlfriend being pregnant and just… not wanting it? It would be too much to ask of them. Way, way too much.

Jackie blinks. "I wouldn't."

Shane's face must do something wrong, because she leans in.

"Shane. I wouldn't. Omegas don't do that to each other."

In Shane's experience, omegas do a lot of things to each other: agree that it's weird, how some guys turn out. Giggle at the omega guy who's dating their friend. Yell fluke from the stands. Nod along with heat jokes on the golf course. Ask questions like what was your intuition telling you in the second half of the first? between periods. Talk to students about a classmate's sperm and eggs in the name of scientific education.

But the nurse at the hospital didn't fuck Shane over, so. Maybe there's variance.

"Thank you," he tells Jackie again, in case it makes a difference.

"Of course," she whispers.

There's a scraping at the door before Jade and Ruby careen in, Ruby hollering at the top of her lungs.

"We're home," Hayden calls out, dry.

Shane accepts the distraction happily. Jackie has the mercy to go along with it.

—

A message from Hayden, later that night: Why is Jackie asking if you have a girlfriend?

IDK, Shane replies. She wants to set me up with a yoga friend again?

She didn't say that.

Shane, grateful the Pikes will have a very distracting infant in like two days, just sends back a shrug emoji.

—

Shane drives up to Lanaudière a day ahead of Ilya getting there. Gives him time to check the place out. Make sure no pseudo-Shane's been roaming around his territory. (He knows no one has. He's got a contract with a security firm. But - what if, you know?)

He stocks up on (too much) food. Rubs his face on all the beds. Touches the trees around the backyard, pisses in the woods. (What? They're his fucking woods.)

No one can actually smell the resulting claim. That's not important. Shane just has to do it. More so than in most years.

He invited an alpha, after all.

Chapter 3: Lanaudière, Part I

Chapter Summary

You'd never guess Hollander's an omega, Metros fans say all the time.

What a compliment, right? That Shane doesn't seem breedable?

Chapter Notes

If you are interested in this very fictional story's real-life sources, pls refer to this comment.

Lanaudière, Part I:

For the Atlantic City expansion draft that year, teams have to submit their list of protected players halfway through June. It goes without saying that Shane is on the Metros' list.

It should go without saying, that is.

On the fifteenth, Theriault calls Shane. I wanted to personally let you know that we're protecting you from the expansion draft, he says.

It's Shane's cue to thank him.

We talked about it for a long time. In the end, it was a no-brainer. Yeah, you're hurt, but this is the first one. Apart from the knee last year.

That was when a defenseman from St. Louis plowed into Shane from the side. Left his knee stiff and bruised, with just a hairline fracture visible on the x-rays. Shane sat out one game.

Everyone knows you're working hard to come back from this. Come ready to prove yourself in the fall, okay? We're expecting a lot from you.

Shane gives the expected yes, sir, and his second obligatory thank you. What the fuck else can he say?

He catches extra flak. Always has. The omega thing, the Asian thing, the secretly-gay-and-maybe-some-people-can-smell-it-on-him thing, he doesn't know. There's a type of suit-wearing guy who thinks Shane's not tough enough. Who wants him to know no one's going to go easy on him.

Could be an empty threat. Could be a warning.

Either way, it suggests a certain tone for the free agency negotiations looming in the near distance, doesn't it? We're doing you a favor. Be grateful. Take what we give you and smile about it.

Shane relays the details of the call to his mom. To Farah, too, so nothing gets lost in translation.

He puts his foot down on discussing his mom's resulting twelve-node strategy map until after his supposed silent retreat.

In four years, there will be another expansion draft, to the new team percolating in Utah. Shane will turn thirty right before that. He'll be objectively past his prime. Expensive, too. And surely he'll have some additional injury under his belt by then. Especially if staying off of his knee for one fucking game counts.

Those are okay reasons for the Metros to keep Shane off of their list, if they're looking for them.

They'd be fucking stupid to do it, but they'd be justified.

And if the Metros don't shelter Shane, Salt Lake will snap him right up.

—

During the drive to the cottage, Ilya carefully teaches Shane a handful of swear words in Russian. All you need to know, he tells Shane. Watching his mouth shape the syllables. Laughing gently when he gets something wrong.

Also, he just outright says he's excited and terrified to enter Shane's territory.

It's obvious flattery, but. Doesn't mean it's not nice.

—

At the threshhold, Ilya pauses. "Wait. Wait." He rummages around in his bag, pulls out a box.

Shane sets down Ilya's bag to accept it. "Oh."

"Russian thing."

The box is about the size of Shane's hand, a few inches tall. Silver with a brown ribbon. "Do I -"

Ilya gestures for him to go ahead.

The ribbon whispers as it slips off. The scent of chocolate blooms in the air, dark and sweet.

Inside, he finds nine dried apricots, each dipped in gleaming dark chocolate, just a sliver of golden orange peeking out from each confectionary blanket. They look like tiny sunsets.

Shane blinks. "How did you know I like chocolate?"

"Doesn't everyone?"

"Well. Yeah."

"So."

Shane ate three bites of cake at Arthur's first birthday party. It was the offseason, and the cake was from this one Park Ex bakery that's practically famous, and it was for a baby's birthday party; as Shane's not a lunatic or the actual Grinch, he accepted the slice offered to him.

Still, three different people said to Shane, wow, you're eating it!

There's a name on the inside of the box that Shane doesn't recognize, the imprint stark and understated enough to suggest luxury, expense. If this came from an airport shop, it was one of the nice ones.

"Thank you," Shane says carefully. "Very much. Do we… share?"

He's not totally sure how he feels about chocolate and apricot together, just as a concept. If he hates them, maybe he can get Ilya to eat at least four.

Ilya shrugs. "If you want." Definition of casual. He's so hard to read, sometimes.

"I want."

Ilya ducks his head. "Thank you for inviting me to your home."

It's not obsequious, but it's… deferent.

… oh. This might not be a Russian thing so much as a Russian alpha thing.

There's no one perfect playbook for cross-cultural etiquette stuff.

Shane's parents would have been a great model, if his parents gave a shit about old-fashioned, conservative formalities.

And if Shane's mom had immigrated when she was old enough to remember, like, anything about Japan.

And if his dad was an alpha man, or if his mom was an omega woman. Only matches with at least one or the other ever warranted all of that.

(Shane assumes that the old etiquette manuals relegated flippers to footnotes. And gay shit sure never came up. The old days fucking sucked, he's aware.)

Shane hazards an incredibly weak, "You're welcome. Um. Thank you for coming. Please come in?"

And hey, it's not a total fuckup of Russian etiquette, because Ilya does.

—

There's a buzz under Shane's skin, watching Ilya pad cautiously past his kitchen. Happiness, nerves.

High stakes, putting his favorite place and his - well, maybe his favorite person - together.

Ilya makes fun of him a little for being so excited about the quad-glazed windows, but he also seems impressed. Or - charmed, maybe. Lets Shane brag about having his own well. Is the lake good for swimming? Yes, Shane says. And the woods - are the woods good for running? Yeah, Shane tells him. His breath catches on the end of it.

When it gets awkward, when the nerves start to overwhelm the happiness, Ilya saves them both by finally, finally, putting his tongue in Shane's mouth, slipping it back behind Shane's teeth, right where it's supposed to be.

—

Ilya hasn't fucked anyone since they were together in Tampa, apparently.

It's not that Shane doesn't believe him. Alphas don't actually need to fuck more than other people do. Sure, they're louder about their libidos. Less secure. But Shane doesn't think they actually want sex more.

It's just. Odd. Shane didn't even know to want that. It's a lot of responsibility, to be the first one after so long.

Ilya makes a really compelling point about getting their hands on each others' dicks right there on the couch. Shane - a playmaker - drags them both into a bedroom anyway, where Ilya does this thing where he pretends he's a sexually inappropriate hotel guest and pins Shane down on the bed; Shane fights and squirms, but Ilya doesn't let him go.

Shane's stuck there, spread out, neck bared, body rolling underneath Ilya's, just for a second.

"They make you come to work at the hotel like this," Ilya grumbles to Shane. "Put you in front of me. Stupid."

"Like what?" Shane asks. He doesn't intend it as a bit, but Ilya's pupils dilate.

He leans down and says against Shane's ear, "Preheat, sweetheart."

That's - that's hot, actually. Shane in a crappy situation, just the bellboy who couldn't skip a shift, and Ilya stepping in.

But right now, Shane just - he can't stay still. Keeps moving them around. Because -

Well, because: when he goes out of Ilya's reach, Ilya follows. Slow and intent, laughing both with Shane and at him.

It does something to Shane's stomach, turning around to see Ilya right behind him. Pulling away and watching Ilya reach back out.

Like he wants to catch Shane.

So catch me, Shane thinks at him. Grab me, corner me -

And Ilya does, boxing him in against the window in a way Shane doesn't want to wriggle away from.

Ilya's got Shane right where he wants him. Which, incidentally, is right where Shane wants to be: in front of Ilya, his back to the sweep of his own territory, so Ilya can take it all in at once.

(Playmaker.)

He ends up sucking Ilya's dick - and Ilya wants it so bad, it's so fucking hot - with Ilya facing the window, looking out at Shane's forest, Shane's lake, Shane's domain. Here it is, here I am, don't you like it, Shane thinks at him, going for a slow, agonizing suck. Don't I make you feel good? Does anyone else make you feel this good? Don't you wish you could stay?

—

After blowjobs, Ilya makes Shane get up and walk around with him some more. Shane points out the stuff he's proud of. His well, again. The fire pit. The lake. The big-ass boulder they dug up during excavation and placed carefully in the lake, far enough out to be something to swim for.

They stand on the shore with their toes in the water. Shane makes them be quiet for a second. "There's nothing. Listen," he says. No one around. No street noise. No planes, even. Just… them.

Ilya faces the lake with his eyes closed, holding Shane's hand. "Nice here," he says. He cracks one eye open long enough to look at Shane when he says, "I like your territory, Shane."

