Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Hockey Player Shane Hollander, Ottawa Centaurs Player Ilya Rozanov, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Mental Health Issues, Irina Rozanova Haunts the Narrative, Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), kind of a companion reading to TLG, Inspired by the Raven Cycle, Character Study, Canon Compliant, Complicated Relationships, the relationship being shane and hockey and sex and ilya, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Additional Warnings in Author's Note

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-10-14 Words: 21,651 Chapters: 1/1

honey bees and other doomed creatures

Summary

The beginning starts with an ending: Shane Hollander dies when he is twelve years old. It is not permanent, but it does linger.

(Shane, Ilya, and the great game of being good enough to be worth something to someone.)

Notes

additional warnings:
- cw: there are vivid descriptions of bees. if insect imagery is uncomfortable for you, this is perhaps not a fic you should read.

- cw: there is temporary major character death (shane) that happens prior to the fic but is alluded and flashed back to; there is also canonical minor character death (irina), which also happens prior to the fic but is alluded to.

- cw: there is a sense of unreality to some scenes in which shane is not 100% certain of what he is experiencing/seeing/feeling/remembering and if it is real or not. this unreality is not necessarily anything related to psychosis or mental illness, though i suppose it could potentially be read that way. if anything regarding a character doubting their memory or reality is a trigger, this is maybe not the fic for you.

- cw: implied/referenced racism. shane being asian is foundational to my reading of his character, and much of his experience here is rooted in that.

final note, the originating premise of this fic (in particular, the honey bee allergy and shane's death) is taken from the raven cycle series by maggie stiefvater. the rest of the character arc is my own.

thank you for reading<3

Ilya hasn’t noticed it yet—he’s lying on the bed with his head pillowed on Shane’s shoulder, his eyes closed, that pleasantly fucked out and satisfied look still lingering on his face. This is one of Shane’s favorite kinds of moments with Ilya; the one where his lips are slightly parted and his breaths are slow and even and his hair is all tangled from Shane’s hands tugging at it and their bodies’ warmths are pressed skintight against each other.

Here, now, it’s soft, and quiet, and so vulnerable in a way that they denied themselves for so long. In a way that once would have terrified Shane, in a way that once would have hurt. But right now, instead, it’s welcomed. It feels like home.

Ilya’s apartment in Ottawa, really, has become much more of a home than Shane’s own apartment in Montreal. If Shane is being honest, Montreal maybe stopped being home in the moments after he came out to the Metros; in the moments after the team he knows he carries on his back started to turn their own backs on him.

One day, they’ll be able to be together in a shared life, instead of living on borrowed time. One day, Shane’s heart which walks outside of his body will be next to him all of the time, instead of two fucking hours away. One day, things won’t feel so distant and impossible and heavy. One day.

It feels, sometimes, like that day will never come. However hard Shane clings to the dream, sometimes it feels—

But he can’t afford to think like that. He can’t. Right now is supposed to be about this: the two of them in this bed in Ottawa, secluded away from the world that would not let them have each other, having love anyway. It’s supposed to be about the gentle kiss Ilya presses to the bare skin of Shane’s collarbone before he shifts to resting his head on Shane’s arm. It’s supposed to be about Ilya talking sweet nothings, I love you and always so good for me and—

But Shane can barely process the words, because while Ilya hasn’t noticed yet, Shane can see the insect by the window and he can’t look away. His breath is stuck in his throat, like maybe he’s already been stung, and he can’t listen to Ilya while the insect is there.

From here, Shane can see it crawling along the windowsill, a dark stain against the white paint. He has a perfect view of it. It’s rounded, but not bulky. No narrowing at the waist. Striped, but more black than yellow. A honey bee, then. Crawling so fucking slowly, taunting and dangerous even in its innocence—it’s not its fault that Shane can’t breathe.

“Ilya,” Shane finally manages to choke out. He sounds pathetic even in the one word.

Ilya stops, looking up at him from where he lies half on Shane’s arm and half on the pillow. “Hm?”

“There’s—” Shane stops, the words halting in his throat without his permission. He forces himself to take a shaky breath, and Ilya seems to be catching on that there’s something wrong and he sits up to look more intently at him. “There’s a bee. On the windowsill.”

Ilya blinks. He turns to look at the window to their left. It’s early February and the window is shut and there shouldn’t be any bees here, there shouldn’t be anything crawling on that windowsill, threatening, it shouldn’t even be alive in temperatures this cold and weather this hostile, but there it is, they both see it now, and—

Ilya’s lips curl up when he looks back at Shane. “I didn’t know you are afraid of bees.”

Shane swallows hard, trying to remember what it feels like to breathe normally, to fill his lungs with air and then to exhale without suffocating on it. He says, “I’m allergic.”

“Badly?” Ilya looks back to the window. The bee hasn’t moved.

“I—” Shane cuts himself off; he knows there are things he cannot say, not even to Ilya— “almost died, once. There were…there was a nest. We were throwing a ball around in the dark. I was standing too close.”

Ilya whips his head around to Shane, his eyes wide. “Why did I not know this?”

“It never came up?” It sounds like a question even to Shane’s own ears. “It’s not—not usually relevant. I keep the EpiPen in my bag but I don’t carry it everywhere.”

“Shane.” Ilya sounds horrified. “You almost died and you don’t even carry the EpiPen with you now?”

Shane shrugs stiffly. There’s no point in telling him that, as bad as his case is, the EpiPen isn’t actually all that likely to save him. He doesn’t look at Ilya, instead keeping his eyes firmly on the bee. It’s started moving again. He says, weakly, “Can you please just get rid of it?”

