Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Svetlana Vetrova

Additional Tags:

various boston raiders, wish fulfillment: the fic, yes i am kidnapping shane hollander to boston for very vague reasons, yes i want shane hollander in my city get over it, we need this!!, Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Player Shane Hollander, marleau/shane friendship, Good Friend Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, this is 33k of me wanting to make things nice for everyone, so i turn the anxiety and internalized homophobia dial down like 3 whole clicks, the metros are the villains in this because im lazy, hockey inaccuracies, probably, i don’t even KNOW so I’m just assuming, i stole one of shane’s cups with the metros to try and make the trade more believable, which i feel bad about, but on the plus side i stole a cup from the metros so, this is largely comedy/fluff with like 2 seconds of angst which is a new one for me, Anxious Shane Hollander, in the sense that this entire plot is really a sort of extended tuna meltdown for him

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-07-12 Words: 33,727 Chapters: 1/1

Shipping up in Boston

Summary

Shane is traded to Boston during the hookup era, and his attempts to act normal and professional around Rozanov are a little too successful: fans start shipping him with Marleau, instead.

Notes

I thought this was going to be a 5k fic about the shipping stuff, but it turned into 33k of wish fulfillment in the sense that I go over the top in giving them an easy time. As a result, I have no idea what this fic is except that I know it’s very soft.

The trade is, everyone agrees, complete bullshit. 

That’s good, because no one online seems to be blaming Shane for it, which was his biggest concern. Of course, none of the real reasons for it have leaked yet, so he expects that will probably change. It has seemed from the beginning like Metros management doesn’t want anything coming out either, but considering how fucking awful things got by the end of last season, Shane has been expecting the worst. Like, everything else has gone catastrophically wrong in his life, so why would he expect his former team to play by the rules about this when they’re currently getting eviscerated on Twitter for being stupid enough to let Shane Hollander go?

No one agrees that the trade is bullshit more than Shane, who has like five panic attacks about it within the first hour after the call from his agent confirming it. It’s not like it’s a complete surprise, but right up until the call, he’d been convinced that everything would somehow work out in his favor. Obviously that was naive of him, but it’s just…he’s Shane Hollander. He thought that meant something. Farah and his mom have both been telling him repeatedly since this clusterfuck started that the Metros would be fucking idiots if they went through with it, and he's generally found that they know what they're talking about. 

But apparently management are idiots. He won them their first cup in years, and sure, maybe the following year ended atrociously, but if they weren't fucking stupid, they would know it wasn’t on Shane, the fact that his team couldn’t get their shit together just because they found out—in a way that Shane is still internally cringing about, all these months later—that their captain is maybe a little gay. His mom, who knows roughly ten percent of the whole story, and who knows barely any of the really relevant bits, because Shane is apparently delusional enough to think he can keep her in the dark about being maybe a little gay for the rest of his life, eventually suggests that the commissioner might have had something to do with making sure the trade went through, probably not liking the threat of the questions that would naturally arise if the Metros kept Shane but got rid of like five other guys. Shane thinks she might be right, because the call he had with Crowell earlier in the year, when he first indicated that he would be open to a trade, had been threatening, if technically surface-level friendly. 

The official reason for the trade given by the management team is some corporate-speak horseshit about “shaking things up” and moving in “a different direction” after a disappointing season. A lot of the members of the management team coming in are new, so there’s a lot of leaning on that, acting like they need “fresh blood”, as if Shane is near the end of his career, rather than still approaching its peak. One of the things they pick up in the trade is a cheaper, flashier new center who’s never going to be half the player Shane is, but they act like acquiring the kid is a huge deal, clearly committed to selling the lie. Most people sniff it out as bullshit, because the Metros are trading Shane fucking Hollander for a forgettable, half-decent center from fucking Detroit. 

None of this technically matters to Shane. He hopes they never win the cup again. 

After his panic attacks are over, he settles into a state that he welcomes happily, because it’s better than the panic and is necessary if he wants to get off his living room floor and start responding to his four million texts. This almost surgical absence of panic where panic should be has happened to him a few times over the years. He’ll worry himself sick about something for days ahead of time, but when he gets to the point where he’s going to have to deal with it, his brain will lock up tightly enough that he’s able to just go out there and fucking do it. It’s like his emotions bleed out of him completely, leaving an empty husk who’s able to complete whatever task he has to complete, and then a week later he’ll come back to himself and his entire body will start shaking so badly that he’ll have to sit down on the floor of the shower until it stops. 

Okay, he thinks, once he’s read a dozen articles and three hundred tweets and is satisfied that everyone is on his “side”, even though they don’t know exactly what his side is, yet, because so far Metro's leadership is, as promised, keeping their mouths shut about the fact that Shane had been the one to ask for the trade. Okay, it’s done. Focus on the next thing. 

His agent texts him twenty minutes after their last call, reminding him that no one is going to say anything to anyone, including her. No one wants the truth about the last year coming out, least of all Metros management. There are a few polite implications that if Shane does decide he wants to tell people, Farah will have his back. Telling people is the last thing he wants to do, so he just hits her with a thumbs up and goes back to disassociating in peace. 

It happened like this: 

Shane led the Metros to their first cup win in years. Everyone loved him, then. His whole team. He finally started feeling like he was really part of them, and not just their captain who was always standing separate. 

Near the middle of the next season, a few of the guys saw something on Shane’s phone that they shouldn’t have seen. This was probably salvageable, except that Shane panicked, and was stupid about it, and so he confirmed some things about his sexuality that he never meant to confirm to anyone, possibly ever. 

Half the team seemed neutral-to-fine about it. The other half was bad-to-very-bad. 

They were swept in the first round of the playoffs, at least in part because the half of the team that couldn’t deal with Shane liking dick were fucking stupid enough to let it affect their game. 

Shane trained even harder in the off-season, convinced he could carry the team through to another win if he just tried hard enough, convinced they would accept him again if he proved himself. He also convinced himself, like a naive idiot, that his teammates would use the summer to get over themselves and would go back to playing hockey instead of giving a single shit about his sex life.

Two weeks into the regular season, Shane went from confused to hurt and then settled somewhere near blisteringly furious. He could have continued to power through. Maybe, arguably, he should have. He gave up on them, instead. He reached his limit on the comments, on the unwarranted hip-checks in the locker room, on the defacing of his locker, on the snickering every time he entered a room with too many of the biggest assholes in it. Even the half of the team that hadn’t been openly bigoted were quiet whenever Shane was targeted. Only Hayden and JJ stood up for him, and it just wasn’t enough. He spoke to his coach. He spoke to management. He quickly realized that they all thought that him liking dick was the bigger problem, and that the guys in the room should be free to “share their opinions”, and that Shane would just have to “man up” and “be the bigger person” no matter how many slurs were hurled at him. He considered threatening to go public, but he couldn’t make himself do it. He talked to his agent, instead.

He told his mom that the locker room was toxic, and that he had tried his hardest, but that he couldn’t be there anymore. She tried to talk him out of it. She said you know what locker rooms are like, Shane. He probably should have told her then that the comments were about him, but he didn’t, because he was afraid. He said instead that he couldn’t continue to play for a team where the culture was so trashed, and he asked her to have his back. I’ll always have your back, she promised him, but he could tell that she was hurt.

He told his agent that he wanted a trade. His mom again tried to talk him out of it, and was surprised when he stood his ground. He was a little surprised he stood his ground, too, but he was so fucking angry and so fucking sick of trying to appease them for something he’d tried and failed to control. He was still mad at himself for letting anyone find out. He was mad at himself for needing what he needed. But he was more mad at them, at least for a little while. 

The trade demand was supposed to be a bluff. He figured they’d realize that he was a more valuable asset than the seven or so guys who were doing the most to make his life miserable. He was fucking Shane Hollander. He was a generational player, and they were all middling at best. Why would they trade him instead of getting rid of the worst of them and making sure that the rest stayed in line? Didn’t they want to fucking win? 

The Metros called his bluff, and in the end, Shane was traded to Boston. 

Hayden and Jackie show up at his apartment half an hour after the trade is announced, and they hug him hard between them. They’re the only people in his life who know (almost) everything that’s been happening, and he doesn’t think he would have made it through the year without Hayden, and he definitely wouldn’t have made it without Jackie. Hayden got him out of the locker room and took him home that first day, and they cooked him food and piled the kids on top of him on the couch to watch some awful animated movie that got him out of his funk just because he couldn't stop snarking about it. They said with their actions even before they said with words that everything was okay, that they were okay with Shane, and that Shane would be safe with them. He feels unmoored to be cut off from them now, sent away from the only people he has been able to be (mostly) honest with, but they keep reminding him that they’ll always be there for him, always have time for him, and he chooses to believe them. Needs to believe them, maybe. 

His mother calls four times before he finally answers, when the Pikes have finally gone home. She and his father are already on their way to his place, which isn’t a surprise. He doesn’t even mind it; he doesn’t think he wants to be alone. He keeps scrolling through Twitter while he waits for them. There’s a genuine protest forming at the rink. They might actually storm it, like they think the Metros are holding him hostage inside, or like they think they’ll find the trade documents locked in an office safe and be able to shred them or light them on fire to nullify it.  

He’s careful to keep his fingers away from the ‘like’ button, because he’s tempted to hit it a few times, and he knows that would be fucking stupid, considering. Someone posts a meme of that girl smiling while a house burns behind her, and they caption it Rozanov right now. Shane’s finger hovers over the like button for a hair too long before he puts his phone down and has another panic attack, because somehow, in all of this, he has forgotten to freak out about Rozanov.

Things between he and Rozanov have been kind of weird, lately. Closer than they used to be. They've been texting a lot. Shane thinks it’s probably his fault, because the first time they met up after the team found out about him last year, he tried to tell Rozanov that they had to stop fucking. Rozanov had looked bewildered in a way that made Shane’s stomach ache, but then went all closed off, shrugging and looking away, and Shane had realized, uncomfortably, that Rozanov was hurt. He’d folded immediately, taken it back. Maybe he should have told Rozanov the truth, then, but he hadn’t. He just told Rozanov to stop texting him dick pics, because it was dangerous, and Rozanov had rolled his eyes but agreed, and then happily fucked him into the couch cushions the way Shane likes best. They’d gone back to normal after that, but Rozanov stopped sexting so much, and started just texting instead. Shane, unfortunately, likes it a lot.

Shane picks up his phone and puts it back down four times, each time realizing that he doesn’t have any idea what to even say to Rozanov. Is Rozanov going to be annoyed? Is he going to be confused? Is he going to be angry? Shane is frightened by the fact that Rozanov is basically the only person he’s ever met in his life who hasn’t texted him about the trade yet until he remembers that Boston is literally in the middle of a game. 

Fifteen minutes before she’s supposed to get to the house, his mother sends him a link on Youtube with, “well I guess I have to love him now or whatever”, which makes Shane laugh until he clicks on it and realizes that it's a post-game thing with Rozanov. Well, that saves him the trouble of figuring out what to text, at least.

“I'm not sure if you've had time to digest the news about Hollander or not, but we were hoping to get a statement?” a reporter says. Rozanov frowns, glances off-screen. 

“News about Hollander? He is okay?” he asks, clearly concerned. Shane's heart clenches a little bit, and he bites the inside of his cheek, and he tells himself to stop being so fucking eager. 

“Physically, yes,” the reporter says, which makes everyone laugh off screen. “I'm sure he has mixed feelings about being traded to Boston, though.”

They clearly want to surprise Rozanov with the information, thinking he’ll give them a better soundbyte if he's caught off guard. Rozanov's eyes narrow for a second, and he leans back and checks off screen again, apparently for confirmation. When he gets it, he smiles wide, and he leans forward again, elbows on the table, mouth lowered almost right to the mic. 

“They are giving me Shane Hollander?” he asks in this low voice. Does he have to make it sound like Shane is some kind of fucking war prize? Jesus. “What was Montreal thinking? I know I say this a lot, but this time.” He leans back in his chair again, but this time he's laughing, his smile huge and genuine and giddy. Shane finds himself smiling wide too, like they're in the room together. Why had he ever been worried about how Rozanov would react to this? “Naomi is shaking her head at me off there. She knows I will give terrible PR answer if I say what I'm really thinking. So I will speak to Hollander directly.” He leans in, looks down the barrel of the camera. “Hollander? Stop freaking out. This is going to be so much fun.”

He winks, and Shane pulls his face down into the collar of his hoodie to hide his grin from no one. 

Lily

Holy shit holy shit

For the record I am sorry 

Or whatever you need to hear

I know you have probably been crying for hours so sad that Montreal is so fucking stupid 

BUT THIS IS GOING TO BE SO FUCKING GOOD 

Jane

Fuck you I haven't been crying 

Lily

Lovely Jane, you get tears in your eyes when I don't fuck you fast enough

You cry when I suck your dick too good 

Jane

I'm blocking you

Lily 

Is that any way to talk to your new captain?

Jane

And why the fuck would you say it like THAT

Like I'm a prize!!! No one GAVE you anything!

Lily

Would you rather I say wow can you please repeat yourself ms reporter because my cock got so hard at this news it made boing noises like cartoon and I could not hear the question?

Jane

Obviously not

Lily

Well that was the only other option

I am sorry though 

For your sadness

Or whatever

But come on 

We are going to fucking destroy them

You and me 

And, well, okay. At least there's that. 

He worries about how different it's going to be, being around Rozanov all the time, and he worries especially because he’s pretty sure Rozanov will agree with him that they have to stop fucking, at least during the season. Maybe they can still fuck sometimes in the offseason? But they can't fuck and be on the same team, because it will be too obvious that they’re fucking if they're around each other all the time. They've only gotten away with this for so long because there was the whole rivalry thing, which was only good cover because everyone assumed they gave enough of a shit about a league marketing stunt to hate each other personally. If they’re supposed to be pivoting into being teammates, maybe even friends, people are going to see the way Shane looks at Rozanov, and they're going to immediately know. 

He doesn't text Rozanov about it, because he knows Rozanov will make fun of him, or will be annoyed, and he thinks it's probably a conversation that should be held in person instead anyway, even though he remembers very well what happened the last time he tried to have this conversation with Rozanov in person. 

And what do you know? He shows up at Rozanov's house for the first time, just a few hours after landing in Boston, and Rozanov immediately slams him against the door and kisses him, and Shane is only human. 

It's only after, still panting in Rozanov's bed, cuddled up next to him, feeling better than he’s felt in weeks, that he starts to rethink his earlier position. 

“We really need to talk about this,” he says. Rozanov reaches over and puts his hand on Shane's thigh, which is a dirty negotiation tactic, and he knows it. Shane would be more upset about it except he's pretty sure he wants to be talked out of what he hasn't yet had the courage to say. 

“Mm, no, not really,” Rozanov says. 

“We're going to be playing on the same team.”

“Yes.”

“Isn't it, like, a conflict of interest if we're also fucking?”

“Was it a conflict of interest when I was fucking you after beating you?”

“I mean, yeah, probably.”

“But you didn't let it stop you then.”

“No,” Shane admits quietly. 

“Do you want to stop?”

“No.”

“Okay. So we don't stop.”

Shane sighs. He has the constitution of a wet paper towel when it comes to Rozanov. 

“Okay,” he agrees. “But we should have, like, ground rules. We have to act totally normal in public. I don't want people seeing something they shouldn't.”

“What, I cannot stick my tongue down your throat on center ice?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Hollander, just because you are boring and your Metros were assholes, it doesn't mean everyone will think we’re fucking if we smile at each other. We could do worse than smile at each other and everyone will say, ‘wow, they are becoming such good friends’.”

“I think that's a bit of an exaggeration.”

Rozanov snorts, and he pulls up YouTube on his phone. 

“Look at this,” he says. Types “rozanov marleau friendship” and immediately gets multiple videos. Fanmade compilations of himself and Cliff Marleau goofing around on the bench, or during interviews, or on the ice. There's some cheesy 80s ballad playing in the background. 

“What? People think you and Marleau are, uh…?”

“Fucking? No. Well, some people do really believe it, but nobody listens to them. They just have their own fun. But this is what I'm telling you. This is normal! Every team with two star players, you have videos just like this. Look at this shit. They have them for Kent and Barrett, Hollander. Believe me, nobody will guess anything. They will tweet pictures of us with little hearts, and everyone will say ‘oh, so cute how they are friends now’. I could kiss you on the fucking mouth and they will say I'm being so welcoming to a new teammate. So sportsmanlike. So European.”

“There's no way that's true,” Shane murmurs, but he can't take his eyes off the clips still playing on Rozanov's phone. Rozanov and Marleau hugging, kissing each other on the helmet, arms around each other's shoulders in the locker room, sweaty and shirtless, while Rozanov talks to reporters. Shane knows that guys get handsy and close sometimes, but he's always stood apart from it. Even with Hayden, there was a barrier there. Is it really that normal?

“Why are you licking his face?” he asks, mildly horrified.

“Just think,” Ilya says pointedly. “Could be your face, next time.”

When he meets the Raiders in the locker room before his first practice with them, they’re nice to him to a degree that would be creepy except that Shane knows they all see this trade as them “winning” something. The front office people are all normal amounts of nice, welcoming him to the team and making him pose for a million pictures holding his new jersey. He tries not to feel weird about his new jersey, the new colors, the new locker room, the new teammates. He tries to tell himself that people switch teams all the time, and that he can get used to things here just like he got used to things in Montreal. He thinks he’ll get there eventually, but it’s not working yet. 

Montreal the city is still freaking the fuck out, apparently, and even the non-hockey fans in Boston only need to be told that they’ve gotten a win over a rival to get involved, because he keeps getting cheered everywhere he goes. It’s overwhelming, but not necessarily in a bad way. In a loud way, definitely, and maybe he needs to escape to bathroom stalls more often in the first few days so he can have mini panic attacks in peace, but he eventually settles down as people lose interest in him as a novelty.

He tries to avoid shit talking Montreal too much, mostly because there's a part of him that still hopes this trade turns out to be some terrible prank, but it's hard not to get caught up in it all when his feelings are, yeah, so shattered that he can hardly breathe when he's alone in a room for more than fifteen seconds, and also when Rozanov is so smugly pleased about it. He tends to just smile and let Rozanov talk shit for him, which pleases the Raiders, and which admittedly pleases Shane, too, even though he thinks he probably should not enjoy Rozanov sticking up for him as much as he does. 

All through that first practice, the Raiders call him shit like Shaney and Shanester and Hollatron and Hollzy and Hollamander, for some reason. He never had a nickname in Montreal. He can’t decide how he feels about these ones except that he’s sort of touched that they’re trying at all. They jostle past him in the locker room, shake him by the shoulders for seemingly no reason, and they whoop about everything he does in practice, and they tease him with the same open affection with which they tease each other. Marleau is the worst/best offender, but they’re all pretty bad. Shane is used to being separate from everyone else in the locker room. He's used to being the captain, the killjoy, the one who has to tell them to stop using slurs. Who has to choose carefully the moments when he's allowed to tell them to stop using slurs, because half of the slurs apply to him. The Raiders room immediately treats him like a person, like one of them. He doesn’t think it’s just because he's not their captain now. Maybe it’s just that they feel like a less “serious” team, but he doesn’t think that’s the whole of it, either. 

Rozanov is himself in a way Shane has never been allowed to see him before. He's light, vicious, brutally funny. He chirps everyone with affection, and they all show him affection right back. When they leave the ice after practice, he says “good job, I love you” to everyone. When Shane leaves the ice, last, he leans in close. “And you,” he says, louder than Shane would prefer. “Are my favorite”, and then he kisses Shane on the helmet, also loudly. But he's right, and no one thinks anything of it except that they're all happy to have Shane around, because there's no way they're not going to crush Montreal now. 