The management company that leases out the condo adjacent to Shane's spoke knowingly, when Shane set things up with them, about how it's difficult for alphas and omegas to rent places out. They don't like ceding space, they said.

That's bullshit, Shane's pretty sure.

For one thing, he didn't hire them because he has territory issues; he hired them because he makes seven mil a year and he doesn't have time to be someone's landlord.

For another thing, he's realizing that he would cede a scary amount of territory to Ilya, given half a chance.

He already has.

Shane rubs his fingertips across Ilya's knuckles. "Thank you. For coming."

—

Ilya doesn't actually breed Shane until the afternoon, which Shane thinks is pretty inconsiderate.

Back in the bedroom, the blinds are still open.

Shane doesn't put them down.

When Ilya shifts away to look for lube, Shane gets on all fours, a dramatic arch to his back. A perfect breeding pose that he definitely hasn't practiced lately.

(Okay, so he has. He's had lots of time on his hands, all right? And now his recommended videos are all things like Yoga for omega fertility and 10 Exercises to Stay Limber During Your Next Heat.)

Ilya inhales sharply. "Shane."

"Yeah." It sounds like a sex thing: yeah, yes, there.

"Your spine is okay from the hit? No problems?"

"It's fine."

"Good." Ilya's hand lands between Shane's shoulder blades and forces him face down, ass up. He's not gentle.

Shane groans. "Fuck me."

In tender Russian, mouth inches from Shane's hole, Ilya hushes him and murmurs, "Bitch."

The boring, conscious part of Shane's brain that mostly learned when people are talking shit through rote memorization goes, oh, that's not an appropriate thing to call me, my mother wouldn't like that at all.

The rest of his brain tells that part to shut up shut up shut up so we can hear him if he says it again.

Ilya probably glances up at Shane; Shane probably nods at him, wordless, fast. He doesn't know, really, because right after that, Ilya grabs Shane's hips with both hands, and Shane doesn't have to think anymore.

—

Shane only barely convinces Ilya not to make him come on just his tongue and one pathetic finger.

In, he keeps having to beg. In, in. Please. Fucking - inside already.

Ilya wants Shane coming on his cock, too, Shane knows. He just also likes it when Shane pleads with him.

When Ilya's dick finally goes inside - a slow, heavy slide, god, it's good - Shane doesn't last long.

It's the closest he's felt to heat, outside of it. Something frantic in him. A race to the finish line.

Shane's in, in turns into knot me, please, please.

"No." There's a smile in Ilya's voice. Satisfaction eclipsed by triumph, or by greed. "You're not ready yet."

"Yes, I am," Shane insists. He's not, actually, but two weeks is enough to recover, surely. Two weeks is forever. And who even cares about recovery, really?

Ilya's got one hand planted between Shane's shoulder blades again; it makes everything Shane says come out breathy.

Ilya calls him a bitch again. There's something attached, probably an adjective. It's sympathetic, the way Ilya says it. Like he knows Shane's struggling.

"You won't have it," Ilya informs Shane. "I'm sorry."

There's finality to it, hurtful and hot.

At Shane's whimper, Ilya shushes him. "Just my come. That's all you get."

Oh. "Yeah, fuck." Shane dips his back more, gets his ass as high and obvious as it can with Ilya already in him.

Ilya grunts. Russian, or maybe just a slurred fuck. "Poor thing. So sad. Need - my fucking - come in you."

"Knotted," Shane corrects, a worse slur in his voice.

A breathless laugh. "One day. Maybe. If you're good."

Shane, horny and stupid, just nods. Yes, yes. He'll be good. He'll be whatever he needs to be to get it where he needs it.

In the meantime, he refuses Ilya's reacharound with a pained sound. "Just breed me," he insists, tetchy.

"But you have to come first." In Russian, Ilya adds bitch again, then mumbles in English, sweetheart.

Shane's heart chooses the first one to speed up about. The second's just a bonus.

He groans or something. Ilya takes it as a protest. With all of his overconfident, alpha-minded, medically inaccurate idiocy, he goes, "Won't take if you don't come. You want it to work, right? Want me to fill you up?"

Shane definitely groans then. He musters enough of himself to grit out, "Fucking - fuck a baby into me, Rozanov."

There's a beat of silence before Ilya swears in Russian again, words Shane doesn't know, guttural and deep. He moves Shane's right leg wider. "It's here, you get it, like that, yes, take it -"

Shane does, with a pained sound and the desperate, fevered hope that his hole seizing up is enough to get Ilya to come. Enough to pull his come way down deep inside, where Shane is so overdue for a re-up.

—

"But I couldn't breed you yet. I had to hear all about your well water," Ilya tells Shane seriously, once Shane's hips are propped up, and after Shane's told him off for taking so long. He passes Shane a glass, sips some of his own. "It's good."

This, stupidly, makes Shane's head loll back.

Two weeks. Two weeks of this.

—

They work through the apricots that night. Shane's thrilled (well, more relieved) that the flavors work together, not nearly as bitter as chocolate and orange together. The coating snaps satisfyingly when he bites into it, like those flat filled Ghiradelli squares.

Ilya glances over while Shane tries the first one. When Shane makes an oh! sound about the snap, Ilya cracks a smile.

He doesn't touch them, doesn't so much as look in the box's direction, until Shane urges him take, take. Even then, he won't. Shane has to put one in Ilya's hand, which briefly closes around it, like it's a treasure.

—

For such a sleepy, cozy span of time, a lot happens within it.

Shane makes burgers, for one.

Ilya gives him shit about halving the recipe, but Shane was too excited about grilling to make less.

Omegas never get to man the barbecue. It's just a thing.

(Actually, in a big group of mostly white people - or maybe just the ones Shane sees day-to-day - the Asian guy usually isn't the first pick to hold the tongs, either. At least not without everyone clenching up about MSG or some shit. Or making super timely and topical jokes about hibachi. Throw a shrimp and I'll catch it in my mouth. Or no, no, babe. Hey, babe, get an egg, we can try the thing!

Maybe if Shane had a wife to patiently bring him an egg, he'd be humored on a grill until he proved himself. But he doesn't, so.

Anyway, the Metros are less about barbecues, more about steakhouses. That's a good thing. Stedlund once earnestly explained to Shane that if each side of a steak gets at least ten minutes on the grill, you don't even need a meat thermometer to know it's safe to eat.)

But this is Shane's fucking cottage and Shane's fucking Napoleon Prestige 500, so he can make as many burgers as he wants. And he can do it like a sane person.

Ilya, likewise, can give Shane as much shit about it as he wants, as long as he keeps standing behind him like that. Holding Shane's hips. Mouth brushing over Shane's shoulder.

One of his hands trails from Shane's hip to his abs, under Shane's shirt. He strokes Shane there. A light, light touch, moving in slow circles. "I put something here," he mumbles.

The way Ilya's hand feels against Shane's belly is something else. Or - the way Shane's body responds is, anyway. Inside, he turns lightweight and fluttery. Almost itchy.

It makes Shane want to arch his back. Drop his head back onto Ilya's shoulder. Get Ilya to do it over and over and over, until Shane loses track of time, of what's happening.

If Ilya was attentive enough, and if one of his thighs stayed between Shane's legs - fuck.

Maybe Shane could come from it, a little bit.

It feels that way. Like he's so fucking - fertile, so good at getting bred - at being knocked up - that just petting him like that could do it.

He really might be able to come, just from that. If it was Ilya helping him get there.

"You're not gonna distract me," Shane says, but his voice is too breathy, too excited.

"Oh. Too bad." Ilya drops his hands and steps away.

Shane makes a sound that's more of an exclamation point than anything else.

Ilya laughs at him. Comes back. Puts an arm around Shane's middle. "No, no, you are right. Cannot breed you and then leave you to make too many burgers by yourself."

"It is not too many," Shane protests. He pins Ilya's arm down with his elbow so the bastard can't go anywhere.

By the time the burgers are done, Shane's more than half hard. The food doesn't suffer for it, though.

(He'd like to see any of his alpha or beta grill-hog teammates do that.

Well, except that he really wouldn't.)

—

Ilya asks about Shane's family. Says Shane's mom is probably where you get your looks. It's maybe a microaggression. Shane's not great at identifying those, not all the time. It's also an unexpected departure from the usual thing, where someone looks Shane - beta-looking, normal guy - up and down and says his alpha mom must be how…?

Like it's rude to say Shane's a flipper, but fine to blame his mom for it.

"And your dad is, what, boring?" Ilya asks.

Shane's used to people seeing him and wanting an explanation: why is Shane Asian, why is he an omega, and how can he be both of those things and an MLH star?

(Like Paul Kariya never even happened. Okay!)

There's something different in Ilya's questions. He's got this fascinated crinkle in his brow about Shane's objectively boring and normal dad. Shane is used to needing to hammer home the normal point, to pushing back on the unspoken idea that a guy who marries an alpha woman must be a little bitch, or else some kind of rugged bodybuilding mountaineer who's incredibly secure in his masculinity.

(Honestly, the secure-in-his-masculinity part, probably so?

But also - Shane's parents met in college, when both of them were super cool and super hot.

It's not, like, a surprise they got together.)

Ilya's not asking about it like that. It's more like -

"Ryan Price, his parents are both alphas," Ilya says.

"Okay," Shane says, nonplussed.

Ilya shrugs.

"What?"

"It's interesting. To me."

"What is?"

Ilya shrugs again. "You know."

"Not really."

A sigh, from Ilya. "Some people. In Russia. Say children of, um, flippers and… not flippers… will be. Not so healthy. I know this is not true," he says, as soon as Shane opens his mouth. "It's like… people say you will get sick from rain, yes? Fake, but people say it."

"Okay."

"And you are healthy. So. Do people have a problem? With your parents?"

"Not like that." Sometimes his dad gets comments about how he signed up for a handful. Happens infrequently enough that he'll complain about it when it does. It's not just a regular, everyday thing.