Ilya is moving before Shane has even finished the sentence. There’s an empty water glass on the nightstand, one that Shane had drained only minutes before noticing the bee. Ilya grabs that, tears off a page from a magazine nearby, and goes to the window.

He moves slowly—careful not to disturb the awful thing that’s haunting them, the awful thing that’s done nothing wrong, really, the awful thing that’s threatening Shane so badly—and places the glass over the insect. Sliding the paper under the cup, he’s able to get it out of the room.

Shane assumes that Ilya brings it downstairs and outside, but he doesn’t follow him to find out. He leans back against the headboard and closes his eyes instead, feeling like he hasn’t blinked in hours. His eyes are dry and his mouth feels like cotton and his heart is still beating a little too fast.

But the insect is gone now, even if the panic response is still there. Ilya comes back into the bedroom without the glass or the paper, and kisses him before joining him on the bed.

“You have to tell me these things, Jesus Christ, Hollander.” He kisses Shane again. “I will bee-proof this house first thing tomorrow morning.”

Shane snorts. “What would that even entail?”

“I will find out tomorrow morning. I will research.”

Something in Shane melts a little at that—the panic, maybe, slipping away from him. He looks at Ilya, and he knows there’s a softness in his eyes that he shouldn’t even bother to try to hide. Ilya has always seen right through him. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Ilya says. “Any more deathly allergies I should know about?”

Shane pretends to think about it, long enough to make Ilya roll his eyes. “None that I can think of, but no promises I haven’t forgotten one.”

“You’re the worst,” Ilya says, and kisses him again.

Shane kisses him back, his hand cupping Ilya’s jaw and pulling him ever closer. The bee is forgotten within moments.

Later, Shane isn’t totally sure why he lied to Ilya. Or, he didn’t lie. He just…didn’t elaborate. He didn’t tell the full truth. He doesn’t know why he didn’t, except for how the truth is completely unbelievable. He’s sure that he could trust Ilya with the information, but he’s also pretty sure that Ilya would laugh and call it the hallucination of a traumatized twelve year old. The memory being dismissed like that might hurt more than Shane wants to let on. So it’s better not to share at all.

But the memory keeps coming back to him, more often than it ever has before. Usually, it sits under the distant roots of time, at the bottom of the depths of all his fears. Usually, he goes about his day and he doesn’t think of it all that much; he can go on like it isn’t there, isn’t something haunting him, isn’t something constantly pushing him to the brink of himself. Usually, it genuinely isn’t relevant, until it is.

Here is how the memory goes, in the back of his mind:

Shane is twelve years old, and he is dying.

It’s dark, and he’s lying in the grass, staring straight up at the sky. There are stars, above him, distant and tiny and glittering. He can’t breathe. Can’t move. The bees are crawling over him, their stings long since passing painful and turning into something much worse.

He knows he is dying. He knew the instant that the baseball went into the branches of the tree behind him and the nest came crashing down. He knew that he was not going to survive this in the very second that the bees came out in a swarm, finding him standing there.

It’s painful, and terrifying, and he thinks he’s going into what his mother once warned him was called anaphylactic shock, which is defined as what happens when you get stung by a thousand bees and you are deathly allergic to bee stings.

His eyes are wide open, and he can vaguely feel the crawling of a bee that’s getting closer and closer to his mouth. He has stings over his cheeks and forehead, over his bare arms, his bare legs, over the line of his exposed neck, over the hollow of his throat; and yet this is the first bee to find his mouth. He wants to scream but to part his lips would be to let the bees inside of him and he’s so terrified—

He’s so scared, scared in a way that doesn’t have words, only has trembling silence, and he wishes he weren’t alone while he dies.

Dying feels like it takes both an infinite amount of time, and no time at all. He has barely any length of life to be flashing before his eyes; he has only the sensation of something seizing up inside of his chest and the bees creeping across his skin. He wonders if anyone is running towards him, or if all the other kids scattered when the nest shattered on the grass below the branch.

The last thing he sees before he dies is the light of a flashlight in the barren distance. He tries to groan, but no sound comes out. The bee is at the corner of his lips and he doesn’t dare to open his mouth, doesn’t dare to move at all.

Squeezing his eyes shut, everything goes black. And then all sound fades away. The feeling of the creeping and crawling over his skin slips into no sensations at all. His mouth is still pressed together in a thin line, teeth grinding together.

The last words he hears before waking up are these: Breathe. Someone else is dying when she should not, and so you will live when you should not.

Barely more than a dozen words, but they have echoed in Shane’s head ever since. He doesn’t think he will ever get the sound of them out of mind—the regal way the voice had spoken, so decisively, the way it had come into his head like one of his own thoughts, how it had reverberated through his whole body. How the two sentences seemed to go on forever, echoing again and again in the back of his head, until the voice of his mother broke through their gift.

She was the one to get to him. Covered in dying honey bees, still terrified to move. A single bee paused in its death at the corner of his mouth. She had brushed all of them off almost violently in her panic. He thinks now, as an adult haunted by the memory, that it wasn’t until he was fully clear of the insects and hugged tight in her arms that he managed to get his heart to start again.

He was taken to the hospital and pronounced a miracle. The honey bees had clearly stung him, because they had also died all over him, their stingers trapped under a layer of skin and tearing their bodies apart as they tried to fly away. But the welts from the bee stings were nowhere to be found. The venom was coursing through his body, and then it was gone. Just gone.