If Rozanov is this bad in a practice, Shane is a little afraid of how bad he'll be in a game, but he's sort of coming around to the idea that people won't notice, or at least won’t care. He pays attention to how the Raiders interact with each other. In the Metros locker room, things were often tense and silent or they were loudly gregarious, depending on coach’s mood that day, and probably also the moods of the loudest guys in the room. But they weren't often friendly in the same way the Raiders are turning out to be friendly. 

The Raiders are constantly pulling Shane into one armed hugs and ruffling his hair and telling him he's a fucking menace. They don't resent him when he and Rozanov skate circles around them in practice. They cheer him and chirp him and they treat him immediately like one of their own. Shane doesn't always like being touched by other people, but being touched by the Raiders feels in some ways like an extension of being touched by Rozanov. Like Rozanov's team has welcomed him, embraced him. It's nice. 

The second time he visits Rozanov's house, like a half hour outside Boston if he leaves the city at a good traffic time (which is, Shane is beginning to find, something that only happens if the universe feels like providing miracles), Rozanov seems so pleased to see him there that it makes Shane's heart hurt, just because he doesn't think anyone has ever been so openly happy to see him except maybe his parents and the Pike kids.

“We have all day,” Rozanov says, when Shane is eager, ripping off his shirt basically just past the entryway. “No need to catch a flight. No need to run.”

Shane's heartbeat speeds up, and he knows that he wants that. Wants this. Wants hours with Rozanov instead of minutes. But they've never done that before, and he thinks he's terrified of fucking it up. What if they don't actually like each other when they have hours to spend together? What if this whole thing has only worked as long as it has because they don't see each other often enough to get sick of each other? What if it fucking flames out because when Shane is around all the time, his boringness stops being a fun quirk, and Rozanov realizes how much fucking work it is to have to constantly placate a person who is a writhing mass of anxiety at the best of times?

He needs to make this work. He's so fucking desperate to make this work, and he's afraid that Rozanov will be able to tell that he's desperate to make it work, and he can feel himself spiraling even as Rozanov kisses him. Rozanov has just been so good, this whole time, for this entire process, and Shane wants to be just as good back at him, but what if he’s just not capable of that? What if he tries his hardest and still fucking sucks at it?

By the time he leaves the next morning, it’s possible that Rozanov has fucked all the anxiety out of him. Like he will never be anxious again. He goes back to his apartment, and he lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling, and he waits to spiral, but he doesn’t. 

I actually think you can do this, he surprises himself by thinking.

During Shane’s first game with the Raiders, Rozanov strikes a balance that feels completely natural. It’s actually really fucking annoying how good he is at it, while Shane feels like he’s floundering every time Rozanov breathes in his direction. Rozanov doesn’t go over the top with the helmet kisses and the one-armed hugs and the broad smiles, the way Shane has been a little afraid he would. That’s what he does at practice, and Shane has been struggling not to gaze at him with stupid little cartoon hearts in his eyes the entire time, so obviously it would be even worse if the same thing happened during a game, because Shane already gets kind of horned up about games in a totally normal way, without adding Rozanov to the equation. And, like, Rozanov being even slightly flirtier than normal would be a problem for all the usual anxiety-laden, league-shaped reasons, but it would also be fucking terrible just because it's an unfortunate truth that watching Rozanov play does tend to turn him on, because Shane likes good hockey almost as much as he likes the rest of the stuff he and Rozanov do. 

But Rozanov is restrained, for him. He skates circles around Shane during warmups, chirping him and laughing about something before skating off to do the same with Carmichael and then St-Simon before sticking to Marleau for the rest of it. As they’re leaving the ice, he pulls an arm across Shane’s shoulders and points at a kid holding a sign welcoming Shane to Boston in the front row. Shane smiles and waves awkwardly, and Rozanov rubs the top of his helmet as if Shane is being cute. 

And that’s fine. That’s all fine. No one can tell they’re fucking from that, obviously, because that would be ridiculous, and for once, Shane’s anxiety agrees with the part of his brain that makes up conscious thought, so that’s nice. It’s all good PR, anyway. Him and Rozanov being friendly, clearly not continuing to do the stupid rivalry shit. His mom literally told him on the phone this morning that he should make an effort to look like he’s getting along with Rozanov, because she thinks the league spin will be all about making them unlikely friends now. Shane tried to tell her that the rivalry was never real on his and Rozanov’s part, feeling kind of bold when he told her that they have always been friends, kind of. 

She’d laughed at him like she thought he was kidding, so it’s apparently going to be a work in progress, but Shane still feels a bit brave for having said it at all.

They win that first game convincingly, and Rozanov is giddy afterwards with everyone, but it feels like he’s especially warm and pleased with Shane. Shane scored one of their three goals, and he assisted Rozanov on the second one during the Power Play, so it doesn’t even feel like it’s unearned, or like it will look weird, for Rozanov to be so pleased with him. Everyone on the team is pleased with him, too. Of course they are. He’s Shane fucking Hollander. He just forgot that for a little bit, last season.

He feels like he’s been smacked in the face with the realization that he gets to have Rozanov bright and effusive after wins now, and he gets to be bright and effusive about it at the same time. Like, it was never bad with Rozanov. Shane admittedly enjoyed the fact that one of them would win and the other would lose, because there was this undercurrent of genuine resentment that writhed around beneath the blistering attraction and the unfortunate affection, but this? He gets to have Rozanov like this? That’s insane. 

He’s not sure if Rozanov will want to fuck after the game, since it’s not like it used to be, where they only had these hours after games against each other during which they could fuck. They’ve fucked more than a few times since Shane moved to Boston, so maybe Rozanov will want to hook up with someone else. Maybe he has other plans. Shane has been doing a pretty good job of not being as insane about Rozanov as he wants to be so far, and he sees no reason to break that streak, and so he makes himself be chill. If Rozanov wants to go out with the guys and get laid, okay. Shane will be fine about it. He won’t be weird about it. He definitely won’t go home alone and find himself with suspiciously timed allergies as he sniffles wetly into his hockey book or whatever. He’ll be an adult who is capable of having only casual feelings for his casual fuckbuddy, and it will be fine. 

Except then Rozanov insists that Shane go out with them to some club the team apparently frequents in Boston, and he covers for Shane when Shane doesn’t really want to drink, and he manages to sneak them out a side door maybe two hours later, when the other Raiders are too hammered to notice that their captain only had one drink and their Shane didn’t have any. They go back to Shane’s place, Rozanov acting out drunkenness, endearingly bad at it, joking that if anyone is watching them like creeps from their windows, it will look like Shane is offering his wasted captain a place to stay for the night. 

The club is only a few blocks from Shane’s new apartment, and so they get there quick, and Shane starts to ask if Rozanov wants a tour, but Rozanov is already kissing him aggressively, babbling all sorts of shit in Russian that Shane can’t understand. He’s pretty sure it’s about hockey, because of the way Rozanov keeps moving his hands around and gesturing wildly. Shane laughs at him, and Rozanov finally swaps back to English. 

“Finally you are mine, and fucking Montreal will cry themselves to sleep forever. That fucking goal in the third period, Hollander!”

“Oh, so we’re not doing that thing anymore where you pretend to think I’m a shitty player?” 

“Of course not. You are mine now. You are a beautiful player.” 

Rozanov kisses him on the nose before he sidles off into the living room to examine Shane’s very boring apartment, still largely unpacked, and Shane pretends not to be stunned stupid by the thoughtless little gesture, annoyed with himself for blushing about it. 

So Shane is feeling pretty good about things, is the point, by the time the second game comes around. He’s maybe feeling a little bit playful, and he kind of wants to test the waters, or at least let Rozanov know that he’s not completely neurotic about them being friendly in public. So when the third line is out on the ice, and he and Rozanov are sitting on the bench at the same time, and he wants to point something out, he puts an arm around Rozanov’s back and leans in close to talk to him, and he can see that it sparks something interested and a little amused; Rozanov looks over at him, sweat dripping from his hair, grinning in pleased surprise, and then he pays attention to Shane's observation about the opposing goalie clearly being in some discomfort, and lagging slightly when defending his left side. 

“Mr. Hockey Genius,” Rozanov says after they watch the goalie deflect a shot just barely, clearly favoring his side as he does. “Okay. Good call.” And Rozanov taps his head a little bit against the side of Shane's. 

Shane finds the .gif of that head tap and after the game. He finds it all across hockey Twitter, people bemoaning the loss of the rivalry while also cheering the gain of the “surprisingly wholesome” friendship. There are all sorts of quotes about each other to the media, reposted from all the interviews they’ve given since the trade was announced, brought up again now that the visual evidence of them getting along is picking up interest. Shane has been avoiding social media for the most part, trusting Farah to tell him if anything unfortunate has leaked out, not wanting to watch in real time as the Montreal fans inevitably turn on him now that he’s been doing well in Boston and has not been loyally huddled in a corner weeping through O Canada. But now he scrolls through and reads all the comments he can find, and of course Ilya was right. There are a few replies that are like “do you think they've ever explored each other's bodies” level jokes, but he saw that exact same comment posted on the Rozanov and Marleau compilations, so he knows it's a meme or something. Most people are just calling them friends, and that’s sort of nice, maybe. It’s not like they’re not friends.

He's still careful in public. He still makes it a point to keep some professional distance, especially so early. Playing with the Raiders is easier than he would have dared to hope, but of course there’s still an adjustment period. They're rough and known for fighting, and Shane has never really been about that. It’s weird, at first, how different their locker room is from the room that he’s used to, but it’s not like it’s perfect. There are a couple of douchebags on the team who Shane tries to avoid, and even the nicest guys are loud as fuck, and Shane has to get used to that. And it’s clear he’s still expected to be himself, even on the Raiders, so there’s a little bit of that old pressure he used to feel on the Metros, the pressure to be above the fighting or whatever. He still feels a little bit outside the room in a way he doesn’t think he’d have been able to help, anyway, just based on how he is as a person. There are a lot of talks with the PR team where they emphasize and reemphasize that he’s a great balance to Rozanov, a great foil. It’s no surprise that they have them doing media together a lot, and they fall into it easily, their roles exactly what they’ve always been, except now they’re teammates, and their same old bickering comes off as jocular and friendly, just because of the different context. 

It’s kind of funny, because everyone’s acting like things with him and Rozanov are going to be way more difficult to adjust to than they really will be, and Shane understands how this works. They want it to be an adjustment period. They want to watch the growing pains. They want to watch Rozanov and Hollander fall in love with each other’s hockey. They want to watch them become teammates in real time. They would feel cheated out of the narrative if they understood that they have always respected each other, always liked each other. 

So he plays that up, a little bit, the outsider thing. Still standing at the edge of the room for now. It’s just hard to stay on the outside when they’re always eagerly drawing him in every time he tries to take a step back. It does kind of sting, though, how much they clearly do want him closer. They like him. They think he’s funny. They want to hang out with him. But they don’t take it personally if he says no. They don’t chirp him about it. They groan in disappointment, but they say, next time! And it makes Shane want to actually go next time, because he doesn’t want them to think that they’re the problem. The whole thing is starting to give him a bit of a complex: was he the problem in the Metros room all along? Is he the reason it was so unfriendly? Did they all sense that he was uncomfortable and closed-off, and they became cold and avoidant as a result? Is that why he was so easy to trade away? Are the Raiders only so friendly because they haven’t realized yet that Shane is exactly as boring as he seems?.

It weighs on him, and he tries to hide it, but he can tell that people notice, especially Marleau. Marleau has this bizarrely charming golden retriever energy to him, but that just makes it easier for him to shock people when he’s intuitive out of nowhere. He’s like one of those therapy dogs: he always seems to sense Shane's discomfort, and he always seems to know exactly what to say to break him out of a spiral. It's impressive. He mentions this to Rozanov once, and Rozanov goes off on an impassioned rant about Marleau’s telepathic ability to be exactly the kind of friend that a person needs in any given situation, while simultaneously having the emotional intuition of a dishrag. He sounds equal parts rattled and impressed, and Shane feels more comfortable around Marleau in general after that. It’s unfortunately true that he trusts Rozanov’s judgement about these things. If he thinks that Marleau is a safe person to befriend, he’s probably right.

And it's funny how Rozanov pointed out that people are obsessed with him and Marleau, because Shane sort of gets why. Maybe that’s a fucked up thing to think about your recently-not-very-casual fuckbuddy and your shared, admittedly hot, teammate. Marleau just has this energy, especially when it comes to Rozanov. Rozanov in the locker room and on the ice and after games is all unrestrained, savage joy, and Marleau is an easy presence beside him, bringing him back to earth with a jovial clap on the back and some incomprehensible joke that Rozanov always finds hilarious. It would be stupid to be jealous of that, and so Shane isn't jealous, but it does twinge inside him sometimes, this awareness that he could never be that person for Rozanov, even if he tried. 

After four games, Shane is already starting to feel settled, which is both a surprise and a relief. He historically hasn’t done well with change, not even small changes, and this one isn’t very small, so he should be stuck on it, but he isn’t. He and Rozanov practice together like they’ve always played together, and there’s no denying their effectiveness on the Power Play. His parents fly down to watch the fourth game in person, tense and nervous for him but trying to hide it when they meet him at his apartment, and he does his best to assure them that he's okay. He'd toyed with the idea of having Rozanov come meet them so they can see for themselves how well he’s actually getting along with his new captain, but that felt a little too weird for everyone involved, and so he invites Marleau instead. He's still nervous about it, because Marleau has a tendency to say shit so stupid it rewires Shane's brain, but Marleau is also a chameleon, because he charms Shane's parents immediately. He acts like the older brother Shane never had, raves about what a value add Shane is to the team. He’s suddenly a tour guide, talking about all the places the Hollanders have to check out in Boston. When Shane’s dad mentions wanting to see the New England Aquarium, he’s got information not only about which exhibits his nieces like the best, but also about the best way to get there, and the best restaurants for after. Shane watches him the whole time with open bafflement that hopefully doesn’t look too admiring, because he really is admiring. Like, who the fuck is this? This can't be the same Marleau who, three days ago, spent a full fifteen minutes—Shane timed it!—describing the “perfect tits” of some porn actress he then had the gall to claim was “just all right”. 

It’s especially weird listening to Marleau talk about him, because he doesn’t think Marleau is capable of deception in that way, but he’s saying shit about how fun and funny Shane is, which means he might actually like him. Why? Shane never understands why most people like him, and he definitely doesn’t get it with Marleau.

“Thank you, dude,” Shane says, later, on their way into practice. “I don't know how you do that. You made them feel better about me being here than I've been able to do in weeks.”

Marleau laughs and says, “yeah, moms love me,” and even that manages to sound fun, and not disgusting. 

Rozanov is smugly pleased with himself when his casual offhanded mentions of Shane being a good potential roommate for him because he’s so quiet and well behaved and probably won’t let him get in any scandals bears fruit, and they’re rooming together for their first long roadie. It’s an insane indulgence that Shane hadn't expected. They don’t have to sneak anywhere? No one will think it’s weird if they’re in the same room together, at night, with the lights off and no clothes on? That’s allowed? And no one will be able to burst in and ruin everything because they can just lock the door?

Rozanov says a bunch of frankly perverted things about how he has to “take care” of his new rookie, which has Shane flushing and scowling and snapping that they're the same age. Rozanov ignores him, knowing that Shane does, unfortunately, find it kind of hot, the whole captain-rookie roleplay thing. Like most things Rozanov, Shane is appalled at himself, but that doesn't make him want to actually stop.

It’s not like they've never shared a bed—convenience means that he has stayed at Rozanov’s house a few times rather than driving back into the city, and Rozanov has stayed with him a few times too—but it feels so strange and domestic to be sharing a hotel bed, even though that makes no fucking sense. It just feels more purposeful, maybe. Like, there’s another bed right there. They could fuck and then get into their own separate beds like married couples in old TV shows, but they don’t. They make the choice to stay in the same bed instead.

Rozanov laughs when Shane insists on messing up the other bed, just in case someone knocks early in the morning, before they’re awake enough to think of it, but he also looks beautifully happy when Shane crawls back into his bed afterwards. It does feel too close, like maybe this is too much, but Shane doesn't know how to turn it down, especially because he doesn't want to. He wants too much, is the issue. He wants more, when he has already been handed almost everything. It seems unfair to wish that there was more that Rozanov could give him, especially since he can't even define for himself exactly what he wishes that would be.  

Marleau comes to get them for breakfast in the morning, and he notices nothing strange, of course. He chirps Rozanov about keeping the new guy awake, tells Shane to text him if Rozanov ever sexiles him, like they're teenagers. Shane laughs and agrees, and Rozanov pretends at offense and jokes that maybe Shane should stick around during his hookups to “learn a few things”, which unfortunately gets Marleau on the topic of getting Shane laid after the game. Rozanov grimaces apologetically for that on his way out the door with Marleau, but he's also laughing, so it’s not a very good apology. Shane only sighs, and packs it away, and is glad to have the room to himself for a little bit. It was really nice, staying in bed with Rozanov after they were done fucking. Rozanov's skin was so warm and soft, his arms so comforting and welcoming. It's how he has been through this entire thing, so maybe Shane shouldn’t be so surprised, but he is surprised. He keeps expecting to reach out and be slapped away again, but maybe he should stop expecting that. But it’s that thing about Shane and change again. Once the rules are set in his mind, they tend to stay the rules. He has been doing well in adjusting to this new city and this new team, but he knows that part of it is because of just how miserable he was last year on the old one. The rules with Rozanov have shifted at the same time, and he has been trying to shift with them, but it's still strange. Difficult to figure out. It would be easier if he thought that Rozanov would tell him, if he asked, but he’s afraid to ask. He doesn’t want to fuck everything up when things are currently so fucking nice. 

They do go out that night, unfortunately, after a resounding victory. He and Rozanov are both pulled for media, and Shane tries to match Rozanov's glittering energy, but he knows he falls flat. He does his best to try and make it clear that he really does like working with Rozanov, and playing with him, and living in his city. He takes the chirps good-naturedly, and Rozanov smiles at him openly, and so he agrees to go out, even though all he really wants to do is go back to his hotel room and sleep, preferably after getting railed. He figures that going out beats waiting around in his hotel room and probably falling asleep before the railing can even happen.

The club is hot, loud, and too small for the amount of people in it, but Shane dutifully allows Marleau to talk him into a few drinks. He loosens up a little bit. Not enough to dance, but enough to let Marleau put an arm over his shoulders and lead him around to talk to different groups. It’s kind of nice, feeling like he has a guide and a tether. Marleau is so sturdy and comforting. Even though he’s always saying insane shit, it never makes Shane feel off-balanced, or like there’s a joke he doesn’t understand. Marleau is too much an open book for that. 

Shane occasionally catches sight of Rozanov dancing with various women out of the corner of his eye, and he keeps reminding himself that he's not allowed to get upset about it, and he tries very hard to stick to that particular rule. It would be stupid to be upset. He and Rozanov have been spending a lot of time together, but they’re still just fucking. They’re friends who are fucking now, maybe, more than they used to be. That doesn’t mean that Shane has the right to expect Ilya will stick to him during the roadie just because they’re sharing a room. It's just weird because they're on the same team now, so Shane has to see the evidence of Rozanov potentially preparing to fuck someone else, right in front of his face. He's not sure he likes it, but that’s a him problem, and he’s not selfish enough to make it Rozanov’s. So he just keeps his face turned away whenever he can, and he disassociates when he can’t turn away without making it too obvious, and he’s feeling pretty good about surviving the night in that way.