"Good. Good for them." Earnest.

It's occurring to Shane that maybe his parents are - like, maybe, to Ilya, Shane's parents are basically gay? Since they couldn't be together in Russia? Is that possible?

(Especially given the potential implications of Svetlana's non-apocryphal dick, vis a vis Shane's own alpha mom.

Many thanks to both Svetlana and Ilya for that thought.)

Shane's parents would probably… not love that. Being seen like that. They've always made a thing about how it's not a thing. How they're a normal couple. A normal family.

Shane could be projecting, though. Maybe they'd love being pseudo-homosexual icons.

… Gross. His parents don't get to be gay. Being gay is Shane's thing.

—

That night, Ilya tells Shane about his mom's death.

"You weren't kidding about genetic stuff, huh?" Shane asks, and Ilya sighs, "No, is all a mess."

Hysteria, Ilya explains, was the reason given for his mother's moods. There were institutions for treatment, but if she'd gone in, she wouldn't have come back out.

(Last year, Ilya expressed enthusiasm for surprise heat porn. Shane's so glad he didn't reciprocate by disclosing his occasional perusal of omega male hysteria patient fantasy POV JOI stuff.

He's not proud, okay?

Anyway, he's never gotten too into those. They're too silly: the speaker wears weird steampunk shit or, god forbid, puts on an old-timey accent. Because hysteria's so old, you know? Such an outdated concept.

At least in Canada, it is. Yikes.)

Then Ilya floats the possibility of signing with a Canadian team once his contract's up.

At most, it could give them offseasons in the same country, more stolen weeks like these ones. And once Ilya retired, he wouldn't have to leave for Russia.

That's so remote. So distant.

And yet - that's almost better. That far in the future (really, five to ten years, but Shane's not prepared to think about how close retirement is), Ilya might still - possibly - see a place for Shane somewhere in his life. At least enough to talk to him about this plan now, like he thinks it could theoretically affect Shane. Because maybe - because, if they don't call this quits, then they could, they might -

"You should do it," Shane says.

"Yeah?" Ilya asks, a slow smile on his face.

"I mean. Yeah, I'd like - I'd like that. If it happened."

If Ilya signs with Vancouver and Shane ends up playing him basically never, it might kill him, but. What's one more thing on the pile?

—

Berries arrive the next day.

"No jam this year?" Shane asks, looking through the box.

He's not miffed that Ilya didn't remember, or didn't think the guy he just knocked up is worth the price of some god-tier rhubarb preserves.

He's not.

Ilya shakes his head. "That's for after." He gestures to Shane's middle, like: you know, for after you knock that out. "This one is for both of us."

"You mean you'll send jam later?"

Ilya gives him a shrug that means obviously.

"I still don't get why you do this." Why Ilya would think that sun-ripened, earth-fed, peak summer abundance belongs in the same vicinity as Shane.

"Mm."

"Not that I want you to stop," Shane rushes to clarify.

Ilya shrugs. Smirks. "These ones are mine. I always wondered about…" He pops a saskatoon berry into his mouth. His eyes go wider, then smaller. "Weird," he says, but he takes a handful and starts working on it. "Maybe, if you are very nice and good, I will share."

"Oh, if I'm good."

"So good," Ilya says, and feeds Shane a berry, pressing it onto his tongue, keeping Shane's mouth open for a second longer than he needs to.

God, they're sweet. The berries. "How about the others?" Shane asks, nodding toward the haskaps.

"You remember you sent me a picture last year of your fingers? They were purple from these," Ilya asks, taking one.

"Kind of?" Shane selects a saskatoon berry. Only the second one he's grabbed for himself, since Ilya's been oddly eager to hand them off to Shane. He bites it in half - a satisfying snapping sensation - and it's so good, sweet and pure and somehow cold, that he dips forward, lets one of the halves fall into his hand, and passes it off to Ilya.

Ilya accepts it with undue sensuality. Takes Shane's wrist gently and licks the fruit out of Shane's palm. He might be making fun of Shane?

But his tongue still wraps around the offering, obscene.

Once he swallows, Ilya shrugs. "Could not stop thinking about this picture, Shane. I got some for myself, but it didn't fix it." At Shane's questioning look, he picks another haskap. "We have them in Russia, too."

"No, you don't," Shane says, which is the start of a really stupid discussion where Ilya keeps interrupting them both to take a blueberry for himself, or to gently slip strawberries behind Shane's teeth. Once, to lick a saskatoon berry out of Shane's mouth partly squashed, which, wow, that should be gross. It really should. Right?

They keep arguing about it for a while, just to hear each other talk.

Eventually, Shane looks it up. "A non-climbing honeysuckle native throughout the cool temperate Northern Hemisphere regions of North America, Europe, and Asia," he reads out to Ilya. "The name haskap is derived from its name in the language of… the native Ainu people of Hokkaido, Japan. Wait, what?"

"What?"

"I don't know. Can plants be from that many places? Like, originally?"

Ilya shrugs. "You believe me?"

"I - yeah."

Ilya smooths his thumb between Shane's brows. "What?" he repeats, gentle, laughing a little.

"I don't know. It's just weird to think." Something growing here and in Russia and, apparently, in Japan, all at the same time.

"Don't," Ilya advises him. "Don't think."

Always easier said than done, but Shane accepts the berry Ilya offers to him, wrapping a hand around Ilya's wrist to better suck the juice off his fingers.

—

The next day, they fuck around playing video games, and kissing, and kicking a ball around, and having sex while Shane's on the phone.

"Why was that so hot, fuck," Shane gasps.

"Because you like to be bad," Ilya says. He looks Shane up and down. "Like it to be a little fucked up, probably."

"Hey. That's not what this is."

Ilya makes a tiny bit gesture, two fingers close together.

"Okay, but. That's not why. Not really."

Ilya pushes up onto his elbows. Teases, so close to Shane's mouth, but not quite touching: "Then you just want Pike to hear me knock you up."

"That was a blowjob, Ilya." A really fucking exceptional one. Shane's so jealous that Ilya can suck dick without his hands. Shane can't pull that off unless Ilya's fucking his face. Even then, Shane's not especially good at it. Not yet. "It doesn't work like that. You know it doesn't work like that, right?"

Ilya ignores him. "Do I need to be jealous? Of Hayden Pike, fifteenth worst Metro?"

"No," Shane insists. "God, no. Gross."

"You don't want him to breed you? He must be okay at it, with his eighty children."

Shane feels a thing move in his jaw. "No."

"… But if you did want a baby," Ilya says, sly. "If. I am not so good. As an option."

"Yeah. Got that." Shane doesn't know if he agrees, but it feels in poor taste to argue that Ilya's swimmers are good candidates.

Shane's already got hold of them. There's nothing Ilya can do about it.

He stretches a little, thinking about it. Nothing Ilya can do at all.

"So I think Svetlana, probably?"

Shane closes his eyes. Doesn't make a face. "What about her?"

"It could be yours and hers," Ilya says. "Your babies would be so cute."

"But they'd come out flippers," Shane points out blankly. He doubts Svetlana's signed on for this plan. Since, you know, she's never even fucking met Shane.

"Cute flippers," Ilya says gravely, in - oh, okay, got it - the tone Shane's come to recognize as alphabrained Ilya. "If you did it. Shane. If. You should have the best. No Pike babies. Or Landry babies. Or anyone who would want you to stop playing. Only hockey royalty. Okay?"

Shane hums, content in the knowledge that Ilya's just being sweet and stupid. Pushes his face into Ilya's chest. Scrapes his bottom teeth over a nipple. Doesn't start a whole thing by explaining that actually, he's already had the best, and it's Ilya, and that's why he lets Ilya -

Ilya inhales sharply at Shane's teeth, but says, "No, look."

There's a faint glow past Shane's closed eyelids. "If you try to show me a picture of a woman you've fucked right now, I will do actual damage to your balls."

The glow goes away. "Promise?" Ilya asks, sly and perky.

"Yes," Shane grits out, so they stop thinking about that stuff for a while.

After, Shane says, "And you don't need to be jealous of Hayden, jesus."

"Don't listen to me," Ilya says softly. "Sorry. I was - I thought. What if you go back to Montreal and den up with the Pikes. Retire. Live in their attic."

"Gross."

"Sorry," Ilya says again.

"It's fine, I get it. But. No," Shane says. "First, I already said: gross. Second, he doesn't get to have me. No one gets to."

Ilya brings him in by the chin. Thumbs Shane's lower lip. "And why is that? You don't want anyone else to breed you?"

"I mean. Yeah," Shane says. "I don't. I don't want anyone else doing that." And he closes the distance between them.

—

Playing Laich again the next day, Marleau comes up.

"He has a good nose," Ilya says. "Sometimes he knows if a guy will get sick."

"… like from a scent?"

"Never been wrong." Ilya shrugs.

"Weird."

A nod. "Always knows if someone's going into heat, too. Or rut."

"Actually, or is he just saying that?" You hear about people who say they can tell. Seems like mostly an excuse to sexually harass someone, though.

"It's his, um. Party trick? Bar trick? People who aren't on suppressors ask him to guess. Like, do me, me next."

"Wow." What must it be like, for talking about your season in public to fall under the category of flirting. Shooting the shit. Fucking - networking.

When talk circles around to heats and ruts, Shane mentally rehearses the right thing to say: it's just a day where I want to jerk off a lot. I get dehydrated. To be fair, last time I had one, I was eighteen, so the jerking off might have been unrelated. Fuck you, I've spent it with girls. (He has! Once. Hated it, thanks.) (He'd wanted to see what the big deal was about sex in season before he went on MLH-mandated suppressors. He didn't learn then, but he can guess, now.) Better alone unless you're synced up with someone, I think. Play omega girl-on-girl stuff on a loop. Easy. "And he gets it right?"

Ilya hums. "He also says after a girl sucks dick, he can smell it for, probably, an hour? But I think he's fucking with us."