The doctors were at a loss. Maybe he’s not allergic to bees at all. Maybe the allergy had just gone away—bodies have been known to do stranger things than that. But then they did a skin prick test, and after refusing to believe that, they did some kind of blood test, in which the results showed that Shane Hollander should be dead.

Except he’s not. He’s very, very alive.

So—a miracle it is.

It’s only Shane who knows that it wasn’t a miracle at all. It was an exchange. His life for someone else’s life. A woman who he will never know was dying at that moment, and so by some greater power, Shane gets to live.

And Shane doesn’t even know where the fuck to begin with that. He’s never known. He was twelve years old, and suddenly his life was carrying the weight of two. He has to be worth this stranger’s sacrifice, because she died and he did not. Because she died, and he lived, and now he has to make this exchange worth something. He has to be worth something.

There is nothing more terrifying than the thought that he isn’t, and he won’t ever be. Because if he thinks too hard about it, he knows that nothing—nothing—can ever repay this exchange. This gift. Nothing can ever make him worth such a thing.

He’s getting in his head about it again, about the exchange of lives. He’s thinking it over and over, wearing the idea down to the bones. He doesn’t know who the voice belonged to. He doesn’t know who got to make that choice for him and for her. He doesn’t know who “she” is. He doesn’t know what made him special, and what made her doomed. Why wasn’t his death her life? What the fuck was any of it for?

All he knows is that he has to keep going. He has to do better than the best, he has to be better than the best. He has to be something she—whoever she is—would be proud of. He doesn’t know her name or her story, but he knows he has to be worth her dying.

This echoes in his mind like a second heartbeat. He has to be worth this. He has to be worth this. He has to make himself worth this. He can never, ever disappoint anyone, and he can never allow himself to falter. He can never allow himself to fail. Not when the weight of someone else’s death is pinned on his living shoulders.

Sometimes Shane thinks maybe he did die that night when he was a kid. Sometimes he thinks maybe it actually all ended there and everything after that is some kind of hell or heaven or purgatory. Most days, he can’t decide which. Hell, where his teammates hate him and he’s constantly on the verge of falling apart because of the pain of that; heaven, where Ilya Rozanov loves him. Purgatory, where he pushes on, day after day after day, and nothing ever gets better, but nothing technically gets worse either. At least it doesn’t on the visible surface level. Underneath the surface tension, there is something that is drowning.

He’s scared that the drowning thing is himself. He’s scared that the drowning thing is Ilya. He’s scared that the drowning thing is their relationship.

And in another memory, less distant than the last one: there is still snow on the ground, the roads are still iced over with frozen cold, the windows are frosted at the edges, everything in the world around Shane is silent and deadened, and he’s crying while he drives. The tears are uneven and messy, and the road is blurring and then snapping back into focus with every hard blink.

“Everything I care about, gone,” Shane had said, snapping his fingers with a harsh, violent crack into the silence.

Ilya’s voice had gone so flat, so dead, that Shane’s heart stopped, and he doesn’t think it restarted again for weeks. In the memory, he can’t hear the white noise of blood rushing in his head or the pulse of his heartbeat. He could only hear a strange kind of absence of noise. Like a black hole, or a dead body in the midst of a crowd.

“Everything,” Ilya repeated, gaze blank, as if he himself were already a dead thing too.

“Not everything. But hockey is pretty fucking important to me,” Shane said, and he doesn’t know if this is salvageable, doesn’t know if there’s anything he can say to make Ilya understand what he means when Shane himself doesn’t know what the fuck he means. He’s just so angry and tired and—and he’s scared.

Shane can’t remember any of the rest of the conversation because the hurt and the shame and the panic seem to have blinded the memory. All he has is the unbearable feeling of loss, deep and hollowing in the muscle of his heart. All he has is the echoing pulse of Ilya saying, “I already chose you, Hollander.”

The snow and ice have thawed since then. The winter has since melted away.

But some shiver remains down the length of Shane’s spine, like a kind of haunting. He can’t ever let himself forget the way Ilya had looked at him, so heartbroken and disappointed and hurt. And Shane had been the one to do that, to make that awful expression linger. Spring has come over the world, but Shane cannot forgive himself, he cannot forget the memory, and he cannot ever, ever do it again.

Things are better, with springtime. Ilya came out to Svetlana and told her about their relationship, and that seems to have eased his hurt just a little. The Centaurs had their Pride Night earlier tonight, and Ilya is on his way to Montreal. They’ll be in the same place in only an hour and a half or so.

While waiting for Ilya, Shane finds himself quickly drifting into sleep. He makes a valiant effort to stay awake—splashes cold water over his face and wrists, sits at a table instead of the couch, reads a book instead of keeping the TV on at a low volume—but eventually, he finds himself slumped over an open book and dreaming.

In the dream, Shane is driving one of the sports cars Ilya had gotten rid of when he moved to Ottawa and declared them impractical. Shane had made so much fun of him for saying those words exactly, had accused him of getting old, but Ilya had only laughed, then grinned while calling himself boring. There was so much love glimmering in his smile then that Shane’s only response was to kiss him hard.

But in the dream, Shane is driving Ilya’s car with the windows down and the roof pulled back. He’s going down a dirt road—the sports car is holding up miraculously well—and he’s surrounded by large, imposing trees. Their branches arch over the road, casting him in strange, shifting shadows. The headlights are the only real lights, and they seem to flicker in and out with every bump that the car goes over.

Shane is watching the scene from behind and above, so he sees the tree coming before his dream self, driving, can. It’s this giant, ancient tree standing in the middle of the road. It towers above the other trees, its canopy casting a shadow on every other branch. Its roots break upwards from the ground, creating a strange mass of bumps and ridges in the dirt. It blocks the entire path, but dream-Shane is going so fast and it’s so dark that the tree seems to come out of nowhere around a bend in the road.