Marleau tries to wingman for him a few times, dragging Shane up to meet beautiful women. Marleau is good at talking to beautiful women, because of that aforementioned golden retriever energy. He’s good at excusing himself after a few minutes and leaving Shane alone with said beautiful women, too. Shane wishes he wasn’t so good at that part. Did he get good at it by wingmaning for Rozanov? Probably not. Shane can’t see Rozanov having any issues. 

Shane does end up in a long conversation with a pretty redhead named Lucy who likes the same real estate shows he does, and they talk for almost a half hour about the stupid people with their unrealistic budgets and their insane wishlists. She seems surprised that he wants to keep talking to her after she tells him three minutes in that she’s got a girlfriend, but she also seems pleased, and Shane tries not to feel too bad about essentially using her as cover, but he actually does really like talking to her until she has to leave. 

“I thought you had that one in the bag, man,” Marleau says as Shane wanders back over to their table with another drink, paid for by Lucy, who told him he was the nicest man she’d ever met in a club, which has Shane feeling very smug about himself. 

“I’m not really feeling it, sorry,” he even has the bravery to say. “I’m not really a hookup guy.” 

“Hey, man, that’s cool!” Marleau reassures him, somehow without sounding like he’s trying to reassure him. “You know what I would kill for right now? Fucking wings. There's a place two doors down that does fucking phenomenal wings. Come with me?”

“Oh, yeah, okay,” Shane says, super causal, like he's not dying to get out of here. 

He even consents to getting his own plate of wings, much smaller than Marleau's, and he listens in genuinely rapt fascination to Marleau's rambling epic about his on and off again girlfriend. She’s from Dracut, man, Marleau keeps saying, like that’s supposed to mean something. Shane finds himself getting invested in the way Marleau tells stories. He doesn't do it straightforwardly. He'll get like three minutes into a story before saying oh, by the way, it's important you know that her dad was in the military, and it'll make the previous three minutes of the story make so much more sense. It turns it into a spoken word mystery by accident. Like a verbal puzzle. Shane, still half-drunk, sits with his chin in his hand and his elbow on the table, eyes laser-focused on Marleau’s disgusting wing-eating, and he’s already having more fun than he had the rest of the night. Even more fun than he was having with Lucy!

Rozanov finds them eventually, with Conners and two rookie defensemen who are named Donaldson and Duncan and are always together, and so are known as Dunkin Donuts, as a unit. There's also a whole group of women with them, and Ilya tries to tempt Marleau away from his plate of wings like a foul-mouthed siren, trying to get him to join them on their way to some other club. Shane is relieved when Marleau tells them to fuck off so he can just echo Marleau’s words instead of trying to get out of it on his own. He and Marleau walk back to the hotel alone, and Shane finds himself talking about that last year in Montreal, and how bad things were getting. He doesn't tell the whole truth, of course, just vague descriptions of how toxic and shitty the locker room was getting, and he's buoyed by Marleau's bro-y, insistent “fuck them, dude, fuck them!” shouted in the quiet streets. Buoyed, too, by Marleau's in-context hilarious promises that he won't mention anything to anyone, especially not Rozanov, until Shane is ready. 

“He won't, like, take a girl back to the hotel room, will he?” Shane asks, in the elevator of the hotel, trying to seem unbothered, or maybe just an appropriate amount of slightly put off by the idea. Marleau laughs. 

“Probably not. He's still, like, meeting the parents with you, you know? Trying to make a good impression. Not acting like such a gremlin. He's been like a fuckin’ boy scout since you got here. But, hey, who knows?”

“Ugh,” Shane says. He doesn't actually think Rozanov will, but what if he's so drunk or so horny that he forgets Shane exists? 

“Vic took an early flight back to Boston because his grandma is sick, or something, so I don't have a roomie. I was gonna just get more drunk and jerk off like a normal person, but I guess I could get more drunk and watch a movie instead, if you want?”

Shane is still tipsy enough to think that sounds like a great idea, and so they head up to Marleau's room and watch some awful horror movie, and then an even worse horror movie afterwards. Marleau is probably terrible to watch movies with sober, because he asks so many questions and talks so much, but tipsy Shane is still fascinated by Marleau’s cool caveman vibes, so he likes it. 

“Oh, looks like you're safe!” Marleau says, cackling, looking at his phone at one point. “Angry text from Roz accusing me of, and I quote, ‘losing my Shane'. He's back in the room by himself, I guess.” 

Shane stammers out something hopefully not too obvious, his face flaming red and his dick unfortunately twitching in interest at the words my Shane. He pulls out his own phone, long since set to ‘do not disturb’ by his automatic timer, and scrolls through several confused and then some seemingly worried texts from Rozanov, who apparently got back to the room ages ago. 

“Hey, uh, thanks for letting me crash,” he says to Marleau on his way out, feeling awkward for the first time in hours. 

“Man, thank you. Roz is a machine. Sometimes I just want to get drunk and eat wings and watch a movie, you know?”

“Yeah, totally,” says Shane, who would much rather have been getting fucked by Rozanov, personally, and who typically doesn't enjoy any of those three things Marleau listed, but since he did enjoy himself tonight around the totally inappropriate jealousy he was feeling over Rozanov's time, he can agree this once. 

“You're all right, Hollamander,” Marleau says as punctuation, right as Shane leaves, and unfortunately Shane is still just tipsy enough that he takes that compliment very to heart. Lucy and Marleau in one night! Maybe Shane is cool.

Rozanov is already asleep by the time Shane gets back to their room, lying on his stomach, the sheet so far down his back that Shane is frozen for a second with terror when he looks at the tempting expanse of skin, for some reason. He gets ready for bed as quietly as he can, but not quietly enough. Rozanov wakes up with a sound that's unfortunately pretty adorable, and he squints over at Shane. 

“Not having sleepover with Marleau?” he asks casually. Shane laughs, and tries to sound the same. 

“No, just watching some movies.”

“Hm,” Rozanov says. Shane's brain flits through several chirps before he decides they would all sound too ugly if he said them now. Ugly, grasping, jealous. He hesitates when it comes time to pick which bed to climb into, feeling like he has to make the right choice here, but Rozanov turns a little, opens his arm, and Shane is grateful for the hint. He slides into Rozanov's bed beside him, and it feels weird to be sleeping in the same bed when they haven't fucked, but Rozanov presses a sleepy kiss to his temple and then goes slack, his arm tightening possessively around Shane just before he does, and Shane tries not to grin at the ceiling, just in case Rozanov wakes up again and sees it. 

In the morning, Rozanov comes out of the bathroom, freshly showered, looking so good that Shane takes a second to remember what he was doing. Rozanov smirks to notice it, and Shane doesn't try very hard to pretend like he was doing anything else. 

Rozanov keeps pausing in the act of getting dressed, like he has something to say and is just trying to figure out how to word it. Shane feels stupid for being so tense and worried about it, but he is tense and worried. He knows he was fucking weird last night, skittish around Rozanov in ways that feel too obvious now that he's not tipsy and uncomfortable and trying too hard not to be obvious. 

“Sorry,” he blurts, because waiting for Rozanov to figure out what he wants to say is starting to get torturous. “I, uh, think I was weird last night. I was trying to, like, stay out of your way, or whatever.”

“Stay out of my way?” Rozanov asks, openly baffled in a way that makes Shane feel a bit stupid. 

“Yeah, you know. Not, uh, cramp your style?”

“Hollander, what the fuck?” Rozanov asks. “I am too hungover for shit idioms.”

“If you wanted to hook up, or whatever, I didn't want…”

Rozanov looks relieved, a bit, and he stops pretending to be folding his clothes before packing them, and he walks over to where Shane has been seated awkwardly in that weird chair that’s in every hotel room ever, and he grips both armrests, leaning in close, trapping Shane in the pleasant way he does, which Shane has given up pretending not to like, at least to himself. 

“Hollander, okay,” he says. “So we are clear. I am not such an asshole that I would bring a girl back to a room I am sharing with you, okay? I do not shit where I eat.”

“Not too hungover for that idiom,” Shane grumbles, embarrassed that Rozanov is looking at him so intently. Rozanov smiles at him. It’s almost too soft for Shane’s heart to take. 

“No, that one is good. Okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Shane agrees. 

“We go out, we drink, we flirt with girls, or maybe you flirt with Marley, if you want…”

“I wasnt fucking flirting with Marley, asshole.”

“...but we never bring girls back here. Or boys, whatever. Room is just for us, okay?”

“Okay,” Shane says, relieved almost to the point of embarrassment to have it spoken aloud, made into a rule they're both expected to follow. Like Rozanov thinks there's any world where Shane would pull someone at a club and bring them back to his hotel room, even if that hotel room didn't have his fuckbuddy in it.

“Yes?”

“Yes,” Shane agrees, stronger, and Ilya finally leans down and kisses him so gently that it makes Shane's entire body go loose and happy. 

Someone posts these exterior shot pictures of Marleau and Shane at the wing place. One of them goes semi viral because someone posts it alongside some apparently famous painting of a diner because of the similar lighting and composition. In the picture, Marleau is ranting about something with his mouth full and a half-eaten wing in his hand, with which he is gesturing pointedly. Shane is watching him with an intense, focused expression, like Marleau is saying something much more important than just a rambling tale about a girl he's been seeing. People add captions to the picture, jokes about what Marleau must have been talking about, and some of them are sort of funny. Shane's mom has been on him about engaging more on social media, so he retweets a couple that are tame enough, and Marleau retweets maybe a thousand, way less tame. Rozanov, naturally, retweets only the one that has a long caption all about how hot he is. 

Shane had expected to feel terror at the exposure, but he really doesn't. There are pictures of Rozanov and Conners and the girls at the wing place, and then them leaving, and then Marleau and Shane walking off alone, still talking animatedly. If it was pictures of him and Rozanov, he'd probably fucking die, even though of course there are so many plausible reasons for them to be friends now, so it's not like it would even be weird. But Marleau is such an easy person to like. Everyone likes him. No one is going to be surprised that Shane is friends with him. 

“I mean, it's not bad for your image,” his mother says to him on the phone, a few days later. “It's not like it's Rozanov.”

Shane, who is currently lying center stage starfish in Rozanov's bed because Rozanov just spent the last hour thoroughly destroying him and is now very smugly making them some food in the kitchen, snorts a little. 

“I mean, not yet, but it's only a matter of time. We all go out as a team a lot, and I do hang out with Rozanov, you know.”

His mother makes a thoughtful noise at that, but he can't tell what kind of noise it is without seeing her expression at the same time. 

“I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, obviously. Actually, the friends angle is pretty good. I've already been approached by a couple of different brands to see if we're up for a joint campaign. Putting the rivalry to bed.”

Shane snorts again, staring up at Rozanov's ceiling, lying in Rozanov's soft sheets. 

“Okay,” he says. 

“I'm just saying that you could have been caught in way more compromising positions than talking to Cliff Marleau over a plate of wings at one in the morning. I was a little surprised that you seemed to click with him so fast. I figured you'd befriend someone more like Hayden? Quiet and family-oriented, maybe. But I'm happy you have friends on the team, Shane. I really am. I think it's sweet.”

“You make me sound like I'm eight years old,” Shane laughs, and Yuna laughs, too. 

“I guess I do. Sorry. You'll always be eight years old to me! Anyway, I just wanted to make sure you're not worried.”

“I'm not,” Shane replies, and he's surprised to find that that's true. 

The problem, of course, is that people get it in their heads that Marleau and Shane are a unit, in the same way they used to think Marleau and Rozanov were a unit.

Shane scores on the Power Play, and Rozanov reaches him first and lays a smacking kiss on his helmet, joyfully calls him something that Shane later discovers means my beautiful boy in Russian, kisses him again, and then hugs him bruisingly before skating off. Marleau tells him nice one, Hollamander! and presses their helmets together briefly. And so obviously Shane is thinking about the first one way more than the second one, for various reasons, but it's the second one that ends up gaining traction on Twitter. Rozanov sends him a link with multiple laughing emojis to a video that someone made of Marleau and Shane bumping helmets in slow-mo while some romantic song plays over it.

Hollander wants Marleau so bad it makes him look stupid, reads the top response, and Shane reads it, rereads it, scrolls back up and watches the video, and then rereads it again. 

Shane

Are these people fucking blind?

Roz

Told you

And, well, sure. Rozanov did tell him. Are people just obsessed with Marleau? Shane goes and watches the goal celebration, this time at a normal speed and with no weird pink glittery filter over it. He sees the way Rozanov is looking at him, and he sees the way he's looking back at Rozanov. He rewinds it, in the safety of his empty Boston apartment, and he watches Rozanov smiling at him again. He does it a third time before he realizes that he's being pathetic, and he allows the video to keep going. 

The way he looks at Marleau is nothing in comparison, and Marleau looks at him like he's, well, a buddy who just scored a goal. That's so normal. Are people just seeing the remnants of desperate lust that were probably on Shane's face after being in critical proximity to Rozanov? He puts on his glasses to better analyze it, but no. He's smiling at Marleau pleasantly enough, but that's it. 

Oh, he thinks, almost giddy. These people are fucking blind. 

Marleau is thrilled with this development, as if he’s been linked in the tabloids to Rose Landry or something. 

“They think I’m fucking Hollamander!” he shouts in the locker room. He’s wearing only a towel, and so Shane is understandably a bit startled when he comes up and pulls Shane into a bone-breaking hug, shaking him a little before shoving him back towards the bench. Shane, who unfortunately kind of likes being tossed around, is trying not to look like he does, but Rozanov is smirking knowingly at him from his own stall.

“Hey,” Conners says sternly from the bench next to Shane. “Are you being cool about this, or are you being homophobic? Because you know I got a gay cousin, man.” 

“What? You fuck. My big sister is gay!” Marleau shoots back. 

“Oh, shit, I forgot about Cammie. That’s gayer than my thing. Carry on.” 

Rozanov laughs loudly, annoyingly loose and unconcerned. Probably a little gleeful, like he always is when Shane is uncomfortable. 

“They don’t actually think we’re fucking,” Shane manages to say without sounding too scandalized. Maybe a little bit scandalized, actually, because later that day, when they’re all at Carmichael’s place for a cookout, Marleau pulls him aside.

“Hey, Holly, you don’t actually have a problem with any of that shit, right?” he asks. It’s mostly a friendly-sounding question, except for the tinge of disappointment that lurks beneath it, and Shane is suddenly jolted with an unfamiliar shame. Does Marleau think he’s homophobic? Shane never considered that as a possibility. He’s been so worried about everyone immediately clocking how fucking gay he is for Rozanov that he forgot to consider the opposite might happen.

“What? No, of course not,” he says quickly. “I just don’t want the online shit to cause any problems. I just want to play hockey, man. I don’t want the room to get weird about it.” Like in Montreal, he can’t bring himself to say, even though it’s implied, because of what they’ve already talked about. Marleau is nodding, looking at him with this awful, considering look on his face. Shane feels somehow like he has fallen into a trap.

“It’s not going to cause any problems,” Marleau says. “Not here. Not with us. Okay? Like I said, I got a gay sister. Cammie’s, like, gay as fuck. She pulls hotter chicks than I do. It’s fucking breathtaking to watch, bro, I’m so serious. She’s got game that Roz wishes he had.” 

“Okay?” Shane says. Shane’s an only child, so maybe he just doesn’t get it, but is it normal to say stuff like that about your sister? Then again, she’s probably just as weird as Marleau, so maybe. 

“And Conners, you heard him, about his cousin.” 

“Yeah. Of course.” 

“He’s actually like totally close with his cousin. They hang out all the time. Ed’s a good dude. And St-Simon doesn’t have any gay family members that I know of, but he’s always at Boston Pride every year. Okay? So, like, this is a place where that kind of thing is fucking cool.” He’s looking at Shane very intently, and Shane feels, a bit, like he can’t breathe. He can’t tell if Marleau is trying to warn him or if he’s trying to tell Shane I know what you are, and I don’t care, but he’s leaning towards the second one, and he’s actually kind of hoping for it, weirdly. It feels like a big step, to prefer someone knowing he’s maybe gay-ish to thinking he’s homophobic.

“Okay,” Shane says. “Okay, uh. Thank you?” 

That seems to be the right answer, because Marleau nods and then claps him on the back, and Shane is left feeling only mildly as if he’s been through an invisible tornado.

So it ramps up, after that. It’s like everyone knows that Shane is cool with it—he’s still not sure if he actually is cool with it, but okay—and suddenly they’re all doing it. Marleau is the worst one, obviously, because he’s high off the apparent victory of being the one who is the object of imaginary Shane’s affections, but he’s not the only one. It’s like it has become a game to see who Twitter will pick up on next. Rozanov and Marleau are obnoxious with each other, and so are Conners and St-Simon, so it’s not just Shane, but it’s like everyone wants a stupid, fake piece of Shane, because Twitter is obsessed with Shane and any Boston Raider. Suddenly Conners is getting all up in Shane’s face, and Carmichael is constantly talking to him on the bench, scooting closer and closer every time Shane moves back to try and give him more space, until he’s practically fused to Rozanov’s side, and Rozanov’s arm is around his waist to give him more room, and people crop Rozanov out of the .gif, for some fucking reason. It makes Shane feel insane. 

There are some people online who do clock he and Rozanov, and he’s actually a little annoyed when he realizes that they’re a much smaller percentage than the people who think he’s cute with fucking Marleau or Conners or even St-Simon, who Shane has had, maybe, five total conversations with. How can people be so oblivious? It’s not like no one is noticing the way Rozanov and Shane look at each other sometimes. It would almost be more forgivable if no one noticed it at all. Like if Rozanov and Shane weren’t being broadcast, maybe. Like if the people working the television feeds picked up on their obvious chemistry enough to edit them out or just not cut to them when they look at each other too intensely, because it’s supposed to be a family program, or whatever the fuck. But those parts do show up online in .gifs, so he knows that people are seeing them. They’re just not seeing them. 

In a moment that is a new low for Shane, emotionally, he finds a whole community of people online who have been wanting Shane and Rozanov to fuck for years, and it’s a little bit validating to scroll through and think yeah, exactly! See! This is what I look like when I actually want to fuck someone. But that starts feeling weird way too fast, so he closes out of it and only goes back in when he’s feeling particularly pathetic, or particularly insane because yet another fucking picture of him and Marleau leaving the stadium together after the game, walking a full three feet apart, has gone medium viral in certain circles or whatever. 

Hayden thinks it’s all hilarious. JJ, too. But they only think it’s hilarious after Shane assures them that Marleau (probably) knows about the gay thing and has been cool. 

“He has a gay sister,” Shane tells Hayden weakly during a phone call, figuring that since Marleau seemed to have meant it as a comforting factoid, maybe Hayden will take it the same. Hayden lets out a relieved breath and starts listing all of Jackie’s gay friends in order of their closeness to the Pike family, so apparently this is something that straight people do when they want gay-ish people to feel comfortable? Shane wishes it didn’t work, but it kind of does, at least for him. 

JJ’s version of showing his love for Shane is to threaten to try and set him up with men the same way he used to try and set him up with women, which is another thing that feels like it should probably be annoying, but Shane instead finds it comforting, because apparently he’s broken as a person, or whatever.

(He mentions this offhandedly to Rozanov when they’re eating takeout on Shane’s couch, and Rozanov literally almost chokes on his meal because he starts laughing, and Shane wishes he felt more defensive about it, but then he realizes he’s just gazing fondly at Rozanov as Rozanov coughs and laughs and coughs and chugs half his beer and then wheezes out something incomprehensible, still laughing, so yeah, Shane is definitely broken as a person.)

