Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Original Characters, Cliff Marlow

Additional Tags:

Time Travel, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Temporary Character Death, Protective Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, POV Ilya Rozanov, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Protective Shane Hollander, simp Ilya Rozanov, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Found Family, Friendship, Slow Burn, Off-Screen Attempted Sexual assault, Implied/Refeferenced Eating Disorder, Best Friends to Lovers, Possessive Ilya Rozanov

Language:

English

Collections:

☽ Top Fics From Saph ☾, Good Therapy in Fanworks, 🏒Heated on Ice🏒, Hollanov 🥰, the perfect fic doesn't exi-, fics that genuinely changed my life, a library of only the BEST FICS TO EVER EXIST ✨, hollanov to feed your soul, i'm coming to the cottage🏒💋, In this glass house we are free, fanfics that i keep coming back to read, My heart is full, dopamine hits ✨💕, Meldiriel didn't know whether to laugh or to cry, HR, hollanov faves, These are the stories and series that I have at least reread twice., Spade Z FaveZ, Hollanov Hall of Fame, Hope's Fav HR Fics, Prongs_Antlerz favourite hockey yaoi, ✨ The Best of Hollanov✨🏒✨, The Most Beloved Fics, 🏒 Hockey Boys 🥅, Happy Fluffy Hollanov<3, 🏒hollanov🥅, hollanovels - long form hollanov fics to spend a day reading on the couch, Alidesidero's Hollanov Hall of Fame, elian’s favorites <3, ella's hollanov hall of fame 🏒, Russia's Anti-Queer Laws Endanger Ilya Rozanov, Самые💅Ебейшие💎и🥰Офигенные😩Фики💕Которые💐Я🩵Только💅Читала💎🥳, Ilya loves Shanes stupid freckles, hollanov completed, the peanut butter to my jelly, Pay Attention, Zulie's Best of Heated Rivalry, 🫡 i hope you come back from the war

Stats:

Published: 2025-12-08 Updated: 2026-03-31 Words: 90,896 Chapters: 20/?

so it's gonna be forever

Summary

Ilya is plummeting to his death when he closes his eyes, heart full of regret.

When he opens them in what feels like just a second later, he is standing outside a rink in Regina, Saskatchewan. There’s a banner on the building across the street:

World Junior Hockey Championship 2009.

What?

Notes

Absolutely no idea where I'm going with this, but the plot idea wouldn't leave me alone, so I guess we'll see ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Chapter 1: Prologue

He throws up.

Awareness slams into him, sudden and painful. There’s an unpleasant swoop in his stomach, as if he’s still falling from the sky, still trapped inside a steel box with flames around him, wind whistling high-pitched in his ear because parts of the plane are missing. Going down, crashing, dyin—

The sick spills out of him, throat burning with acid as he hunches over to let it all out.

He’d died.

Ilya had been in a plane crash, and he’d died. He knows he did.

He’d been thinking about Shane, thinking about all the things he never got to tell him in person, wondering if he’d finally get to see his mother now, after so long.

Had wondered if there was a heaven, and if there was, would Ilya even be welcomed?

(Had wondered what Shane would do without him.)

He doesn’t understand how he’s here.

Maybe this is hell? he thinks. Maybe I wasted too much time doing stupid shit, and this is to be my purgatory.

Ilya is dead. He died in that crash. All of them did, he’s sure, and is immediately sick again at the thought, because his team is gone. His teammates, his friends. They’re all gone, but somehow Ilya is here.

Can he be dead if he still has a consciousness? If he still has thoughts and feelings and so many fucking questions because nothing, absolutely nothing, makes sense?

I think, therefore I am.

Holy fuck. Ilya slides down the wall until he collapses, broken and shaky on the ground. He’s crying, loud, hulking sobs that tear out of his chest. He's gotten vomit on his shirt, and some of it is drying on his chin.

He’s a fucking mess, and it should be embarrasing—would have been pathetic to a seventeen-year-old Ilya; he’d been so cocky then, brash, a whole future of hockey and fame to look forward to—but there is no one around to see, and Ilya can only manage to scrounge up enough energy to care about two things:

1. He’s alive. Impossibly, unbelievably, somehow Ilya is alive and seventeen years old again.

And,

        2. Shane.

**

Eventually, he manages to get his feet under him. He’s on full autopilot as he makes his way to the hotel where the Russian team was staying back then—now? Before? Ilya is so fucking confused.

There’s a keycard with a room number in the pocket of his jacket, and when Ilya lets himself into the correct room, there’s a boy already there.

He must be his teammate, but Ilya doesn’t even recognise him. Would have sworn up and down that he’d never seen this boy before.  

Whoever he is, he hadn’t made it to the NHL.

(Won’t make it? Which fucking tense should he be using? Was Ilya even from the future? Could he have dreamt it all up? Was this even real? Was any of it real?

Ilya doesn’t know.

He doesn’t fucking know—)

“Jesus Christ, Rozanov,” the boy says, gaping at him. “How hard did you party last night?”

“Party?” Ilya murmurs, confused. 

“Jesus,” the boy says again. “Are you still drunk? How much vodka did you have? Coach will be pissed if you’re not at breakfast and you broke curfew. Won’t even matter that we won gold last night.”

Ilya stares at him uncomprehendingly. He’s not drunk, but nothing is making sense. He needs a shower, and he wants to sleep.

He wants to go back.

And he wants Shane. He really, really fucking wants Shane right now.

A hand touches his shoulder suddenly, and Ilya startles so violently he flinches backwards a few steps, crashing into a desk behind him, hands flailing wildly.

A lamp is knocked to the ground.

Ilya stares at it, unseeing.

What is happening?

“Shit! Sorry, I didnt—did you take something? Are you high? Tripping?”

Ilya lifts his eyes to the boy. He looks concerned for him, and for a second, Ilya thinks about blurting it all out. Letting everything spill about the plane, about how Ilya died, about how Ilya has apparently travelled back in time, what the fuck?

It has to be time travel, right?

It was real. Ilya is from the future. He’d died in 2021, and now, by some kind of… 

Some kind of what? Cosmic intervention? An act of God? Whatever higher power is responsible, the end result is Ilya in the past. Thirteen years in the past.

That has to be it. It has to have been real. Ilya does not have the kind of imagination it takes to have come up with the future he’s experienced, the life he’s lived.

Shane, as Ilya knew him, was not a fantasy.

He wasn’t.

“Rozanov? Let me go get Coach, or someone from the staff.”

No. No, it was real, and Ilya has time travelled, and he can never tell anyone. They’ll think he’s crazy, they’ll institutionalise him or worse. It has to stay a secret.

No one can know. No one can—

He grabs the arm of the boy as he makes to move past him, towards the door. “I’m fine,” he blurts out, and it’s an obvious lie, so far from the truth Ilya feels like crying again, but.

“I’m fine,” he says again, more convincingly, because he has to be. 

Because Ilya has been given a second chance and he can’t—will not—squander it.

“I’m going to be fine.”

Chapter 2

For the next three months or so, Ilya convinces himself he made it up. That it had been a drug-induced hallucination, after all. 

His roommate—Sasha? Sergei? Something S—must have been right.

Ilya had been out celebrating their championship win, high on a gold medal and being the best, and Ilya had been drinking, drinking, drinking. Someone must have slipped him something, something stronger than vodka, and Ilya had crashed hard.

He’d spent the night dreaming up a life where he’d already made it to the NHL, had already won a Cup, was already one of the most prolific hockey players in the world.

(Had dreamt up Shane.)

And then the alcohol and whatever drugs he’d taken must have had a bad reaction, and Ilya had thought he was dying before it flushed out of his system. 

(Could still feel the wind lashing at his face, so fast and so hard it was a struggle to breathe through it. Could feel that awful sensation of falling, the terror of knowing he was going to die, that he would never see Shane again and—

Shane. Shane, Shane, Shane.

Always Shane.)

Surely, it was nothing more than Ilya’s fucked up brain dreaming up an imaginary future.

Time travel isn’t real.

Ilya is seventeen not thirty. Ilya is about to become a rookie in the NHL, and so he can’t already be a veteran player. A Stanley Cup champion.

He’s not in love with Shane Hollander.

(Except that he is. Except that he misses Shane so, so much, Ilya feels like dying all over again some days. He is miserable and scared and lonely and he has all of these impossible memories of Shane laughing, Shane smiling, Shane scrunching up his nose like an angry kitten. He has memories upon memories of loving Shane Hollander, of being in love with him, this beautiful, contrary man.

Remembers wanting to marry him.

The thought is so sudden, so fierce, and so dangerously impossible, that Ilya goes out and picks up a girl to fuck it away immediately.)

So he writes it off as a freak occurrence. A wild night gone bad. 

He goes on with his life, throwing himself into training, into games and hockey, into counting the days till the draft.

He builds his new normal, block by block.

A month passes, two, then three, and as the days creep past the fourth month since the championship ended, Ilya has finally managed to find some kind of equilibrium.

It’s good, it’s fine. 

He’s fine.

And if he’s finding his life back in Russia to be just a little more restrictive than it had been before the tournament, just that little more constraining, that’s Ilya’s business. 

It’s Ilya’s problem, that where before he’d been so desperate for his father’s approval, now he just finds it tiring. He’s chafing beneath the pressure and expectations of being the best at what he does, of being told not to embarrass himself, his family, his country, of his father telling Ilya he wants him to stay.

“Stay,” he says. “Play in Russia, be close to home, with family,” he says, and what Ilya hears is stay and provide. 

Let us leach off of you.

They want him to play in Russia, to live close where Ilya’s family can keep him close—keep him locked up with familial obligations, leach money from him, leach joy, leach life, leach all that he is until Ilya has nothing left to give.

Can be nothing. Certainly not himself.

A prisoner in his own life.

And how the fuck is Ilya supposed to become the best hockey player in the world anyway, when the best hockey is in the NHL? That’s not even subjective or a matter of opinion.

It’s a fucking fact.

So he’ll leave. He’ll go to the draft, and he’ll be taken first overall, and Ilya will leave Russia like he’d done before. 

The way his past self had done. His future? No.

No, his dream self. His hallucinated self.

(Time travel is not real, llya reminds himself.)

Hockey, at least, is still good. Perfect, in fact. Ilya’s passes are sharper, his shot more accurate and his stick handling more lethal, and no one can deny that Ilya did not just come home with a gold medal, he came home better.

It’s easy then, to explain away how his stride seems at once more explosive and clunky, how his reach isn’t as long as he thinks it should be, as if the Ilya in his mind is taller, longer limbed, than the Ilya on the ice.

Ilya is already tall now at 185 cm, and the team doctors say he’s probably had his last growth spurt, but, well. Boys can still grow past their teens, right? Ilya thinks he’ll shoot up a few centimeters more, at least.

(Remembers being taller, before. Stood at a cool 191 cm when he last measured in his twenties—)

It’s May when the blocks start teetering, threatening to come down.

The day starts like all the others since he came back. He wakes, goes about his morning ablutions, goes carefully blank as his father starts in on something, everything, that is wrong with Ilya that day, and then leaves for the rink after breakfast.

Practise is good, as is the weight session after. Ilya has already packed on some muscle, is working out smarter and more effectively than before, and it shows.

He lets a group of his teammates drag him out after. They have a rest day tomorrow, and any time Ilya can spend outside his family home is a good time. They head out to a restaurant to eat dinner first, because they’re young and always hungry, and because hockey burns so many calories Ilya feels he could eat for hours and hours sometimes. Afterwards, they end up at a club they frequent often enough they’re recognised by the bouncer, who takes his usual bribe to let Ilya in because he’s still seventeen, and it’s easy, familiar, fun.

Ilya dances with pretty girls and kisses a few, and if he turns down several offers for what was clearly more than kissing, he’s just not in the mood.

It’s good, it’s fine.

He’s laughing later in the night as he’s being dragged along to a nearby McDonald’s for something to eat again—because dinner was hours ago and they’re all starving—his teammates drunk and affectionate, hollering and joking as they stumble down the street.

It’s good, it’s fine.

A group of girls walk past them, loud and giggling. They look to be in their early twenties, beautiful and scantily clad, but that’s not what has Ilya stopping in his tracks.

They’re singing, a truly high-pitched rendition of Happy Birthday in sloppy, accented English. One of the girls has a plastic tiara on her head, and she’s wearing a sash.

It’s my twentieth birthday, it says.

“What’s the date?” he demands. He grabs onto his nearest teammate, shakes him urgently when no one can answer him quick enough. “What’s the fucking date?”

“Chill, Rozanov, God.” Ilya watches impatiently as the boy checks his brand new iPhone 3G, staring blearily at the screen. He takes too long, too drunk to make out the details on the screen, and finally Ilya’s patience runs out.

He grabs the phone from out of his hand and looks at the date himself.

It’s after midnight, near three in the morning, but there, in small, glowing numbers, it is:

10 May 2009.

Shane’s birthday.

And finally, the blocks tumble down.

**

The thing is, the Ilya of before had not known this.

The Ilya of before had met Shane Hollander outside a shitty rink in Regina, Saskatchewan. Had seen his pretty freckles and awkward smile and thought, mockingly:

The prince of hockey. 

Ilya remembers thinking, only a few months ago, that he was going to beat Hollander for the gold. That Hollander was not the only hockey phenom around, and that Ilya couldn't wait to knock perfect Shane Hollander off his perfect high horse.

Remembers thinking it thirteen years ago.

And in the years since Ilya has known Shane, has been in a relationship with him, has loved him, Shane’s birthday has been the one day no matter what that Ilya has made sure to let Shane know he’s thinking about him.

It’s been an annual reminder in his calendar, but Ilya has rarely needed it, something about the date burned into his awareness, so that he never forgets anyway.

Fuck. 

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Time travel is fucking real. 

The thought effectively kills whatever buzz Ilya still had going, and he stumbles away from his teammates. He can’t remember if he makes any excuses as he leaves, just throws himself into the nearest available taxi and blurts out the name of a familiar hotel.

He needs—fuck, he doesn’t know what he needs. To be alone, maybe, to actually sit down and go through his own life. The one where he’d died at almost thirty years old. He should probably make lists. Lists of things that happened. Lists of future events, of things that haven’t happened yet.

Shit, he’s getting his tenses mixed up, and he’d thought that before, hadn’t he? When he first came back.

He can’t go to his father’s house. His father, who is dead, who died years ago but is still alive now. He feels trapped, suddenly, and it hits him, how he hasn’t been back to Russia since 2017, since the funeral.

His country of birth has not been home for a long time, and that’s the crux of it, isn't it? Because the life Ilya wants, the person he wants to spend it with, was not something Ilya was willing to sacrifice.

Instead, he’d given up this:

His family, that he hated and felt duty-bound by in equal measure. His country. Any chance at representing Russia in an international tournament. 

Shane hadn’t promised him forever by the time Ilya got on that plane, but he thinks they’d have worked their way there eventually. Had secretly been preparing himself for years to be an openly bi man, so that he could love Shane Hollander loudly and fiercely without shame or fear.

He isn't giving that up. Not for a country he loves, that can't, won’t, love him back.

Not for a family who’d only seen fit to use him for his fame and money.

“Here is your room key, Mr Rozanov,” the receptionist at the hotel tells him, and Ilya murmurs his thanks, taking the card on autopilot, ignoring the way the woman lets her fingers drag suggestively against his own.

He makes his way into the elevator, watching the number display climb higher and higher until he finally reaches his floor. It’s not until he’s standing in the middle of his hotel room that he finally stops up short.

He stares at nothing, mind racing with memories and ideas and questions, too fast to really latch onto any one single thought.

He needs a plan, he decides eventually. Lists, he reminds himself. I need to make lists.

That’s what Shane would have done. Boring Shane with his boring lists and boring plans and needlessly complicated strategies. An overthinking overachiever and Ilya misses him so much he can hardly breathe through the ache.

He wants, desperately, to call him. To tell him happy birthday and listen to his voice. Listen to him ramble on about nothing and anything. Tease him into calling Ilya an asshole, as much a curse as it has become a pet name over the years.

Wants to hold him in his arms, to tell him how much Ilya loves him, and, honestly, fuck the world.

Fuck it, because Ilya had died. Ilya had died without ever having gotten to call Shane his husband, and he hadn’t realised just how much he wanted that until it was too late.

But more than anything, he really just wants to hear Shane say, I love you.

Ilya feels his legs buckle, and then he’s on the floor, crying, because the Shane of this time doesn’t even know him. Not really. Not like before.

The Shane of this time doesn’t share the same memories or history between them. Won’t have any reason to feel anything other than animosity towards Ilya. A rival to beat, to compete with and measure up against.

Certainly won’t be in love with him.

The thought lodges itself like shrapnel under his skin, a bomb detonating inside his heart because by thirty, so much of his life had revolved around Shane. Ilya had moved countries for him, just to be that little bit closer, was planning to turn his back on Russia just to be with him. Had willingly gone to a team that hadn’t been a Stanley Cup contender in the last two decades, a team that was wildly considered to be one of, if not the worst, team in the league, and if that isn’t love, nothing is.

And maybe those things hadn’t been easy choices to make, necessarily, but Ilya had still been happy to do it. Had thought it was worth it, and still did.

For Shane.

It is devastating to realise that that future is now gone. That it died alongside Ilya in the plane crash, because no matter what Ilya chooses to do next, he’s never going to be able to live his life exactly as he had before. He has no hope to remember every single day of the last thirteen years, the choices he made or the things he said that all led him to that plane in 2021.

Nor would he want to, he thinks. He’d died, after all, and Ilya would really rather like to avoid that, actually. There are other things, as well. Regrets he’s had, things he wished had been different.

Losing the Shane of his future—his past?—is heartbreaking and so, so terrible that Ilya can’t really put it into words, but maybe, just maybe, they might build a different life together.

A life where they can actually be open about their relationship. A life less fraught with paranoia and the constant need to look over their shoulders to maintain their secret.

The idea of it rushes over him, sudden and bright and wonderful and yeah. Ilya would like that a lot, he thinks. It would be really fucking nice, not to have to walk around with a lump in the pit of his stomach containing all the guilt and shame he feels for being himself and being in love with a man. That pit that consists of a yearning so deep and vast Ilya has been drowning in it for years.

The life he’d had before is gone, but that doesn’t mean he can’t build a new one.

Maybe not better, because nothing that had been a life shared with Shane could ever have something better, but it could be a different kind of good. Might even be something wonderful.

“Fuck,” Ilya whispers into the quiet room, and then has to laugh, hoarse and incredulous and more than a little manic, because fucking time travel.

What the fuck?

But he feels better for it. More settled. Feels more like himself of the past—the future?—who is a more world-weary and experienced Ilya than the seventeen-year-old he’d been.

He can do this. He can live through life one more time.

He has to. He’s been given a miracle, and he can’t waste it, no matter how crazy it all seems.

The only way out is through.

There’s no other alternative.

**

Ilya spends the next two weeks planning and making the many lists he’d promised himself.

He’s short on time, suddenly, with the combine starting on the 25th. The draft won’t happen until a month later, in June, but Ilya needs to have several things in place by then.

He stays holed up in his hotel room for days, leaving only for practice and food, and ignoring the many calls from his brother and the increasingly angry texts from his father. He’ll have to go back to the house, and soon, before it turns into an unpleasant situation all around, but Ilya takes as much time as he feels like he can get away with. Needs the time to get his head on straight, to make his plans, discarding them just as fast and then coming up with new ones.

More reasonable ones, for a measure of it.

By the time he slinks into the house before his father sends out a search team for him, he’s more or less decided on a particular course of action.

His game plan is…

Fuck, well it’s nothing short of messy, and it’s stupid and dangerous, but it’s gonna be the most expedient way to get him what he wants.

And what he wants is NHL hockey and Shane.

(Always Shane.)

“Where have you been?” Grigori barks at him the moment he catches Ilya outside his bedroom.

“Out,” Ilya says, carefully bland, and predictably it has his father in a fury. He stalks towards Ilya, and before, when Ilya had actually been seventeen, he would have ducked his head. Waited for the blow that was sure to come and the words that would follow, harsher and stinging more painfully than the hit itself because Ilya had never managed to shut down that part of himself that cared too much, that just wanted his dad to be proud of him. To love him.

Ilya at seventeen had been of a height with Grigori but not as broad. It had felt easy, to feel small and dwarfed by everything that was his father. To feel weak and pathetic in his presence.

Now, they are still of a height, because physically, Ilya is seventeen going on eighteen, but he has not been that small, scared boy in many years. He’s also put on nearly three kilos of muscle since January.

It makes sense then, that only Grigori is surprised when Ilya catches his wrist mid-air, before the open palm of his hand can make contact with Ilya’s cheek.

“You—!” he starts, but Ilya squeezes down once in warning, and Grigori abruptly goes quiet.

They’re staring into each other’s eyes, a tense silence between them, and the Ilya of before would have been horrified at his own actions, would have never acted against his father in any circumstance, but that was before, and Ilya has lived a whole life without Grigori since then.

He’d not missed him, even if he’d regretted the way things had been between them.

Grigori must read some of that on his face now. Must be able to tell just how little Ilya cares and the way he’s not about to let himself be pushed around anymore.

Looks almost scared to realise the truth of it.

He wrenches his hand back roughly, opens his mouth to say something, but then closes it quickly. Looks as if he doesn’t quite recognise who Ilya is anymore.

There will come a time, later, when Grigori will look at him and his brain will be so addled by the Alzheimer that he won’t recognise him, won’t know that Ilya is his son.

But now? Still healthy and yet to show any signs of deterioration, this might be the only time his father will see him for who he actually is. As close to himself as Ilya has ever allowed himself to be in the presence of his family.

“Practice was hard,” he says finally when Grigori remains speechless. “I’m going to rest for a few hours.” He opens the door to his bedroom, and Grigori lets him go.

**

The days after that are filled with brief, terse conversations and Ilya keeping mostly to himself.

His brother drops by occasionally and looks at them with an awkward sort of confusion, as if someone, somewhere, switched out the script of their usual play and no one had bothered to tell him. It’s the most disconcerted Ilya has ever seen Andrei.

It’s objectively awesome.

Despite everything, it’s also the most at peace Ilya has ever been in his family home, which is all kinds of sad and tragic. That also means it seems like no time at all before Ilya is sitting in the passenger seat of his father's car, on his way to the airport to join the rest of the Russian contingent headed for the combine in Toronto.

His father hadn’t joined him on that trip before, and he won’t now. He’d only made the flight out for the actual draft in the past future, but this time he won’t be able to.

Ilya will make sure of it.

He’s been preparing to leave Russia for good, to leave his family behind and break all ties between them. It’s harder than he expected, standing in front of Grigori at departures, wondering if they'll ever see each other in person again. 

Grigori has been a shit father in both timelines, but he’s still the only father Ilya has ever known. Ilya won’t even be around to help however he can when the Alzheimer hits this time around. He feels unbearably guilty about that, but he’d given so much the last time, and he’s finally at a place where he can admit he wants to live for himself and his own dreams.

It’s this that makes him close his arms around his father. The only hug he can remember sharing between them since Ilya became a teen in either life. 

“I hope—” he starts, and then immediately stops himself because hoping for his father to be proud of him is an impossible dream. So what he says instead is, “I only ever wanted to make you proud.”

His father stares at him, brows furrowed in confusion, as he pulls back. 

Ilya waits, hoping despite himself. He so wants to hear those words from his father, to just once have him say he is proud to have Ilya as his son, but in the end he’s let down.

Again.

“Goodbye, Ilya. Do well.”

Ilya swallows. Closes his eyes briefly. “Goodbye, Father.” And because it’s the only chance he’ll have to say it, he adds, “I love you.”

He leaves before Grigori can reply.

**

Minutes away from boarding a plane that will take him away from Russia for the last time, Ilya is strangely calm.

He thinks he should probably be panicking about the fact that the last time he’d been on a plane it had crashed and Ilya had died and then consequently time travelled.

(What the fuck?)

Thinks that that should be enough to fuck up a person and keep them from flying for a lifetime, but instead all he can focus on is the phone in his hand and the pictures on the screen.

He’d been careful, so, so careful to protect the identity of the boy he’d taken to bed for this very purpose, but the pictures are still incredibly explicit.

And telling.

Ilya’s face is on full display. 

He’s uploading the pictures to a burner account on Vkontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, with his thumb hovering over the ‘post’ button.

Ilya might not be the superstar he will soon become, but he’s still well known within the hockey world in Russia, and in Moscow especially.

When he clicks ‘post’, the pictures will be everywhere. Ilya will have outed himself.

He won’t be able to go back.

He’s spent days going over the plan, spent hours upon hours agonising if this is the right course of action. He’ll publish the pictures as an unknown scorned third party, will forcibly out himself, and this is what is going to give him grounds for asylum in Canada. Ilya is going to make himself a persecuted refugee.

Fuck. It’s so dumb, it’s so fucking dumb, and he can’t take it back once he does it, but he’s made his decision.

This is the first step towards Shane, and Ilya would do a great deal more terrible and dangerous things than this, to make that a reality.

“Rozanov! Come on, we’re boarding.”

Ilya looks up to see his travel group already making their way through the checkpoint, scanning boarding passes and displaying their passports.

He looks back at his phone. It’s now or never.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” he says.

He pushes the button.

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

Thirty-seven minutes after posting.

In Chelyabinsk, a fourteen-year-old girl is logging into her VK account before school. Her name is Elena and she’s spent her whole life around rinks, surrounded by hockey players like her father, her brother, her brother’s friends. She doesn’t much like playing herself, but she follows the sport religiously.

Traktor Chelyabinsk for life!

Lately, though, she’s been following one of the Muscovite teams. Spartak has been decent in recent years, but the team has been on absolute fire since Ilya Rozanov returned with gold from the Junior World Championship. It’s added more excitement to the KHL than the league has previously seen the last couple of years.

Also, Rozanov is very, very handsome. Elena and her friends all think so. They’ve spent hours pouring over his pictures, stills from his games or promotional photos that display his broad shoulders and cocky smile.

Elena sighs dreamily. If she was just a little older, maybe she’d have a chance at being his girlfriend one day. They’d all been so disappointed to see that one interview after Worlds, where a reporter had teased him about all the girls waiting for him back in Russia and Rozanov had shaken his head, winked at the camera and said, “I like my lovers older.” All tongue in cheek.

Well, that doesn’t mean she can’t still look, she thinks, as she types Ilya Rozanov into the search bar. Besides, her dad says she’s too young for romance anyway, so all she can do for now is admire from afar.

**

Stuck somewhere over the European Continent with no way out, Ilya has little else to do than think about the grenade he’s just launched into his own life. 2009, he’s rediscovering, has no in-flight internet, and so he has no way to monitor the traffic to the post. He has no idea if anyone has even seen it.

Are pictures of Ilya’s dick being spread all around the web right at this moment?

He has no way of knowing, and the uncertainty is almost worse than having it confirmed.

Ilya has just made the gamble of his life, and had he actually been seventeen, he never would have done it. Not even for the possibility of the future he’d come from. It would have been inconceivable to that version of himself.

But Ilya as he is now, has known life with Shane, with the love of his life. He’s known it since he was nineteen, young and brash and stupid enough to enter into a years-long situationship with the prettiest boy he’d ever seen. He’d lived for that thrill those first few years, for the danger of it, the secrecy and the sneaking around. The feelings had come gradually, a slow takeover of his own heart until having Shane in his life was as important to him as hockey. Or maybe the feelings had been there all along, actually, but it hadn’t been safe to act on them. Not then.

And hadn’t that been telling?

Ilya is not going through that again. Not if there is an alternative that lets him have Shane in his life now and in a manner they don’t need to hide.

So yeah, posting the pictures is a gamble. The estimated timeline he’s planned out to get everything moving into motion the way he needs it to, is a gamble. The real issue, though, the thing that he’s thought about again and again, is that the burner account has no followers. He keeps wondering if it is worth it, knowing the wrench in his plans this has the potential to be. 

With no followers, the post won’t show up on anybody’s feed, but he decides to bet on himself.

Seventeen-year-old Ilya has nowhere near the level of fame he’ll reach in the future, but after winning gold at Worlds, he’s garnered a decent pocket of dedicated fans. And if nothing else, he can always count on reporters to keep up with the latest news surrounding the future of Russian hockey.

So Ilya posted the pictures to an account with no followers, and added them to a single tag:

Ilya Rozanov.

**

Four hours and twelve minutes after posting.

YOU NEED TO SEE THIS!!!

Gennady blinks at the new email in his inbox. It’s from a reliable source, one that has provided Gennady with breaking hockey news often enough that he trusts that whatever is in the email it will be something good.

Still, the heading gives nothing away. He’s curious, but it will have to wait. He gets plenty of emails like this, and nine out of ten times it’s nothing worth chasing. Just some wannabe reporter thinking they’ve broken the next biggest story. Even this particular source has had a few misfires. Besides, he’s already late to the midday editorial meeting, and he still needs to pick up his latest article from the proofreaders.

Gennady is grabbing for his coffee cup as he shuffles papers inside a manila folder with his other hand, about to lock his computer screen when a second email ticks in from the same sender.

ILYA ROZANOV: SEX SCANDAL (GAY)

Gennady stares. He very carefully lowers himself into his chair, eyes never leaving that single word in parentheses. Holy shit, he thinks, and opens the second email.

There’s no text, and so it takes a few seconds for the images to load. Gennady is tapping his finger against his coffee cup impatiently, thinking about Rozanov, about a young, talented player with a legendary career in front of him. He’d interviewed him just a few months ago. He had liked him, even if he was a cocky little shit. If this is what Gennady thinks it is—

Rozanov should be on his way to Canada now, for the combine. 

The first picture comes through, and Gennady swallows. He spends a single second of grief for what should have been Russia’s pride and joy for the next couple of decades, because Ilya Rozanov is a beast of a hockey player already at seventeen. He is a once in a generation talent, and he will not be able to come back to Russia.

“Stupid boy,” he murmurs to himself, finding himself saddened for Rozanov. “Why did you get it on camera?”

And maybe, if he wasn’t so shocked by the scandal of it all, by what this news will mean for hockey Russia and sports in general, Gennady would have questioned that just a little more. As it is, he reaches for his desk phone and dials the extension to his editor, because Gennady is a sports journalist and he’s just been handed breaking news.

**

They have an hour-long layover in Paris, and Ilya keeps on high alert as he trails after his fellow prospects. He’s decided not to check his phone, because if the news has been picked up by social media, he needs to be as surprised about it as everybody else.

And if it hasn’t—

Well, the pictures are out there now. Someone will have seen them, and if it reaches the KHL first, if they bury the news and get the State involved all while keeping it out of the media, Ilya will be returning to a world of pain. He’ll be lucky if all they do is terminate his contract. Knows the likelihood of them letting him leave again for the draft is next to nothing. They’d rather keep their greatest talent at home than let him embarrass the motherland.

Fuck. Ilya really, really needs for this plan to work out, crazy as it is.

“Hey, Rozanov, you want something?”

Ilya turns to see one of his travel companions nodding towards a drinks menu, and he realises that they’ve stopped at a café not too far from their gate. The boy looks at him with brows raised in question.

He looks perfectly placid, face open and kind. Ilya had seen him on his phone earlier, but he doesn’t look as if he’s just seen pictures of Ilya’s dick, of another boy with Ilya’s dick in his mouth.

He wonders, for a wild second, if this boy would acknowledge him at all, if he had.

“Yeah,” Ilya says finally. “I’ll go for a Coke.” He goes to pull out some coins from his Team Russia sweatpants, but the boy shakes his head with a smile.

“I got it,” he says, in what will likely be the last bit of unsolicited kindness from any of his countrymen for a long while yet. Maybe ever.

“Thanks,” Ilya says quietly, and is ashamed to realise he doesn’t know this boy’s name. Can’t remember if he’d known it before and has just forgotten.

Probably not, because as Shane likes to tease him—used to, in the time before—Ilya really was a bit of a dick as a teen.

He has a second chance, though. In every way that counts. He can do better.

He will do better.

**

Nine hours and fifty-four minutes after posting.

“Boss, we have a situation.”

Barry pre-emptively grimaces, and looks up from his computer to see no less than two of his junior agents standing in the door to his temporary office.

"A player murdered someone kind of a situation, or a prospect knocked someone up kind of a situation?”

His employees share a troubled glance, and Barry groans loudly. “Someone knocked someone up? Urgh, teen pregnancies are a bitch to navigate. The teams aren’t going to like that and—”

He breaks off, sitting up a little straighter at the way their faces go a little more grave. “Not a teen pregnancy, then,” he says. “Show me.” He’s all business when one of them, Ashley, steps into the office fully and hands him a printed out article in Russian.

“It’s about Rozanov, boss,” she says quietly.

Barry raises his brows, because Ilya is one of his most promising new clients. He is young and flashy and has talents out of this world, but he’s been far from the wild child Barry had worried he’d signed on to his sports agency a year ago when it became increasingly obvious the boy was never going to play anywhere but the NHL.

He looks down at the paper in his hands, takes a second to parse out the text—his Russian speaking and listening comprehension are far better than his written—but finally, he’s pieced it together.

“This is real?” he demands.

“The pictures are on the third and fourth pages. Blurred out, thankfully.”

Shit. Yeah, this is a situation and a half. He checks the time on his computer, does the math, and curses aloud at the realisation he only has a couple of hours to get a lot of important balls rolling and also do a bit of damage control. 

“Ashley, we’re going to have to get the Canadian government on the phone. Ask for Johnny in IRCC. He does a lot of work with immigration and NHL players. Explain the situation and have him meet up with me at the airport in two hours. Tell him Ilya is arriving with a Russian contingent, and it is imperative that we get to him before they learn what’s happened and spirit him away. We’re lucky they’re still on the plane with no internet access. Johnny will understand the urgency.”

Ashley chirps her agreement and hurries out the door, phone already in hand. Barry looks to see his other agent still by the door, waiting expectantly. “Josh, inform the League. Better it comes from us before it reaches mainstream media. They’re going to hate it, of course, but Ilya is too good a player not to be drafted. He might have lost his chance at going first overall, but there’s still a few teams that will fight for a talent like that.”

Josh nods decisively. “Any particular way you want to angle this?” He'd come out to Barry and their collegues last year; at twenty seven, Josh had gotten to choose his coming out, but he'd once told Barry he'd been terrified of being outed before then. Ilya is now living his nightmare.

Barry sighs. He runs a hand through his hair wearily. “They’re going to look at it as a disruptor either way. This is unprecedented, history in the making. For all we know, this will be an NHL defining moment. I can’t, in good conscience, make a definite play without Ilya’s input. Not without knowing his full situation.”

“So how do we play this?”

“I hate to say it, but if we’re going to have any chance of garnering some sympathy, some support, let’s play up the moral superiority.”

Josh makes a face, but nods in agreement. “Okay, so we position the League as the welcoming heroes. Rozanov is in danger from his own people, but look at us, look at how tolerant we are. So much better than the Russians.”

“It’s far from ideal,” Barry says, because it isn’t, because it’s objectively terrible that Ilya’s sexual orientation will be an issue at all. “But yes, pretty much. That might just be the only thing about this a few of the NHL execs will be able to swallow. Emphasise the danger, Josh. That part is not an exaggeration. We’ve seen queer Russian players disappear before. I’m not letting that happen to Ilya.”

They hash out some last minute details before Josh takes off as well, leaving Barry alone in his office. He sighs, leaning back in his chair and reading through the article one more time. He doesn’t bother looking at the pictures.

Barry has more than one client attending this year’s combine, and normally, he would have been satisfied with sending a couple of agents or three to represent his agency, to have them coach the prospects for their team interviews and help the European and Russian prospects with language support and cultural navigation.

He’d made this trip in person for Ilya. Had already decided the boy would grow into one of his biggest and most important clients. He still believes that.

Ilya truly is that talented. The only one even close to rivaling him is Shane Hollander, and Barry knows the two of them are going to be the biggest selling points of the League for the next decade at least. Furthermore, Barry straight up likes the kid.

He’s a funny one. Full of snarky one liners and clever commentary. An antagoniser if Barry ever saw one. But Ilya has the skills to back it up, the work ethic and the dedication, and that’s what makes him different. That’s what makes him great. 

Barry had met the kid’s father once, back when he first signed Ilya on to his agency. “Lazy,” Grigori Rozanov had said of his son, and Barry hasn’t seen that at all. Not once since he became his agent.

No, Ilya Rozanov is nowhere near lazy. He has a whole future in front of him that is going to be nothing short of legendary, and frankly, Barry wants to be a part of that. Wants to help Ilya achieve what he knows is greatness in the making.

And not even what is probably going to be one of the most famous dick pics in the world, is going to stop that from happening.

**

Ilya is dead on his feet when they finally arrive at the Toronto Airport. He’s been awake since takeoff in Moscow and has been in transit for more than twelve hours. His internal clock tells him it’s around nine in the evening, but his phone says it’s just past two in the afternoon; outside, the sun is high in the sky.

He’s shuffling along with all the other passengers as they disembark when he switches off flight mode and his phone starts chiming with incoming texts. 

He’s got twelve messages from his American agent alone.

Ilya breathes in sharply. The pictures must have become public knowledge. It has to. His plan is working.

Go straight to customs, the first text reads in Russian.

Do not go anywhere alone. Do not let anyone drag you off. You’ve been outed as queer in Russian media.

And then,

DO NOT RELINQUISH YOUR PASSPORT TO ANYONE EXCEPT CANADIAN IMMIGRATION. That one is in all caps. There’s more, instructions of what to do, what to say during passport control.

Invoke a refugee claim, one text says. As soon as you get to a border agent. 

And, finally:

Make a scene if you have to.

Barry is taking no chances. He seems to actually fear for Ilya’s safety, and it is this that has him ducking his head as he finally makes it out onto the jet bridge. He’s clutching his phone in one hand and the straps of his backpack in the other as he speeds up the bridge, passing a couple of his fellow prospects who’d been ahead of him in the queue off the plane.

“Rozanov!” he hears someone call behind him. He recognises him as one of the Russian staffers, but Ilya ignores him, eyes scanning the signs ahead of him for customs and immigration. He’s brushing past other travellers, anxiously following the stream towards baggage claim when he hears rushing steps behind him and his name being called out again. It’s not a particularly friendly call.

Ilya doesn’t look back. He runs.

**

Seventeen hours and fourteen minutes after posting.

Grigori is numb.

He has lost a wife and now he’s lost the son she’d bore him too. His Ilya, his little boy.

He has spent the last few hours talking with KHL officials, with government officials. His own superiors. Talking, Grigori thinks derisively. More like interrogated. 

Grigori’s career in the police force is long and storied, and he has too much dirt on everyone that matters for them to actually get rid of him, but he knows the next while at work will not be pleasant. Nowhere will be pleasant.

Officially, his son has done nothing illegal. Displays of homosexuality is not a crime yet, but Grigori has heard the talk, knows what the politicians are pushing behind closed doors. The criminalisation will come soon enough. 

No, officially, there has been no crime. But Ilya, his foolish son—that soft boy, so much like his mother—has ruined any chance of a future he might have had in Russia. Primed to be a national hero, a hockey icon for Russia to lord over the Americans, the Canadians, and Ilya himself has taken a machete to the future he could have had.

Grigori knows—he knows—Ilya had posted those images himself.

I love you, he’d said. Grigori remembers him, his boy, standing at departures, looking at Grigori as if he was never going to see him again.

I love you.

Grigori will probably never get any answers to the questions he’s left with. Why had he done it? Why make that choice? Ilya likes women well enough. Grigori has caught him sneaking girls into the house often enough to know that is no lie. Ilya likes girls.

So why couldn’t he just keep away from the boys? Why did he have to be greedy? Why did he have to be selfish?

All for a tight hole? A pretty mouth?

Grigori, sniffs, disgusted.

Weak. Ilya is weak. He has always been so, and Grigori has done his best to toughen the boy. He had recognised his son for the diamond in the rough he was, but everyone knows you have to put coal under pressure before you're left with a jewel.

Grigori had believed he’d managed it. He had been so pleased by the man Ilya was shaping out to be, the hockey player everyone so admired.

But now. He’s shamed him. He’s shamed his country.

There is no returning from this.

Grigori closes his eyes.

He’s been ordered not to make contact with Ilya, to alert his superiors if Ilya is the one to reach out. Grigori is a good Russian man. A man of duty and honour. He will do as told.

But still.

I love you.

Ilya had known that might be the last time they’d see each other, and his last words to Grigori were words of love, despite everything. 

That’s not nothing, he thinks, and wishes, abruptly, that he’d just said the words back.

Why hadn't he said it back?

He hopes, whatever happens next, that Ilya has the wherewithal not to come back. To understand that he’ll be disappeared, that not even Grigori will be enough to protect him now.

A national hero turned national embarrassment.

“There is no future for you here, now, Ilyusha,” he speaks into the empty room. He casts his gaze around, takes in the bareness of the walls, the lack of clutter. Ilya has left his bedroom stripped of any personal belongings. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

Had even planned for it. It’s obvious now. Just as obvious that Grigori missed it, and when had his son become so unreadable to him? When had it all changed?

“I’m sorry,” he whispers then, and isn’t quite sure what he’s sorry for or who he’s apologising to.

“Be well, Ilya.” 

Ilyusha. His boy, his son.

**

“I know you must be tired, but you did well,” Barry tells him in the car, some six hours later.

Ilya snorts, because he’s now been up for nearly a full day and tired is a bit of an understatement.

“Thank you,” he says. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t made all those plans today.” He really doesn’t. Ilya had had a vague plan of already being at the combine when the news broke for real, but events have moved sooner than anticipated. He hadn’t expected the article, had thought the online chatter and silent sharing of news between reporters would have been enough to alert him to the potential dangers that awaited at home. He would know to look for it, after all. Wasn’t planning to alert his agent until the final days of the combine.

“You’re welcome,” Barry says in his accented Russian. “And I’m sorry. I know this must be tough. As far as being outed, this is a rough one.”

“Yeah,” Ilya whispers, because he’s out now. The closet is wide open and he won’t ever be able to slam it back shut. The details aren’t right just yet. He’s bisexual, while everyone is thinking gay, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? He likes men. That’s the part everyone will focus on. He’s the one who made this choice even if no one else knows that, but it’s still his life made into entertainment. A deeply private part of himself—of anyone, truly—being sensationalised and gossiped about.

At least he’s safe in Canada, for now anyway, and spares a few thoughts to the other boy in the pictures, the one who hadn’t known what Ilya would use them for. He'd been under the impression that mutually assured destruction meant those pictures would never see the light of day.

Ilya hopes he is safe. Had done everything in his power to make sure there is nothing—absolutely nothing—to identify him by, but it’s always a risk, and Ilya has used him. He won’t even be able to apologise for that.

“You’ll be okay, Ilya. This isn’t the end. You’ll be an NHL player even if I have to beg, cry or cheat to make it happen.”

Ilya barks out a startled laugh at that, and he’d forgotten how good Barry had been to him as a young player. How good their relationship had been in the future where Ilya had died. He’d never changed agents since making it to the NHL, had never even considered it, and Barry had rewarded his loyalty with fierce negotiations and more money than Ilya would ever need in a lifetime. Ilya’s contract with the Centaurs had been particularly inspired. Barry had absolutely fleeced them.

“I know,” he says. Ilya knows he might have to lower his expectations, that Boston might not pick him first this time. There will be teams who think the background noise is more of a distraction than it’s worth, but Ilya is still about to breeze through this combine. He is going to make sure that the top prospect, by all measures, is Ilya Rozanov.

It had been true the last time around, and it would be true now, because physically Ilya has a leg up on Shane, who, more of a cerebral player, is the only other prospect that can even measure up against him.

For all that Shane and Ilya are generational talents, their draft year hadn’t been particularly deep. Number one and two had never been in question, even if people argued about which of them had an edge over the other.

“Good,” Barry says firmly. He pulls the car into the hotel garage and turns to look at Ilya once he’s parked. “Make sure to get some sleep, okay? The testing starts tomorrow, and you need to be at your absolute best. Your paperwork is still being handled, but we’ve managed to secure the permits we need. That’s a good start. It means you can stay in Canada once the combine is over while we get everything sorted out. You just focus on the hockey and let me worry about everything else.”

Ilya swallows, blinks furiously against the sudden wetness of his eyes. “Thank you,” he says again, because he’s felt so terribly alone since he came back to this time. Even in the months when he was still in denial, when thinking about his past—future?—and Shane was so difficult, so painful it was easier to bury all thoughts of it all together, Ilya has been so very lonely.

It’s a relief to realise that he’s not actually alone, even if he can never tell anyone the truth, even if no one will ever truly understand him, he has people in his corner. People he trusts and can lean on. 

“Just, thank you.” And if his voice comes out as little more than a hoarse croak, Barry is kind enough to ignore it.

“Don’t mention it, kid. I’ve got your back.”

Chapter End Notes

After a bit of research, I believe that a scandal like this would most likely have been buried by the Russian State and the media, rather than having it exposed as breaking news. Most likely, it would have been treated with silence and behind-the-scenes handling. For the purposes of this story, though, it’s going to be breaking news, and my reasoning here is that even if the news were buried, the KHL would still be alerted, Ilya’s home team and his family would all be informed. The pictures still exist on the web, and screenshots are a thing. It would still have been a deeply unpleasant experience for Ilya. I think, as far as consequences goes, for Ginnady, exposing the news, even as unlikely as that would have been, it was a kindness. Yes, Ilya will likely never be able to return to Russia, but he’ll get his shot at the NHL and a more queer friendly society (for a measure of it). Hope you enjoyed!

Chapter 4

Chapter Notes

Thank you to everyone who takes the time to leave a kudos or comment! It's been so much fun to see which parts of the story resonates with others!
Warning for this chapter: instance of homophobia, referenced internalised homophobia, use of a slur.

“Ilya.”

Ilya is floating in a sea of nothingness. Drifting on clouds of dreams and thoughts and every single wish he’s ever had.

It’s peaceful.

“I miss you so much, Ilya.”

He feels asleep and awake at the same time, as if he’s breathing deeply but holding his breath. He is and isn’t.

“Why did you have to go? Why did you leave me behind?”

He is alone in this space. Has been alone here for seconds and eons, for all of eternity and the single moment since he burst into existence.

“I love you. I miss you. I don’t—”

Something drips onto his face. Water? No. It's tears. Someone is crying. Is there someone here with him?

“I don’t want to go on without you. I just want to be with you. I thought we’d have more time, I—”

Shane. That’s Shane. 

Shane is calling for him, crying. He sounds miserable. He sounds so, so sad. Devestated. Ilya has to comfort him. He has to take him in his arms and tell him he’s okay, he’s right here, he’s—

“What is the point of any of it, if you’re not here? Everyone keeps telling me that it’s okay to grieve, that it will get better, but they don’t understand.”

No. What is he saying? Why does he sound like that? Ilya struggles to open his eyes. He can’t form words around his tongue, but he needs to talk to him, needs to tell Shane to hold on, to not do anything stu— 

“I want to die.”

Ilya gasps awake, Shane’s name on his lips.

He blinks away the vestiges of sleep, the memories of the dream already slipping away.

It takes him a second to remember where he is—when he is—and everything that has happened in the last day or so.

The combine. He’s made it to the combine.

He has been outed in the process, and while that has been according to plan, his estimated timeline has been vastly accelerated. At least he's made it safely to Canada. That’s a start. A good one.

Reaching for the nightstand to check his phone, Ilya groans to see 04:07 blinking back at him. He hasn't even slept through the night. He'd crashed almost immediately after making it to his room last night, and had only stopped long enough to undress and eat the sandwich Barry had thoughtfully provided for him before he passed out. He hadn’t even brushed his teeth. Still, Ilya has gotten nearly seven hours of sleep, and that will have to last him through the day. 

He’s wide awake and absolutely starving. He'd been too nervous and too anxious to have eaten much yesterday, but his stomach is gnawing angrily now. He definitely needs food.

Fuck. At four in the morning, the hotel restaurants won’t be open yet, nor will the nearby cafés. He can’t remember if he’d seen any 24/7 fast food shops around as they arrived at the hotel, and he doesn’t exactly feel like venturing outside on his own anyway. There’s bound to be a vending machine in the lobby, though, and maybe near the fitness room if he’s lucky.

He thinks it over. The lobby will be quicker, but it might not be a bad idea to get some minutes on a treadmill or a bike if they have it.

He’s hungry, but he’s also uneasy, feeling antsy from a dream he can no longer remember. Might as well get in some easy exercise before the combine orientation. The first time he attended the combine, the truly physical stuff hadn’t started till the second day, and he has no reason to suspect it’ll be different this time. If he wants a workout today, now is a good time. There won’t be a lot of people, if any, exercising this early, and if he waits until the end of the day, he’ll be stuck with the rest of the prospects, fighting for equipment and waiting in line with a bunch of sweaty teens.

No thanks.

He’ll gamble on the fitness room, then.

Decision made, Ilya spends a few minutes in the bathroom getting ready before he heads out, keycard and wallet in the pocket of his shorts and phone in hand. He’s annoyed not to have a water bottle, but figures the vending machines will at least have a Gatorade or something.

Ten minutes later, he’s more than annoyed. 

He’s actively yelling abuse at the ancient vending machine just outside the fitness room, fist raining down on the metal when he hears a voice say, “Oh.” 

Ilya looks up from where he’s been executing unfettered violence on a vending machine that has not only stolen his bills but hasn't even had the decency to spit out the bag of chips he’s been going for. To add insult to injury, the machine doesn’t even have Gatorade.

He freezes with his fist inches from making another dent into the already beat-up metal.

“Shane.” 

It slips out of him, a prayer, a whispered benediction. Mouth shaping around the sweetest word in existence.

“Ehm,” Shane says uncertainly, and Ilya had forgotten about this. He'd forgotten how Shane sometimes gets so wired up by big events that he can’t quite contain all of the excitement and nerves. He will be too restless to sleep, too anxious about the what-ifs. His solution had always been to put his body through some kind of strenuous exercise, until he was so exhausted and had pushed his body so far, he more or less collapsed into sleep.

It wasn’t exactly healthy, and Ilya and Shane have had their arguments about it throughout the years, but now, looking at Shane in his workout gear, his hair sticking up in soft tufts, Ilya only feels fond.

Shane looks unbearably young, newly eighteen and still the most beautiful thing Ilya has ever seen in his life.

He wants to kiss him. He wants to take him into his arms and never let go. He wants to say I love you, I love you, I love you until the words are tattooed onto the very fabric of Shane’s soul, so that if there is only one thing Shane knows to be true in this life—in any life—it is that Ilya Rozanov loves Shane Hollander.

But Ilya can say nothing of that, can’t touch him or hold him the way he wants to just yet, because this Shane doesn’t know him, doesn’t know the things that Ilya would do for him. 

Is already doing.

They’ll get there, though. Ilya believes that. He has to believe that. He has to keep to the faith that in any universe, as long as there is Ilya and Shane, they are meant to be together. They’ll always find each other.

“Do you, uhm, do you need help?” Shane is gesturing to the vending machine, gaze locked at Ilya’s brows rather than his eyes, and he had done that a lot in the beginning. Avoiding eye contact until Ilya tilted his face this way and that, catching Shane’s eyes with his own until it’d been something Shane had found comfort in. 

There you are, he’d say, and Shane would go all butter soft and sugary sweet in Ilya’s arms, knowing that Ilya would care for him, that he would keep him safe.

It is the greatest show of trust Ilya has ever been granted. He wants that back, desperately.

“The machine stole my money,” Ilya says instead of the thousand other words wanting to spill out of him. He lets his lips tug into a smile, teasing, when he adds, “But not dare steal from Shane Hollander, yes? Shane Hollander too good to steal from. Best.”

Shane ducks his head, blushing a lovely red as he murmurs out, “Asshole,” but he’s hiding a grin, and the exchange is so familiar, so dear, that Ilya could cry from it. He has to shove his hands into his pockets to keep from reaching for him when Shane cautiously takes a few steps forwards, coming to a stop beside Ilya. He sneaks a quick glance at Ilya before looking back at the machine.

He is so awkward. Ilya loves him so much.

“What, uhm, what did you want?”

Ilya shrugs easily. “I am trying to get bag of chips, but I'm very hungry. I will eat anything.” As if to punctuate this statement, his stomach chooses that moment to rumble loudly. And Ilya is actually very hungry, but here, standing next to Shane, so close he can feel his body heat, Ilya is sated in a way he hasn’t been since he came back to this time. He could stay here, stomach growling in this pocket of eternity, and still live off of Shane’s presence. He’d be well-fed from that alone.

“Oh,” Shane says. He sneaks another glance at Ilya, accidentally makes eye contact and then holds it, one second, two, three, before looking away, startled.

Ilya smiles gently and knows not to comment.

“I mean, a bag of chips isn’t going to be enough, probably.” Shane shifts his weight on his feet. He tugs his lower lip between his teeth, but then makes a face, catching himself. He'd always looked at his habit of biting his lip as a bad one.

Ilya wants to kiss away the scowl marring his pretty face. He wants to lick into his mouth, to suck on his tongue and—Shane is eighteen, he forcibly reminds himself. Shane is eighteen and curious, but he’s never done anything with another boy at this time. He still thinks he likes girls. He hadn’t even considered the possibility of being gay for years yet in the before—future?—and Ilya knows how intense he gets about Shane. Remembers how that had sometimes scared Shane in the beginning. How it had scared himself. 

(Ilya has never—will never—feel about anyone the way he feels about Shane.)

“There’s a Timmy’s down the street. It's about a ten minute walk and they should be open. Do you maybe wanna go there?” Shane asks him, and he looks determined now.

Ilya remembers, suddenly, the Shane who’d introduced himself a few months ago and thirteen years before. The one Ilya had mocked. They’d never really talked about that first meeting, but Ilya wonders now if that wasn’t Shane’s attempt at making friends, at making a connection with someone who would understand the kind of pressure he was under. He can so easily picture Shane just wanting someone to share in the burden of expectations that had been placed on him. Ilya had wanted that.