In an instant, Shane crashes straight into the tree. At the very moment that the car hits the rough bark, the tree seems to shatter. It breaks up into a million buzzing pieces—honey bees, suddenly swarming. They encompass the car into their churning, shifting mass of a body; a million bees working as one to completely drown the car. The headlights flicker in and out with the movement until they, too, are drowned in the bodies of the insects.

They cover dream-Shane, too, swarming over every bare inch of skin, burrowing into every fold of clothing, crawling and buzzing and stinging. He doesn’t make any noise as he’s enclosed within the mass of bugs. He just lets himself get enveloped in the swarm, and he lets himself crumple under their touch.

The car and driver become nothing more than a shape. There’s no life or light to it. Just the shifting shadows of a million bees in the shape of what had once been Shane Hollander.

Then there’s a kind of collapsing, as the bees all die seemingly at once. They sink to the ground, and nothing exists in the place where they had been. Dream-Shane and the car are both gone, completely consumed by the stinging insects. Devoured by them, skin and metal and bone and all.

In the distance, there’s an echoing voice: Breathe. Someone else is dying when she should not, and so you will live when you should not.

It’s with the collapsing of the mass of insects that Shane jerks awake, startling with his breath choking his throat. There’s the creak of his front door, and he knows it’s just Ilya, but his heart is screaming at him to panic, his half-asleep brain is convinced it’s a swarm of honey bees coming to hunt him down from inside his dream, his body is primed to run. He doesn’t know what the fuck running would do; he doesn’t know what the fuck panicking would do either.

He forces himself to breathe, but it’s a close thing. He gets up to greet Ilya, but he knows that he’s doing a terrible job of hiding his lingering anxiety, because Ilya frowns the second he sees Shane.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

Shane swallows, turning away from him and starting towards the living room. “It’s nothing. Bad dream.”

Following him after toeing off his shoes and dumping his bag by the door, Ilya asks, “Want to talk about it?”

“No,” Shane says immediately. He settles on the couch, then thinks about the question again. “Maybe.”

Ilya sits down next to him. He takes Shane’s arm and drapes it around his own shoulder, curling into Shane’s side with a soft hum. He looks cozy and sleepy and adorable when Shane glances down fondly, and he wants to keep this moment forever, bottle it up somewhere safe, keep it far away from the buzzing of insects. He wants to never hear that buzzing again. He wants to never have to even think about it.

He doesn’t want to carry this around anymore. This desperate need to be enough.

But he also can never let go of it. He can never let the bees he’s outrunning in the back of his mind catch up to him. He won’t survive a second death.

“Maybe?” Ilya asks. He’s closing his eyes already—it’s late, and he’s got a long game and a long drive behind him, and Shane hates to keep him awake.

“In the morning,” Shane offers. “Maybe it’s time for bed now.”

Ilya makes a soft noise of assent, but neither of them move. After a few moments, Ilya’s breathing evens out and Shane huffs a small laugh. He doesn’t want to sleep on the couch tonight, because it’s terrible for both of their backs, but he can allow them both to rest for a moment. Just a moment.

This time, Shane dreams of nothing. When he wakes, Ilya is in the kitchen making them both breakfast. He’s opened all of the shades and the morning light is streaming through the east-facing windows, dust hanging suspended in the sun like magic. Ilya hums something as he cooks, moving around the kitchen like it’s his own. Shane watches him from the doorway for a moment before he gets noticed, just basking in the domesticity of it, the comfort of it. How right it all feels.

“Good morning,” Shane says, eventually stepping fully into the kitchen and crossing over to Ilya. He comes up behind him, wrapping his arms around Ilya’s waist and hooking his chin over his shoulder. “Sorry we fell asleep on the couch.”

Ilya leans his head back onto Shane’s shoulder. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply. “Is okay. We were both tired.”

Shane kisses the side of his neck and then pulls away, both of them straightening up. “We were. What are you making?”

“Pancakes.” Ilya looks back at him, then rolls his eyes at whatever expression Shane is unintentionally making. “Protein powder included. And blueberries instead of chocolate chips, because you want to live forever, or whatever that diet is for.”

Shane snorts, trying to ignore the sting of the idea. “I want to play hockey forever.”

“Same thing, for you.”

And Shane can’t really argue with that, so he just shrugs non-committally and goes to steal a blueberry from the bowl nearby the stove. Ilya tries to bat his hand away, but he gets off with a handful. He grins at Ilya, who calls him a menace, and then they’re both laughing and they’re there and they’re together and maybe, like this, Shane would be okay with living forever.

It’s not until they’ve sat down to eat—after Ilya has lathered his pancakes in syrup and whipped cream and Shane has made a thinly veiled look of disgust at the combination—that Ilya brings up the question from the night before again. He asks what the dream was, and why it was so upsetting, and Shane hesitates before answering.

“I don’t know,” Shane lies. “I don’t remember it.”

He doesn’t know why he tries lying. Ilya can see right through it, and they both know it. Besides, he really doesn’t need to lie, not about this and not to Ilya. Why would he have to? It was one bad dream, and Ilya loves him.

“No?” Ilya asks. “Not any of it?”

Shane shrugs, looking down at his pancakes. He’s cut them up into tiny little square bites, but he hasn’t actually eaten any of them yet. Ilya’s cooking is always so good, but thinking about the dream, he feels sick. Like there’s a thick venom in his veins and he’s going to vomit up all of his organs.