Shane has gotten used to this idea, in his head, that Rozanov is always leading him around on a string, and Shane is just following along. He’s agonized over it before, the inherent humiliation of feeling so deeply for a person who could replace you in a heartbeat if you stepped out of line. It has been feeling more settled lately, at least in part because now that they’re on the same team, they’re spending more time together outside of fucking, and he’s noticing that Rozanov might actually like him, in the same way that he actually likes Rozanov. Rozanov definitely doesn’t seem like he’s ever in any hurry for Shane to leave, and he’s usually the one who suggests staying, or asks to stay, because Shane is still a little afraid, sometimes, of reaching out, worried about getting pushed away again. 

So maybe that’s why he doesn’t notice, at first, that Rozanov is doing anything on the ice, until Marleau laughs at him one day before a game, and Shane perks up when he hears his own name, and he stops tuning out the rest of the locker room the way he usually does. 

“...Hollamander and me are fucking!” 

“Jealous?” Rozanov asks disbelievingly. “I am not jealous of what some stupid teenagers think, Marly!” 

“Listen, baby, I know we’ve been together for years…” 

“Fuck off,” Rozanov laughs, rolling his eyes. 

“...but I’ve got a new man now, and you’re just gonna have to accept it, so stop trying to get cute with him on the ice! You're so obvious, bro.” 

“Are you talking about me?” Shane asks. 

“Uh oh, you made Hollzy snap out of robot mode. You’re both so fucked,” Conners says.

“We have a game to play,” Shane says, because they’re all staring at him now.

“There he is,” St-Simon says happily. “Stop reading shit about yourselves online. You’re all fucked up and acting weird now. I know Hollatron agrees with me.” 

“Uh, yeah,” Shane says, knowing full well that he spent at least an hour last night scrolling through posts about him and Rozanov. “Definitely.” 

Rozanov shoves Marleau and mutters something under his breath, and Shane can see that his face is just a little pink. He thinks of Rozanov saying I am not jealous. He thinks of how much that sounded like a lie. Was Rozanov jealous? Is Rozanov jealous of the way the rest of the team has been acting with him? Has Rozanov been ‘getting cute with him’ on the ice more than he usually does? Shane feels a little guilty for not noticing, actually, and he wishes that he could tell Rozanov you don’t have to be jealous. I don’t think about any of them at all, and I think about you all the time, but in a slightly less obsessive way, maybe. 

It’s not like open competition, the way Marleau and Rozanov act with him on the ice, but now that he’s noticed it, he can’t stop noticing. It’s sort of funny, mostly because it’s still subtle enough that he doesn’t think anyone’s going to notice except for the people who are always looking for things to notice.

Most people just see Marleau and Rozanov and Conners and Carmichael and all of them, even fucking Dunkin Donuts, as being nice to an exciting new teammate. His hockey podcasts all say things like the Raiders are welcoming Hollander with open arms! We were a little afraid there would be some bad blood from their rivalry days, but is it really such a surprise? Everyone’s always said what a professional Hollander is. Of course he can slot into any team and make himself a fixture. 

And yes, of course, that’s nice to hear, and that’s what Shane wants them to think about what’s happening, anyway. But it’s also sort of nice to know that it isn’t just about his game. It isn’t just about what he brings to the team. Even though it’s something that’s mostly happening to him, it feels like he’s involved in something deeply stupid and silly and fun. He plays into it sometimes, and other times he avoids it, and either way, it doesn’t seem to make the guys like him any less. Maybe it’s just nice that the fucking misery of the last year has given way to something that is so the opposite: the thing that made half of his old teammates treat him like a contagion turned into something that's making him feel like so much more a part of this team. 

Rozanov and Marleau both approach him separately and ask if he wants them to tone it down, or if he wants them to ask the other guys to tone it down for him. He doesn’t, he finds, even though he probably should. He thinks he might be starting to like it too much, the acceptance he feels when he’s with them.

He's been dreading his first game against Montreal, obviously, especially since it turns out to be in Montreal. The city hasn't forgiven the franchise for trading him, especially since there are still mostly only ugly rumors with no actual clarification in terms of what made Shane leave in the first place. That should make it easier for him to be back in the arena he thought he'd retire in, and it should make it easier to face his one-time home crowd, but he knows they're going to boo him, and he’s just going to have to deal with that, emotionally, even though he’s a little afraid that he can’t. 

Rozanov sits next to him on the plane, and he keeps his leg pushed up against Shane's in a way that could plausibly be interpreted as a casual accident, except Shane knows better. Rozanov is the only person who hasn't asked Shane how he feels about playing in Montreal again, probably because he knows how Shane feels about it, because Shane “slept” at his place last night, and Rozanov walked out of his bedroom grumpily at 4 am to pry Shane away from the TV so he'd stop rewatching old games. He keeps cutting threatening looks over at Shane's iPad, so Shane contents himself with reading instead of trying to watch game tape. At one point, Rozanov rests his hand on the edge of his own thigh and brushes his pinkie finger back and forth on the edge of Shane's, which is distracting enough that he almost does something insane like consider a mile high club thing. 

Instead, what he does consider is that he has been putting off something huge that he knows he would be better off doing now rather than waiting for it to blow up in his face. He's been in denial a bit, he thinks, about the way things went down with Montreal, and he knows how these things work. They're going to be desperate to prove that they made the right choice in getting rid of Shane, especially since Boston has only lost a single game since Shane signed. If there's any tactical advantage to be had, they're going to take it. 

He waits until he and Rozanov are settled in their room. Rozanov is reclined on “his” bed, eyebrows arched, waiting for Shane to say what he clearly needs to say, because of course Shane has been so obviously jittery that Rozanov can tell. 

“I think I need to talk to you and Marleau,” he says, finally. “Maybe, uh, Conners? Too?”

“Are you okay?” Rozanov asks, already picking up his phone to text the others. 

“Probably not,” Shane admits. “Just, uh, follow my lead on this, okay?”

Rozanov would be within his rights to ask more questions. If Rozanov had started acting weird and then was like trust me, bro, Shane would absolutely the fuck not. But Rozanov just examines him for a few seconds and then nods, and then he sends his text. 

Shane feels like he's going to throw up as he faces down his three new teammates. Rozanov must have said something in the text like Hollander is freaking out so take this seriously, because Marleau only makes one joke about a gang-bang, and Conners looks downright nervous as he sits on the end of “Shane's” bed. Marleau looms over by the bathroom door, looking like a club bouncer. His size is, admittedly, one of the reasons Shane wants him to have his back out there, but he also just knows Marleau will be cool about it for the same reason he knows Conners will be cool with it.

“Holly, you look like you're gonna throw up,” Conners says, which has Marleau scuttling away from the bathroom door. 

“I might,” Shane admits. “I have to, uh, talk to you guys about something. About the game.” No one says anything, or interrupts. They all look varying degrees of nervous. It's annoying, because he'd sort of assumed they would start talking over him, and it would give him something to springboard off of, but of course they can't even give him that. “So, uh. A couple of the guys on the Metros know I'm…that I'm…that sometimes I…uh.”

“Oh, the gay thing,” Conners says. Marleau and Rozanov both whip their heads towards him, eyes wide with identical shock. 

“What?” Shane gasps, trying unsuccessfully not to sound too scandalized. 

“Yeah, uh. I guess Vinny Lemaire heard some shit from a couple of the Met guys, and he was asking me if it was true. I told him I don't really give a shit, but, uh. I'm guessing that's what you're talking about.”

“Fuck,” Shane says. “Yeah. I guess.”

“Hollander, what?” Rozanov asks. 

“Roz, don't be a dick about this,” Marleau warns quietly, and Rozanov gives him a look of such incredulous disbelief that Shane almost laughs aloud. 

“Look, Jesus, okay. So I'm gay, I guess? Or, like, at least a little gay. I don't know. And some of the guys figured it out because they...fuck. This is so embarrassing. They saw a picture that, uh, someone texted me.” Rozanov's eyes go owlishly wide at that. Shane shrugs a little, making an apologetic face back at him. “It was only a couple of them, and I thought they'd keep it a secret, but then coach found out, and then some of the guys were such fucking assholes about it that I demanded a trade, and there was this whole deal in place where I'd leave quietly and go wherever they sent me just as long as they didn't, like, fucking tell anyone? But then the Marleau shit started happening, and then all of you guys started playing it up, and I have this feeling that they're going to try and start shit tonight, especially if they see anything that's, like, I don’t know. Gay. Ish. So I wanted to give you guys a heads up, because you're the three people on the team I figured would be cool with it? At least I hope so? And I also figured I'd warn you to, like, stay away from me tonight.”

“You want us to be less gay with you so your dumbass old team doesn't chirp us about it?” Conners asks. Shane shrugs. 

“Nah, fuck that,” Marleau says. “Wait, Holler, to be clear: is this because you want us to stop being gay or because of the Metros stuff?”

“I mean, we all know it’s not actually gay,” Shane points out. “I'm not, like, hitting on any of you. To be clear.”

“Oh, you’re not?” Rozanov drawls. 

“Roz, come on, he's being really brave, trusting us,” Conners hisses. Rozanov throws up his hands. 

“But we're not, like, making you uncomfortable?” Marleau persists. 

“Oh. No?”

“Okay. Cool. So: nah, fuck that. We're gonna go even gayer.”

“Oh!” Rozanov says brightly. “Now that is a good idea.”

“No it isn't,” Shane says. 

Marleau and Conners leave, and Rozanov applies himself with his typical intensity to making sure Shane forgets everything he's ever been unhappy about. They don't really have time to fuck before the game, but they have time for Rozanov to jerk them both off while they lie in bed together, which feels, like, weirdly intimate, with Shane's head on his shoulder, their chests touching. Shane should probably still be freaking the fuck out, but he's not. Hs just glad that he was right about Marleau and Conners. 

“It was my penis, wasn't it?” Rozanov asks almost immediately after they're done, still holding his softening dick in his hand, frowning down at it. 

“I mean, yeah,” Shane admits. “Obviously.” 

“Fuck, Shane. I'm sorry.”

Shane is stunned by that for a couple of different reasons. Has Rozanov ever said his first name before? Has he ever apologized so sincerely? He genuinely looks upset, and Shane scrambles to make him feel better. 

“Eh, it was my bad for opening it in the locker room. I wasn't thinking, and I didn't realize Drapeau was behind me. And I probably could have been more smooth about it. Like, I fully panicked. I said it was a picture of my own dick, and they were like ‘Hollander, we've all seen your dick’, and then I said ‘no you haven't’, and then I had a full-fledged panic attack.”

“Oh my god,” Rozanov breathes incredulously.

“I know.”

“And this is why you wouldn’t tell me?”

“What, because it was embarrassing? Or because I didn't want you to feel guilty? Because the answer is sort of both.”

“Well,” Rozanov agrees quietly. He pulls back a little to look at Shane. “You’re okay, though?”

“Yeah, I mean, after that, I feel fine.”

“Maybe I jerk you off again right before the game, then? Storage closet?”

“Ew, no.”

“Might help. Plus, I could use it as a chirp.”

“You are not using this as a chirp, Rozanov. I'm so serious. If Marleau wants to be whatever his version of ultra gay is, okay, fine, let him. But I'm not going to let you fuck up your whole life and risk exposing this shit just because you're annoyed.”

“What, you are the only one allowed to fuck up your life?”

Shane shrugs uncomfortably. Rozanov does look actually upset by this, and it's not like Shane doesn't get it. He'd probably feel horrible if Rozanov got caught because of him, even if it was over something so stupid. And there were, of course, a few moments when he'd cursed Rozanov in his own mind, because it's always easier to blame someone else for being too tempting to resist rather than solely blaming himself for being tempted, or whatever. But he's never really blamed Rozanov.  And it's probably better that he's the one who was caught, anyway; he knows Rozanov's situation is more precarious, thanks to some late-night anxiety googling when he first fucked up and let them see Rozanov's dick. Like he thought someone was going to have a flashback to sharing a shower with Rozanov at an All Star game and suddenly turn into the fucking Sherlock Holmes of cocks and somehow get Rozanov sent back to Russia. 

“It's fine,” he says, instead of admitting to all that. It feels too heavy, maybe, to admit to the relief that it was him who was caught instead of the other way around. Rozanov knows he's focused on hockey, knows he would do anything to keep playing. He doesn't need to know the terror that went through Shane at the idea that them fucking could literally be a risk to Rozanov's life, if things went bad enough. That's too heavy for what they are, or at least what they're supposed to be. “I'm…this is better, now, I think. It’s probably good that it happened.”

“I don't think you really believe that,” Rozanov suggests gently. 

“What? Yes I do. Shut up.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it. This is…this team is…I don't…”

“You wanted to be a Metro forever. I know you.”

“Yeah, well, maybe they shouldn't have been such fucking prudes about a fucking dick pic,” Shane mutters. Rozanov laughs. 

“Okay. Yes. Maybe. And we will win later and prove them idiots. And then we will win the cup.” He seems to realize something, pulling back a little, frowning. “Last season? Did they know last season?” At Shane's guilty nod, Rozanov curses under his breath. “This long?” 

“Yeah,” Shane admits, feeling suddenly exposed in a way he doesn't like. 

“That is why suddenly only three Metros remembered how to skate. I thought you would win two in a row.”

“Rozanov, that might be literally the nicest thing you've ever said to me.”

“I say much nicer things to you all the time in Russian. You are just stupid and can't speak it. You know it wasn't your fault, right? That you lost?” 

“Tell that to upper management.”

“Ah. So that’s why they caved so quickly?” 

“Well, I wanted the out. Or maybe not wanted, but. It was kind of supposed to be a bluff. I was so fucking angry, because I had to lie to my mom about all of this. Or maybe I didn't have to, but. And she doesn't understand why I would tank my fucking career over some ‘locker room talk’, because I’ve been too much of a coward to admit that the talk is, like, about me. So management said it was about us flaming out in the playoffs the year after a cup win, like it was my fucking fault, and I’ve been letting people believe it, I guess. I said either they get rid of the assholes on the team who won't play with me, or they get rid of me. I figured they'd stick with me.”

“But they were stupid enough to give you to me, instead,” Rozanov says quietly, fondly. He's actually doing a pretty good job of striking the balance between smug and gentle. If he was too gentle, it would probably feel like pity, but it doesn't, because he's tucked enough assholey scorn into his tone to, weirdly, soften the blow. Make it seem more like him. “And now they will not win the cup this year, either. Or any year we are both still playing, if we can help it.”

Shane can't stop the happy little noise he makes in response. 

“We can help it,” he says. “We can stop them.”

“Yes, we can. You come once for every goal tonight?” 

Shane laughs incredulously. 

“What am I, a dog? I get a reward for good behavior?”

“Mhm,” Rozanov says, smirking, shrugging one shoulder. “What, you are too good for friendly bet?”

“I didn't say that,” Shane admits, and Rozanov grins wolfishly in response. 

It's fun, playing with the Raiders, usually. Shane hasn't thought about it much, too in his own head about a thousand different things, but it is fun. They're fun. He has fun playing with them in a way he used to have fun playing with the Metros. A few of them are fucking annoying. There's this one rookie who never shuts up and is firmly in his edgy teenager humor phase, which means a lot of prodding at the edges of what Rozanov will put up with in his locker room before he snaps. But largely, overall, the Raiders are fun people, and they have his back. 

He hopes that this game against Montreal isn't going to change that. 

He meets JJ and Hayden at center ice during warmups, and he's pleased that the crowd largely seems to be cheering them. He's trying not to hear the booing laced beneath it. He's trying not to hear the cheers, too, honestly. The last thing he wants to do is start feeling bad for how much the Raiders are going to dominate the Metros tonight in their own arena. 

Marleau comes up in the middle of their conversation and slings an easy arm across Shane's shoulders, and he effortlessly slides into the friendly chat, with only a little bit of menace behind it. Shane wills himself not to flush, because he knows already that .gifs of this fucking interaction will be on Twitter, and the last thing he wants is to blush so hard that the teenagers making the edits don't even have to add the fucking blush filter. Hayden seems largely amused by Marleau's presence, so it's good at it was Marleau and not Rozanov who skated over, obviously, but still, Shane finds himself looking over his shoulder, unsurprised when he sees that Rozanov is watching the interaction carefully, and that his eyes are roaming over the other Metros, who are circling a bit like sharks. 

It's stupid to feel kind of nice about how protective it feels, so Shane orders himself to knock it the fuck off. 

Shane scores a hat trick, and Rozanov scores a further two goals, and Marleau gets one on an open net. The Metros score a single goal, which isn't much consolation, especially since they’re also the resounding losers of the three fights that break out. Rozanov naturally spends too much time in the penalty box, and his eye is already swelling shut from a nasty right hook during one of the scrums, but the mood in the room is still so fucking electric, even Shane gets caught up in it. 

They go out to a club, because Marleau suggests it, and because Rozanov agrees, and Shane isn't looking forward to waiting around in their hotel room, so he says he'll go along. Everyone reacts as if he's scored another goal, and he laughs helplessly when he's smothered in hugs from multiple players. They have about four more minutes before he starts getting all touched out, but he allows it for now, on the high of the win. 

At the club, cozied up next to him in a booth far too small to hold all of them, Marleau laughs boomingly as he scrolls through Twitter. Shane rolls his eyes as he watches the tweets and the .gifs about the game roll in, and he shakes his head as Marleau cackles and hearts basically all of them. 

Conners planting a massive kiss on Shane's cheek. Marleau grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him until his head goes all bobble-headed with it before pulling him into a crushing hug. Rozanov winking at him from the penalty box and laughing delightedly when Shane flips him off with a smile. 

If there are people being homophobic about it, or reading into any of it, Marleau scoots by them too fast for Shane to see, and Shane is in danger of getting emotional about it, so he allows Conners to drag him to the bar so they can get shots for everyone. A few Metros fans approach him to complain about the trade, which is nice, so he chats with them for a little while. As he makes his way back over to the table, he sees Marleau and Conners and Rozanov with their heads bent together, talking seriously, but they straighten up and pretend to be talking shit about Montreal when Shane slides into his seat. 

Shane arches an eyebrow at Rozanov, who shakes his head and makes this little hand gesture that Shane has come to recognize as later, when we're alone. Shane hesitates, but nods, because he trusts Rozanov. Rozanov tangles their ankles together under the table, as if to tether Shane in place. 

Someone eventually gets word that some of the Metros are headed to the same club, and they react with laughing good cheer, yelling to each other that they have to get Shane to safety. The Montreal clubgoers, who have been occasionally heckling the team in a mostly good natured way, get on board with this idea, and two girls get their bartender friend to let Shane and Rozanov out the back, and it all feels very silly, like a spy movie. 

For months now, Shane has been waiting for this to start feeling crushing. The weight of some of his old team knowing that he likes at least one dick, the weight of disappointing his mother by fucking up enough to get traded to a team other than her favorite, the team he was supposed to retire with. It was crushing at first, yes, but then he saw that giddy press conference with Rozanov, and ever since then, there has been a lightness to everything. 

He should be hiding under his hotel room covers right now, crying into his pillow, missing this team and this city so badly that it aches, but he doesn't. He just doesn't. 

Rozanov grabs his hand and pulls him out of an alley, and then they're hopping into a cab, and all the while, Rozanov is touching him idly, but it's nothing more or less than the way Marleau and Conners have been touching him all night, and he's allowed to have it, and he's allowed to want it, and he's allowed to touch Rozanov in turn, and it's fucking incredible that he's allowed to have this, even after he thought he lost everything. 

Back in the hotel room, that frothy light feeling is dampened only by Rozanov saying, as soon as the door is closed, “I do not want you to freak out about this.”

Which is, obviously, the wrong thing to say to a person like Shane. 

“Oh god,” he groans. “They tried something.”