He still wants it, he realises. Wants them to be friends from the beginning this time, because it had taken them a few years to become something more than just fuckbuddies in Ilya's first life. They had wasted so much time refusing to admit what they wanted that they had been nearly a decade into their relationship before they became people who shared details of their lives with each other, simply because they wanted the other to know. Even if it wasn’t exciting, even if it was something mundane and everyday. Especially then.

Ilya, more than anything, wants Shane to fall in love with him again, but he can let himself want this too. 

“You will buy me breakfast, Shane Hollander? So sweet to me,” he coos, and laughs aloud when Shane puffs up in outrage.

“I wasn’t gonna—!” He glares at Ilya, but Ilya keeps his face open, lets Shane see that he’s teasing, yes, but he’s also perfectly willing to let Shane drag him along to the nearest Tim Hortons.

“Fine,” Shane says, and then, because he’s so very brave, his Shane, he adds, “but you’ll have to pay next time.”

“Yes,” Ilya agrees easily. “This is what friends do, Да? Take turns to pay?”

Shane blinks up at him, surprised, but then he’s beaming. “For sure!” he says, eyes crinkling happily in the corners, and he doesn’t know it yet, but Ilya is about to make him his best friend. Because this? This Shane who is so very easy to please, so eager for any crumb of affection or acknowledgment of friendship and familiarity from someone who isn’t his immediate family? This is the same Shane who’s been getting death threats from the parents of the players he plays against, because he’s just so much better. This is the same Shane who’s been shunned by his own teammates because of all the attention he receives. Because the others are talented, yes, they have to be at this level, but Shane is going to be a franchise player. The face of the League, one of them. That has never been in question. Not even at this time, before he’s even drafted.

There are going to be so many people ready to tear him down, but Ilya won’t let them. He’ll make sure Shane knows he’s in his corner no matter what.

“Good,” Ilya says. “We will go now? Before I starve to death.”

Shane snorts. “Yeah, okay. Do you need to head back to your room first, or do you have everything you need?”

That’s not a bad idea, actually. Shane is wearing a long-sleeved half zip and matching pants, but Ilya is just in his shorts and tank. If nothing else, he should at least grab a jacket to throw on, but he shakes his head. Ilya is Russian; he will brave the cool, morning wind if it means he doesn’t have to leave Shane for any length of time. 

And so he says, after a beat too long, softly, so soft, “Have everything I need right here.”

**

Ilya is in the middle of laughing his ass off at a story Shane is telling him about a prank at Worlds involving a carpet, stolen clothes, and an elevator when Barry calls him in a panic.

“Where the hell are you?”

“At a Tim Hortons down the street,” Ilya answers cautiously in English, for Shane’s benefit when he catches him looking at him worriedly. Barry’s voice had been loud and he's speaking Russian.

“You're at—? No, never mind that. Ilya, for Christ’s sake. I thought you had been taken or something. You weren’t in your room when I came to check on you, and after last night…” Barry trails off, and Ilya winces guiltily, because Barry’s fears aren’t exactly unfounded. He spares a quick glance to his phone screen, and is surprised to realise it’s past seven in the morning. Barry had told him last night that he would meet him at his room, seven sharp, to hash out a strategy of how to deal with Ilya’s outing going into the combine. That would give them a couple of hours before orientation started at nine. Shit.

Ilya has been so wrapped up in Shane, he hasn't bothered to pay attention to how quickly time was passing between them.

“Sorry,” Ilya says into the phone, and then switches to Russian. “I’m okay, I promise. I woke up starving at, like, four in the morning, and then I met a friend at the hotel, so we decided to head out for food. Fuck, I should have sent you a text that I was leaving the hotel. I’m really sorry.”

“Yes, well.” Barry sighs, seemingly losing some of his steam at Ilya’s obvious contrition. “Just get back here ASAP. And Ilya,” he says, but then hesitates.

Ilya steels himself. He knows what follows is probably not going to be pleasant. “Just tell me.”

“There’s going to be a lot of media attention at this year’s combine. A lot of people are excited about you and Hollander. It’s been a long time since there’s been a prospect anywhere near as good as either of you. A lot of people are counting on you to boost sales and popularity. The League itself is banking on this.”

“Okay, so we’ll be under a lot of pressure. That isn’t exactly new.”

“No, but—” Barry sighs again. “I know it’s only been a day, but that article from yesterday is spreading like wildfire. It hasn’t quite reached online chatter here, yet, but it’s only a matter of time. I was given a courtesy call just a few minutes ago; a couple of smaller sports outlets will be reporting on it. It’ll get picked up by the bigger broadcasters from there.”

Ilya swallows. It isn’t like he hasn’t known this could happen, but it’s all going so fast, happening too soon. He’ll have to go through the combine knowing his fellow prospects will be gossiping about him, mocking him and talking behind his back, and he isn’t quite prepared for that.

He feels a gentle touch on his knuckles, and looks down at the table to see Shane stroking his fingers over where Ilya has clenched his free hand into a fist. 

Okay? Shane mouths at him when he glances up to see him already looking at Ilya.

He looks so concerned, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth the way he always feels so self-conscious about and Ilya is reminded why he is putting himself through this.

Why he would make the same choice a million times over if it let him have this:

Shane’s eyes on him.

Ilya offers him a small smile. Okay, he mouths back.

“Ilya,” Barry says in his ear, and Ilya turns his attention back to the call.

“Yeah, I’m here. Look, we’ll work it out, okay? This is obviously not ideal, but I’ll handle it. I’m headed back now; we can come up with a game plan before check-in and orientation.” It will be bare bones with the amount of time they have before Ilya has to be at the registration desks, but better than nothing.

Barry is silent for a second, then he says, “You really are handling this very well. I’m proud of you, kid,” and then he hangs up.

Barry doesn’t know that Ilya is almost thirty years old and not the teen he’s supposed to be. He doesn’t know that Ilya has years of media training and experience to draw from, but Ilya finds that he is grateful for the words anyway. Is surprised to find how much the sentiment means to him.

There’s been so few people in his life that he actually cares about, that he respects, who have found reason to be proud of him.

Shane, of course, has always been one of them.

“Is everything okay?” he asks now. His fingers are still stroking over Ilya’s hand. Ilya doesn’t think he’s even aware of it.

“Not exactly,” he says with a grimace. “I did something not so smart before I come to Canada. A lot of people found out.”

“Oh,” Shane says as they make their way out of the booth they’ve been occupying for the last couple of hours. Ilya’s hand finds its place automatically on Shane’s back, guiding him through the exit when Shane follows that up with, “Is this about your nudes?”

And Ilya promptly trips over his own two feet.

**

The first time around, the combine had been a whirlwind of stress and chaos in all the best ways. Ilya had been so busy with just getting through the fitness tests and making sure his English was good enough to make himself understood that he hadn’t even cared about how well he did in any of the categories. Mostly, he’d been worrying if he’d made a good enough impression on any of the teams he interviewed with. 

He had wanted to go first overall, because Ilya was more than good enough, but truthfully, he’d just really wanted to be drafted. He’d go to any team as long as it meant he got to play NHL hockey.

This time, he has more or less reconciled himself to the fact that he probably won’t be picked number one again, but knows he’ll at least be drafted when the time comes. Even with the baggage, the noise, that now comes along with Ilya Rozanov, some NHL team out there will want him on their roster.

That fact goes a long way at keeping him calm throughout the next few days, especially when mouthy teenagers with acne and bad BO start hurling abuse at him. Ilya gives as good as he gets, of course—chirping is practically second nature after nearly twelve years in the NHL, and he is so much better at it than some snotfaced little upstart, but it still grates. Still pisses him off when some shitty nobody who couldn’t even skate his way out of a bag looks at him and calls him faggot, sneer in place. 

Had Ilya actually been seventeen, he would have laid them all out. Some of them even look as if they’d like to test him, but he is both tall and broad; it never gets physical. 

It sucks. 

It really fucking sucks, but Ilya is still gratified to see that it’s not all bad. 

There are boys who’ll call out the homophobes for what they are, and fewer still who manage to catch Ilya alone, giving him quiet words of support. 

A couple of boys even come out to him, and one of them is so grateful to have someone safe to talk to he cries throughout the entire conversation.

Ilya remembers him from before, a defenceman of middling talent who’d played for one of the American teams. He’d been up and down from the minor league before finally giving it up, realising he’d never be a regular in the NHL.

Ilya remembers him, because he’d been one of those players so quick to spout homophobic shit on the ice.

He is abruptly reminded of Troy, of the internalised homophobia Troy had struggled with so intensely, that had made him such a bastard of a man before he’d gotten his shit together, and just feels sad.

He gives the boy a short hug, says, “You’re going to be okay,” and hopes that’s true. Hopes that, if nothing else, Ilya being out publicly, will mean this boy can go on to live a life where he doesn’t have to torture himself mentally every day. Where he doesn’t have to hate himself.

So yeah, not all bad.

It helps that Shane is right next to him, every step of the way.

Ilya had been grouped with his countrymen and a couple of other Europeans his first time at the combine. They’d been just over a hundred prospects then, sorted into groups of ten to fifteen boys, rotating through the different testing stations on predetermined schedules. This meant that Ilya hadn’t seen Shane at all the last time. Their groups had been kept on opposing schedules.

They’d been at different hotels too, because Ilya’s lodging had been organised by Spartak, his Russian home team.

This time around, Barry has set him up in a different part of town entirely, closer to the sports facility where the combine is being held. He’s been pulling strings and calling in favours to make sure he got Ilya added to a different group than the one he was originally assigned to; Barry had wanted as little overlap with the Russians as possible.

When Ilya and Shane had walked into the lobby of the hotel that first day, Barry had taken one look at where they stood, Ilya grinning, his arm around an awkward Shane’s shoulder, and said, long sufferingly, “Let me make some more calls.”

He really is the best agent Ilya could have asked for.

“Are you nervous for the interviews today?” Shane asks him the morning of their last day.

They’re back at the Tim Hortons; Shane has more or less made it into their regular breakfast place these last couple of days, and Ilya, as always, is weak to his wants. He’s so delighted to see Shane inhale his food with no thought to calories or macros that he doesn’t even care he’s eaten so many donuts this week he’s kind of getting sick of them.

“Eh.” Ilya makes a so-so gesture with his hand. “Not really. It is what it is.”

Shane hums at that. “You’ve done really well, though. You’re first in pretty much all of the rankings.”

“Yes, I am best.”

He grins when Shane rolls his eyes and throws his rolled up napkin at him.

“You’re such an ass. I’m serious, okay? Boston would be stupid not to take you. Montreal, too.”

“Shane,” Ilya starts tiredly, because they’ve had this conversation several times already. “You know is more complicated than that.”

Shane pouts mulishly. He’s so adoreable, Ilya wants to grab his cheeks between his hands—fuller now than they’ll be in adulthood, still lingering with baby fat—and squish that precious face.

“This isn’t how I want to go first,” Shane says quietly, and maybe that sounds selfish, but Ilya gets it. He’d have raged too had their positions been reversed.

They both want to be the best because they’ve worked for it, because they actually are, not because it was handed to them.

“It is what it is,” Ilya says again. “Not everyone will be happy with bi man on team, and besides, I just want to play hockey. I will play where they let me. Will win the Cup no matter what, because I am just that good, yes?”

Shane rolls his eyes again, but he’s smiling, freckles scrunched high on his cheeks. “I guess,” he says. “Not before me, though. I’ll definitely win the Cup before you.”

“Oh? Shane Hollander so good he can see future?” Ilya chirps him, and grins at his own private joke. It’s been easier, thinking about the future he’s lost when Shane is right next to him. He still misses that life, that Shane, but this is good too.

Ilya will make sure it is.

“By the way,” Shane says on the walk back to the hotel. “Did Barry figure out where you’ll be staying after today? And after the draft next month?”

Ilya shrugs. “I have to stay in Canada for immigration paperwork, but will probably billet somewhere. Barry says he has many friends in Canada I can stay with. Maybe even NHL player.” He nudges Shane’s shoulder playfully. “Might give me advantage, hm?”

But Shane doesn’t take the bait. Instead, he grabs Ilya’s arm, stopping in place as he says, “Come to Ottawa. Stay with me.” He’s staring up at Ilya earnestly, all brown eyes and beautiful freckles, this baby gay who doesn’t even know he’s queer yet.

Ilya loves him so fucking much.

He should probably ask questions, should ask if David and Yuna are aware that Shane has invited an outed Russian hockey player to live with them. He should ask if Shane has thought this through, because people are so fucking small-minded; some people will automatically assume that Shane is gay too—bi, or whatever—just for being close to Ilya. That it’s true isn’t even the point.

Ilya should asks questions, because he’s not actually sure this is a good idea, but instead he says, “Okay.”

It’s the easiest decision he’s ever made.

Chapter 5

Chapter Notes

Happy holidays to all who celebrate and a good read to everyone else!
Chapter warning: referenced disordered eating.

Convincing all the necessary parties takes a bit of time.

There are a lot of moving parts to consider, after all.

Shane’s parents had been unable to take time off work; they hadn’t made the trip to the combine with him, and Shane trying to explain that no, actually, it’s a great idea for Ilya Rozanov to billet with them over the summer, is not ideal over the phone.

In the end, Barry books a hotel meeting room for a video conference call. Barry had initially been wary of the idea of Ilya going to Ottawa, but once he’d seen that Ilya wasn’t budging on this—they’d have to pry the chance of living with Shane out of his cold, dead hands—he’d sighed, said, “You’re killing me, kid,” and gone to work.

As it turns out, the real challenge is Yuna. Ilya has spoken with Yuna and David a bit over these last few days, because Shane and Ilya really have been living out of each other’s pockets, and he’s been around when Shane has been on the phone with them several times already. They’ve been perfectly cordial, if a little surprised at how close Ilya and Shane have become, and how quickly.

Yuna, he knows, is worried Ilya will be nothing but a distraction. He’s been a feature in several news reports throughout the combine, and while the talking points of his outing has been deemed tentatively ambivalent, it’s better than the shitstorm Ilya had been expecting. It probably helps that he’s not actually an NHL player just yet. He’d known the news wouldn’t exactly be positively received, but Barry assures him that the ambivalence is good. It means they’re more concerned about his hockey than who is sucking his dick.

Yuna, though, is a harsher critic. Not about his sexuality. Never that. Ilya knows from conversations they’ve had in the future—past?—that already now, she and David suspect that Shane might not be entirely straight, but she’s hesitant about the fanfare surrounding Ilya now, the reputation that precedes him. 

Ilya is also aware that she hadn’t exactly left Worlds with the best impression of him.

And maybe it’s cheating or manipulative of him, but in the future he’s lost, Ilya has been like their second son for years; these are people he knows and loves, and so he maybe turns up the charm just that little bit extra. Knows exactly what to say to convey how serious he is about hockey, about not being a distraction for Shane.

It seems to help a little, but after another hour where nothing is settled, Shane finally says, “What if it’d been me, Mom, and Ilya was the one offering me a safe place?” and things move quickly after that, because Yuna Hollander lives and breathes hockey, but Shane is her baby.

She shares a look with David, the two of them having an entire conversation without a single word spoken, before she visibly sags in her seat. She looks back at the camera, a reluctant smile pulling into place over the grainy video feed.

“Okay. Ilya can come live with us.”

**

By the time he died in 2021, Ilya had lived with Shane on and off for nearly four years.

The time they managed to scrape together was special and far too few in between, but they had made do as best they could. The truth was, Ilya would take the separation, all of those awful hours, days, weeks of being apart in exchange for the precious moments they got to spend together.

Ilya will take anything—everything—Shane deigns to give him, and will always want more.

He is a man starving and Shane his sustenance.

These are the things Ilya knows about living with Shane:

It takes compromise. So much fucking compromise. Shane is particular about a number of things, from organisation to food to cleanliness. He was not always understanding of how Ilya sometimes found that restrictive or hurtful, like when Shane had to restack the dishwasher because Ilya had not done it to his satisfaction.

That they are both stubborn to a fault had not helped.

Living with Shane had been one of Ilya’s favourite things, but it hadn’t always been easy.

They had to learn each other all over again, away from hockey, away from sex. It took time for them to figure out each other’s non-negotiables and the things they were willing to budge on. It helped that they were so determined to make things work, and once they figured out communication was key, things got better.

Living with a teenaged Shane is surprisingly different. It’s Ilya, getting to know a Shane he had not been privy to, not really.

The Hayden Pike of his future had once likened them to high school sweethearts, because they’d been seventeen when they first met and nineteen when they stumbled into bed that first time, but Ilya isn’t so sure that it’s an accurate description. He’d been in lust, yes, and in love not far after even if he hadn’t wanted to admit that at the time, but it had taken years to really get to know Shane beyond the sex and the player on the ice; the only one who could actually keep up with him.

They were rivals, fuckbuddies. But they hadn’t been friends at first, even if they had been friendly. That came later.

Now, Ilya gets to be Shane’s friend from the beginning. It’s a novel experience. Special, because after thirteen years, Ilya had believed he knew everything there was to know about Shane Hollander, and he is finding, to his absolute delight, that it’s not true. He is unsurprised to learn that Shane’s competitiveness has been a lifelong trait, that his strive for perfection was something he cultivated early on, but is surprised to learn just how much of a kid he is at eighteen. The Shane in Ilya’s mind had always been so mature—calm and competent and boring and so dazzlingly talented, so beautiful, it was hard not to look at him. A lodestar in the sea of chaos that was Ilya’s life. 

Ilya had found great comfort in that, in the peace and quiet that Shane provided for him. 

In the beginning, the only times he’d gotten to see Shane break his stoicism was when Ilya took him to bed and he became eager with passion and needy with want, and Ilya had loved that Shane too. Loves every version of him.

Even this younger Shane, who has a paper route on Sundays and mows his neighbours lawns, who works as a youth hockey coach; he keeps sneaking his earnings into the jar of cash in the Hollanders’ kitchen that David and Yuna use for groceries. Feels so guilty, he tells Ilya, about the money he knows have been used to make sure that Shane had the right gear, always had skates that fit, could always participate in hockey camps and tournaments and, “The first thing I’m going to do when I start making real money is pay off their mortgage,” Shane whispers once, a secret.

Ilya smiles, fond, and keeps letting Shane drag him along on his paper route even if that means Shane has to push him out of bed before five in the morning.

He is so sweet, his Shane. Shy and quiet, which is familiar, but more willing to goof off and shoot the shit than his adult counterpart had been. Not quite so anxious yet, more willing to be loud and take up space in casual settings.

Seeing him around his childhood friends is a revelation. They’re a small group, boys he grew up together with; they all play hockey, but they’re not hockey players and this makes all the difference. They’ll chirp at Shane, eager to tell embarrassing stories to Ilya when he’s introduced to them, but it’s all teasing and friendly, in a way that makes it clear Shane is in on it. There is no jealousy because there is no competition. Not a single one of them has any ambition of playing in the NHL. 

They’re good guys, but still teenagers, so when one of them says, “We’re cool about the, uh, gay thing, you know,” so earnestly while the rest of them nod their agreement, Ilya is suitably impressed and a little touched. Feels like yanking their chain a bit, says, “How cool?” and then lets his eyes drag up and down the boy who’d spoken while wiggling his eyebrows in clear invitation.

He’s being a shit, and the boy doesn’t do anything for him—not when Shane is right there, beautiful, beloved, and the best thing Ilya has ever seen—but Ilya thrives on this, on getting under people’s skin, just for the fun of it, just to see how they’ll react. 

Most of the time, Shane is his preferred target.

There is a few seconds of tense, awkward silence, but then the boy grins. “Fuck off!” he says cheerfully, and gives Ilya’s shoulder a friendly push, and it’s all good, even if Ilya does take the time to explain he’s actually bisexual.

They all hang out a lot in the days between the combine and the draft; Ilya kind of wants to keep in touch with them after.

Another thing he hadn’t known about is the baking.

It’s Ilya’s birthday the first time he sees Shane in the kitchen, pulling out the different ingredients.

“I’m going to get you a present later, but you should definitely have birthday cookies,” Shane says seriously. “It’s tradition.”

So Ilya watches as Shane carefully measures out butter and sugar and flour, reading through his recipe twice before mixing together his ingredients to make a dough, and Ilya nearly cries to see it. He nearly cries, because as Shane pulls the cookies he’s made out of the oven some forty minutes later, he barely even waits for them to cool before he’s shoving one into his mouth, moaning at how good they are.

Ilya, in the thirteen years he’d known Shane in his future past, has never seen Shane enjoy baked goods like this. Has so rarely seen him consume anything that wasn’t pre-approved by his strict diet or an incredibly rare cheat day. They’d not named it, in that life, they way Shane had counted and discarded food if that count wasn’t right, but Ilya knows what it’d been. Had been so scared to realise it was getting worse. He’s not letting that happen again, not if he can help it.

“Didn’t know you bake, Hollander,” Ilya tells him when Shane hands him a cookie to try. He tilts his head, surprised when he bites into it. Holy fuck, it’s good. Why has Ilya not been getting birthday cookies before?

Shane shrugs, but he can’t hide his pleased smile at the way Ilya devours his treat before immediately grabbing for another to munch on. 

“I used to do it a lot with my grandma when I was a kid. She used to say she wanted to become a pastry chef when she was young, but that there wasn’t really a place for women in professional settings back then. So she learned on her own mostly, and then she taught me.”

Ilya hums at that. He hadn’t known this about Shane, tucks the information safely into the section of his brain that files away all Shane related trivia. “You like? To bake, I mean.”

“Yeah, it’s fun. Helps when my head gets loud sometimes.” He sneaks a glance at Ilya, shy. “There is structure to it, right? Everything needs to be measured and mixed in order. I like that.”

“Good,” Ilya says softly. “That’s good.” He makes sure to keep his smile, but he feels saddened for the Shane he’d known and loved. Ilya had never once seen him bake, hadn’t even heard about it, and wonders if it was something he’d stopped because of the diet or because some asshole somewhere had told him baking was for women; there had been a period of time where Shane had been so very careful not to do anything that could be perceived as gay or feminine, terrified of being outed and losing hockey.

Ilya has actually been a little surprised by how openly supportive and protective he’s been of Ilya since the news broke, doesn’t quite understand the difference between then and now. The other day, Shane had gotten into it with some internet troll on a hockey forum who’d insisted bi people didn’t exist and that Ilya Rozanov was an attention-seeking gay loser who’d never make it to the NHL. Ilya had had to physically drag him away from the computer.

Now though, Shane beams at him, offers him another cookie, and says, “Happy birthday, Ilya.”

It’s one of the best birthdays he’s ever had.

*

The next day, Barry calls him while he’s in the middle of a run.

“You’re being sued,” he says by way of hello.

Ilya groans as he comes to a stop. “By Spartak? I only signed with them through the season, though, and we were out of the playoffs before I left for the combine; I’ve completed my contractual obligation.” It had been a point of contention between Ilya and the Spartak management before he left. They’d been pressuring him to extend his contract, to sign on for another year, and didn’t Ilya know that plenty of good Russian boys deferred their rookie season in the NHL for a year or so?

Ilya does know; he'd been one of them. He’s also known boys who never made it over, because their clubs and hometowns got their claws so deep in them, in their families, it became impossible to untangle. 

“No, not Spartak. You did well not to sign the contract they presented you,” Barry says over the phone. “It’s Adrenaline Rush. They claim you’re in breach of contract, that you’ve broken your morality clause and haven’t fulfilled your deal of the endorsement.”

“They sell energy drinks,” Ilya says drily. “Not exactly a bastion of moral high ground.” 

“No,” Barry agrees. “But there was, in fact, a morality clause in the contract, and those pictures will have broken them even if the wording was vague as hell.” He’s silent for a moment. “That’s another contract you shouldn’t have signed.”

“Yes, well.” Ilya knows, of course. The deal had included a lot of money for a then sixteen-year-old, which was why his father had pressured him into signing with them, and in all honesty had been fairly decent all things considered. Barry’s not wrong, though. A lot of the wording had been vague throughout, and in the end, it had been just another thing tying him to Russia. “Is this something I should be worried about? Legally?”

“No,” Barry says immediately. “They’ve filed in Russia, and if you ever returned there it’d be a problem, but there is no court in Canada that will uphold a claim made by a Russian company for a contract that was signed by a minor. Also, your refugee status should protect you here. I’ll double check with Johnny in IRCC, but I’m not worried. I just wanted to keep you in the loop and to warn you that it could potentially become a talking point in the media. Under normal circumstances, I’d worry that it would affect your draft ranking, but well.”

“Not much to do there either way,” Ilya agrees. He sighs tiredly. He’s known there’d be repercussions to what he’s done; some of them he’s planned for, but a lot he’s finding he just hadn’t considered. Thirteen years is a long time to remember everything from back when he was seventeen and eighteen. He hadn’t even remembered he’d been signed to Adrenaline Rush before Barry mentioned it. Thinks he might have ended the endorsement sometime in his early twenties the last time.

“Could we maybe go through the contract and work out how much they’ve lost? I’ll pay them back once I sign with a team.”

“You want to return the money? I’ve read the contract, Ilya. The signing bonus was considerable, but the annual base fee was low. They’ll just stop paying you now, and you’ve already upheld your end for the first two years. Like I said, no Canadian court is going to take this lawsuit seriously; no one will make you pay back the bonus.”

Ilya shrugs even though Barry can’t see him. “I know, it’s just, I am in breach. And I don’t want to feel as if I owe them anything. It’s the right thing to do, I think.”

There is silence over the line again, and Ilya can tell that Barry disagrees, but because he really is the best agent in the world, he caves easily enough. “Fine. I’ll set it up, but Ilya, they won’t pull the lawsuit just because you pay them back. They’re asking for damages.”

“I know, but I need to do this anyway. Thank you.”

Ilya’s relationship with Russia is complicated; he’s not always sure how he really feels about his home country. In the grand scheme of things, paying back the money Adrenaline Rush had paid him probably won’t do a whole lot, but at least Ilya knows he’ll feel better for it.

That has to be enough.

**

He comes home to a surprise guest and Shane waiting for him out on the front porch.

“Ilya!” he hisses at him the second he sees Ilya rounding the corner of the street leading up to the house. “Where have you been?”

Ilya grins, deliberately drapes himself over Shane the second he’s close enough, laughing delightedly when Shane bats at him to get off, telling him to keep his sweat and stink to himself.

“Out on run, which I not only told you about but also invited you on before I left.”

“I told you, I’m doing conditioning at the rink later. I need fresh legs then. Wait, no, nevermind that. Ilya!” he hisses out again. “Boston’s general manager is here.”

Now that has Ilya stopping up short.

It’s not unusual for teams to contact prospects after the combine. In fact, it’s expected. A lot of teams will schedule follow-up interviews for the players they’re likely to pick, and they’ll still be doing information gathering and development planning all the way till draft day. 

For a GM to make a surprise house call at a prospect’s home, though? That is unusual.

More so because it’s Brian Doyle.

The Boston Bears’ general manager had retired by the time Ilya signed with Ottawa, but he remembers Doyle as a serious, stoic man—strict, but fair. He’d had a keen sense of hockey and management, but he’d not been much for socialising. 

Ilya cannot remember ever having heard of Doyle showing up at a player’s house unannounced. Much less a prospect.

“Why is he here?” Ilya demands, looking over Shane’s shoulder even though the front door is closed. “Is he here for you?” It wouldn’t be a surprise. Ilya has been preparing himself not to be drafted first overall. Has, in fact, been preparing himself for not being taken in the first round at all, but it still stings. He’s the one who made the choice to leave Boston, to sign with Ottawa so he could be closer to Shane in his first life, but he’d been sad to do it. Ilya had really enjoyed Boston as a city, the people and his teammates, even if he wasn’t necessarily close with any of them except for Svetlana and maybe Cliff. He’d still been immensely proud of the work he’d done there, the hockey he’d played.

Shane shakes his head. “No, not really. I mean, we did talk, but no, I don’t get the feeling he’s here for me.” He smiles up at Ilya eagerly. “He asked me about you.”

Ilya looks down at him. “What you say?” he asks curiously. “That I’m best at hockey and Shane Hollander wishes he was as good as me?”

It’s a joke. A tame version of something Ilya tells Shane pretty regularly, just to get a rise, just to see his cheeks flush a lovely red and call Ilya, Asshole. But Shane nods.

“Yeah. Told him he’d be really fucking dumb not to use their pick on you.”

Sometimes, Ilya can’t breathe for how much he loves this silly boy before him. This boy who has let Ilya decide they’re best friends now, who keeps fighting Ilya’s battles.   

“You stupid?” Ilya croaks out. “Why would you—?”

They’re interrupted by the door pulling open abruptly. “Ilya,” Yuna says, and she looks a little wild around the eyes. “There you are. Would you mind coming into the kitchen? There is someone here for you.”

Ilya nods at her. “Yes, of course.” As Yuna steps back into the house, Ilya takes the time to chuck Shane under his chin affectionately, says, “You idiot,” before he’s pushing past him through the door.

“Would you like me to stay with you?” Yuna asks him outside the kitchen, but Ilya is already shaking his head.

“No, that’s okay. But thank you,” he says, and smiles at her gratefully. He loves her for making the offer, but he needs to hear what Doyle has to say for himself.

“Okay,” she says. She gives him a gentle pat on the shoulder. “Good luck.”

Ilya inhales once, deeply, before he steps into the kitchen, closing the door gently behind him. Doyle is sitting with his back to the door, a cup of coffee in front of him, but he turns when he hears Ilya coming.

“Ilya,” he says in greeting, and Ilya can’t read him at all. He never was able to crack his old GM.

“Mr Doyle. You wanted to speak with me?”

“Yes.” Doyle gestures to the seat opposite him. “Please, sit.” He waits until Ilya is seated before going straight into it, foregoing any pleasantries. “Remind me, Ilya, how many teams did you interview with at the combine?”

“Sixteen,” Ilya answers shortly. It was more than he’d expected going into it this time around, but less than the full thirty he’d met with the first time. Still, to be asked to meet with sixteen different teams was more than adequate.

When prospects interviewed with teams at the combine, they usually only met with one or two teams. Maybe three if they were lucky. Top prospects—the really good players—would interview with a dozen plus. Shane and Ilya had originally met with all thirty, because good was not an accurate enough word to describe the talent and drive they possessed. 

Shane had still seen all thirty this time around, and when Ilya had teased him about being Mr Popular, Shane had only grumbled and complained about how Ilya should have been there, right along with him.

“Sixteen,” Doyle repeats. “Impressive.” He sits back in his chair, regarding Ilya with solemn eyes. “I think you’re aware, Ilya, that of those sixteen teams, only a handful will be serious about drafting you.”

Ilya clenches his jaw. Says nothing.

“Yes, I can see that you are.” Doyle takes a swig of his coffee. Pauses as he sits the cup back on the table. “Shane Hollander has a great deal of respect for you,” he says, a non-sequitur. “I asked him if he would like to play for Boston, and he told me outright I’d be dumb not to draft you.” He chuckles. Seems genuinely amused as he adds, “The balls on that kid.”

“He didn’t mean it,” Ilya tries, because Shane can sometimes be impulsive in the worst ways, but Doyle holds up a hand.

“No, he most definitely did. He’s a good friend.”

Ilya nods. Feels his eyes go wet and has to blink to hold back the tears. “The best,” he chokes out.

Doyle hums at that, gaze heavy as he considers Ilya. “I was impressed during your interview in Toronto; you answered well for yourself. I didn’t get to ask you this question then, and I wanted to know. If you go to Boston, what kind of player would I get?”

“The hardest working one on your roster,” Ilya answers immediately, firmly, truthfully. He has years of evidence that no one will ever know to back that up, but it had been true in that first life, and it will be true now.

Ilya had been the most talented player on that team. He’d been the most popular one, the face of the franchise, and the most marketable one. But none of that is what Ilya had prided himself on, because no one on that team had wanted a Cup more than him. No one had worked harder to make that happen.

He’ll do it again, because nothing in his career, none of the individual accolades, had felt as good as winning the Stanley Cup. Ilya wants that again. Wants it as many times as he can get it.

Doyle lifts a brow. “Interesting,” he says, and Ilya still can’t fucking read him, has no idea if he’s given the right answer or if there even is one. 

Has no idea if it matters.

They chat a little more, Doyle asking questions and Ilya answering. Finally, Doyle says, “Thank you for your time, Ilya. I’ll be taking my leave now.”

Ilya nods, escorts him to the door, and they give their goodbyes. As he watches Doyle climb into the rental he’s got parked down the street, Shane comes sidling up next to him.

“How’d it go?”

“I have no fucking idea,” Ilya says, and waves along with Shane as Doyle drives past them.

**

Ten days later, at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Ilya is drafted first overall by the Boston Bears.

No one cheers louder than Shane Hollander.

Chapter End Notes

I went back and forth with myself (so much!) on whether to have Ilya go first in the draft or not, but ultimately decided that not only does he deserve it, it was the right thing to do. Hope you liked the chapter!

Chapter 6

Chapter Notes

Thank you for the continued support and encouragement!

It’s remarkable, Ilya thinks, the difference between the first time he was drafted and this second time.

For one, he isn’t immediately miserable once the euphoria and pride of having gone first overall—of getting one up on Hollander—has passed. No, this time, instead of listening to his own father disparage him in front of his team officials and sneaking glances at the pretty boy with the pretty freckles, he gets to stand next to the pretty boy in question.

Mostly because Shane has attached himself to Ilya’s side at the after party, and not even conversing with his own team officials is enough to move him. Somehow, this means that Ilya ends up holding court with the Hollanders while agents and GMs and coaches mingle around them, networking.

Ilya gets more pictures this time too, pictures where it’s just him and Shane, grins big and arms around each other, draft jerseys held up in front of them. Pictures of the two of them clinking their champagne glasses together in celebration, Shane looking flushed with glee, beautiful with happiness and all things perfect and Ilya sometimes wishes he could shrink Shane to fit in the palm of his hand, so that Ilya could put him in his pocket and carry him close, always.

He sees David snap about a thousand pictures throughout the day, and resolves to catch him later; he wants a printed version of those photos.

At some point, they end up in a conversation with Shane’s parents, Shane’s GM and Doyle. Ilya is surprised to see Doyle at all. He hadn’t attended the first time around, had sent his assistant manager and other team officials instead. Ilya wonders at the change, but obviously can’t comment.

“What do you think, Roger?” Doyle asks now, addressing Shane’s GM but keeping his eyes locked on Shane. His gaze is as solemn as usual. “How about you trade me this one? Let me build a dynasty in Boston. We’ll win the Cup this season already.” 

Shane blushes at the unspoken praise, but he’s quick to shake his head. Answers before his GM can. “Why don’t you trade Ilya to Montreal and we can build a dynasty,” he says, because Montreal is the team that has drafted him and Shane is ridiculously loyal.

They all laugh at his quip, but Doyle is looking from Shane to Ilya, considering.

They spend another couple of hours socialising before it’s deemed late enough that they can retire from the festivities. The party is being held at the same hotel they’re staying in, and Ilya is eager to go back to the room he’s sharing with Shane so he can get out of his suit and into something more comfortable. He’s stopped by Barry on his way out of the hall.

“Ilya. Wait a second. I want you to meet someone.”

Ilya stops and turns to look at where Barry is approaching with another man in tow, and next to him, Shane brightens.

“Bobby!” he says and offers his hand for the other man to shake. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”

The man, Bobby, grins easily as he takes Shane’s hand. “It’s a good way to make new potential clients,” he says. “How are you doing, kid? You ready for this summer?”

“Yes, I’ve been keeping up with all my conditioning, and I’ve been injury free; I should be good to go.” Shane turns to look at Ilya. “Bobby is an expert in sports science and performance; we’ve been training together since I was sixteen,” he explains. “He’s really good.”

Bobby laughs at Shane’s earnest review before addressing Ilya directly. “It’s nice to meet you, Ilya. Barry tells me you might be interested in having a trainer over the summer.”

Ilya greets him with his own handshake. “Nice to meet you too,” he says even as he raises his brows at Barry in question.

Barry shrugs. “You’re going to need a structured training program over the summer if you’re wanting to make a spot on the team straight out of training camp. Since you’re staying with the Hollanders and Shane already trains with Bobby, I figured you’d be a perfect fit.”

Bobby nods. “I’ll be in Ottawa from July to August with Shane; it won’t be a problem to fit you into my program, and if you’re willing, we’ll do a run through of individual goals for you to work on. I don’t come cheap, but I guarantee you I’m worth it. If you don’t see improvement over the summer I’ll pay you back every dime.”

Shane is practically vibrating in place beside him, clearly eager for Ilya to join them, but Ilya hesitates. He recognises the man, he realises. Bobby Thorne had been widely regarded as the best trainer in hockey in Ilya’s first life, a pioneer in athlete development and movement. Ilya had not gotten the chance to work with him before, but he’s known guys who’d kill to be his client. He’d been expensive, yes, but more than worth it for the results he got.

Ilya doesn’t think Bobby will have built that reputation just quite yet in this time, but still, Ilya does not have the kind of money this will cost him. He’ll likely sign his entry level contract with the Bears very soon, but the payouts won’t start until the season begins in October, and that is only if he makes the team out of camp. The signing bonus, at least, he’ll get to cash out partly in July, but he’ll need that money to pay Barry and his agency. Ilya hasn’t even started worrying about his living situation in Boston yet; he can’t afford to waste his money on Bobby’s program even if he really, really wants to.

He’s been quiet for too long, and there’s a bit of an awkward silence when Shane touches his elbow carefully. “Ilya?” he says, and he sounds worried.

“I—” Ilya begins, but then stops. Has no idea how to convey his concerns, and finds to his horror that he’s embarrassed to have to decline this opportunity. He has no money, and it won't be for long, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he is poor now.

Ilya has not been without money since he was sixteen in his first life, and even before that, his father made a good living; Ilya’s childhood was lacking in many ways, was often harsh and violent, but he has never gone without. Even later, when his father started aging out of the police brass and Ilya was sending money home to pay for his brother’s partying and his father’s treatment, Ilya still had plenty of money to fund his own comfortable lifestyle.

“Gentlemen,” Barry cuts in. “Will you excuse us for just a moment?” He gives Shane and Bobby a cursory nod before he’s guiding Ilya off to the side. “What’s up?” he asks the second they’re far enough not to be overheard, and then switches to Russian for good measure. “Was this not a good idea, after all? I thought you and Shane were getting along really well, and this will be a unique opportunity for you. Getting in with Bobby now is going to benefit you later in your career.”

“No, no. It’s not that, it’s just…”

“What?” 

“Barry,” Ilya says helplessly. “I’m grateful, I really am, but I—fuck. I can’t pay him.”

Barry stares at him. “Ilya, kid, you’re killing me.”

Ilya shifts on his feet, uncomfortable. “Look, we both know I’m behind on my payments. Spartak probably won’t pay out the last of my contract, and you’ve been more than generous so far. But, Barry, I’m going to have to use my signing bonus to pay you, I’ll have to figure out housing in Boston, and then there is the money I owe Adrenaline Rush, and I just. I can’t afford to pay him.”

Barry shakes his head. “Ilya,” he says gently. He reaches up to place a comforting hand on Ilya’s shoulder. “You are going to be a superstar, you hear me? You’re going to make me so much money, it's not even funny. I’m not being generous, I’m being smart. I’m investing in my client because I believe in you. If you want to train with Shane and Bobby, I will front you the money. Don’t even worry about it.”

Ilya swallows. He has to look away from Barry’s sincere face before he answers because Barry might claim he’s not being generous but he is. Ilya doesn’t know anyone whose agent has been doing the things that Barry has done for him. 

He meets Shane’s eyes from a few metres away, and startles into a chuckle at Shane’s botched attempt at a wink.

He looks back at Barry. A friend as much as an agent, he’s beginning to realise. “Okay, yeah. I’d like that.”

Barry’s eyes search his for a moment; he must find what he’s looking for, because soon enough he’s smiling. “Okay. Good man. Now let’s go hash out some details,” he says, and guides Ilya back to where Shane and Bobby are waiting for them.

**

Later that night, Ilya is staring up at the ceiling, too wired to sleep, when he feels the cover of the bed being pulled aside before Shane is crawling in next to him.

“You’re thinking too loud,” he grumbles, and immediately follows that up with, “Scoot over. You’re taking up too much space.”

“This is my bed,” Ilya says indignantly.

“Sharing is caring.”

“No, not stealing other people’s stuff is caring.”

Shane hums, but he doesn’t answer, just waits patiently until Ilya groans and makes room for him the way they both knew he would.

He doesn’t do it often, but in the month that they’ve lived together and shared his childhood bedroom, Shane will sometimes make his way into Ilya’s bed when he’s feeling overwhelmed—more frequently the closer they had gotten to the draft—or if he thinks Ilya has been particularly homesick that day.

They hadn’t shared this before in that other future. This type of intimacy without it ever turning sexual. At least not until they’d actually committed to a relationship. Ilya likes it. It’s a different route than the journey they’d taken before, but if the end destination is the same, he finds he doesn’t mind this. Likes it a lot, actually.

“You okay?”

“Mhm. Body is tired but my brain is very awake. The days leading up to the draft was very…”

“Exhausting?” Shane suggests when Ilya trails off, unable to find the word he’s looking for.

“Exhausting,” Ilya agrees. “Scary too, and exciting. It was many things.” 

They’re quiet for a moment, then Shane asks, “Were you scared you’d have to talk about the pictures today? About being bi?”

Ilya thinks about it. He’s not been scared, necessarily, but wary, yes. He’s made the choices he has knowing the impact it would likely have on his life and his career, and maybe some part of him had been preparing to have to defend himself today, to have to apologise for the pictures but stand his ground on his sexuality. It’d be enough to drain anyone.

“No, not exactly. No one said anything, but sometimes I could tell the elephant was there. Is that how you say?”

“The elephant in the room. People talk around it or avoid it completely.”

“Yes. That. Why should it matter? I like girls and I like boys, and still I am best at hockey. Is this not the most interesting thing about me?”

“It is,” Shane says insistently. He’s found Ilya’s hand under the covers, threading their fingers together the way he’s decided best friends do sometimes. “I mean, you’re second best, obviously, but I love your hockey, Ilya. I think it’s amazing to watch.”

Ilya snorts. “This is how you comfort people, Hollander? Tell them lies about being second and then follow up with cute compliments?”

“I mean, if you can’t handle the truth then—no! Ilya, stop!” Shane bursts into giggles when Ilya’s free hand finds his side, fingers gliding over the spot on Shane’s ribs where he knows he is particularly ticklish.

“Take it back! Who is best at hockey?”

“Me! I am!”

Ilya tickles him harder, smile bright at the way Shane’s laughter increases. “Who? I did not hear you.”

“Fine! It’s you! You’re the best! Please, stop. I can’t breathe,” Shane wheezes out, and Ilya pulls away smugly, letting Shane catch his breath.

He’s glad for the darkness of the room; Shane sometimes has difficulties reading other people’s emotions, but he would not have missed the besotted look Ilya is sure is plastered all over his face right now.

“Thank you. I feel better now,” he says.

“But your brain is still awake, huh?”

Ilya nods. “Да. Don’t think I am ready to sleep yet,” he admits.

There’s a brief silence, but then Shane is pulling the covers back again, climbing out of bed this time. He turns to look at Ilya expectantly, and Ilya doesn’t need to see to know there will be a determined look on his face. “Come on,” Shane says. “There’s a hotel gym here. We can go run off some excess energy; we’ll tire you out that way.”

Ilya is reminded then, of thirteen—twelve?—years before in another lifetime, where Shane and Ilya had met at this same hotel, in the gym Shane is talking about now, but under very different circumstances. He thinks that must have been the first time Ilya had really looked at Shane Hollander and thought to himself, I want him.

He tries to wrap his head around a moment that has already happened, that is also happening right now, and finds he has to abandon the thought because that way lies only madness and confusion. He doesn’t understand it, the time travel. Doesn’t understand how he can have memories of things that happened but that he is living through differently this time. How can both be true? How can he experience things that hadn’t happened at all, and still remember the things that had happened?

He doesn’t know. Maybe he never will. 

But here and now, watching as the love of his life flits about the room, gathering his workout clothes and Ilya’s too, maybe he doesn’t need to.

**

It’s July when Ilya sees Shane’s girlfriend for what will be the last time.

He’d known from his first life, in a distant sort of way, that Shane had had a girlfriend he had broken up with shortly after the draft—after that weird, charged night they’d shared at the hotel gym—but Ilya has honestly not given much thought to her.

He would maybe feel more guilty about that if Shane himself doesn’t seem to forget about her half the time.

The first time they met, Shane had seemed genuinely confused for a second when she’d introduced herself as Shane’s girlfriend—Ilya had had to talk him down from the panic attack he had suffered afterwards for being, in his own words, “A terrible boyfriend and a horrible human being.”

That Shane still does not realise he’s gay is honestly a mystery.

Jessica is a perfectly lovely girl. She has brown eyes and brown hair and is of average height. She comes from a good family, is the youngest of three children, and wants to study human resource management at the University of Ottawa. She is, Ilya thinks, utterly boring. Not in the fun way that Shane somehow makes interesting and exciting, but in the way of respectable, dull people everywhere.

She does not like Ilya. 

This was obvious from the second they meet, from the moment she laid eyes on where Shane was more or less straddling Ilya’s lap, trying to reach for the Wii remote Ilya was holding over his head.

“Shane?” she’d said uncertainly, looking between the two of them, and Shane had frozen from where he’d been tugging none too gently at Ilya’s curls to reach the remote. He always fights dirty, his Shane, but Ilya has never minded, not when it gets him Shane practically sprawled all over him.

“Hello,” Ilya had said cheerfully when Shane seemed unable to find his words. He’d grinned to see Shane sending him a panicked look, didn't even think he had known why he was panicking, and had sat up properly, settling a hand on Shane’s waist to keep him from sliding off the sofa entirely as Ilya righted himself. “I am Ilya. Nice to meet you.”

“Jessica,” she’d answered. “Shane’s girlfriend,” she’d added, pointedly, and bristled when Ilya had raised his brows as if to say, Are you really?

It had not been an auspicious first meeting.

That had been back in early June, and since then, Ilya has only seen Jessica a handful of times. She’d not joined them at the draft in either timelines.

He’s on his way out the door to meet with Bobby for a private session—they’ve been working on his lateral movement lately—when he accidentally runs into her out on the porch.

“Oh,” they say at the same time. Jessica blinks at him.

“I am here to see Shane.”

“Are you here to see Shane?”

They speak over each other, and it’s so painfully awkward Ilya is just dying to excuse himself.

“Well, Shane is inside,” he says and gestures at the open door behind him. “He should still be in our room.”

“Your room,” she says slowly, “that you share.”

Ilya only shrugs at that. The Hollanders’ house is not very big, but they do have a guestroom outside of the master and Shane’s bedroom. Yuna had tried, in those first few days, to suggest Ilya take the guestroom, but Shane wouldn’t hear of it and Ilya was perfectly content to follow his lead. It hadn’t been an issue since.

“Yes. The room that we share. Anyway, I have to leave now. I will see you later, Jessica.” 

He won’t know that Shane ended things between them until he’s back home later that night. When he asks Shane why he broke up with her, Shane shrugs, biting at his lip. He’s baking, a recipe that has quickly become Ilya’s favourite, and fiddles with the ingredients for a moment. Ilya waits him out. Knows if he gives him the time to think it through, Shane will tell him soon enough.

Finally, as he’s forming his dough into cookie balls, Shane says, “I don’t think I actually liked her very much. I probably should have broken up with her sooner.” He glances up at Ilya, wincing guiltily when their eyes meet. “Does that make me a bad person? Fuck, it does, doesn’t it? It’s a shitty move to string someone along.”

Ilya works very hard to keep his face neutral. Doesn’t say that from what he’s gathered, Jessica had liked Shane’s insane hockey talent and his burgeoning fame more than anything else. They really hadn’t had a lot going on between them as a couple. “You are eighteen, Shane. Relationships at this age is maybe not so serious, yes?”

“I guess. I mean—” Shane looks off to the side, looking a little hesitant, a little thoughtful. “I think with the right person, it could be. Serious.”

Ilya was twenty nine when he died; would have been thirty that year. He’d died the first week of January in 2021, and had come back on the first week of January 2009. Since then, he’s lived another six months. He’s celebrated a birthday. He is eighteen in body but thirty in mind and spirit. He is so in love with this boy he doesn’t know how his heart doesn’t explode from all of the emotions it tries to contain inside his chest.

But therein lies the problem. Shane is, for all intents and purposes, still a boy.

Ilya is not.

He wants a future with Shane, with his soulmate if such a thing exists, but he wants to give Shane the space and time to grow, to come into himself. Ilya intends to give him the safest possible environment in which to do that, to create a culture that will hopefully be more open and receptive of them, but that means he needs to give Shane the chance to live for himself first. To figure out who he is outside of Ilya.

So he says, voice gentle, “If it is the right person, it will always be serious, no? Can be serious later then, give you chance to be curious first.”

Shane tilts his head in question at that. “Curious?” he asks, because he doesn’t get that reference; they haven’t had that conversation in this timeline.

“Yes,” Ilya says firmly. “About life, about love, about the people you meet. Is good to be curious. You learn a lot about yourself.”

Shane stares at him for a long moment, looking at Ilya as if he’s a puzzle he hasn’t quite figured out yet. Curious.

“Okay,” Shane says at last, and Oh, shit, Ilya thinks. 

(That maybe backfired just a little.)

**

The rest of the summer passes by quickly.

Ilya shoots up two centimetres from July to August, and Shane is so jealous he takes to measuring himself every day to see if he’s had a growth spurt; he hasn’t and he won’t. He never did pass the 178 cm he measured at the combine.

Ilya understands now why his stride and reach have been so unbalanced, knows he’ll have another three centimetres of growth before he’s reached the height of his adult body, but working with Bobby goes a long way at adjusting the deviation gradually. Ilya would have paid him for that alone. He’s absolutely worth every dime.

Still, Ilya’s brief experience with having no money has left its mark, and he figures he should start planning for a contingency in the event that he loses hockey and won’t be able to make money that way. It is a legitimate concern considering the brutality of the sport. So he goes back to his lists—the ones he’s got hidden inside a matryoshka doll, written in Russian—and rifles through them until he finds the one he’s titled INVESTMENTS????

(Shane can be Mr Real Estate; Ilya will be Mr Wall Street.)

When he calls Barry to ask if he can recommend a decent financial advisor, there is a stunned silence over the line before Barry says, “I can’t believe people tried to convince me you were a complete wild child. What kind of eighteen-year-old wants to set up a financial portfolio?”

Two hours later, Ilya is being introduced to a woman named Lisa Moore over Skype, and once he’s explained the kind of things he’s looking to invest in, she gives him a grin he can only describe as feral. “You and I, Mr Rozanov, are going to have a great partnership,” she says, and Ilya believes her.

At the tailend of August, Yuna calls a family meeting in the kitchen.

“David and I have been talking,” she says, and looks as if she’s gearing herself up for battle. “Have you boys started thinking about the practicalities of moving to Boston and Montreal?"

Shane is immediately suspicious. “I’ll rent an apartment, and then look for something more permanent if I make the team out of camp.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to billet? At least your first season?”

“No. I don’t want to live with people I don’t know. I won’t be comfortable there.”

“Come on, kiddo,” David says gently. “You know it’s not unusual for rookies as young as you to live with a veteran player to help with the transition. Being in the NHL is going to be a big change.”

Shane is shaking his head even as Yuna says, “You’ve managed perfectly fine with Ilya, haven’t you? You didn’t really know him either before he started living with us.”

“Ilya is different.”

“How?”

“He just is,” Shane says stubbornly, and won’t be budged on the issue. Ilya knocks their shoulders together in comfort.

Yuna sighs. Seems to accept she won’t be making any headway with Shane for the moment, and turns to Ilya instead. “What about you, honey? We really do think billeting is the way to go. At least with Shane we’ll only be a couple of hours away, but you’ll be all alone in a whole other country,” she says worriedly. 

“Yuna and I would really feel much better if you were living with someone from the team,” David adds.

In his first life, both Ilya and Shane had sat out their draft season. Ilya has actually never learned why Shane decided not to play that first year, why he returned to his team in the minor leagues for an extra season. Nothing is ever guaranteed, of course, but as top ten prospects, both Shane and Ilya are more than good enough to make it to the NHL, and as the number one and two draft picks, they’ll almost certainly make their respective teams out of training camp. That is true in this life, and it was true in his previous one.

Ilya will probably never know why Shane had declined his first invitation to attend Montreal’s training camp; there’s no way he didn’t receive one.

Ilya had declined his own invitation at the behest of his father, because Grigori had demanded he stay one more year in Russia, play one more season for Spartak. Ilya does not remember that year fondly. He’d been miserable and resentful and all he wanted was to play in the NHL already. To live his own life away from his father’s sharp words, his brother’s demands, and his country’s expectations. 

Ilya had wanted freedom.

He’d grown a lot that year, maturing faster than he should have, probably. So when he finally was ready to begin his rookie season, a year older, Ilya had felt old at nineteen. Certainly hadn’t felt the need to share a home with anyone from his team.

In retrospect, he thinks maybe he should have. That in Ilya’s quest for freedom, he’d been so desperate for solitude and a safe space that he’d isolated himself instead. Hadn’t gotten the chance to make any deep connections to the people around him in Boston, and finds that he is craving that now.

“I think I would like that, probably. Yes,” Ilya says, and has to hold back a grin at the horrified look Shane sends him. “Will give me chance to meet new people.” He turns to tug at Shane’s ear playfully. “Since I cannot smuggle my best friend in my suitcase. You are small enough, yes? Will fit in my luggage?”