Shane snorts.

"And he can smell if a girl's pregnant. Early. Two, three months, or something, he said. He ruined the surprise from his sister two times."

"Huh. That's way ahead of time." Pregnancy scent only kicks in for the final month or so - wait. Wait. "Huh."

Ilya's ahead of him. "He couldn't smell you on ice. He's not magic."

"Good," Shane says. A guy whose sense of smell can get past hockey stink probably needs an operation or something.

"But off ice…" Ilya lets the idea linger.

Shane blinks. "I've never seen him around when I'm - you know."

"Probably good. He might smell it on you," Ilya says carelessly.

Something zings between Shane's chest and his stomach. His cheeks go hot. "Would he even know what that smells like on an omega flipper, though?"

Shane, a normal person, can only smell pregnancy in the last month or so. And he's never smelled it on a guy, obviously. If guys are doing that, they're sticking close to home at the end of it. Shane doesn't blame them; he, too, would want to hide from people in that state.

"Don't know." Ilya presses a kiss into the top of Shane's head. "Maybe we should find out."

He's joking. Shane knows he's joking; he's laughing through his shoulders a little bit. But - fuck. "He'd think I'm…" Shane was going to say a faggot, but there are alpha girls to consider; again, sometimes Shane gets gay sex gets so tangled up with breeding that he forgets there's a straight way for him to get knocked up.

"Someone's come-hungry bitch?" Ilya asks, rubbing Shane's neck sympathetically.

Needless to say, Shane loses that round of Laich.

—

"Did you let her breed you, though," Ilya says to Shane later, completely out of nowhere.

Shane's head is in Ilya's lap. His legs are slung over the arm of the couch, two pillows under his ass, to keep it, you know, in. This hasn't stopped him from thumbing over Shane's asshole. Some leaked out, I'm trying to put it back, he said distractedly, when Shane asked what the fuck he was doing.

Ilya seems a little confused about if he thinks he's already bred Shane, or if he thinks that Shane really, really needs to get bred.

After sex, Ilya does his usual: nudges and bothers Shane until it's just easier for Shane to prop his hips up however Ilya wants him to. Mostly, he does it after he puts it in Shane's ass, but sometimes blowjobs or whatever, too. Logic is not the point. It's easier to just go along with it. And it's not bad, Ilya surveying the tableau after, a gleam in his eye.

Outside of sex, Ilya has a couple of new quirks - insistent, reasonless, almost certainly alphabrain-induced. Asks if Shane's comfortable enough with a worried little frown, like the hit from Marleau was only last week. Hands him a pillow from the other side of the couch, or goes inside to get an extra blanket, regardless of what Shane says in response.

Other times, he brings Shane a snack for vitamins and shit, you need it for - a shake of his head - I don't know, you just need it, and watches him eat it with weird intensity.

(But then he'll sit back and leer as Shane moves something heavy around.

"Aren't you worried this'll affect the whole…" Shane says, waving a hand at his own middle.

"Oh, no," Ilya moans. "Then I will have to breed you again? How terrible. No one wants this.")

"Who? Rose?" Shane asks. For all he knows, this is the setup for a complicated joke about Jackie Pike and her child army.

"Yes. Rose Landry." Soft in delivery, but rough in texture. His hand slips under Shane's shirt. Pets Shane's stomach slowly.

Shane laughs. He can't help it. It's just funny. "No. She wouldn't even want to do it that way."

It turns out it's not comforting to your whatever if you say no, she didn't breed me; she didn't want to.

"So you did offer." Ilya says, stony. "And she would not have you. Are you serious."

"Ilya. Of course I didn't ask Rose Landry to breed me." That would be crazy.

"Then how do you know she wouldn't do it."

"I just do." Sex was too awkward between them to even think of adding something like that in.

Anyway. It seemed like she thought of it happening in the other direction.

(It takes female alphas longer to conceive, since ovulation works differently? But on average, we carry to term about as easily as anyone else. Rose said that very matter-of-factly, maybe a month into them getting to know each other.

Wait, had that been a fucking hint? Fuck. Shane's such a dipshit. He needs to send her flowers, or something.)

"Actually, she kind of said she'd want to be pregnant, totally hypothetically and not about me specifically -"

It's too late. Ilya's leaned down to gnaw at Shane's shoulder through his shirt.

—

That night, Shane lies in the dark next to Ilya and thinks deep, stupid thoughts, the kind of spacey nothings that drift into his mind in the summer, after Ilya knocks him up, before he takes care of it.

There's an empty place in his body, his heart, that he really only wants Ilya to fill.

Sometimes, I think of it like… part of me's unclaimed territory, or something?, Shane told Rose, very late one night. It was the only time they could make work, and the conversation just kept going - neither of them wanted to get off the phone.

In response, Rose - at the time, considering a project her agent summarized as "sci-fi Erin Brockovich for the Me Too era" - said something offhand about problematic narratives of colonization.

That was the first time Shane thought distinctly: okay, maybe he and Rose weren't gonna work out, for reasons totally unrelated to Shane's compulsive need to get bred by Ilya Rozanov.

So, okay. No claiming of territory. But what if Shane doesn't mind being, like, at least visited? Just a little?

Most of Shane is made to spec. He's the perfect height and bulk for playing MLH hockey in this era. The height, he can't take credit for. But his muscles, he's built them up like houses, arenas, cities; whatever needs to be there to contain the hockey player that he wants to be. That everyone wants him to be.

People love it. They like him on the ice, they like seeing him in commercials and shit.

You'd never guess Hollander's an omega, Metros fans say all the time.

What a compliment, right? That Shane doesn't seem breedable?

Except - to Ilya. Ilya, who had the idea at the same time Shane did.

When the time's right, Ilya's good for it. Ready to meet Shane where he's at. To fill that space, to change him. Or at least to try.

These two weeks, they won't know if Shane's knocked up. Tests won't be accurate until Ilya's back in Boston training. But it's enough for them, just like this. The possibility is more than enough.

—

They work out, eat, play sewerball, dip in the water, run back to play some more. Ilya goes in and gets them drinks, a beer and an actual beverage each, in case you're dehydrated. That one sounds like an alphabrained thing, but Shane thinks it might actually just be Ilya.

As they're drinking their electrolytes of choice, Ilya goes, "American omegas, right? In Boston, or… ?"

"… right?" Shane agrees, for lack of a better response.

"Sometimes they actually do this thing from shows. Or movies. The - nest thing?"

"Oh. Canadians, too. Sometimes."

Ilya's looking out at the water. "Do you? Ever?"

"No." It's a hard, firm no, given before he can think to soften it into a sort of no, sorry, or no, thanks. Fuck. Do they do that in Russia? People talk about it being an American thing, but Shane doesn't know. "Um. Not that. I mean, of course it's great for people who like it."

Ilya grins. Tilts his head back for another drink. Shakes some water out of his hair like a dog. "I only wondered. Do you ever want to?"

"Not really." He feels his eyebrows drawing together against his will, turning it as skeptical as he feels. If this is a weird Russian thing, an alpha inviting an omega to do that together somehow, he'll - well, who's he fucking kidding, he's obviously going along with it. But still, it's -

Ilya breaks into laughter. "Your face. No. It's - in Russia, you don't put used clothes on your bed."

"It's so gross," Shane blurts out. "The sweat smell?"

"Well, that's hot." (Shane opens his mouth to say ew, closes it, and instead files this away for further consideration at a later date.) "But Carmy's girlfriend uses his road trip clothes."

"Drapeau says his wife does that."

Ilya makes a face. "They want bed bugs?"

Shane shakes out his hands to ward off the very idea.

Ilya gives him a kind of thank you gesture. "I'm glad you don't do this. Even if you do have two hundred pillows on your bed."

The pillows were Shane's designer's thing. She's a beta, and a little overenthused about Shane's modern omega male aesthetic.

"Oh. Yeah, no. Not in heats, not out of them."

"Mm. What did you do?"

Shane blinks. "For heats?"

Ilya nods.

"Um. Nothing about the bed. I remember really wishing I had a lock on my bedroom door?"

"You like security."

Shane shoves his shoulder. "Shut up, it's not deep. What about you?"

Ilya shrugs. "I started ruts late. Fifteen, I think? Maybe sixteen."

"Oh. Were you surprised?"

Ilya shrugs. It's a tired motion.

Shane wants to know; wants to know everything. But he's learning, slowly, where some of Ilya's tender points are. It doesn't take a genius to figure out stalled ruts in a teenage athlete whose mom died horribly when he was at the age that people usually present.

Shane takes Ilya's hand.

Ilya waves him off with his other hand, but doesn't let go of Shane. Squeezes a little. They watch some wispy clouds go past.

When the moment's drifted away, Shane asks, "You really thought I was an outside clothes on the bed person?"

Ilya takes a long sip. "I know you're clean. But sometimes… you're surprisingly filthy, Shane Hollander."

"God, shut up."

"No, no. I mean it. I like this. It's so good. You are…"

He shakes his head, same as you do for a crazy play. An incredible save. Or Scott fucking Hunter.

When Shane does that, what he means is: unbelievable.

"So you'd have hung out in my gross bed?"

"No, there are limits."

Shane shakes their linked hands.

"Maybe," Ilya corrects. "Is that good enough?"

Shane gives him his own maybe in return.

Maybe was how Shane opened the door, that very first night: maybe I'll answer.

Maybe is how Shane feels about the morning after pill, every time: maybe it would have taken.

Maybe got Ilya to Shane's cottage.

Shane does like security. Maybe isn't calm, cold certitude.

It's got something to recommend itself, all the same.

—

The offseason's the offseason, but there's some maintenance conditioning on both of their slates. Shane's post-hit traps-and-delts PT gets them talking about the hit, and about afterwards.

Ilya - feeling up Shane's shoulders in a kind-of-inappropriate-coach way that Shane - well, that Shane's receptive to - claims that Shane scented one of Ilya's wrists in the hospital, which is believable, and also that Shane fucking purred about it, which is hilariously not.