“They said some things, yes,” Rozanov agrees, speaking so blandly that Shane figures those things must have been even more vile than he's imagining. 

“To who?”

“Me, of course. Thought I would agree with them, I think. Very stupid of them. No one is more happy you are maybe gay than me. Marleau says a few of the guys chirped him about it, and their goalie kept trying to ‘warn’ him. Dunkin Donuts said they got a few, too.”

“They went after the rookies?” Shane asks, aghast. 

“I think they were trying to rattle us, or you. Is why we didn't want to tell you until after the game. Marleau was feeling everyone out earlier, at the club. Sounds like most thought Montreal were just being assholes, and a few said they don't care how many dicks you suck if it means we get the cup.”

“Oh, well in that case,” Shane says. Rozanov is still watching him warily. 

“You’re okay? I thought you would be having a panic attack by now.”

“Fuck off. I'm fine.” Despite his immediate defensiveness, he's a little surprised to realize that he's telling the truth. “I'm fine,” he says again, sounding a little baffled with it. “Fuck, Rozanov. It was so fucking miserable, last year. I don't even give a shit what happens anymore, as long as I don't have to be there.”

“You won't have to be there ever again,” Rozanov confirms, his voice steady and firm and protective, and it shouldn't do it for Shane as much as it does, because if anyone, including Rozanov, suggested that Shane needed to be taken care of or protected, Shane would flip the fuck out, but unfortunately it does feel really good, right now. 

“Okay, captain,” he says, trying for lighthearted and not particularly sexy, so there can be, like, plausible deniability if Rozanov thinks he's being gross. But Rozanov clearly doesn't think he's being gross, because his eyes go all big and round the way they do when Shane is extra forward, like Shane had assumed/hoped they would. Sometimes, lately, this thing with Rozanov has started to feel easy, reliable. It's a mistake to think about it like that, because he knows that it's really anything but. It's the biggest risk he has ever taken in his life, and it has the potential to be his greatest mistake. But now that they're on the same team, it's like this thing between them has gotten lighter, too. 

Maybe it's just because the thing he feared for so long happened. People found out at least part of his biggest secret, the thing he thought he would be ashamed enough about to carry close until he died alone and unloved, and they were horrible about it. Not all of the team, but enough of them—and enough of the loudest personalities in the locker room—that he found it more tolerable to leave. It still feels insane sometimes that he had the courage, or maybe the self respect, to put himself first. There had been a path before him: keep his head down and shoulder through it, maybe get a girlfriend and stop this thing with Rozanov completely, or fucking leave and stop trying to make up for his desires to people who have no right to an opinion about them anyway. 

And now he's here, in a hotel room with Rozanov, and Rozanov is pushing him down onto the bed and sinking to his knees at the end of it, whispering filthy things about how he's going to be such a good captain for Shane, smiling like there's nowhere he'd rather be. Shane has felt sick with his wanting for so long. Not just sick because of this specific wanting but sick because he wants this at all, and terrified because he knows he shouldn't. But that sick feeling has fallen away in recent days, because it's not just sex anymore. He's not sure if it was ever just sex, really. He always thought Rozanov was hot, and funny, and kind of sweet sometimes. He's always been really good about this thing between them. Gentle when he knows Shane needs it, even when Shane fights him on it, not wanting to admit to needing anything. 

But being on the same team with Rozanov means that he has seen that sweetness and that gentleness and Rozanov's secret good heart more and more, and it fucking hurts sometimes, how much he wants it. 

They're friends now, he knows. Sometimes they'll be hanging out at Rozanov's place for an hour before one of them goes wait, what are we doing, playing PlayStation? We could be fucking! And it's not that the fucking isn't phenomenal, but it's just that it's nice that they don't have to rush anymore. Sometimes they get comfortable. 

It feels comfortable now, laying back on the bed, Rozanov adjusting his legs and frowning thoughtfully as he does, like he's posing Shane to paint him, or something. Shane lets one hand drift down to card through Rozanov's curls the way he always likes, and Rozanov beams at him with this unguarded enthusiasm that makes Shane's breath catch in his throat. How can this be the day he was so worried about? They destroyed Montreal, and he even had a nice time at the club, and Rozanov is so fucking happy to be here, so openly happy, that even Shane can't overthink it. 

It's weird to feel a new thread of fondness for Rozanov as Rozanov starts sucking his dick. Like, it could have been earlier, when Rozanov was being gentle and nice to him about Montreal trying to spread those rumors. It could have been when Rozanov was getting irritated before the game because he kept trying to be funny and Marleau and Conners thought he was being homophobic. That at least would have made sense. But no, there's something sweet in Rozanov that comes out when they're in bed together sometimes, and it has been coming out more and more now that they're on the same team, now that they're friends. Like there's less reason to hold themselves separate from each other. It's nice. Maybe that doesn't sound very enthusiastic, but Shane likes nice. He likes things that are pleasant, and nice, and lovely, and gentle, and, sure, he likes when Rozanov is fucking rough with him, but he also just likes when Rozanov is nice, underneath the rest. 

He's surprised at how quickly Rozanov finishes him off, until Rozanov says “one down!” with a cheeky little grin, and Shane remembers. He groans and lays back on the bed, pretends like it's going to be a chore, because he knows it will make Rozanov laugh, and it does make Rozanov laugh, because Shane kind of knows him now. 

And maybe that's scary. Is it scary? It's definitely scary. Shane might be on the verge of freaking out about it, but he can't, because if he freaks out now, he'll ruin everything. Sometimes, a way to control his anxiety is to realize that things would be way too awkward or terrible if he freaked out. Like if a lot of time and effort has gone into the setup of an ad that he realizes too late he doesn't want to film, he’ll film the fucking ad, because the thought of being the cause of all those lost hours is way more mortifying than the thought of having to film a commercial wearing a wet t-shirt. This is a little like that. Sure, he's feeling too intensely fond of Rozanov, and he's scared, but this isn't like it used to be. They're friends now, friends who fuck, and he can't just cut and run like he maybe would have done in the past. 

It would be more horrible to try and put the brakes on this thing between them just because Shane is feeling more than he's supposed to. He would definitely hurt his own feelings trying to create distance, and he'd probably hurt Rozanov's in the process, and he just doesn't want to that. So he stays. He chooses the less horrible option. He swallows back his fear, and he refuses to let himself ruin this. 

“Ship wars,” Marleau says. Rozanov frowns at him. Shane frowns at him even harder. 

“You can't just keep repeating ‘ship wars’ more bitchily every time you say it and expect us to figure out what the fuck you're talking about,” Shane says. Rozanov laughs and points at him.  

“Exactly. What the fuck are you talking about, Marly?” he asks. 

“It's like an internet thing,” Marleau says. “Cammie has been sending me shit, because she knows I think the whole Marllander thing is hilarious.”

“Ew, is that what they're calling it?” Shane asks. “Why not Holleau?”

“What, you need to be first in this too?” Rozanov chirps. Shane flips him off. They're all at Rozanov's house out in the suburbs because they have a very decadent three full days off coming up, so Rozanov decided to throw a party as an excuse to get Shane out here and keep him out here, and Shane dutifully pretended to be reluctantly talked into it, because apparently that's what they're doing now: pretending that they're accidentally tripping into a long weekend together. It feels kind of pathetic, but Shane is trying to be cool and follow Rozanov's lead, so he's allowing it. 

The downside is that the party is still in full swing, and Marleau's sister Cammie is apparently sending him more internet shit about them. 

“Yeah, I don't know, but it seems like that's the name.”

“What about me and Holly?” Conners asks. 

“Bro, you got like two .gifs floating around. You don't have a name.”

“Honners,” Conners says thoughtfully. “Connander? No, that's stupid.”

“It’s all stupid,” Shane says. 

“Nah, it's hilarious! Dude, for years it was just me and Roz.”

“Rozeau,” Rozanov says smugly. 

“Right. And I'd occasionally get, like, weirdos tagging me in shit, because I'm way too fucking online and see everything. But it was easy enough to ignore. Or send it to Roz if it was especially explicit.”

“Oh, I remember.”

“But now it's like, fucking, armageddon out there. Ship wars.”

“I still don't know what that means,” Shane says, deciding that he doesn't care. He picks up his beer and starts to head into the other room, but Rozanov stops him by hooking a finger into the pocket of his sweatpants, and it's such a bizarre, risky move to do that in front of their teammates that Shane stops and looks back at him incredulously. Rozanov isn't even looking at him. 

“Like, they're all fighting over who's fucking who,” Marleau continues.

“Nobody's fucking anyone,” Shane says. It must sound as much like a lie as it feels, because Rozanov hides a laugh behind his hand. 

“Yeah, no shit, but I figured it could be, like, a fun competition.”

“Please. Is no competition. I will win,” Rozanov says. Which is obviously true, but come on. 

“Uh, bro, you got a ways to go if you want to catch up,” St-Simon puts in from over on the couch, because apparently everyone is listening to this fever dream of a conversation. “Marly sent me some screenshots earlier. They are obsessed with Holly and Marleau. They are writing Game of Thrones sized books about Marleau leaving you for a new man.”

“What? Ridiculous. Look at us.” Rozanov slings an arm over Shane's shoulders and pulls him in close, squishing their faces together unpleasantly. 

“Eh,” Conners shrugs. Rozanov lets go of Shane to throw a half-eaten hot dog at Conners, which gives Shane an opportunity to escape to the bathroom. 

He's had two and a half beers. He's not even tipsy. There's maybe a pleasant buzz, but it's not doing enough to curb the panic. He splashes water on his face, does some deep breathing, tells himself that everything is going to be fine. When Rozanov knocks on the door, Shane opens it. Rozanov is alone, and he jerks his head towards the bedroom, and Shane follows only after making sure no one is following them. 

“I can tell them to stop,” Rozanov suggests when they're behind the closed door. He reaches out and pulls Shane closer by the hips, which is unfortunately as hot to Shane as it always is. The blinds are down over the windows, and it's cool and dark in the bedroom, the sounds of the rest of the team barely filtering through. Shane knows they can't spend long in here, but it's nice to have for now. He presses his face forward, forehead against Rozanov's chest, and Rozanov's arms go around him, surprisingly sweet. 

“No, it's okay,” he says. “Sorry.”

“I don't mind. I will tell them it's stupid.”

“They're having fun.”

“Mm. But are you? They know you are gay, yes?”

“Gay-ish,” Shane argues quietly, though he doesn't know why he bothers. Rozanov clearly doesn't either, from the expression he makes. “Whatever. Yeah. I mean, some of them.”

“League will know soon, too.”

They'd talked about this at length, when they got back from Montreal. Rozanov had been surprisingly careful with him, warning him in a gentle way like he was afraid Shane would take it much harder than he ended up taking it. 

“The rumors aren’t going away, I know,” he agrees. 

“And the room will be fine. Even if they all know, it will be fine. Maybe one or two guys will be weird for a second, but this is a good room, and they all love you.”

Shane nods, and he ruthlessly banishes a sudden, inappropriate feeling of sadness and longing to hear that. 

“Yeah, I know. It's fine.”

If Rozanov tries to get too nice about this, Shane thinks he might have to leave out of the sheer humiliation of realizing that he needs it too obviously, but Rozanov just looks at him carefully for a few seconds and then nods. It kind of reminds Shane of the first few times they hooked up, when Rozanov was trying to be careful with him and would occasionally press just a little too hard, and Shane would flare up like a bruise, offended to be coddled. Rozanov has been good at the balance since then, but maybe Shane looks more upset than he is, because he has been more careful lately, more hesitant, in a way Shane isn't sure he likes. It makes him feel sometimes like he's being managed. He wonders, a lot, if it's guilt, like Rozanov blames himself for the dick pic even though Shane told him not to. 

Rozanov goes back out to the party first, after a gentle kiss that serves to remind Shane of what he has to look forward to for the next few days. Shane sits on the end of the bed and breathes and tries to deconstruct his thoughts into a shape that makes sense. Is he really that upset about the people online? No, he doesn't think so. He's upset that they're talking about it here, maybe. Upset because he can't tell if they're actually cool with it or if they're just playing it up, trying to prove they're fine with him being gay-ish, even though they haven't talked about it since Montreal. Upset because they're not more upset about the gay-ish thing, probably. He was expecting some pushback, at least. Some disgusted looks. He shored up his defenses, having learned from Montreal that it's an insidious thing, that even when you think things are going back to normal, they're fucking not. But if they're really fine with it, then that means that Shane being gay-ish was never the real problem in Montreal, and maybe those guys were just assholes, and maybe Shane has been blaming himself and being cruel to himself for no reason, and he's not sure he's ready to face that. It still feels like he must have done something wrong to earn their ire. He's not sure why he likes it better, being wrong or at fault. It probably doesn't make any sense. 

He wants to call his mom and tell her everything, suddenly. He wants to ask her advice. He doesn't. He goes back out into the house, and he rejoins the party. Maybe Rozanov said something to Marleau, or maybe Marleau's just over the “ship wars” thing, because they're telling some story about a guy named Kasparov who retired last year, this epic night he had at a club in New York. Shane has heard this story three times already, and the others have surely gotten sick of it by now, but they're telling it again, and half the details are different now, of course. Shane is relieved to stand there and pretend to listen. 

He goes into the backyard and listens to some of the rookies talking about some incomprehensible meme they all apparently find hilarious, and then he joins a conversation with a couple of guys about next week's games—finally, a conversation he can actually enjoy. He's always aware of Rozanov, the whole time. It's like even when he can't see him, he can feel him, lingering. 

He settles the longer the night goes on, which is usually not the case for him. He usually gets so overwhelmed at parties, but maybe the problem was that he used to be at parties with guys he didn't particularly like. He used to find himself getting so wound up with tension that he ended up just fucking walking out when he couldn't take it anymore, usually with a massive headache and muscle aches from the amount of clenching he was doing, but he's feeling loose-limbed and happy by the time the other Raiders take off. 

No one seems to think it's weird that Shane is staying behind, helping Rozanov clean. Like, of course Hollander is helping Rozanov tidy up, and of course Rozanov is chirping him about it, because that's what they do.

The second the door is closed behind Marleau—always the last to leave—Rozanov is on Shane so quick that Shane trips over his own feet and falls backwards onto the couch with an indignant, inelegant noise. Rozanov lands on top of him, spouting a stream of probably filthy, irritated Russian, and Shane just keeps laughing at him, imagining what he's saying. 

“Why are our teammates so fucking annoying?” Rozanov groans when he finally switches back to English. “Next time, we plan brunch.”

“They'll still be here until one in the morning,” Shane points out. “We’ll all just be drunk on mimosas instead of shitty beers.”

Rozanov grunts in acknowledgement and kisses him, pressing him further into the couch, and it’s nice. Shane hums happily against him. It's still so crazy that he's allowed to have this basically whenever he wants. Sometimes he feels like he still hasn't accepted it. Like it has to be a long, intense dream or something. Last season was so fucking miserable that he would occasionally find himself wondering if he'd ever love hockey again, and now he gets this. Rozanov. Hockey. A team who doesn't hate him.

The weekend is weird. Not in a bad way. He and Rozanov have been spending more time together generally, of course, but it's another thing entirely to spend time together without leaving in the middle. Shane keeps startling awake from a nap or jolting back to himself at the kitchen island like shit, I'm late! Only to settle when he remembers that they planned this entire weekend around not having to leave for anything.  

Rozanov acts more normal about it, the way he's always more normal, which is as infuriating as it always is. When Shane tries to emulate him, tries to capture some of that casual energy for himself, he feels like a little kid trying to imitate an adult, and he thinks Rozanov feels the same way, judging by how he always looks a little patronizingly fond. 

But it’s still nice, the weekend. Being together all day and all night. Rozanov is more of an octopus at night than he’s gotten before—and he was already pretty fucking bad every time they’ve slept in the same bed. Shane wakes up overheated, face smashed into the pillow by the bulk of him, but he doesn't hate it, which is just fucking awful, because he should hate it. Shane is normally one of those people who has to have optimum conditions to fall asleep on time, and who will wake up at the slightest change in temperature, but it’s apparently different, when it’s Rozanov.

Shane might be freaking out by the time the final morning rolls around, is the point. 

Rozanov gets up before him, and Shane can hear him moving around in the kitchen, making something for himself for breakfast. Based on the way yesterday went, Shane already knows how this will go. Rozanov will make enough for two, and then he will shrug and say he made too much for himself, and he’ll look so smug and pleased with himself when Shane pretends to believe it. And that’s sweet. It’s the kind of thing that Shane’s dad always does with his mom. Tricking her into treating herself when she’s too preoccupied. Oh, shoot! I ordered the wrong ice cream. I hate pistachio. Honey? And Yuna will laugh and hum and kiss him on the cheek and say, well, if it’s just going to go to waste, sure! And she’ll put her phone down to take it from him, which would have been the point of the deception in the first place.

And Shane knows that they’re not like that, he and Rozanov. It’s just that there’s an echo there, and it scares the fucking shit out of him, and he almost rolls out of bed and army-crawls his way past the kitchen and out the front door. But that would fuck up his entire life immediately, and so he doesn’t do that. It’s not like he feels like he has to keep fucking Rozanov so he doesn’t mess up the dynamics of the team—though he worries about that for approximately three and a half seconds before he’s able to convince himself that that’s not it. It’s just that it’s that anxiety thing again where the consequences of leaving—Rozanov being hurt, Shane feeling guilty, team dynamics probably going to shit, Shane having to pine from way too fucking close while Rozanov probably goes back to fucking every beautiful woman in the greater Boston area—would be so much worse than the consequences of staying—feeling too many emotions for what this is supposed to be, virtually guaranteeing an eventual broken heart. 

He goes down to the kitchen, dressed in Rozanov’s clothes, and he sits at the kitchen island, and Rozanov turns around from the stove and, what do you know? He has suddenly forgotten how to cook! He has extra scrambled eggs! Does Shane want any? 

Shane nods and smiles, and he chokes down breakfast and hopes he doesn’t look too much like someone eating his last meal. Rozanov is pleased and warm and shirtless next to him, frequently kicking out his leg and knocking Shane’s foot off the rung of his stool for no reason other than to be a dickhead, which Shane returns, laughing. By the time he’s done with the eggs, he has forgotten to be upset. He helps Rozanov do the dishes. 

Some pop culture website runs an article about performative masculinity and even more performative homosexuality in male sports. They drop the term bromoeroticism. It ruins Shane's life for the next week, because Carmichael finds reasons to pepper it into every other conversation, and everyone thinks it’s hilarious how Rozanov says it—including Rozanov himself—like he’s sounding out the syllables phonetically. Marleau keeps shortening it to “bromo” and keeps saying “no bromo”, which Shane thinks is funny only the first time, and certainly not the hundredth. 

Rozanov is continuing to do his annoying, protective hovering thing, probably still blaming himself for his dick being the thing that got Shane bumped from the Metros. This has mostly led to Shane trying not to react uncomfortably to anything, afraid that Rozanov will try to do something noble like get them all to stop making jokes, and then Shane will get even more unforgivably goopy about him. It has already become enough of an issue, the goopiness. 

The deeper into the season they get, the more he starts to relax about the Rozanov thing. It's weird being on the same team while fucking, sure, but it's also so much more frequent than it's ever been, and that's obviously incredible. Rozanov was also right that no one would suspect anything. The team just think they're besties, and some of them are quoted a few times saying how much time Shane and Rozanov hang out together, and breathless articles are posted to the hockey sites about how nice it is to see them as a unit, and how their friendship off the ice is making them better than ever on it. It's true, too, that their connection on the ice is insane on the Power Play, enough that Coach has them start experimenting with Shane on Rozanov’s wing or Rozanov on Shane's, on the first line. Shane thought it would feel more like an insult than it does, to eventually realize that he works better with Rozanov centering him than the other way around. He can tell that Rozanov is nervous about it. He still chirps him in the locker room, but there's this anxious set to his brows that he gets sometimes when he's anticipating a Shane Freakout, and it makes Shane feel guilty. Like he's a lot of work. 