“You’re such an ass!” Shane exclaims, and pinches Ilya’s side in punishment, but there is a reluctant smile on his face. “5’10 is not even that small.”

“Is tiny,” Ilya insists. “Like baby bird. Very cute.”

Shane rolls his eyes, but Yuna and David laugh.

“You agree, then? It’d be a good idea for you to billet?”

Ilya nods at Yuna’s question, so thankful for these two people who have accepted him into their lives a second time. Who, even without the benefit of being Shane’s boyfriend, have decided to love and care for Ilya.

“Yes. I think it will be good.”

“Okay, fantastic! I’ll call Barry and we’ll coordinate with Boston management. It will be great!”

David sighs fondly as Yuna disappears out of the kitchen in a flurry of movement, already pulling out her phone and muttering under her breath.

“You’ll have to excuse her, boys. She’s been worrying for days now.”

“Is okay. Means she cares,” Ilya says as he leans back in his chair, arm stretching to rest on the back of Shane’s. “You really don’t want to billet?” he asks him, tugging on his ear again—the other one this time, and then has to laugh, sharing a look with David when Shane visibly blanches at the prospect of sharing his personal space with people he doesn’t know. 

“No, I—Dad, please don’t make me. I’ll have a roommate for road games; I don’t want to have to share my space at home too. Not with—with people I don’t know, or might not get along with.”

David’s face goes soft. He reaches across the table, grabs Shane’s hand in his and says, “If what you want is to rent an apartment, then we’ll make that happen. No one is going to make you billet if you don’t want to.”

Shane slumps in relief, as if there was ever any chance Shane wasn’t going to get what he wanted.

Spoilt, Ilya thinks warmly, and tugs on his ear one last time.

Chapter End Notes

So! A couple of things:
1) Thank you so much to rorurio who pointed out Ilyunka is the wrong diminutive of Ilya. I realise now that I have misread Ilyukha (which Google told me would be a more masculine diminutive used by friends and fathers) as Ilyunka. I've changed it to Ilyusha just to be safe. This was for chapter 3.

2) As I was writing this chapter, it occurred to me that in canon, Shane and Ilya did not play in the NHL/MLH their draft season. This, to me, is a bit of a plot hole. It's not unusual for the top draftpicks to make their team roster immediately, and since Shane and Ilya are loosely inspired by Crosby and Ovechkin, I'd have to think they'd have the kind of talent where there'd be no need for further development in the minors/KHL. Since there is given absolutely no reason for why they'd defer their rookie season in canon (not that I have seen anywhere), I can only speculate. Like, Shane and Ilya tied at 67 goals scored their rookie season. That is an actual insane stat, which means they definitely should have been playing their draft season. I thought about not adressing it, and just continue on as if 2009-2010 was always their rookie season, but then there are canon events later down the line that doesn't quite make sense, logically, and also it is just weird that they didn't play their draft season. So we're making a shift in the timeline! In the life pre time travel, they defered for a year, and post time travel, the play their draft season. This also means I made a tiny change to the narrative in chapter 5 when Ilya is on the phone with Barry. It's not much, but it does reflect this change of events.

Chapter 7

Chapter Notes

Happy New Year, everyone!

Preparing to leave Ottawa for Boston is a whirlwind of paperwork and phone calls and Barry making sure Ilya has all the necessary documentation he needs in order to travel out of the country. Barry had set his agency's lawyers the task of working with the Canadian government since Ilya first arrived in Toronto, and once he was drafted by Boston, the Bears got involved too; Ilya trusts Barry implicitly, but he has been largely kept out of the everyday going-ons of the proceedings, and he can’t help but worry. His legal status is complicated, and Ilya has been actively avoiding thinking about how there’s no guarantee they’ll have it all sorted out before the start of camp.

Because Ilya is in Canada under a refugee protection claim, he’s not allowed to use his Russian passport. Any travelling would have to be done under a Canadian refugee travel document. He’s technically not eligible for one until his application for permanent residency goes through—which, Barry bemoans, likely won’t be for another six months at the earliest. A year if they’re unlucky—but there’s some hope for an exemption as long as his refugee claim is accepted by the Immigration and Refugee Board. It’s been pending since he first met with the border agents his first day in Canada.

They’re in a bit of a grey zone here, legally, but Ilya’s status as a drafted NHL player is not without its benefits. He’s been given to understand that there is some excitement over the fact that he can, in the future, potentially represent Canada in international competition once he is granted citizenship. Apparently, this has sped up his paperwork considerably.

Becoming a Canadian citizen is still at least four years away, though, and it won’t matter for Sochi, because the chances of Ilya being disappeared if he steps back on Russian soil is distressingly high, but there is still the annual World Championships. And who knows? Maybe the league officials will actually allow the NHL players to attend the 2018 games this time around.

Ilya doesn’t know what the hell kind of magic Barry is working, but in the first week of September, he is granted a hearing with the IRB in Ottawa. Barry and the lawyers are there, presenting his case and all the relevant evidence, and after hours of Ilya answering very uncomfortable questions and detailing why returning to Russia would be very much not good, his claim is accepted.

Ilya is so relieved, so fucking grateful, that the second he steps out of the conference room to where Shane has been anxiously waiting along with his parents, he collapses into his arms, crying silently into his neck.

This whole plan has been such a Hail Mary from the beginning; Ilya can’t believe it’s even worked half as well as it has. It’s been the craziest, dumbest shit he has ever done in either life, but he’d been so desperate. At the end of his rope with no way out, and all he’d wanted was this:

Shane’s arms around him. Shane saying, “You’re okay, Ilya. It’s okay, you’re safe. Everything is okay.”

That is probably not entirely true. Ilya is going to be the first openly queer NHL player in a sport that is famously driven by toxic masculinity, and he remembers the aftermath of Scott Hunter; a lot of it had been positive, but Ilya knows the verbal abuse Scott had suffered on the ice from both players and fans alike. Knows there’d been high sticks and cross checks and hits that had been more brutal, more vicious since his coming out. Knows not everyone in his own barn had been happy about Scott being gay or the way he’d made that fact public.

Being out was a relief, Scott had told him once, but it wasn’t always safe.

Things had been changing, though. Gradually, slowly—so fucking slowly—things had been improving since 2017. Not enough, of course, because by the time Ilya died in 2021, Shane was still terrified of what coming out publicly would do to their careers, terrified that loving each other, specifically, would alienate their teammates and league officials and fans and—that’s just not acceptable; Ilya refuses for that to be their reality this time around.

So he’s got work to do. Ilya still isn’t done, not by a long shot. There is more to his plan and plenty of lists to go through, and he knows the road ahead will likely be hard and long and unpleasant. But there is hope too, an anticipation of good things to come, so for a brief, selfish moment, Ilya allows himself to bask in the feeling of today’s win and Shane holding him close.

If only for today, everything is okay.

**

It takes a couple of days for the travel documents to come through, and then another two days after that before the Bears have his work visa in place. This leaves Ilya with only a few days before rookie camp and Shane with no time at all; he’ll have to leave for Montreal tomorrow.

Shane and Ilya do not actually have to attend rookie camp. They’ve been guaranteed a spot at their teams’ main training camp regardless, and so rookie camp was voluntary for both of them. Shane, though, is adamant that it’s important to start their team careers with the rest of the newcomers. They’re already so far beyond what constitutes a normal skill level, he doesn’t want to be set further apart when they’re all starting out at the same time.

Ilya had skipped it the last time and gone straight to training camp. It’d been an unnecessary hassle and everybody already knew there was no way Ilya wasn’t making the roster anyway. He still thinks that, honestly, but Shane does make a good point.

About thirty to forty guys will be at rookie camp, and less than half of that will go on to be invited to the team’s training camp. Usually, only one to three rookies actually make the team straight away. The ones that don’t make it will go back to the minors for further development, and some will wash out entirely, but they’ll all remember.

They’ll remember that Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov grinded through rookie camp just like them. That they put in the work, the effort, and the sweat even if everybody there already knew they didn’t need to, that they could have gone straight to main camp.

There is merit in that. Some of those guys will make it to the NHL eventually; it doesn’t hurt for them to already be fostering good will when Ilya knows exactly the kind of careers he and Shane will have. The legends they’ll become and the weight their names will carry.

Okay, yeah, maybe rookie camp isn’t such a bad idea even if, professionally, Ilya will get nothing out of it.

If nothing else, it will give him the chance to gauge the reactions to his queerness. He’s already told Barry he won’t be flaunting his sexuality, but he won’t shy away from it either. He’s out now, and Ilya is done with hiding.

“You remember to pack everything?” he asks later that night, sitting crosslegged on his bed as he watches Shane meticulously sort through the toiletries he’s got spread out on his own bed. Ilya doesn’t know why he bothers; Shane has gone through it twice already.

“Just the basics,” Shane says absently. “No point in bringing anything but the essentials when I don’t know if I’ll make the team yet.”

“Yes, if I was bad at hockey like you, I would be worried also. It will be difficult for you to make team when you are so bad.”

“Fuck you!”

Ilya grins as Shane abandons his packing and launches himself across the room, diving for Ilya with pointy limbs and clawed fingers. He grunts as he’s pushed down on the bed with Shane on top of him, pinching at whatever skin he can reach. Besides tugging at Ilya’s hair, it’s Shane’s favorite go to when they scuffle. He always fights dirty, because Ilya’s size means Shane is on the losing end more often than not, and Ilya is never prepared for how much the pinches sting.

“Ow! Motherfuck—” he starts out, but is cut off by David’s voice from the kitchen, warning them to knock it off and keep it down; they’ve got an early start tomorrow.

Shane snickers. “You got us in trouble,” he sing-songs, and really he’s just asking for Ilya to push him off the bed at this point. Before he can, though, Shane goes boneless on top of him, collapsing fully on Ilya and burrowing his face against his chest. He’s a solid, familiar weight.

“I’ll miss you,” he says, voice muffled by Ilya’s t-shirt.

Ilya smiles softly at that. “Will miss you too, котёнок, but we have plan, yes? Text everyday, call all the time, and visit when we can.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“And we will play each other often. Will be sad for you to lose so many games, but will good to see me, I think.”

Ilya laughs when Shane pinches him again. He gathers him close, stroking his hands up and down Shane’s back in comfort. He’s trying very hard not to lose his shit, to be strong for Shane, because not spending nearly every hour of the day together is going to suck. Ilya has been living out his dream these last few months, getting to spend every day with Shane. He’s never had that before. Even the summers Shane and Ilya had shared in his other life had been fraught with the knowledge that they couldn’t actually go anywhere, that they couldn’t be seen together unless it was for the charity. 

Now, Ilya has spent a summer blasting their friendship all over his Facebook page and the Twitter account he’d gotten back in June; his posts have been about eighty per cent hockey and twenty per cent whatever shenanigans he’s gotten up to with Shane, and because they’ve been working out so much together with Bobby, lifting weights and running drills at the rink, this means that his feed is really a hundred per cent Shane.

Ilya has actually been getting a decent amount of followers since the draft. He’s picking up more and more of Shane’s fans too, because Shane doesn’t really engage online unless it’s on a hockey forum, and he’s been all over Ilya’s socials for months now.

It’s been a fucking revelation not having to hide how much Shane means to him, even if they’re only best friends at this time. He’s not looking forward to going back to only speaking through text and phone calls.

“I wish there was a way for us to play together,” Shane says after a moment of quiet, a whispered confession they’ve shared between them several times after weeks of living together.

Maybe, sometime in the future, that will be a possibility. 

But for now, it remains nothing but a dream.

**

Saying goodbye in the morning is brutal. Ilya cries and Shane goes non verbal. 

It has to be one of the most lowstake goodbyes of his life, because there is absolutely no uncertainty around the fact that they will meet again; Ilya does not have to hide Shane this time around. Won’t have to steal time out of his own life just to orchestrate a few precious hours of clandestine meetings and secret touches. This time, he’ll get to introduce Shane to his teammates, to bring him home or show him around Boston without it having to be a scandal. No one will think it’s weird that Ilya wants his best friend in his life.

So yeah, this should be an easy goodbye, but letting go of Shane feels like the hardest thing Ilya will ever have to do.

It's a miserable affair all around. 

In the end, Yuna has to gently pull Ilya out from where Shane has been stubbornly clinging to him for the last several minutes, and both she and David are a little misty eyed once they’ve finally got Shane buckled in the car, his bags in the trunk and David behind the wheel.

Ilya stays behind with Yuna, watching as the car disappears down the street, Shane in the passenger seat and Ilya’s heart cradled in the palm of his hands.

“Come on, honey,” Yuna says, once the car is gone from view and Ilya still has not made any sign of moving. “Let’s go inside. We’ll make a pot of tea, okay?”

Ilya sniffs and knuckles at his left eye roughly. “Yeah, okay,” he says, voice hoarse. 

He lets Yuna pull him into a sidehug, guiding him back into the house that Shane has made Ilya’s home.

**

Yuna may have been sceptical of Ilya in the beginning, but once she decided he was hers, there was no going back. Ilya is family for life now. He thinks that will be true no matter what happens between Shane and him in the future.

Ilya knows exactly how lucky he is for Yuna and David to have accepted him into their home and life, but he’s still surprised whenever they display such obvious care for him; David had been adamant that Ilya not travel to Boston on his own the first time, and because he couldn’t get the days off work, they’d decided that David would drive with Shane to Montreal and Yuna would fly with Ilya to Boston.

“It makes sense for me to go with you,” Yuna had told Ilya firmly when he’d tried to protest that he could travel on his own, that he didn’t want any of them to have to skip work. “I’m already scaling back my hours at the office, and you know the plan is to quit entirely. We’re getting more and more calls about endorsements for Shane and I can already tell it’s going to be a fulltime job just keeping up with that.” She patted his cheek fondly. “Honestly, if Barry wasn’t so possessive of you I’d like to have managed your brand deals too.”

Yuna has been gradually stepping back from her job for about a year now, Ilya knows, because the plan has always been for her to become Shane’s fulltime manager, but it still feels excessive that she’d want to spend several days with Ilya in Boston, making sure he’s fully situated in time for the season opener.

Ilya is thirty years old. The time travelling makes it confusing, but it doesn’t negate the fact that he doesn’t actually need this kind of handholding. It’s nice, though, is the thing.

Makes him wonder if this is what it would have been like if his mother had still been alive. Would she have fussed over him too? Insisting on travelling with him and making sure he had everything he needed before leaving him to experience life on his own?

He thinks she might have, but hates that he’ll never know for sure.

At least Yuna is giving him an approximation of what it would have been like, and he loves her fiercely for that. 

He’s nervous going through the airport, and Yuna looks ready to throw down even as she reminds him that all his paperwork is in order; no one is going to stop him from leaving the country. Logically, Ilya knows this, but his entire career will depend on being able to travel freely between Canada and the US, and Ilya doesn’t start relaxing until they’ve actually boarded the plane, and even then he can’t quite let go of the tension in his shoulders. Five hours later, they’ve had a layover in Toronto, arrived at Logan International, and made it into a taxi after getting their bags. No one ever gave his travel documents more than a cursory glance.

Being back in Boston after so many years is a little bittersweet and a lot nostalgic. Ilya keeps smiling as he looks out the window on the drive to the hotel. He has to stop himself from pointing out different places and buildings to Yuna; he’s not supposed to have any memories of this place yet. 

Yuna must catch some of his mood, anyway. “You’re excited,” she says, and sounds relieved. Ilya knows she’s still worried about him being so far away from them.

He turns away from the window to grin at her. “I will like this city very much, I think. Will win the Cup here.” Maybe this time he’ll get more than one with the Bears. He’d really like that. “Will win before Shane, for bragging rights,” he adds, just to tease, and Yuna startles into a laugh.

“Well, we’ll see,” she says, not very convincingly, because she is a diehard Voyageurs fan and Shane’s biggest supporter, but she doesn’t lose her smile.

They split into separate rooms at the hotel after agreeing to meet up for dinner later. 

Because there was such a rush to get his refugee status and paperwork in order before he left Ottawa, the plan is to stay at the hotel through the duration of rookie camp and then meet up with the Bears’ management to discuss his housing situation for the coming season. Rookie camp is scheduled to run through the next four days, and then there’ll be another four-day gap before training camp starts up. Hopefully, he’ll be out of the hotel by that time.

“How was first day of camp?” he asks Shane over the phone after dinner. “Still think is good idea?”

There is a telling silence over the line.

Ilya snickers.

“Well, it’s just the first day,” Shane says diplomatically. “It’s all measuring and testing, getting an idea of where everyone is at physically. We’ll do more skating tomorrow, play through some scrimmages.”

“Ah, so everyone sucks,” Ilya says knowingly. He’s only teasing. Certainly, there will be no one of Shane’s caliber to compete against—not with Ilya in Boston—but the others wouldn’t be there if they weren’t at least decent hockey players.

“Don’t be an ass. Anyway, there’s a couple of guys I like the look of. I think one of them might make the team, actually.”

“Oh?”

Shane hums thoughtfully. “Yeah, he’s got size, strong legs, and—” He breaks off, laughing. He sounds amused and a little incredulous. “He’s got a mouth on him, was chirping at everyone the whole day. Definitely gonna be a pest on the ice.”

“Like me then,” Ilya says, and smiles fondly when he hears Shane laugh again. 

“Yeah, just like you.”

It’s been two days since they last saw each other in person, and obviously that is two days too many, but they’ve talked on the phone several times a day since then. Ilya doesn’t see that changing anytime soon. 

Shane continues giving him the rundown of his first day of camp, and when he winds down, Ilya says, “Tell me about the apartment,” unwilling for the conversation to be over just yet.

He settles into his bed, closes his eyes, and listens to Shane’s voice in his ear.

**

Rookie camp is about as useless as Ilya had predicted it would be, but he’s no slacker and he’s not about to give anyone reason to doubt him or his commitment. Not when he’s being watched by the public who attend the open practices.

Everyone is curious about Ilya Rozanov.

The staff is nothing but professional and accommodating, and Ilya sees Doyle and the Bears’ coaching staff around sometimes, watching the players and making notes on clipboards, but mostly the trainers run the show. 

The days pass quickly, and Ilya is pleasantly surprised by how little shit he gets about everything. Sure, there’s a few boys who mock him for his refugee status and some who sneer at his sexuality, but it’s mostly subtle digs, nothing overt where Ilya can see or hear. Mostly, everyone is focused on showing off and making it to training camp.

And anyway, the ones who do look like they would like to get up in his face quickly shut up when they see him on the ice; Ilya is very, very good at what he does.

He doesn’t delude himself into thinking that they don’t disparage him plenty behind his back, but there is not much he can do about that. 

By the time camp is over, he’s even made something of a friend. 

Dan is tall and wiry, all limbs and uncoordinated movement off the ice, but a fucking gazelle on it. He has soft hands and a bomb of a slapshot, and Ilya thinks he’d do very well as a defenceman, actually, even though he’s been playing as a forward for most of his life.

Dan, as it turns out, has a twin brother who’s attending Montreal’s rookie camp. “We were drafted a couple of years ago, but we’ve been stuck in the minors since then. I’ve got a feeling about this year, though!”

“No shit?” Ilya says. “My best friend was drafted by Montreal this year. Maybe he knows your brother?”

“Maybe. What’s your friend’s name?”

“Shane Hollander,” Ilya says, and almost laughs himself sick when Dan takes a rare tumble and goes crashing into the ice.

“Dude,” he says meaningfully, staring up at Ilya from where he’s sprawled out on the cold surface. “Shane Hollander is your best friend? The Shane Hollander? Canada’s fucking prince of hockey? My mom loves that guy.”

Apparently, Dan is Canadian. Apparently, Shane is a lot more famous than Ilya thought at this time. This might explain his still increasing follower count, actually.

In the future, Shane is going to have a hard time going anywhere in Canada where they won’t recognise him, but he isn’t quite there, yet. 

Yuna seems pleased Ilya has gotten himself a buddy, and insists on inviting Dan out for dinner with them. Dan is incredibly bemused to see Shane Hollander’s mother in Boston with Ilya, and they spend a few minutes explaining how Ilya has been living with the Hollanders since May.

Dan is a good guy, but kind of simple. He does not keep up with the news and doesn’t have social media; he’s missed most of what’s gone down in Ilya’s life since he left Russia.

“Oh man,” he says sympathetically when Ilya tells him about the pictures. “That’s one way of being outed, eh? Tough luck,” he says, and gives Ilya’s shoulder a friendly squeeze.

Fuck, now he’s going to be disappointed if Dan doesn’t make the team. Ilya likes him a lot.

The end of rookie camp means that Ilya and Yuna can finally sit down with Boston’s management, and even Barry has flown in for the occasion. 

“We have some other business to discuss, anyway,” he tells Ilya when they meet at Doyle’s office. “Figured I might as well come see you in person.”

Yuna is the one who kicks off the meeting, reiterating that she and David are happy to remain Ilya’s home in Canada, and that they feel it’s important he won’t be on his own in Boston. “At least his rookie season,” she says, and both Doyle and Barry murmur their agreement.

“And you still feel it’s okay to billet this year, Ilya?”

Ilya nods at Doyle’s question. “Yes. Will be good for me, I think. I don’t like being alone,” he admits, and thinks he sees Doyle soften a little at that.

“I have spoken with the Hollanders and Mr Barry several times over the last couple of weeks. We have a few alternatives for you. Cliff Marlow has expressed a willingness to host you if you’d like to stay with a player, and we have a few people on staff whose families you could billet with.”

Ilya’s brows shoot up at that. Cliff is eight years older than Ilya, but he’d never once shown a desire to accommodate any of the rookies in Ilya’s first life; he was more likely to corrupt them with alcohol and parties than being anything like a sensible mentor. Cliff had been a good friend to Ilya, had even kept in touch after Ilya moved on to the Centaurs, but he’d been very attached to his bachelorhood. Ilya can’t imagine he’d want an eighteen-year-old in his space, cramping his style.

He holds back a cackle, wondering if maybe Cliff had been strongly advised to open up his home for Ilya this year.

Yuna tuts disapprovingly. “I’m still not sure Cliff Marlow is the best idea. I’ve heard he’s a bit of a womanizer. Perhaps that’s not the kind of environment that would be best for Ilya this year.”

Doyle hums consideringly at that, but he doesn’t deny it. He leans back in his chair, stapling his fingers over his stomach as he looks Ilya over.

Ilya finds himself straightening automatically. 

“I would like to offer one more option. I’ve spoken with my wife, and if you are open to it, Ilya, we would like for you to live with us this season.”

“That’s a very generous offer, Brian,” Barry says after a brief pause, and shares a look with Yuna.

It doesn’t seem like they’d known about this beforehand.

Doyle tilts his head in acknowledgement. “My wife and I have a house in Wellesley. Our kids have left the nest, but we’re currently fostering three of our grandchildren. You’d be sharing a home with three girls under ten,” he tells Ilya with a wry smile. “There’s a lot of tea parties.”

Ilya can’t help but laugh at that, remembering boa feathers, sparkly tiaras and Hayden Pike’s girls.

He glances at Yuna, and while she’s giving Ilya time to answer for himself, it’s obvious this would be her preferred option.

“You’re sure?” he asks, just to be absolutely certain. He thinks Doyle probably has a good handle on what Ilya is like as a person after all the scouting and the reports. He’ll know what he’s like as a player, but Ilya still comes with a lot of baggage, and the noise surrounding him is only going to get louder once the season begins. Shane and Ilya are going to be making waves, already as rookies.

“Cathy and I have given it a lot of thought; I wouldn’t have offered if we weren’t sure.”

Ilya looks at him, sees those solemn eyes and the calm expression. 

Barry is right. This is a generous offer. Established players hosting younger ones for a season or two is a common enough practice, but Ilya can’t remember ever having heard of a GM opening his home to a rookie. Doyle hadn’t done it before, and he wonders what exactly has changed from his last life that he would do so now? There have already been so many differences—Ilya himself feels different—that he has no chance of pinpointing what the deciding factor would have been.

“Ilya?” Barry prompts.

It’s a considerable change from the other timeline, and Ilya finds himself taking it at face value. It’s a generous offer, yes, but also, it is kind.

He’s getting more and more used to that, he thinks as he looks over at Yuna again and finds her smiling back at him encouragingly. 

There are going to be people who will make it a sport out of hating Ilya. They’ll hate that he’s Russian. They’ll hate that he’s queer. They’ll really hate how good he is at hockey.

But there are good people, too. Kind people. And when they reach out a hand, Ilya wants to meet them halfway.

“Yes. Yes, I would like that very much.”

**

Ilya drives Yuna to the airport the next day.

Well, Dan drives once Ilya finds out he has a car in Boston—he heckles him for his shitty driving the whole ride.

Yuna laughs at them, but she can’t quite hide the relief on her face when she steps out of the car.

“Good luck at training camp. You take care of my boy, okay?” she tells Dan as they pull out her bag from the trunk. She gives Dan a quick hug, and he sends a bewildered look at Ilya over her head before awkwardly patting her gently on the back. 

Ilya grins at him.

It’s maybe a little embarrassing the way he tears up as Yuna abandons Dan to pull Ilya into a firm, warm hug instead, but he can’t bring himself to care. He still can’t believe she came all the way to Boston with him—for him—and squeezes her a little tighter, just because.

“You be good, okay? Listen to your coaches and trainers. Keep yourself out of trouble. David and I will be in Toronto for Shane’s season opener, but we’ll come down to Boston for your game against Washington and—” It seems like she has an endless list of things to say to him, and Ilya feels as if his heart could burst from all the love he feels for her, for David, and for Shane.

(Always Shane.)

He lets her fuss over him for a full ten minutes before she finally manages to stop herself, telling him, “I love you!” as she enters the terminal, waving at them all the while.

Joke's on her. Ilya would have let her go on for another ten.

Chapter End Notes

I know that Cliff is actually a year younger than Ilya in the books, but they aged him up in the show, and I really like the idea of having an older player to look after Ilya.

Chapter 8

Chapter Notes

“So, like, how do you decide if you’re in the mood for ass or pussy?”

The question effectively quiets the comfortable chatter that’s been buzzing in the locker room before practice, and Ilya raises his brows, amused despite himself.

Next to him, Dan gapes incredulously.

“Dude,” he says, scandalised. “You can’t just say shit like that.”

“Why not?” Cliff asks, and looks genuinely confused, because Cliff Marlow at twenty six turns out to have about as much tact as the Cliff Marlow that Ilya had known at thirty seven—which is to say, none at all.

Ilya casts a subtle glance around the room as Dan and Cliff keep going back and forth. He takes note of the guys who look over at them curiously and the ones who look away, sneering. 

More than he would have liked, but not near as many as he’d feared. 

Now, almost two weeks into the pre-season, Ilya thinks he’s got a pretty good handle on which of his teammates are going to be friendly enough, which will be indifferent, and which will be a problem. The Bears’ training camp has been considerably more intense than rookie camp had been, and Ilya is competing against established NHL players for a roster spot; there are more than a few of them who’ve been less than enthused about the cocky eighteen-year-old gunning for their place in the lineup. That he’s bisexual, Russian, and just plain better at hockey does little to endear him to them.

He’s had a fair amount of hissed insults and jabs thrown at him. Some of the guys have been checking him harder during scrimmages than necessary, their sticks slashing more viciously at his ankles while battling for the puck, but it hasn’t gone beyond that and Ilya doesn’t think it will. 

Management has made it no secret about how excited they are about Ilya, about how they think he is going to be the future of the franchise.

And besides, Ilya is billeting with their GM’s family. Hard to ignore that kind of obvious support.

In 2009, it’s been a couple of years since Boston made the playoffs and longer still since they won the Cup. It’s clear they’re expecting that to change now with Ilya’s presence.

That’s a lot of expectations to throw at a rookie, and had Ilya actually been eighteen, he might have felt that pressure more keenly, but he’s not, and this is the kind of environment Ilya has learned to thrive in. It feeds the beast inside of him when he gets to prove his doubters wrong, when he gets to silence the haters by scoring goal after goal just to spite them, just to prove how little he cares about whatever vitriol they’ll snipe at him on the ice or from the stands. Unoriginal and unimaginative.

Nothing like Ilya’s creative barbs.

It’s one of the reasons he’s always loved playing New York. They hated him there. They’ll hate him now too, because Ilya really is that good.

“No, but seriously,” Cliff says, grinning at Ilya and ignoring Dan’s continued protests. “How do you choose who to pick up? Like, if there is a beautiful girl and a hot guy, or whatever, who do you go home with?”

“You looking for tips, Marly?” Ilya chirps him. “Old man can’t get laid? No sex for you, so sad.”

“Oh, fuck off!”

Ilya laughs as Cliff shoves at his shoulder, grumbling about how Ilya is a little shit and Cliff should be teaching him to respect his elders, saying, You ain’t all that, kid.

It’s been a lot of fun meeting Cliff again. Ilya hadn’t even realised how much he’d missed his friend’s laidback nature and straightforward manner until they’d met for the second first time and Cliff had shaken his hand in greeting and then said, “So, you like dick, huh?” 

They’d kept in touch once Ilya signed with Ottawa in his first life, but it hadn’t been the same.

Ilya is relieved that they’ve clicked just as well now as they had in their previous lives, and even Cliff’s inappropriate questions have been more amusing than anything else. He recognises that this is Cliff’s way of showing support, of being an ally the only way he knows how: 

By making stupid quips and not shying away from the queerness of it all.

Really, it’s no one’s business what Ilya does in bed, but Cliff is so earnest about all his questions, trying to understand this rookie player who’s ended up on his line, that Ilya can’t help but indulge him sometimes.

He doesn’t mind answering some of them when Cliff genuinely wants to know.

Besides, Ilya has been centering Cliff and Dan all through the pre-season, and they’ve been on absolute fire, racking up points between them in all of their games. Ilya is extremely keen to keep that chemistry going. Even Dan has lost some of the nervous tension he’d carried into camp, so worried he’d be cut with every passing day and sent back to the minors again. No chance of that happening now. 

He’s been magic on Ilya’s right wing.

“Come on, old man,” Ilya says, deciding today won’t be one of those days he’ll indulge Cliff his curiosity. He gets to his feet and reaches for his stick, tapping first Dan on his shin and then Cliff. “Let’s go run some drills.”

**

As soon as he’s in the car on the way home from practice, he’s on the phone, texting Shane and ignoring the knowing looks Brian keeps sending his way.

“You should congratulate him on his hat-trick last night. That second goal was a thing of beauty.”

Ilya smiles at that, receiving the praise as if it was his own, happy that Shane is doing so well in Montreal and that he seems to have settled in well enough. He re-reads the text Shane has sent him about making sure to recover and stretch between games—to not wear his body out before the season truly begins. He’s such a worrier, his Shane.

While Ilya has been tearing it up for Boston during the pre-season, lighting up the goal lamp in practice games against New York, Toronto and Columbus, Shane has been dominating play during his own matchups. Everybody knows that the pre-season doesn’t mean shit, too small a sample size to be any kind of indicator of how a team or player will do during the regular season, but still. Shane has been putting up some numbers; his nickname as the prince of hockey is gaining traction.

Ilya looks away from his phone, his smile stretching wider as he glances over at Brian. 

After living with his GM and his family for half a month, he’s gone from Doyle to Brian, but it’d taken a few days. Ilya had not been on a firstname basis with him in his other life. It’s a little weird that he is now.

“No can do,” Ilya tells him. “Shane will actually think he is good at hockey, and then he’ll be very sad when he plays us tomorrow and loses. Will be lots of tears and Yuna will yell at me when I call home. Is bad for me.”

Brian shakes his head in exasperation, but doesn’t press him on it, already used to Ilya’s shit talking and his complete inability to not pull at Shane’s metaphorical pigtails.

“You are still okay to watch the girls this afternoon? It won’t be for more than a few hours.”

“Of course! We have plan to watch movie and sing Disney songs. It will be amazing.”

Brian chuckles lightly at that, and it had taken Ilya some time to get used to that too. The person he’d known as his GM had been a solemn, no nonsense man. Not exactly dour, but not particularly friendly either. He’d been all about business. 

This version of his GM, the man Ilya gets to call Brian, is, first and foremost, a family man; he has an endless well of patience when it comes to his wife and the three girls that live with them.

Ilya still hasn’t gotten the full story of how the Doyles ended up fostering their granddaughters—all he knows is that their father is dead and their mother is absent—but it’s obvious that both Brian and his wife, Cathy, adore the girls.

Ilya does too. He’s never had sisters, but he imagines it’d be a lot like this:

Ilya, helplessly wrapped around the fingers of three little girls.

They’re on him the second they walk through the front door, Lydia jumping into his arms and Ava attaching herself to one of his legs, grinning up at Ilya toothily. Sara is hovering in the background with Cathy, content to let her sisters take the lead.

She’s the middle child, six years old and painfully shy. Of the three of them, Sara had taken the longest to warm up to Ilya, wary of the new person in their home and slow to trust. Every smile has been a hardfought battle, and Ilya treasures them like the victories they are. He has an extra soft spot for her; she reminds him a lot of Shane.

“Oh, no! The monkeys have escaped from zoo. Sara! Please! You must help me bring them back to the cage.”

Sara giggles quietly as Ilya staggers towards her, clutching Lydia on his left hip and dragging Ava along on his right leg.

“They’re not monkeys,” she scolds him gently. “That’s Lydia and Ava.”

“Nuh huh! I’m a monkey,” Ava says happily. “Monkey, monkey, monkey!”

Ilya laughs. He shares a grin with Cathy and Brian before reaching for Sara with his free hand. “Come, we will give your grandparents some time alone, and bring the monkeys to the cage. Maybe then they will become little girls again.”

There’s a brief holdup as the girls are on the receiving end of goodbye hugs and kisses from their grandparents, and Cathy spares a few minutes to tell him there’s food in the fridge and snacks in the pantry if they want it.

“Try to pick the healthy snacks,” she says, winking at Ilya when Lydia and Ava boo at this.

Once the Doyles actually make it out the door, Ilya is dragged along to the playroom where he threatens to throw all little monkeys back into their cage.

The cage in question is the blanket fort attached to the six chairs they’ve got placed along the far wall of the room. It’s a fairly simple construction, big enough for the girls, but it collapses every time they manage to convince Ilya to crawl in after them.

Ava abandons him almost immediately in favour of the fort. She is the baby of the three, four years old and absolutely fearless. She has, to Ilya’s utter consternation, no sense of self preservation. Ilya has already caught her a couple of times after she’s thrown herself off of some kind of elevated surface. He’s pretty sure if she ever becomes a hockey player, she’ll be a terror on the ice.

He lowers himself to the ground next to the fort, shifting Lydia to rest on his lap and lifting an arm so Sara can cuddle in close.

“What did my little monkeys do today? Have you been good girls, or did you have big party? Have disco in your room and make lots of noise? Give Grandma headache?”

The girls giggle, even Sara, and from the fort, Ava’s head appears, grinning. She’s always smiling, that one. 

“Monkeys can’t dance!”

“What? Little monkeys cannot dance?” Ilya gasps dramatically. He falls backwards in feigned shock, taking both Lydia and Sara with him, and when Lydia chides him for being too silly, his fingers find the back of her neck, tickling her until she’s howling with laughter, arms flying around wildly. 

It takes a while to settle the girls again, but once they’ve all calmed down and Sara has made her way into the fort to play barbies with Ava—Ava keeps inventing elaborate plots where some shady shit is going down and Barbie needs to save the day—Lydia is right back in his lap.

“Can we call Shane now, please? You promised yesterday.”

Lydia is old enough to understand that hockey isn’t just a sport Ilya plays for fun. She knows that it’s his job and that he works with her grandfather. She’s been playing organised hockey since she was five, and moved up to an u10 league after this summer. She’s been telling Ilya since the day he moved in that she wants to play in Peewee with the older girls, because she is just as good as them, if not better, even if she is only nine, and doesn’t he know that Shane Hollander got to skip Bantam and go straight to Midget?

Ilya hadn’t known, actually, but he’s not surprised. Shane at thirteen would absolutely have had the skills to jump an age bracket.

He learns other things too; Ilya is delighted to discover that Lydia is a fan. Apparently, she’d seen a segment that CTV News had done on Shane a couple of years back. They had run it on ESPN over in the States, and it had been love at first sight. Lydia can tell him that Shane’s favourite subject in school had been history, that he’d grown up rooting for the team that drafted him because of his mother, but that he has a hometown bias for the Centaurs. Once, during a tea party, she’d told him Shane’s favourite music is country music, and Ilya had burst into such a loud laugh that Sara had shied away from him in fright. Ilya had soothed her immediately, stroking over her hair and apologising for startling her before he’d turned his attention back to Lydia.

“Shane does not like country music,” he’d said with authority, because if Shane listened to music at all, it was always what Cliff would describe as white-girl music. Ilya doesn’t even think he has a favourite song.

“But he said so on TV!”

Ilya shrugged. “Probably, he panicked a little bit, said the first thing he could remember.”

Lydia had narrowed her eyes at that, eyeing him doubtfully, and that’s when Ilya had revealed that Shane is his best friend; he would definitely know if Shane liked country music.

(Ilya has since become the coolest person Lydia knows, and he’s taken great pleasure in calling Shane to brag about this.

“Yeah, because of me,” he’d answered, and then hung up the phone.)

“Ilya,” Lydia whines when he doesn’t respond quickly enough, dragging out the sound of his name in the way of impatient kids everywhere. “Please, can we call?”

Ilya pokes her in her side. “Thought you wanted to see movie.”

“Shane first, and then we can put on the movie,” Lydia says firmly, as if Ilya is the child of the two of them.

He grins, helplessly charmed.

“Hanna Montana!” Ava cheers as she and Sara crawl back out of the fort, and even Sara looks excited at the prospect. 

Ilya folds pathetically fast.

Well. It’s not as if he’ll ever turn down getting to talk with Shane on the phone.

(The movie is kind of good too.)

**

The next day, Ilya is back at the rink in the sleepy hours of the early morning.

The Bears are playing a home-and-home with the Voyageurs, which means Shane is arriving in Boston with his team for an early game-day practice. They’ll stay the night before both teams head back to Montreal for the final game of the pre-season.

The Bears only have an optional skate today, and Ilya wouldn’t have bothered showing up until a couple of hours before game start if it wasn’t for the fact that Shane will be here.

He’s idling in the underground garage of the Garden, waiting for the Voyageurs’ bus to pull up at the arena. He wishes he had a cigarette while he waited, but Ilya hasn’t smoked since he came back to this time. His New Year’s resolution in 2021 had been to quit smoking altogether, but by the time Ilya stepped on that plane, he’d already broken it several times. Then the plane crashed and Ilya had fucking died.

Ilya will probably never figure out how the hell he’s time travelled into the past, will never understand how he can be alive when he knows that he’d died, but the experience has left its mark. The one time he tried smoking since Worlds, he’d put an unlit cigarette to his lips and had immediately been hit with the memory of someone saying, I will never fucking forgive you if you get lung cancer and die.

The memory had been so strong, so visceral, that he’d freaked the fuck out. He’d thrown the cigarette into the nearest trash can and cleaned out his stash once he got home. He’d still been in denial about the time travelling back then, but once he accepted it was true—once he realised it had been Shane’s voice in the memory—it had seemed like such a fuck you to pick the habit back up again. Some kind of entity or cosmic event or something has given Ilya the chance at a new life, and he doesn’t want to throw that away. Doesn’t want to be ungrateful.

Besides, Shane really will kill him if he gets lung cancer.

He’s checking his phone to see if he has time to run inside for a cup of coffee—doesn’t want to risk it if it means missing Shane’s arrival—when he hears the sound of the bus pulling into the garage.

He rocks back onto his heels as he waits for the bus to come to a stop. Shoves his hands into his pockets and then takes them out again. He feels antsy.

It’s been three weeks since he last saw Shane in person, and that is nothing, comparatively, to the times they’d been apart in his first life, but it had been different then. So much of their time together had been about physical release, about getting to touch and be intimate even as they had to keep that secret, but now their dynamic is completely different.

They text all the time and speak to each other on the phone at least once a day, but Ilya is realising that he has no idea how Shane will react to seeing him in person again. They’d been so isolated over the summer while working with Bobby—the only people they’d actually hung out with were already Shane’s friends. People he was familiar with and had known since childhood.

Ilya misses his Shane like a lost limb—he will never stop loving the Shane that Ilya left back in 2021, will love every version of him, always—but he can’t deny that he has been so spoiled with this Shane either. This Shane, who’s been unafraid to show his affection even in public, who’s accepted Ilya’s claim as best friends. He’s nervous that Shane will pull back in a hockey environment so wired in microaggression. Worried that they’ll end up like before, hardly able to acknowledge each other as anything more than rival players.

He’s not sure his heart can take it if Shane wants to keep his distance in professional settings.

He needn’t have worried.

“Ilya!”

Shane is the third man off the bus, and not even five seconds later, Ilya has an armful of Shane Hollander.

He closes his eyes. Breathes him in.

“Котёнок,” he whispers into Shane’s hair.

Shane clutches at the back of Ilya’s coat, saying nothing.

“Hey, man, you must be Ilya. Am I okay to call you that?”

Ilya looks over Shane’s head to see a man he is pretty sure he hasn’t seen before, but who looks vaguely familiar anyway. 

“Да. Yes.” He accepts the hand the guy holds out towards him, but doesn’t let go of Shane.

“Nice to finally meet you. I’m Chris. This fucker here doesn’t shut up about you, so I feel like I already know you,” Chris says, nodding at where Shane is doing his best to burrow himself against Ilya. “We’ve been on the same line these last couple of games.”

Only a few pre-season games are televised, and Ilya has been so busy playing his own games that he hasn’t gotten to watch any of Shane’s, but he’s read all the recaps. Ilya is right, he hasn’t seen the guy before, but he recognises the name now.

Chris Hynes has gotten the assist on most of Shane’s goals.

He’s also Dan’s brother.

“You are Dan’s twin brother,” Ilya says as Shane finally pulls back. Their eyes meet, and Shane’s pretty doe eyes look a little wet, his cheeks a little red. Ilya wants to smother his face in kisses.

“Yeah. We don’t really look alike, I know. We’re fraternal twins,” Chris explains with a grin as Ilya's gaze flick to him. “Dan’s the ugly one.”

Neither of them are particularly ugly, Ilya thinks charitably, but they’ve got that same kind of bland Canadian wholesome look of the Hayden Pikes of the world. Handsome, but forgettable. 

Nothing like the beauty that is Shane.

“Missed you,” Shane tells him now, and Ilya doesn’t know exactly what his face is doing as he looks down to meet Shane’s eyes again, but whatever it is has Shane’s gaze going sharp. A little considering, maybe. “Are we still on for later? Morning skate should be done by ten, and then I’m free until we leave the hotel at four.”

“You sure you don’t want to nap before coming back? Will need to be rested for the game. Boston will win, of course, but maybe not by more than three goals if you get your sleep.”

“Shut up. And no. I’d rather spend the day with you.”

He’s so sincere about it that Ilya can’t help but take that sweet face between his hands and buss a kiss to the apple of his cheek.

He’s probably being too obvious and too excessive, but fuck it. Ilya is European and everybody already knows he’s bi. He can explain away his affection as just Ilya being eccentric.

But Chris doesn’t look put off by it, and neither does Shane, which is the important bit.

He smiles up at Ilya, soft and happy.

“We have to head in now, or we’ll be in trouble with Coach. You’ll be around, or are we meeting someplace else?”

“I’ll be here. Will get some work done in the gym, prepare my muscles for tonight so I can hit you into the boards extra hard. With love, of course.”

“Ass,” Shane says, but so fondly it could have been the sweetest term of endearment for all Ilya cares.

“Go on. Go play bad hockey.” He gives Shane a gentle push towards Chris, because if he doesn’t get Shane moving, Ilya is going to keep him outside here with him and then they’ll all be in trouble.

“Bye! I’ll text you when we’re done.”

Ilya waves, missing him already as he watches Shane and Chris disappear into the tunnel after their teammates and coaches. 

He stands there alone for a few more minutes, clenching his hands into fists and trying to keep the heat of Shane’s skin from slipping off his palms.

**

Ilya drags Shane all around Boston in the few hours they have after Shane’s morning skate and before the game.

He forces Shane to take an endless amount of selfies at various places around the city, and is so incandescently happy that they get to this that he doesn’t even complain when Shane drags him into a nearby Trader Joe’s and spends a solid twenty minutes raiding the shelves for goods to bring back to Canada.

Once they actually step onto the ice for the opening face-off, Ilya is so giddy to be playing against Shane in an actual game that he feels a little high with it. Ilya must have proven himself ten times over throughout the course of the pre-season, but he thinks he plays some of his best hockey that night.

He can’t even bring himself to be too upset that Boston loses and that Montreal takes the game at home ice the next day too.

Never has a double loss stung less.

The end of the pre-season means they’re getting ready to start up the real thing, and a few days before their home opener against Washington, the player roster is finally set.

Dan made it to the team, much to his relief.

Ilya had never truly worried about his own spot.

The official announcement has Barry showing back up in Boston. He’s been in and out of the city the last few weeks, discussing the lawsuit from Adrenaline Rush and strategising potential endorsement deals. He wants to add to Ilya’s team, he says, and bring on one of the brand managers he’s got on the agency’s payroll. 

Barry is probably one of the best sports agents out there, and other than his unfortunate love of golf, that’s his true passion. He is the owner of Fortitude Agency, and while he’s hired someone to function as CEO and take care of the day to day, he’s still pretty hands on. He’s very particular about building the teams around his clients in-house as much as possible.

“Less chance of getting our wires crossed that way,” Barry had told him in his first life, and Ilya can see the benefit of that.

He’s known a couple of NHLers who’ve been signed to a sports agency, but has had their own parents act as managers and publicists. Not so incidentally, those guys had been broke by the time Ilya died.

Not everyone has a Yuna Hollander for a mother.

“All right,” Barry says in Russian once they’ve concluded most of their business. “About addressing the city and the fans, you’re sure you still want to do it? Most people will have seen or heard about the pictures by now, but we’ve been good about not directly addressing your sexuality in public. You handled the media extremely well during training camp. Honestly, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you’d already gone through media training. No one is really expecting you to make a statement now.”

Ilya shrugs. “It’s not a statement exactly, just a post on Facebook and Twitter. I want to tell the fans how excited I am to play here, and, I don’t know, just add in a subtle acknowledgement somewhere. Nothing crazy, just an ‘oh, by the way, I’m bi, no big deal’ kind of thing.”

He’s been thinking about it a lot. 

Putting his queerness under a spotlight, even in a ‘blink and you’ll miss’ it kind of way, has the potential to open him up to a lot of shit, but Ilya had made the decision not to shy away from it already when he posted those pictures.

He’s not backing down now.

He knows what visibility means in sports; Scott had paved the way for him to be able to make the choices that had brought him to Shane and Ottawa. Maybe this time Ilya can do the same for him.

And if nothing else, he desperately wants Shane to see that even if people know, this isn’t the end of the world or Ilya’s career.

There is room for queer people in hockey.

Barry hums thoughtfully, but doesn’t seem really opposed. “You’re absolutely sure?” he presses one last time. “The pictures are out there. There’s no going back into the closet for you, but the second you acknowledge it, there’s going to be questions. Everybody wants to be a critic.”

“I’m sure. I’ve shown Brian the draft I want to post, and he says the Bears are fine with it.” He looks at Barry, holding his gaze to show how serious he is. “I want to do this, Barry. It’s important. And it really is incredibly subtle. You’d have to already know to pick up on it, I think.”

“All right, kid. Let’s do this.”

**

The post is simple:

He includes a cluster of pictures. There is one of Ilya from the draft, wearing his Bears jersey and holding up his finger for number one. There’s one from his first days in Boston when he’d been out sightseeing with Yuna. He adds a few from camp, Cliff and Dan grinning on either side of him, and then finally, he puts up an obligatory picture of Shane. One of the selfies they’d taken before the game in Boston.

The post is simple, but it still blows up with likes and comments.

Ilya only likes back two of them:

Chapter End Notes

I just wanted to say I appreciate everyone who takes the time to comment, kudos and bookmark. You guys have been so supportive! Hope you enjoyed this chapter as well <3

Chapter 9

Chapter Notes

Kudos to everyone who clocked Dan and Chris as a reference to Empty Netters Dan and Chris. I've only seen a few clips of their HR watch series, so other than being very supportive of Shane and Ilya, the personalities of the fictional Dan and Chris are entirely made up.

In 2009, social media is dominated by Facebook. Twitter is gaining traction, and YouTube has been up and running for a few years, but the landscape of digital social interactions as Ilya had known it in 2021 is still in its infancy.

God, he misses Instagram and good memes.

Influencers are not really a thing yet, either, but Ilya can see that people are already starting to put together that followers equal influence and influence equals power and money. It’s not such a big step away from brand ambassadors, after all.

Ilya, with the advantage of having seen what social media will become, understands this better than most.

One of his lists in the matryoshka doll is titled ONLINE PRESENCE!

Ilya is very aware of what the power of fandom can do. He is also aware that people are fickle, that they’ll be swayed with the crowd in whatever direction the wind is blowing. Hardcore fans, though, are different. They’re ride or die; these are the people still screaming into the void long after everyone else has left.

(This is the kind of loyalty that is going to benefit Ilya, later.)

So Ilya doesn’t really mind when about a month into the season, in late October, Brian pulls him aside and says the communications and PR departments want to do a series of player videos to put up online. It will be a couple of years before the first all-access documentaries start popping up around the League, but as far as in-house content creation goes, this is probably a good start.

There is interest too. Ilya is averaging a point per game as a rookie, and while they’re only fourteen games in, that’s impressive. People want to know more about Ilya Rozanov; the Bears’ home-game attendance is increasing by the week.

Being in front of the camera is easy and familiar—Ilya waves off compliments about how much of a natural he is, because he can’t tell anyone that he’s been doing this for years already—and the PR people are careful to only give him lowrisk, softball questions.

Ilya is asked about what it’s like being new to the NHL, what he likes to do in his off time, and what he thinks about Boston as a city.

(Amazing, relaxing, awesome.)

He’s asked about his connection to the Hollanders, because Yuna and David Hollander showing up at his games in Ilya’s jersey has been much remarked upon by pundits and fans alike—they’d seen his home opener in Boston and caught another game in Ottawa. Ilya smiles at the question, and gives the very abbreviated, childfriendly version of how he came to live with them in Canada. He tells them that Yuna has a tally in the kitchen at home where she keeps track of Shane and Ilya’s wins and losses. This has been the source of much contention, Ilya confesses, because they both hate to lose.

They’re currently tied at seven wins and seven losses each, but Shane has the lead in points. Eighteen to Ilya’s fifteen.

Ilya is the better goal scorer, though. He has ten goals on the season, and Shane only four.

“Is because he is very bad at hockey,” Ilya says, grinning wide at the laughs that gets him.

“Isn’t he your best friend?”

“Yes.”

They don’t mention Russia.

The video goes up on YouTube and Facebook, and Ilya links the clips to his own accounts, satisfied when that nets him a few hundred followers more.

“You’re the one who sucks,” Shane says on the phone once Ilya has pestered Dan into telling Chris to tell Shane to check it out. “You lost to Pittsburgh last night. 6-1. Didn’t even get a point.”

“Yes, well. It’s Pittsburgh.”

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Shane allows, because Pittsburgh just won the Cup this June and lost against Detroit in the finals the year before that. They’re a powerhouse.

“Anyway, how’s the deal with Adidas coming along?” Shane asks him.

(At the beginning of the month, Shane had signed a three-year deal with Gatorade worth 1,2 million Canadian dollars. Yuna had been very satisfied, and Barry had gotten a worrying competitive glint in his eyes when Ilya told him the news.

Shane had called him almost as soon as the ink had dried on the page and told him he was finally paying off his parents’ mortgage. It will be his Christmas gift to them.

“Mom won’t like me spending so much money on them, but I have to, you know? I wouldn’t even have gotten this deal without them. They sacrificed so much for me to be able to play hockey, and I don’t ever want them to have to worry about money like that again.”

Ilya knows from fights and arguments they’ve had in his first life that this has been some of the driving force behind Shane’s pathological need for perfection, his need to be the absolute best, because in his eyes, anything less would make David and Yuna’s sacrifice in vain.

“They’ll be happy,” Ilya had said with quiet conviction. They might grumble about Shane spending that kind of money on them and how the mortgage isn’t his responsibility, but Ilya knows they’ll be grateful all the same. “It's a good thing you’re doing, Shane.”

In his first life, Ilya had paid off whatever debts still attached to his father’s house not because he wanted to, but because it was expected, and he’d still been financing a lot of his family’s spending for an unbearably long time after that.

Ilya can already see the difference on his bank statements this time around.

“Hey! If you pay off mortgage, maybe I buy them a new car? Give them one each. We can give Christmas gifts together.”

There had been a brief silence over the line.

“Do not buy my parents new cars, Ilya,” Shane had said sternly, and Ilya had teased him for a few more minutes before agreeing.

He knows David and Yuna wouldn’t have accepted it anyway. He’ll just have to wait till next Christmas.)

“Barry says the deal is looking good. Says Adidas should pay more, but you know.” Ilya shrugs and hears Shane humming over the line, picking up his train of thought.

“You’ll be their first openly non-straight ambassador.”

“Yes. Adidas is good brand, good to their clients, but Barry says he thinks they want to ‘exercise caution’,” Ilya says, quoting his agent word for word. “It is still good deal. Not as much money as Gatorade pays you, but still a lot. They even agreed to have a clause in my contract; they can’t terminate or change the conditions because of my sexuality.”

Ilya actually thinks this is going to become common practice for Adidas, remembers reading about it in his future past, but they’re still years early this time around, and it’s way beyond anything Ilya was expecting when Barry had told him, “We’re going to get you Adidas.”