He's all pissy about Shane not falling for it, too.

"I wouldn't even know how to do that," Shane says, incredulous.

"What, do you know how to sneeze? It's a reflex, Shane."

"One I don't have." It's like curling your tongue, or coming when a girl gives you a handjob; not everyone can do it.

Ilya hums. "But you did, so."

"Ilya."

Ilya throws up his hands in exasperation. "Shut up, you did, shut up."

"Why, you want me to purr for you instead," Shane snickers. Even as he rolls his eyes, he's doing his best to drag them both down to the floor mats.

After that, and after Shane swears up and down that it didn't happen, that he's never purred, Ilya mostly lets it go.

"Never?" he prods, one more time.

"Fucking - no," Shane laughs.

Ilya smiles, tongue caught between his teeth. "Okay. Sure."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

Ilya's gaze flicks to Shane's barbell and back. He only has one here. They've been switching off. "Means I want to see more rack pulls."

"Why do you get to be the coach," Shane complains. Kind of. Like, fakely.

Ilya just gives him a warning look that has Shane crawling over to the barbell, which probably answers that question.

—

Hayden calls back the next time he's on infant duty.

Shane woke up for the washroom around seven. When he made it back to bed, Ilya was half-hard and mostly asleep, so Shane sucked his dick. Ilya knocked out again immediately after, which gave Shane this weird flipping-over feeling in his stomach, like - I can keep him in my bed, I can keep him in my body, what if I just kept him in my house -

In that frame of mind, Shane gets up to pace around the house. Peer out of the windows. Check the locks.

His keys are on the hook by the front door. Car, house.

The cottage has normal locks. Normal-expensive, with a keypad and shit, but normal. You only need a key to open the door from the outside. Obviously. That's how doors and houses work.

Still. Shane quietly lifts his keys off the hook. Turns them over slowly, so they don't jingle.

He pads into the kitchen with them.

In the leftmost lower cabinet of the island, there's a big stock pot. Not the one for boiling pasta. This one's more soup-sized. There's little use for it in the summer. It's steel, lid included, so you can't see inside it just by opening the cabinet.

With his keys hidden in the pot and the cabinet closed, the kitchen looks the same as it did when he entered it. No one would have any reason to know they're there.

Perfect.

He nods to himself and goes to make tea.

All of which is to say that Shane's awake when Hayden calls again. And Ilya's not there to cause any hiccups.

Hayden did this when they had Arthur, too. Called around a lot.

He's not a partier like J.J., but he's a social guy. Too much time without another adult to talk to about adult life and he starts reaching out to whoever's likeliest to answer the phone. Especially when he's sleep deprived and trying to stay awake.

Shane, single by default and historically up by six even in the offseason, is usually good for it.

Hayden doesn't seem to have registered anything out of the ordinary about their last call, just launches into delirious new-baby chatter. The Pikes really value being hands-on with their infants, despite their night nurse and Jackie's helpful family nearby. Hayden's rundown covers all of the baby stuff that people in possession of a baby like to talk about. Feeding, sleeping, sometimes shitting. In-law stuff. The doctors say Jackie's tailbone didn't re-fracture, which had been a concern, after Arthur. "I still can't fucking believe it happened in the first place," Hayden marvels. "Like, why didn't nature figure that shit out? Isn't it a bad design, to give someone a brand new baby and break their bones at the same fucking time?"

Shane doesn't have much to contribute along that line of conversation. "Swearing."

"Fuck off."

Shane sips his tea. "No, I mean, that's good, man. Really good. What else is going on?"

Hayden makes a thinking noise. Sends Shane some pictures. "She has Jackie's nose, we think," he mumbles. "Oh, and she's a beta, so Ruby's still our only, you know."

Oh. Their only - like - "Hayd, I don't think you're telling people that," Shane says gently.

"What? Oh, I - wait, fuck, right. Sorry."

"I'm not worried. I'm just saying."

Like Shane, Jackie and Hayden grew up before testing was really a thing. There's ongoing debate about what's best for kids nowadays. The Pikes are in the camp that tries to split the difference between testing at birth and finding out the hard way. They got their kids checked out, but they never announced anything.

… maybe they settled on that approach for a slightly different reason than Shane thought.

Do the Pike kids know? Do they even know that their parents know?

They might not care yet. When Shane was young, most kids didn't. It wasn't like most of them were at any real risk of -

"Let's just -"

"Ruby's a flipper?" Shane asks over Hayden, before he knows he's going to.

"I. Yeah." Shane can practically see Hayden holding Amber and wincing. "It's weird, right? Like, what are the chances of a one-off like that? Just a totally random - you know?"

Hayden cut himself off before he got there, but Shane's heard it enough times to know what was coming, technically factual and still thoughtless: fluke.

When Shane's parents were growing up, it was just what you called non-inherited flippers.

Then, in like, the nineties, someone decided fluke was conceptually too close to mistake and freak, and anyway, that you shouldn't mark out a difference between people with inherited and random chromosomal mutations, that it wasn't a worthwhile distinction to make, which Shane thinks is mostly true.

Only the meaner kids said it when Shane was in school. Even then, not with a teacher within earshot. And it didn't hit too hard, since no one had presented yet.

Obviously, Shane got it in hockey all the time, from kids and their parents, especially after he turned thirteen. But that's just Shane, and hockey. Mostly, it wasn't a thing you heard that much.

Shane couldn't really say one way or another, but he thinks it's coming back around. He gets it in the stands today more than he did when he first got to the show. And the rookies, they pull it out a lot, use it as a halfway point between cocksucker and lame.

Shane swallows. "The mutation? Like, one in a thousand, or something."

(The math on that's kind of dogshit. The frequency of random mutation might be much lower. Spontaneous flippers and inherited ones have the same chromosomes. Only way to tell if it's a family thing is to look at history, which isn't reliable: people gloss over flipper grandparents or great-grandparents. Their kids never learn they're carriers. Those kids are surprised when their kids come out flippers.

Even knowing family history, you can't be sure someone inherited it instead of getting a spontaneous mutation.

Anecdotally, Shane's noticed that a weird proportion of the flippers on forums and shit are biologists. There's one beta-like omega guy he follows who's big in sports stats, too.)

"Huh." A moment of silence. "Can you just, um. Pretend I didn't say anything to you?"

"Course."

Hayden gusts out a sigh. "So I'm trying to convince Jackie we don't need the girls - the older girls, shit - on the monitor still. I'm pretty sure it's just giving her, like, anxiety?"

Here's where Shane's supposed to hum noncommittally and let things move on.

Instead, he goes, "You gotta stop saying she's the worst, man."

"I would never say Jackie's the worst, what the fuck."

"Ruby."

"Ruby?" Hayden really does sound wiped. "Oh, like, our joke? She likes it."

It's true. He calls all of the Pike kids little terrors. Jade and Ruby think it's funny; Arthur's learning to laugh alongside them, so he'll agree soon enough.

Ruby's got the special title of the worst one, mostly because of her now-outgrown biting phase.

She doesn't seem upset by it. She just giggles and gnashes her teeth.

But even if she were a beta or whatever, it still wouldn't be, like, good, probably.

And if she's a flipper - "It's not about that. You don't want - to reinforce expectations."

"Like what?"

Jesus. "Just. Stereotypes." That she's loud, aggressive, a bad influence.

"Oh." Shane can practically see Hayden's waved arm. "People don't really care about that stuff anymore, though. Like, look at Rose, right?"

Last year, a casting director told Rose's agent that Rose is too butch for rom-coms.

Shane tries to explain this, but it comes out more like he's saying she gets typecast.

Hayden, jokily: "Okay, we'll worry about it when Ruby's a famous actress. But seriously, a lot of the kids these days know already, and they don't care."

"It's not just other kids," Shane presses on, against common sense. "You don't want to give anyone a reason to think she's a bad influence." You don't have to actually be one for other kids' parents to raise concerns. Shane stopped being able to stay overnight at other kids' houses when he was thirteen. What if his heat hit out of season, was the thought. It wasn't even wrong to think that way. If that happened, best case scenario, it would have been painfully fucking awkward.

Doesn't change the fact that he was the only guy that happened to. Betas, or boys who had presented as alphas, didn't have to stay home.

If his mom called Shane the worst in front of other parents? It wouldn't have helped Shane fit in.

Defensive, Hayden goes, "Ruby's not a bad influence."

"I know." Shane sighs. "Ruby's great, Hayd. It's fine. How's Arthur handling being an older brother?"

Whatever. Hayden's loopy right now, and Jackie might be more receptive, anyway.

Shane adds it to his mental list of shit to deal with when he's back in Montreal. Maybe. If it still seems like a good idea, in a month, to butt in and tell Jackie that Hayden let this slip.

Shane can ask Rose what she thinks, too. Later, back in the real world.

For now, it's not his place. Not in this little slice of time where he and Ilya are finally completely alone, together.

When he's run through his list of baby topics, Hayden asks, "What's going on with you?"

Absolutely nothing. Nothing Shane can share, anyway. "Just, um. You know. Glad to be on the safe list." He doesn't have to clarify; the expansion draft had been a specter over the head of every Metro. Ones with full or partial NTCs, especially. No clause can keep a player safe from an expansion draft.

Some players are always braced to learn of their trade in the morning and to suit up for their new team that same afternoon. Guys with NTCs thought they were past that. They'd all gone soft, not used to that pressure, to thinking, what if I fuck up and they send me to live in a different city next year?

Shane, though he lacked an NTC, had thought like the latter group. His mistake.

Hayden laughs. "Yeah, feeling bad for Jordy." A beat. "You made the right call."

"I didn't have anything to do with the safe list." Hayden knows that.

"Oh, no, just, not telling people you were safe. It was a good choice. I think if you'd confirmed it when they gave you the heads up, other guys would have, too - I would have, anyway - and then the poor guy would've been sick over it for months, not knowing for sure where he stood."