He doesn't freak out, though. He's still anticipating it himself, waiting for the moment he stops being able to be chill about everything and starts becoming unreasonable. It doesn't happen. He takes it as a challenge, mostly; he wants to play on a line with Rozanov, and he knows it's the right move for the team. 

It takes two games for Rozanov to stop looking at him like he's a ticking bomb, mostly because they fucking dominate those two games. After their fifth goal of the roadie—a beautiful shot from Rozanov off a physics-defying assist from Shane—Rozanov pulls him into a laughing hug and smacks a kiss on the front of his helmet, and Shane doesn't even think about pulling away. He might, sort of, maybe, sink into it a little, instead. 

His parents decide to come down for a whole week when they have a string of home games. Shane tries to put them off the idea without saying “noooo but I want to be railed by my teammate repeatedly”, but Rozanov has been pretending his recently injured knee hasn’t been bothering him anyway, so it’s probably for the best that they don’t spend a week fucking while Rozanov takes breaks hiding in the bathroom with ice packs he thinks Shane doesn’t notice and continues to refuse to admit that he needs painkillers. It still feels a little sad, the last time Shane makes the drive to Rozanov’s place for the week, the night before his parents are due to fly into Logan. He would feel more pathetic about it, but he can tell that Rozanov is feeling the same way, so he doesn’t. 

One weird thing that he has been noticing more often lately is that he has developed a much better handle on what Rozanov is thinking and feeling, and that scares him sometimes, especially when he sees his own confusingly horrid and wonderful desires reflected back at him from Rozanov's face. Shane has gotten used to the sexual desires, mostly. It's been easier to accept especially because he goes out with the guys sometimes and watches them with girls, and he has reluctantly started to admit to himself that he’s just not interested. Hard not to at least get inklings of the truth when your first reaction to someone suggesting you should get with a perfectly nice-looking girl who keeps making eyes at you is to go “what? Why? No,” while barely hiding your grimace in your drink. 

Rozanov had even been annoyingly chill about that, meaning he waited until they were back in Shane's apartment before laughing in his face. But his hand had been on Shane's dick at the time, so it took some of the sting off it until Shane was laughing at himself too, saying knock it off, asshole. You want me to go back and hook up with that girl? Rozanov had then done an unfairly accurate imitation of Shane politely offering to go down on her while pretending to gag, and Shane had protested that characterization with Roz, seriously, have you ever known me to be bad at something I think I have to succeed at? Still laughing, and Rozanov had hummed and turned it into some weird sexy roleplay where he pretended to be a girl and demanded that Shane go down on him, and maybe all of that isn't important, but the point is that he'd been weird about it after, trying to give Shane this pep talk about how he didn't have to go home with girls to be normal, and that Rozanov would cover for him if he wanted, but really, he didn't think the guys would mind, since it wasn't like they’d been assholes about the fact that Rozanov hadn’t gone home with a girl in a while, either.  

And Shane isn't great at picking up hints, but he would have to be way worse  at it to miss that one, and so he's been feeling better about the whole gay thing. Not great, still. He's accepted it about himself in the same way he has accepted his reading glasses or his freckles or the fact that his mom can be overbearing. Like they're things he has learned to put up with, to overcome, to work around. Little flaws. 

It's the other shit that’s frankly difficult to accept, because they're not desires. Desiring Rozanov makes sense and is fine, because Rozanov is desirable, and because no one has ever made Shane feel so good. At this point, it would be ridiculous of him to not desire Rozanov physically. 

But he doesn't just desire Rozanov physically. It's shit like this, like being at his house and eating dinner with him and wishing that they could spend this whole week together, when just last season, they were lucky to get four hours every couple of months. It's shit like thinking that even if Rozanov has to take it easy on his knee, maybe Shane could have spent the week taking care of him, and maybe Rozanov would have even allowed that? Maybe? It's difficult to imagine, but it's also nice to imagine, too.

And he's always afraid that he's the only one feeling these things, but then Rozanov will do something borderline weird that only makes sense if you assume that he's feeling the same nameless, frightening Feelings, like maybe they're not just fucking, and maybe it hasn't just been fucking with them for a while now. 

So it's weird, the day before his parents come. Shane keeps fantasizing about doing something stupid like coming out to them not only as gay but also as Rozanov's fuckbuddy. It's obviously insane; he can't do that. His parents are great, and he loves them, and he knows that they love him too, and more importantly, he knows that they will continue to love him probably no matter what, but it would also lead to too many questions that he doesn’t even know the answers to.

Like, what are he and Rozanov even doing? What's the end game? They keep fucking until one of them starts dating? It'll have to be Rozanov who ends it, because Shane can't imagine ever wanting anyone more than he wants Rozanov, certainly not badly enough to date seriously, especially not now that he's starting to accept the gay thing. So, what, is he supposed to just wait around, feeling more and more unforgivably soft about Rozanov, waiting for Rozanov to get a girlfriend? The thought makes him sick, literally nauseous. Humiliating enough that he hasn't been able to stop this thing between them because he needs it so badly. To crave it and keep reaching for it only to be turned away for something that Rozanov wants more than him? He's not sure he'll survive it.  

He can tell that Rozanov notices something. He seems almost nervous, which isn't like him, and it makes Shane feel guilty. This makes him try harder to seem normal, which makes Rozanov look more nervous, because Shane is fucking awful at trying to seem normal. 

“What is this,” Rozanov finally says, flatly. 

“Uh,” Shane replies, confused by hearing the exact question that has been haunting him coming out of Rozanov's mouth. 

“You're acting strange. Just say what’s bothering you.”

Rozanov has this determined little jut to his chin that surprises Shane. He looks like he's preparing himself for something. What exactly does he think is happening? 

“I think I'm gay,” Shane says. Blurts, maybe, is a better way to put it. He feels like an idiot when Rozanov raises one very pointed eyebrow at him. 

 “There have been signs,” he says. Shane rolls his eyes and goes back to eating his pasta, trying to continue to glare while he does it, but Rozanov really went all out with the sauce, and it's hard to stay angry when the food tastes so good. 

“Look,” Shane finally says, once he has eaten enough pasta that he has figured out the right order of words in his brain. “You're not gay.”

“No.” 

“Okay. But I am.”

“Okay?”

“So, like, things could be way easier for you,” Shane says. Rozanov's brows furrow slightly in the look he gets when he's not sure if he doesn't understand because of the annoying subtleties of the English language or if he doesn't understand because the thing Shane said was fucking stupid. Shane is very familiar with that look. He sighs. “It's stupid. Whatever.”

“I don't know what you mean,” Rozanov admits. 

“I don't know what I mean, either. We can drop it.”

“Shane,” Rozanov says seriously, and Shane can feel his lips pressing together in an angry little line, because he really doesn't want to say any of this, and it's all his fault that he even started, and he's so afraid he's going to fuck everything up forever. 

“I was just. I was thinking, like. I don't know. Like we've been hanging out a lot, lately, and it's really...nice.”

“Nice,” Rozanov repeats flatly, in a tone like he thinks ‘nice’ might be an insult. 

“Yeah, dickhead. Nice. I like being here with you. It's nice. But, like…” Rozanov puts down his fork and groans, tipping his head back, clearly annoyed by Shane's inability to string a fucking sentence together, which is fair, because Shane is annoyed about that too. “Forget it,” he mutters, going back to his food. “Forget I said anything.”

He tries his hardest not to let things be weird the rest of the night, but of course it's not solely up to him. Rozanov is intense, thoughtful, like he's trying to figure out what Shane had been about to say, and Shane is desperate to make him forget that he had almost said anything, because he knows what he had been about to say, and he knows that it would have been ruinous. I’m afraid that you might be it for me. I’m afraid that there’s no coming back from this, for me. I’m afraid that I want you and am going to lose you one day, and I think it might fuck me up forever. Yeah fucking right. He can’t say any of that. 

Pretending must work at least a little bit, because Rozanov doesn't kick him out or even try to tease and/or trick him into being honest. He just fucks Shane into the mattress, holding him down by the back of his neck in the way that always makes Shane go boneless with pleasure. Afterward, he pulls Shane close, positioning him the way he wants before snuggling up behind him, and Shane is too relieved to fight it, even if he wanted to fight it, which of course he doesn't. He closes his eyes and listens to Rozanov's heartbeat, and he thinks it's probably for the best that they're not going to be spending this week together. He needs to take a step back before he fucks up everything with his hideous, impossible wants. 

David loves Boston in the same way he loves almost everything new. Yuna is a little more difficult to please, just because of the hockey rivalry of it all, but one of the things they do together is watch a shitload of cooking shows, so they're both excited to try some specific restaurants in the city because they're owned by celebrity chefs they like or whatever. Shane is glad to have some direction, and glad that the first dinner does a lot to ease his mother into actually enjoying this trip and not just looking for reasons why Montreal will always be better than Boston. It’s not like Shane wants to stay in Boston forever, but he likes it for now, and he wants her to like it, too.  

Their first home game of the week goes well. Things with Rozanov aren't weird, which is a relief. He spins Shane around on the ice after his second goal, grinning at him happily, and it doesn't even feel like it's for this continued game of gay chicken—though that certainly doesn't stop. Afterward, on their way to the next swanky restaurant on the list, his mother surprises him by calling Rozanov “adorable” when she spots a .gif of the moment on her Twitter feed. Shane tries not to stammer or blush about it, just thinking about Rozanov's giant smile and his fluffy curls.

They're halfway through an appetizer course that is, in Shane's very uncultured opinion, pretentious dogshit, when Shane catches the eye of an extremely beautiful woman who looks familiar enough that he panics when he sees her lighting up with a smile and then heading over. How does he know her? Is he supposed to remember her name? She can't really just be walking up to him, can she? People in Boston have been much more chill about him than they were in Montreal, and he's gotten used to being able to go out for dinner without being approached by fans. Is she a fan, though? She's really looking at him like she knows him. 

“Hi,” she says when she reaches the table. She waves a little to Yuna and David before turning back to Shane. “Sorry, I know this is so rude of me, but I have been trying to get Ilyusha to introduce us for weeks, and he has been a brat about it. It seems like fate that you come in while I’m waiting at the bar for him! My name is Svetlana Vetrova?”

Is it possible to feel both relief and the exact opposite of relief at the same time? Like, oh, thank fuck, this isn't a fan. This is Svetlana, Rozanov's extremely beautiful sometimes fuckbuddy who Shane has been feeling agonized and jealous about for years! That's much better! 

“Svetlana!” he says, standing up to shake her hand. He's surprised when she pulls him into a hug instead. She smells nice, and her hug is firm but not crushing. Definitely not into girls, Shane thinks grimly, because if he was into girls, it's hard to imagine a girl easier to be into than her. He turns to his parents. “Um, mom, dad, this is Svetlana, Rozanov's friend.”

“We grew up together, in Moscow,” Svetlana says, shaking his parents’ hands with a kind of bashful charm that is very pretty on her. “My father is Sergei Vetrov. Ilya told me you would recognize his name, if I ever met you. He says you know everything about hockey.” 

“Yes, of course,” Shane and Yuna say at the same time, which makes Svetlana laugh. 

“Good!” she says. “So do I!” 

“Is it…do you want to join us?” Shane finds himself asking. Svetlana looks surprised, but Shane's parents both put her immediately at ease by echoing Shane’s offer, making room. 

Svetlana turns out to be a fantastic buffer between Shane and his parents. She knows hockey just as well as his mom, and she has lots of opinions about Boston restaurants that thrill his dad. She tells embarrassing stories about Rozanov as a child, and Shane can't even be too mortified when his parents offer tidbits of their own. She has a sparkling brightness to her that makes Shane unfortunately very comfortable, which is only unfortunate because her being perfect really does spell doom for him, and he knows that. 

Why would Rozanov even be messing around with him when Svetlana is an option? She clearly loves him. Does she love him like Shane…

Well, fuck. 

Does she love him like Shane—fucking stupidly—loves him? Since when does Shane love him? How did he let that happen? Why did he have to realize it right this fucking second? 

Can she give him the things that Shane can't? Safety and security and someone he can actually be open about loving? Fuck. This is awful. She's so perfect. 

He could probably hate her, maybe, if he tried, but that seems pointless. He likes her a lot, instead. They talk about hockey, getting into an argument at one point that's so much like arguing with Rozanov that he almost calls her an asshole, but he stops himself just in time. She laughs at him, clearly recognizing it. His parents both look sickeningly hopeful. He feels like he's in a whirlpool, circling closer to the center, about to be sucked down into the depths. 

Svetlana insists on taking a selfie at one point, and of course David offers to take the picture instead, so they look even more like a very awkward first date. Shane has reached a state of discomfort so complete that he can’t even feel anxious about it anymore. He smiles woodenly into the camera, and Svetlana laughs with seemingly genuine delight as she sends the picture to Rozanov. 

“This is what he gets for being late to meet me,” she says, again so charming that it makes all of them laugh, including Shane, and then she goes back to vehemently agreeing with Yuna that Shane should be centering Rozanov rather than the other way around. 

Rozanov shows up finally about ten minutes later, looking harried and a bit stricken to find Svetlana comfortably holding court with the Hollanders. 

“Ilyusha! There you are!” she cries, and she stands up and gathers her coat. Shane stands up to try and shake her hand again, and she clucks her tongue and smothers him in another hug, kissing him on the cheek, a bit too close to the mouth for comfort. Rozanov is watching them carefully, his eyes looking for something, though Shane isn’t sure what, so he just smiles a little and bobs his head in greeting. Svetlana effusively thanks Shane and his parents for putting up with her presence, visibly pleased when they all protest over each other that it was no trouble, and that they hope to see her again. Then Rozanov is stepping up to shake Shane’s parents’ hands, and he’s saying Ilya, please when they try to call him Rozanov, and he’s thanking them for keeping his friend company while he was busy with media. 

“I’m surprised they didn’t have Shane join you,” Yuna says, and Shane can already feel, on the tip of his tongue, the instinct to head his mother off before she can finish that probably passive aggressive thought. “I know the front office has really been leaning into the whole bromance thing with the whole team, but I figured they’d be leaning into it more with the two of you.” 

“Ah, I figured I would give Hollander the night off, since I knew you were coming to see him,” Rozanov says. Unfortunately, he’s just as charming as Svetlana when he says it. They’re fucking perfect for each other, of course. Great!. 

“And with no care that I was waiting for you,” Svetlana says with joking offense. She nudges Shane. “I think he likes you better than me.” 

Shane laughs uncomfortably. 

“I don’t see how he could,” he manages to say, and Svetlana gasps happily and then turns to Rozanov with a stream of delighted Russian. 

“She says I have been hiding you from her because I’m afraid you will steal her,” Rozanov translates with an arched eyebrow and an unimpressed almost-glare in Svetlana's direction. Shane doesn’t quite know what to say to that, and so he just laughs and shakes his head. 

“See you at practice tomorrow,” he says. “Svetlana, it was nice to meet you.” 

“We will be seeing each other more often, I think, Shane Hollander,” Svetlana says. “Give me your phone.” 

Shane sighs and hands it over, giving Rozanov an apologetic grimace as he does so. Rozanov’s expression is so blank, it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking, but Shane is already way too exhausted to get worked up about that; nothing that has happened in the last twenty minutes has been his fault, technically. Things are happening around him, and he’s just desperately trying to keep up. 

Svetlana programs her number into his phone and sends herself a kissy face emoji, and then she kisses him on the cheek again and says more goodbyes, and Rozanov claps Shane on the shoulder before he goes, his thumb brushing just slightly over the knob at the top of Shane’s spine.

When they’re gone, Shane feels a bit like he has just survived a hurricane, but his parents seem amused. 

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Yuna asks, gesturing to his phone, still in his hands. “Seemed like she and Rozanov were…?” 

“What? Uh, oh. Maybe, yeah. I don’t know. I think they’re, uh. Sort of…do we really have to talk about this?” 

“No,” Yuna says, holding up her hands. “I’m just telling you to be careful. Nothing worse for team unity than two players fighting over the same girl.” 

Shane blinks at her, uncomprehending for way too long. 

“Oh,” he says. “Uh, no. That’s not. You don’t have to worry about that, okay?” 

“Okay,” Yuna says, in that voice she uses when she can tell that she’s on the verge of pushing Shane too far but doesn’t necessarily regret what she said. “I just want to make sure you’re making good decisions here, Shane.” 

Shane doesn’t reply to that, because he knows there’s nothing he can say that won’t sound defensive, and also because he’s definitely not making good decisions. They make it through dinner, and through dessert, and they make it all the way back to Shane’s apartment, where David pours himself and Yuna some wine, and they settle into the couch to keep talking, and then it suddenly, for no reason, becomes impossible to stay quiet. 

“I,” he starts, and then he stops, because he can’t believe he’s about to open his mouth and actually say this just because his parents got the exact wrong impression of the Svetlana thing. Would it be the worst thing in the world if his parents had to stay a little worried about him being a womanizer or getting into trouble with the woman who appears to be his teammate’s girlfriend? Probably not. But it’s just not the truth, and Shane hasn’t been telling them the whole truth for a while, and he wants to. He doesn’t want to lie to them anymore. He doesn’t want them to worry about him being something he’s not. “I’m not…there’s nothing with Svetlana. There’s not going to be anything with Svetlana, okay? I’m…fuck. Jesus Christ. I’m, uh. Gay?” 

He says it like a question, way too tentative, like he thinks there’s a chance he’ll be able to say ‘just kidding’ and take it back, if they don’t react the right way. Of course, his dad just looks at him with mild, surprised pleasure, like he probably would have reacted if Shane said he wanted to retire and become a zoologist or something. Yuna gazes at him over the rim of her wine for long enough that Shane’s hands start shaking, and then she puts the wine down and throws her arms around him. 

“Oh, Shane,” she breathes out, squeezing him tighter. “Okay, sweetheart. Oh, my boy. Okay. It’s okay.” 

Which feels a little over the top, at first, and then Shane realizes that he’s definitely crying, so maybe it’s not over the top at all, actually.

Well, shit, he thinks. No taking it back now.

He manages to make it through the rest of the week, only mildly traumatizing both himself and his parents by admitting (most of) the truth about why he left Montreal. His mother is devastated, but he’d expected that. His father is angrier than he expected, and it feels kind of nice. His parents are both visibly relieved when he confirms for them that Boston has been good so far, and that Rozanov, Marleau, and Conners all know for sure that he’s gay and have never treated him any differently—obviously that’s not entirely true, given the Rozanov of it all, but it’s close enough to the truth that it doesn’t feel like much of a lie. 

His parents have questions for him, but they’re gentler about it than he’d feared they would be, especially when he’s clearly uncomfortable. He has to stop his mom from taking notes at one point, because she wants to mark down all the names of people she wants to violently destroy in a revenge tour, but other than that, it actually feels good to get things out in the open with her. She apologizes over and over again for not being as supportive as he probably wanted during the negotiations, but he waves her off. 

“I wasn’t ready to tell you,” he says. 

“I’m so glad you got here eventually,” she tells him, squeezing his hand, and he believes her, which is such a relief. “I always want to know everything about you that you want to tell me, okay? There’s nothing you could do that would make me love you any less. You know that, don’t you?” 