“Did you know,” Shane starts, “that when a honey bee stings you, it can’t get the stinger out without killing itself? Pulling the stinger out rips apart the abdomen, or stomach, or something, and that rips out all the muscles and insect-skin and whatever the fuck else is in there. So it basically tears itself open and then bleeds to death, even though it doesn’t even really have blood like us. I don’t think anyway.”

Ilya stares at him. “Shane, I am eating.”

“Sorry.”

“But that’s horrible.” Ilya’s brow is creased, probably less in an attempt to understand the inner workings of honey bees and more in an attempt to understand Shane. “Why would they ever sting anything then?”

Shane shrugs. “The only ones that sting are the worker bees, and they’re disposable. If something threatens the nest, they’re just supposed to defend it. Doesn’t matter if they die.”

“It probably matters to them.”

“I don’t think so,” Shane says plainly. He suddenly feels exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept at all. Ilya is still staring at him like he’s taking apart and then putting back together a particularly complicated puzzle.

“Okay,” Ilya says slowly. “Is that what you dreamed about? Bees?”

Shane shrugs again. He’s studying his pancakes extremely intently, but he hasn’t taken a bite of them. There’s a blueberry in the exact center of one of the squares, and he forces himself to eat it instead of answering Ilya’s question. As soon as he swallows, it’s like a switch gets flipped and he’s starving now. He takes another bite, and another.

This is proof that he is alive. He is eating, because he needs food to function. He is tasting the food, because all of his senses are in working order. He is breathing, he is sitting at a dining table with his fiancé who loves him. He is real, and he is alive.

“Did you know that a hive of honey bees can have somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 bees?” Shane asks. “But it depends on the season. And in the wild, a colony can get up to 60,000.”

Ilya’s brow creases even more. “I didn’t know that. Why do you know that?”

Shane looks up from his food, finally meeting Ilya’s eyes. He stares for a long moment, and thinks, I love you. He thinks, Would you choose me over hockey? He thinks, I have to be good. I have to be right. I have to be worth something to someone.

He says, “I had to know. After I died, I had to know what killed me.”

Ilya is silent for a long moment, where they just look at each other as if trying to read minds, as if trying to hear something that they can never bring themselves to say. They’ve gotten so much better at communicating, but there are still secrets between them.

“What killed you,” Ilya repeats, slowly, eventually.

Shane nods once. “Yes. Sixteen years ago, someone threw a baseball into a bees’ nest in a tree, and it cracked open on the ground, and somewhere between 10,000 and 60,000 bees killed me.”

Ilya raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t look like he understands. “Does an EpiPen work on 10,000 bee stings?”

“No,” Shane says. His voice is flat, matter-of-fact, and that seems to throw Ilya off somewhat. Shane continues, “I died.”

Ilya says, “You’re alive now.”

Shane says, “Yeah.”

“Okay.” Ilya nods slightly. “I don’t think I understand.”

“You can’t say I’m crazy,” Shane says. “You can’t tell me I’m crazy.”

“Shane, I am really not following this conversation.”

“Promise me you won’t say I’m crazy.” The words come out much harsher than he means them to. Ilya stiffens at his tone and Shane immediately tries to soften, despite all his guards and all his fears suddenly primed for a fight. “Please. Just—just promise.”

Ilya bites his lip, setting his fork down carefully. “I promise I won’t call you crazy. Now please tell me what you’re thinking.”

Shane takes a shaky breath. He looks down at his hands in his lap, finally breaking eye contact. He twists his hands around each other, trying to soothe himself with the sensation. It doesn’t work. “I was twelve. It was springtime. The bees killed me. I died. Then there was a voice. And I woke up.”

Silence. Ilya doesn’t say anything, and Shane doesn’t say anything, and the only sound is his own heartbeat in his ears.

“What did the voice say?” Ilya asks. It sounds tentative, unsure, or maybe just disbelieving.

Shane swallows hard. He quotes, easily, the words coming with muscle memory, “‘Breathe. Someone else is dying when she should not, and so you will live when you should not.’”

Another silent beat. Then, “Okay.”

“Okay?” Shane asks, finally looking up at Ilya. Ilya hasn’t turned away from him. “That’s it?”

Ilya nods. “Yes. I think so.”

“You’re not going to say I’m crazy?”

“I thought you didn’t want me to.”

“But you think I am then? You just won’t say it?”

Ilya sighs, rubbing a hand roughly over his face. “Shane.” He drops his hand, and there’s something impossibly loving in his gaze, even though Shane thinks he himself might be fucking losing it. “I don’t think you’re crazy. I think you were twelve and something terrible happened to you.”

“You think I’m making it up to cope.” The words are spit out like more of an angry accusation than they have any right to be, given that they’re probably true.

“I think you believe it,” Ilya says carefully, “and so it is true enough.”

“Fuck,” Shane chokes out. He pushes the heels of his palms against his eyes, groaning into his wrists, elbows sharp against the table. “Fuck. I’m going crazy, aren’t I? I’ve been crazy this whole time.”

Ilya makes a quiet, hurt noise. “Shane. Sweetheart.”

There’s the sound of his chair scraping against the floor as Ilya stands up, and then Shane feels him come close. Ilya touches his hand to Shane’s thigh, and Shane refuses to move his hands from his eyes, but he figures Ilya is kneeling next to him. A soft kiss is pressed to his shoulder, then to his knee.

“I’m here, my love,” Ilya murmurs. “I’ve got you.”