Ilya, like any self-respecting Russian man, loves Adidas. He wears their gear all the time, from his beloved striped joggers to the obligatory slippers, but he hadn’t been associated with them in any official capacity in his first life.

Like so many other things, it is a marked change from before, and Ilya is only now beginning to understand the far-reaching effects of the ripples in time he’s made. 

“Good,” Shane says firmly. “You shouldn’t have to worry about bigots and homophobic assholes.”

Ilya chuckles, his whole body warming at Shane’s words. “Shane Hollander so honourable! You protect me if anyone is mean to me? Be my hero?”

“Yes,” Shane says, simple as anything, but Ilya hears the promise behind it and is so filled with feelings he thinks he might need to scream into a pillow because the alternative is to blurt out how in love with Shane he is.

That’s too soon, though, so instead he changes the subject and tries not to think about how long too soon might last.

 **

In November, the Voyageurs return to Boston. It’s the first time they’ll play the Bears during the regular season, and much is made about the battle of the best friends.

Ilya has spent months building the story of his and Shane’s friendship for the world to see. Has laid the groundwork for everyone to know that he is happy for Shane and Ilya to be pitted against each as rivals, yes, but only on the ice.

Their NHL careers will be separate from their private lives.

When he’s asked in a post-practice interview if he’s going to go easy on Shane during the game, Ilya laughs incredulously. He maybe plays it up for the cameras a little, but he’s also serious when he says, “You ever try to go easy on Shane Hollander? He get so mad! Will reset game just to make sure everyone is playing like they mean it. He hates to lose, but he hates it even more when he loses…what is it called? When you lose automatically?"

“By default?”

“Yes! That!”

The reporters laugh. Someone asks, “So you won’t hold back from body checking him when you play?”

“Of course not. I will give him extra hard hits, but with love,” he says, and winks for the cameras.

Yuna and David show up too even though it is a weekday.

“I wasn’t going to miss the first NHL game you boys played against each other,” David says, and proudly shows them the custom-made jersey he’s ordered to support them both. It says 81 Rozanov on the back and 24 Hollander on the front. He’s got one in reverse, too, he explains, which he’ll use when the Bears play in Montreal.

When Ilya asks Yuna if she has one also, she scoffs, throwing David a disgusted look.

“I would never desecrate a jersey like that.”

She’ll wear each of their jerseys for the games she sees where they don’t play against each other, and for the ones that they do, she’ll wear the number of whoever’s ahead in the scoring race.

“Mom,” Shane complains, but Yuna just pats his cheek and says, “Think of it as incentive. Not to mention the bragging rights,” which, of course, fires them both up.

They’ve always competed the hardest against each other, after all, even in this life.

The Bears lose in a shootout, 2-1, which sucks, but Shane missed his shootout attempt while Ilya scored on his, and that makes it better. And anyway, Shane is a kinder winner than Ilya would have been; he only taunts Ilya a little, and even then he bites his lip guiltily. 

After the game, Ilya brings all of the Hollanders home to meet the Doyles.

Lydia has been talking about getting to meet Shane in person for a week straight, but she clams up the second he’s actually in front of her, so starstrucked to meet him in person she is completely lost for words. Ilya has never seen her speechless before.

Seeing Shane with the girls makes Ilya a little wistful, even as he can’t help but laugh at how awkward he is with them in the beginning.

The Shane of his first life wasn’t much for kids, but he’d loved all of Hayden Pikes’s hundred children, and he’d confessed to Ilya once that he’d like for them to have kids of their own some day, once they were done playing.

Ilya never got to give that life to the Shane of his future past—he’d so desperately wanted to marry him, for him and Shane to spend the rest of their lives together, making their own family.

Being eighteen again, such a dream seems impossibly far off, but Ilya still wants it, and if there is any chance of having any of that with the Shane of his present, Ilya is going to make that happen.

While the adults converge in the living room, Ilya and Shane are dragged along to the playroom with the girls, and as Ilya takes tea with Lydia and Ava, he smiles softly to see Shane and Sara by the reading nook, flipping through a book about garden birds.

They’re talking quietly to each other, Sara pointing to the various pictures and Shane nodding seriously at whatever she’s explaining.

Ilya’s heart clenches with fondness for them both.

Sara does not have the warm hue of Shane’s skin or the pretty freckles smattered across his cheeks and over the bridge of his nose, but they share the same dark eyes and hair and it’s easy to imagine—

Ilya leaves them to it and turns his attention back to the tea party.

The Hollanders are staying the night, but Shane is travelling with his team the next day and has to be back at the hotel by curfew, so Ilya suckers Dan into picking them up at the Doyles to take them back into the city.

(He can’t fucking wait until he get’s his driver’s license, but that probably won’t be until next summer because of how busy he is during the season.)

When Dan’s now familiar 2006 Honda Civic shows up in the driveway, Chris is there,  grinning at them from the front seat.

“Get in, losers!” he hollers, and Shane sighs, exasperated.

He likes Chris a lot, he’s told Ilya, but he is very loud and very enthusiastic and Shane usually needs a full business day to recover after rooming with him on the road, zapped of all his social batteries.

“Come on,” Ilya says, snickering as he pushes Shane into the backseat.

“Thanks for driving us back to the hotel, Dan,” Shane says politely.

“No worries! Besides, Ilya would have bitched at me forever if I didn’t do it.”

“Bitch at you anyway.”

“Well, more than usual then.”

Which is true enough. Dan has only known Ilya for two months, but he’s already clocked how soft he is for Shane. 

“Hey, what’s it like living with your GM?” Chris asks. He’s turned around in his seat to look at Ilya. “Still can’t believe you carpool with your boss everyday, man.” 

“Was weird at first,” Ilya admits with a grin. It still is a little bit, even if the Doyles have been nothing but lovely, treating Ilya more and more as an extension of their family rather than the houseguest he is. Still. He’s living with the general manager of the team he plays for. 

That’s breaking all sorts of professional barriers.

“But is good. Brian and Cathy are good people.”

“What about you, Shane? You’re renting alone, right?” Dan asks, meeting Shane’s eyes through the rearview mirror.

“Yeah. The plan is to look for an apartment to buy early next year.”

“Is difficult for Shane,” Ilya tells Dan, sotto voice. “Too many things on his must-have list. Can’t check them all off.”

Shane punches his arm. “Shut up! It’s a big purchase. You can’t just buy the first place you see. Besides, the must have is for both of us. Do you know how hard it is to find a decent apartment with a good view and double parking space within a reasonable budget?”

Ilya stares at him, surprised. “You are millionaire now,” he says weakly. “Can afford expensive penthouse.” He catches Shane’s eyes, his voice quiet as he asks, “You’re buying place for me too?” 

Shane blinks at him. “Yes?” He glances at where Chris and Dan have gone quiet in the front of the car. “Was I not supposed to? Where else are you going to stay? You can’t tell me you want to live with Mom and Dad in Ottawa the whole summer. We might as well get a place in Montreal. Bobby will be there from June to July next year.”

Ilya has been instructed by the IRB to return to Canada in the off-seasons to fulfil the criteria of his future citizenship, but truthfully, he has not given much thought to next summer or where he’s supposed to live. In his past life, he would have gone back to Russia, spending weeks and weeks hating everything from his family to his lack of freedom and despairing that Russia was the only place in the world where he didn’t constantly need to translate every fucking thought into slow, stilted English. Ilya’s English has gotten better with the years, because he did actually work hard on it, but it is still a struggle sometimes, even now.

Ilya only rarely doesn’t manage to make himself understood these days, but he hates that not everything always translates. Hates that he feels so much smarter and articulate in Russian than his second language.

Russia had been a welcome relief in that it was the one place where he could speak his language, where he wasn’t constantly making some kind of cultural misstep, but it still wasn’t a place where he could be completely himself, and it never would be. Not for him.

Nowhere was.

Not even as he’d been at almost thirty years old. He’d been with the love of his life, but they still had to keep that secret.

Now, though, Shane doesn’t have to be someone he hides from the world. And it’s not the same, they’re not a couple, not the lovers Ilya would like for them to be, but Shane still wants to make himself Ilya’s home and that is everything.

Fuck.

Ilya loves this ridiculous boy so fucking much. 

It doesn’t matter that Ilya hasn’t considered where he’s going to live in the off-seasons, because Shane already has.

Of course Shane wouldn’t leave him to his own devices. Of course he is buying a place that will fit Ilya too. Of course they’re going to spend the summers together. 

He is realising now, that for Shane, there was never any other option.

“So good to me,” Ilya croons finally, but so soft, so sincere that Shane doesn’t even call him an asshole.

He looks a little flushed, though, eyes crinkling in satisfaction at Ilya’s easy acquiescence. “If you really want, we can sign the deed together,” he offers graciously, and he’s been refusing to allow Ilya to buy his parents a new car or two, but this he’ll let him spend money on. 

Maybe because it’s Shane and Ilya, and they’ve always been weird about each other. 

Well, it’s not as if they don’t have the money to spend.

In the front seat of the car, Dan and Chris share a disbelieving look, and then Chris laughs, sounding incredulous as he turns to his brother, saying, “We will not be buying a place together, I’ll tell you that much.”

**

On December ninth, Ilya catches a flight to Ottawa after practice just to be able to sit with Yuna and David in the stands to watch Shane play the Centaurs.

“Dude, you’re fucking crazy,” Dan says when Ilya has explained where he is going, and even Cliff looks at him as if he thinks Ilya has a few screws loose.

“You’re seriously going to spend your one day off this week by flying to another country, watch a game you could just as easily see on TV, and then fly back home the next day?”

“Crazy,” Dan reiterates.

Ilya shrugs, but he’s grinning toothily. “I have never seen Shane play in person. Is different when we play against each other. Want to see if he’s as good as everybody says.” He sounds flippant about it, but the second Ilya had looked over their schedules and seen that this was something he could do, he was determined to make it happen.

In his past life, Ilya had never been able to openly watch one of Shane’s games and cheer him on. Instead, he’d had to throw out disparaging comments as a decoy for how fucking beautful Shane’s hockey was, and he’d only ever seen him play on a screen if they weren’t sharing the ice.

Ilya wants to see him play live so badly he can feel the tips of his fingers tingle with excitement at the prospect.

Cliff scoffs in disbelief and turns to Dan. “How about you? You feel like flying to fucking Ottawa to see your brother play?”

“I would rather swallow his toe clippings than waste a day off just to see him play.”

“Shut up. Can you drive me to the airport or not?”

Dan does agree to drive, and Cliff tags along, just to be able to spend another half hour telling Ilya how fucking stupid he thinks he is. 

“I’m not covering with Coach if you’re lagging at practice because you’ve gotten no rest,” he says at departures, even as he pulls Ilya in for a patented bro hug. “Buy me a fucking keychain or whatever.”

“Tell Chris I said hi and that he sucks at face-offs,” Dan says in parting, and Ilya gives them both a two-fingered salute in goodbye.

David picks him up at the other end. By the time his flight has landed, it’s just an hour before the game, so they head straight for the arena, avoiding most of the traffic by virtue of how late it is.

“Shane still does not know I’m coming?” he asks David in the car.

“No, we didn’t want to ruin the surprise. Did you travel okay?”

They make easy small talk on the drive, and while Ilya has been lagging after nearly two hours of travel and practice before that, he feels himself getting a second wind as they make it to the arena and fans in red and black are trickling inside the doors.

The Centaurs may well be the worst team in the League, but their fans are faithful; their attendance record is strong, and because Ottawa is only a two-hour drive from Montreal, there are plenty of Voyageurs jerseys to be seen.

They make it inside okay, and Ilya is nowhere near as famous outside of Boston as he’s going to be, but hockey fans will still know the name of one half of the wonder duo that’s been tearing up the League so soon into their rookie season. No one stops him as he and David find their seats beside Yuna, but he’s getting plenty of startled looks sent his way.

“Is that fucking Ilya Rozanov?” he hears a man exclaim a few rows behind him, and Ilya grins.

He chats easily with David and Yuna as the players take the ice for warm-up, eyes tracking Shane’s form as he glides across the ice. Ilya doesn’t even need to see the number on his back to know it’s him; Ilya could have picked Shane out of a thousand skaters on the same ice, almost as familiar with Shane’s skating as he is his own.

Soon enough, they’re standing for the Canadian anthem, and then it’s puck drop. Like Ilya, Shane is already centering the first line with Chris and another player on his wing—some guy Ilya doesn’t care to remember the name of. 

Shane has been good at the face-off circle, but he loses this one. From her seat, Yuna tuts. “Slow,” she says, and Ilya knows she’s not serious in her criticism, but Ilya bristles anyway. No one picks on Shane more than he does, but he hates when others do the same.

The Centaurs play a decent first twenty minutes and get on the board first, but they fall apart in the second. Shane nets himself two goals and then a double minor for an accidental high stick that draws blood.

The home crowd cheers and the Montreal fans groan as Shane skates into the penalty box and Ottawa gets a four-minute man advantage. Shane still hasn’t seen Ilya, still hasn’t noticed that his family has been sitting right next to the penalty box the whole game, so when Ilya hollers, “You suck, Hollander! Can’t even keep track of stick,” the “Shut up, asshole,” he replies with seems entirely automatic.

Ilya laughs uproariously as Shane throws a dirty look at what he obviously thinks is a Centaurs fan heckling him, and then does a double take to see Ilya and his parents there.

The look on his face is absolutely priceless. Ilya, because he really is an asshole, takes a picture with his phone.

The look of surprise gives way to a scowl, but Ilya isn’t fooled for a second. He can see the smile Shane is struggling to hold back, pleased to see Ilya in the stands.

“What are you even doing here?” he asks Ilya as he turns his gaze back to the ice, watching as his team clears the zone and dumps the puck behind Ottawa’s blue line. “Don’t you have an off-day tomorrow? You should be at home resting.”

“Everyone says Shane Hollander is so good at hockey, I wanted to come see.”

Shane turns to look at him for the express purpose of rolling his eyes. “You see me play all the time,” he points out.

“Yes, but never in person.”

They’re getting quite a few looks from the people around them, and Ilya knows this isn’t the time or place for this conversation, so he says, “I’m such a good friend, yes? The best?”

And that has Shane grinning. “The best,” he agrees.

The period ends with Shane still in the box and the Centaurs unable to convert. It doesn’t go better for them in the third. Once Shane is back on the ice, he plays as if he has something to prove. As if to tell Ilya, This is why everyone says I’m good at hockey. As if Ilya didn’t already know.

It’s absolutely breathtaking, and when Shane scores his third goal of the night for what is his first career hat-trick, half the crowd erupts into jubilant cheers and Ilya screams so loud he knows he’ll be hoarse for days.

“A hat-trick!” Yuna yells, shaking David’s shoulder, and David looks so overcome he can’t even form a full sentence.

“Fuck, yes!” Ilya cheers, and from across the ice, Shane is pointing in their direction.

Did you see?

And yeah, Ilya saw. 

He never once looked away.

**

The Voyageurs end up winning 4-1, and Ilya is amused to see the home crowd disappointed but not particularly dispirited. They’d been like that for him too, once, before Ilya’s presence on the Centaurs meant they actually started winning.

Mostly, people are excited about having gotten to see Shane Hollander’s first career hat-trick.

They go out to a restaurant to celebrate afterwards, and once they’re ready to leave, David sneaks off to pay the bill while Ilya and Shane fight over who gets to pay. The betrayed look on Shane’s face as David returns is so adorable, Ilya can’t do anything but laugh and coo at him. 

It’s such a good night, Ilya decides it’s absolutely worth the wasted rest day to have gotten to see Shane play in person. Has already decided he’ll do it again whenever their schedule allows.

Saying goodbye hasn’t gotten any easier, though, and Ilya is the one who clings this time, Shane rubbing at his back in comfort.

They won’t see each other in person until Christmas Day; the Hollanders will be celebrating with the Doyles in Boston. That's less than three weeks away, but it feels forever.

“All right, boys,” Yuna says when it becomes apparent that they’re not moving. She gently pulls Shane out of Ilya’s hold, and Ilya is reminded of the first time they parted back in September. “Shane is going to be fined if he’s late to meet with his team.”

That’s a solid point, so Ilya makes himself pull away fully, and lets David and Yuna shower Shane with their own hugs and kisses before they see him off.

Later that night, in his bedroom at the Hollanders’, Ilya goes through the pictures he’s taken on his phone, laughing when he sees Shane in the penalty box, his face a mask of shocked surprise.

Ilya doesn’t hesitate; he posts it to Facebook:

The post makes Sportsnet and ESPN.

**

Before the year ends, Ilya is the most followed hockey player in the NHL.

Chapter 10

Chapter Notes

Attention!! This chapter contains several content warnings, but I don't want to spoil anything, so please, please check the end notes if you feel the need to prepare yourself. Also, there be angst ahead.

On the one-year anniversary of his death, Ilya dreams about the crash.

He falls asleep in his bed and opens his eyes inside the plane.

For a second, he can’t make sense of what is happening; there is screaming, the sound of wind rushing in his ears and his stomach swooping with the sensation of falling.

He looks down at where he’s clutching an iPhone in his lap—a newer model than the one he has now. Or is that before? 

What the fuck is happening?

Ilya feels distressingly awake, conscious in a way he’s not supposed to be if this is a dream. This has to be a dream, right?

He can’t be back, he can’t leave Shane again. He still has so much left to do.

There are messages on the screen of his phone; Ilya’s last words, all for Shane.

There is a terrible sound of metal groaning as it’s being torn apart, and Ilya can hear people yelling in fear—his friends, his teammates. He can feel the heat of a fire. Can see the flames, licking up against the tiny airplane windows. Both engines are on fire now.

He’s going to die. They all are. Again, or the first time? Has he been inside this plane the whole time? Had he passed out and dreamt an entire year?

Did he ever really time travel?

He doesn’t know. Can’t tell what is real and what isn’t.

“Ilya.”

Ilya has squeezed his eyes shut. Not sure how he knows, but certain anyway that they are only seconds from the ground. It will end soon.

“Ilyusha.”

He feels warmth on his face, gentle hands cupping his cheeks and Ilya blinks his eyes open.

He’s still on the plane, they’re still falling, but that is his mother in front of him. He’s not seen that kind, beautiful face since he was twelve years old, but he would recognise his mother anywhere.

“Mama?”

“Ilyusha, it’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”

“Mama, what is happening? How are you here? I—”

“You have to listen, Ilyusha. The plane will crash soon, but it’s going to be okay. Just keep your eyes on me, my sweet. You won’t feel a thing, I promise.”

Ilya has so many questions, he doesn’t even know where to start, but his mother is here. His mother has told him to keep his eyes on her, so he does, staring into the hazel eyes he’d inherited from her.

A second later, the plane hits the ground.

Everything goes black.

Somewhere, a bell tolls twice.

Once for his soul.

Another for his memories.

Ilya is floating. He’s drifting in the place that is and isn’t.

He has been here for seconds and eons—

He has been here before. Ilya’s eyes snap open. He sees his mother, hears Shane crying, distant and far-off, and—

“Take my hand, Ilyusha,” Irina says.

Ilya does.

The world goes black again, and then reappears in a burst of colour and sound so sudden and violent it takes Ilya a few seconds to get his bearings.

They’re not on the plane, thank fuck.

“Where are we?” he asks his mother. They look to be in the woods somewhere, leaves rustling ominously in an unseen wind. A bird tweets, high and sharp. Ilya turns to look at her, but she doesn’t answer. Just tugs at his hand in the universal sign for follow me.

She leads him down a path only she sees, past large trees and mossy rocks. Ilya wants to ask more questions, but something tells him to keep his mouth shut, to go along silently.

He doesn’t know how much time has passed when they suddenly break the treeline and step right into a cemetery.

Ilya can’t hold back then. “Mama?” he asks uncertainly.

She smiles at him sadly. “Go on. He’s waiting for you.”

Ilya turns to where she’s pointing ahead at a cluster of gravestones some distance away. They’re all blank. Nameless, save one:

In everloving memory

Ilya Rozanov 1991 - 2021.

Until we meet again.

Ilya breathes in shakily. He really did die, then.

He turns back to his mother. “How am I here?” 

How is any of this possible?

Irina shakes her head. Doesn’t answer. Instead she points back to the gravestone. “He’s waiting for you,” she says again, and this time, when Ilya turns, there is a figure before his grave.

Shane.

Ilya’s feet are moving before he’s even conscious of it, large strides eating away at the ground until he can fall to his knees next to Shane. 

“Sweetheart,” he chokes out, because this is Shane, his Shane. The one Ilya left behind in 2021. He reaches a hand towards the tears streaking down his cheeks, but Ilya’s fingers never make contact. Something intangible, but real, is physically holding him back.

“You can’t touch him,” Irina says, and Ilya looks up to see his mother standing next to him. “We are dead, and he is of the living. For now.”

“What the hell does that even mean?” Ilya demands, angry now. “Tell me what is happening. I don’t understand—”

“You died, my sweet,” Irina cuts him off. “A year ago, now.”

Ilya stares at her. He’s known. Truly, he’s known that the crash was real, that Ilya was dead and then he wasn’t, but to hear his mother say the words aloud makes it real in a different way.

He watches as Irina sinks down on the other side of Shane, looking at him tenderly. “I’ve kept watch over Shane since you passed. For a year, I’ve witnessed him battling his grief.” She shifts her gaze, turning her eyes on Ilya. She looks devastated and fiercely proud in equal measure. “He wanted to end it so many times, Ilyusha, but he never did. He kept fighting in a way I couldn’t. For you. He didn’t want to disappoint you.”

Ilya feels the blade of her words hit true, gutted by sorrow and so, so much anger. None of this is fair. Ilya has never wanted for Shane to suffer like this. Would want him to be happy, always, even if that meant finding love after Ilya. Anything to avoid this.

The Shane before him is pale and drawn. Ilya can see his chest moving shallowly, the cold misting before his mouth in small puffs of clouds. He’s breathing, but barely. He looks deeply unwell.

“Is he—?” He’s not sure how to finish the question. Shane is obviously not okay. 

“He is fading,” Irina says, her voice hushed. She traces a hand over Shane’s head, as close to touching as that invisible barrier allows her. “I wish I could stroke his hair,” she tells Ilya wistfully. “Tell him everything is okay, that he’ll see you again. The end is only the beginning.”

“Mama,” Ilya says helplessly.

A fledgling smile steals across her pretty face. “You chose well, Ilyusha. He loves you so much. I don’t think you’d find a better match even if you’d spent the next thousand years looking.”

“Mama,” Ilya says again, more insistently. Her voice has taken on a dreamy quality, and Ilya has the foreboding sense that they don’t have much time; she’s drifting. “How do I stop him from fading? What does that mean? Is he—fuck, is he dying?”

Irina shakes her head. “You cannot stop the fade, my sweet. His heart is torn asunder by grief and loss. He doesn’t have much time left.”

A broken heart. Shane is literally dying from a broken heart.

Ilya looks down at where Shane is kneeling before his grave, wonders how often he comes out here, how long he spends wasting away at Ilya’s resting place, and feels his heart break along with Shane’s.

“Shane, sweetheart, you have to get up, okay?” He switches to English, voice raised as he says, “Hollander! Get the fuck up. You don’t die here. You keep living, okay? You keep living for me.”

“Ilyusha—”

“No! Mama, I’m not fucking letting him die out here alone. We need to get him moving. He’s going to, fuck, he’s going to freeze to death, we—”

“The living cannot hear the dead; the dead cannot touch the living.”

“Mama,” Ilya sobs, utterly lost. 

He feels helpless in a way he’s never been, even at his own death.

Ilya blinks, and his mother is before him, her hands cupping his face. “Ilyusha,” she says. “Listen, and do not speak.” She waits until he nods before continuing. “You were never supposed to die in that crash; the plane was never supposed to crash at all. Something, somewhere went wrong. Do you remember what you prayed for as the plane was going down?”

Ilya opens his mouth to respond, but Irina narrows her eyes, and so he just shakes his head. It feels so long ago.

“You prayed for two things. The first, to keep Shane safe, for him to live a long and happy life. The second, for more time. For the chance to love Shane without hiding. Do you understand?”

“I—yes, or no. No, none of this makes sense, Mama.”

“Your prayer was answered, Ilyusha. The first one.” Irina pulls away from Ilya and turns back to where Shane is still kneeling by the grave; his eyes are closed now. Ilya can see his lips moving, and it takes him a while to understand what he’s mouthing.

I love you. I miss you.

Over and over.

“You were not supposed to die, and so the powers that be granted a prayer. Shane is supposed to live a long and happy life, but—” She looks back at Ilya, face grimacing. “You chose a stubborn one, Ilyusha. One who has sworn to love no other. He will die here tonight, and so your second prayer is granted instead.”

“The time travel,” Ilya says, because that is the only fucking thing that makes sense. “I asked for more time—I, but I already woke up in 2009. How can I be here now? How can that be real if the first prayer is only now failing?”

Irina shrugs. “Time is constant. Everything is happening everywhere all at once, forwards and backwards, sideways and upwards. All of it is interchangable.”

“Says who? How do you know any of this?”

“The universe is vast and mysterious, my sweet. I don’t know who’s in charge, if anyone at all.” She shrugs again. “Maybe none of this is real. Maybe everything is.”

Ilya is so fucking confused, but he’s starting to put some of the pieces together, he thinks.

“Are you saying my soul is tied to Shane’s? That when he dies, that’s when I travel back to 2009?”

Irina nods.

“What about—what about Shane’s soul? I’m not leaving him behind here. I refuse.”

“Your souls are tied, my sweet. They go together.”

“And his memories?” Ilya asks desperately, because he has spent a year in the past already, and there’s been nothing, no hint whatsoever that Shane remembers any of their years together, but if Shane has been in the same situation as Ilya, then maybe—

Irina shakes her head. “I don’t know. You’ll have to listen for the toll of the bell.”

“What?”

“The toll of the bell,” Irina repeats distractedly. She’s looking out towards the woods they’d come from, frowning. “We’re out of time. The toll of the bell, Ilyusha. One for the soul, another for the memories.” She’s looking at Ilya now, her eyes luminous in the dark.

Ilya hasn’t even noticed the sun setting.

“Mama—”

“I love you, Ilyuhsa. Be good, and take care of Shane. I’m sorry that I couldn’t.”

By Ilya’s gravestone, Shane takes a deep, rattling breath. He doesn’t exhale.

Ilya stares. No, he thinks. Shane.

Everything goes black.

Somewhere, a bell tolls once.

Ilya wakes up.

**

2010 gets off to a rough start.

In the first week of January, Ilya is woken up by Cathy shaking his shoulder, saying, “You’re having a nightmare, Ilya. You’re okay, Shane is okay. It was just a nightmare.”

Apparently, he’s been shouting for Shane, begging him not to leave him.

He’s so distraught, eyes shiny with tears and wild with fear that Cathy calls Shane even though it’s only five in the morning. Ilya only settles down once he’s got Shane’s voice in his ear, promising him that he’s okay, that Shane isn’t going anywhere. “It’s you and me, Ilya. Always.”

I’d die without you, Ilya thinks, and has a sudden vision of the reverse being true, and then Shane has to calm him down all over again.

They’re all a little freaked out by the incident, but Ilya chalks it up as a one-time occurrence—wonders if it has something to do with the anniversary of his death—and insists he’s fine. Beyond the fear of losing Shane, he doesn’t even remember the dream. Reluctantly, they let it go, though Brian tentatively suggests Ilya might benefit from speaking with a therapist.

“You’ve been through a lot,” he says, and is referring to Ilya’s outing and refugee status, because no one knows that those things are really just minor blips in the minefield of his mental landscape because nothing will top having died in an actual plane crash.

Also, time travel.

Ilya has no idea how to navigate any of that, so he demurs on a therapist for the time being, but does concede it might not be a bad idea in the future. It’d worked for him before.

January also sees the Bears going through a brutal losing streak. Suddenly, the puck stops finding the back of the net, and Ilya grits his teeth through a goal-scoring drought that has everyone and their mother wonder if Ilya Rozanov really is as good as they thought.

Ilya loses track of how many times he tells the reporters that their passes are connecting but they’ve had a string of unlucky bounces. It happens. That’s just hockey. They just have to keep playing their game and the rest will take care of itself. 

By February, they’ve lost eleven in a row and Ilya is wound so tight from answering the same pointed questions, from scrolling past comment after comment about how much he sucks, that Coach decides someone else can weather the media storm for a few days.

“Rozanov is not answering questions this week,” Coach tells the PR people, and all Ilya can think is fucking finally. He knows he’s the big shot. He’s a rookie, he’s young, and his is the face that is drawing people to their games, but he doesn’t have the C and he doesn’t have an A.

He shouldn’t have been shouldering the brunt of the media. Let the veteran players answer why they aren’t scoring enough goals.

By the time they’re at fourteen straight losses, Ilya has had enough. They’re in Columbus playing the Blue Jackets, and the Bears are winning this game even if Ilya has to score every damn goal himself. Twelve minutes into the first period, he’s beaten the Jacket’s goalie twice, and when he returns to the bench after his second goal, he roars, “Are we fucking doing this or not?” and finally, finally, his teammates come alive. The fourth line jumps the boards and fights their way into the offensive zone where they battle for a dirty, sloppy goal, but the puck passes the goal line and that’s all that matters; it doesn’t always have to be pretty.

The thing about a losing streak is that it freezes guys up, catches them in a loop of what-ifs and could’ve, would’ve, should’ve, and before they know it, they’re so desperate for the other team not to score, they forget to try and score on them.

It’s easy for that to mess with a player’s head, and then they start self-sabotaging. 

Ilya has seen it happen again and again the last month, but sometimes the tiniest spark is all that’s needed for it to change, and they get it tonight.

They win 7-2.

Shane calls him to congratulate them on the win and is nice enough not to say I told you so, because Shane has been telling Ilya the same thing that Ilya has been telling reporters for weeks now.

“Just play your game, and the puck will go in eventually.”

They make idle small talk, Shane asking about the Doyle girls and telling Ilya about the Reebok deal that Yuna is working on.

“They make you do commercial for TV?” Ilya teases, because Shane will never really lose his awkwardness in front of the cameras. It’s due entirely to his earnestness that he makes that more charming than anything else.

Finally, the conversation turns towards their plans for their upcoming break. Vancouver is hosting the 2010 winter Olympics, which means the NHL season is off for nearly three weeks. Ilya needs to spend that time in Canada, but they’ve been going back and forth between going to Ottawa or staying in Shane’s rented apartment in Montreal.

“I still think this is a good opportunity for us to go apartment hunting during the break. We’re not gonna have this much time to actually check out different properties until after the season has ended.”

“I don’t want to spend our break going to different listings,” Ilya whines, grinning when Shane says, “But that’s the fun part!” 

He’s being entirely sincere.

Ilya has come to learn that his fondness for real estate started even before he’d bought the sex building in their other life.

Ilya had given him a book on Central-American architecture for Christmas, a rare first edition that had no business costing as much as it did. He would have paid the price twenty times over for the look on Shane’s face as he’d unwrapped the present and seen the cover.

“You know, if you really think about it, we should just build a house from the ground up. We’d get everything perfect then.”

Ilya groans. This is not the first time Shane has suggested this. “Will take too long, you know this.”

“Not that long. If we buy the land this break, the house would probably be done by the beginning of next season.”

“And where will we stay for summer, huh? Your apartment only has one bedroom. If you want me to sleep on a couch for four months, I’ll spend whole summer at home in Ottawa.”

“I wouldn’t make you sleep on the couch,” Shane says indignantly. “Geez. Besides, you’re too much of a giant to even fit the length of it. We’ll just share the bed.”

He’s absolutely serious, Ilya knows, and silently despairs of all his life choices because he’s not going to be able to say no.

Ilya is Shane’s best friend, and so for him it makes perfect sense. Not even the chirping of their respective teammates will make Shane understand how weird they are about each other, and Ilya knows from Chris there’s been a lot of friendly ribbing.

Chris is his inside man; Ilya suckered him into looking out for Shane months ago, to make sure the Voyageurs are treating him right. Things seem to have been all right so far, and Ilya still can’t help but marvel at the difference visibility makes in sport. When guys are supportive, it sets the tone for the whole locker room.

Shane still hasn’t come out, hasn’t even hinted at it to anyone as far as Ilya knows, but he’s been vocal about his support of Ilya, both on the ice against his opponents and at home with his teammates. Like Ilya is in Boston, Shane is Montreal’s star player and wields a lot of clout. His voice matters.

He’d been scared to use that before, in the future past, but he has in this time, for Ilya, and Ilya doesn’t even have the words to describe how much that matters. How much that means to him.

“Gonna need a bigger bed,” Ilya says finally, instead of suggesting getting a separate bed like a normal person would. He’s so dumb.

Shane just hums in satisfaction, unaware that he’s got Ilya entirely wrapped around his fingers.

They eventually decide that they’ll spend the first week of break in Ottawa with the Hollanders before driving back to Montreal to look for somewhere to build a house. Together.

Christ, Ilya is so gone on Shane it’s a wonder no one has started asking him uncomfortable questions about it.

(Truth be told, he wouldn’t have it any other way.)

**

A couple of nights later, the Bears play the Hurricanes at home.

It’s another blowout game, Ilya’s team up by 5-0 in the dying minutes of the third, and while it sucks to be shut out by any team, the Canes seem to take exception to the fact that it’s Boston in particular.

Well, they’re from Raleigh, and North Carolina is considered a Southern State; some of the Canes players have been sniping at Ilya the whole night, calling him everything from fag to fairy, to sissy.

This far into the season, Ilya has gotten used to it, has become intimately familiar with the teams that will leave his sexuality alone and the ones that won’t. The thing is, though, it’s actually died down somewhat, because Ilya has made it a point to drag his team to victory against their more homophobic opponents, and the ones who manage to coax him into actual fights quickly learn that not only is Ilya big, he knows how to move his body. He’s not afraid to drop the gloves. He might be a rookie in this time, but Ilya has years of experience fighting on the ice and it shows.

(Not incidentally, Ilya’s penalty minutes have been higher than his first rookie season.)

His teammates stand up for him too, even the ones who still sneer at him sometimes because winning is infinitely better than losing, and so they dish out crushing hits and slashes hidden from the refs, and generally, other teams have come to understand that bashing the queer guy on ice won’t actually help them win games, but the Canes aren’t letting up.

Their star winger has been trying to get a rise out of Ilya the whole night, which Ilya has responded to by putting up two goals on the board. He wouldn’t mind going for the empty netter when the Canes inevitably pull their goalie; he still hasn’t gotten his first hat-trick.

Less than two minutes left of the game, the Canes’ goalie skates for the bench, and Ilya’s got the puck jammed into the half boards of his own defensive zone, playing keepaway from the Canes player who’s been talking shit the whole night.

“You fucking cocksucker, go back to Russia, you cunt,” the guy growls at him, low enough that the refs won’t hear him, and Ilya laughs.

“You talk so much of me sucking cock, Fuller, is this you asking me to suck yours?” Ilya finally manages to box out Fuller enough to get the space to send the puck behind the red line where his D-man has the open lane to clear the zone. It misses the Canes’ open net and becomes an icing.

“Shut the fuck up, Rozanov,” Fuller tells him as they wait for the refs to set up the face-off back a the red dot, and Ilya’s grin is mean and full of teeth.

“Could not pay me to suck your dick, but your daddy was begging me to suck his the last time we were in Rale—” and that’s how far Ilya gets before there is a blinding pain in his right knee.

He goes down, white noise in his ears as he breathes through the pain and the game descends into chaos.

Fuller gets a game misconduct for a two-handed slash, which hardly matters with just seconds left on the clock, but Ilya takes pleasure in knowing the fucker will be suspended and fined, a small comfort once Ilya is told by the team doctors he’ll have to sit out the last two games before the break.

He’s been lucky, for a measure of it, that nothing is broken or torn. His knee is banged up, hurts like a son-of-a-bitch, but that’s all it is. The padding did its job.

The Bears take the two points of a decisive win, and the Canes leave Boston, shamefaced. Ilya should be celebrating with the rest of his teammates, even with the injury, but he can’t help but feel uneasy about it. 2010 has gotten off to such a shitty start with the losing streak in January and now this. 

It feels a bit like a bad omen, and the thing is, Ilya knows that bad things often come in threes. He can’t help but worry about what comes next.

**

The day he’s supposed to fly back to Ottawa for the Olympic break, Ilya is woken up by his phone ringing in the middle of the night. His hand slaps around on the nightstand, trying to grab for his phone as he curses in Russian, already pissed at whoever is on the other end.

If it’s Cliff calling him to come meet the boys at some club, Ilya is going to make sure Cliff is cockblocked for the foreseeable future; they know he has an early flight.

He finally manages to grab hold of the phone, and freezes when he sees the caller ID.

“Chris,” he says. “Where is Shane? What happened?” He’s scrambling upright in bed, turning to switch on the lamp on the nightstand. He doesn’t know how or what, but he knows that something is wrong. Can feel it in the way a shiver runs down his spine forebodingly. 

(Bad things come in threes, after all.)

“Ilya, I am so fucking sorry. I lost track of him for a few minutes, that’s all. I had eyes on him all night. But—”

“Chris! Tell me what the fuck happened. Is Shane okay? Is he—?”

“Hospital,” Chris chokes out. Ilya can hear him crying, and for a second, he fears the worst. 

Can’t breathe for how scared he is.

“Is he okay? Hurt?”

“Physically, he’s fine. Mostly. Some bruises, but no major injuries. It’s—”

Chris takes in a gulping breath, and Ilya steels himself, but he’s still not prepared for it when Chris says, “He got roofied. We were at this dude’s place out in the suburbs, someone who knows a couple of the guys on the team. The place was packed, and some guy clocked Shane pretty early on. He started hanging around him, pestering him to go home with him. Shane kep telling him no, that he wasn’t interested, but the guy wouldn’t fucking take no for an answer.” There’s a brief silence, Chris exhaling shakily. “A couple of us ran him off, Ilya. I swear, we had Shane’s back the whole fucking night. A few of our teammates even spoke with the home owner to make sure the guy didn’t get back in, and I had eyes on Shane, I—Fuck. He needed to use the restroom, and he looked fine, but I guess the drugs were already in his system? That’s how it started; the asshole mixed him a welcome drink. He was being pushy about it. I should have knocked it out of Shane’s hands.”

The last part is mumbled, Chris speaking more to himself than Ilya, he thinks.

Ilya is so fucking enraged it takes him a few seconds to blink away the film of burning-hot red before his eyes.

“Did he—? Was he—?”

“No, the guy tried, but—” Another shaky breath, and then, “Mitty noticed Shane hadn’t come back, so I went to look for him. I—The fucker must have snuck back in, but I stopped him in time, and Shane was trying to fight back. I don’t really remember what happened next, I was just so fucking furious. I just started wailing on him. Shane started—Fuck, Ilya. He started seizing,” Chris says miserably. “Someone called an ambulance, and fuck, we’re at the hospital now. The doctors say the drugs had a bad reaction with the alcohol." Chris laughs brokenly, sounding half hysterical. “He wasn’t even drinking that much. It was just that one drink. It’s a fucking shitstorm here now. We’re trying to keep it out of the news, but it’s Montreal. They love Shane here. We’re just hoping everyone keeps their fucking mouth shut.”

“You call his parents? I’m—fuck, Chris, I’m stuck in Boston until morning, I can’t—He shouldn’t be alone.”

“They’re his emergency contact; the hospital already called them, and they’re on the way. Guessing they’ll be here in the next hour or so. I just, fuck, I knew you’d want to know. I’m not leaving until they get here.”

“Is he awake? Can you give him the phone?”

“He’s sleeping now.” Chris hesitates, but then he says, “He was asking for you in the ambulance. He woke up, and he was crying. It was fucking awful.” 

Ilya closes his eyes, so brittle he feels as if one wrong move will have him breaking into a million pieces.

Devastated that he’s not by Shane's side right now, holding his hand.

“If he wake up, you tell him I’m coming. I’ll change my flight, go straight to Montreal. You let him know, okay? I will be there as soon as possible.”

“Yeah, of course. I—” Chris breaks off. “I’m really fucking sorry,” he says finally. It’s not the first time he’s apologised throughout this conversation, and if Ilya wasn’t so fucking angry, he might even acknowledge that none of this is actually Chris’ fault.

The only one to blame is the man who’d thought he was entitled to someone else’s time and body.

What’s happened is terrible and unforgivable even without it being Shane, but the fact that it is—

Ilya is in no frame of mind to offer Chris any kind of absolution right now.

“Just tell him I’m on my way,” he says, and ends the call, already pulling out his laptop to book a new ticket.

He doesn’t go back to sleep.

Chapter End Notes

Content warning: temporary character death, homophobic language, hockey-related violence, non-consensual drug use, off-screen attemtped sexual assault.

Chapter 11

As Ilya’s taxi pulls up at the hospital, Chris is already there, waiting for him.

“Hey, man,” he says tentatively. He looks visibly subdued, and the only thing stopping Ilya from chewing him out is the fact that he knows Chris has refused to leave the hospital, even after David and Yuna arrived.

Logically, he knows Chris isn’t to blame for what’s happened, he does, but Ilya is beyond furious. He’s tired after little to no sleep, and all he wants is to see Shane.

It’s easy to direct his frustration at the first available target.

“He awake?” he asks by way of hello, no patience for anything else.

“Yeah. I—yeah. Let me take you to his room.”

They don’t talk as Chris guides Ilya through the hallways and up a couple of floors. It’s slow going; Ilya’s pain killers wore off hours ago, and while he’s been made to wear a knee brace after the injury, the flight has only worsened the swelling. He’s limping by the time they make it to Shane’s room.

“Hey, before you go in, just, uh, prepare yourself, okay?”

“What do you mean?” 

Chris hunches his shoulders, and even though he’s got a couple of centimetres on Ilya, it makes him look smaller. “It’s just, he’s roughed up, okay? The doctors say it looks worse than it is. He’s got a black eye and some swelling. His lip is busted, and he bruised his hip when he fell down after he started seizing. He’s been sore on that side.”

“You said no major injuries!” Ilya seethes.

“It’s all surface-level, Ilya. I agree, it fucking sucks, but injury wise, it’s mostly just bruises even if it looks bad.” Chris sighs, looking heartsick and as if the night has aged him ten years. He’s been by Shane’s side from the beginning; he must be exhausted.

If Ilya was in a more charitable mood, he’d tell him not to look so fucking guilty.

“Okay, fine. Anything else?”

“Yeah, he’s—he had a bad reaction to the drugs he was given.” Chris makes a face. “He’s having trouble focusing. Don’t be surprised if he repeats himself or seems out of it. He’s throwing up on and off, and he’s been having trouble remembering what happened; it’s making him anxious. The doctors have been telling us to keep him calm.”

Ilya is so fucking pissed off he needs to take a moment to breathe through the rage. He wants, desperately, to have some alone time with the man who’d done this. Thinks he might actually commit murder if they ever meet in person.

More than anything, he wants for this to never have happened, for Shane not to be laid up in a hospital bed, hurting and scared.

“Okay, yeah,” Ilya says. “I can be calm.” 

He’s not actually sure he can, but then Chris is opening the door and all plans of keeping his cool flies out the window the second he’s got eyes on Shane.

He’s grateful that Chris had thought to warn him, because Shane looks so much worse than he was expecting. The swelling around his eye is minimal, but the mottled red and blue of a painful looking bruise goes from the edge of his right brow, across the eyelid and down to the high point of his cheekbone. His busted lip is puffy and crusted with blood—probably too tender to clean it away. Ilya can see tear tracks on his cheeks and it has his own eyes welling up. He has to blink furiously to keep from crying, because the last thing Shane needs is Ilya breaking down in front of him.

“Котёнок,” he says, voice shaky and low. The few seconds it takes for Shane’s gaze to focus on Ilya, for him to process who he is, is the longest of Ilya’s life.

But the confusion is brief, recognition lighting up his eyes as Shane holds out a trembling hand towards him. 

“Ilya, you’re here,” he says, chin wobbling, and then they’re both crying after all. 

Ilya limps past where Yuna is seated in the chair next to Shane’s bed, carefully climbing in next to where Shane is already making space for him. He gathers him into his arms, kissing any part of him he can reach that isn’t already bruised as he whispers apologies over and over again.

He’s sorry he hadn’t been there, sorry Shane has had to go through this.

Sorry he couldn’t protect him.

He wants to say it’s okay, that Shane is going to be fine, but he can’t actually promise that, so what he says is, “I am here. I’m not going anywhere,” because that is true even if Shane’s recovery takes more than the three weeks they have before the season starts back up.

Even if Ilya doesn’t play another game for Boston this year, he’s staying with Shane for as long as he needs. To hell with everything else.

He sits with Shane for long minutes, Shane curled up against his side, clutching at Ilya’s hoodie with both hands. He’s crying silently, and all attempts at making him speak are met with a shake of his head until Ilya doesn’t even try. Instead, he keeps up a litany of words, gently stroking through Shane’s hair as he tells him about Dan and Cliff pranking his teammates, about Sara’s new special interest being whales, and specifically Orcas. He tells him he’s already sick of the knee brace even if it’s only been a few days, and that Jake Fuller is an asshole who doesn’t deserve to play for Team USA. When he’s too tired to remember his English, he switches to Russian, talking about how they should take a road trip this summer, just the two of them. Jump in a car and see as much of Canada as they can. Ilya wants to see the place that is going to be his home, his country, and he wants to see it with Shane.

“It’s okay, Ilya,” David cuts him off eventually. “He’s sleeping.”

Ilya takes in a deep breath, feels Shane’s head move on his chest, and finally looks up to acknowledge David and Yuna. 

Chris is fiddling with his phone in a corner, studiously avoiding looking at them, but Ilya can see that his cheeks are wet.

“Sorry,” Ilya tells them, heartsore and angry. He feels untethered, as if the only thing holding him together is Shane’s solid weight and the trust that Ilya will keep him safe as he sleeps. “I did not mean to ignore you for so long.”

Yuna shakes her head. “Don’t be sorry, honey.” She pauses, breath hitching. “He let you touch him. He’s—” She breaks off, looking off to the side to wipe away a few stray tears.

“He hasn’t been letting anyone touch him,” Chris explains as David goes to comfort Yuna. “I forgot to warn you about that; even the doctors have been having a hard time.”

Ilya clenches his jaw at that. Reminds himself that Shane had reached for him first; there is no point getting out of the bed now. “Do they—The man who did this, is he with police?”

“No, not yet, but they’re looking for him.”

“The police were here earlier. We’ve been assured that they’re taking this case very seriously. Whoever this man is,” David spits out, saying the word man the same way someone might say rabid animal, “he’s looking at assault causing bodily harm, attempted sexual assault, and administering drugs? No, what was the third charge?”

“Administering a noxious substance,” Yuna corrects quietly.  

“Good. That’s good. A monster like this should not walk free.” Ilya looks down at where Shane is nestled against him. He looks peaceful in sleep, even with the vicious bruise, and Ilya has no idea how the hell he is supposed to ever let him out of his sight again. A thought hits him then, and he turns his eyes back on Chris. “This is why you have stayed? You thought this fucker might come back for Shane?”

Yuna gasps, and Chris shifts uneasily, looking caught out.

“I mean, he probably wouldn’t, but I just—I already took my eyes off of Shane once before and everything went to hell. I figured—I don’t know. Just in case, I guess.”

For a second, no one says anything, but then David is crossing the room, pulling Chris into his arms and hugging him fiercely. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you for looking after my boy. You did good, Chris.”

He must have needed to hear it, because as Ilya watches, Chris all but collapses into David’s arms, the tension bleeding out of his shoulders and with it, Ilya’s misplaced anger. Chris has been standing sentinel in his place and for that alone, Ilya will forgive him. 

He was never the one to blame, after all.

**

Shane sleeps through most of the morning.

He wakes up only to be sick, and the first time, he throws up all over Ilya’s front and is so distraught, so embarrassed, it takes both Yuna and Ilya to calm him down, to let him know it’s not a big deal. 

“David is going out to get me new sweater. It’s fine, котёнок, this is no problem,” Ilya says, and shushes Shane as he whimpers miserably.

A doctor comes to check on him, tuts over the persistent nausea and loads him up with a saline bag to help with the dehydration. She looks over Shane’s chart, makes some notes and tells them he can be discharged in the afternoon. They’ve done what they can for him.

“He needs time and rest now, and he’ll be more comfortable at home,” she says, not unkindly, when both Yuna and Ilya start protesting.

In the end, Shane is the one who begs to go home, and none of them can stand to deny him.

The first week back in Ottawa is mostly spent in uncomfortable silence, everyone walking on eggshells as Shane struggles to keep himself awake.

He’s still wary of others touching him, spending most of his time curled up on Ilya’s bed, drowsing as Ilya pets through his hair and reads quietly next to him.

They’re not sure why he’s decided Ilya is a safe space, why he flinches away from David and barely lets Yuna near, but they don’t question it. It gets better as the days go by, anyway.

“I’m just glad he has you,” David tells him one morning, after Shane has shut himself in the bedroom. He looks angry and frustrated, glancing at the door every few minutes until Yuna sighs and tells him to leave him be. Shane will come out when he’s ready.

“I know,” David says, snappish, and they’re all a little emotional those first few days. 

They don’t leave the house.

By the time they’re well into the second week of their break, Shane no longer needs to nap during the day, he’s more alert, and his bruises have started to fade. They’ve gone from angry reds and blues to an ugly green and yellow, and every time Ilya sees them, he has to remind himself that the man who’d hurt Shane has been taken into police custody. He’ll get what he deserves.

They’ve managed to keep the incident out of the news, and the court system is protecting Shane’s identity, but the Voyageurs are a major deal in Montreal. People know there’d been a house party with some of the players, and that someone from the party had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance.

Ilya had seen the online chatter early on, seen the speculations in his own comment sections; he’s been carefully documenting his staycation in Ottawa with Shane and the Hollanders to combat some of the theories. So far, no one has been asking why Shane’s face is never fully in the pictures, and no one has cottoned on to the fact that Ilya was ever in Montreal.

Once he no longer sleeps through most of the day, Shane starts baking as a coping mechanism. He spends hours in the kitchen, making racks upon racks of cookies, and if he gets bored he moves on to cakes. He really is a champ at baking.

He doesn’t talk about what happened, and only the team-mandated counselor that shows up at the house twice a week, keeps Ilya from pushing.

(No one is more eager for Shane to process his trauma than the Montreal Voyageurs.)

It’s a relief that he’s talking to someone at all, even if it’s not Ilya, and so he grits his teeth, gives Shane space to work through his pain and eats until he is stuffed.

He keeps an eye on the online discourse and scowls when he catches a comment from someone who claims their cousin had seen Shane Hollander on the night of the infamous house party, being loaded out of an ambulance at the emergency room. It doesn’t garner much attention, is only a second-hand account, but there is enough talk that Ilya posts a picture of Shane to Facebook; he’s hunched down in front of the oven, watching a new batch as they bake.

The fangirls come out in droves, gushing over Shane, over Ilya, and over Shane and Ilya, together. The sighting is dismissed as a ridiculous rumour.

At the start of the third week, Ilya finally pushes Shane out the door. “We need to go to the store. You need more sugar and chocolate chips.”

“I don’t want to. Just get it yourself,” Shane says, and it quickly devolves into an argument.

It’s the first time they have an actual fight since Ilya came back to the past. They’ve argued before, but it’s been playful and low stakes, nothing serious that either of them were unwilling to back down from.

This is nothing like that.

“How will you play hockey if you can’t even leave the house?” Ilya says at one point, voice raised and angry, and David, who’s been hovering in the background, watching them worriedly, looks ready to intervene.

But Shane doesn’t seem scared. Instead, he screams back, “Fuck you, why do you even care? I bet you’d like it if I didn’t play. Maybe then you’d actually win the Calder.” 

He’s being mean on purpose, cutting straight to the bone because after the losing streak in January, Ilya is behind in the scoring race by a large margin; he’ll be lucky if the Bears even make the playoffs and there’s no way he’ll win the Calder for best rookie. Not with the way Shane has been tearing it up before this.

The second the words leave his mouth, Shane sucks in a sharp breath, looking horrified by himself.

Ilya raises his brows, unimpressed.

“Are you done?” he asks, and then Shane’s chin is trembling, the way it does when he’s trying not to cry.

Ilya sighs and goes to pull him into his arms.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Shane mumbles into his neck, saying the words over and over again. “I didn’t mean it. You know I didn’t mean it, right?”

Ilya catches David’s eyes over Shane’s shoulder and waves him away. He’s got this.

They’d been warned before leaving the hospital that Shane would cycle through anxiety and mood swings, that it was normal for him to act out when he felt upset or unsafe.

“You are idiot if you think there is a world where I do not want you to play hockey,” he tells Shane solemnly once they’re alone. He pulls back, reaches for the side of Shane’s face that is clear of bruises, and says, “I care because I love you. Because you are my best friend and I need you to be safe and happy, always. Hockey makes you happy, no?” He’s stroking over Shane’s cheek, staring into his eyes and willing him to understand.

Ilya will be right by his side, for as long as he needs, but Shane cannot keep himself locked up inside his childhood home.

He needs to step out and face the world at some point.

“I’m sorry,” Shane says again. “I know you’re just trying to help.” A few tears escape the corner of his eye, and Ilya brushes them away gently.

“Crybaby,” he teases warmly, and is rewarded with a shaky smile and a muttered, “Ass.”

Ilya chuckles. He pulls him back into a hug, and Shane winds his arms around Ilya’s neck, burrowing close. 

“I love you, too, by the way,” he whispers after a moment.

Ilya closes his eyes, presses his lips against the side of Shane’s head and basks in the moment. He is content to stand here for as long as Shane needs, keeping him safe inside the circle of his embrace.

“I know. This is why you will not make me go to store alone, да?”