Shane laughs a little, nods, thinks it’s probably true, but he still doesn’t tell her about Rozanov just yet. Maybe eventually, if things ever get to the point where it’s an actual thing, and not just them fucking, but he can’t think of anything more humiliating than telling his mom about his fuckbuddy, who is probably one of the worst choices for a fuckbuddy that he could have chosen, from a managerial standpoint. 

It’s not like he wasn’t talking to Rozanov at all for the week his parents were in town. They texted semi-frequently, semi-explicitly. Flirty, maybe. It wasn’t completely weird, like Shane had feared. He texted a few times with Svetlana, too, after awkwardly checking with Rozanov to make sure it was okay. 

Roz

What u decided to not be gay? u think im jealous?

Which was enough of a blessing for Shane.

So he and Rozanov texted, and he and Svetlana texted, and Svetlana threatened to add them to a groupchat, but Rozanov must have nixed it, because it never happened. Shane saw Rozanov at practice and during their games, and Rozanov was the same as ever. Marleau continued to ham it up with Shane on the ice, and Rozanov did the same, a little less obviously, and Shane expected it to feel different now that his parents knew about him, but it really didn’t. 

And then the week is over, and they’re leaving for the start of a fairly long roadie, and Shane hesitates over his phone for ages before finally texting and inviting Rozanov to spend the night at his place, if he wants, since it will be closer to the airport, anyway. Rozanov doesn’t respond for long enough that Shane gives up and makes himself dinner, and is halfway through watching the Admirals game before a text comes in. 

Roz

Sry, plans w sveta. u can come if u want? 

He drops a pin of some club that the team occasionally goes out to. Shane is familiar. Literally nothing in the world could compel him to go there to watch Rozanov and Svetlana being hot together, and surely Rozanov has to know that. He feels a bit like he has been batted away. Not just rejected, but rejected with a sharp, stinging slap. He watches the rest of the game with a frown on his face and his heart unfortunately racing quite a bit. He can’t tell if he’s anxious or angry or sad. He thinks he might be all three at once. 

Svetlana texts him a selfie of herself. Rozanov is in the background, looking like he’s trying to get the bartender’s attention. He looks so hot it’s physically painful, and it makes Shane feel guilty for zeroing in on him like a gay Terminator. Like he should at least appreciate the picture that Svetlana sent him without immediately thirsting after Rozanov. 

Svetlana

pleaseeeee hollander come out with us!! 

Shane has read receipts turned off for moments just like this one, but he still feels an obligation to respond, because he doesn’t want her to think there’s any chance he’s going to actually join them. 

Shane

Hi Svetlana! you look very nice! sorry im not feeling up for it tonight!

He sounds like such a fucking loser, as always, but she heart reacts his text, and that feels good enough. He puts his phone back down and tries to focus on the game, but his phone buzzes several more times, and he just finally gives up and goes to bed so he can stop thinking about it.

In the morning, feeling a little less pathetic and boring and lonely in a self-imposed way, he checks his messages. Nothing from Rozanov, which feels like another slap, even though that’s stupid. Svetlana texted him several times, hours apart, gently mocking him for being boring and then insisting that he had to go out with her sometime and then finally saying that “Ilyusha” said Shane was just being polite and wasn’t actually interested in getting to know her. Shane quickly texts back that Rozanov’s an idiot, and that he just doesn’t like clubs, but they can get together for brunch or something, if she wants. And then he fucking hates himself, because what, exactly, is he going to do with fucking Svetlana at brunch? Talk about how much better she is for the man Shane is idiotically in love with? Great idea, Shane.

He’s guiltily glad that she doesn’t open the text until he’s already left for the airport, and he’s happy enough to thumbs up her response that they’ll have to do something when the Raiders get back from their road trip. At the airport, he runs into Marleau and gratefully sticks to him like those little fish that follow sharks around, presumably to protect them from other predators. When he sees Rozanov, he does his absolute best to greet him as if nothing is wrong, and he thinks he pulls it off, because Rozanov seems normal. Marleau is talking about something that happened at the club last night, because apparently he ran into Rozanov and Svetlana. Shane tunes them out, and he puts in his headphones as quickly as he thinks he can get away with it. 

On the plane, Rozanov sits next to him the same way he always does, and Shane tries not to feel too relieved about it. Wow, what a surprise, you overreacted to nothing again, as always. Rozanov doesn’t do anything as unfortunately sexy and kind of tender as brushing his pinkie against Shane’s thigh, but he does nudge Shane’s thigh with his own several times, in an annoying way, which makes Shane smile a little, and which makes Rozanov smile a little in turn, which is good enough.

Shane spends the entire flight thinking about it, and then he spends the shuttle ride to the hotel thinking about it, typing up incomprehensible notes on his phone with so many codenames and codewords that even if he wasn’t typing it in French, he doesn’t think Rozanov would understand it. It just helps to write his thoughts out, sometimes. 

He and Rozanov are still sharing a room, which is another relief. As soon as they’re in it, Rozanov looks at him, and Shane is on him, kissing him with desperation as if they’ve been apart for what used to be their normal months, rather than just a week during which they saw each other semi-frequently. Rozanov is muttering at him in Russian, the way he does, and it’s lighting up parts of Shane’s nervous system, as always, and Shane is so relieved that he almost doesn’t think about anything at all. 

Rozanov sucks his dick like a champion, and then Shane returns the favor, loose-limbed and so pleased with himself, especially when Rozanov seems more worked up than usual. Who’s better at it? Me or Svetlana? Shane would ask, if Shane had no shame, maybe, or if he’d had a personality transplant or something. Rozanov probably wouldn’t tell him the truth, anyway. 

“Okay?” Rozanov asks him, after, looking at him with that narrow-eyed look he’s been using more and more often, lately. 

“Mhm,” Shane replies. “Yeah, of course.” 

That gets another long look out of Rozanov, as if he wants to say something too, as if maybe he has his own list of things that he wants to but cannot find the right way to say. 

Bromoeroticism makes a resurgence because Rose Landry, of all people, tweets out something like “why didn’t anyone tell me about the bromoeroticism of these boston hockey boys”, and then she retweets five pictures of Shane with Rozanov specifically, and it’s all anyone wants to talk about for the next two weeks. Collander has unfortunately caught on as a thing with him and Conners, though Marleau is convinced that Conners is making all those posts himself, and Rozanov is quick to agree. He is even more so now acting jealous of the attention that Shane and Marleau are continuing to get, and Shane is pretty sure he’s not just seeing what he wants to see.

Shane has his brunch with Svetlana, and she’s sweet and bright about it, and they talk hockey the entire time. It makes Shane feel bad about lowkey seeing her as his mortal enemy, and so maybe that’s part of why he tells her that he’s gay. 

It’s not something he plans on doing before he gets there, but then he starts worrying about her thinking maybe this is a brunch date, so he just tells her. He figures it wasn’t really necessary, considering the total lack of surprise on her face, but it also feels nice to tell someone without feeling like his chest is about to cave in. Maybe it’s one of those things that gets easier the more you do it.

“Does Ilya know?” she asks. He hesitates, unsure how to answer for Rozanov, and apparently that’s answer enough. Svetlana nods. “Ilya knows.” 

“Yeah, okay. He knows.” 

“Good. That’s good. He has not been rude about it, I assume.” 

“No, of course not. He’s been great.” 

He wonders if she knows that Ilya is bisexual. She would have to, wouldn’t she? He doesn’t want to say it, just in case. It makes the brunch a bit awkward, the way they keep talking around each other, but Shane still ends up glad that they did it. He thinks that maybe he can get used to the idea of Svetlana with enough exposure. He can get used to her beauty and her kindness and the fact that she’s perfect for Rozanov, and will probably outlast Shane. It’s not like Shane has ever expected anything different, and now that he and Rozanov are friends in addition to the other stuff, he’s going to have to get used to the idea that he is not everything to Rozanov the way Rozanov is, unfortunately, kind of everything for him. If he sulks about it, or avoids Svetlana about it, or raises too much of a stink about it, he’s going to be obvious, and that’s going to be humiliating. 

So he promises Svetlana that he’ll go out with them the next time they go to a club, and Svetlana seems genuinely pleased, and Shane tries to return the feeling. It’s not that he doesn’t like her. It’s just that it’s difficult to watch her move with so much confidence, knowing what she represents. 

“I told you he would be here,” Svetlana cries when she sees him. Rozanov is watching him from the bar, a small half-smile on his face. Marleau is behind him, cheering enthusiastically. Shane spreads his arms to show off his presence, trying to look kind of confident, at least. Svetlana pulls him into a hug and kisses his cheek the way she always does. He’s gradually becoming less uncomfortable about it. 

“I promised,” he says. 

“And you keep your promises, unlike some people,” Svetlana coos, clearly talking shit to Rozanov about something. Shane doesn’t know what it’s about, but he plays along, helping Svetlana mock him. Rozanov pretends not to be pleased, but he’s happy with the attention; it’s obvious. 

Shane still doesn’t love clubbing, but this one is at least growing familiar, and he lets himself be talked into a few drinks by some of the guys. Marleau and Conners and Dunkin Donuts all form a protective square around him, and Carmichael and Rozanov come in and out, and Svetlana is always around with a rotating cast of pretty friends who swoop in to chat with the players and often swoop out again just as quickly. Rozanov keeps making it a quiet point to touch him, which is nice. Just, like, hands brushing past his back, over the back of his neck, fingers nudging up against his. Shane always grins at him, his grins going wider the drunker he gets, and he can tell that Rozanov is pleased with it from the way he keeps doing it. 

Svetlana somehow manages to get Shane out on the dancefloor, and Marleau makes a joke like nobody is too gay for Svetlana, and Shane is tipsy enough now that he feels the need to say you know that isn’t true, right? You are very pretty but I’m still gay, which makes Svetlana laugh and kiss him on the cheek again.

Svetlana dances like she does everything else: perfectly. Rozanov joins them at one point, and it’s fun until it’s not. Two more girls join them, and then a few of the team, and then suddenly Shane is on the outside of the group, looking in, watching as Rozanov and Svetlana dance, and they look so good together. They really do. 

Shane staggers back to the bar and orders himself another drink, and then he drinks it too quickly, listing into Marleau’s side. Marleau holds him up with an arm across his shoulders, looking down at him with an indulgent smile, and even that feels like too much. Like Shane is just the weird loser little brother that they have to look out for. Everyone around him is pairing off becasue it’s easy for them, because they can pair off, because they can just meet some random fucking woman and go home with them, and no one will think anything of it. Shane can’t do that. 

It’s kind of what he was trying to say to Rozanov before his parents visited, back at his house, before he chickened out. Rozanov can find a girl. Marry a girl. Marry Svetlana. He can be normal, if he wants. Shane can’t do that without lying, without hurting himself and the probably innocent girl who would try to make it work with him, and he doesn’t want to do that. And with Shane, it’s not just that it’s guys. It is guys, but it’s Rozanov, mostly. He likes Rozanov so much more than he should, and he knows that it’s different, for Rozanov. Rozanov likes him fine, for now, but he has so many better options. It doesn’t feel like Shane has any other options at all.

He means to slip out and leave, walk home feeling sorry for himself, but instead he suddenly finds himself in the back of an Uber with Marleau squished next to him on one side and Svetlana on the other. Svetlana is laughing at something that Rozanov has said from up in the front seat, and she’s brushing her fingers through Shane’s hair, which is kind of nice, if a little creepy, because Shane doesn’t remember how he got here. 

“Where are we?” he asks, and Svetlana laughs again. 

“Go back to sleep,” she says, and then she calls him something in Russian that seems like it’s probably sweet. 

When Shane wakes up again, Marleau is shaking him by the shoulder. 

“Your place, Hollamander!” he yells, despite being like an inch away from Shane’s face. Shane gives him a thumbs up and clambers over him to the door. There’s a bunch of rapid-fire conversation behind him, and he waves over his shoulder and staggers up to his door, punching in the code. He’s probably not as drunk as he’d feared, because he nails it on the first try, and he has occasionally struggled with it when he’s just tired. 

He opens the door and startles when someone grabs it from him, opening it further. He turns, surprised to see Rozanov right behind him. Was Rozanov always here? He looks around him; the Uber is gone. 

“You lost her,” he says mournfully, and Rozanov laughs at him. 

“Sveta is going to meet up with some friends. Marly will see her there and then head home,” he says. 

“Oh,” Shane says. He tries not to feel anything inappropriate about that, because he thinks it would probably not look very good, for him to feel victorious over Rozanov following him home instead of going out and having more fun with Svetlana. “You want to crash here?” 

“If that’s okay with you,” Rozanov says, amused. 

“I always want you here,” Shane says. 

Well, fuck. Probably shouldn’t have said that. Rozanov looks a bit agape about it, like Shane spat in his face.  Did Shane spit in his face? He’s pretty sure he didn’t, but you never know. 

By the time they get up to Shane’s apartment, he feels a little silly, honestly, and a little wary, like maybe the reason Rozanov came with him is because he made such an ass of himself at the club that they figured he should have a babysitter. That would be humiliating. 

“You know, you could go,” he says, whipping around once he gets the door open, startled to find Rozanov so close behind him. 

“What?” Rozanov asks. 

“If you wanted to, uh, like, have fun. Somewhere else. I don’t need, like, a babysitter.” 

“You think I am here to babysit you?” 

“I don’t know, maybe. The last hour is kind of a blur.” 

“So you do need a babysitter?” 

“I don’t know,” Shane groans, flopping onto his couch while Rozanov laughs at him. “I just don’t want to ruin your night or make you annoyed or make you bored or hurt you or fucking, I don’t know, make you realize what a fucking loser I am? Or whatever? Because I do really always want you here, and I know it can’t be forever, but. I don’t know. I wish…” He lets out a withering sigh, and he slams a throw pillow over his face. Rozanov gently takes it out of his hands, and he looks down at him, looking, at least, a little charmed. Mostly amused, though. 

“I want to be here,” he says plainly, and Shane is too tired to doubt him. 

Rozanov bullies him into the shower, and then bullies him into pajamas, and then they fall asleep on the couch, with Shane lying on top of Rozanov like a weighted, heated blanket, watching some nature documentary that Shane insists is going to be good. He falls asleep within ten minutes, so apparently it’s not that good. He wakes up to Rozanov’s hand brushing over the small of his back, up and down, and he pretends to be asleep still so that Rozanov won’t stop. Some time later, he wakes up and rolls off Rozanov so he can get himself some water, and Rozanov wakes up from the surprise of Shane no longer being on top of him. 

He looks so sleepily disgruntled, and Shane can’t help but smile at him fondly, which makes Rozanov smile back. Everything is dark in Shane’s apartment except for the little bit of light that always comes in around the edges of the blackout curtains, no matter what he does. 

“Come on,” he says. “We should go to bed.” 

Rozanov murmurs an agreement, and Shane gets them both some water, feeling a lot more steady than he did before. They climb into bed together, and Rozanov looks soft and sleepy but too far away, and Shane eyes the distance between them sadly. 

“Sorry,” he says when he notices Rozanov watching him. “I don’t usually do this.” 

“Do what?” 

“Drink and make an asshole of myself.” 

“You were the most polite drunk man in that club, Hollander.” 

“Low bar, I think.” 

“Do you know how many women tried to dance with you? And you said, every time, ‘I’m so sorry, miss, you’re very beautiful, and I love your dress, but I’m dating a very pretty girl named Lily’.” 

“Shut the fuck up. I did not say that.” 

Rozanov laughs silently at the ceiling. 

“Close enough. Sveta said she has never seen so many rejections with such specific compliments. You told one girl she had eyes like a thunderstorm. Who says that?” 

“I did? Jesus.” 

“So many broken hearts.” 

“Fuck off.” 

“You were very fun. So no apologies, please. Sveta is half in love with you.” 

“I like her,” Shane admits. He wishes that he didn’t. 

“She likes you too. Very sad you are gay. I think she has guessed about us, but she won’t say anything until you tell her.” 

Shane feels, suddenly, a bit more sober than before. 

“Wait, really? You think she knows?” 

“Mm, she has told me before I am ‘strange’ about you. Now that we’re friends, and I kept her from you for so long, she was thinking there had to be some reason for it.” 

“Does she know about you?” 

“Sveta knows everything about me, I think. Well, almost everything.” 

“She knows you’re, like, bisexual, though?” 

“Yes, of course she does.” 

“Oh. Okay.” He notices for the first time that Rozanov looks nervous. “I guess I don’t really care if she knows. Like, it’s fine with me.” 

Rozanov sits up on one elbow, clearly trying not to look too excited, which makes Shane’s heart pang a little bit. 

“Really?” he asks. 

“Yeah. Only if you think it won’t be weird for her, I guess?” 

Rozanov laughs a little. 

“Oh, she will be very angry that I have known for years that she doesn’t have a chance and I still let her talk so much about her little crush on you.” When Shane nods, his brow furrows. “But not really angry. You look worried.” 

“No, not really. I just…well, you know. I don’t want it to be weird for her, but if it’s not, it’s not.” 

“Weird how?” 

Is this motherfucker really going to make him say it? He’s lucky Shane is still a bit tipsy. 

“Like because you guys are a thing, or whatever.” 

“A thing?” 

“Yeah, like. Friends with benefits or whatever.” 

“We have been, yes,” Rozanov says slowly. “But not for a while. I told you this.” 

“Right, yeah.” Did he? Shane vaguely remembers Rozanov saying something pointed about not really hooking up with any girls lately, but Shane had assumed both that it was incidental and that it didn’t include Svetlana. He’d sort of assumed that Svetlana is different in the same way that he is different. “Okay. That’s cool, then. You can tell her.” 

“Okay.” Rozanov looks a little uneasy, now. “Is this why you were being so strange at the club?” 

“I wasn’t being strange!” Shane practically yelps. “I was trying to be normal!” 

Rozanov laughs a little, and he brushes Shane’s hair out of his eyes, very gently. 

“Okay,” he says. “Yes, you were being very normal, avoiding me. I thought you were being paranoid that everyone would know we were fucking if we talked at the club for too long.” 

“I thought you…” Shane starts, then stops himself, but Rozanov arches an eyebrow, waits, and Shane grits out. “I thought maybe you wanted to spend time with Svetlana, and I was being cool about it, but that doesn’t mean I wanted…I didn’t want to watch it, okay?” 

Shame flushes through him as soon as he says it. Fucking Christ, Rozanov is going to get out of bed so fast he’s going to leave little dust clouds behind him, like a fucking cartoon. 

“You were jealous,” Rozanov says, his voice pitched low and breathy. “Weren’t you? Shane?” 

“Fuck off,” Shane says. “I wasn’t. I was being polite.” 

“Polite.” 

“Look, I’m fine with it, if you hook up with other people, okay? I am. But I just…I was drunk, and feeling fucking sorry for myself. Because, like, you’re you, and everyone wants you, and you want everyone, and you get to have them, and that’s probably really nice for you, or whatever. But I’m not like you. I’m gay, and I’m still, like, terrified of people figuring that out, I guess, even though I know it’s going to come out soon. It has to, with the way Drapeau and Comeau and whoever else are spreading those rumors in the league. Someone’s going to make a big thing of it, and then everyone’s going to know that I’m gay, and then I’m probably going to have to start being really fucking careful about hanging out with any of you guys outside the rink, because I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea, and it’s going to be like fucking Montreal all over again, where everyone just puts me to the side, because I’m the idiot gay guy who opened a picture from a regular dick pic sender in the locker room because I’m so fucking gone on you that I always open your texts the second I get them, even though half the time it’s a fucking dick pic. And it’s my fault. I…not the gay thing, probably. But it’s my fault for giving in to it, and needing it, and wanting it so bad, and being so fucking desperate for it. I don’t know. And it’s my fault for fucking up with Montreal, and it’s going to be my fault when I fuck up again, because I can’t, just, like, fucking stop. Because I’m not ever going to be normal, and I’m not ever going to like a girl. I mean, I could try. I don’t think I would be very good at it. I would just make us both miserable. It’s just you. Fuck. I mean, maybe there could be someone else. I don’t know. But I don’t…” 

“I love you,” Rozanov blurts. Shane immediately shuts up. “I mean. Fuck. I do.”