Shane lets out an involuntary sob, and he presses his hands so tight to his eyes that colors bloom on the backs of his eyelids. They’re in blobbed shapes like bees, and there’s a buzzing in his head that’s always there and always getting louder, louder, louder.

“I haven’t slept a full night in weeks.” Shane’s breath is so unsteady. “And most of my team won’t stand in the showers with me. I tried so hard to be what they want and I don’t know how much harder I can keep trying. And I’m so scared that it’s all falling apart. Everything. And that I’m going to lose you when it does. I’m fucking losing it, Ilya.”

“Shane—” the sound of his name on Ilya’s lips has always been a privilege, has always been an endearment on its own, and Shane doesn’t know how the fuck he lived so long without it, because right now, it feels as if that’s the only thing tethering him to this life— “I’m not going anywhere, okay? If you’re losing it, I am still here.”

Shane swallows back what he wants to say—I’m not worth it, I’m never going to be worth this, I can never be good enough to earn this life I’ve been gifted with, I can never set the scales right and even—and says, “Please.”

“Please what?”

Shane drops his hands, but keeps his eyes straight ahead, not looking at Ilya. He focuses on a distant spot on the wall, where he imagines there to be a bee. Crawling on the surface of the plaster, haunting. “Please just stay with me.”

Ilya takes his hands in his own and kisses his knuckles. “Of course.”

Shane blinks rapidly. “Sometimes I think I can still feel them. The bees. It’s been over a decade and I think I can still feel them on my face. My mouth. My wrists. My legs. I can’t get them off me. It’s not—it’s not me being crazy. I swear. It’s just—a feeling.”

“Okay,” Ilya says quietly. “I believe you.”

“Okay,” Shane says.

Finally, he looks down at Ilya, and Ilya is wearing a look of such open affection and concern and love and, somehow, underneath it all, a steadiness and certainty that suddenly makes Shane feel so terribly safe that he doesn’t know what to do with it. What is he supposed to do with his hands if they aren’t fighting, with his heart if he’s not guarding it, with his every weakness if he’s not hiding them, if they’re loved for what they are? What the fuck is he supposed to do with any of this?

“Ilya,” he chokes out.

The corner of Ilya’s lips lift. “Shane.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

And that’s that. Simple as anything. That’s that.

March comes to him in a whisper. Shane barely realizes that time has passed and that spring is truly here until halfway through the month, when Ilya visits the Drover farm for dinner. He talks about the apple orchard in the spring. The blooming of the flowers in the Drovers’ gardens; the smell of pollen in the air. The earth after rain; the kind of scent that you don’t get in the city proper. He sends a picture of Anya, whose adoption Shane doesn’t really know how to feel about, though he does still love the carefree joy in Ilya’s smile.

So spring comes, simple as anything.

When Shane meets Anya for the first time, all he can think about is how soft her fur is. How gentle a creature she is, even with all the leaps and bounds of energy she clearly has. She rests her head on his knee when he sits on the couch and Ilya coos over her and Shane can’t help but smile at all of it. The Pike kids beg to meet her, and they’re just as enamoured with the dog as Ilya is.

It makes something soften in him, the sight of Ilya with kids and a dog. Something warm blooms in his chest, something that wants to build and create and grow instead of cutting himself up into little slivers of a person who wants the Montreal Metros to accept him at any cost. Ilya looks at him from where Ruby and Jade and Anya have teamed up to pile on top of him in some game they play that Shane will never understand the appeal of, and he grins, and Shane loves him.

“I love you,” Shane mouths silently. Ilya smiles wider, all teeth and joy, until Ruby drags his attention back to her again.

Simple as anything. Shane’s heart walks outside of his body and he will keep it safe.

Then they wake up. The next morning comes. He fails.

“I’m so sorry, Shane,” Hayden whispers. He looks awful, looks like the guilt has devoured him and spit back out something non-human, something undead.

Shane doesn’t say anything. What the fuck is there to say? There’s the buzzing of 10,000 to 60,000 bees in his memory and, after over a decade and a half, they’ve finally seemed to catch up to him. He can’t hear the rest of Hayden’s words; all there is is the buzzing of bees and the sensation of dying.

They were so fucking close to being allowed to make this decision for themselves. They just had to get through the playoffs. Only another few months. And now that’s been taken from them. Ripped from their hands like they had never been holding it in the first place. Because of a fucking FanMail video.

“Please say something.” Hayden sounds like he’s choking on the words. Maybe the bugs have crawled into his mouth too. “I know you hate me. Just say it. I deserve it.”

Hate doesn’t seem like what Shane is feeling right now. That’s not nearly a complex enough word for what Shane is feeling. Hate is straightforward, easy. It would be so much easier to hate Hayden for this. It would be the simplest of emotions to focus on right now, and Shane doesn’t think he could be blamed for it.

He opens his mouth, maybe to say that, maybe to say nothing at all, and then closes it. There are no words for this, just as there is no singular feeling for this.

Looking over at Ilya, something awful tightens in Shane’s chest. Not hatred, but something more like fear. Not panic, because that implies it is sudden and it will calm down sooner rather than later. This is a deep rooted fear that is coming true and rising up in his throat like bile. There’s so much of it that it fills him and then overflows, and he doesn’t know what the fuck to do with it.

Then, Ilya says, quietly, “It is okay. You have been a good friend. Kept our secret for years. This was an accident, and it is our fault for not being more careful.”

Somehow, something about his words makes the buzzing of the bees go a little quieter. It’s still there, crawling over his skin and filling the crevices of his mind, but it’s quieter. Calmer.