Shane snorts. He draws back just enough to let Ilya see him rolling his eyes. “Pushy,” he complains, because of the two of them, Shane is usually the one who bosses Ilya around. He’s the one who will hold out a hand in offer, a welcomed leash and Ilya his obedient dog.

Ilya grins at him. “You love me anyway,” he says, and Shane’s eyes go soft.

“Yeah. I guess I do.”

It’s the first time they’ve said those words to each other.

(It won’t be the last.)

**

Shane seems a little more himself after that. He does accompany Ilya to the store even though he whines about it, and he never strays more than a few feet, but it does him a world of good. He’s still anxious, but more willing to let Ilya drag him out for walks around the neighbourhood and workouts at the local gym. 

A couple of weeks is not enough to blunt their conditioning, but they’ve both got injuries to work through before they get back on the ice.

Ilya has finally gotten rid of the knee brace, but he can still feel a few twinges here and there, and Shane’s hip is still a little sore.

It feels good to start moving again.

Shane keeps speaking to his counselor—they’ve moved to short, daily sessions over the phone, and whatever is said during those talks, it’s clearly working.

Shane is smiling more, doesn’t flinch when David comes near him, and has finally stopped baking so much, which Ilya is admittedly a little sad about. 

He still won’t go outside unless Ilya is with him, though.

With only a couple of days until they have to report back to their teams for training, Ilya is not the only one worried about it; he knows Yuna has been on the phone with Shane’s agent and the Voyageurs’ management. Knows she and Shane have been arguing about it.

He figures they need a break from each other, so he asks David to borrow his car and throws the keys at Shane, because he’d actually gotten his license right after his birthday last May.

“Let’s drive to Montreal,” he says. “We’ll look at places to build house.”

Shane blinks at him, hesitant but clearly interested. He’d been so excited for the break, initially. Had researched different spots around Montreal, sending Ilya links to the places he’d thought would be the perfect building ground. Had been talking about which architecture firm they should hire, and what kind of style they should go for. Was already making noise about a built-in rink even if that meant they’d have to pretty much empty both of their savings.

Then the assault happened and Shane has been anxious about returning to Montreal since.

If he’s figured this is Ilya’s way of getting him back into the city, he doesn’t mention it.

“Okay,” he says, and so they go.

They’re mostly quiet on the drive, comfortable with each other’s silences in that way people rarely are. The few times they talk, it’s mostly about what they want to look for in a home.

Ilya insists they’ll need enough guestrooms so people can visit, and Shane says he’d like a big kitchen with one of those fancy double ovens that costs a truly ridiculous amount of money.

“You keep baking me cookies and you can have as many ovens as you want,” Ilya tells him seriously, hiding a grin when Shane bursts out laughing at that.

He’s missed seeing Shane so carefree.

Once they make it past the city limits, Ilya surprises Shane by telling him he’s actually made plans for a realtor to show them some available spots. 

He’s hesitant at first, sticking close to Ilya as they greet the woman meeting them. She introduces herself as Veronica, and doesn’t offer to shake their hands.

Ilya had asked her not to beforehand, and while he hadn’t provided a reason, she was nothing but a consummate professional, easily agreeing to his request; she picks up on Shane’s discomfort early on, and maintains a respectable distance at every place she shows them.

She’s clearly competent, and for each answer she gives Shane’s many questions, Ilya can see him visibly relax, engaging more and more with her until they finally end up at a neighbourhood in Outremont that they both get excited about.

Ilya watches with a pleased smile as Shane chats eagerly with Veronica, discussing the land and the different permits they’ll need and hey, would they like her husband’s contact info? He works for a local luxury architecture firm.

“Yes,” Shane says excitedly, before visibly catching himself, biting his lower lip guiltily as he turns to face Ilya. “I mean, If you agree, of course,” he tells him, as if there was even the slightest chance of Ilya denying him this.

“Is good place. I think we can build a good home here.”

Veronica smiles, pleased, and next to her, Shane is looking at Ilya as if he is the best thing he’s ever seen.

Ilya looks back at him steadily. He thinks, I’d do anything for you, and wonders if Shane isn’t starting to understand that. 

**

They drive back to Shane’s apartment and waste the rest of the evening watching the gold-medal game on TV.

Canada is playing Team USA, and if Jake Fuller wins an Olympic gold Ilya will have to break something.

Preferably Fuller’s nose, the next time they meet.

They’re resting on the couch, Shane wrapped around Ilya’s back like an octopus as he absently plays with the fingers of Ilya’s left hand. 

“I have to go back to Boston tomorrow,” Ilya says during the second intermission, and Shane makes an unhappy noise. He tightens his grip on Ilya’s hand but doesn’t respond. 

A few seconds tick by, and the longer Shane remains silent, the more Ilya worries.

He’s been so proud of Shane, of the way he’s recovered, but he knows it’s not a linear process. Shane has been hesitant about returning to hockey, resistant to going back to Montreal even if Ilya had been so sure he was ready; he just needed a little push.

Now though, he worries that he’s been too forceful, that Shane truly isn’t ready after all, and if he needs more time, Ilya will give that to him.

He’ll make sure no one pressures him into something he isn’t ready for.

So he says, “I could stay. If you need me to, I will stay here with you. For as long as you need. Just say the word.”

And that, finally, has Shane reacting.

“Don’t,” he says, and it’s the most heartbroken Ilya has ever heard him. “Please don’t make me ask you to stay, because I know you will if I do, and then I’m never going to be able to walk out into the world without holding your hand.” He raises their clasped hands as if to prove his point, brings them to his lips and touches them against Ilya’s knuckles.

Ilya feels as if he’s coming apart at the seams. This is what he wants, he reminds himself, this is what is best for Shane and what Ilya has been telling him from the beginning, but it feels like a goodbye in the worst way.

“Shane—”

“No. Please, let me talk.” 

He turns his head to meet Shane’s beautiful doe eyes, the freckles across his cheeks a starburst of constellations. Ilya can finally see them clearly again now that the bruises have faded in their entirety. He’s missed them; Shane could ask him for the moon at this moment, and Ilya would find a way to pluck it from the sky.

“Okay, I’m listening.”

Shane smiles at him, small but true, and says, “There is no place in this world I feel safer than by your side. Sometimes, it feels impossible that we’ve only known each other for a year. You are my best friend, and I love you so much my heart could burst from it. You are my favourite person in the whole wide world, and if you don’t go, I will let you play my knight in shining armour for the rest of my life. And the thing is, I need my best friend, I need you, and if you stay, you’ll keep being my crutch and that’s not fair to either of us. I think—I think you might be the best thing that has ever happened to me, and I’m not letting him take that from me. He doesn’t get to touch that part of my life.”

Ilya closes his eyes, overcome. He tilts forwards, pressing their foreheads together and takes a moment to just breathe. 

Ilya would have been happy to stay, might even have preferred it in some ways if only because that would keep him next to the love of his life. He understands, though, where Shane is coming from. Is so, so proud of the way Shane is taking charge of his own fear; he survived, and yes, he got lucky, yes, it could have been so much worse, but what happened was traumatic and painful and Shane is finally refusing to let it control his life.

How can Ilya be anything but supportive in the face of that?

“You are my favourite person, too, you know,” he says. He smacks a sloppy kiss to Shane’s cheek, the one that’d been bruised, and closes his arms around him. “I love you, too. More than anything. More than hockey.”

And that’s a secret Ilya has kept locked behind his ribcage in either lifetimes. He thinks before all this happened, that would have scared Shane away, but he knows better now. Their relationship has changed these last three weeks; they’re going to build a house together. A shared home.

They’re not quite there yet, but Ilya knows where they are headed. He thinks Shane does too, because he says, “More than hockey, eh? That’s a lot,” and the words are so tender, his voice so sweet he may as well have returned the sentiment. 

So maybe this is a goodbye after all, but not the kind Ilya had feared at first. Instead, it feels kind of like the last pages of a chapter that has run its course; the book isn’t finished, not by a long shot.

That’s its own kind of excitement, not knowing what comes next but hoping for something wonderful.

Ilya can appreciate that, so when he says, “Ok, I’ll go back to Boston,” they both know that the second half of that sentence is:

But Canada is home. You are home.

Chapter 12

Chapter Notes

The thing about ending a good chapter is having to turn the pages to begin the next one. The story has been good thus far; there's been plenty of heartbreak and tragedy, but there’s been happiness too. There’s been love and friendship and so many tender moments Ilya could have stayed in them forever if he’d only been able.

He’s been lucky, in a sense, that he's known how the book was ending, that the universe or the cosmos or whoever has seen fit to grant him the opportunity to change it, for him to have the chance to rewrite his own story.

Coming back to the past has been a gift. All of the changes Ilya has made have been steps towards a new future, a different one, where he can be with Shane. Where he can love him openly.

He’s never thought to consider the full ramifications of those changes. That not every alteration would be for the better.

Once he’s back in Boston—once Shane is out of his sight and Ilya isn’t so focused on just getting them through the day—he suddenly has time to think about how they got here.

He spends hours thinking about the last year, thinking about the exact moment he came back to the past and the ripples in time that began expanding outwards already then. He tries, desperately, to pinpoint the one choice he’s made differently, the one event that hadn’t happened before that led Shane to that house party with Chris.

The guilt of feeling as if he’s at fault is eating him alive.

Is he not to blame for what Shane has gone through, when the only difference from this time now and this time before is Ilya himself? 

The worst part, he thinks, is that no matter how many times he tries, he can never single out a single moment of catalyst. The past—his present—has become an avalanche of changes and Ilya doesn’t even know where the mistake is, doesn’t know what choice he’s made that he shouldn’t have, and hates himself for being unable to regret any of them.

Not when they’ve all led him to Shane.

He spends a week unable to sleep, the endless what-ifs a never-ending loop in his mind. For that one week, he functions on auto-pilot, going through the motions and ignoring the worried looks he’s getting from Brian, from his teammates and coaches. He’s a force on the ice, because that is the only place he can work through the anger and the guilt, but he is quickly running out of steam.

The only people he can bear to pretend for are the girls—though Ilya knows he’s in rough shape when even little Ava has less demands for him than usual—and Shane, when he calls.

Brian is no fool, though. 

After a week of not getting through to Ilya, of Ilya insisting he’s fine and snapping at everyone to leave him alone, Brian goes to the one person they all know can bring him to heel.

“You’re not sleeping,” Shane accuses the second he answers the phone.

Ilya groans. “Who told you?” he asks, and doesn’t bother denying it. Not when Shane doesn’t even sound annoyed about it. Instead, Ilya can hear the worry in his voice, the sadness.

“Brian called; they’re really concerned about you, Ilya. Is it because of me? Are you having nightmares?”

“Котёнок,” he starts tiredly.

“You should have told me. I always want to know when you’re having a bad time. It can’t always be you playing the hero, okay?”

“But you make such pretty princess,” Ilya jokes weakly.

“Ilya.”

“Shane.”

Shane sighs, audibly put upon, and Ilya manages a fond smile. He can imagine him perfectly, Shane an exquisite portrait in his mind, brows furrowed and nose wrinkled in exasperation. 

Unbearably beautiful.

“I think it’s time you start seeing a therapist,” Shane says, gentle but insistently, and Ilya hates that he’s even gotten to the point where Shane is the one pushing him towards seeking help when he’s the one who was hurt.

When Ilya was perfectly safe in his bed as it happened.

“I’m fine, kотёнок. I just miss you; it was easier in Ottawa where I could see you for myself every day. Even when you were hurting, at least I knew you were safe.”

Shane goes quiet at that, and Ilya berates himself. 

Stupid.

He’s so stupid. Why would he tell Shane such a thing? What does Ilya’s struggles matter in the face of Shane’s pain? Had he not encouraged his independence himself?

Ilya is not about to risk his recovery by dumping his own shit all over Shane.

“I think,” Shane says after a moment, “that you might be suffering from survivor’s guilt.”

Ilya blinks, startled out of his spiralling thoughts. “I do not know this term,” he says, and can’t remember if he’d come across it in his first life. He can guess at its meaning though, so he adds, “I wasn’t even there, Shane.”

“That’s kind of the point. You feel guilty because you weren’t there, and then you start blaming yourself, thinking it might have gone differently, that you could have stopped it from happening if you’d been there too.”

The words are careful, as if Shane is worried about pushing him too hard; they cut like a serrated blade for all that they slice Ilya wide open.

“Shane,” he says miserably, because there is no other way to respond to that.

“I don’t blame you for not being there,” Shane says firmly. “I know you know that, but I’m telling you anyway, because it sounds to me like you need to hear it. I don’t blame you, and I don’t want you to feel guilty about it. What happened is done, but we get to choose how we respond to it.”

It’s been a little over a month since Shane was drugged and attacked, since someone tried to force themselves on him; Ilya couldn’t be more proud of how he’s dealing with it.

He swallows back the lump in his throat and says, “Wow, Shauna really is worth every penny you pay, huh? You think the Bears can tempt her to Boston? She will like us better, I think.”

“No, get your own therapist. Shauna is mine.”

Initially, Shauna had acted as Shane’s emergency counselor at the behest of the Voyageurs. She is a licensed therapist, though, and has been such a good match for Shane, such a big part in helping him process his trauma that he’d signed on as her client once the counseling ended. Ilya knows they speak often, but that Shauna has told Shane the long-term plan is for him to need her as little as possible, and eventually, not at all.

Clever, Ilya remembers thinking when he’d first heard it, because Shane works very well with goal-oriented assignments. It’s obvious she’s gotten a good read on Shane. 

“Ilya,” Shane presses when he’s remained quiet for too long. “You know you can’t go on like this. You need to sleep. Your hockey is going to suffer if you don’t do something.”

Ilya snorts. “Season is almost done. No Calder for me, probably no playoffs. Not much hockey to care about right now.”

“You should always care about hockey,” Shane says sternly, and sounds so much like Yuna that Ilya can’t help but chuckle.

Shane isn’t wrong, though, not about any of it. Ilya is the one who pushed Shane before when he needed it. This is just Shane returning the favour. Ilya can’t possibly disregard that.

Besides, Shane might not have used the word please, but Ilya knows this is him asking anyway, and well.

Ilya has always been weak in the face of Shane’s wants.

“Okay, котёнок. I will find someone to talk to.”

**

All things being equal, Ilya would have preferred for Galina to be his therapist all over again. He’s familiar with her, someone he’s learned to trust and who he knows will respect his secrets and boundaries, and he goes as far as to look her up before deciding it wouldn’t work. It would be too much of a hassle commuting back and forth to Ottawa during the season, and he recognises that he does better with in-person sessions.

He’s not like Shane, who often finds it easier to be vulnerable and open when no one can see him. That’s why the phone sessions with Shauna have worked so well for him.

Ilya is the opposite.

And besides, Galina won’t know him at this time, and the issues he needs to deal with now are separate from the ones he’d originally seen her for. He’s not sure it would work between them even though they’d had a successful partnership in Ilya’s future past. 

So he turns to Brian.

He’d offered to connect Ilya with a therapist before, back on Ilya’s death anniversary when he’d woken from that terrible nightmare. 

“Originally, I was thinking you’d do well with someone from the team, but considering recent events,” he tells Ilya. “Perhaps it would be better to go with someone outside of the organisation. I know someone I’d like to introduce you to, if you’re willing. He specialises in survivor's guilt,” he adds somberly.

Brian is one of the very few people outside of the Voyageurs who knows what happened to Shane over the Olympic break; he’d been the one to drive Ilya to the airport so he could catch the earliest flight to Montreal.

In the future Ilya is from, nearly every team in the League have their own mental health professionals on payroll. Hockey is a high-pressure sport, and players sometimes need help dealing with anxiety and on-ice performance. The further they got past the mid-2010s, the more teams had recognised that a player’s personal issues often affected their athletic ability, and so the conversations around mental health became more widespread and normalised in professional sport circles.

Ilya is immensely proud of the work he and Shane had done with the Irina Foundation and how their charity had contributed to the broader conversation. Therapy was a big part of that, and something Ilya believes in strongly.

It is a constant process, and he’s not actually sure how much progress he’d made by the time of the plane crash, but there is no denying the help it’s provided Shane in this time, and Ilya has no reason to think it won’t work for him.

(Wonders, often, if his mother would have made a different choice, had she been given the help she’d so clearly needed.)

The therapist Brian introduces him to is a mountain of a man.

His name is Kyle Roberts. He must be over two metres tall, has about fifteen kilos of muscle on Ilya, and has the grizzled look of a war veteran who’s seen plenty of battle. If Ilya had to guess, he’d say Roberts is well into his fifties, but he looks as if he’d kick his ass before Ilya could even think to put up a fight.

Ilya is not surprised when Roberts tells him he used to be military; he does not understand how they’re supposed to be a fit.

“Why?” Roberts challenges him, surprisingly non-confrontational. 

Or maybe that’s Ilya’s own biases speaking. He’s met plenty of men who look like Roberts through Grigori’s work with the police, and then later the ministry. They had not all of them been good men.

(Ilya’s father is not a good man.) 

Ilya shrugs. “I have never seen combat. I am not a soldier.”

“No,” Roberts agrees. “But trauma can occur anywhere, caused by anything. It’s a nervous system event, triggering an emotional response. Shutdown or high alert.” He looks at Ilya pointedly. “Anxiety, irritability, anger. Constant worry, the feeling of being on guard, the inability to sleep. Any of this sound familiar?”  

All of it. Fuck, all of it is familiar. 

Between the plane crash, the time travel, and the pressure of keeping a secret he can never tell anyone, Ilya has been struggling long before Shane’s attack. He’s been so busy planning, executing his own outing and escaping Russia, laying the groundwork for the future he’s envisioning for himself and for Shane that Ilya has not had a single moment to actually deal with all the shit he’s been through the last 15 months or so.

He’s been burying his flight or fight response in order to survive.

Shane getting hurt is just the drop that broke the dam.

“Yes,” he whispers. 

“Good. Recognising the symptoms is a good first step. With your permission, I would like for us to find the root cause together. Only then can we start providing you the tools to process your trauma. What do you say?”

“Yes, I—Is good, I think. How do we do this?”

Roberts looks at him steadily, a calming, solid presence. “We talk, Ilya.”

And so they do.

**

“Fuckin A, boys! That was the wildest fucking thing I’ve ever been part of! Tonight, we party!”

Ilya cheers along with the others, grinning at Cliff’s enthusiasm and accepting his teammates’ back-slaps and shoulder grabs as they congratulate him on his first NHL hat-trick and his five-point night.

Ilya’s three goals and two assists had fueled a comeback win Ilya knows he’ll never forget.

It’s some of the best hockey he’s ever played. 

Going into the third period, they’d been down 5-1 against Philadelphia when luck and skill had the Bears putting up three goals on the board in thirty-seven seconds after the initial face off. Ilya scored the first two and cheered from the bench as the fourth line scored the third one. Then, with 13.07 seconds left on the clock, Ilya fired a slapshot off the point, and as the puck made it through traffic at the crease, Cliff managed to get a stick on it for a beautiful deflection into the net that forced the game into overtime.

Ilya scored the game winner, his third on the night.

As the overtime hero, his drinks will be free tonight.

(Ilya won’t be able to accept a single one, not after Shane, not yet.)

“You’re coming with, Roz, don’t even bother trying to get out of it. You can talk on the phone with your boy tomorrow.”

After having played with him for nearly a full season, Cliff and the rest of the guys are convinced that Shane and Ilya are in a relationship and doing a truly terrible job of hiding it. Ilya has sat through many a discussion on the strategic value of hiding in plain sight, and no matter how many times he’s tried telling Cliff that, no, he and Shane are just best friends, he never believes him.

“No one posts that many photos of someone who’s just a ‘friend’,” Cliff keeps insisting, putting air quotes around the word friend. “You flew to Canada for less than twenty-four hours just to see him play. Also, Dan says you’re building a house with the guy. Who are you even trying to fool, kid?”

And, yeah, it does sound kind of damning when put like that.

For a group of burly hockey players trying to navigate a locker room with an openly queer teammate, they’re being surprisingly sweet about it. There've been some few false starts, inappropriate questions and comments that most likely won’t ever go completely away, but they’re trying. 

There’s still the few hold outs, the old guard who’ll start leaving the team already next season due to age and decline, but Ilya knows Cliff and Dan in particular have been open about their support and encouraging others to be the same.

It’s resulted in an almost aggressive kind of acceptance.

When Ilya had returned from the Olympic break, so visibly out of sorts, they’d worried he’d broken up with Shane—even Dan. 

Chris and Dan, like most twins, are close, but Chris is a loyal friend; he’s not told his brother anything about what’s happened.

Now, after two weeks of Ilya seeing his therapist regularly, his mood is visibly improved, his focus on the ice sharpened. As Roberts keeps telling him, therapy is not a quick fix. It’s a process, often a long and hard one, but it’s helping.

Ilya is breathing a little easier these days, and the guys have noticed.

“Happy you and Shane are on the up again, Rozy,” Dan told him one day, so earnestly that Ilya couldn’t even bring himself to say that they were never on the outs.

He’s pretty much given up on convincing them they’re not actually a couple. 

Whenever the team goes out together now, they keep running interference when some guy or girl starts flirting with him, keeping Ilya on the ‘straight and narrow’, as they say.

“You’re never gonna do better than Hollander, man,” they tell him, all earnest and shit.

His teammates are ridiculous, but admittedly helpful.

Ilya knows what he looks like. He’s young in this time, but his maturity shows through even with his cocky demeanor. There’s a lot of interest.

None of them are Shane, though. Will never be him, so Ilya doesn’t reciprocate in truth even though flirting is fun and mostly harmless.

He’s been celibate since he left Russia, since he’d picked up the young man who’d agreed to let him take those pictures during their one night together. It is the longest Ilya has gone without sex since he was fifteen in his first life.

He does miss being intimate, misses sex, but can’t bear the thought of touching anyone who isn’t Shane.

Mostly, he wingmans for his teammates; they get laid a lot, because of him.

“Come on, Roz!”

“Yeah, man, it’s your first hat-trick, we have to celebrate.”

Ilya looks at the guys, feeling warm at their eager faces and finds he can’t deny them this. Doesn’t even want to.

Besides, he’ll spend most of his time in whatever bar they end up at texting Shane, anyway.

“All right, you fuckers. Let’s party.”

**

Towards the end of March, they shut out Shane and the Voyageurs in Montreal, 3-0. The Canes get a regulation win the same night, while the Admirals beat Detroit in overtime earlier in the day, which means that Boston is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs with just eight games left in the season.  

They've been playing incredible hockey lately, firing on all cylinders, but the losing streak in January has been a killer.

No one feels like celebrating the win when they’ve come so close to a playoff position only to fall short with less than two weeks left of the regular season.

“I’m sorry,” Shane tells him outside the visitors’ locker room, because Montreal clinched their spot just a few nights before and their dream had been for both of them to make it to the playoffs their rookie season. “Are you hanging out with the boys or do you wanna come home with me?”

They’re still in their under armour, and there is media to talk to and cool down to go through before they can leave the rink, but for a moment, all Ilya can care about is that Shane is standing before him.

He’s flushed from the game, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. He’s biting his lower lip, looking subdued both from the loss and Boston’s elimination, but it’s a relief to see him healthy and whole.

The loveliest thing in existence.

Ilya opens his arms, and before he can say anything, Shane is already stepping into them. Ilya buries his nose in his hair and breathes him in.

“You have cookies at home? Give me treat for my goal? Should be worth a whole batch, no?”

Shane pokes at his side. “You’ll get fat,” he says, and then soothes the sting of his jab when he admits, “I baked your favourites.” 

Fuck. He’s so fucking sweet to him.

“The ones with the butter?”

“Mhm, the brown butter ones with the salt flakes you like so much.”

Ilya smacks a kiss against his temple, loud and obnoxious. “Best!” he says, meaning the cookies, but also Shane.

“Hey, Hollzy,” Cliff calls out from somewhere behind Ilya. “Do I get to try the famous Hollander cookies? Because Roz never shuts up about them.”

“Oh, man,” Dan says, walking up next to Ilya and looking down at Shane eagerly. “Can I come, too? They look so good in all the pictures and Chris brought home a couple for Mom and Dad to try.” Dan sighs, sounding pained as he adds, “He’s Mom’s favourite now.”

Shane blinks at them, looking a little shy but not as hesitant as Ilya might have guessed.

“It’s okay?” he asks, because he wouldn’t mind shooting the shit with Dan and Cliff in Shane’s apartment, but he’ll tell them to take a hike if Shane is in any way uncomfortable.

“Oh, uhm, sure. We could order food and play NHL 10?”

“Urgh, no, not NHL 10. Stupid Fuller is on the cover. Is no good.” 

“NHL 09, then,” Shane says with a roll of his eyes, but he’s smiling, and Ilya knows his dislike for Jake Fuller rivals Ilya’s own.

“You sure is okay?” Ilya asks as Dan and Cliff chat in the background, Dan making noise about inviting Chris and telling Cliff about a hole-in-the-wall place that makes an awesome pizza.

“They’re your teammates, your friends. They’ll always be welcome,” Shane says, easy as anything.

He’s hung out with Ilya’s teammates a few times before, when the Voyageurs have played them in Boston and Ilya would not be separated from Shane for anything in the world. They like him, if not finding Shane a little intense. 

Ilya has been so eager for these two parts of his life to intersect, the way it never did in his future past. There had been his life with Shane and then there had been hockey, but the two had always been separated by necessity and fear.

To get to have Shane in his life, where his friends know how much he means to Ilya and he doesn’t have to keep him secret, feels almost like a dream.

Even just this, getting to hug Shane in public, to talk to him after a game and make plans to see each other in private without anyone raising a brow, is beyond anything Ilya could have imagined possible. Even when he’d uprooted his life and moved to Ottawa just for the chance to see Shane more often, just to be that little bit closer, the plan had been to keep their relationship secret until they retired.

(Because there had been Shane, and there had been hockey, and never the two together.)

Ilya will never regret having made those choices, but he can’t deny he’s relieved that he won’t have to do it again.

He doesn't need to.

“Best,” he says again, quieter, just for Shane, and feels his heart skip a beat at his answering smile.

Soft and private and for Ilya alone.

Best.

**

Being out of a playoff spot won’t give the Bears much to play for, but sated from cookies and pizza and Shane’s presence, Ilya says, “Bet I can get to hundred points, though, before season ends.”

They pause, Dan and Cliff sharing a considering look with Chris, while Shane says, “Oh, for sure. You’re already at eighty-seven points.” 

(Shane, the overachiever, is at ninety-nine.)

Thirteen points in eight games will be a challenge, but not impossible.

He’ll break ninety, no problem, and frankly, it’s impressive he’ll even manage that much considering the shitshow that was January.

He mulls it over, looks at Dan and Cliff who’ve been amazing on his line and thinks, I can do it.

Cliff grins back at him. “Piece of cake, eh?”

“Let’s get you to a hundred!” Dan agrees, and that’s what they strive for as they finish up the season. By April, a lot of players struggle to stay motivated when there is no Stanley Cup to play for, but the Bears go all in on pushing Ilya over the finish line.

For all of their remaining games, they step out onto the ice as if it’s the playoffs, and for every point Ilya gets closer and closer to a hundred, the excitement in the locker room only grows.

Ilya has never seen anything like it.

In the final game of the season, he nets himself another hat-trick. The Bears lose, but it pushes Ilya to 102 points and they celebrate as if they’d won the Cup. It’s the best end to a season Ilya has ever had, short of his actual Cup win.

The next couple of days are spent in the usual flurry of end-of-season activities, cleaning out their lockers, checking in with the boys, and the end-of-year media scrum.

A reporter asks him what his plans for the off-season are, and Ilya shrugs. “Going to Montreal. Will have to see how far the Voyageurs make the playoffs before making more plans,” he says, unafraid, because everyone here already knows his home in Canada is with Shane and the Hollanders.

“The Voyageurs are your division rivals. Will it be hard to cheer for them?”

“Will not be cheering for the Voyageurs,” Ilya says with obvious disgust, shuddering for effect to make the reporters laugh. “Only Shane.”

Before he leaves the city, he makes sure to get in a final session with his therapist.

Ilya likely won’t be back in Boston until September for training camp, and while Roberts is open to remote communication if needed, Ilya would prefer not to.

“You look relaxed,” Roberts greets him approvingly when Ilya steps into his office. “Congratulations on breaking the hundred-point mark. That was a very impressive achievement.”

“Yes,” Ilya agrees with a grin, because he’s never seen a reason to be humble about the obvious. 

Roberts’ lips twitch, amused, but he manages to keep the smile off his face. “Do you have anything you’d like to speak about today?” he asks, and Ilya takes a full ten seconds to seriously think it through, because that is the deal they’ve agreed upon.

“It’s not that you avoid your issues,” Roberts had told him early on, “it’s that you decide if they’re important or unimportant without giving them due consideration. You prioritise. This is a normal trauma response, but it keeps you on high alert and does not allow you to process your experiences. We will work on this.”

That had been weeks ago, and Ilya still struggles with finding the words sometimes—especially because there is so much he’s gone through that he can’t actually talk about. But he’s getting there, step by step.

It helps when he actually follows Roberts’ advice.

“Yes. There is something.” He takes a deep breath, gathers his courage, and then says, for the first time in his life and about twenty years overdue, “I would like to talk about my father.”

For the next forty minutes or so, Ilya scrapes himself raw as he starts plucking on the tangled mess of feelings and thoughts and emotions and memories that is Grigori Rozanov in his mind.

By the end of it, not even a single thread has come free of its knot, but it feels a little looser.

It is, he thinks, a good session.

Chapter End Notes

Hi guys! I've added a story tag for the off-screen attempted sexual assault in ch 10 after someone mentioned it not being tagged from the beginning. I just want to reiterate that I don't actually have an endgame for this fic beyond the boys getting their happily ever after. I really am just making it up as I go along every chapter, and so I wasn't aware this was a turn the story was taking before I was actually writing it just a few days before posting ch 10. I’m really sorry if that ruined the reading experience for anyone already invested before that point. I believe very strongly in accurate tagging, though, so let me know if there is something else that should be added. Thank you to everyone for all your lovely support!

Chapter 13

Chapter Notes

I call this chapter: hockey playoffs format 101. I hope I didn't get too technical about it. Also, for everyone wondering what my posting schedule is, I don't really have one. I try to get chapters out every five to seven days, but that's a very loose plan based on real life happenings.

In 2010, the playoff format has not yet changed into the future wildcard system that will begin with the 2013-14 season. The League is still separated into the Eastern and Western conferences, but with three divisions each unlike the two that Ilya has gotten so used to. This means that the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs is made up of the six divisional winners, with the remaining ten spots consisting of the five best performing teams from either conference. 

The Bears had placed third in their division, but ranked ninth overall in the East.

Post 2013, placing third in the division would have secured Boston a playoff spot. They would have been one of the six teams guaranteed to make it to the playoffs in the Eastern conference—the seventh and eight spots were decided by the wildcard slots. These were the two teams with the most points outside of the divisional first to third ranks. 

Ilya is, admittedly, a little bitter about this. Playoff hockey is the most gruelling, exciting hockey there is, and it always sucks not getting a chance at it.

He has not played playoff hockey since the spring of 2017, when he left the Bears for Ottawa.

He thinks if the plane hadn’t crashed, if the Centaurs had been able to finish up the season, they most likely would have grabbed a playoff spot that year; 2021 would have been Ottawa’s first time back in the playoffs since the nineties. Ilya had only suffered through the last three years of that drought, but the few times he’s allowed himself to consider it since coming back to the past, he really does think they would have made it that year. Knows the team was finally good enough that had they been able to compete, they would have had a legitimate chance at the Cup.

Thinking about it is painful, though. It is a gaping wound he does his best to stay away from because his last memory of his teammates, of the staff—his friends—were their cries of fear as the plane was going down. So many of them had been praying, desperate words in different languages speaking over each other, the rushing wind an accompanying choir, eerie and dreadful.

They were all of them gone, dead in that time but alive here in the present. Ilya still does not understand how that is possible. He is even more confused about how he remembers it all—isn’t sure how he knows, but so certain anyway that he is the only one who has retained his memories. Can feel the truth of that fact in some deep, intrinsic part of his soul.

He is alone in that sense.

Ilya will always consider the time travelling to be a gift, but it has in no way been easy, and most of the time he feels as if he’s just floundering in the dark. Even with his lists and his plans, he’s realised now that he’ll never be able to fully predict what the ripple effects of all his many choices will be, and is all the more terrified for it.

He feels it for the enormous responsibility that it is, and that, too, is terrifying.

Still, it is worth it for this second chance he’s been given. 

Worth it, to have Shane.

“Are you okay?” he asks Ilya now. “You’re being awfully quiet over there.” Shane glances over at him from the driver’s seat, sunglasses on to combat the rare April sun and the barest hint of stubble at his chin.

He won’t shave again until the Voyageurs either win the Cup or are knocked out of the playoffs. It is the first time Shane is attempting to grow a beard in this life, and so he doesn’t know yet that it will never become anything more than patchy spots of dark, thin hair.

In their future past, it had been so bad that he’d never tried growing it again after that first time, not for any of Montreal's consecutive playoff runs.

(“You are too pretty,” Ilya had told an almost twenty-year-old Shane the first time he’d seen the travesty in person. “Cannot hide such pretty face behind this…I don’t even have word, it is so bad.”

Shane had called him an asshole and stopped speaking to him for the duration of that year’s playoffs, but he’d been the first Voyageur to get rid of the beard once Montreal got eliminated in the second round.)

“Mhm, yes. Just thinking,” Ilya says. “Thinking that this car is small and stupid. Why did you even buy?”

“It’s not stupid! It’s a Toyota. Very dependable for a first-time car.”

“Is too small! Look! I can barely fit. My head is almost hitting the roof.” Ilya makes a gesture that is supposed to encompass the way he’s more or less crammed into the passenger seat of Shane’s brand new Toyota Yaris, and hides a smile when Shane grumbles about giants who won’t stop growing.

He won’t be pleased when Ilya gains the last two centimetres of his pre time-travel height. Probably this summer. He already grew a centimetre over the winter.

They’re on their way from Montreal to Ottawa, because Barry had called and told Ilya he needed to meet with the IRCC, and Ottawa is where they’ve done all the filings of Ilya’s legal documents. Now that he’s no longer playing hockey, they need him to go through a medical examination before granting him his permanent residency card. The Canadian government has been more than generous in letting Ilya defer this part of his application until the NHL regular season ended, but he needs to meet the necessary requirements now.

This is the next step in securing his citizenship, and while Barry has assured him there is very little chance of his refugee status being rescinded, it’s important for them to fully cooperate with the government. They don’t want to be put in a position where they can in any way jeopardize Ilya eventually becoming a Canadian citizen.

“So get your ass to Ottawa,” Barry had told him before ending the call.

There is a week between the end of the season and the start of the playoffs. Shane only gets a couple of days off before the Voyageurs want their players back on the ice to prepare, and so the plan had been for him to stay in Montreal until the team hits the road to play the third-seeded Capitals. Initially, Ilya intended to kill time in Shane’s apartment. He’d wait for David and Yuna to make the drive to Montreal before travelling together to Washington by plane. Once Barry called, though, Shane insisted on driving Ilya to Ottawa so that he could meet with the IRCC. He would not budge on this no matter how many times Ilya told him he could just take a bus.

He’ll make the return trip on his own later tonight.

He is stubborn, his Shane.

The drive goes by quickly, and if nothing else, the tiny car is decent on the roads; it hardly uses any fuel.

As they pull into the Hollanders’ street, they can see Barry out on the porch with David. He must have just arrived himself.

They take the turn into the drive, and Barry starts laughing before they are even parked.

“What? They don’t have normal-sized cars in Montreal? How the hell did you fit in there?” he chirps as they step out of the car.

“There’s nothing wrong with the car!” Shane says defensively.

He’s pouting just a little, and because Ilya is the very definition of whipped regardless of their relationship status, he adds, not very convincingly, “Is good first-time car.”

“Exactly! Thank you.”

David and Barry share a look, obviously amused.

“Still, though, you’re not exactly hurting for money, Shane. Wouldn’t you like something fancier? A little bigger, perhaps?” Barry asks, but he’s gotten a thoughtful look in his eye, glancing from the car to Ilya and back again.

“It’s practical. I don’t need a fancy car when I’m mostly walking everywhere. Mom, tell them.”

“It’s certainly very…safe,” Yuna says from where she’s appeared in the doorway, eyeing the Yaris skeptically before waving them all inside. “Come on, dinner is just about ready.”

Dinner turns out to be a lively affair. 

The conversation flows easily while Ilya keeps a discreet eye on Shane’s plate. He’s yet to see any sign of Shane’s performance diet in this time, but Ilya remembers it had been worse around big changes and important events.

It’s been a couple of months now since February, and Shane's trauma has not manifested itself in any kind of distorted eating as far as Ilya has been aware.

It had been such a trigger point for them in the future past, one of the things they argued most often about, and the playoffs are a separate kind of beast. If Shane does not fuel himself properly he’ll suffer for it on the ice. He’ll increase the risk of being injured, and Ilya would really rather avoid having to see him laid up in another hospital bed so soon. 

Shane gives him a questioning look when Ilya dishes out another round for him once he’s cleared his plate, but he doesn’t say anything. Just offers Ilya this shy, little smile and dutifully digs in.

Ilya is so relieved he could cry from it.

“You ready to work now that the season is over?” Barry asks him.

“I work all the time. Hockey is work.”

“He means your sponsorships, honey,” Yuna says. “Time to work this moneymaker.” She reaches out with a grin, gently squishing his cheeks together in an obvious tease. 

Shane sniggers, and Ilya scowls at him. 

“Oh, shut up, pretty boy. I am not the one they call prince of hockey. Shane Hollander! So pretty, so cute! Like Disney princess,” Ilya says, affecting a high voice as he fake swoons in his chair.

Shane rolls his eyes while the others laugh. “You mean Disney prince, asshole.”

“No. I mean princess.” Ilya gives him a shit-eating grin, and has to dodge a punch to his arm.

“All right, all right,” Barry says, chuckling. “Yuna is right, though. We have a few sponsorship agreements to deal with before next season.”

“Okay. You will take care of it? Nothing while Shane is playing. I cannot miss his games or he will not score. I am his lucky charm.”

“You’re really not,” Shane mutters, but the look he sends Ilya is all kinds of pleased, so Ilya knows he’s done good.

Barry sighs and doesn’t argue. 

He knows better by now.

**

As the Caps are the higher-seeded team, the Capital-Voyageurs series will begin in Washington with game one and two.

Once the playoff series returns to Montreal for game three and four, Ilya and the Hollanders will sit in the family section down in the lower bowl of the Bell Centre. Most teams tend to group all the families together for convenience and security reasons, but for away games, family members are on their own. Some players will have the clout to secure seats, but usually they’ll have to fight the other fans for tickets.

Playoff tickets, naturally, are the most expensive ones; Ilya has forked over the money for the first two games in Washington, as well as game five and seven should the series be pushed that far.

Yuna scolds him soundly when he says he’s bought tickets for her and David too. Twelve playoff tickets makes quite the pretty sum, and she doesn’t want him wasting his hard-earned money on them.

“We are family, yes?” is Ilya’s counter point to that. 

It’s been almost a year since Shane convinced his parents to let Ilya move into their home, and he’s never been treated as just a guest. That’s a standard David and Yuna have set.

“Of course we are,” Yuna says, fierce and protective and just a little misty eyed. She doesn’t argue more after that, and David just gives him a wink.

He’s about as bad at it as his son.

Game one has the Capitals’ arena in a sea of red with some pockets of Montreal blue scattered here and there. Yuna and David are wearing their Hollander jerseys, and they both turn to stare at him, incredulous, when Ilya discards his jacket to reveal the black and gold of a Bears jersey, Rozanov 81 written across the back.

He’ll scream himself hoarse cheering for Shane, but wearing anything but his own team’s merch would be sacrilegious.

“Oh my God,” Yuna says, awed, and Ilya aims a wide grin her way.

He knows exactly how much she values team loyalty.

They settle into their seats. They’re not rink side like Ilya might have preferred, but at Club Level where they’ll be granted more privacy and less heckling from the Capital fans. He’s not truly worried, but figures it’s better safe than sorry; playoff hockey can get ugly, both on and off the ice. The amenities aren’t bad either.

The arena is buzzing with anticipation, people talking excitedly and making game predictions. It makes Ilya antsy, fingers tingling and legs restless as they wait for puck drop. He wants to be out on the ice, he wants to play, to feed off of the energy of the crowd. 

He wants to show the world what Ilya Rozanov can do with the game on his stick. 

He can admit that he’s jealous of Shane—if he’s honest, he’s been jealous for a while. He’d given up three years of his prime when he left Boston. He’d been happy to do it, happy to be closer to the love of his life, but he’d sometimes felt Shane hadn’t always appreciated that for the sacrifice that it had been.

Or maybe that’s an unfair thought. 

Ilya had always gone along with Shane’s plans, and had never once suggested an alternative even though he knows Shane would have been open to it.

It had been easy, is the truth, to let Shane take charge. To not have to think about the what or the where as long as he got the who. Ilya had enjoyed his time in Ottawa. Even with a shitty team and more losses than wins, the people had been great, the Centaurs organisation had been great, and David and Yuna had been there. That wasn’t nothing.

And even then, he’d been so very lonely in the moments without Shane, when he was back in Montreal and Ilya was truly alone, buried under the weight of a secret he so desperately wanted to share with his teammates, with the men who’d become his friends, his family, in Ottawa.

He’d never said anything about how unhappy he was before that disastrous fight he and Shane had in the days before the plane crash. Ilya knows Shane had only operated within the parameters of their relationship, the rules and plans that they’d agreed to; he knows that he shouldn’t have sprung his need to have Shane join Ilya’s teammates for Boxing Day, but Ilya had been so fucking lonely. So fucking jealous of the life Shane got to have in Montreal with friends who knew his secrets and a team that was coming off the back of a third Stanley Cup in five years.

He’d been unkind that night, and Shane had snapped back, confused and uncomprehending of Ilya’s pain. It’d all gone downhill from there, but Ilya knows they would have worked out their differences if he hadn’t died and left Shane behind in that life. There is no world in which he’d ever let Shane go, but he hates that they’d ever gotten to that point in the first place.

Will never forget the look on Shane’s face as Ilya had told him to leave after their fight; remembers the desperate texts he’d sent after, Shane apologising for things he hadn’t even known were hurting Ilya.

Now, watching him on the ice, playing his first ever playoff game in this life, Ilya promises himself that they won’t ever get to that place again, where he puts that look on Shane’s face.

And, he thinks, this time he won’t put himself in a situation where being with the love of his life will make him unhappy.

(This time, there will be no reason to hide.)

**

Washington takes a 2-0 lead in the series, winning both games at home even though it’s close, even though the Voyageurs keep pushing back.

Shane, especially, is playing out of his mind, and so the Capitals start targeting him more and more on the ice. He takes a couple of brutal hits in those first two games, clean but devastating. Ilya grits his teeth to see it, and wishes he could be out on the ice, protecting him.

Montreal’s strength is in their forward group; they’ll spend the next couple of years building their depth at defense, and so they don’t really have the bodies to match Washington’s physical game.

It leaves Shane more open than Ilya would like. He’s their star centre even if he’s only a rookie. His teammates should be protecting him.

Chris, at least, does his best, and someone must have said something, because going back to Montreal for game three, the Voyageurs are a different team. They come to play, and are clearly bolstered by the cheers of the home crowd. This is why home-game advantage matters so much.

Game three is also when Ilya has the idea to start live tweeting the score. 

He’s spent the last year focusing on Facebook to build his follower base, because that’s where the people have been for the most part, but Twitter has been steadily gaining traction. User activity really exploded during the latter half of 2009, and now, well into the spring of 2010, Ilya is using his Twitter account more and more.

He doesn’t think live tweeting sports events will have become entirely normalised yet, but he suspects it’s not very far off. It won’t be long until journalists and sports organisations realise the engagement they can get from this kind of live streaming. Especially as more and more people became dependent on their smartphones.

So Ilya is maybe cheating a little bit by joining the trend so soon, knowing the interest that is there, just waiting to be tapped—he honestly wasn’t expecting the tweets to gain so much attention.

He starts simple. Sneaking a picture of Shane during warmup, he posts it to Facebook along with a picture of Shane from a few weeks back. Twitter doesn’t allow for images in the interface yet, so he has to link the pictures to his Facebook.

The prince of hockey, he captions the old photo. The prince of hockey’s evil twin and his terrible beard, he captions the new one, and already before puck drop, the link has been retweeted over fifty times and picked up a couple of hundred likes.

His next few tweets are relatively harmless. He announces puck drop, chirps Washington’s first-line center and his pathetic face-off stat, and complains about Montreal’s bad habit of dumping the puck into the offensive zone instead of carrying it over the blue line. Their third line is terrific on the forecheck, but the rest of them save Shane, and maybe Chris, can never keep the puck in the zone.

They never get the chance to set up their plays.

The first period is devoid of scoring, but not without chances for either team. Washington is a big team and keeps doling out hits like candy, but the Voyageurs have youth and speed; it makes for a good matchup.

Finally in the second period, Shane breaks the stalemate with an incredible individual effort starting in his own defensive zone. He steals the puck from a Cap’s forward as he breezes past, dragging it with him as his stick extends behind his back, passing to his own skateblade to kick the puck ahead of him, back on his stick in front now, skating past two Caps players through neutral ice before stick handling around a last defenceman in the offensive zone and punting the puck top shelf on his backhand, beating the goalie cleanly on his left side.

There is half a second of shared incredulity as the entire arena struggles to comprehend what the hell just happened, but then Ilya is on his feet.

“Holy fuck!”

The Montreal fans in the stands go wild, and on the ice, Shane celebrates by slamming his fist against the glass before he’s being piled on by his teammates.

Ilya fumbles for his phone as play resumes, Voyageurs 1-0.

Holy fuck, he tweets, because that really can’t be understated. He follows up with five quick ones to stay under the character limit:

I have seen the father, son and holy ghost.

That is the most filthy goal I have seen. Ever.

Shane Hollander is insane.

My best friend is the prince of hockey. Suck on that losers.

1-0 Montreal.

The rest of the game is flush with chances on both sides, but as the buzzer sounds at the end of the third period, Shane’s beauty of a goal remains the only one, and Montreal manages to steal back a game in the series.

By the time they’re on game seven back in Washington, Ilya has live tweeted through four games, has picked up twitter followers by the tens of thousands, and has made sports news twice.

One of those times was due to the twitter fight he’d gotten into with a Bears fan sometime during game six. The guy wouldn’t stop shitting on Shane for not having gotten a point the last five periods, as if Washington hadn’t constantly been targeting him on the ice because Shane had been the most dangerous player all throughout the first round. 

At one point, the fan started questioning Shane’s skill, questioning if he should even be out on the ice, and Ilya took that shit real personally. 

That the guy had been a Rozanov fan had just been icing on the cake. It was a confusing time for everyone involved.

On paper, Washington is by far the better team, and they do take game seven, but that Montreal had pushed them even that far has been something of an upset. The Voyageurs are a young team, lacking the experience of playoff hockey that can sometimes make or break a series, and in the end, it’s the bounce of a puck that decides their fate.

Washington got lucky; the Voyageurs could have very well taken the series if the puck had bounced in their favour.

Ilya watches with David and Yuna as the players meet at centre ice. He sees Shane’s slumped shoulders and can tell, even from a distance, that he is biting his lower lip in an attempt at keeping the tears at bay as he moves through the handshake line.

The end of a playoff series is the only time the players shake hands with the opposing team, and Ilya is abruptly glad that it’s not a staple of the regular season; if Ilya had had to go through this in January, when Boston had been losing game after game after game, he might have lost his actual goddamn mind.

“You did so well, котёнок,” he says when Shane has finished up with the press and his team. “You will do even better next year.”

Shane thumps his head tiredly against Ilya’s shoulder, his hand coming to curl against the fabric of Ilya’s shirt. “Yeah,” he says, the words barely audible. He sounds exhausted. Playoff hockey always is. “You too, okay?”

“Mhm. Good enough to beat you. Will send you home, crying. No Cup for you.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” Shane says, but at least he’s smiling now. “I told you before, didn’t I? I’m definitely getting the Cup before you.”

Ilya does remember that. It had been a year ago in a Tim Hortons in Toronto, during the combine when Shane had barely known who he was and still let Ilya fall into his orbit—when Ilya had been persona non-grata because of his outing and the pictures and Shane had never once allowed that to affect their friendship or whatever worth he’d seen in Ilya. 

Ilya had made some stupid quip about Shane seeing the future, because he’d already known Boston would win the Cup before Montreal, but now he’s not so sure. 

Now he’s come to learn that the future he’s known is his past, and the present he’s living is the unknown. Anything can happen.

Ilya can make predictions based on what he knows and what he’s lived before, but from now on out, that’s all it will be.

An educated guess.

So, “Maybe,” Ilya says, and silently vows to do his very best to make sure that Boston wins the Cup like before. 

Some things, he’s decided, should not be changed at all.

**

With the Voyageurs out of the playoffs and Ilya being able to focus on something that isn’t Shane, Barry seizes his chance and gets him booked and busy through all of May. His permanent residency card couldn’t have come at a better time, Barry says over a video call, because brand executives tend to get a little nervous when words like refugee and asylum get thrown around. They’d been very lucky Adidas had been so keen on making Ilya their client that they’d agreed to sign a deal already the previous fall, even with the political and legal limbo of Ilya’s citizenship.

“Oh, by the way, CCM is very happy about having signed you on. They want to do a commercial over the summer.”

“Shane is signed with CCM.”

“Yes?”

Ilya gives Barry a meaningful look, and hides a grin when Barry rolls his eyes and says, “For Christ’s sake, Ilya. You’re not actually attached at the hip, you know. You can do things separately.”

“But what’s the fun in that?”

Barry sighs, but Ilya knows it’s more for appearances’ sake than anything. He likes Shane, and while he’d been hesitant for Ilya to stay with the Hollanders initially, no one can deny that Ilya hasn’t become thoroughly entrenched in their lives. Barry is pleased that Ilya has found a place he considers home in Canada—even if, as Ilya suspects, Barry is aware that for him, home is more a who than a where.

“Fine. It’s not as if CCM won’t jump at the chance to get both of you for the same ad. All right. I’ll talk to Yuna and we’ll coordinate. I know Shane has told her to block off June and July for training with Bobby. Hm, okay, let’s go ahead and schedule this for August, then. That should give them enough time to have the ad out by the time the season starts up.” Barry nods to himself, seemingly satisfied, and makes a few notes on his computer before turning his focus back on Ilya. “You’re joining Shane and Bobby again this year, right?”

“Yes,” Ilya says firmly. “The program we ran through last summer was amazing. My lateral movement has never been better. We’re going to work on stamina this summer. I want to get better at backchecking.”

“Good. Excellent.” Barry pauses. He gives Ilya a long, considering look. For a second, Ilya thinks the video has frozen.

“What?”

“I just wanted to say I’m proud of you.”

Ilya’s brows go up. “For what?” He hadn’t even made it to the playoffs this year. Even when the Bears were struggling in January, Ilya has done well enough that he’s hit his category-A performance bonuses for points and goals, but he’s going to miss out on the playoff specific ones and the League accolades.

The NHL Awards won’t be until late June, but everyone already knows it’s going to be Shane for the Calder.

“We’re coming up on a year since the combine, Ilya,” Barry reminds him gently. “I know being outed was difficult for you, but you have handled the fallout incredibly well. Engaging with your fans on social media has been a stroke of genius. I had some of my people look at the press clippings and media coverage surrounding you; it’s very much in your favour. The pictures are hardly even brought up anymore, and you’ve done an incredible job of balancing being out but not in your face about it. The media is responding well to that, as are your fans. There’s still the critics, of course, and the more religious parties who like to run their mouths, but I’m amazed at the kind of grace you’ve shown throughout this year. Even on the ice, you’ve handled yourself well.” Barry makes a face. “There will always be players like Fuller, at least for now, but you’re reacting the right way. You’re doing good, kid, is what I’m saying.”

Ilya does not know how to react to any of that. He feels guilty, is the thing, because so much of what’s happened has been purposely self-inflicted.

Ilya is not so much reacting to events when they happen as he is following a plan.

“I—” he begins, but then doesn’t know what to say next.

Barry knows him well, though. “Okay, kid, I can see I’ve made you uncomfortable. I just wanted to let you know that despite everything, we’ve had a good twelve months, okay? We’re on track with your hockey, your endorsements and even your legal status. We’re doing good.”

Ilya breathes in. “Okay,” he says, and if it comes out more shaky than he’d like, Barry is kind enough not to say.

**

Later that night, Ilya is stretched out on the couch, watching the Admirals get their ass handed to them by the Capitals, when Shane breezes into the apartment with a brochure in hand. He looks excited about it. 

While Ilya had been tied up with Barry, Shane had been out meeting with the architecture firm they’ve hired to design the house they’re building.

“Veronica was there,” Shane says. “Our real estate agent,” he adds, as if worried Ilya has forgotten. As if Ilya wasn’t the one who introduced them. “She was visiting Kris—that’s her husband, the architect—and she showed me this place in Ville-Marie that’s for sale. She says it would be a great investment. Look at this!”

Ilya laughs as Shane waves a real estate brochure in his face, and then chokes when he gets a good look at it.

It is, unbelievably, the sex building from their first life.

Three years too soon. 

Before, Shane hadn’t bought it until 2013, when it was becoming harder for them to sneak around in hotels without being seen.

Ilya does not know if this is something he needs to be worried about.

“Isn’t it great? The entire main floor is for commercial space, but the rest are residential condos. I can have them renovated and then sell them off.”

“You will not live there yourself?”