“Oh,” Shane says. “Me? Really? Are you sure?” When Rozanov only gives him a blankly unimpressed look, Shane stammers out, “I mean, obviously, same. I love you too? But I thought it was just me.”

“Shane,” Rozanov says. Well, Ilya. He should probably…Ilya. 

“Ilya,” Shane says dutifully. 

“I have been trying for months to make it obvious. And you thought I've been hooking up with people still? Svetlana? Do you think I can be in two places at once? Shane, we have been fucking so much that I don't think it would be possible to hook up with anyone else. When we have nights we don't see each other, I get some fucking sleep.”

“You make me sound like some insane pervert.”

“Well, yeah,” Ilya says, sounding pleased. “That was not a complaint.”

“Ilya,” Shane says again, because he can, and because he wants to. “You're really not fucking anyone else?”

“Not for a while, no. Since you came to the team.”

“What, seriously?” 

At Shane's delighted question, Ilya rolls his eyes and moves like he's going to get up and leave, but Shane stops him, holding on to him tightly. 

“Yes, okay! Stop making that face at me. You are too drunk to take seriously.”

“No,” Shane argues, but he can't stop smiling, and he knows it probably lessens the impact of the word. “I really didn't know, Ilya. I thought I was going to have to, like, hide it forever.”

“Well, that's very stupid,” Ilya replies seriously, and then he's kissing Shane gently, and Shane feels like he wants to crawl out of his skin, which is a pretty common feeling for him, except it's in a weirdly positive way this time. Like he feels too happy and too free for his stupid body. He’s probably just still drunk. 

“You're stupid,” he fires back, and then he kisses Ilya again, and then he rests his head against Ilya's chest and closes his eyes. 

In the morning, there's a very short period of time during which Shane considers freaking out, but he lets it pass. Ilya is snoring quietly, Shane's ear still pressed against his chest, and the bed is warm, and Shane feels fucking awful, but he doesn't want to move, and he doesn't want to freak out. Ilya loves him. Ilya told him so. 

Ilya looks surprised to see him still lying there when he opens his eyes a little while later. 

“Shh,” Shane says, before he can speak. “I'm not freaking out.”

“Suspicious to say,” Ilya hums quietly, but he leans in and kisses Shane gently, and Shane allows it for a second before grimacing. 

“I'm not, though.”

“Okay.”

“Do you also feel like you're fucking dying?”

“No, because I am an adult who can drink.”

“Fuck off, oh my god.”

“You had, what, two drinks?”

“You know I had more than that, you fucking dick.”

“You try to pretend you were drinking, but I know it was only ginger ale.”

“I take back what I said last night,” Shane says, testing the waters, trying to see if Ilya will acknowledge it or shrug it off. Maybe it would have been smarter to do this when his chest wasn't literally pressed up against Ilya's so Ilya can hear his heart stop for a second. Ilya looks down at him, smiling a little. 

“No, you don't,” he says, kissing Shane's nose in a disgustingly sweet gesture that takes Shane very aback. “And neither do I.”

“Thank fucking god,” Shane says. 

When Shane thinks back to his last season with the Metros, lately, it feels like something that happened to someone else. Like he put himself into a very small box, hid his feelings away because he knew it was the only way he was going to be able to survive what was going to happen next. Sometimes he forgets that it's something that actually happened to him until Hayden or JJ will text him, usually when they’re complaining about something Theriault or one of the other guys said, and Shane will be like oh, right, that was my life before. Wow, that’s terrible! Glad that's not me anymore!

Then it comes time to play Montreal again, at home this time, and Shane isn't even nervous about it anymore. They've been having an incredible season, usually playing him and Rozanov on the same line, switching up between center and wing, still not sure which configuration is going to stick. Playing on a line with Ilya is insane. It feels like a fantasy he never even thought to have. They're fucking unstoppable. 

By the time of the second Montreal game, more of the guys have heard through various league rumors what went down with the Metros last season. The thought doesn’t send Shane into panic spirals anymore. Duncan even approaches him and asks him directly, and he manages to answer without doing more than breaking into a mild sweat. Turns out Duncan’s mom has a new wife! Shane feels like he should start sending fruit baskets to all these random gay family members of his teammates. Or would fruit baskets be homophobic? Probably not fruit baskets, then. Thank you cards might be safer. Maybe the problem with Montreal was that those seven guys on the team who were dicks about it just didn’t have any gay friends or family? 

He thinks maybe the slow-drip reveal of his gayness to the team keeps him from overdosing on the panic of it. That annoying as fuck rookie turns out to not be cool about it, but he’s going to be sent back to Providence any day now because he’s a terrible fucking player in addition to being an annoying asshole, so Shane finds it difficult to care very much what he thinks. A third-line defenseman and their backup goalie occasionally do that thing where they stand next to each other muttering and looking at Shane, but is fucking Shane Hollander supposed to care what a third liner and a fucking backup goalie care about him? Maybe he would have, when he first got here, but he doesn’t now. Most of the other guys are cool with it, and actually get even cooler with it once they realize the connection between what made Shane leave his last team and what made him come to them. Maybe if he’d given a hint of his intentions last season, the neutral-ish guys on Montreal would have made more of an effort, too? Because these guys start basically trying to woo him. It’s another one of those things that probably should make him uncomfortable or whatever, but it doesn’t. He thinks it’s nice that they’re trying. 

The on-ice affection doesn’t stop, though it has turned away from being a game or a competition and has turned instead into something warmer. He wonders sometimes if Ilya said something to Marleau and Conners, because their antics become less about the “ship war” or whatever the fuck on twitter and seem more about showing Shane genuine support. His mom has been on the phone with him more, trying to reassure him that the rumors aren’t that out of control in the league yet, which means they’re probably getting out of control very quickly, and she’s trying to head off his anxiety. He thinks most of his friends on the Raiders are doing the same thing. They’re probably privy to things he’s not, and they’re probably hearing all sorts of shit about him from the other teams, and they’re choosing this method to remind him that they’re with him. It’s kind of sweet. 

They're affectionate with him all during the game against Montreal, and they're affectionate with each other, too. Now that he and Ilya are officially a thing, he floats the idea of Ilya toning it down to avoid suspicion being thrown on him, but Ilya looks murderous enough at the idea that he gives up and instead does the exact opposite: being more openly affectionate with Ilya than the others. He hugs Ilya more during games, calls Ilya his best friend during interviews, goes out with the guys more often and is photographed usually with Ilya somewhere nearby. Ilya doesn’t bother to hide his smug pleasure to be singled out, which makes Shane feel even better about choosing to do it. Marleau doesn't seem to suspect a thing, and seems only minimally disappointed that the girls online are more interested and Rozanov and Hollander now than they used to be. 

One thing breaks containment a bit online. It's an interview on ice at the end of the home game with Montreal. Shane is leaning up against the boards, trying to answer the questions with all the boring professionalism he can muster, and then Marleau skates up and kisses Shane on the cheek before skating off. Shane falters a little in his surprise, but keeps talking. Then Conners comes up and ruffles his hair as Shane keeps talking. After St-Simon skates up and kisses him on the forehead, Shane realizes that it’s a thing, and weary resignation settles into his features, which everyone seems to find hysterical, judging from all the screenshots he sees of his face over the following twenty-four hours. A line forms behind him, guys coming up to offer him hugs or fist-bumps or helmet kisses. Ilya is especially obnoxious about it, and insists on going last so that he can stick around after his obnoxious helmet kiss and sling an arm across Shane's shoulders and nod very seriously at everything Shane is saying while Shane struggles to hold on to his professionalism as even the interviewer is laughing. That video shows up while Shane is browsing the Internet for the rest of his career, and every time he sees it, he has to smile. Watching the way Ilya looks at him, so serious. Watching the way the guys on the Raiders so pointedly embrace him and welcome him in direct defiance of Montreal. Maybe not all of them know for sure that he's gay yet, but more and more of them have been hearing the rumors, and none of them have reacted as poorly as Shane had feared. He's starting to accept that maybe they won't.

Maybe some of them will have more of a problem with it once it’s no longer vague rumors and has been confirmed. Shane's not completely naive. He knows who's the quietest after the Montreal game, and who has looked at him a little sideways. Ilya is like a prison warden about his locker room sometimes, but banning certain words and certain discussions doesn't do anything to change people's minds, if their feelings are deeply entrenched enough, and Shane knows it isn't perfect. Boston isn't perfect. Shane still hears slurs shouted from the crowd, still meets way too many people who are unfortunately very comfortable calling him words that went out of favor 50 years ago. But Boston is also becoming home in a way he never felt quite comfortable in Montreal, like a home he can fade into. Where he can be both Shane Hollander, hockey phenom, and also just Shane.

“You're going to win the cup, you know,” Svetlana says one day, before playoffs have even started. Shane normally would reject this kind of talk, even though he doesn't think he's particularly superstitious, but he doesn't reject it today. He shrugs a little. 

“Probably,” he admits, and Svetlana grins wildly at him. 

“You will,” she says, like a promise.

He thinks about it, afterward. They're at a party at Marleau's new place, and he and Ilya share an Uber back into the city later, and Shane is tracing the plausibility of it the way he always does. Like, oh, it's not weird that we're sharing an Uber back to the city because we have practice in the morning so maybe Ilya doesn't want to bother going all the way out to his house when he's going to have to drive back here tomorrow anyway, and he's suddenly exhausted by it. Ilya goes to the fridge for a drink as soon as they get in, and he gets a glass of water for Shane, and he heads into the bathroom and starts the shower because Shane had said earlier that he couldn't wait to take a shower the second they got home. And he said it like that, home. He said we. It was automatic. 

He finds Ilya in the bathroom, testing the water with his hand. Ilya smiles when he turns and sees Shane, already stripping out of his clothes. 

“Hurry up, you're so slow,” he says, mocking the way he always is, and Shane loves him so much. 

“Hey, this is real, right? For you?” Shane blurts, gesturing between them. “This, us. Because it's, like, the best thing in the world, to me, and I want to make sure I'm not, uh, jumping the gun.”

“Ugh,” Ilya says, probably about the idiom. “Yes, of course this is real.” 

“Great,” Shane says. “Okay.” When Ilya rolls his eyes, he’s still smiling a little, plainly delighted by Shane’s awkwardness, as always. And Shane should probably leave it there, but he can’t. He’s Shane. “Just so you know, I’m…I’m probably not being very cool about this.” 

“You are not cool about anything, Hollander,” Ilya says dutifully, knowing his lines, at this point. 

“No, I know,” Shane admits, and then Ilya looks like he probably feels bad, and he steps forward to frown at Shane a little, gestures at him to keep talking. “I just mean, like. I’m thinking about how we’re going to win the cup, and I’m thinking about how much it sucks that I won’t be able to kiss you right there on the ice, in front of everyone, and I’m thinking about how fucking glad I am that you never listen to me about how dangerous it is to send dick pics, and I’m thinking that I’m glad that I was stupid enough to keep opening texts from you anyway? Because if either of us were doing what we were supposed to be doing, I would still be back there, in Montreal, and instead I’m fucking here, and I’d rather be here than anywhere else. You always seem like you maybe don’t believe me? But it’s true. I love this fucking team, and I love that we’re going to win a cup together, and I fucking love you. Okay?” 

Ilya smiles a little, and he comes close enough to reach out and start helping Shane out of his clothes. 

“Okay,” he says gently, like he’s placating Shane, except that Shane can see from the sheen in his eyes that he’s actually touched. “I love you too. I am glad you’re here. We are absolutely going to win the fucking cup. And, okay. Maybe this year, it would not be such a good idea, to kiss you when we win. But we will have other chances. As long as we are playing together, I think we will have a lot of chances. And, just so you know, Coach was raised by a single mother who had a lot of help from her brother and his ‘best friend and roommate’ Alain. He felt the need to tell me this after we played Montreal.” 

“Oh my god,” Shane mutters into the skin of Ilya’s neck. 

“So I think he might have heard some things.” Ilya’s voice is steady, but Shane can feel him shaking with laughter, and now Shane is shaking with laughter, too, obviously. It’s so fucking stupid. “I think he was warning me not to be a homophobe. Everyone assumes this about me! Me! The person who made you know you were gay because of how good I fucked you!” 

“I’m not sure that’s how I’d put it,” Shane argues fondly, but Ilya scoffs, and Shane doesn’t feel the need to argue beyond that. They get under the spray together, finally, and Ilya’s hands are brushing over him with the kind of intention that means this conversation isn’t going to last much longer. “But thank you. For telling me.” 

Ilya shrugs his sincerity off the way he usually does when Shane gets a little too sappy. 

“I just mean, you know, you are probably not going to be traded again. Boston is not as stupid as Montreal, especially not once we win and keep winning. Okay? So we will have other chances. Things at home…well. I wish I could just say fuck all of you, I fuck men too, happy pride, but is not really an option for me right now.” 

“I know that. I know. Sveta has been telling me some stuff.” 

“But, uh, maybe I can start looking into some things? Citizenship stuff. Just in case. For next time.” 

“For next time,” Shane agrees, smile growing. 

They do win the cup, because of course they win the fucking cup. because they’re Hollander and Rozanov, playing on the same team, on the same line. No one else stands a chance. 

Ilya sweeps Shane up into a bruising hug, slamming him back into the boards as Shane laughs and holds on tight. Marleau hits them next, and then it’s an endless train of all of their teammates, and Shane feels the same things he felt during his first cup win. Like his chest is too full of happiness and joy to contain himself. Like he doesn’t think he could ever be unhappy again. 

Svetlana and his parents are making their way down to the ice, but for a little while before they get there, it’s just Shane and Ilya hugging at the center of the rink, and then pulling back to smile at each other, standing next to each other, a semi-respectable distance away, leaning on their sticks as they look out at the crowd, their helmets long-abandoned in the celebration.

“Would make people lose their minds, if I kissed you now,” Rozanov says thoughtfully. Shane grins. 

“Yeah,” he admits. “Including your very homophobic family.” 

“Oh, right. That’s why I shouldn’t,” Ilya says, as if he has just remembered. Shane smiles wider. “Except, see, I have been working on a thing with my lawyer. Kind of a big deal. And I talked to Coach.” 

Shane’s eyebrows climb a little higher. 

“You asked Coach if you could kiss me if we win?” 

“Yes. Why, didn’t you?” 

“No, because of your very homophobic family and the very homophobic laws of your country.” 

“You keep saying that like it’s important.” 

“Well, I love you, and I don’t want you deported and imprisoned where I can never see you again, so.” 

“Oh, just that?” 

“Fuck off,” Shane laughs. “You can’t kiss me on the ice. We talked about this.” 

“Coach will have our backs, Hollander. I won’t be deported for being too sexy for the league and having a boyfriend who is even more sexy. My family?” A string of Russian that, Shane thinks, more or less translates to can go fuck themselves. Shane frowns at him. They’re still right at the center of the ice, where they used to stand and face off against each other. Probably, they’re already being weird enough to capture the attention of the cameras, as everyone’s family members come on to the ice to greet them. Shane should probably at least wave at the crowd, move away, greet his parents. He can’t stop looking at Ilya, though. 

“You’re not serious,” he says. 

“Only thing is that I am not sure what you want.” 

“If we do this, we can’t take it back,” Shane says. “And I don’t want to be something you regret just because you wanted to do something funny.” 

“I have been thinking of this since they told me Boston signed you,” Ilya says, shrugging, like it’s nothing, which means he’s telling the truth, and that he actually wants to do it quite badly. Shane breathes out slowly. Breathes in even more slowly. His eyes move over Ilya’s face. He can see the tension in Ilya’s jaw. He can see the furrow in his brow. Ilya knows that this is important. He knows the stakes. It’s not like he’s not thinking of all the things that might go wrong. He is thinking of what might go wrong. He just wants to do it anyway. 

Fuck. Shane might want to do it, too. This time last year, he wished there was a way he could carve his feelings for Rozanov out of his brain with a scalpel. How could he have gotten here so quickly?

“This is such a bad idea,” he says, but he’s smiling, and he pushes himself forward a little bit, drifting towards Ilya. “This isn’t just because you’re mad everyone thinks I look hotter with Marleau, is it?” 

“I don’t care about the opinions of very stupid people,” Ilya scoffs. His grin is growing as Shane gets closer. He looks young and giddy like this, and so beautiful. “I care about you.” 

“You know we can’t go back from this, right?” 

“Mhm. I don’t want to.” 

“Fuck, okay,” Shane says. “We’re so fucking dumb. If I end up having to marry you to get you Canadian citizenship, I’m going to fucking kill you.” 

“Yes, I will marry you,” Ilya says, and Shane rolls his eyes, tries to pretend that that doesn’t make his heart jump a bit, and then he grabs Ilya by the front of his jersey, and he pulls him in for a kiss, and he feels the size and the giddy shape of Ilya’s brilliant smile against his lips, and he doesn’t hear anything that anyone says, or does, in reaction. He will see those things later, in clips shared widely online, in thinkpieces and news segments and endless .gifs. He will hear the booing and the jeering, and he will hear the cheering and he will feel the outpouring of love. He’ll stand side-by-side with Ilya, still in their full gear, and he will answer two or three questions that are all variations of uh, what the fuck? Until Ilya will laugh and tell them all okay, now fuck off, me and my boyfriend just won the cup, and we need to get drunk right now. Shane will ride high on the excitement of the cup win. He and Ilya will kiss approximately forty-five times for screaming Bostonians at various nightclubs. Several of those pictures will break containment in a massive way, including one where they make out filthily in front of a gay club lit up with rainbow lights, both of them far past tipsy, while Cliff Marleau salutes them in the background, hilariously stonefaced. 

They will answer the questions of their family and friends. They will explain how long they have been involved, and they will hesitantly admit to having been in love for a lot longer than they were ever willing to admit it to each other. Ilya will, shamefacedly, own up to being the owner of the penis that put Shane through hell that last year in Montreal, which is received impassively but politely by Shane’s parents and with raucous cheers from the entire Raiders roster, along with too many jokes about Soviet-era spy movies and honeytraps. 

Things probably won’t be easy. Ilya won’t be fired, and he won’t lose his visa, because he was right about his lawyer, and right about his coach. He will eventually admit that he started talking to his lawyer and his agent about coming out the day after he confessed his love to Shane to get him to stop spiraling, because he wanted kissing Shane on the ice to be an option. But his family will be apoplectic, and he won’t ever be able to go back to Russia without feeling unsafe, which means he probably won’t ever go back. There will be people who question their integrity, and people who question whether they should be allowed to play on the same team, as if women haven’t been successfully marrying each other and playing sports both together and against each other for years. They will have to get used to being called slurs by idiot middle aged men who say “we” when they talk about their favorite sports teams. 

Shane will probably sometimes wonder if they made the right choice, and will probably sometimes beat himself up for allowing an impulse to take over when it did. He will probably wonder if they should have been more careful, or hidden for longer, just to make things a little easier. But he won’t ever really regret it, and Ilya will never really regret it, either. 

But Shane, for once in his life, isn’t thinking about any of that as he kisses Ilya in the center of the rink. He isn’t thinking about the future, or about other people. Not yet. 

There is only Ilya. Everyone else can wait.