He doesn’t hate Hayden, because that would be too simple. He’s not panicking, because that would be too simple, too. Maybe there’s nothing to do but step forward, into the hive.

“Ilya’s right,” he manages to say. “Of course we don’t hate you. So how bad is it?”

“Bad.” Hayden can’t look him in the eye, keeps his gaze locked on Shane’s hands. “The video is fucking everywhere.”

Shane takes a breath, fills his lungs with insects. Allows them to take over. “What are people saying?”

Hayden gives them an overview, and Shane drops his face into his hands. He doesn’t want to look at Hayden, who is embodying all of his worst fears coming true right now. He doesn’t even want to look at Ilya, who has done nothing wrong but love him, but is getting punished for it nonetheless. He squeezes his eyes tightly shut. He doesn’t want to look at the palms of his hands, either; hands which have done nothing wrong except for how they have not done enough right.

The year he turned twelve was when tapes of him playing hockey started to circulate. NCAA coaches were reaching out to him by the end of that year. Early by most standards, but not unheard of. They weren’t asking for any serious commitment, just expressing their interest and looking for vague verbal agreements to promise to look into their programs in a few years.

They got to him before Shane even really knew what it would actually mean to commit the rest of his life to hockey. He wanted to do it anyway. Then and now.

Hockey was—is—everything to him. It’s the thing that makes him feel real. The thing that makes him feel human. It makes him feel needed, feel wanted, feel accepted. He’s under no delusions that this need and want and acceptance isn’t conditional upon him being the best at it. He knows that this thing he loves is also the thing that is going to kill him one day—because once he loses hockey, he will have nothing left making him worthwhile.

Shane barely fucking knows who he is without it. He doesn’t know what his life looks like without hockey. He doesn’t know what his time looks like, what he looks like, what all his relationships look like. None of those have ever existed within an absence of hockey.

His parents will be a little more distant when they don’t have to manage his career anymore, but probably they’ll still check in every once in a while. His teammates will move on, the fans will move on too. His friends are a harder bet either way, and Shane hates betting.

And then there’s Ilya. Ilya, who brought something to Shane’s life that he wants more than he’s ever wanted hockey. Ilya, who gave Shane a love he never thought he could have, and he’s allowing Shane to keep it. Ilya, who is constantly giving and giving and giving—all to build Shane a life before, during, and after hockey. A life that they can share. A life that they can love.

Shane needs hockey, is the thing, but he wants Ilya more. He needs hockey to be who he is, but he wants Ilya more than he wants to be the person who hockey has devoured and left a ghost. He wants to be more than the person who has given everything to hockey and received rejection in return. He wants to be someone worth something more than the game they play.

Because—no matter how much he gives up for his team, no matter how small the pieces he breaks himself into, no matter how palatable he makes himself, no matter how good a role model he acts, no matter how hard he works to destroy the parts of himself that no one wants to see—the truth is that he was always going to disappoint them. It was never going to be enough for them: his teammates, his coaches, the fans, the critics, the commentators. He was never going to be enough.

And he thought, maybe, maybe if he forces himself to be something he isn’t, they’ll accept him. Maybe if he loves a woman, if he marries Rose Landry, they’ll stand at his side in his wedding party. Maybe if he never, ever mentions his racial identity, they’ll praise him for him instead of for being the first and only. Maybe if he’s always both a team player and a leader and a star, they’ll never notice that he’s different from them.

Except it was never going to work. That’s not how the world turns. It was never going to be enough.

But again, and again, and again, there’s Ilya. Ilya, who laughed when he said he was gay not because he was making fun of him but because he has always known and has never thought differently of him for it. Ilya, who listens to him rant about racist reporters and rarely adds his own opinions, who learned from Yuna how to make the simplest of rice balls with rapt attention and care, who is famous in hockey circles for shutting down any racist chirps in the locker room, whether against Shane or not. Ilya, who loves him for him.

Ilya, who has chosen him. Ilya, who believes he’s worth all of the consequences. Ilya, who believes he’s worth a life without hockey.

Shane sometimes prays, entirely unbelieving, that Ilya is right.

Crowell orders them benched, and the buzzing is so goddamn loud in Shane’s ears that he thinks maybe the bees from when he was twelve have burrowed inside his head and just fucking stayed there. He thinks maybe he’s going crazy, finally; his death from sixteen years ago is maybe finally coming back to get him.

He’s been thinking about that night more and more recently. He’s not sure why it’s coming to him, but now he wants to blame all of his issues on that night. He wants to say he came back from the dead in a way that people aren’t supposed to, in a way that makes him evil and crazy and wrong.

But he knows that’s not what it is. This was always what was going to happen, this is who he was always going to be, even if those bees hadn’t crawled in his head and made a hive there. Even if the memory wasn’t still lingering.

He snaps at the Metros and he doesn’t regret it, even when he has to pull over on the side of the road on the ride home, where he slams his palms against the steering wheel over and over, letting out ragged sobs, until it’s finally out of his system and he can keep driving. Still, he doesn’t regret it. He doesn’t. He refuses to.

Someone exchanged their life for his. He cannot forget that. He has to make the exchange worth something, and that means being worth something, and that means he has to pull it the fuck together. He has to take control of this before it all falls apart even more. He has to—

“I thought you need a reminder,” Ilya says, a finger tilting his jaw up. “Before our meeting tomorrow.”

“Reminder of what?” Shane lets him guide his head to the side, closing his eyes.

A light kiss is pressed just under his jaw, Ilya’s lips cold and familiar. Shane shivers under the touch, breath catching.

“Of who the fuck you are,” Ilya breathes out.