Shane's nodding his head like Hayden's in the room. Staring hard at a birch just past the lawn. "Months. Yeah."

"Nice work as usual. Oh, Captain, my Captain, eh?"

"For sure," Shane agrees. Then he makes his excuses and lets Hayden go.

—

When Ilya's up, Shane relays this to him. Not the flipper part. He's going to think about that some more. But he needs help reacting to the expansion draft thing.

He'd texted Ilya a sarcastic turns out I'm safe on the fifteenth, after his call with Theriault. At the time, Ilya expressed mild surprise that Shane hadn't been given any assurances. Different teams do things different ways: the Raiders who were safe - Ilya included, of course - all got the okay the day after they were knocked out of the playoffs.

"Months," Ilya says, echoing Shane's quote of Hayden's words. His mouth is flat, eyes wide, neck stiff.

Shane nods.

"Hayden Pike had the all-good since… April?"

"At least."

"What the fuck."

"Maybe they thought not knowing would hurt his performance in the playoffs," Shane says.

"What about your broken brain? Stress didn't hurt that at all?"

"It wasn't broken. Just. Deep-bruised."

"Sounds relaxing."

Shane blinks. "Actually, it kind of was?"

"You were bored as shit. And your head hurt all the time. I was there in your phone, Shane."

"Yeah, but - it was nice to spend that much time with my parents? I haven't been home for that long since I was a kid. I don't know. Maybe it's, like." He makes an ick face. "An omega thing."

Thoughtfully, Ilya says, "Maybe."

"But you think maybe not?"

Ilya's quiet for a second. Considering it, and also bolting down half a bagel. "If I could stay in my mother's house for three months. Even if I was dizzy. And I had to stay in the dark. And my bones were broken. I would be relaxed, too."

You know what? Fuck Hayden. And fuck Theriault, too. They don't get to take this morning from Shane. "Is it fucked up that that makes me want to kiss you?"

Ilya's brow crinkles.

"Like. Mouths open?"

Ilya raises his eyebrows. Nods to himself. "Yes."

He hoists himself onto and over the kitchen island to take Shane's chin in hand and lick into his mouth, streaks of cream cheese still on his tongue.

—

They (meaning Shane) grill again - salmon with the good mayo, honey, and fish sauce, plus this cucumber-onion salad thing Shane's family always makes. Ilya's weirdly obsessed with it.

Shane asks if Ilya wants to open a bottle of wine; Ilya shrugs, and Shane feels about the same way, so they leave it.

Deciding against white wine makes Shane remember his super fun little chat with Jackie. "Oh, shit, I didn't tell you. Jackie Pike knows I'm a ruined man."

Ilya leans forward. "You are…"

"She knows I got knocked up."

Ilya blinks. "She does."

Shane shrugs.

"Okay. Explain." Ilya puts a hand out.

"She looked at my, like, after visit summary? The notes the hospital gives you when you leave?"

"… this is Pike's wife? Fuck did she have that?"

"She just likes looking at that stuff, I don't know."

Ilya looks faintly puzzled. "You said the hospital kept the miscarriage secret."

Shane beams at him weirdly. It's so nice that Ilya's casual about this stuff; probably, the average person's whatever can't just be like, oh, the miscarriage, for sure, without it being a whole thing. It makes it feel normal. Makes it feel like they're normal. Maybe better than normal, even. If that's not a terrible thing to think.

"They didn't, but she used to be a nurse, she figured it out."

He tries to give Ilya the broad strokes. Ilya makes him stop and slow down. Elaborate. Repeat stuff. Acts like it's the best thing he's heard all year, Shane's awkward tale of Jackie Pike carefully wading into the waters of Shane's uterine lining. "You are a fucking professional athlete," Ilya says. "How the fuck wouldn't you notice if you were like, pregnant pregnant?"

"I guess it happens."

"To you? You're crazy aware of your balance. Wouldn't that throw you off? At least later?"

Shane still just feels kind of awesome when he's pregnant, all buzzy and confident. Really hard to separate that out from the factual knowledge that he won the prize, though. "I don't know."

"Shit." He laughs, shakes his head. "Did she know how long?" Ilya looks to Shane's stomach, then back to his face, like Shane would have trouble understanding him.

"No." Shane chews some more. "Well. Actually."

"Oh my god."

"I don't know! She didn't say. There's no way there was enough information there for her to go off of, though, right?"

"You're asking me?"

"Fair. Yeah, no, she doesn't know."

"But you think she thinks it was Rose?"

"That's what she said."

"Maybe she thinks Rose Landry broke up with you and then knocked you up. Or - she knocked you up and dumped you. Left you all alone. Just you and your money and multiple homes and loving family."

"Fuck off," Shane mumbles, pushing at Ilya's bicep.

Ilya refuses to be moved. "No. Unlike alpha terror Rose Landry, I won't knock you up and leave."

"Simplest explanation she came up with, I guess," Shane shrugs.

Ilya nods, agreeing. "Simpler than getting face down ass up bred by the best player and handsomest alpha in the league."

"Second best player." They never seem to get tired of needling at each other like that. Shane loves it.

"You do not fight me on handsomest alpha, though."

"No, obviously that's you. Handsomest overall, there's Hunter -"

"There is not Hunter, fucking look at me."

"I'm looking. I look too much. That's the whole fucking issue."

"Too much? No such thing." Ilya gropes his own cock. It's sexy, but also half-assed; the salmon's really good and the cuts were generous.

"Yeah, yeah."

"She will tell Pike, do you think?"

Shane shrugs. "I hope not."

"So you do think so."

"Maybe not for a while, at least," Shane sighs. "They have a baby."

"I am aware."

Shane ignores that. "So they're probably busy."

"… do you think he will pity you? For what my huge cock did to you?"

"He won't know it had shit to do with you."

"So what's the problem?"

"I don't know what I'll tell him. If he finds out."

Ilya blinks at him. "You don't tell him."

Shane shrugs.

"No, no, Hollander. You don't tell him anything. Why the fuck would you?"

"He's my friend."

"Okay, but friends don't have to share fuck details."

"I'm… bad at saying no." It's hard to tell people to fuck off if they think they mean well.

"Bellboy is bad at saying no," Ilya corrects. "Shane Hollander has potential. Just need to practice."

"Oh, and you'll help me? Get me to tell you no a whole lot?"

"I'm a bad person to practice with." Dumb little impish smile.

Shane humors him. "Why's that?"

"I like ignoring you too much."

Shane nods thoughtfully. "Maybe Rose can help me practice. Like an acting thing."

Ilya fakes sour. "Perfect."

"I think so, yeah."

There's silence for a minute. Ilya's eating his fish faster than Shane is, which is pretty gratifying. When he gets to a browned edge, his hum hits Shane's spine from feet away.

"You're really worried?" Ilya asks. "About him knowing?"

"Yes."

Ilya swallows. Shane kind of wishes he'd said yes to wine, so he could watch Ilya's strong fingers pick up a glass, could see his throat flex as he sips.

"What for?"

Shane keeps his eyes on his plate. "It would be embarrassing." More scary, really. Instead of thinking about stuff he can't control, he sets up a distraction. "Don't you think?"

Ilya gives him this long look. Nods. "Yes. So shameful, Shane Hollander. Hottest omega in the league. Taken bitch." The way he says it, Shane can't tell if it's describing a thing that happened - Shane, a bitch someone took down - or, like, a title: Shane Hollander, Taken Bitch.

The former's nice enough. The latter has a real ring to it.

"Can still play hockey, of course, but for fucking… who would want you now, I wonder." Ilya sighs expansively. "Someone who doesn't mind a man who's already broken in. With a fucked-loose hole."

Shane doesn't think any holes work like that, despite what many MLH players say about their ex-wives. He squints at Ilya. "You're into that?"

Ilya drags a basket of honeyberries between them. "Is this shocking?"

"Nothing about you is shocking."

"I must try harder, then." He makes a show of selecting a handful of fruit.

"You don't have to try, with me."

"Because I shock you all the time?" Ilya slips a berry between Shane's lips.

Shane crushes it with his tongue, feels the juice pool out. "No, just. You don't have to try."

Ilya smiles at him, all private and quiet, sweeter than the taste of summer on their tongues.

—

They're on opposite ends of the couch, toes touching, doing the kind of quiet parallel screen time Shane's never gotten around to with a girlfriend, when Ilya says, "Technically, I could marry Svetlana. For citizenship. But then neither of us could go back to Russia. She would miss it, I think."

It's a deliberate provocation. It has to be, because what the fuck.

Shane is the beta-ish type of omega, so he stays nice and calm and measured. Asks "why not find a woman you'd want to marry for real?" and "do you ever want that problem to go away?" and listens carefully to what Ilya has to say.

He makes sure not to blink too much. And he doesn't raise his voice. Nor does he snap and tie Ilya down by the wrists and tell him to stop fucking talking about her.

He's not hysterical.

"Don't marry - just don't," he says, too many times. Even though it would keep Ilya safe - Shane hates it. Hates it.

At least Ilya says, "Okay."

—

Shane used up all of his emotional control on the talk about Svetlana, maybe, because he thinks he actually browns out a little bit. Next thing he knows, he's in Ilya's lap, his hands on one of Ilya's wrists and the opposite shoulder.

(Ilya's not physically tied down, though. Score one for Shane's logical, beta-like lack of reactivity and emotionality.)

"What the fuck," Shane whines, as Ilya once a-fucking-gain knots his own hand instead of Shane's hot and willing insides.

In the moment, Ilya breaks Shane's (loose! rational!) grip to smear his dry hand across Shane's face, like shut up.

Shane bites Ilya's fingers. It's a new hobby he's been getting into.

As he cleans them both up with a discarded shirt, Ilya contends that if he were to knot Shane, they would need to be in a bed. Ease into it. Go very, very carefully.

Like Shane doesn't know that already, fuck.