“No?” Shane says, sending Ilya a surprised look. “Why would I? We’re building a house together. I’ll just keep the lease on this apartment before we move in September.” He waves the brochure in Ilya’s direction again. “This would just be an investment. Like your thing with the financial portfolio. I heard you on your video call with Lisa the other day. You’re doing really well, right? I figured I should start thinking about my long-term plans as well. We won’t play hockey forever.”

And, Ah, Ilya thinks. Ripple effects.

It’s true that his financial advisor had presented the Q1 report just a few days ago. It’s also true that Lisa had been very pleased with their last few moves. 

(“We’re a few years off, but I’ll make you a millionaire yet,” she’d told him, that shark-like grin wide on her face.

“I’m already a millionaire," Ilya had said, because his new deal with CCM had pushed him over that threshold.)

“So smart to think ahead,” he coos at Shane now. “You are not so good at hockey. Such a weak backhand. Maybe you will retire early.” 

“Oh, fuck you!” 

He lets out a grunt when Shane reaches out to tug at his curls in punishment, and sits up enough to grab Shane around the waist, dragging him over the back of the couch and pulling him down to tuck him against Ilya’s chest.

“There, there,” he says, laughing as Shane struggles against him. He holds him fast even as Shane starts pinching his side. “I will take care of you even when you no longer play. Pay for everything. You won’t even have to work.”

Shane stills at that. He looks up, eyes meeting Ilya’s, and says, “Really?” 

He sounds breathless. Probably from their scuffle, from trying to pinch Ilya’s skin right off his bones.

Probably.

Ilya could make a joke. Could say something about sugar babies and laugh it off—was the modern version of a sugar baby even a thing in 2010?

But looking at Shane’s bare face, at his pretty eyes and his pretty freckles and the mouth Ilya dreams about kissing, he can’t find it in himself to lie.

“Yes,” he says, and would bankrupt himself for the smile that earns him.

Chapter End Notes

Also, guys, because I'm a dumbass, I thought the world junior championship where Shane and Ilya first met was the 2008 championship since it started in December 2008, but it actually is the 2009 championship because it ended in January 2009. I've changed the summary to reflect this.

Chapter 14

“Perfect, Ilya. Excellent. You’re a star; the camera loves you! Now, if you’d just angle slightly to the left—”

Ilya dutifully shifts. He changes his pose just a tad and strengthens the flex of his arms to make the muscles of his biceps really pop.

“Yes! Just like that. Perfect!”

“Fuck, he really is.”

“Oh my God, I know, right. Just look at him.”

“How old is he again? Like, he’s legal right. You can’t look like that and not be legal.”

“Girl, shut up. He’s gonna hear you.”

Ilya already has; they’re not subtle. He wants to roll his eyes, but knows it will ruin the take.

They’re on the last of a three-day marketing campaign, and the shoot is going well. The photographer Adidas has hired for the job has a clear vision and is obviously skilled. She has been good about communicating directions, which is always helpful. If nothing else, it makes everything go smoothly, time flying by with every new take.

Ilya likes being in front of a camera. He likes the attention and the admiration. 

Had he actually been in his late teens, the way he is supposed to be, he would have been loving every second of this shoot. Would have soaked up the fawning and the flattery and the stylist and makeup artist who’ve been lusting after him since the moment he walked into the set.

He would have taken them to bed—either one or both if he’d just played it right—and they would have been just another couple of notches on his bedpost.

Ilya would have gone on with his day, and it’d be one of those things he only mentioned when he wanted to be obnoxious or when someone was doubting his status as a bonafide man-whore. He’d tell them about that time he had a threesome with two chicks from an Adidas shoot; he would not have remembered their names or even what they looked like.   

Ilya used to be proud of his fuckboy reputation and the way he slept around. Sure, some of it had been a cover for the time he spent sneaking around with Shane, but Ilya genuinely enjoys sex and lots of it.

He liked being able to make others feel good, really liked the high of being wanted—and Ilya was, is, wanted. 

There had been many, many women in his first life, as well as a sprinkle of men here and there.

And Shane, of course.

(Always Shane.)

Sometimes, when he was still in denial about what Shane meant to him, he would pick up someone in Boston or the road. He’d show them a good time, his legend would grow, and he would think, See, it’s good with others, too. It doesn’t need to be him.

He’d think about the many and awful repercussions of being outed. He'd think about the dangers of loving a man—would feel the branching roots of unyielding wood, like gnarled hands wrapped around his leg; his family and Russia, painfully tugging him East.

Except Ilya’s heart was always pointing North, and no matter what he did or how many people he fucked, that internal compass never wavered.

“Gorgeous!” 

There is a last flash, and then the photographer is lowering her camera. “That’s it, people, we’ve got everything we need here.”

The set erupts into applause for a job well done, and Ilya allows himself a grin. He’s one of several athletes who’ve taken part in this particular campaign, and while the whole thing has been a whirlwind of different sets and locations, he thinks it’s going to come out really nice.

If Ilya manages to end up on a billboard somewhere before Shane, he’s going to be lording that over him forever.  

“Ilya, you’ve been absolutely amazing. Like, really incredible. Have you done any modeling before?” 

“He certainly has the looks for it,” the stylist says appreciatively from the side.

“Esme, shut up, he’s right there,” the makeup artist hisses, and Ilya does roll his eyes then.

“No,” he says, ignoring the two of them and focusing on the photographer instead. “I did some shoots for Russian sponsors, but nothing like this.”

“Wow, you must really be a natural then,” she says, and Ilya just shrugs.

It’s more that he’s just so used to it after years of playing a televised sport and spending his off-seasons pouting for a camera. Shane might have been the most prolific player in the NHL, but Ilya had not been without his own sponsors.

“Being on camera is not so bad. Just have to look broody and think about how bad Shane Hollander is at hockey. This makes me happy.”

Ilya can hear Barry groan exasperatedly from where he’s been waiting behind the monitors, and the photographer startles into a laugh. She’d told him Shane is her favourite player when she first introduced herself. A born and raised Voyageurs fan.

(“I follow you on Facebook and Twitter,” she’d added sheepishly. “Do you think you could get him to post the recipe to those cookies you keep bragging about. They look really good.”

“They are best,” Ilya had agreed, and liked her immediately.)

“I’d say from the way you were tweeting through the playoffs, you actually think he is very good at hockey.”

“Shush!” Ilya exclaims, looking around exaggeratedly. “Someone might hear and they will tell him. His ego is already too big.”

Barry snorts at this outrageous lie. “You’re the one with the ego, as you well know,” he says, joining Ilya and the photographer. “Shane is just the poor schmuck who puts up with you.” He holds out a hand in offer. “Ms Tremblay, thank you for your hard work these last few days and for putting up with this one.” He jerks a thumb in Ilya’s direction and skillfully ignores Ilya’s indignant, “Hey!”

She shakes Barry’s hand with an amused grin, the touch lingering just a second too long. “It’s Amanda, as I’ve told you several times already. And it was a group effort. Actually, Ilya has been a dream to work with. Sometimes an athlete can make things…difficult.” 

They all pause, remembering the group shot they’d done the day before. Turns out wrangling half a dozen athletes with matching egos is not a job for the faint of heart.

“Well,” Barry says diplomatically. “I’m sure Adidas will be very pleased with the end result. And we’re extremely grateful everything has been kept on schedule.” 

“Of course,” Amanda says easily. “We all have other commitments. Ilya, it really was a pleasure working with you. Why don’t you let Esme and Bonnie help you undress and remove the makeup, and then you’re free to go. ”

Ilya gives her his thanks, and abandons Barry to wrap things up before going off with the stylist and the makeup artist. They shower him with compliments, telling him how well he’s done and how good he looks, and he is almost dismayed to find their eagerness annoying rather than flattering.

Maybe a little creepy too. They look to be in their mid to late twenties, and Ilya will be nineteen in a few weeks, at least physically. It feels like a big gap when he knows he’d be put off if it had been the other way around.

Or maybe Ilya is just so gone on Shane he can’t really tell anymore.

(And isn’t he just like them when it comes down to it? Is he not also lusting after a nineteen-year-old when he himself is in his thirties? Fuck, but time travel is so fucking confusing, sometimes.)

Getting back into his regular clothes takes no time at all. He makes sure to stay friendly as he’s being helped out of his outfit and his makeup is removed, but he never returns the obvious flirting and he straight up ignores the hints at something more.

When he steps outside of the dressing room, it is to find Barry already waiting for him, his brows arched. 

“One of those ladies was all but throwing her panties at you. She’s been all over you for days. The other one too,” he says in Russian. “And they’re both beautiful. You know, any of my other clients your age would have been all over that.”

“Meh, they weren’t my type.”

“Weren’t your type,” Barry repeats, disbelievingly. “Is this about the pictures? Ilya, it’s been a year. You don’t have to live like a monk for the rest of your life, you know. You’re a young man. You should be enjoying yourself.”

“By sleeping around? Relax, Barry. I just wasn’t interested.”

Barry eyes him shrewdly. “Because they aren’t Shane?”

Ilya says nothing.

It’s not that he hasn’t worked out that people are starting to figure out how he feels about Shane. His own teammates already think they’re dating, but Barry knows the truth of that.

What he doesn’t know is that Shane is gay—Ilya still isn’t sure if Shane has figured this out yet—and Barry, quite possibly, believes that Ilya is tragically in love with his straight best friend.

Barry shakes his head. “This kid,” he mutters under his breath, in English. “All right. Well, just know that people aren’t going to stone you at the village square if you do fall into bed with someone.”

“What the hell kind of analogy is that?” Ilya asks, amused. 

Barry shrugs, but he’s clearly fighting back a laugh. “I’m just saying, if you do happen to meet a nice boy or girl, and they happen to be your type,” he says, emphasizing the word type, “don’t be afraid to go for it, all right?”

“Oh, the same way you’ve been going for it?” Ilya affects a stoic voice. “Oh, excellent work, Ms Tremblay. Can I get you a coffee, Ms Tremblay. Is he wasting your time, Ms Tremblay? Ilya, do as Ms Tremblay says.”

“That wasn’t—! I’m not—She isn’t—”

Ilya stares. Barry is actually blushing. He’s never seen his agent so flustered before; in his mind, Barry has always been an unflappable rock.

“Holy shit! You really do like her. Why the hell didn’t you ask her out? Amanda’s been flirting with you this whole time.”

“She has not.”

“Barry. The first day, you said you were just checking in and wasn’t planning to stick around for the whole shoot, and she basically batted her eyes at you until you agreed to stay. She is definitely into you.”

“No, that’s not—I mean, clearly she wasn’t—” Barry blinks at him. “Really?”

“Yes. For fuck’s sake. Go ask her out.”

Ilya has never known a time where Barry has been in a relationship. He’s somewhere in his late thirties now, but even in the future past, when he’d been Ilya’s agent for fourteen years, he’d still been single. Ilya had just figured it wasn’t his thing.

Clearly, he’s been wrong.

“Okay, shit, I’m gonna—” Barry checks his watch, frowns, and then looks back at Ilya. “You need to leave for the airport or you’ll miss your flight.”

Ilya grabs Barry’s shoulders with both hands, shakes him lightly, and says, “Barry, as you have just pointed out, I am not, in fact, a child. I do not need my agent to hold my hand through the airport.” He gives Barry a cocky grin. “I’ll just jump in a taxi, fly back to Montreal, and then I’ll meet with Pat in Toronto in three days.”

“You’re such a little shit,” Barry grumbles, but he’s smiling. He brushes Ilya’s hands away before pulling him into a brief hug. “Fine. Off you go. And for god’s sake, don’t be a menace. Pat is actually excited to be paired up with you. He’s one of my best brand specialists, you know, and I do actually have other clients I need to check in with. I don’t have the time to devote the whole summer to you.”

“But I’m still your favourite, though. Right? Right?” 

Barry groans at his exaggerated whining, and drags a hand over his face. “God help me, you really are. Don’t tell anyone.”

Ilya beams at him. “I’m pretty sure they already know. You keep giving me that VIP treatment,” he says smugly. “But don’t worry, okay? I’ll be on my best behaviour with Pat.”

“You will,” Barry says drily, “or I will tell Shane.”

Ilya loses his smile at that, wincing. That is no idle threat; Shane is very particular about upholding contractual obligations. 

“See, this is why you should just coordinate with Yuna and book all the same brand deals.”

“My God,” Barry says, giving him an incredulous look. “That boy really does have you wrapped around his fingers, doesn’t he?” 

Ilya shrugs, unrepentant. It’s true, after all.

“All right, enough, get out of here.”

They make their goodbyes, Ilya telling Barry good luck with Amanda and cackling when Barry more or less kicks him out of the studio.

He steps out into a busy New York street and immediately hails a taxi. He needs to check out of his hotel before he can head for the airport, but then he gets to go home for two whole days.

That is the deal he’s made with Barry.

He will cheerfully go where he is needed, to New York, Toronto, or wherever. He will work through all of May and parts of the summer if necessary, but he had made it clear he wanted to be home on May 10.

He checks his phone, smiling when he sees a text asking about tile samples and if Ilya has any strong feelings about marble or limestone and does he prefer earthy tones to more contrasting colours?

Marble, he sends back, not because he’s partial to it, but because Shane gets so fucking excited when he participates in the decision-making process for their house. Big tiles. Not small. Maybe earthy tones?

Agreed! Are you at the airport yet?

On my way. Need to check out of hotel first.

Okay. Text me before you take off. I’ll pick you up when you land.

Best, he texts.

He’s had fun in New York, hanging out with athletes from different sports and letting the Adidas people wine and dine them, but he’s ready to go home now.

He isn’t missing Shane’s birthday another year.

**

“The house won’t be ready until November,” Shane greets Ilya at the airport parking lot. He looks gutted.

Ilya stares at him. He hasn’t even managed to fold himself into the passenger seat yet. Jesus Christ. The first thing Ilya is doing once he’s gotten his license is buying a normal-sized car. Preferably a luxury one. He’d favoured his Bentley in his other life, but he won’t sneeze at a Ferrari and he’d liked his Porsche well enough.

“I thought you said September,” he says once he’s chucked his travel bag into the tiny trunk and wrestled his way into the car.

“I did,” Shane says. “But apparently Kris and I have been talking around each other. We won’t have all the necessary permits in place to start construction early enough that the house will be move-in ready by September. The outer construction will probably be done by then, but they’ll still have to do all the flooring, the electrical and plumbing, the kitchen, the bathrooms…” 

He’s ticking each new thing off on his fingers, looking stressed the longer the list goes on, so Ilya reaches over and gently grabs Shane’s hand.

“Shane. Let’s just take deep breaths.” Ilya waits until Shane breathes in deeply, looking a little less wild around the eyes before he says, “Is this big crisis? Kris is good architect, yes? He knows what he is doing. We will get the permits we need, the contractor will start building, and the house will be done when it’s done.” He squeezes Shane’s hand in comfort. 

“But I told my landlord I’d be out by September,” Shane protests, more for the sake of it than anything, Ilya thinks. He’s already looking more calm.

Ilya shrugs. “Your lease is month by month. Am sure your landlord will not mind you staying until November. And if it is problem, we find someplace else in the meantime.”

“I guess,” Shane says. He takes another deep breath. “Okay, yeah. You’re right. This is not a crisis. It’s fine, everything is fine.” He gives Ilya’s hand a squeeze of his own before pulling away to put the car in reverse. 

“Tell me about the shoot. Did you really get to meet Messi?”

Ilya dutifully recounts the three days he’s spent in New York. He talks about getting to meet Lionel Messi and how excited he’d been about the upcoming FIFA World Cup. Shane doesn’t pay much attention to football, but he has a deep respect for athletes in general.

Russia hadn’t qualified for the 2010 Cup in either life, but Ilya is still going to make Shane watch a few games with him this summer.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Ilya says when they walk into the apartment later. “Barry has a crush!”

“Barry? Really? Did he meet someone at the shoot?” 

“Yes. The photographer. Amanda. They were very flirty,” Ilya says approvingly, and Shane immediately narrows his eyes at him.

“No meddling,” he says sternly.

Ilya holds his hands up to show his innocence, but he’s grinning. He’s not afraid of some matchmaking if he thinks someone needs a little push, but Barry can probably manage on his own. Amanda really had been quite charmed by him.

“You will like her,” he tells Shane as he follows him into the kitchen. He seats himself at the breakfast bar and watches as Shane starts pulling out ingredients for a stir fry. He’s not as good at cooking as he is at baking, but they’re both fairly decent at frying shit in a pan.

Shane hums to indicate he’s listening, so Ilya keeps talking. “Amanda is from Montreal; she told me she is a big Hollander fan. She wants you to post your cookie recipe. The ones that I like so much.”

Shane looks up at that, surprised. “Why?” he asks, looking baffled.

“I post about them a lot. Your cookies are very famous.”

“They’re just regular cookies?”

“Lie! They are best cookies, made with love and special Hollander magic.”

Shane laughs, bright and happy, and shakes his head at Ilya. “You’re ridiculous,” he tells him. “Stop being such a weirdo and come help me make dinner.”

Oh well. That wasn’t a no, though, so the recipe probably isn’t a family secret or anything like that.

Ilya will just have to try again later.

**

Shane’s birthday is a low-key affair.

He is adamant that he doesn’t want to make a big deal about it, so Ilya reluctantly lets go of his more outrageous ideas and allows Shane to drag him along to a few kitchen designers out in the city.

Watching Shane appreciatively oh and ah over the different countertops and backsplashes is like watching a kid in a candy store; he is particularly taken by the metallic backsplashes.

A nineteen-year-old should not be this excited about kitchen features. Ilya loves him so fucking much.

Once Shane feels as if he’s gotten enough inspiration to bring back to Kris for their next meeting, he lets Ilya herd him into an upscale restaurant for lunch and spends an hour moaning over his grilled salmon. He is so pleased he only puts up a token protest when Ilya asks for the bill and offers his card.

After, they drive Shane’s shitty Yaris to Ottawa where they meet up with David and Yuna for an early dinner, and then spend the evening horsing around with the group of friends Shane had introduced him to the year before.

They rib Shane about the Yaris—which Ilya appreciates—and chirp at Ilya about his follower count.

“There’s an internet celebrity among us!” one of them crows, and Ilya rolls his eyes while Shane looks vaguely confused. 

“No, but those playoff tweets were something else, man.”

“Fucking awesome,” a third one adds, and then, as if they’ve rehearsed beforehand, they turn to Ilya. “I have seen the Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” they quote, in sync, and then laugh their asses off.

Holy Fuck, Ilya thinks. I have become a meme.

Ilya has to leave for Toronto the next morning, so they don’t stay the night.

It’s late when they make it back to the apartment; they shuffle around each other tiredly as they get ready for bed. When they finally collapse on top of the mattress, Shane sighs happily.

“That was a really good birthday,” he whispers into the darkness of the room. He pats at Ilya blindly. “Thank you.”

Ilya grabs the hand that is awkwardly patting at his left hip, and tugs until Shane is curled up next to him.

“I’m glad, котёнок,” he says. “I missed you last year,” he adds in Russian, because Ilya had, because that had been the catalyst to everything that’s happened since. May 10 last year had been when Ilya finally accepted that the plane crash had been real, that he’d actually travelled back in time. He’d missed Shane so fucking much back then, even as he’d known he would get to see him at the combine and then the draft. He’d been near crazed at the thought of only getting to see him in flashes. In those blink-and-you-miss-it kind of moments that had defined their relationship for those first seven years.

Ilya was in no way prepared to go through all that again, and so he’d thrown a live grenade at his own life. Anything to catapult himself into Shane’s world.

Telling Shane any of that isn't possible, though. So when Shane hums in question, half asleep already, Ilya just shushes him gently.

They can talk in the morning.

**

Shane is not in bed when Ilya wakes.

It’s not unusual for Shane to wake up first; he is a morning person and Ilya is decidedly not. 

Ilya breathes in deeply through his nose as he rubs the sleep out of his eyes. He feels more sluggish than normal, which means that it’s early. Very early.

He checks his phone. 04:43.

Fuck. A nightmare then.

He rolls out of bed, shoving his feet into the fuzzy bear slippers that Shane had gifted him for Christmas as a joke.

“Shane?” he calls. He walks into the living room and finds Shane there. He is curled up against one side of the couch, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders as he stares, unseeing, at the black screen of the television.

Ilya feels his heart squeeze painfully. 

“Котёнок,” he says softly.

Shane turns his head to look at him, tear tracks on his cheeks, and Ilya doesn’t hesitate. He bullies his way onto the couch, reaching out slowly enough that Shane can tell him to fuck off if he needs to, but Shane falls against him easily.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers into Ilya’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Ilya gathers him close. He bends to nose against Shane’s hair before pressing a kiss to his temple. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he says, quiet but firm. 

“Shouldn’t I be over this by now?” Shane sniffs a little. He sounds miserable, and Ilya wishes he could take this pain from him. Wishes he could take the memories of that February night so Shane never had to think about it again.

“Is not how it works. We have good days and bad days, yes? That is what my therapist says; the bad days are not so fun, but we deal with them anyway. They are part of processing our trauma.”

Shane rubs at his nose. He tilts his head up to look at Ilya imploringly. “But we had such a good day yesterday. It was probably one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had. Why couldn’t I just stay in that headspace?”

Ilya shakes his head helplessly. “I don’t know, котёнок.” He wishes that nights like these were preceded by some kind of trigger. Something visible and obvious. At least then he’d know to stay away from them, to steer Shane in another direction. “You will call Shauna in the morning,” he says, and it’s not a suggestion.

Shane nods obediently and burrows closer to Ilya.

They sit there in silence, Ilya holding Shane until he feels him go slack against him, his breathing slow and rhythmic. Ilya strokes his hair and lets him rest.

By eight in the morning, it has gotten late enough that Ilya needs to get ready to leave.

He hates having to disturb Shane from what is obviously a well-needed rest, but he doesn’t want him to wake up alone to find Ilya gone.

“Котёнок,” he says, “you need to wake up now. I have to go soon.”

Shane is slow to blink his eyes open, but when he does, he offers Ilya a small smile. He looks a little better, Ilya thinks. 

“Good morning,” Shane says, voice hoarse with sleep.

“Good morning. I have to get ready, and then I will take a taxi to the airport. You will call Shauna, okay?”

“Oh, but I was supposed to drive you.”

Ilya shakes his head. “No, is okay, Shane. I will be fine with taxi. You need a session with Shauna.”

Shane makes a few more objections, but they're weak, and he’s out of it enough that he folds quicker than normal.

It’s not long before the taxi arrives, and they embrace for a long couple of minutes at the door. They’ll both be so busy in the coming days that they won’t really get to meet in person until June when they start training with Bobby. 

They’ll be using the apartment as a home base, but there won’t be a lot of overlap, if any, as they fulfil their endorsement and media obligations.

“Text me before your flight takes off, and when you land, too,” Shane tells him, and Ilya just nods.

He is holding Shane in his arms, but finds he is already missing him. He doesn’t want to let go.

“Okay,” Shane says after another minute. He steps back reluctantly. “You need to leave, or Barry is going to yell at me for keeping you from work.”

“He would never; I would fire him,” Ilya says, not entirely joking. He smiles, satisfied, when that teases a laugh out of Shane. He reels him in for another hug, short and fierce. “I love you. Don’t forget to call Shauna.”

“Bossy,” Shane says, but he looks fond. “I won’t, and I love you too.”

Ilya does leave then, because if he doesn’t, Barry really is going to have words for them.

He’s just gotten into the taxi when his phone chimes with an incoming text, and Ilya laughs, so fucking in love, when he reads:

So we agreed on a metallic backsplash for the kitchen, right?

Chapter 15

Chapter Notes

I've added a tag for implied/referenced eating disorder by request, and will be focusing a little more on that this chapter. I know Rachel has said that she didn't write Shane with an ED, but I think an argument for distorted eating at the very least could be made. That's kind of what I'm going off of here. That being said, this is probably never going to be a prevalent issue in this fic.

I've gotten comments asking to translate this fic into other languages, and for someone to write something based off Shane's POV. I'm so honoured anyone would want to do either, and I have no objections against it. I will say, though, that I would suggest waiting until the fic is done in its entirety. I've already gone back to previous chapters to change the wording or a phrase here and there, and I'm expecting I'll be doing that until the last chapter.

At the tailend of May, Ilya feels as if he’s coming off the grind of a West Coast roadie.

Most of his time has been spent inside of hotel rooms, and the few times he’s been home, Shane has not. 

He has been so tired from his busy schedule, Ilya hasn’t even had the time to really miss him.

At least Barry and Pat are pleased with all the work they have managed to get done.

After their first meeting in Toronto, Pat is now a permanent member of Ilya’s team. He will be functioning as his brand manager, because as Barry had told him back when they got the Adidas deal, “You keep me busy enough; I’m not going to be able to keep on top of all your endorsements as well. I’ll stay involved, obviously, but we need someone to manage your sponsors.”  

After a few weeks of working together, Ilya has come to know Pat as the same kind of brand chaser as Yuna Hollander.

(“Oh, excuse me for wanting financial security for my son,” Yuna had said when Ilya had called to tell her and David about Pat. “You know you won’t be playing hockey forever. You need a nest egg for what comes after.”

Ilya had laughed and courteously agreed before offering to buy her a car in apology.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she’d answered, but Ilya knows what she sounds like when she finds him particularly charming. She’d ended the call with an, I love you.)

Ilya likes Pat well enough, even if he does get very intense about potential new sponsors. He had been particularly pleased when Tim Hortons had come calling. 

They hadn’t expected it.

It happened after a phone interview Ilya had done for one of the Boston radio stations that followed the Bears. They’d mostly talked about the team and the players, about how close the Bears had come to making the playoffs this year and how they were looking to capitalise on that going into the next season, but inevitably, he’d been asked about Shane. Ilya had kept to his usual chirps, because he knows people find it amusing when he playfully disparages Shane’s hockey or his boring personality—the joke being, of course, that every word that comes out of Ilya’s mouth is such an obvious lie—but the radio host hadn't been satisfied with the now familiar bit. He had kept pushing Ilya, pressing him about how his friendship with Shane had even started.

“I mean, by all accounts you should have been adversaries, right?” the radio host had said. “The top two prospects in the world, one being Canadian and the other Russian. It has all the makings of a classic rivalry.”

Ilya had laughed. “We are still rivals,” he’d insisted. “Shane is the most fun to play against, because he is such sore loser and he always plays hard. He is very boring off the ice, but never on it.”

“See! This is why it is such an unlikely friendship. You’re always roasting him. How did you guys even end up being friends?”

Ilya had hummed thoughtfully. “We met first time during Worlds, but we really got to know each other at the NHL combine. It was a difficult time for me, and Shane was very supportive. He did not like the hotel food, so he kept dragging me to the local Timmies. In Canada, you cannot have breakfast at Tim Hortons without becoming best friends. It is impossible.”

Someone had recorded the interview and put it up on Youtube, and that one soundbite had gone absolutely viral.

Ilya has lost count of how many times he’s been tagged on Twitter and Facebook since then. Usually, it is a variation of Just had breakfast with some girl/guy I met at my local Timmies. We’re best friends now. 

The meme evolved from there.

Ilya was very amused, Tim Hortons was intrigued, and Pat was ecstatic.

Shane, predictably, did not get all the commotion, but was happy enough to take on Tim Hortons as a sponsor.

(Yuna and Pat have booked time for them to film a quick commercial right around the time they’ll do the CCM shoot in August.)

As they enter June, Ilya finally gets a three-week stretch of no travelling.

He comes home late from another trip to Toronto, stumbles his way into the apartment, and crashes straight into bed. He’s asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow.

When he wakes in the morning, his head has migrated from his pillow to what feels like a muscled thigh, and there are gentle fingers brushing through his hair. 

For a second, Ilya forgets himself. For just a second, he’s back in 2021.

“Sweetheart?” he says, because he’s waking up to Shane’s scent around him and his hand in Ilya’s hair. This could so easily be just another day where Shane has made the trip to Ottawa under the blanket of night, so that none of Ilya’s neighbours would have seen him entering the house.

Ilya is going to wake up, is going to have to meet his team at the training facility while Shane goes back to Montreal where his sexuality isn’t a secret but Ilya is. Ilya will be alone until the next time either of them can find a moment to sneak away. He will spend all of that time missing Shane. He’ll feel so fucking lonely he could die from it, and more and more he was merely drifting in the time in between, waiting for the moments he could breathe again. Waiting for Shane.

The fingers stroking his hair freeze, and when Ilya manages to blink his eyes open he remembers where he is.

Remembers when he is; Shane is no longer a secret he has to keep from the world, and Ilya hasn’t been lonely for quite some time.

“Котёнок,” he corrects himself, and Shane makes a noise of agreement.

“Who did you think I was?” he asks, tugging lightly at one of Ilya’s curls. He sounds a little put out, as if the idea of Ilya calling someone sweetheart—someone who isn’t Shane—doesn’t quite sit right with him.

Or maybe that’s just Ilya’s wishful thinking.

“It was nothing. A dream, maybe,” he deflects. Ilya is not about to explain that the sweetheart in question is Shane. A future version—or should that be a past version?

Fucking time travel.

Shane hums again, but he doesn’t press. He starts stroking his fingers back through Ilya’s hair, and Ilya breathes in deeply, basking in the feeling of being home and having Shane near. He is hungry, and he smells of sweat and travel. At some point, Ilya needs to get out of bed and take a shower. He’ll have to scrounge up some food and make a couple of calls before the day starts in earnest, but for now, he is content to stay right here. He will soak up Shane’s easy affection for as long as he can. 

He drowses for a while, warm and comfortable, but eventually Shane’s leg must fall asleep, because Ilya comes awake to him carefully easing his head off Shane’s thigh.

“Sorry,” Shane says. “I have to pee.”

Ilya grunts and snuggles into the spot left vacant as Shane gets out of bed. A few seconds later, he’s asleep again.

The next time he wakes it’s to the sounds of a sizzling pan and the glorious smell of bacon. Ilya’s stomach rumbles loudly.

He rolls out of bed and makes his way into the bathroom, and by the time he’s had a quick shower and put on a pair of Adidas joggers, Shane has a full breakfast spread ready for them.

“You are the best human being to ever exist,” Ilya tells him seriously as he enters the kitchen. He takes his seat at the breakfast bar and immediately loads his plate with three slices of toast, six strips of bacon and a tower of scrambled eggs. “Never let anyone tell you different.”

“You tell me differently all the time,” Shane says, but he looks pleased. “When did you even come home last night? I woke up and you were suddenly there; I thought you said you weren’t flying in until later today.”

“We finish up early with the supplement people. Pat said there was nothing more for me to do, so I came back sooner.”

Ilya has been back and forth to Toronto several times by now. A newer supplement brand had contacted them at the end of the season, when Ilya was making his push to cross the 100 points threshold. After some research, Barry had found out another athlete was supposed to be their ambassador, but had suddenly dropped out. As far as they could tell, it seemed to be an issue with the athlete and not the brand. Barry decided he liked the look of the company and had put Pat to work; if Ilya was interested, they would be a good partner moving forward. The brand is preparing to launch a creatine monohydrate powder, and Ilya has been touring their facilities to ensure they’ve covered all the bases of quality, manufacturing, and independent lab testing.

A lot of hockey players use creatine, including Ilya, but the difference in quality matters.

He remembers a player from one of the Californian teams in his future past who’d endorsed a brand that turned out to be producing contaminated batches. They’d found trace amounts of NHL banned substances in the powder. 

It had been a huge scandal at the time, and the player had been suspended for twenty games; the suspension was largely why his team had not made the playoffs that year.

Ilya is not going to put himself into a position like that.

“I’m all wrapped up, too,” Shane says. “No more travelling until Vegas.” He sounds very happy about this. Ilya has not been the only one keeping busy. 

“You talk with Bobby yet?”

“Mhm. He’ll be here in two days. Told us to be ready then; he wants to get right to it,” Shane says approvingly. 

Ilya has only done some light exercising since the end of the season, and pretty much nothing through all of May. The beginning of the off-season is when they get to nurse any lingering aches or rehab the bigger injuries. They need a few weeks to recover from the muscle breakdown that occurs during the season before they can start up their summer training. 

Shane has endured the same period of rest, but more by necessity than want; he actually enjoys working out for fun. He must be champing at the bit to get back to it now that he’s fulfilled most of his contractual obligations.

“We start in the gym?”

“Yeah. Active recovery and then strength training. He’s probably going to make us do a lot of mobility work.”

“Urgh,” Ilya groans. He does not have Shane’s limberness and will never be as flexible. He’d rather focus on lifting heavy than going through all the different stretches.

“Don’t pout. You know you’ll run into hip issues if your mobility is off.”

“I am not pouting,” Ilya says, pouting. “I never pout.”

Shane laughs. He pokes a finger at where Ilya’s lips are definitely pursed. “Then what is this?” he asks, and steals a strip of bacon off Ilya’s plate while he’s distracted with batting Shane’s hand out of his face.

“Thief!” Ilya cries out, indignant, and Shane just smiles smugly, the bacon crunching loudly as he bites into it. 

**

Two days later, Bobby greets them with a grin and a look in his eyes that promises nothing good for Ilya’s hip flexors. 

“Are you ready to feel the burn?”

“For sure!” Shane says, all sincere eagerness, and Ilya—because he is a weak, weak man—feels himself get a little amped up in the face of Shane’s obvious enthusiasm.

Before he lets them do any kind of physical activity, Bobby has them run through a status report. He wants to know about any injuries, any aches or soreness that has the potential to become a problem later on, and he wants a full rundown of how they feel the season has gone.

“How was your skating? Your speed? Any problems with lethargy or muscle cramping?”

They both agree that their skating and speed had been satisfactory, but third-period lethargy had been an issue.

“I had some muscle cramping, too,” Shane admits. “Especially during the playoffs.”

“Probably a lack of electrolytes,” Bobby says. “Or at least an imbalance.” He looks thoughtful. “Were you hydrating enough?”

Shane shrugs. “I mean, I try to be good about it, especially on game days. I don’t feel as if I’m not drinking enough.”

“We’ll keep an eye on it,” Bobby says decisively, and they move on.

Shane mentions the fall he’d taken in February that had resulted in a sore hip, but that it hasn’t been an issue since, and Ilya rushes to bring up his own knee injury. Anything to get rid of the tightness around Shane’s eyes.

“I saw that,” Bobby says darkly. “Can’t believe Team USA didn’t kick Fuller out after that. He could have really damaged your knee.”

“Was the Olympics,” Ilya says, and really that is explanation enough. Jake Fuller may well be a homophobe, but even Ilya will admit that he is probably one of the best American players out there. He’s not sure Team USA would have made it to the gold-medal game without him.

“At least Canada won,” Shane says, and squeezes Ilya’s shoulder in solidarity.

Once he’s more or less satisfied he’s gotten all the details he needs from them, Bobby turns his attention to nutrition.

“How was your food intake? I know your teams will have been tracking your weight throughout the season, but that rookie year can be brutal. I know so many young players who’ve gone from the minors to the NHL, and it’s just another tempo. You burn calories like crazy and fluid retention is often a problem.”

“I’m still averaging 4,500 calories,” Shane says. “I’ll up it for game days and dip a little on off-days or for practice.”

Bobby gives him a long considering look. “That is probably not enough for you now. It was fine in juniors, but you’ve been averaging over twenty minutes of ice time and I don’t see that changing. I’d like for us to try and up it to 5000 calories and see how you do.” Bobby chuckles at the face Shane makes. “I know,” he says. “It’s a lot of food and you struggle with the volume, but you play a 200-foot game, Shane. You’re probably burning upwards of 2000 calories a game. You need to fatten up so you can endure the weight loss during the season. You’re looking a little too skinny for my tastes right now.”

Shane looks resigned, but he’s nodding along, and Ilya carefully stays out of it.

He’s tried before to pinpoint when Shane’s focus on food had become less about fueling himself and more about control—or punishment, as Ilya had sometimes suspected—but the truth is, there was no sudden shift. He thinks it must have been a gradual change in the way that all insidious things are. A culmination of Shane’s anxieties, his strive for perfection, and the amount of stress he was under. There were so many things outside of his control that he became more and more obsessive about the things that were.

Ilya had watched it happen, had watched as it became worse and hadn’t known how to fix it.

It wasn’t that Shane had been starving himself, but underfueling? Yeah, probably. He'd definitely been depriving himself of the food he really wanted, because for however much he’d insisted his performance diet was working, he hadn’t actually enjoyed being on it very much.

Ilya has been so fucking relieved to see he’s been so casual about food in this lifetime; Shane is still particular about what he puts into his body, but more willing to compromise and enjoy a treat meal here and there. 

Ilya, desperately, wants for that to remain the case.

He thinks the best course of action is probably to not draw attention to it, and Ilya resolves to leave it alone unless it becomes a problem. 

“What about you, Ilya?”

“I have been at around 5,150 calories,” Ilya says. “Little bit under, sometimes. It has been good, but I want to start packing on muscle. I think I could increase.”

Bobby hums in agreement. “You’re still growing, and if you want the muscles to fill out your frame you are going to need the calories. We can probably start at 5,350, but honestly, I won’t be surprised if we end up at something closer to 6000. We’ll see what we land on as an ideal weight for you once we start skating. You’re such a physical player and you’re playing the same minutes as Shane, right? You might need the extra calories once the season starts up.”

Ilya nods agreeably. He’s a fast player, but a lot of his speed comes from his long stride. He can afford the weight of some added bulk. Ilya is in the mid nineties right now, already big for his age, but he had been at his best with an extra eight to ten kilos as a power forward. A lot of that had been muscle. It is going to take him a few years to reach that size again, but he thinks he’ll get there quicker this time around. Bobby really is quite good.

When Bobby dismisses them for the day, they haven’t done much more than a few mobility exercises and a light session at the stationary bikes.

He sends them home with a list of recommended foods and supplements, telling them he wants them to focus on a 2:1 carb to protein ratio. Later, as they increase the intensity of their training and start focusing on muscle repair and growth, he wants them to transition to 1:1.

“Don’t get too caught up in the protein,” Bobby says sternly. “A lot of guys are afraid the carbs will make them fat, but you need it for your energy stores. And remember to hydrate.”

He waves them off with a promise to meet at eight in the morning the next day.

The real work starts then.

Bobby has structured their program to focus on nutrition, mobility, and strength training in June. Once they get back into the groove of regular workouts, they’ll switch over to speed and high intensity workouts in July. They’ll do very little skating the first two months, and the real on-ice drills won’t be happening until August.

Ilya spends those first couple of weeks sore from moving his body again after a month off. He has been eating enough food for three people during this time, and even then, he is still hungry some days.

“Some guys struggle just to keep the weight on. Actually gaining weight can be harder than you think,” Bobby says during a daily weigh-in. “You pair an active metabolism with the amount of calories you’re burning from your workouts, and it’s not going to be easy.” He jots down a few numbers in his notebook and compares the data to the week before. “All right, let’s add another 200 calories to your average and see if that won’t get you a couple of pounds.”

Shane tuts in sympathy, but Ilya doesn’t mind.

He’s turning nineteen today—nineteen but also thirty one—and he fully intends to gorge himself on his annual birthday cookies.

Shane has promised to bake a batch as soon as they get home.

“That’s illegal, I think,” Shane teases him later as Ilya is doing filthy things to his precious baked goods.

“No, it’s worship,” Ilya says seriously, and moans loudly as he bites into the chewy centre of the cookie. They’d figured out that Ilya liked his cookies just a little underbaked a few batches ago, and honestly, it’s been a new world ever since. “If you ever quit hockey, I will buy you a bakery, okay? You will be very popular and very famous.”

Shane snorts. “Fuck off. Besides, I’m already very popular and very famous.”

“Meh.” Ilya makes a so-so gesture with his hand, cackling when he has to jump out of the way from Shane’s punishing fingers.

“Anyway,” Shane says a few minutes later. He goes to pull down the recipe book he keeps on the shelf next to the oven, and opens the cover. “Here. You wanted the recipe, and it’s not like it’s a secret or anything.” He gives a one-shouldered shrug, as if it’s not a big deal, but he doesn’t meet Ilya’s eyes when he hands him a piece of paper in Shane’s carefully penned out handwriting.

Brown butter chocolate chip cookies with flake salt, it says.

It’s not that it’s a particular extravagant gift. It’s the sentiment behind it. It’s Shane sharing with Ilya something that he takes great comfort in. It’s Ilya receiving something he has come to associate with home.

“Shane,” Ilya breathes out, so fucking grateful to this beautiful boy who’s decided that Ilya is his to spoil. This young man, who, a year ago, took a chance on someone who’d already burnt him once before.

Ilya wonders, for a brief second, what his life would have been like in his future past, if he’d just been a little more friendly that first time they met.

(Would he have had anything like this, with that Shane?)

“Happy birthday, Ilya,” Shane says quietly, looking shy but so, so earnest. 

As sweet as the cookies he’s gifted him.

**

Ilya posts the recipe to Facebook and links it to his Twitter account.

It trends for a week straight.

**

Towards the end of June, they pack their bags and jump a flight to Vegas for the NHL Awards.

Ilya has never been much of a fan of the event. Even the times when he has won big, the actual ceremony has always been awkward and tedious for the most part, really only worth it for the afterparties. He thinks this year might be a lot of fun, though. He’ll get to hang out with Shane the whole time, and no one will be raising any brows at how friendly they are.

Ilya is absolutely using that to his advantage. 

David and Yuna join them for the occasion, and Barry shows up on the day of. Ilya is not his only client in the NHL, but the only one who is nominated for an award, which Ilya takes great pleasure in pointing out.

“This is why I am your favourite client, yes?” he says, smug.

“Come back to me when you’ve actually won something,” Barry responds, all dry and deadpan because they all know the Calder is going to go to Shane.

Ilya shrugs easily. “Next year,” he promises, and fully believes that.

The awards ceremony is hosted by a B-list celebrity with bad jokes and an awful suit and the whole thing is exactly as awkward as Ilya had predicted.

The only bright side is Shane winning the Calder, looking flushed and humbled as Ilya practically has to push him onto the stage so he can accept the award.

His speech is the shortest one by far.

After, in the banquet hall of the after party, Ilya sticks to Shane like glue and delights in dragging him around, introducing him as the Rookie of the Year. They get quite a few bemused looks, but most people seem to take it in stride, and the whole bit is worth it for Shane’s embarrassed flush alone.

“Stop it!” he hisses as they walk away from a cluster of West-Coast players they only rarely get to see.

“But I am so proud of my best friend,” Ilya coos at him, and laughs when Shane rolls his eyes with prejudice. “Okay, okay. I will stop now.”

Neither of them are legally old enough to drink in the States yet, but once they lose David and Yuna in the crowd somewhere, they are offered quite a few shots throughout the night. Ilya accepts them cheerfully, and is so obnoxious about knocking back Shane’s too that no one notices how relieved Shane is not to have to drink. Ilya is extremely good at holding his liquor, but eventually, he starts to feel the alcohol.

“Need water,” he tells Shane. “Stay right here, okay? I will be back soon. Do you want ginger ale?”

He’s swaying a little, not truly drunk but not particularly sober either. 

Shane shakes his head at him, looking fond. “Why don’t you stay here, and I will get you a bottle of water, hm?” He pushes Ilya down onto the seat of a plush leather sofa and laughs when Ilya starts tipping sideways. “Okay,” he says. “No more shots for you, all right?”

Ilya hums his agreement, but then whines when Shane makes to leave.

“I’ll be right back,” Shane promises and gently tugs at the hand Ilya has wrapped around his wrist.

It occurs to Ilya that he might be more drunk than he’d thought.

He feels someone sit down next to him, and he blinks his eyes open. He doesn’t remember having closed them.

“You don’t look too good, rook. You doing okay?”

Ilya turns his head to see Scott Hunter looking back at him with what he thinks might be amusement. Or maybe concern. Probably a bit of both.

“‘m fine,” Ilya says.

Scott makes a doubtful noise. “I’m not so sure about that. Where’s your boy Hollander?”

Ilya smiles dopily. His boy. His Shane. Ilya likes the sound of that.

He blinks. Where is Shane? Why isn’t he with him?

“Whoa, easy there.” Scott grabs his shoulder to steady him as Ilya tries to lever himself off the couch and slips on the slick floor before falling back into his seat.

Fuck, Ilya thinks, slow and uncoordinated. He probably shouldn’t have accepted the last three shots.

“Ilya!”

Ilya smiles again at Shane’s voice, tilting forward out of Scott’s grip and straight into Shane’s arms. “Missed you,” he mumbles into his neck.

“Did you give him something?” Shane demands, voice low and angry, and for a moment, Ilya is so confused. 

But then he hears Scott sputtering out a denial and, Oh, fucking hell.

Ilya is such a fucking idiot.

“Of course not! I was going to invite the two of you to have a couple of drinks with us older fucks, but I think Rozanov has probably had enough already.”

Scott sounds insulted. Indignant that Shane would even accuse him of such a thing because he doesn’t know what happened to Shane back in February. 

Shit, shit, shit.

Ilya definitely shouldn’t have taken those shots.

“Just drunk,” he says, carefully sounding out the words. He pulls back enough to lock eyes with Shane and says seriously, “Normal drunk. Nothing else.”

Shane gives him a long look, his brows furrowed in concern; his face has paled in distress and it makes the freckles across his cheeks stand out. Ilya wants to kiss each one.

“Okay. Good. That’s—yeah. Sorry,” Shane says, aiming a curt nod at Scott. “I’m going to bring him back to the hotel room. Do you mind helping me get him up off the couch?”

He makes Ilya down the glass of water he’d brought back from the bar, and once he’s done, Scott is kind enough to help them all the way out of the banquet hall and into the elevator. Those shots must have had a delayed reaction, because even with the water, Ilya really is quite unsteady as they help him along.

He is glad Scott is there. He is almost as tall as Ilya and nearly as broad; Shane would have struggled on his own.

“You guys okay from here?” Scott asks. “You know his room number?”

“Yeah, we’re in the same room,” Shane says distractedly. He’s rooting around in his suit pocket for the keycard that will activate the elevator, so he misses the way Scott’s brows shoot up at that.

Ilya snickers. He wonders if Scott thinks they’re about to get down and dirty, and then he sighs, sad that they won’t be.

“Uh, okay. Are you—” Scott looks between them, at the way Shane has a supportive arm around Ilya’s waist and how Ilya is resting his head on top of Shane’s. 

You can have this, Ilya wants to tell him. You can fall in love too, and it will be okay.

Scott isn’t out yet, at least not publicly, and Ilya thinks he’s probably inferring some things about Shane and Ilya that isn’t quite true yet, but he hopes this helps.

He hopes knowing that Ilya is bisexual, is out, and is still able to be so casually affectionate with another man is enough for Scott to take a chance.

To trust that coming out will be hard and uncomfortable but that it won’t be the end of the world.

Won’t even be the end of his career.

Ilya only knows that because of Scott, which is weird and trippy and confusing and he’s come to learn that time travel is all of that.

But, “Thank you,” Ilya tells him. He had, in the time before, thanked Scott for his bravery in coming out, but he hadn’t been able to tell him what it had meant to Ilya personally. What it had meant for him and Shane as a couple.

He won’t be able to thank him for that now either, but it is suddenly the most important thing in the world that Scott Hunter knows how fucking thankful Ilya is. How grateful he is for what Scott has done for inclusivity in sports. What he had done for every closeted player in the NHL.

There may not have been the number of coming outs that they might have liked after 2017, but Ilya knows that just the knowledge that there existed an openly gay player, married to a man and still known as one of the best in the League, had done so much to combat the soul-crushing loneliness so many of them had felt.

“You are good man, Scott Hunter,” Ilya says, a gravity to his voice that has even Shane glancing at him in surprise. “Old, like dinosaur, but good man.”

“Oh my God, you’re so drunk,” Shane says, mortified, and Scott lets out a startled laugh. “I’m so sorry, Mr Hunter. He’s usually not like this.”

“I think we all know that’s not true,” Scott says. He’s looking at them with exasperated amusement, though, so he’s probably not too offended. “All right, Hollander, get him into bed and make sure he drinks some more water. He’ll be in a world of pain tomorrow morning.”

“And it will be well deserved,” Shane says, chiding, but noticeably softens when Ilya nuzzles his face against his hair, entirely unrepentant. 

Scott shakes his head at them. “Goodnight, kids,” he says, a little pointedly, and Ilya waves cheerfully while Shane offers his own thanks for Scott’s assistance.

“Don’t mention it,” Scott says in parting. He shakes his head again, laughing ruefully. “No, really. Don’t mention it.”

Later, once Shane has managed to drag Ilya out of the elevator and inside their room, Ilya collapses on top of their bed, face first. He lays there while Shane flits about, removing Ilya’s shoes and pulling out a bottle of water from the hotel fridge. He’s going to bitch about that in the morning, Ilya knows.

“Expensive,” he’ll say disapprovingly, and will stubbornly refuse to let Ilya pay the bill just to make a point.

So sweet, even when he pretends not to be.

“Sorry,” Ilya mumbles into the bedding. “Was not planning to drink so much.”

Shane chuckles lightly. “No,” he agrees. “But I know why you did. Thank you.” He brushes Ilya’s hair out of his face when he turns to look at him, blearily staring up at Shane. 

“Did not want you to be afraid.”

“I wasn’t. Not with you there.”

Ilya hums in satisfaction. “Good,” he says sleepily, and presses more firmly into Shane’s touch.

Shane smiles at him. “Sleep, Ilya. I’ll be here when you wake up,” he says, the look in his eyes so, so soft.

Ilya hums again. Feels sleep tugging at his heavy eyelids as he murmurs out something that might be a goodnight.

If he gets an answer, he doesn’t hear it.

When he sleeps, he dreams of Shane.

Chapter End Notes

The cookie recipe is based on this recipe: Tiktok cookie recipe
It's really, really good!

Chapter 16

Chapter Notes

Heads up for incoming bigot OC character.

“I am dying.”

Pointed silence meets this dramatic proclamation. There is not a shred of sympathy to be found.

“Shane. Shane. Sha—”

“Oh my God! What?”

Ilya hides a smile. “I am dying. You are my best friend, котёнок. Will you not help your dying friend?”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Hungover is what you are, you big baby.” He sighs, looking a little guilty as he finally deigns to fix his gaze at where Ilya is more or less sprawled over their table. He’d been the one to drag Ilya down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, insisting the short walk would do him some good.

Had he been on his own, Ilya would have ditched the walk in favour of room service and then spent the rest of the morning curled up in bed, feeling sorry for himself.

He can never let Shane know that the awful headache he’d woken up to actually had improved somewhat once he was up and moving.

“I could have had room service, but no, you make me walk all the way here. Will you really make me stand in line for terrible buffet too?”

“This is actually one of the highest rated casino restaurants in Las Vegas and—”

“Shane.”

Shane gives another roll of his eyes. “Fine. You want your usual mountain of eggs on toast?”

“Mhm, yes, and bacon. Do not forget the bacon, Shane. It is very important.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll go get your bacon.” He stands from his seat, pausing briefly by Ilya to run a quick hand through his curls. “How’s your headache?” he asks, voice gentling, and finally, there is some of that sympathy Ilya has been waiting for.

“Would be better with bacon,” he quips, grinning when Shane laughs at that.

“Spoilt,” Shane says, tugging at a curl and then walking off to get Ilya his bacon.

Two trips to the food stations later, they dig into their breakfast, playfully chirping at each other and talking shit about different guys from around the League; Ilya had not been the only drunk hockey player last night.

At some point, they are interrupted by Carter Vaughan. He walks up to their table with a plate in hand, shifting awkwardly on his feet as he gives them a hesitant grin. 

“Hey! So, like, Scott isn’t up yet. Scott Hunter? He said he spoke to you guys yesterday. Anyway, I don’t know anybody here, and, like—”

“Hey, Carter,” Shane cuts him off kindly, offering him a friendly smile. “Would you like to join us?”

Carter’s shoulders sag in relief. “Yes. Thank you.” He puts his plate down on the square little table, and takes the seat opposite Ilya. “We haven’t actually been introduced. Like, officially, and stuff. I’m Carter Vaughan, but everyone calls me Carts,” he says, eyes bright as he holds out a hand for Shane to shake, and then Ilya. “Right winger for the New York Admirals.”

Ilya has to hold back a laugh. Carter is technically a couple of years older than him, but he’s giving off excited puppy vibes.

“You were rookie this year, yes? Like me and Shane?”

Carter nods. “The Admirals drafted me in ‘07, but I spent two years in the minors before this season.”

“You make it out of camp?”

“Nah, I was a call up. One of our guys got put on long term injured reserve back in November. They’ve kept me around ever since, though. I’m playing on Scotty’s line now.” He shakes his head, looking awed. “Scott Hunter, man. I still can’t believe it.”

“Scott Hunter is a very good player,” Shane says hurriedly, before Ilya can get a word in edgewise. He sends him a reproachful look, and Ilya dutifully occupies his mouth with a sporkful of eggs so as not to offend Shane’s delicate sensibilities.

“Hey, so, like, is it okay to ask for your autograph?” Carter asks once they’ve cleared their plates. He’s got his eyes on Shane, a sheepish look on his face. “My baby sister is a huge fan of yours. She’s really bought into that whole prince of hockey thing you’ve got going on. Says you’re the prettiest player in the NHL.”

“Uh…”

“Shane is the prettiest. This is true. Tell your sister she have good taste,” Ilya says approvingly, smirking at the way Shane’s very pretty face flushes with embarrassment. 

“Cool! So it’s okay? I think I have a piece of paper here.” Carter digs into the pockets of his sweats and pulls out what looks like a receipt of some kind. “Does anyone have a pen?”

They don’t, but a helpful staff member is kind enough to bring them one, and then Carter is telling Shane, “Could you make it out to Naomi? She’s half Japanese like you.”