It's been clear enough since he was thirteen, sneaking onto the family computer late at night, blearily seeking answers to questions he could never have asked his parents: are male omegas gay? Like, sure, there are omega men with wives and kids, but are they just lying? Why do I slick up, and how the fuck do I stop? If I try putting a finger up there, will that turn me gay? Does being knotted feel good, or does it hurt?

He gathered a mixed bag of findings, enlightening and confusing in turns: male omegas might be gay, just like anyone else might be. And anyone could be lying. Getting slick is luck of the draw; there's an operation to remove slick glands, if something's wrong with them, like they're malformed or constantly impacted, but recovery's pretty fucking uncomfortable. Fingering yourself sure as hell doesn't make you less gay.

And as far as being knotted goes? Anecdotally, for guys, it's like anything else. Experiences run the gamut. But officially - as officially as advice like this ever gets - anal knotting is unwise, especially for omega men.

Omega women (ones getting, if you'll forgive Shane's blunt clarity, pussy knotted) hold onto knots, but can pull away if they really need to. Supposedly with only minor tearing, whatever that really means. (The women Shane's had sex with wouldn't be all whatever about getting ripped up, but maybe Shane's been doing it wrong.) Anally, well - they're not holding on as tight as with pussy knotting, but - you can imagine. Alpha and beta men run the same risks as women when they're knotted in the ass.

When omega men are knotted, it's the worst of both worlds. Their assholes aren't any better set up to take (or scramble off of) a knot. And they get the same hormonal signal soup that omega women get from pussy knotting: clutch, grab, keep.

But they've only, uh, got the one - you know. Like. The one hole.

Lacking real omega musculature, it constricts spasmodically. Painfully, apparently.

And pulling away from a knot is - double bad. Yeah.

The takes are mixed: risk of serious injury from the clinical sites, fluke fags get what they ask for from a forum, worth it but OW not an every day thing from - well, from some fluke fag on the internet somewhere.

Male omegas' assholes slick up because their bodies are confused, people often say. Hungering after that fabled - well, rare - female alpha knot. It's just evolution going haywire. Signals getting crossed. A - well, fluke is charged, but a… mistake. A little accident. Unfortunate, but easily ignored.

That's the sympathetic view. The neutral one.

Shane's starting to think it's not exactly right.

This one Omega Male's Guide to Taking a Knot doc's been floating around online for years, an illustrated, comic book-style PDF made by some horny graphic design student flipper on a mission to stop male omegas' assholes from snapping. Shane's run into it a bunch of times.

The comments on that thing are always incredibly positive. Worked like a charm, and this is how I got my clutch game so good, and dude's saved so many buttholes from untold trauma.

Some of its advice is standard to anal. Go slow, don't eat spicy foods, make sure you're well hydrated.

Other advice is more specific. It cautions against prepping. Your mucosal membrane is your friend. Let it do its thing, reads a sunny caption. Explains how to breathe to keep your body from freaking out. Suggests identifying an emergency medical provider, just to be super safe! Delves into other methods, recommends doubling or tripling up on them.

(Shane hasn't yet sprung on Ilya that he packed the leftover muscle relaxers from his collarbone recovery. Just, you know, in case.)

Wherever the guide comes up, none of the comments say don't, you'll fucking die. They just say be careful. Sometimes, they even say have fun.

"You've never been knotted. Right? Even fake ones?"

Shane gives Ilya a flat look. Of course he hasn't. No one, other than maybe Ilya, has ever wanted to knot him.

(Ilya and, Shane guesses, the tiny but loudly horny online contingent that likes to imagine putting down big, beta-like omegas. Shane's been cautioned against engaging with them, like he needs the warning. He tries not to think about that whole… community… because it makes him very nervous in a really confusing way.)

And toys - he doesn't own any knotting toys. You have to force them inside, the normal ones, which is a little easier if you have more than one hole to work with. Some brave omega dude out there's surely used one before, but it wouldn't feel good going in or out.

Shane doesn't want to ruin that for himself; he's a huge fan of things going in and out.

Inflatable toys are less painful, more embarrassing. Even more so than the regular kind. Too close to just, like, a medical device. Something to get omega women through stubborn heats.

In theory, it's hot for your omega wife or girlfriend to turn into an insatiable heat sex maniac; in practice, everyone knows it's a lot of time to spend together.

Unless you sync up, most guys agree their girls get annoying at the height of it. All needy. Obsessed with you. Pouting and demanding orgasms. Being harder to get off than usual, too.

Whether that's because they stop faking it or because women aren't supposed to come during heats, should stay horny the whole time for evolutionary reasons, who could say. Like. Shane has his theory, for sure, but the female orgasm is good can be a controversial take among hockey players, and if Shane says it too loud, it'll devolve into a mostly good-natured of course you think that, Hollander, you fluke pussy, blah blah blah.

The point is, while everyone agrees on a base level that ruts are serious and important, heats sometimes warrant cheat codes. Like toys.

(Dick-shaped ones, that is. Fleshlights aren't cheat codes, unless you're on any of the major subreddits that posit a stroker will suck all of your masculine alpha energy out through your dick.)

Knotting dildos are a practical solution. So you don't have to waste an entire day making your girlfriend come, you know? Give yourself a break. Foist your wife off on a fake knot - one smaller than you, or else so big it hurts her to use it - and hide out in your shed with a beer.

Shane's not a woman, and he's not (known to be) the faggiest kind of male omega. Omegas like Shane - you know, beta-like guys - barely even have real heats, so they don't need anything like inflatable knots, shouldn't want them.

Which Shane doesn't. In their pre-inflated state, those toys are sort of… saggy. Unappealing.

Ilya raises his hands in surrender. "I'm just asking."

"No. I haven't." Getting to hold Ilya's knot, tender and absurdly hot to the touch, one of Ilya's hands over Shane's own to guide the pressure, doesn't count as being knotted. Neither does ducking down to suck on the exposed knot from between their knuckles, even though it makes Ilya give up this high, rasping gasp, and despite the small, violently purple hickies that bloom in the wake of Shane's mouth. Fuck, Shane, fuck, Ilya will mutter, dragging Shane up for a kiss.

Despite what betas would have you think, alphas aren't coming the whole time they're knotted inside of someone. It just feels good. Descriptions Shane's found online range from secure to victorious.

Shane would like Ilya to feel both of those things with Shane. More specifically, in Shane.

Some omegas can come on a knot. Like, more than once. Shane's even seen male omegas talking about it. You can't move much on it, but if your - the - alpha cooperates, lets you have a slow grind and isn't fully collapsed on top of you - and if you're not prone to knot torpor - you can touch yourself.

Doesn't seem like it would be that hard for Shane. He's already really good at coming around Ilya's dick.

And Ilya would probably work with him. He's not that prone to knot torpor. Just gets a little spacey. Unless torpor hits Ilya harder when his knot's inside of someone.

Shane wouldn't know, since Ilya won't put it in him.

If Shane himself goes too knot-stupid to jerk off around Ilya's knot, well. Knot-stupid doesn't sound so bad.

(Sounds kind of, like, fucking delicious, actually.

Shane once saw it described as getting scruffed by the pussy. He's never really recovered.)

Ilya nods at no, I haven't, like that settles it. He gives Shane this terrible, sympathetic face.

Shane barfs out, "I - why don't you want this?"

"I want it." Ilya's brow is crinkled.

Shane ignores him. Tries to appeal to his dumbass alpha brainstem or whatever that insists Shane needs to get off for it to take. "Like, don't you think it would be hot? To breed me like that? I could come on it so much." Except, wait, fuck. "Or, or maybe it's annoying to have some omega trying to get more out of your dick while you're enjoying the afterglow. I get that, totally. But I wouldn't have to come again. I could stay still on it."

Ilya opens his mouth and closes it. "No, you couldn't."

"Yes, I could," Shane insists. (Lies.) "And I know it's probably - boring, but it can't last that long. You can look at your fucking phone, fuck."

"I wouldn't be bored." Of course Ilya can say that with confidence, because he's done it before, probably with a bunch of nice, tiny girls with bouncy hair who took it perfectly and didn't need any special fucking medical considerations.

Shane looks away. "Whatever. We don't have to."

"I want to knot you, Shane. Without hurting you. I looked up all this shit about it, okay? It's not like fisting, you can't just -"

Shane makes a sound. "Do not talk to me about fisting right now. Oh my god." If Ilya's fisted Svetlana, or fucking Sasha, Shane will scream for real.

Ilya shakes his head. "We could do that, if you want. Fisting."

"I said stop talking about fisting. Fuck, you've bred me how many times, but suddenly knotting me is a step too far?"

Ilya puts his hands up in surrender. Very plainly, he says, "No. I only want it close to -" he waves a hand - "ambulance, paramedics. Not two hours away from a doctor."

Saying I won't bleed out, even if the worst happens won't help Shane's case.

"But -"

"You can wait," Ilya tells him.

"Until when?" This is their chance. It can't happen during the season. That would be a really stupid thing to do. Shane's going to limp a little, for a day or two afterwards. As far as Shane's concerned, the point is limping afterwards.

Ilya shrugs. Looks past Shane's shoulder. "Next year, maybe."

Christ. "Next year?"

"If we can."

"They're not going to have built a hospital across the street by then." Shit, if they try, Shane will just buy the land out from under the developer.

Maybe he should do that anyway, call it a preserve, get a tax write-off and guaranteed privacy in one - okay, wait. Focus.

"Here? No, no." Ilya sniffs. "I can come to Montreal for two, three days."

"You'd be stuck. Hiding."

Ilya shrugs.

Shane stares Ilya down.

Ilya stares back, unmoveable.

"You're such an asshole," Shane tells him. He's meant it more at other times, but he doesn't not mean it now.

"Think about it. Me in your place in Montreal. Can't even go out to smoke -"

"You'll just vape, I'm not stupid -"

Ilya hushes Shane. "You ruin it. Inside, Shane. Nothing better to do than eat your food. Knot you. Lick your bruised asshole. Watch old games. Jerk off on your couch. Be nice to you."