Shane blinks at him in surprise. “Really?”

“Yeah, my parents divorced when I was a baby, and my dad remarried my step-mom a few years later. My dad’s a military man; they met when he was on assignment in Japan.”

Shane opens his mouth to respond, but before he can say anything, they’re interrupted by a grating voice and an ugly sneer.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the NHL’s very own diversity and inclusion hires; looks like we got the token black guy, a Russian fag, and his geisha whore.”

Ilya is already moving, halfway out of his chair when Shane basically throws himself at him.

“Public! We’re in public,” he says frantically, using all of his body weight to keep Ilya in his seat and his fists away from Jake Fuller’s smug face.

Across the table, Carter has gone ram-rod straight. His lips are pressed into a thin line, and there is a tightness around his eyes that speak of resigned familiarity. This will be far from the first time someone has spouted racist shit at him.

Fuller eyes the way Shane is more or less in Ilya’s lap, and kisses the back of his teeth, the sound loud and obnoxious. “Fucking disgusting,” he spits out, entirely unaware that Shane is the only thing keeping Ilya from attempting murder.

He’ll tolerate slights against himself, but he will not stand for Shane being the target of any kind of vitriol; if he wasn’t so fucking pissed off, Ilya would almost be impressed that Fuller has managed to be a racist, twice over, as well as a xenophobic homophobe in a single sentence. 

Add in the misogyny of referring to Shane as a geisha whore, and that’s just the fucking bingo of bigotry.

“Fuller,” Shane greets, with far more calm than Ilya would have managed to convey. There’s a pause, and then Shane adds, “I see you’ve been let out of your cage.”

The delivery is flawless, the words a perfect callback to Fuller’s earlier suspension; that he’d won a silver medal at the Olympics only to go home to sit out several games for a dirty play, had been a major embarrassment. 

Fuller turns an ugly red. His face contorts itself into a mask of rage, and he takes a threatening step towards them. “You filthy little—”

Ilya is about to push Shane to the side, to keep him out of the way of potential harm, when suddenly a big hand clamps down on Fuller’s shoulder, gripping him hard.

“Are these the dulcet tones of Jake Fuller, I hear?”

Ilya looks on, satisfied, as Fuller winces from the force of Scott’s grip.

“Morning, Scotty,” Carter says quietly. He looks relieved.

“Good morning, Carts. Rozanov. Hollander. You guys okay, here?”

“We’d be better if your friend took his leave,” Shane says firmly, staring at Fuller straight on. He’s being so, so brave. Ilya can feel where Shane’s fingers have knotted themselves in the hem of Ilya’s t-shirt. He is far more anxious than he’s letting on.

“You know, I think that’s a good idea,” Scott says. His voice is full of forced cheer, and there’s a hard look in his eyes. “I’d remind you, Jake, that there’s people with cell phones around.” He makes a subtle nod at the attention they’ve garnered, people looking at them with wary curiosity.

There is no hockey team in Vegas yet—the expansion won’t happen until 2017—but this particular hotel had just hosted the NHL Awards the previous night. The place has been crawling with hockey players for days. None of them will be considered superstars here, but there are still fans aplenty; people will be able to recognise them.

Fuller seems to realise the same thing. He sniffs in disdain. 

“Fuck this shit,” he says. He wrenches himself away from Scott’s hand on his shoulder, and leaves with a last glare at Shane.

Ilya watches him go, anger still simmering in his veins. Good fucking riddance.

“What the hell was that all about?” Scott asks once he’s made sure Fuller is completely out of the restaurant. “I came up just as you were talking about cages. Which, by the way, sweet fucking chirp, rook.”

Shane shrugs as Scott takes a seat at their table, but when he abandons Ilya to reclaim his own seat, there’s a decidedly satisfied look on his face.

Shane isn’t much for chirping, but he can be downright cutting once the mood strikes him.

Ilya is honestly so proud.

“That guy is an asshole,” Carter tells Scott. He’s looking a little more relaxed now that Fuller is gone. “A homophobic racist asshole. Can’t believe you had to make nice with him during the Olympics.”

Scott grimaces, and Ilya has to hold back a sympathetic wince. It isn’t easy captaining a team where one of the players is so overtly against the very thing he is hiding from the world.

Ilya would know. He has personal experience—Ilya had not tolerated discrimination in his locker room in the future past. Not everyone had accepted that.

“Was it really bad?” Scott asks, looking apologetic about it, as if he is in any way responsible for another grown man’s hateful comments.

Shane nods. “Bad enough that I will be reporting him to the NHLPA and League Commissioner’s office,” he says fiercely. 

He looks rattled, and Ilya wants to kill Fuller all over again. He is under no illusions; Fuller has the kind of reckless fury that would absolutely make him attack someone in a rage, and the last time someone had acted out their aggression on him, Shane had ended up in a hospital bed. 

Ilya would have happily rearranged Fuller’s face before he ever let him touch Shane.

Scott sighs tiredly. “It will probably do fuck all, but at least it will go on record. That’s something, I guess.” He makes a face. “I wasn’t here for this, but I’ve witnessed other instances.” He nods at Shane in acknowledgment. “I’ll make my own report. The League keeps claiming they’re cracking down on misconduct and harassment. We’ll see what they make of this.”

“I will too, but it will not do much good, probably,” Ilya says. He looks over at Shane. “What is it called? Fuller already made dirty play against me, so I will be not objective?”

“They’ll think you’re biased,” Shane agrees. “You should do it anyway. Three reports made by three different players from three different teams will have a bigger impact even if it ends up going nowhere. It might be useful further down the line if he keeps acting like this.”

Carter snorts. “He for sure will,” he says bitterly, and Ilya doesn’t doubt it for a second. “Okay, you know what? I’m not letting that fucker ruin the rest of my day. Would you still be willing to sign your autograph for my sister?”

“Of course. You said her name was Naomi, right? Here, give me the pen.”

Carter brightens. He hands Shane the pen the staff member had found for them. “Could you sign it as ‘your friend, Shane Hollander’? It would make her year, man.”

The conversation turns to lighter topics, and as Scott goes to grab his own plate of breakfast, it’s been long enough that Shane and Ilya join him for seconds. Even Carter loads up another plate.

Once they’ve finished their meal and Shane and Ilya get ready to leave, Carter gives his thanks for letting him sit with them.

“Would it be okay to exchange phone numbers? I’d really like to keep in touch with you guys.”

“Of course, but you should know that Shane is terrible texter.”

“I’m not! I use emojis and stuff.”

“Yes, but you always get confused by text slang. It’s very cute.”

“I just don’t understand why people can’t type out the full words. It doesn’t even take that long. Grammar is important,” Shane grumbles, as if he is ninety and not nineteen.

Scott laughs at them. “Even I have been known to use the occasional abbreviation, and apparently I’m a dinosaur.” 

“Yes, very old. Ancient. Almost extinct,” Ilya agrees with a cheeky grin. 

Scott is the same age as Cliff, eight years older than Shane and Ilya. In normal terms, that’s really not much of a difference, but in hockey it might as well be an age. Besides, this is a bit that Ilya has committed to across two lifetimes. He’s not about to ease up now.

Scott rolls his eyes. “This is how it’s going to be, isn’t it?” he asks the world at large, sounding resigned but not terribly upset.

Next to him, Shane sighs. “You get used to it. Unfortunately,” he says, and Ilya just laughs.

He knows they love it.

**

The NHL Awards were held on a Wednesday this year, so Ilya and the Hollanders decide to stay through the weekend. It will be one of the few stretches of off-days Ilya and Shane will get through the summer, so they may as well take advantage.

Because they’re not old enough to hit the clubs or casinos, they spend their time doing a few touristy things and soaking up the sun by the pool.

Well. Ilya soaks up the sun. Shane lathers himself in several layers of sunscreen and mostly keeps to the shade so as not to damage his skin.

Ilya has now sat through a speech on the dangers of skin cancer, UV rays, and accelerated aging from two different Shanes. He forces Shane to join him in the pool sometimes, but otherwise leaves him be.

On Friday afternoon, Shane drags Ilya away from the sun beds and back to the hotel room to watch the NHL draft on ESPN.

The Voyageurs have a fairly high draft pick this year, and while the pool of prospects is nothing to sneeze at, there’s no truly outstanding ones. Shane just wants to know if they manage to pick up a defenceman of decent size and speed.

Ilya knows they will; this is the year J.J. Boiziau is drafted.

If he remembers correctly, the three of them—Shane, Hayden and J.J.—had been rookies together in the future past, which means that Pike will be moving up from the Quebec League this coming season. They’d been a tight knit group. Especially Shane and Pike with the way Hayden claimed Shane as best friend.

Ilya wonders what their dynamic will be like this time around. Shane will have a year’s worth of experience on them. Has already settled into his role on the team and has his own group of friends; Ilya can’t imagine Chris will take kindly to someone muscling their way between his friendship with Shane. He’s almost as protective of him as Ilya is.  

Montreal’s locker room is not the same as it had been, when Hayden and J.J. had been the deterrent between Shane and the teammates that hadn’t been quite so accepting of his coming out.

Now, everyone knows that Ilya Rozanov is Shane’s best friend; Shane had set the tone early on for this team, even as a rookie, and Chris enforced it.

“…and with the fifth selection for the Boston Bears, from the Quebec Remparts, Jean-Jacques Boiziau.”

What?

What the actual hell?

Ilya has been messing around on his phone while Shane watches the draft, nodding along to his comments here and there, but now his head snaps up as he tunes in, watching the screen as an eighteen-year-old J.J. Boiziau gleefully makes his way to the stage.

That…wasn’t supposed to happen. 

He frantically tries to comb through his memory for what the draft order had been like the first time around, but it had been a year after his own draft, and Ilya had still been stuck in Russia for that extra season; he had not been paying attention to the happenings in the NHL before he started his rookie campaign.

Surely, Montreal must have had the higher pick? And originally, they hadn’t made the playoffs that year, like Boston. Ilya can’t fucking remember. It had been so long ago for him. Had the Voyageurs finished lower in the standings than Boston and so they had the higher pick, or had they traded for it?

It doesn’t matter.

Montreal did make the playoffs in this time, while Boston didn’t. Logically, that means Boston would get the higher pick, but they’d done well enough this season that they shouldn’t have had the fifth selection. Brian must have traded for it.

Shit, Ilya hasn’t even been aware that the Bears have been in the market for a young defenceman, but then again, Brian, as GM, has knowledge of the roster that Ilya does not.

“Oh, man, that’s a steal. Brian did good there,” Shane says. “I’ve seen some of Boiziau’s clips from the Q. He would have been perfect for Montreal.” He sighs mournfully, but seems happy enough when nine picks later, the Voyageurs draft their own defenceman. Sami Iilahti from Finland.

He’s certainly got size, Ilya thinks as he watches the boy throw on his brand new Voyageurs jersey. Jesus. The Fins tend to be big, but that kid’s a monster.

He doesn’t recognise him, though, and wonders at that. Had he been drafted by another team the first time around and just never made the roster? Or had he stayed in Finland?

Ilya has no idea. 

Fucking ripple effects, he thinks incredulously, and realises he has no idea how this will impact things going forward.

J.J. Boiziau is going to be a Boston Bear.

The future Ilya has lived really is becoming his past; it’s no longer a blueprint of events he can trust will happen as before. The more he changes things in the past—his present—the further they move away from his original timeline.

But isn’t that the point of all this? 

Next to him, Shane is shaking his head in disapproval and snarking at Detroit's terrible first round selection. He's pressed up against Ilya’s side on the bed, graciously sharing the Trader Joe's apple chips they'd bought the day before and this is how Ilya knows Shane loves him, because Shane does not play around when it comes to his apple chips.

Yes, Ilya decides.

That's exactly the point.

Anything to have this.

The draft will continue into the next day, but Shane is satisfied with having watched the first few rounds, so once the broadcast concludes, they get ready to meet with David and Yuna in the hotel lobby. They’ve agreed on one show each for this trip, and have managed to sucker Shane and Ilya into joining them for both.

Tonight it’s Cirque du Soleil, which had been Yuna’s choice.

Tomorrow, they’ll catch Garth Brooks at the Encore Theatre, because David is a not so secret lover of country music.

(Ilya wonders if this isn’t why Shane had claimed his favourite music was country when he’d done that interview for CTV. The one that Lydia had told Ilya about back in September.)

Cirque du Soleil turns out to be amazing, but Ilya isn’t much for country, so the concert is spent mostly sneaking pictures of Shane pretending to be very engaged and uploading them to his socials. They also take a number of pictures with the fans who come up to them throughout the night. 

Turns out the intersection between hockey and country music is fairly decent.

At one point, a pair of teenage girls stumble across them and frantically start searching around for a marker. 

“Will you sign my arm?” one of them blurts out, blinking large blue eyes up at Ilya. “You’re my favourite player,” she adds, breathless, and solemnly swears she will never shower ever again once Ilya has written out his name on the stretch of skin between her wrist and elbow.

The other one gets an autograph too, and squeals when Shane adds his name next to Ilya’s.

“I tried your cookie recipe,” she tells him, the words tumbling out of her in a rush. “Oh my God, they were so good! Will you be posting more?”

“Uhm…” Shane says, and subtly tries to inch behind Ilya. He isn’t very successful.

It turns out to be a good night, even though David is the only one who truly enjoys the music. When Sunday comes around, both Shane and Ilya are ready to return to Montreal and Bobby’s training. 

By Monday, they’re right back to it, and Bobby works them so hard they don’t really come up for air until two weeks later. By then, they’re so in need of a complete rest day they can’t be bothered to do anything but collapse on opposite sides of the couch.

“If you want any more food today, you’re going to have to get it yourself or order in. I’m not moving from this spot for hours.”

Ilya lifts his brows sceptically. “If I order from the Russian place I like, will you eat too?”

Shane makes a face. He doesn’t mind Russian food, Ilya knows, but he sometimes finds the fare too heavy. “Okay, but make sure to double the order for blini. You always finish them off before I can get to one.”

“Yes, yes. I will get you your blini.”

They put on the TV and turn the channel to CBC to watch the World Cup final. It’s the only game of the tournament Ilya has managed to sit down for, but he’s followed along online; Messi and the Argentinians had been knocked out in the quarter finals. The final turns out to be plenty exciting even though it remains scoreless for the longest time; the referee keeps having to hand out yellow cards, and eventually a player from the Netherlands receives a second one that makes it an automatic red, and is consequently banned from the rest of the game.

Shane shakes his head at the play. “Sloppy,” he says, and Ilya agrees.

At the end of regulation time, the game is still scoreless, but then Spain finally manages to net a goal twenty six minutes into extra time, and a few minutes later, they’ve won the game.

They watch the screen as the fans lose their minds in the stands and the Spanish players all converge on the field, jumping into each other’s arms as they celebrate their win, some of them crying tears of joy.

“I want that,” Shane says wistfully as the goalscorer cries into the neck of one of his teammates.

Ilya hums, distracted, and then blinks as he registers the words. “You want football trophy?” he asks, confused.

Shane rolls his eyes and pokes his toes against Ilya’s. “No. Obviously I’m talking about the Stanley Cup. Or an Olympic gold,” he says, exasperated.

“Obviously,” Ilya mocks, but he’s hiding a smile. “You will have that, котёнок. You’re too good not to. Being second best player in the League is nothing to sneeze at.”

He laughs when Shane’s toes dig in a little harder, his indignant, “Asshole!” a welcomed pet name.

“Anyway, that’s not what I mean. I’m saying I want to win a Cup with you.” He looks at Ilya, as serious as Ilya has ever seen him when he adds, “We’ll probably get a chance at Gold together when you eventually get your citizenship, but I really, really want to win a Stanley Cup with you, Ilya.”

And how is Ilya supposed to answer that with anything but the truth?

“I would like that too. Very much,” he says solemnly.

They’ve talked about playing on the same team before, but they both know if not an impossible dream, it's certainly a difficult one.

Shane tugs his lower lip between his teeth, looking so hesitant Ilya can’t stand it.

“What?” he asks finally, when Shane has been quiet for a long couple of minutes and Ilya’s skin is prickling with anticipation.

“It’s just—I’ve been thinking.”

“Okay?”

Shane takes in a deep breath and then exhales. “What if we signed to the same team in free agency?”

Ilya’s brows shoot up, but before he can say anything, Shane hurries to explain.

“I know, I know. We won’t be free agents until the summer of 2016, but we’ll only be twenty five by then. That’s just the beginning of our prime; plenty of excellent hockey left in us.”

Ilya looks at him, at his excited face and bright eyes. Shane really, truly wants this, he realises.

“What about Montreal?” he asks, because this had never been the plan in their first life. Shane had always been adamant that he would retire as a Voyageur.

Shane shakes his head, but he’s looking a little guilty as he says, “I love Montreal, and I hope I get to win a Cup with them, but by the time we’re out of restricted agency, they won’t have the cap space to accommodate us both.” He gives a helpless little shrug. “If I have to choose between being a Voyageur and getting to play with you, I’ll choose you every time.”

He may as well have clawed Ilya’s chest wide open and crooned those words directly at his heart.

The pain is the sweetest ache he’s ever felt, because for so long, Ilya had doubted. Had been terrified that if it came down to it, if Shane was forced to make a choice, it would always be hockey first.

“Where would we play?” he chokes out eventually, so overcome with love for Shane—any Shane, in any life—that he just barely manages to get the words out.

Shane straightens eagerly in his seat. He leans over, hand curling around Ilya’s foot, squeezing once. “I don’t know yet. We’ll figure it out, but—but you agree, then? We’ll play out the next six years for Boston and Montreal, and then we’ll sign somewhere together.”

“As long as it is not Carolina or Buffalo,” Ilya blurts out. 

And really, he thinks, as Shane laughs giddily and launches himself at him, hiding his grin into Ilya’s collarbone, there was never any chance of saying no.

Chapter End Notes

I hope everyone's been eating cookies since last time!

I am so pleased that so many of you enjoyed the previous chapter's focus on hockey players and food. As some of you may have guessed, I'm a hockey fan (some of you have been very good at clocking real life references throughout this fic) but I know I can sometimes get too caught up in the authenticity of it all. Hope you enjoyed this one <3

Chapter 17

Chapter Notes

Hey guys! I took a week off to write For You (In Sweetness), which is a 10k oneshot hollanov fic where Shane adopts a baby and Ilya's simping is out of this world as per his MO for anyone that is interested.

When Ilya signed with Ottawa in free agency, he’d become the highest paid player in the NHL.

Shane’s brand deals might have meant he had Ilya beat in terms of total earnings, but there was not a single team in the League that was paying a player more than the Centaurs were paying Ilya Rozanov—it was, the pundits decided in that future past, a mutually beneficial agreement.

Ottawa was desperate to turn around a sinking ship and Ilya was good enough to get it done; he’d made it happen in Boston, after all. If not a Cup-winning team, he’d make the Centaurs a playoff contender.

Where the pundits were wrong was in thinking that Ilya would have gone anywhere, that he was less interested in winning and more interested in getting his bag.

Back then, Shane was the one who decided on Ottawa, Barry was the one who made it happen, and Ilya had been happy to follow along but he’d been something of a passive participant. Some years, distance and a bit of time travelling later, he can finally acknowledge that. Ottawa had turned out to be a good fit, and being closer to Shane had soothed an ache in Ilya he had been ignoring for years, but he recognises now that he’d grown increasingly bitter in the moments of solitude when all his intrusive thoughts became loud and overwhelming. 

The window of an athlete’s career is short, and Ilya was wasting some of those prime years by having to forcefully drag the Centaurs from the bottom of the standings.

He was not alone in making it happen, but it had often felt like it.

It was easy, then, to miss Boston and the home and people he’d left behind there.

Easy, too, to blame some of that on Shane.

Ilya now knows that it had been both unfair and unkind—Shane had never begged or made any kind of ultimatum to make Ilya sign with Ottawa. He’d asked, because he’d thought that would be the best thing for their relationship and their future, and Ilya had agreed.

He wants to do more than just follow along this time around, though, because if building a house together has taught Ilya anything, it’s that Shane likes it when he contributes. He likes it when Ilya cares enough to have opinions and be assertive about the things he likes and dislikes.

“You have thoughts and ideas about these things too, right?” Shane had said with a shrug and a hint of a smile the last time they had a meeting with the architecture firm. “It’s going to be your house too; it can’t just be me making all the decisions.”

They had spent the next forty minutes arguing about the wine cellar Ilya felt was an absolute necessity in any home, and when they left Kris’ office, Ilya was absolutely delighted by how quickly Shane had folded.

It makes him wonder just how many times in their previous life Shane had been waiting, leaving pauses in their conversations for Ilya to speak up and make his own thoughts known. 

Even if those contradicted Shane’s.

Ilya is not about to make the same mistakes again. This time, he wants them to meet halfway.

“I want to tell Barry,” he says in August, a few days before their CCM shoot. 

He’s been mulling that thought over for a while, running through the pros and cons of involving his agent. In Ilya’s first life, Barry had still been an excellent agent, still ferocious in protecting Ilya’s interests, but they had not shared the same kind of relationship they do in this life. Ilya had never crossed the professional boundary that existed between them, and he’ll be forever grateful that Barry was the one to do so this time around.

Barry is the one who looked at Ilya and instead of a lost cause, saw only potential.

Ilya doesn’t want to ice him out when Barry has done so much for him; he wants to return that loyalty.

Last time, Ilya’s decision not to re-sign with Boston had come as a complete shock, and he’d never told Barry why he had been so insistent on signing with Ottawa. He’d never even told him about Shane.

“Tell Barry what?” Shane asks distractedly from where he is stretched out on the couch, face hidden behind the laptop he’s got balanced on his chest. Ilya lost his attention hours ago, once Veronica emailed him a list of potential renters for the commercial space in the sex building he bought back in May.

Ilya walks over to the couch, stealing the laptop out of his hands and grinning at Shane’s indignant, “Hey!”

“Pay attention to me, котёнок,” Ilya whines playfully as he places the laptop on the coffee table.

“I give you plenty of attention,” Shane grumbles, but he straightens up on the couch and looks expectantly at Ilya. “Tell Barry what?” he asks again.

“About us wanting to sign with the same team. I want him to know.”

“Already? Ilya, we still have to play through our ELC contracts and then another four years in restricted free agency.”

“Yes, but a lot of teams will push for long contract for franchise players like us. Lock you up for ten years and longer. Boston will try, and I want Barry to be prepared to push back,” Ilya argues. In his future past, after the 2012–2013 lockout, those kinds of contracts were no longer allowed under the new CBA, and so both Ilya and Shane had avoided that kind of pressure from management. Shane had still ended up signing with Montreal for the maximum eight years he was allowed, and would only have become a free agent after the 2020–2021 season. Shane had even left money on the table for the Voyageurs to be able to build a supporting roster around him. The Montreal GM had been lauded for years afterwards.

He’d locked down Shane Hollander through the prime of his career for a steal of a bargain, and gotten himself three Cups as icing on the cake.

Ilya, meanwhile, had signed for five years; long enough to win a Cup and show Boston exactly how much money he was worth, but not so long he didn’t have an out if he needed it.

(Admittedly, he’d not expected to use that out the first chance he got.)

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t tell our agents eventually, but isn’t this a bit soon?”

Ilya shrugs. “Maybe. But I still want Barry to know. He is always telling me he cannot help if he does not have all the information.”

“I think that was Barry’s way of saying you better not have any more fucking nudes hidden away somewhere,” Shane says, half disapproving, half amused.

“Is this jokes, Hollander? You are joking about my very traumatic experience?” 

Shane bites his lip guiltily at that, because they don’t really talk about the pictures or the many consequences they’ve had on Ilya’s life, but it’s been more than a year and it all happened by Ilya’s doing anyway.

He can probably own it now.

“Relax,” he says, leaning over to press his finger against where Shane’s brows have knitted together. “No more amateur porn for me. For now,” he adds, and then bursts into a belly laugh when Shane grabs the nearest pillow to smash against Ilya’s face.

He probably deserved that.

“Fine, you can tell Barry, and I’ll give Farah a heads up the next time we talk,” Shane says. He looks thoughtful, clearly running the idea of it over in his head. “No, you’re right. We should let our agents know. We just have to be careful not to do anything that would be considered collusion. We’ll be in so much trouble if the League decides we’re trying to manipulate the market or accuses us of tampering.”

Ilya hums his agreement. “It is probably best that we keep secret until we can start talking to teams, but Barry and Farah need to know,” he says firmly. Ilya does not want Barry working to secure Ilya a contract he has no intention of signing. It’s a waste of time and resources, and, he admits to himself, he doesn’t want to give Boston false hope either.

Barry had not been the only person blindsided by Ilya’s decision not to re-sign with the Bears; Ilya had hurt both his teammates and fans by leaving the way he did. 

By that time, Brian had retired as GM, but now Ilya is intending to leave once Boston no longer holds his player rights, and by 2016, Brian had still been working. 

Ilya doesn’t want to repay the kindness Brian has shown him by keeping up false pretenses.

“This is really important to you,” Shane says, more a statement than a question. He’s looking at Ilya curiously.

Ilya nods. “I like Boston,” he says simply. “I like my team and Brian and the coaches. They are good people and have been good to me. I want to leave on good terms.”

Shane’s face softens into something like understanding then. “You don’t want it to be like Spartak,” he says knowingly, and the words are so out of left field it takes Ilya a second to translate that into something that makes sense.

Ah. Shane thinks this is about the way Ilya had to leave Russia and his KHL team.

Spartak had been out of the playoffs by the time Ilya left for the combine, but technically, Ilya’s contract was not set to expire until the end of June of that year; there might not have been any games left to play, but Ilya had still bailed on the last month of his contract. It had not been a popular move by Russian fans and pundits, and it had only added the word traitor to Ilya’s long list of sins.

Well, Ilya may as well take advantage of Shane’s assumption; it is better than explaining time travel.

“Yes. It was not how I wanted to leave.”

“I get that, but it won’t be the same this time, okay? We’ll make sure we do it right. For both of us.” Shane grabs Ilya's hand with one of his, entwining their fingers and squeezing three times.

Ilya smiles softly as he looks down at him, knows every squeeze represents a word, and thinks he could drown in all that he feels for Shane.

“Will be nice,” he admits quietly, “not to do it alone this time.”

He would have done it a hundred times over, Ilya knows, if that is what it took to be with Shane, but looking at his sweet face and pretty eyes, he takes comfort in knowing that he won’t have to.

This time, they’ll do it together.

**

The first time they had done the CCM shoot, they had been in Toronto.

Ilya remembers the entirety of that day—it had been filled with so many firsts for them. The first time they laughed together, the first time they saw each other naked, the first time Ilya kissed Shane and Shane sank to his knees for him, beautifully eager.

It had been the first time one of them had given the other a room number with the expectation of meeting up later.

1410.

Even after all these years, Ilya still remembers that number. It’s heartbreaking to realise that its significance will only ever exist in his memory; they’re filming in Ottawa this time, at the Centaurs’ rink because Pat had decided he wanted their Tim Hortons commercial to be filmed in their hometown for maximum effect and they may as well kill two birds with one stone.

They won’t be needing a hotel room.

“We’re gonna do the Tim Hortons commercial first,” Pat tells them over speakerphone as they make the drive from Montreal to Ottawa. Shane is behind the wheel of his shitty Yaris, because wasting money on plane tickets only to cut their travel time by an hour and some change was out of the question.

“Also, global warming,” Ilya had added sagely, and the look Shane sent him was something akin to the one from his first life when Ilya managed to load the dishwasher to perfection and was about to get his dick blown in reward.

Ilya preened smugly and resolutely ignored the interested twitch of his cock.

(After months of sharing a bed with Shane, Ilya is a veritable champion of ignoring the needs of his dick. Honestly, he should be receiving a fucking medal for the way he has managed to keep from jumping Shane in some kind of lustful daze.)

“It’s gonna be sweet and simple, just the two of you sharing some breakfast foods and asking each other questions about each other. We’ve asked your fans to tweet us what kind of questions they want answers to; the participation was, uhm, well. Let’s just say there was a lot of interest. But don’t worry! We’ve filtered through them, so there shouldn’t be anything too crazy.”

The look Shane sends Ilya’s way at that is so doubtful, Ilya has to avert his eyes to keep from laughing.

“Sounds good, Pat. We film for Tim Hortons tomorrow and CCM the day after?”

“That’s the plan.”

“And the Centaurs are still okay with us using their rink for filming?” Shane asks anxiously. It’s a valid question. Neither of them have an official tie to the Centaurs in this lifetime, and it’s impressive that Pat and Yuna have been able to not only book the rink time but secure all the approval and licenses they need for filming.

“Yes. They were happy to agree once CCM told them which players they’re using for the commercial. This is great PR for the Centaurs, too, Shane. You might have to do some schmoozing with management, but they were more than willing to lend us the ice.”

They hash out another few details, Pat intent on making sure everything goes perfect as this will be the last of Ilya’s brand commitments before the start of the season; once he’s done filming in Ottawa, he is scot-free until next summer, and they’re early enough in the timeline that he won’t even be expected to promote his sponsors on any of his social media accounts. 

He’ll get to spend the next eight months focusing on hockey and Shane.

By the time they hang up with Pat, they’ve got another forty minutes of driving, and Ilya settles back into his seat with a grimace, already uncomfortable.

“Forget David and Yuna,” he grouches. “I am buying you new car for Christmas this year.”

“This is a perfectly good car,” Shane says, immediately defensive, and Ilya is so annoyed at the tight squeeze he doesn’t even bother to tease him about it.

“Is horrible car. Good for small people, maybe,” he allows dubiously. “But for famous hockey player with lots of money? Not so much.”

“It’s just a first-time car,” Shane says, as if that in any way makes it better, and Ilya tilts his head, eyes narrowing as he takes in the way Shane’s face has gone blank and how he’s gripping the steering wheel just a tad too hard.

“Why did you buy this car?” he asks. He’s brought it up before, though Shane has always deflected away from it, and Ilya has mostly been joking anyway, but he’s curious now.

Why hadn’t he gone for a Jeep or a Rover? While not exactly cheap, they weren’t necessarily flashy and Ilya already knows they’re exactly Shane’s preferred type of car. So why had he gone for something so small and unassuming?

Shane wouldn’t even be able to argue that they weren’t at least as dependable as a Toyota.

“It’s a good first-time car,” he says, a well used refrain by this point, but Ilya doesn’t let him deflect away from it this time.

“Котёнок,” he says, “tell me the truth.”

Shane sighs. He doesn’t look at Ilya and keeps his eyes on the road as he says, “Don’t be mad.”

Which of course means Ilya’s hackles are immediately up. “Someone say something?” he guesses, because this had been a thing in Ilya’s first life. Shane had been slow to upgrade cell phones and clothes and the like, and he’d insisted that he just didn’t see the point in wasting money on things that were still working perfectly fine. There was probably some truth in that, because Shane truly doesn’t like being wasteful, but Ilya had learnt later on—from Hayden Pike—that a lot of it had stemmed from jealousy. 

Montreal had been a very young team when Shane started his rookie season and none of the other players could measure up against Shane’s fame or money. There had been tension there, and Yuna getting Shane all those brand deals so early on in his career hadn’t helped.

“They thought he was a show off,” Pike had explained once. “That he was flaunting his money and fame in their faces. They used to say some really shitty things about him. It made him make himself small.” He’d looked tired, glancing at where Shane and Arthur had been quietly drawing by the kitchen table. “You know Shane. He doesn’t like being the centre of attention.”

That still holds true, though Ilya thinks he carries it a little easier this time around. Having Chris play for the Voyageurs and on his line has really helped Shane settle on the team in a way he hadn’t until he’d won that first Cup.

“Just a couple of the guys being assholes,” Shane says, and he’s trying to sound casual, but Ilya can tell that it bothers him. “After the Gatorade deal there was a lot of, well, you know how the locker room can be sometimes. There’s a lot of shit talking. A couple of the guys thought I was getting too full of myself. That I was arrogant. I just wanted to prove them wrong, I guess.”

Ilya stares at him. “And you thought a Toyota Yaris was the way to go?”

“Okay, yeah,” Shane admits sheepishly. “That was maybe an overreaction, but really, the car isn’t that bad.”

“It’s so small, Shane. So, so tiny.”

Shane rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t argue, so Ilya knows he agrees at least a little.

“You know they are idiots, yes? The teammates who say you are full of yourself.” Ilya gives him a long look, waiting until Shane meets his eyes before he says, “Sometimes I think you are not arrogant enough. You are too kind, Shane Hollander. You fight for others but not yourself. This is why you have me, so no one take advantage.”

Shane looks back at the road, but his lips have stretched into a small smile. He looks pleased. “Yeah?” he asks. “You’ll take care of me? For how long, hm?”

And that one is easy.

“For forever, of course.”

**

That night, Ilya goes to sleep in the Hollanders house in Ottawa and wakes in a dream.

He opens his eyes to his mother’s face and remembers.

He remembers the impact as the plane hit the ground, remembers his mother plucking him out of the place that is and isn’t. Limbo, Ilya thinks.

He remembers walking through the woods, eerie and unnatural. He remembers the graveyard, and Shane, dying in front of him.

Fuck.

His mother had told him to listen for the sound of a bell and Ilya had only heard it toll once.

“Shane doesn’t remember. He won't, will he?” he asks, feeling the truth of those words settle heavy in his gut, and Irina smiles sadly.

“No, my sweet. His memories travelled elsewhere.”

Ilya sighs, already confused. “Mama,” he says, tired and heartsore and wishing any of this would just make sense.

“Do you know how time travel works, Ilyusha?”

“I really, really don’t.”

Irina laughs lightly at that; she seems so different from the last time Ilya had seen her. Less fraught with urgency and tension. More settled in her bones, maybe.

It helps, probably, that none of them are in the process of dying this time.

“Come join me, Ilyusha,” Irina says, holding out a hand, and Ilya doesn’t know where they are—there is only open space and a muted fog around them—but as he steps towards his mother, she is suddenly seated at a small table, a coffee cup cradled between her hands and what looks like a café behind her. They’re in a plaza somewhere, ghost impressions of what could be humans bustling back and forth but Ilya cannot make out a single face.

It’s the creepiest thing he has ever seen.

“What are they?” he asks as he collapses into the chair opposite his mother, eyes tracking where a group of ghost impressions run by. They’re small and fast, and Ilya thinks he can hear an echo of laughter.

Children, he thinks.

“We are all souls, Ilyusha. Some of them have places to be and some of them must wait, but they are all going somewhere.”

“And where is that?”

Irina lifts a shoulder as if to say, who knows? but her smile is secretive and knowing. “The soul is singular and infinite,” she explains, as if that is something Ilya is just supposed to understand. “I am me as you are you—in every universe. Your soul is the same but your timeline is not. For every Ilya that exists your personal history is different. Life is made up of crossroads, Ilyusha. Where you in one world chose left, you may choose right in the next, and so on and so on.”

Ilya is so fucking lost. “Okay, that…kind of makes sense, I think, but what does it have to do with anything?”

“The soul is singular and infinite,” Irina repeats, “but it cannot hold two sets of memories. For a consciousness to travel in time as you have, it must travel along the lines of your personal history. You can only go back to a place in time your consciousness has already experienced. In that sense, time is a straight line.”

Ilya swallows painfully. “So my Shane, the one we saw in the graveyard…?”

Irina nods, looking sad again.

“His memories are not compatible with the Shane of your present. When you travelled back, you arrived at a time you had already lived through and so your soul and consciousness could meld without issue, but you arrived at a crossroads, Ilyusha. Every choice you made from that point on was different from the first time, and so the timelines diverged. By the time you met Shane at the combine, the changes were irreversible. If Shane’s memories were to return, it would have to be to a point in time he himself has lived through, which would rewrite everything that has happened since you returned, because the Shane of your past never lived through any of what the Shane of your present is living through now. The universe does not abide the unspooling of time, my sweet. What has happened must always happen; you can keep something from happening in a different future, but you cannot erase what has already been. Your past Shane and your present Shane have lived two separate lives now. The soul wouldn't know which consciousness to meld with, and it’s impossible to merge the two.”

“Which is why my past Shane and my present Shane are not compatible,” Ilya whispers, understanding that much if nothing else. 

It makes sense, is the thing. Ilya can’t imagine trying to reconcile two sets of memories and experiences when he can only remember living through one of them. It’s been hard enough for Ilya to remember his past life and living through those same events as they unfold differently a second time around, but at least it is all happening to him.

Time is a straight line in that sense.

Ilya gets that now. Even as he travelled back in time, everything that Ilya has experienced has become a part of his past. His personal history.

It wouldn’t have been like that for Shane.

“Last time, you told me to listen for the toll of the bell. Once for the soul, another for the memories. Why tell me that if the bell was never going to toll for Shane’s memories anyway?”

Irina shakes her head. “You misunderstand. The bell will toll regardless, but if you’d heard it, you’d know you weren’t alone.” She leans over the table, her coffee cup gone as she takes Ilya’s hands in hers. “But like I said, Ilyusha, a consciousness can only travel to a point in time they have already experienced. If you had heard the bell toll for Shane’s memories, time would have diverged again. The body in the life you live now would stop working; you’d essentially die, and that world would go on without you. The Shane in that world would have to go on without you while your consciousness travelled back along the lines of your personal history, until you reached a point in time where you and your past Shane were both compatible for soul melding.”

Fuck. This is so fucking confusing. Ilya thinks he’s only getting about a third of what his mother is telling him, but he’s coming to understand that time and space is a multitude.

What was it she had told him at the graveyard?

Time is constant. Everything is happening everywhere all at once.

“What about the soul then? If the memories are gone, what does it matter if the soul comes back?”

“The soul is an anchor," Irina explains. “Without your soul, your memories have no foothold in your body. If the soul doesn’t travel, you become a spectre. You exist, you are aware, but you have no way of interacting with the mortal plane. The soul ties it all together.”

“So my Shane is gone then?” Ilya asks, horrified. “The Shane that I loved, that I watched die at my grave. If the bell tolled once for his soul, and it travelled back in time with me, does that mean that somewhere out there is his consciousness without a soul?”

The idea of it is devastating. The thought of Shane, any version of him, stuck in some kind of spiritual plane as a spectre, aware and alone, makes Ilya physically ill.

That’s just fucking unacceptable.

“I told you before, didn’t I?” Irina says, squeezing Ilya’s hands in comfort. “The soul is singular and infinite. That you heard the bell toll for Shane’s soul does not necessarily mean it travelled back along your timeline.”

And, oh, Ilya thinks. “Everything is happening everywhere all at once,” he says, the words halting and not entirely convinced, but Irina smiles approvingly.

“Forwards and backwards, upwards and sideways,” she agrees. “The bell will toll for Shane’s memories if it hasn’t already, but when he wakes, it will be at a crossroads.”

“And time will diverge.” Ilya thinks he knows then. “The me as I am won’t see that Shane again, will I?” 

That is a wound that will never heal, but Ilya will treasure the scar it leaves behind if that is to be his only reminder of the time he got with that version of Shane. He won't give that up for anything.

“No, Ilyusha. Not in the world you inhabit now. I imagine somewhere out there is a version of you that is about to fall head over heels with a pretty boy and his pretty freckles, though.”

Ilya startles into a broken laugh at that, feeling a sort of bittersweet amusement at the thought of himself, completely enthralled by a Shane Hollander who already knows he loves him. “I’m about to get my socks knocked off, aren’t I? No idea what’s about to hit me.”

Irina purses her lips, suppressing a smile. “I imagine you are going to be very confused, yes.” She tilts her head, listening to something Ilya can’t hear as she looks at the ghost impressions around them.

Souls, Ilya knows now. 

It occurs to him that he’s not really supposed to be here.

“I have to wake up now, don’t I?”

“Yes,” Irina says, sounding tired and resigned in equal measure.

“Will I remember this when I wake up? Will I remember you?”

“No, Ilyusha. Mortality is a constraint in that way. You are not meant to comprehend the beyond until you are part of it. That you are here now is only because you’ve died once. You can access this plane only in your subconscious mind.”

Right. It makes sense, Ilya thinks, because if this was something he had to contemplate in his waking hours, he might actually lose his fucking mind trying to understand it all. It’s almost easier to accept time travel not knowing how it is possible in the first place.

It still sucks, though, because his mother is here, and to see her again has been a gift beyond measure. He so very desperately wants to keep seeing her. To talk with her for just a little while longer.

“Will I come back?”

Irina lets go of his hands. She sits back in her chair as she focuses her gaze on him, the other souls having lost her interest for now. “Perhaps,” she says after a few long seconds. “I will be here if you do.”

Ilya nods, accepting the promise for what it is. “I love you,” he tells her, and the smile that blooms across her face is heartachingly beautiful.

“I love you, my sweet. If anything, remember that.” 

Ilya blinks to keep his tears at bay, and in between one blink and the next, Irina is suddenly in front of him, his face in her hands.

“I’ll send you off with this, Ilyusha.” She stares into the eyes that match her own as she says, “A soul cannot hold two sets of memories, that much is true, but sometimes the veil between worlds thins and there’s a bleed through. Like deja vu. The Shane of your present does not have the memories of the Shane of your past, but that doesn’t mean his soul doesn’t know you.”

What does that mean? Ilya wants to ask, but then he blinks his eyes again and he is awake.

If he dreamt, he doesn’t remember.

Chapter End Notes

And there you have it, there are officially two separate Shanes. In some alternate dimension, the Shane that lost Ilya in the plane crash is about to accidentally seduce the hell out of another version of Ilya, but this Ilya's timeline is now an offshoot from his original one and so this Shane will remain his own person with his own experiences and memories. It's been so much fun reading through all of the different theories everyone has, and I wasn't sure either until a few chapters ago to be honest, but ultimately I couldn't reconcile how Shane as I have written him here could in anyway stay the same with his memories from the previous lifetime, and by now I've gotten really attached to him. Hope you guys enjoyed!

Chapter 18

Chapter Notes

Ilya wakes in the early hours of the morning, grumpy and tired. 

He feels heartsore and heavy with grief without knowing why, and the feeling is so unsettling all he wants to do is burrow back under the covers and sleep the day away.

“Do you want me to call Mr Roberts for you?” Shane asks him quietly. 

He’s been in and out of the room several times already. First to make breakfast, because David and Yuna are away to visit David’s cousin in Halifax for a few days, and then he kept checking on Ilya when it became apparent he wasn’t getting out of bed. 

Now he’s anxiously fidgeting in the middle of the room, trying to get Ilya to call his therapist, and he’s just trying to help, trying to make it better—and somewhere, beneath the inexplicable sorrow flooding his lungs, Ilya knows that, but he’s finding it hard to breathe around the lump in his throat and that just makes Shane’s hovering annoying rather than helpful.

“Leave me the fuck alone,” he snaps in Russian, too tired to even try to translate that into English, and while Shane obviously doesn’t know what he said exactly, Ilya’s tone of voice is cutting enough that he can probably guess.

Shane goes quiet, long enough for Ilya to start feeling guilty about his poor behaviour, but then he says, “Right. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.”

The quiet click of the door as he leaves the room might as well have been a gunshot for all that the sound resonates.

Fuck.

It’s been a long time since Ilya has felt his mood get this low, where he’s so sad he feels as if he’s teetering on that edge of depression. In his future past, he’d just barely been diagnosed by his therapist before the plane crash—they hadn’t even settled on whether or not he should try out medication, and Ilya never got around to telling Shane.

He’d been afraid to, he thinks. It’s not that he was scared Shane would handle it badly or in any way ridicule him, but Ilya knows he can be a lot, and he didn’t want his depression to be another item in the bag of issues that was Ilya Rozanov. The bag was already stuffed to the brim, and Ilya’s nightmare has always been becoming a burden to his loved ones; he hadn’t wanted to add to Shane’s long list of worries when they already had so much working against them.

He lies in bed for a while, body feeling like lead as his mind loops on the things he usually tries his best not to think about. He feels as if his head is under water, and he doesn’t know how long it’s been when the door slams back open, but it’s so sudden Ilya doesn’t even have time to react before Shane is stalking across the floor and climbing into bed with him.

“I don’t know what’s up with you,” he says as he curls up against Ilya, “but you would never leave me alone if I was crying into my pillow, so you’re fucking stuck with me, asshole.”

“‘m not crying,” Ilya says, and he hasn’t been, but he feels pressure behind his eyes now, because he’s not always sure he’s deserving of Shane’s love and care but he’s so very grateful for it anyway.

For this boy who refuses to leave him alone.

“But you’re sad?”

Ilya’s breath hitches. He nods. Doesn’t know how to explain it.

Shane finds his hand underneath the covers, linking his pinky with Ilya’s. “That’s okay,” he says softly. “I’ll stay with you for as long as you need.”

“Might need long time,” Ilya whispers, a confession and a secret rolled into one.

“That’s okay, too.”

“But we have Tim Hortons shoot later today.”

“Then I’ll call Pat and tell them to cancel,” Shane says, in that easy way he never does when it comes to himself. He’ll hate it, because Shane is particular about punctuality and fulfilling his obligations. He never cancels if he can help it, always conscious about not wasting anybody’s time, but he’ll do it for Ilya. 

Ilya knows he will.

“Just give me an hour?”

“As long as you need,” Shane says again, voice solemn as he holds Ilya’s gaze.

Ilya looks back at him, this person he’s chosen as his own. 

He is sad this morning, and while the sadness feels like a boulder pressing down on his chest, it doesn’t hurt quite so much with Shane there. 

When he smiles at him, Ilya smiles back, a fragile fledgling of a thing, and finds that he breathes just a little bit easier.

**

They are behind schedule when they leave the house hours later, and while Ilya fires off a text to Pat to warn him that something came up but they’re on their way now, they get lucky in traffic and are only ten minutes late when they walk into Tim Hortons.

Ilya’s mood is much improved by then. 

He’s still feeling a little off, but suspects it would have been worse if he’d been left to wallow in his own misery by himself.

Shane asking if he would like to help him look for a potential new car had brightened his mood considerably—in return, Ilya had to promise to schedule a video call with Roberts.

“You know I always feel better after talking to Shauna,” Shane had told him before smacking a kiss to Ilya’s temple. “Come on, let’s get some food in you.”

Well. Joke’s on Shane. Ilya would have called up Roberts either way, but now he gets to spoil Shane with the Land Rover he was already planning to get him for Christmas.

Pat is there to greet them at the door; it’s the first time he’s meeting Shane in person.

“I thought you’d be taller,” he blurts out, and then blushes bright red in mortification. It clashes horribly with his red hair. “Shit, I’m so sorry. That was so rude of me. It’s just that Ilya talks about you so much you’ve grown into this looming figure in my head.”

“You see him on TV all the time,” Ilya points out, laughing when Pat winces in acknowledgement.

“I’m wearing skates then. It adds a couple of inches,” Shane says graciously as he offers his hand in greeting.

They go through another round of introductions once the director comes over, and then it’s a flurry of activities as the crew gets everything set up and Ilya and Shane are ushered to a table in the middle of the shop. It’s already plated with coffee and baked goods.

Ilya hopes the coffee is for product placement only, because neither of them drink coffee yet—and hadn’t that been a surprise, to realise that his tastebuds weren’t the same as his thirty-year-old self?

“Okay, guys, try not to mind the cameras and just act as casual as possible. The campaign slogan is going to be ‘Tim Hortons, the place to meet’. We’re going to do a series of videos showcasing different types of people getting to know each other better. You guys fall under the best friends category, so it should be easy for you, eh? Just act like you normally would.”

They’re not usually filmed when they’re out eating, though, which is a point Ilya can tell that Shane is itching to make, but there is already a boom mic above them and Shane is too polite to object anyway.

Ilya grins, uncaring of the people in the background, and if it really had been just the two of them grabbing a bite to eat at their local Timmies, he’d already be trying to steal one of the timbits off Shane’s plate.

Shane is no fool, though. He must be able to read Ilya’s face, because he shields his plate protectively, glowering at him from across the table. “Touch it and die,” he says, and there’s a stunned silence from the crew while Ilya just laughs and holds up his hands in a show of innocence.

Shane has been visibly uncomfortable as the crew set up the necessary equipment, shy and quietly polite whenever anyone spoke to him, but he’s relaxing at Ilya’s antics, falling back into familiar habits even with the cameras pointed at them.

“Amazing,” the director breathes out, already salivating over the footage he’s about to get, Ilya suspects. 

Shane is famously stoic on camera, and there are only a precious few clips of him actually acting his age. Usually when a reporter relays one of Ilya’s taunts and Shane can’t help but chirp back, never one to let Ilya get one up on him.

“Sorry about that,” Shane says, looking sheepish and awkward, but the director is immediately shaking his head.

“No, no, you’re fine! This is exactly what we’re going for. We want you guys to be relaxed and have fun with it.”

They do some test shots before they get going for real, introducing themselves on camera and explaining that they’ll be reading each other questions from fans. They stay away from pre-prepared lines, which Ilya thinks was a good decision; Shane is a horrible liar and an even worse actor.

Once they get around to the actual questions and start snacking on the food, they find their groove, the cameras rolling without cuts.

“Oh, this is a good one,” Ilya says after he’s grabbed the next question from the bowl they’ve placed in the middle of the table. “If you did not play hockey, what would you do for work? I already know your answer,” he tells Shane, grinning at him smugly.

Shane raises his brows. “Let’s hear it then,” he challenges, and Ilya’s grin widens.

“You would be architect. Or definitely work in real estate.”

“…Okay, yeah. That’s fair.”

“Too bad you cannot draw,” Ilya says, laughing when Shane kicks him under the table. 

Ass, he mouths, and Ilya really, really hopes that they got that on camera.

“Okay, here’s your next one,” Shane says, plucking another question from the bowl. “If you were stranded on a deserted island, what three things would you take with you and why?”

Ilya hums, thinking it through. “I would bring knife for building and hunting, and I would bring a box of medical supplies because this is good to have in emergencies.”

“And the third thing?”

“I would bring you. At least if I have Shane Hollander with me, I can still play good hockey.”

Shane gives him a sceptical look, but there is a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. “That doesn’t even make sense. It’s an island; where would we even skate?”

“Eh, we’ll make it work,” Ilya says confidently, and Shane just shakes his head at him, eyes sparkling with amusement.

“Unbelievable. Can’t believe you’d drag me along to a deserted island.”

“Who else would I bring?” Ilya asks defensively. “You want me to bring Marly or Dan? They know nothing. Would die after one day, so boring for me.”

“I’m telling them you said that,” Shane says, and he’s outright laughing now so Ilya just shrugs, unbothered.

He’s told them far worse to their faces.

They run through several more questions; some are about hockey, some about their private lives that they mostly skirt around, and some completely random. Pat wasn’t lying when he said they had filtered through the questions, because most of them are incredibly tame, but they make for good entertainment. Ilya even learns a couple of new facts about Shane, like how he’d actually wanted to be a goalie when he first started playing hockey; it was the position David had played, and Shane had wanted to be like his dad. 

He learns that Shane doesn’t have a favourite colour, but if forced to choose he’d go with yellow.

“Why yellow?” Ilya asks him, baffled.

“It’s a happy colour.”

It’s not really much of an explanation, but it’s charming and so fucking cute Ilya can do nothing but store the information away in his mental archive of all things Shane.

“Final question.” Ilya reaches into the bowl again and grabs for the last piece of paper. “Do you believe in soulmates?” he reads aloud.

“Yes,” Shane says firmly, no hesitation, and while he doesn’t elaborate, it’s so matter of fact that Ilya just stares at him for a second. He’s never heard Shane talk about soulmates before, but apparently he feels strongly about it.

(He wonders if Shane thinks he has a soulmate, and just who the hell he thinks that would be, because if it’s someone other than Ilya, that poor unfortunate soul is about to have a problem in the form of a well-placed right hook.)

“Really?” Ilya asks, momentarily forgetting about the cameras as he keeps his eyes on Shane. 

“Don’t you?” Shane looks back at him steadily, and there is something challenging in the lift of his brows, something almost daring.

They stare at each other for long enough that somewhere in the background, someone asks, “Should we cut?”

“I do,” Ilya says, before anyone can do anything else. “Yes. I believe in soulmates.”

It’s true. Even before the time travel, Ilya has always felt that if soulmates were real, Shane had to be his.

Across from him, Shane’s face blooms into a smile, wonderful and secretive. 

**

Ilya is burning with curiosity.

He manages to keep his questions to himself as they finish up the shoot, thanking the crew for their hard work and making plans to meet with Pat at the Centaurs’ rink early the next day.

He doesn’t mention it on the drive back to the Hollanders’ house even though his tongue is itching from holding back all the questions, and he says nothing about it all through dinner and the six rounds of Mario Kart Shane goads him into.

Finally, as they call it a night and start getting ready for bed, Ilya can’t hold back anymore.

“You really believe in soulmates?” he asks, watching from the door of the bathroom as Shane brushes his teeth.

Shane makes a noise of agreement, spitting the foam into the sink. “Mhm. Ever since I was a little kid.”

Ilya looks at him for a long moment.

He can’t remember them ever talking about this, in either lifetimes, and it makes him so, so curious. Wary too.

Shane isn’t religious, and he’s not particularly spiritual. He’s too practical for it, Ilya thinks. He believes more in the things he can see and touch and feel. He puts his faith in the tangible, in people and science—he believes in love because it’s something he can act on. He demonstrates his love through time and effort and care in a thousand different ways, and when he’d given his heart to Ilya in their future past, he’d trusted that Ilya would treasure it and show that care back.

His faith had been in Ilya.

“Do you—do you think you have a soulmate?” Ilya asks, because he has to know, can’t bear the thought of—

“Yes,” Shane says simply. He meets Ilya’s eyes through the mirror. 

Who? Ilya wants to know—needs to know—but can’t bring himself to ask, too afraid that Shane will say a name not his own. 

It’s been a year and eight months since Ilya first time travelled. It took him a while before he accepted his new reality, but once he did, his goal had been to return to Shane as fast as possible. Everything Ilya has done since then has been about securing his place in Shane’s life, to be by his side. 

He’s been prepared to wait, to settle for being his friend while Shane grows into himself and figures out who he is, but never once has Ilya considered a future where they don’t end up together.

Never once has he believed that Shane would fall in love with someone else.

“Ilya,” Shane says gently, and it’s only when Ilya blinks his eyes open that he realises he’d closed them.

Shane is standing in front of him, and the look on his face is so unbearably tender it takes Ilya’s breath away.

“Shane—”

Shane lifts his arms, wraps them around Ilya’s neck to draw him down and whispers, “I’m going to try something, okay?” 

It’s obvious what is about to happen, but somehow Ilya still isn’t expecting it when Shane pushes up on his toes to close the remaining distance between them and presses his mouth to Ilya’s.

It’s the sweetest first kiss Ilya has ever had, and lasts for about three seconds before his brain remembers he has arms and now would be a great fucking time to use them. His hands find purchase on Shane’s hips, drawing him flush against him, and when he deepens the kiss, tongue pushing against the seam of Shane’s lips, Shane gasps and Ilya swallows the sound down greedily.

He wants to do a whole host of other things to make Shane gasp like that again.

Ilya wants to touch him, lick him, suck bruises into his skin that will take days to fade. He wants to gather Shane into his arms and take him to bed, press him down on the mattress, cover his body with his own and make him feel good in that way only Ilya can, because Ilya spent years learning Shane’s body and he very much wants to put that knowledge into practise.

He wants to fuck him.

Wants to open him up with spit and fingers and press inside, stretching his pretty hole with his cock until Shane is stuffed full of cum and Ilya’s flesh and gets that punched out look in his eyes that means he’s well and truly gone.

Until Shane is fucked out and loving it.

Keeping himself from doing any of that feels a little like dying.

“Shane,” Ilya breathes out once he manages to tear his mouth away. “What—what are you doing?”

Shane blinks up at him, long lashes fluttering enticingly. Ilya wants to swallow him whole.

“Was that not okay?” Shane asks, looking unsure suddenly, and Ilya groans, hands abandoning Shane’s hips to cup his face instead, drawing him back for another deep kiss because Shane should never be in doubt that Ilya wants him. Not ever.

Ilya’s teeth bite down gently on Shane’s bottom lip, and when Shane sighs into it, Ilya thinks he could do this forever. It would be so easy to get lost in the feel of Shane’s lips on his and his sweet voice breathing out Ilya’s name.

If Ilya had actually been nineteen, he wouldn’t even have hesitated. He would have grabbed at Shane’s ass, lifting him so Shane could wrap his legs around Ilya’s waist and carry him to the bed. He would have taken as much as Shane was willing to give him, would have fucked him and sucked him off and wrung out as many orgasms from him as he could, and in the morning Ilya would be done.

He’d come up with a hundred reasons why it couldn’t happen again, and a thousand more for why it should.

He’d find reasons to keep in touch, to needle himself underneath Shane’s skin like heroin, flowing through his veins like a habit he couldn’t quit.

He’d want Shane all to himself and keep him at arms length at the same time.

It would take him years to be anywhere close to admitting that Shane was the drug and Ilya the addict.

Ilya had wasted those years before, even if they had gotten there in the end. He’s not letting that happen again.

“Is more than okay,” Ilya says. He rests his forehead against Shane’s. Takes a moment to gather his thoughts, breathing in on Shane’s exhales. “Shane, you—you like men? You’re gay? Bisexual? Just curious?”

He doesn’t think Shane would risk their friendship for a little bit of curiosity, but Ilya is not about to let there be any misunderstanding between them; he wants Shane to be aware that Ilya isn’t looking for a fling. He’s in it for the long haul.

“I like you,” Shane says simply, but he’s nodding as he pulls away from Ilya, tilting his head up so their eyes can meet. “Yeah. I’m, uh, gay, I guess. Girls are pretty and all, but they don’t really do it for me.”

Ilya’s thumb strokes across the freckles of his cheek, and he wants to kiss him again, but he doesn’t want to overwhelm Shane if this is all new to him.

“How long have you known?”

Shane shrugs. He averts his eyes and mumbles out something Ilya can’t quite make out. 

He makes a questioning noise, and when Shane looks back at him, there’s a blush blooming across his face. 

“I mean, you’re very…” Shane gestures at Ilya. “Those pictures were…there was a lot of skin.”

Ilya’s brows shoot up. That almost sounded as if Shane has been aware of his sexuality the entire fucking time.

“What—?”

“It turns out my type is kind of, uh, specifically, well, you. Which was—” Shane bites at his lip. “I had a girlfriend when I—when I first saw your, uhm, your nudes. And that was confusing and weird and a lot, and I know I never should have looked at those pictures; I know how invasive that was. I had—I had a lot of guilt about that, but I was convinced it didn’t matter anyway. I’d already met you and you were kind of a dick, Ilya, but when we saw each other again at the combine you weren’t like that at all. You were going through so much crap, but you made it a point to be nice to me, and you still looked like that.” He gestures at Ilya again, looking a little helpless. “Turns out I was really, really into you, and I kind of forgot. About Jessica. I hadn’t seen her for a while when you first met her, remember?” 

Ilya nods absently, so fucking blindsided he can’t even speak before Shane goes on.

“I was so confused, Ilya. I’d never felt that way about a boy. I’d never felt that way about anyone. And you were so perfect; I’ve never just clicked with someone before. I’ve never had a best friend like you, and that day when I broke up with Jessica, do you remember that?”

Ilya swallows. He does remember. “I said you should be curious.”

“Right. And I thought you meant about you. I thought that was your way of saying you were interested in me too, but then we spent the whole summer together and you never made a move, so I thought I got it all wrong the first time, that it had actually been your way of letting me down gently. I thought you’d figured out how much I liked you and you were telling me to be curious about other people because you didn’t feel the same. That you were happy just being best friends.”

Ilya makes a wounded noise, distraught that Shane would ever think there was a world in which Ilya didn’t want him. “Котёнок, I—”

Shane shuffles on his feet, looking nervous as he says, “I kissed someone. At camp last year. We kind of fooled around for a couple of weeks; long enough for me to figure out that I was definitely gay, and definitely in love with you.”

Ilya inhales sharply. “Shane,” he chokes out, immediately jealous but so overjoyed at the same time by Shane’s confession he doesn’t even know what to focus on first.

“I wanted to tell you. After Christmas, I wanted to—I was going to tell you how I felt. I thought that even if you didn’t return my feelings, we were close enough by then that it wouldn’t ruin our friendship. That even if you didn’t love me back, at least you’d know, and I would have been happy just being your best friend. I would have been okay with that, but I wanted you to know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“The Olympic break happened.”

And Shane had ended up in the hospital, Ilya realises as he closes his eyes, pained.

“You were…not okay, after that,” he says, remembering those terrible days and how messed up Shane had been, how messed up Ilya had been. 

“No.” Shane shakes his head, regretful. “You were so good to me then, you always are, but I—”

“You needed time,” Ilya finishes for him. He wraps his arms around Shane’s waist, pulling him into a hug as he rests his chin on top of his head. “My brave котёнок,” he says. “I love you. I have been in love with you since…forever.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Very much so.”

Shane huffs out a laugh. “Chris said you had to be. He said best friends just don’t build houses together, and if you weren’t going to do anything about it soon he’d steal me away.”

Ilya freezes. “Shane,” he says, the realisation coming over him slowly. “Is Chris guy from camp? The one you fool around with?”

Shane hums out a confirmation, and Ilya abruptly runs back through every single interaction he’s ever had with Chris—the guy he’s fucking trusted to look after Shane and who’s apparently had feelings for him this whole time.

What the actual fuck?

“Are you mad?”

Ilya sighs. 

He is mad, but that’s him being jealous and unfair about something that isn’t actually his business. 

Shane wasn’t entirely wrong, is the thing.

He had meant for Shane to go and experience his sexuality outside of Ilya. Not because Ilya didn’t want him, but because Shane deserved to see what the world could offer him before he shackled himself to Ilya’s side, because the second he did, Ilya was not about to let him go ever again.

He’d told him to be curious; Ilya can’t be angry that Shane actually had been, or that he’d chosen Chris to explore with.

(Even though he is, a little bit. A lot. Ilya will be having words with Chris.)

“Not mad at you,” Ilya promises, and that much is true at least. “Котёнок,” he says. He pulls out of their hug far enough so he can lift Shane’s chin, eyes locking with his. Fuck, he’s beautiful. “Why tell me now?” He presses a quick kiss to Shane’s lips to let him know how very much not upset by that he is, but he still wants to know what has pushed him to confess now specifically.

Shane smiles at him, hand coming up to run through Ilya’s hair the way he has a hundred times before. Lovingly.

“I’m doing better now, and I guess I didn’t want to wait anymore. Besides, you were being a dumbass,” he says, and Ilya is so startled he barks out a laugh.

“What?”

“You were having a mental breakdown about me believing in soulmates, Ilya. You’ve been stressing about it ever since we left the shoot earlier today.” Shane rolls his eyes, but it’s so terribly fond Ilya has to kiss him again.

“I am your soulmate, котёнок? Is this what you think?” he asks, smug, because of course he is.

Who else would it be?

Shane shakes his head, exasperated; he can probably tell exactly what Ilya is thinking, but he doesn’t deny it. 

“I love you,” he says instead, and when he kisses Ilya this time, it feels like coming home.

Chapter End Notes

I've changed the rating from teen and up to mature after someone pointed out that Ilya's lusty thoughts regarding what he wants to do in bed with Shane tends towards the explicit (thank you, JadeLights, for pointing it out! I completely forgot what the original rating was).

Also, I'm not saying that an 18-year-old Shane saw a picture of another boy giving Ilya head and immediately wished he'd be the one doing the cocksucking, but I'm not *not* saying it either.

Chapter 19: Interlude: Chris

Chapter Notes

I call this chapter: In defence of Chris.

Turns out I had a shit ton of feelings about him.

Christopher falls in love during rookie camp. 

For all that it happens over the course of four days, the fall is a gradual one. It happens between line rushes and scrimmages, in the tense moments of weight lifting and trying to outdo the other rookies. It happens at a secluded corner of the rink, Christopher staring down at Shane Hollander, asking, “Can I kiss you?”

He’s been peacocking the whole day, chirping at anything that moves and displaying all of his skills to the best of his ability because this is the year Christopher is making it to the big league. He can feel it.

He’s not above admitting that he wants to impress management and the coaching staff. Most of the other rookies have decided the way to go is by outperforming the best prospect there, but Christopher already knows that’s a hopeless endeavour.

Shane Hollander is a force of nature. 

There is no outperforming him—not for them, anyway—so Christopher does the only thing he can do:

He tries to keep up.

It’s easier than Christopher expected, or maybe it’s because Shane takes a liking to him, so he makes it easy, finding Christopher on the ice with impossible passes and appearing in the open spaces just as Christopher sees them. It feels as if he could score a hundred goals on Shane’s line.

It’s breathtaking to get to play with a hockey IQ like that, with someone who sees the ice like a chess board and moves accordingly; the other rookies are so jealous of Shane’s talents they seethe with it, and Christopher is too, a little bit, but. 

Well.

Shane likes him. For whatever reason, Shane Hollander had looked at him and decided they’d work well together, and the truth is, it’s so, so easy to like him back.

Shane is lovely and gorgeous and a bundle of contradictions.

He is painfully shy but fiercely determined. He does his best to avoid the spotlight but shines so bright on the ice it’s impossible to look away.

He is a torrent of rain and the warmth of the summer sun, and falling in love with him is as natural as the blooming of wildflowers in spring.

Christopher fancies himself a bit of a poet, but he’d never been a particularly tortured one. Not until Shane.

He has been in love before, with pretty girls and cocky boys but it’s always been puppy love. The fizzling out of affection has been a mutual thing; nothing like this, like the heartbreak of realising that the one he loves will never love him back. 

How can he, when Ilya Rozanov is the sun that Shane orbits?

“We’re just best friends,” Shane says when Christopher asks, and lets Christopher kiss him in hidden places and the apartment he calls his own.

“Ilya doesn’t like me that way,” Shane says when Christopher pushes him on it, and gasps against his mouth as Christopher jerks him off for the first time.

I’m in love with my best friend, is what Christopher hears, and my best friend doesn’t love me back. 

Shane is the smartest person Christopher knows; he is also spectacularly dumb.

Anyone with eyes and ears can tell that Rozanov lives and breathes for Shane Hollander, and for the two weeks that Shane lets Christopher hold him, touch him, and kiss him breathless, he can’t help but hate the guy.

There he is, living Christopher’s dream. An openly queer hockey player who was drafted first overall. An openly queer hockey player that is going to make it to the NHL, who’ll be a first line centre, and whatever talking points and arguments being made about Rozanov, none of them question his skill. Not a single one.

Christopher was drafted two years ago and he still hasn’t gotten to play for the team that drafted him. There’s not even a guarantee that he will this year, even if Shane is doing his very best to make that happen.

It’s just so fucking unfair.

Rozanov gets to be out, gets to play the best hockey in the world while Christopher has to fight for every single minute of ice time he’s given.

He has neither the charm nor the pure talent that Ilya Rozanov has; there will be no buffer between Christopher and a world that would do its very best to tear him down.

He doesn’t even have Shane, not really.

Not when kisses are interrupted to respond to a text or a call. Not when Shane’s face lights up at a single name and he breathes out, “Ilya, hi!” with so much love Christopher wants to scream into the void because Shane doesn’t ever react like that to him.

He never will. Christopher knows that, feels the loss of it like a dagger to the gut, and still he remains stubbornly in love.

By the time he gets to meet Rozanov in person, Christopher has known Shane for nearly a month, has stupidly fallen deeper into love, and Rozanov has become Ilya because that is the only name Shane calls him. He does not suffer slights against his best friend, and if Christopher wants them to remain close, he at least needs to be friendly with Rozanov.

Ilya.

Seeing the two of them together for the first time is what Christopher imagines two stars colliding would look like; if Shane shines bright on his own, he glows in the arms of Ilya. Christopher hasn’t known him long and Ilya not at all, but he has never seen two people as happy in each other’s presence as Shane and Ilya. The world could have ended in that moment and Shane would still only have had eyes for one person, and the dagger in Christopher’s guts embeds itself just that little bit deeper.

“I’m Chris,” he introduces himself, and tries not to die from the bleeding. He fashions his expression into something open and friendly, and hides his clenched fists in the pocket of his slacks as he watches Ilya take Shane’s face in his hands before he kisses him on the fucking cheek in fucking public.

Watching the way Shane beams up at him afterwards is its own kind of pain.

“Did you meet Rozy yet?” Dan asks him eagerly when he meets Christopher at the rink before the game. “He’s awesome, right? I’ve been doing really good on his line, Chris. Maybe this year I’ll actually make it. You too, okay?”

Dan is his twin brother, and Christopher loves him, but he can be so very oblivious at times. He doesn’t know that Christopher fucks as many boys as he does girls. He’s never told Dan, because he doesn’t want to put him in a position where he has to choose between family:

Christopher, his twin brother, or the dad they grew up admiring—the same man who’d caught Christopher with a boy when he was fifteen and who’d quietly told him he never wanted to see anything like that again, and if he did, Christopher was no son of his.

Neither of them tell his mom.

Christopher doesn’t mind, not for the longest time. He dates around a lot, flitting from one girl to the next, and when he gets the urge for someone more masculine, he knows to be discreet.

Shane is the first time he’s wanted to be reckless. The first time he’s thought that risking his family might actually be worth it if Shane was the prize on the other side of it, but Christopher already knows he won’t be. Not when Shane only has eyes for Ilya.

Boston loses the first game of their home-and-home, and after they lose the next day too in Montreal, Shane invites them for dinner at his place: Christopher, Dan, and Ilya.

It’s the first time Ilya gets to see the apartment in person, and Christopher knows it’s petty, but as Shane shows Ilya and Dan around, he can’t help but look after them and think, I’ve already kissed him here. I’ve sat on that couch and held him as he came.

Christopher hates himself a little then. He is not a mean person, and he’s never been particularly hateful, but he is so very jealous, and more and more he keeps getting dragged under, slowly drowning under the weight of it.

When Ilya pulls him aside after dinner, he only feels more shitty about it.

“You do not know me well,” he tells Christopher, “but I want to ask for a favour.”

Shane is an anxious soul, Ilya explains. He worries over big things and small things, and he doesn’t use his voice to stand up for himself near as much as he should. He’ll disappear into his head if left alone, and would Chris mind looking after him? To keep an ear and eye out for anyone giving him more crap than the usual locker room chirps?

“I am openly bi, and everyone knows Shane is my best friend; not everyone will be kind. You will make the roster this year, like Dan. I can tell. Shane could use a friend like you.”

But I want to be so much more, Christopher doesn’t say.

The words are right there on the tip of his tongue, but Ilya loves Shane like Christopher does, and he is not asking for something Christopher wouldn’t do in the first place.

“We’re already friends,” he says instead of, I wish I met him first. “Of course I’ll look after him.”

When Ilya clamps a hand down on his shoulder, thanking him solemnly, Christopher hates himself for hating him.

The worst part, he thinks, is that Ilya is actually a good guy.

He is cocky and arrogant and a monster on the ice, but absolutely putty in Shane’s hands.

His love for Shane is loud and obvious and Shane is seemingly the only person in the world who doesn’t think it’s weird that Ilya ships him bags of chips from Trader Joe’s whenever he asks or that there are more pictures of Shane on Ilya’s Facebook than there is of anything else.

Ilya himself is loud—his very nature demands attention and Shane gives it so readily, so eagerly.

Not like Christopher, who is loud because he has to be, who pesters Shane with comments and opinions and thoughts—anything to make Shane look at him, anything to drag his eyes away from the phone in his hand and the texts on the screen.

Shane thinks he can be a lot sometimes, Christopher knows that. He knows that Shane thinks he is exhausting with his loudness, but how can he stop when Ilya is just as loud and Shane thinks he is perfect?

(Shouldn’t Christopher be perfect for him too, then?)

The first time they play the Bears during the regular season, the Voyegeurs manage to scrape out a win by the skin of their teeth.

“Fuck, look at that,” Shane says from the visitor’s bench when Ilya kicks off the shootout and scores on his attempt. “I could never deke like that. Could you? He’s so good at stick handling.”

No one dekes like that, because no one has the raw kind of talent that Ilya possesses, not even Shane.

Shane is the more complete player, Christopher thinks loyally, but Ilya probably has him beat in terms of pure goal scoring and natural instinct.

Christopher has none of that, and it’s just another thing to hate him for.

“No,” he admits, but Shane’s head is already turned, laughing when Ilya skates up to him and offers his gloved fist in celebration of his goal—as if that isn’t completely ridiculous, as if the fangirls aren’t going to be squealing about that for months. It is ridiculous, because opposing players don’t celebrate goals together, but it’s still going to be a talking point among the pundits.

How nice, they’ll say, to see two great talents like that being so friendly with each other. Have we ever seen anything like this before?

“Was a good goal, no? I score for you, котёнок. You like?”

“Yeah,” Shane breathes out, and when Ilya winks at him before skating back to his own bench, he only rolls his eyes fondly.

Christopher musters a smile and wonders if the bleeding will ever stop.

After the game, Shane disappears with Ilya and his parents, and Christopher doesn’t see him again until Dan gets a call to come pick them up at Brian Doyle’s house.

“Shit, Ilya really lives with your GM?” he asks Dan on the drive over. He’s already heard from Shane, but he’s still finding it a little hard to believe. Players billeting with a GM is unheard of.

“Mhm, he’s, like, totally part of their family now. Babysits Doyle’s grandkids and everything.”

Of course he does. As if the guy wasn’t perfect enough already.

When they arrive at the house, Shane and Ilya are already outside waiting for them, standing closer together than necessary. They’re talking, Shane gesticulating with his hands and Ilya grinning down at him, and even before Dan has pulled to a complete stop, Christopher rolls down the window to holler at them. At least if they’re looking at him, they’re not looking at each other. 

But it’s a futile endeavour; Ilya holds the door open for Shane, herding him into the backseat of the car before slotting in right next to him, two halves making a whole, as if God created Shane Hollander with an indent in the shape of Ilya Rozanov—and how is Christopher supposed to compete with that?

How is anyone?

When Shane reveals he’s been looking for a home for both of them, Christopher dies a little inside. He’s known Shane has been eager to get out of the rented apartment, has even helped with his ever-growing checklist of essentials, but hadn’t known Shane had been planning for that list to include Ilya.

Christopher laughs bitterly.

But of course he should have. 

He shares a look with Dan, because for whatever else, Shane and Ilya are eighteen, and their codependency is bordering on unhealthy—and if even happy-go-lucky Dan can recognise that, it must be true.

Christopher throws out a glib comment, something about not buying a place with Dan, and while they all laugh, he wonders if maybe it isn’t time to remove that dagger.

**

By December, Christopher has mostly made peace with his unrequited love.

When Ilya shows up for the Voyageurs game in Ottawa, he is resigned to having lost Shane forever.

(He never had him to begin with.)

He watches as Shane puts on a clinic, as he scores goal after goal for Ilya to see, little gifts for him alone, and wonders if he’d been in Ilya’s shoes, would Christopher have bothered to do the same? Would he have been in the stands as Shane Hollander scored his first NHL hat-trick? It takes a special kind of dedication, he thinks, to take time out of an insanely busy schedule just to be able to spend a few hours in another country to watch someone play hockey—even if that someone is the love of his life.

He’s not sure he would, because that is an objectively crazy thing to do—and with this, at least, Christopher cannot fault Ilya; he loves Shane as if it’s wired into the building blocks of his DNA. As if it’s a universal truth that Ilya Rozanov exists, so therefore he must love Shane Hollander.

In the locker room after the game, the guys holler and cheer, congratulating Shane on his achievement and the reporters are right behind them, asking Shane as much about Ilya watching the game with his parents as the three goals he’d scored.

He doesn’t celebrate with the team afterwards. No one is really surprised.

“We’ll just have to drink in his honour,” one of the guys declares at the club they end up in, and Christopher drinks himself blackout drunk. 

He only remembers flashes from that night:

His teammates staggering underneath his weight as they smuggle him into the hotel without any of the coaches seeing.

Shane’s worried face when he opens the door to the room they share and his hissed reprimands as he helps their teammates getting Christopher into bed. 

When he wakes in the middle of the night to lean over the bed to puke, he hears Shane sigh and mutter under his breath even as he gets up from his own bed to clean up Christopher’s mess.

Shane helps him out of the shirt he’s been wearing, stained with his sick now, and when he eases him back into the bed, Christopher starts crying. He thinks he might have apologised. He thinks he might have told Shane he loves him.

If he did, Shane never mentions it.

For Christmas, Shane gifts him a book on poetry. Christopher resolutely does not look at it all through morning and past noon, manages to distract himself well into the evening, but as he hides in his room that night, he opens the book to the page of the first poem and strokes his fingers over the words there reverently.

“Fuck,” he whispers.

Loving Shane is as easy as breathing, but it’s a constant ache. It’s the most painful thing Christopher has ever experienced, because no matter what he does, Shane will never love him back the way Christopher wants him to.

He will never care for Christopher as much as he cares for Shane.

He’d reconciled himself to that, he’d thought, that their relationship would always be lopsided. That their friendship would always mean more to Christopher than it did for Shane, and that was his cross to bear; the pain of being second.

But there is this too:

Shane paying attention. Shane listening to Christopher even though he is loud and tiring.

Shane finding a copy of a poetry book from his favourite poet, because Christopher had casually mentioned in a throwaway comment that he’d lost his own copy a few years back.

How strange, Christopher thinks, that loving someone should hurt this much.

The terrible thing—the foolish thing—is that the gesture, small as it is, reignites his hope. 

Christopher is a jester in a king’s court, and it hardly matters if he’s made a fool when there is even the tiniest chance of him having Shane.

(Except there was never a chance, and Christopher has only ever been fooling himself.)

February is when it all goes to hell.

Shane says, “Ilya and I are thinking about building a house together,” and Christopher feels that tiny spark of a chance, small and brittle as it was, slip away entirely. It drifts from his clenched fingers, like grains of sand slipping through the cracks and it makes him desperate, makes him stupid, frantically clinging to a reality where Shane isn’t his, but at least he isn’t Ilya’s either.

The party is Mitty’s idea—he knows someone who knows someone—but Christopher latches onto it with the fervour of someone who knows the end is near.

One last night, he thinks as he convinces Shane to come out with them. He just wants one more night with Shane before he loses him forever, before Ilya slots into the place Christopher so desperately wants to inhabit.

(What is a loss when the thing lost was never his to begin with?)

The man is already there when they arrive, his depravity hidden behind a plain face and icy blue eyes, and Christopher will spend the rest of his life wondering how he hadn’t recognised the monster in human flesh.

Surely, there should have been something that marked him for what he was. Some way to denote his wickedness.

Christopher loathes that he will never know. Loathes that it was just luck and timing that saved Shane from something worse than the damage he already suffered.

Christopher doesn’t actually remember much of what happened when he found them, of the punches he threw or the words he spat out, but the seconds that Shane spent seizing in his arms are burnt into his memory for life. He remembers hollering for Mitty, for any of their teammates that had tagged along to the party, remembers yelling for help. The ambulance must have arrived soon after that, but it might as well have been hours; Christopher had been so scared.

He lost sight of the monster in the shuffle, and doesn’t think to wonder what became of him until they arrive at the hospital, until after Shane has woken up in the ambulance and the name he cries out for is not Christopher’s. Never his.

“I didn’t see where he went,” he tells the police officer who takes his statement as the doctors tend to Shane, “but I got a good look at him.” He gives them a description, and tells them to talk to Mitty and to the guy who’d thrown the party.

“We’ll be back in a little while,” the police tell him, and Christopher only nods numbly.

The hospital calls Shane’s parents, and Christopher calls Ilya—it’s the hardest phone call of his life; he feels Ilya’s rage as if it’s his own, the helplessness shared between them, and absorbs the blame without fight.

Christopher is the one at fault, after all.

He stays by Shane’s side throughout the night, refusing to leave even as Shane wakes only to throw up, as he shifts restlessly in bed because his hip is hurting and his face is swelling with bruises. He stays as Shane flinches violently away from anyone who tries to touch him, and Christopher wants to scream and scream from all the impotent rage inside of him—from the ocean of guilt he is drowning in.

In the morning, Ilya arrives, and finally, he manages to tear himself away from the hospital room, leaving Shane in the care of his parents as Christopher goes to get Ilya. 

Shane is hurt and confused and won’t let anyone touch him, and as much as it burns, Christopher knows Ilya will be the exception.

Ilya is the one person Shane will feel safe with and there is no way Christopher is standing in the way of that no matter how much he wishes things were different.

He does his best to warn Ilya beforehand, to give him a rundown of Shane’s condition, but he can tell Ilya isn’t prepared for it when he actually steps into the hospital room and can see Shane for himself.

That Shane reaches for Ilya as soon as he registers he is there is honestly a relief. Christopher has felt so lost in the hours since everything happened. He’s been too wired to sleep, too anxious that something else would happen or that the guy who’d hurt Shane would find his way there. 

He’s been so unsure of how to comfort Shane and hating that he wouldn’t have been able to anyway.

Not when Ilya is the one he needed.

At least Christopher can relax now. He knows Ilya will take care of Shane, that he would set fire to the world and salt the ground if that’s what it took to protect him.

He watches the two of them curled up on a hospital bed together, Shane leaning trustingly into Ilya’s side as Ilya speaks sweet nothings to him in Russian, and it feels a little like letting go.

Shane was never going to give his heart to Christopher. He always knew that. How could he when it was already on a chain around Ilya’s neck long before Christopher ever met either of them?

For the first time since falling in love, Christopher lets himself accept that.

It doesn’t lessen the hurt.

**

He leaves them be during the Olympic break, letting Shane take his time to heal as Christopher spends his days in Cabo with Dan, getting drunk with the friends that tagged along on the trip and doing his best not to think about monsters with human faces.

He flirts with anything that moves but goes to bed alone most nights; there is a bottle of Tequila on his nightstand, a permanent fixture.

He has nightmares.

He wakes up in the middle of the night, stifling his screams into strangled whimpers because the walls are thin and no one knows what happened. 

Christopher will never be the one to tell. He’ll take the secret to his grave if that is what Shane wants.

He breaks only once, desperate to know how Shane is doing, and messages Ilya.

How is he?

Not good, Ilya texts back. But getting better, I think.

A few seconds tick by, and then: Shane says thank you for saving him. He forgot to tell you before.

Christopher stares at the text for a long moment, uncomprehending. As soon as the words start making any kind of sense, he’s running for the bathroom, throwing up into the sink, sick with guilt and shame and bile.

My fault, my fault, my fault.

The words loop in his brain for the rest of the day and well into the night. He doesn’t answer the text.

**

“Hi,” Shane says the next time they meet, somehow shy and as lovely as ever. His face is free of bruises, his hip healed up nicely, and he greets Christopher with a hug—and Christopher could cry from the joy of it, to not have Shane flinch away from his touch. To initiate it himself.

It’s an easy thing, then, to finally remove the dagger from his gut, to staunch the bleeding and cauterize the wound.

He’ll always love Shane, but he’s given up the hope for anything more than friendship—he will live off of Shane’s happiness, the trust that Ilya will never hurt him, and be satisfied with that.

It’s easier than he expected.

The season starts back up, and Christopher declares himself Shane’s protector on the ice and his second in command in the locker room though neither of them has a captaincy.

He smiles as Shane shows him drawings of the house he’s building with Ilya, and is surprised to realise it doesn’t feel like tethered hooks pulling at his cheeks.

Shane tells him he wants to tell Ilya how he feels about him, but that he isn’t ready yet, and Christopher nudges him with a soft grin, saying, “Ilya is so stupidly in love with you, he’d wait forever if you made him,” and knows it’s true because it’s what Christopher would have done.

“Maybe you should let him be the one to make the first move, hm?” he tells Shane. “If he doesn’t get a move on soon, I might just steal you away.”

Shane laughs as if it’s a joke, and Christopher just smiles, wistful.

The Voyageurs fight their way into the playoffs, and while they give the Caps a run for their money—while Shane shows the world exactly how good at hockey he is—they fall short in the end. Christopher played well, and when Shane looks at him in the locker room after Game seven and says, “Next time,” so fierce and so unyielding, Christopher believes him.

They go their separate ways after that.

Christopher goes home to Calgary where he meets up with Dan and the life they leave behind during the season, and Shane stays in Montreal with Ilya.

They keep in touch. Phone calls and texts, and here’s the part that Christopher can see now that he isn’t so blinded by jealousy and want:

Shane is a good friend.

He won’t ever be Christopher’s lover, boyfriend, husband—

But he is his friend, probably his best friend, and that’s not nothing.

It’s kind of everything.

It lets Christopher browse Ilya’s Facebook page, smiling at the many images of Shane, watching the life the two of them share together through pictures of training, travelling, and winning awards.

Shane tells him about all of it, but it’s nice to have a visual to accommodate the stories.

There is space for Christopher there. It just took him a while to figure out where it was.

**

In August, Shane texts him:

Ilya loves me back!!!!

Christopher reads over that text a couple of times, takes a deep breath and lets it go slowly, shakily. When he types out, Told you so. Happy for you guys, it doesn’t feel like a lie.

The dagger is out and the wound is closed if not completely healed. Christopher will be fine, eventually.

He does make sure to message Ilya privately, though: 

Hurt him and no one will find your body.

Ilya, the cocky bastard, sends him a thumbs up back, and Christopher laughs.

They’ll be okay, he thinks.

All three of them.

Chapter End Notes

Real life is catching up to me, guys, so updates probably won't come as often and consistently as they did until ch 18. I think I'm probably also nearing the end of this story. I won't give an estimate of how many chapters left, as I don't really know myself, but I took a little break from writing, and when I came back to it, I very seriously considered changing it to complete at ch 18. I feel as if I achieved a satisfying conclusion to the time travel and Shane and Ilya's relationship in ch 17 and ch 18, and I don't want to drag it out if it doesn't feel natural. We'll see what the plot muse says, I guess.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this one!

Chapter 20

Chapter Notes

This chapter follows immediately after ch 18. I have also tentatively raised the rating again.

They kiss for what feels like seconds and hours, time losing all meaning as Ilya lets himself disappear into the taste of Shane, the scent of him, the sight of him, the feel of him.

His Shane.

Truly his now.

He presses kiss after kiss against Shane’s mouth, his cheekbones, his eyelids. He trails his lips across his freckles, tasting the skin of his nose and cheek and chin, lips trailing down the column of his throat where he sets to sucking a bruise into the juncture between his neck and collarbone, needing to leave a mark.

Ilya is parched.

He has been dying of thirst—of want—since he first saw Shane again in this time. It’s only been a little over a year since the combine, and Shane had seemed impossibly young back then, soft and freshfaced, but now, after a full NHL season, after growing together and gaining some life experience, both the good and the bad, he has a maturity about him he hadn’t had before. 

It makes all the difference, and now that Ilya has him in his arms he feels desperate with it. He is frantic with need and desire. Doesn’t know how he is supposed to let go when all he wants is to consume Shane whole.

So he doesn’t.

Shane lets out a small whimper when Ilya bites firmly over the hickey, exactly the way he knows Shane likes—and it does occur to Ilya that they are probably rushing this; he knows all of Shane’s likes and dislikes, but Shane knows none of his. He won’t understand how Ilya knows his body so well, and Ilya will not be able to explain it. There is a laundry list of things they should talk about, to decide on and agree on. They should clarify their relationship if nothing else before they go any further, but Ilya already knows whatever they are, they are a unit, two halves of a whole, and it would take a stronger man than Ilya to pull back now.

“Bed?” Shane breathes out, sounding hopeful and maybe a little tentative, but mostly excited, as if he too would really like to see what it would be like; the two of them in bed, together.

Ilya is nodding mindlessly against Shane’s neck, pulling back just far enough to chant out, “Yes, yes, bed, yes,” as he backs out of the doorway, hands on Shane’s hips to drag him along with him. 

He’s so lost in Shane that he backs straight into the wall of the hallway, too eager to see where he is going, and can’t help his hopeless grin as Shane smothers an easy laugh.

“Ilya,” he says chidingly, but he’s still smiling, pulling Ilya down to steal another kiss before grabbing for Ilya’s hand and lacing their fingers together. “Come on.”

He walks toward their bedroom, Ilya following him close behind.

They’re alone in the house, no one around to hear them, but Shane still pauses to close the door once he’s pulled Ilya into the room, and then stops up short, looking first to his own bed and then Ilya’s.

“Ehm,” he says, chewing on his lower lip before turning to blink his doe eyes up at Ilya.

Ilya feels himself soften, some of the fire in his veins dousing at Shane’s hesitancy. He pulls him close again, wrapping his arms around him in a gentle hug as he lets the urgency go.

“We don’t have to do anything tonight,” Ilya tells Shane. He’s swaying them back and forth, nose buried in Shane's hair when he feels him melting into the embrace, his weight falling against Ilya’s chest. “We have time.” 

So much of it now. 

Days and weeks and months—whole years, in fact, instead of the stolen minutes they had fought for before.

Shane loves him, Ilya reminds himself. Shane thinks they are soulmates.

Shane has already figured out he is gay, and Ilya doesn’t know if that means he is ready to be out, ready for people to know about them, but it’s more than Ilya had dared to hope for when he first left Russia.

It’s more than he’d had in their first life.

The rest will figure itself out. With time.

“I want to, though,” Shane mumbles against his chest. “Maybe not all the way; I still haven’t—”

He cuts himself off, looking up at Ilya with a blush, and he’d said he’d fooled around with Chris earlier, but Ilya doesn’t know what that means exactly.

Truthfully, he doesn’t care to know. 

Ilya, for all his many faults, has never been a hypocrite. He is the last person to slut shame anyone, sex positive as he is, but he knows himself. Ilya is possessive—not generally as a rule, but he is of Shane. More and more as they got older.

He’d gotten to take Shane’s virginity in their first life, and before that, Ilya had never put much stock in virginity, but damn if the memory of the first time he got to fuck into Shane, got to make him feel good on his cock, hadn’t been one he’d regularly gotten off to.

It was in his top five of best sex ever, just for the sheer novelty of it.

He really fucking likes that he got to be Shane’s first. He’s not entirely prepared to have lost that in this life, and is still hopeful he won’t based on what little Shane has told him of the time he’d spend with Chris.

“Whatever you want,” Ilya says instead of, Did you let Chris fuck you? He doesn’t think the answer will be yes, anyway. “I will be happy just to hold you; to wake up next to you tomorrow.” And that much is true, at least.

“We already do that.”

“Yes,” Ilya agrees, “but now I get to kiss you in the morning and I do not have to hide my morning wood.”

Shane lifts his brows pointedly, giving Ilya a rueful look. “To be fair, you weren’t all that great at hiding it.”

Ilya blinks at him, surprised. “Wait, what?” 

Truth be told, he is always horny for Shane, feels so much lust and love for him that it takes nothing at all to get him going, but he’s been so sure he’s managed to keep his erections to himself whenever they became an issue—which was often, because Ilya privately thinks Shane is the most beautiful person to ever have been born and Ilya is just a man.

He’s never been able to resist Shane.

Shane kisses the surprised look off Ilya’s face, laughing when Ilya follows him down for another smooch as he pulls away.

“We’ve been sharing a bed for months, Ilya, and you’re a big boy,” he says. There is a telling red across his cheeks, and he’s avoiding Ilya’s gaze as he gestures vaguely in the direction of Ilya’s dick.

Ilya grins, amused. 

“Have you been peeking, котёнок?” he asks.

“I did not!” Shane immediately denies, and Ilya knows that’s probably true, but makes a doubtful noise just to tease. “I didn’t!” Shane insists as he takes a stubborn step back. “It’s just that I usually wake up before you, and sometimes you cuddle me in your sleep, so really it’s your fault. You’re the one who’s been—”

He breaks off, unable to finish his sentence, but Ilya can guess at what he was alluding to.

“Was I grinding your ass, hm?” he asks, pulling Shane back into his arms before lifting one hand to his chin, tipping his head up so Shane is forced to look at him. “Did you like it, котёнок? Hm? Did you push back when I was sleeping? Feel how hard I get for you?”

Shane shakes his head weakly. 

“No,” he says, but Ilya knows the truth of it; Shane has always been such a terrible liar, after all.

“I think you did,” Ilya tells him. He bends down, nosing against Shane’s jaw all the way up to his ear. “I think you liked it. I think you wanted more,” he whispers, and when he sets his teeth on his earlobe, tugging harshly, Shane moans.

Ilya hides a grin, smug.

Shane’s left ear is especially sensitive.

“Ilya,” Shane breathes out, the sound so inviting Ilya can’t help but kiss him again. “Bed,” Shane reminds him when they break apart again.

Ilya wants to, so, so much, and the first time they’d done this, back when Ilya really had been nineteen, he’d been so eager to get his hands on the pretty boy with the pretty freckles he hadn’t spared a thought to whether Shane had actually been ready for it or not.

Ilya hadn’t gotten to fuck him that night, but he’d had Shane’s mouth on him and Ilya had returned the favour eagerly.

They have never actually talked about what that had been like for Shane; his first ever sexual encounter with a boy, and Ilya had left him right after. Had left Shane, who so often got lost in the sex, who gave up so much of his control to Ilya, drifting in that hazy place of pleasure and floatiness—subspace, though it had taken them years to put a word to it, had taken years for Ilya to understand that Shane needed aftercare and what that meant. 

Ilya wants—fuck, he really, really wants—but he is not the selfish nineteen-year-old he had been.

He’ll take care of Shane this time, even if that means not doing anything at all until Shane is truly ready for it, but as he looks Shane over, as their eyes meet and hold, Shane’s gaze open and trusting, he knows things are different this time.

Shane is nervous, yes, but not unsure.

“I want to make you feel good, котёнок,” Ilya tells him quietly. “Very much so. Will you let me?”

Shane nods silently, and this time when he reaches for Ilya’s hand, he doesn’t hesitate. He pulls him towards his own bed.

“Can I suck you?” he asks Ilya, and Ilya breathes in sharply, nostrils flaring.

“Have you done before?”

Shane hesitates, biting his lip, but finally shakes his head no. “I might be terrible at it,” he admits, and Ilya lets out a rough laugh.

“No, котёнок, you won’t be. This, I promise.”

Shane shrugs, but there’s a pleased little smile at the corner of his mouth. “So, can I?”

Ilya laughs again, gentler this time. “Eager,” he says, stroking his knuckle across Shane’s freckles, so fucking thankful he gets to have this twice. “Maybe I should suck your dick first, hm? Show you how to do.”

“Oh, fuck you!” Shane pinches Ilya’s side, though not very hard. “I don’t need you to teach me.”

“No? But I am a very good teacher, and you are such eager student. Makes for a good match, yes?”

“You’re a terrible teacher,” Shane grumbles out, an outrageous lie because Ilya gives instructions very well, actually, and Shane is the one who never has the patience to explain what comes so naturally to him.

“Liar,” Ilya says, and then promptly loses his train of thought as Shane sets his fingers on the waistband of his sleeping pants, staring at Ilya defiantly as he pushes them down, dragging his briefs along until he is standing in front of Ilya, naked.

He hadn’t been wearing a shirt—neither of them wear one to bed, usually—and they’ve caught glimpses of each other before; they’ve been sharing such close quarters for so long it’s been impossible not to, but Ilya has not gotten to see and look like this in what feels like a very long time.

Ilya has spent months politely averting his eyes whenever he caught Shane stepping out of the shower or happened to walk in on him changing, because they were best friends but not lovers. Not yet.

Now, though.

Now, Ilya gets to look his fill.

Shane is as beautiful as ever—the most perfect being in all of existence, and he is Ilya’s.

“Shane,” he says, mouth dry as Shane kicks his clothes away, walking backwards until his legs hit the bedframe. Ilya watches, hungry for it as Shane gets on the bed, scooting backwards until his head is at his pillow and his tanned, beautiful body is stretched out on the mattress.

On display for Ilya.

“Well,” Shane says, staring at Ilya with a challenging glint in his eyes. “Weren’t you going to show me how to suck cock?”

Yeah, Ilya thinks. That and so much more. 

He wastes no time getting rid of his own clothes, chucking them on the other side of the room to land somewhere in the vicinity of his own bed before he stalks towards Shane. He presses his knee onto the bed, crawling over Shane confidently until he settles over him, chest to chest, hands on either side of him to keep himself upright.

He grins wickedly at the way Shane’s pupils blow wide in appreciation at the show of strength.

“Anyone ever have their mouth on your dick before?” he asks Shane.

He knows Jessica had by the time Ilya got to him in their first life, but he can’t remember if Shane ever gave a timeline for it. He doesn’t think it would have been before the World Juniors, and Shane had been seventeen then.

Had it been for his birthday, when he turned eighteen? Or maybe in the days after the combine, as a reward for having done so well. If the latter, that wouldn’t have been the case this time around, Ilya thinks smugly. 

Shane had already seen Ilya’s pictures by the time of the combine, had already met Ilya again, and from there his interest was sparked.

“You’ll be the first,” Shane says.

Ilya feels heat pool at his stomach, the surge of possessiveness so hot it steals the air from right out of his lungs.

Shane’s first. His only.

Ilya will make sure of it.

He bends down, lowering his weight onto his elbows as he seals his mouth over Shane’s in a hard, bruising kiss.

“Will have to make it good, then,” he says when they break apart, a promise as much as a statement.

He kisses his way down Shane’s jaw, scooting back to kiss a path along his sternum, pausing halfway to pay attention to one nipple and then the other. He groans when Shane keens out and tugs at Ilya’s hair harshly as he closes his lips around the bud and sucks.

He bites down, chewing firmly on the flesh between his teeth, and Ilya is almost positive he could come from the sounds Shane makes alone.

Fuck, but Ilya loves this about him. How he is so sensitive everywhere; if Shane hadn’t been made for hockey, Ilya might think he’d been made for sex instead.

Or maybe just made for Ilya.

“Ilya,” Shane gasps out when Ilya abandons his nipples to continue his journey south. 

He licks a stripe down his stomach, tracing the smooth skin of his abs before he swirls his tongue around Shane’s belly button, dipping into it briefly.

But Shane’s whines are becoming needy, and his pretty cock is right there, Ilya’s for the taking.

“Pretty,” Ilya breathes out, an echo of his thoughts, and Shane’s flushed face reddens even further.

“Shut up,” he says. “Cocks aren’t pretty.”

“Yours is,” Ilya says. He takes a moment to admire it, and when he finally looks up, Shane has thrown a hand over his eyes. “Котёнок,” he says, amused. “Will you not look?”

Shane shakes his head. “You’re being weird.”

“Pretty cock like this must be admired,” Ilya says, half teasing, and entirely serious, but then he grabs a hold of Shane’s dick, grip firm at the base as he leans in to kiss his leaking head.

He’s so wet already.

Shane makes a startled noise.

“Taste good, too,” Ilya tells him solemnly.

“Ilya!” Shane protests, clearly embarrassed, but then Ilya opens his mouth and swallows him whole in one go. He pushes down as far as he can go, nose burying in the dark hair at the root of his cock, and the sound Shane lets out is a deep guttural thing, as if punched out of him.

It’s been more than a year since Ilya sucked cock, but it’s not something he’s forgotten how to do.

He relaxes his throat, making space for Shane’s dick before he hollows his cheeks, slurping at the cock loudly as he moves his head back up and off.

Shane makes a noise like he’s dying, and Ilya grins before he kisses the cockhead again, tongue coming out to lick away the precum. He pulls away to spit in the palm of his hand, using the slick to ease the way as he settles his hand back on Shane’s cock, stroking from head to base before he tightens his grip there, pushing down on Shane’s hip with his other hand as he bucks against him.

“Eager,” he teases, but doesn’t give Shane the time to respond before he closes his mouth over his cock again. He sucks hard at the head, tongue pressing against his slit as his hand leaves Shane’s cock to fondle his balls instead.

Shane moans again, and Ilya has fucking missed this, having Shane’s dick in his mouth, getting to make him feel good.

Shane tries bucking against him again, and Ilya squeezes his balls warningly, not enough to hurt, but enough pressure that Shane keens out helplessly for how good it feels.

He’s always preferred a more forceful touch.

Ilya pulls back to give Shane a quick once-over, takes in his open mouth and panting chest and doesn’t think he will be able to hold out much longer, so Ilya really sets himself to the task.

He shoves his fingers into his mouth to wet them, quick and dirty, and when he pulls them out, he closes his mouth around Shane.

He relaxes his throat once more, pushing down deep, swallowing around him before pulling back and doing it again. 

He finds his rhythm like that, blowing Shane with skill and plenty of enthusiasm, and when he works his slick hand between Shane’s thighs, down to his gorgeous ass, Shane makes the most delicious sound as Ilya’s fingers find his hole.

He presses at the furled skin there gently, one finger just barely dipping inside, and he’s unable to hold Shane down as he bucks against Ilya’s hand this time, pushing his cock further into Ilya’s throat.

Ilya gags in surprise, pulling halfway back before diving back in, so fucking eager for it.

He’d accused Shane of that, hadn’t he, but Ilya is the one rutting against the mattress, so turned on he hardly knows what to do with it. He’s going to come, he realises, with his fingers pressing against Shane’s hole, Shane’s cock in his mouth and his pretty moans in his ears.

He is going to come without a single touch to his own dick.

Fuck, Ilya hasn’t been able to come handsfree since the last time he was in his late teens, but as Shane cries out in warning, Ilya works his hips, pulling back just enough on Shane’s cock so as to not choke himself again on his cum, and finds his release against the mattress. 

He swallows around Shane’s softening cock, relishing in the weak twitches, and when he pulls off, his mouth and chin is sticky with spit and cum. He probably looks as messy as he feels, but Shane goes wild at the sight of him, making grabby hands as he cries out, “C’mere, c’mere, kiss me, kiss me, kiss—”

Ilya kisses him hard.

He opens his mouth to let Shane lick into him, chasing the taste of himself as he sucks Ilya’s tongue into his own mouth, and it’s so hot Ilya feels as if he could come again, right there.

He feels desperate, suddenly, to feel where his mouth had been, but when he reaches down to caress Shane’s balls, dragging his fingers over the skin of his softened cock before gripping it lightly, Shane pushes at him weakly.

“Sensitive,” he breathes out. “It’s too much.”

Ilya hums against him and reluctantly lets him go. 

“Sorry,” he says, pressing kisses to Shane’s mouth, and pulls his hand away from Shane’s oversensitive dick. He reaches up, goes to use the same hand to brush away some hair from Shane’s sweaty forehead when Shane flinches away.

“What are you doing?” he demands.

Ilya blinks at him. “Brush your hair away?” he says, the words lilting enough to make it a question, startled at the sudden change.

Shane wrinkles his nose. “Not before you wash your hand,” he says firmly. “You’ve got spunk on that hand.” He blushes, looking away from Ilya, shy. “You had the fingers of that hand in my ass.”

“I just kissed you with mouth full of spunk!” Ilya protests laughingly. “Also, I did not get to finger you properly. Cannot call that having my fingers in your ass,” he informs Shane, genuinely mournful about that. 

He would very much like to finger Shane for real, to stretch him open for something far wider.

Shane sniffs, still avoiding Ilya’s gaze. “That’s different. Besides, I don’t want cum in my hair. Or ass fingers.”

Ass fingers, Ilya mouths, incredulous.

God, he loves this silly man so much. 

He grumbles unflattering things under his breath as Shane kicks him out of bed and tells him to go wash his hands—“And brush your teeth while you’re at it. You didn’t do it earlier.”—but he goes easily enough, not truly upset. 

Once in the bathroom, he dutifully washes his hands and brushes his teeth. He takes a moment to wipe clean his own junk before grabbing a wash cloth as well, running it under warm water before bringing it back to the bedroom to take care of Shane.

When he gets back, Shane is still wonderfully naked, but he’s migrated to Ilya’s bed, and the look he gives Ilya as he walks through the door is so appreciative, so openly admiring, he can feel his cock start to stir under Shane’s hooded gaze.

Ilya wouldn’t mind starting something again, but it’s late and they have an early start in the morning.

Pat will kill them if they’re late again, and truly, there is no need to rush.

They’ve got time, Ilya reminds himself.

“Hey,” he says as he climbs into bed next to Shane. He leans over, brushing his lips lightly against Shane’s before showing him the wash cloth he brought back. “Let me take care of you?”

Shane furrows his brows, looking confused. “Aren’t we gonna—? I mean, don’t you want me to blow you? Seems unfair that only I got to come.”

Ilya smiles at him. He kisses him again, already addicted to the feeling of it, and presses his thumb into the corner of Shane’s pretty mouth, kissing him there too.

“I did come,” he says, not at all self-conscious about it. “You so good you make boys come just from being so sexy.”

“Urgh, shut up, you did not!”

“Promise it’s true,” Ilya says, and Shane must be able to read the truth in his eyes because he blooms a bright red.

“Shut up,” he says again, looking away from Ilya for only a second before he looks back again. “Really?”

Ilya laughs. He kisses him deeply. “Really,” he promises. “You did not notice, because my cocksucking skills are just that good.”

Shane rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t deny it.

He shuffles back on the bed, spreading his legs trustingly for Ilya to wipe at the mess between his thighs, sighing happily at the warm touch and the feeling of being clean.

Ilya hides a smile.

His pretty neat freak, his beautiful Shane.

Once he’s done, Ilya tosses the cloth onto the floor, knows Shane will make him pick it up in the morning, and shifts on the bed until they’ve got the covers pulled back and over them. He gathers Shane into his arms, spooning him close the way he knows makes Shane feel safe and small and wonders at the difference of two lifetimes.

Ilya hadn’t allowed himself to want this in his first life, not at nineteen. 

The boys he took to bed were one and dones, simple trysts he didn’t stick around for because it wasn’t safe and Ilya was not prepared to face the consequences should someone, anyone, find out.

Shane, as usual, was the sole difference.

He was the first boy Ilya had wanted to keep, and because it scared the shit out of him he’d kept him at arms length for years, giving just enough to make sure that Shane kept coming back to him.

He’d hurt Shane like that, he knows, but he’s not repeating those mistakes. Nor is he the same boy who’d made those errors in the first place.

Ilya is in a place now where he is finally sure of himself, of his place in the world and his place in Shane’s life.

He has no use for pretense or fear between them, not when they’ve already chosen each other.

Ilya nuzzles his face into the nape of Shane’s neck, lips finding his skin there before breathing in deep, breathing in Shane. He closes his eyes, tired from a long day of filming and the poor night of sleep he’d had the day before. He is warm and sated on Shane, so content and happy in this moment that he could fall asleep in seconds.

He has already started to drift when Shane shifts against him, his plush ass pressing back into Ilya’s cock enticingly.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to suck you off?” Shane asks him sleepily.

Ilya smiles, unseen. “You offering, котёнок?”

Shane hums out something that might have been a positive, and when Ilya doesn’t respond, Shane’s breathing evens out, asleep with his hand clutching at the arm Ilya has slung over his waist.

“Silly boy,” Ilya whispers into the dark, in Russian. “How dear you are to me, how beloved.”

Shane doesn’t hear him, of course, and wouldn’t have understood if he did, but when Ilya wakes in the morning, it’s to soft, butterfly kisses pressed all over his cheeks and eyes and Shane’s pretty face looking back at him, voice roughened by sleep as he greets Ilya with an, “I love you, Ilya.”

There is no better way to wake up than that, and when Ilya kisses him good morning, he knows it’s just the first of many.

Chapter End Notes

Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates and happy reading to everyone else!

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