Shane swallows. "Watch old games?"

Ilya sways close enough to press a soft kiss to Shane's lips. "Old as you want. Terrible image resolution."

Image resolution. How does he learn this stuff? "You'd be - trapped."

Ilya hums. "Yes. Good?"

Shane makes himself shut his mouth. His teeth click from the impact. He gives Ilya a jerky nod. Much better than leaving his mouth open and using it to say okay, but I'm gonna scratch your back up like crazy.

Ilya's smart enough to have worked that out already. If he signed on anyway, Shane sees no reason to warn him.

 "Okay. Good." Ilya kisses Shane again, soft, with a slip of his tongue against Shane's. "We can't just do it. You're not -" he wisely cuts himself off.

Shane tilts his head to one side. "Not what," he says. Flatly. Rationally.

A grimace flashes, there and gone, at the left corner of Ilya's mouth.

There's a tense pause.

"… You're not not perfect," Ilya declares, as though solving a riddle.

Shane narrows his eyes. "You were going to say I'm not a normal omega," he accuses. Playfully. Sort of playfully.

Ilya hesitates. "Not like that."

"Fuck you," Shane's feeling up Ilya's bicep as he says this, which undercuts his sincerity.

Ilya looks at Shane kind of curiously. "You know I like that you are different, yes?"

Shane scoffs.

"No, Shane." Ilya uses his somewhat-less-gross hand to force Shane to look at him. "I like it." He moves his hips stupidly.

Shane scoffs harder. "What, like the fact that I'm a guy turns you on because I'm stronger than a girl or whatever. Sure, I can take it, except apparently my asshole is so fucking breakable you won't even knot me, you slippery fucking coward -"

(He's repeating himself, he's pretty sure. You have to understand: Shane decided to lean into the whole territoriality thing for this brief, perfect window… and now the territoriality thing is kind of leaning into him.)

Unperturbed, Ilya drops the shirt to the floor again. Makes a circle with his hand. "No, you - you're like a shiny rock I found at the beach. Or the big, flat shells."

Huh. That's - sweet. Sort of. "Big? And conspicuous?"

Ilya shakes his head. "Most people don't look at the sand so close." He leans up, voice going quiet. Like he's telling Shane a secret. He's practically biting his lower lip. "Very stupid people. Couldn't see something -" his gaze flicks from Shane's face, down his body, and back - "… special."

"You might have a fetish, you know that?" It's not the first time Shane's thought it. "Between me and -" sigh - "Svetlana."

Rose deals with that a lot. Her photoshoot contracts give her more set control than normal because, as she puts it, every DP believes he's the first person to think of dressing an alpha woman up like a mean librarian mommy dom. If you give those types an inch, they'll go all Wikialphagirls on you.

Ilya shrugs. "Not the only thing I like."

"No, I know." Would be hard to miss that, what with him being all over the blond omega skank at Ciel.

(Sorry, is Shane wrong? Anyway, he's not anti-skank. Ilya's, like, the ultimate skank, and Shane's demonstrably a huge fan.)

Even if Shane hadn't seen Ilya out that night, there's still everyone else Ilya's been known to fuck around with, besides. Rozanov bags crazy pussy is a longstanding line of conversation, a thing everyone knows. Shane doesn't even hate that. Like. Maybe Shane counts as crazy pussy, too. Maybe he's the craziest, even? He doubts a lot of girls are letting Ilya -

Ignoring Shane's internal monologue, Ilya goes, "But. You have a good mouth, a tight hole -"

"Shut the fuck up," Shane says, his teeth bared in a grin despite his (not very thorough) efforts.

He wants - a lot of things. He settles for rubbing his hair against Ilya's ribs and on the cushion closest to him.

It feels really fucking good, in the same way that marking the cottage perimeter feels good: pointless, but necessary.

"A. Tight. Hole," Ilya repeats, undaunted. "And wet, fuck, I didn't…"

"What?"

"Didn't know for sure that could happen to men, before you."

It takes Shane a second. "You knew Svetlana has a dick, though." Alpha women having dicks is a lot more apocryphal than omega men having slick assholes.

"Sometimes has one. And no one told me. I knew because I fucked her."

Shane hums. It's not a growl. He just can't believe the I fuck Svetlana conversation is happening again, even in the past tense.

Ignoring him, Ilya continues, "She only let me because she went to boarding school. Different people. Different ideas."

Shane, passing his hair over Ilya's chest and arms and the furniture he can reach, prods at him to continue.

Ilya's voice is shallow, pleased. Not breathless, but… less breath. "For normal Russian alpha girls, it's only omega men. Same with omega men, only alpha girls. I never met an omega man I thought would want to -" he makes a funny pleased grumble at Shane pressing his face into Ilya's hand - "you know."

"What, flippers are all straight, in Russia?"

Ilya kind of rolls his eyes. "Everyone's straight in Russia, even gay people. No, they're… careful."

"And I'm not."

Ilya shakes his head. "Not like that."

"So before me it was, what, all beta guys?"

"Only Sasha, really." Sasha, Shane's gathered, is the coach's son Ilya mentioned long ago. To Shane's knowledge, Ilya's only other male repeat. (For the sake of Shane's sanity, he should probably not learn about any others.) "He's an alpha."

"Right." Of course. "Did you like that?"

A shrug. "Knots are fun to play with."

Shane nods slowly. "You want to tell me everything else he has going for him?"

Ilya leans up and licks a stripe up Shane's neck. "You know. Sometimes. You're a jealous little bitch."

Shane gives him an uh-huh. It comes out breathy.

Ilya laughs at him.

"Whatever, don't change the subject," Shane warns, head pressed to Ilya's ribs again, avoiding his eyes.

An eyeroll. "Sasha… he has an awful haircut. No freckles. Bad skater. And his hands aren't soft like yours." At Shane's look, he rolls his eyes and clarifies, "In the hockey way, yes, of course. You have very manly, um. Calluses."

"Bet he has a nice, normal, dry ass, though." One that's more knottable than Shane's! How fun for Ilya and Sasha.

"You think dry is an advantage?" Ilya says incredulously.

"You do love getting it wet."

Ilya shrugs. "He doesn't drip like you in front, either."

"Oh my god." Shane's never even considered that his dick's sort of… leaky faucet of precome quality… might relate to the getting wet thing.

(And he'll never know. Health stuff that affects alpha and beta men tends to get first crack at research funding. Flipper issues are way at the bottom of the pile.)

"You really hate it?" Ilya gropes Shane's ass, in case he's confused about the subject of the question.

"No. I don't know."

"I think you must like it a little. I like it. I fucking love it."

"Fuck off."

"No, you - Shane, you're so convenient."

"Fuck off." Shane does the hair rubbing thing again.

"Hungry, wet asshole I can slip my dick into any time I want? Always ready?" Always is a stretch - literally - but the thought is flattering. "It's not a problem for me."

A problem is something you can fix, Rose said. It's true. Shane finishes the important work he's doing (the hair rubbing) and lies down on top of Ilya again.

"Also…" Ilya gently rocks his hips up against Shane. "If you're comparing yourself to alphas, betas? Fucking you is extra illegal for me."

Shane looks at him and shakes his head. Is now the time?

Ilya looks at him like he's dumb. "Is very hot to commit crimes with you, Hollander."

"Oh," Shane's nonplussed. "Just because you're not allowed?"

"Yes," Ilya says slowly. "I should pretend not to see you, should never touch you, and you let me anyway. If we were in Russia? You would marry some alpha girl your parents found for you. Share a house and a bed and just -" he closes a fist in the air, like space collapsing - "be stuck."

Shane nods slowly. "Yeah. I think that almost happened to me here, minus the arranged marriage part."

This doesn't deter Ilya. Might spur him on, actually. He grunts a little. "But you - you do what you want, you - you come to me, over and over, and ask me to ruin your parents' good, dutiful son."

"Fuck." He has to press his face back into Ilya's chest.

Ilya's hand comes up around the back of Shane's head, curling into his hair, holding him there. "And you don't just let me touch you. You let me fucking breed you, make evidence of - do you have any idea how fucking - first, is very dangerous, please never go to Russia again - or Georgia or Belarus, or many other places, probably - but fuck. It's crazy, how you let me do this."

"You like it that much?" Like, Shane's completely insane about it, but he's Canadian. It seems stressful, the cross-breeding thing.

Swapping blowjobs with guys in Russia also sounds stressful, so. Maybe Shane's just not cut out for a life of crime.

"Yes," Ilya says slowly, like Shane's stupid. "I don't need to hurt you with my knot. I have enough danger with you already, okay? It could fucking-" Ilya breathes in differently - like, hornier - "kill you. And you still let me. You ask for it. You make me crazy."

"That doesn't happen so much anymore," Shane says softly. "They have antibiotics now. Blood transfusions. Anesthesia." And there's a drug to combat the complications from omega males' - sigh - uterine acidity. Everyone knows it's possible, these days. Even if no one knows a guy who's actually done it.

Ilya just shakes his head. "Death or imprisonment, Hollander. And you still want my dick so bad you beg for it."

Shane hums. "Okay," he says, after a minute.

"Okay?"

"Yeah. I guess that's okay."

"Oh, good, I am glad I have permission to jerk off to the crime of putting my cock in your mouth. Or in your ass and fucking -"

He bites Shane instead of continuing, apparently overcome.

"Maybe we shouldn't have been having phone sex while you were in Moscow, Ilya," Shane says sensibly. It's fun to be the pragmatic one at Ilya, who gets that Shane's not always serious about it.

"I would have used ugly vase from sitting room to break the bathroom window and throw myself out," Ilya says, with worrying immediacy and specificity.

"Oh. Then maybe we need to keep having phone sex."

"All the fucking time, Shane," Ilya whispers, and sweetly runs a hand through Shane's hair, bumps his forehead against Shane's temple.