The exhale is hot against his throat, where Ilya kisses him again. Shane lets out a hoarse moan, his heart pulsing faster. He grabs at Ilya’s shirt, trying to keep himself standing.

“Yes,” he gasps. “Remind me.”

And for a moment, then and there, the buzzing is drowned out. The teasing of Ilya’s hands over his chest, his nipples, down to the V of his hips is enough to brush away the sensation of thousands of tiny legs and wings crawling over his skin. Ilya’s heavy breaths behind him are louder than any insect could ever be, able to overpower every terrible thought that’s ever been in Shane’s head. His heartbeat is pounding in his dick, and the brush of Ilya’s cockhead against Shane’s hole makes him moan loudly even before Ilya’s pushed inside.

Ilya’s breath catches in his own moan as he sinks into Shane. He pushes back against Ilya, frustrated by how slow he’s moving, and Ilya lets out an uncharacteristic whimper at the sudden pressure around his dick. With the sound, Shane forgets to be self-conscious, forgets to be tense, forgets to be scared.

All there is, right now, is Ilya goddamn Rozanov, and Shane fucking Hollander.

“Do you want to know a secret?” Ilya says it as an exhale, breathing out the words like love prayers. He leans closer to Shane, his chest pressed tight against Shane’s back, and his words practically vibrate against Shane’s ear. “I feel like I am fucking a king right now.”

Shane moans, and it might be Ilya’s name or it might be the answer to his prayer or it might be a prayer of his own. Ilya tangles his hands in Shane’s hair and tugs, Shane’s head falling back against his shoulder.

“Do you know how powerful this feels, fucking a king in his throne room?”

“Fucking hell, Rozanov—” Shane can’t breathe, but it’s less like he’s suffocating and more like he’s ascended past the need for breath. His dick twitches, untouched, and he feels fucking electric.

Ilya wraps his arms around Shane’s chest, holding him tight against himself. Shane throws his head back, eyes squeezed shut, unable to focus on anything except for Ilya’s warmth.

“You are Shane fucking Hollander.” Ilya’s voice is almost a growl. “If you ever forget that, I will you drag you back in here and fuck you until you remember.”

It’s exhilarating, the way Ilya is fucking into him relentlessly, tearing the breath out of Shane’s throat before he can catch onto it. Shane doesn’t know if he can string a real sentence together, managing only to stutter out something about sharing a trophy room one day, about sharing dreams, about sharing a life.

“Yes,” Ilya groans. “A fucking empire.”

Shane’s eyes open wide, blown dark and heated and desperate, tears beading at the waterlines. The trophies seem to glint in the peripheries of his vision, glittering at him like solid gold. Kings in their throne room; Shane and Ilya at the helm of an age.

“A dynasty.” Shane can’t think, entirely out of control and giving himself over to Ilya’s hands. “Fuck, Ilya. I love you.”

There’s a high gasp behind him, and then Ilya bites down into Shane’s shoulder—it’s possessive and hot and unrestrained and Shane comes all over the chair in front of them. Ilya doesn’t stop rutting into him, groaning something in Russian, until he comes hard inside. Ilya collapses forward, forehead at the top of Shane’s spine, his breath hot down his back.

“Holy shit.” Ilya still sounds breathless.

Shane can’t help it—he laughs, breathy and low and worn out in the best way. He loves this man so much, and any thought but that one has slipped out of his mind’s grasp.

A reminder of who the fuck you are, Ilya had said.

Later, Crowell says, “I am offering the only option that will save both of your careers and the reputation of this league. If you post your own statement and start flaunting your…relationship…then you will obliterate your legacies.”

Ilya, sitting beside him, is so tense that Shane thinks he might snap. Shane’s eyes drift to the window of Crowell’s office for half a second, where he sees a flowering tree towering outside of the window. The branches have these little white blooms at the ends, and Shane has no idea what kind of tree it is, but he can see the tiniest speck buzzing around the flower.

It might not actually be there. Shane is sitting way too far away from the window to get a real look. He might be imagining things in between shifting light beams between branches. But he thinks it’s there, and so it’s real enough.

“You’ll be jokes,” Crowell continues. He’s leaning on the desk, staring at them both with a thinly veiled anger.

The bee outside of the window flies up, up, up, until it lands at a branch just barely in view. It takes around 30,000 bees—an entire colony—to pollinate one acre of fruit trees. Most apple orchards have a hive per acre. Shane has not been to an apple orchard since he was twelve years old. There is a buzzing in his mind, in his blood, in his bones, and it is reaching a crescendo. Shane wants to scream, wants to put his hands over his ears so he doesn’t have to hear any of this.

Ilya is looking straight back at Crowell, his mouth in a thin line, trying to appear so composed, but Shane can see the way that words are failing him. He can see the anger, the panic, the hurt settling in like a rot.

Crowell says, voice deadly, “Choose carefully.”

And, abruptly, the buzzing that’s always at the back of his mind goes quiet. It’s startling, the sudden quiet; almost overwhelmingly so. But Shane also thinks maybe he’s thinking clearly, in an absence of the constant white noise, for the first time in a very long time.

Shane stands up. His heart walks outside of his body and it is next to him and it is scared, and so he will have to be brave. He leaves no room for argument, no room for doubt, no room for hesitation, when he speaks. “I choose him. Come on, Ilya.”

Then they leave.

In Shane’s dream that night, he is not allergic to bees. Instead, he is sitting on the back porch of his cottage, and he is cradling one in his palms. It looks dead, but its wings flutter weakly every few seconds as if it is still fighting to live. Shane holds it up to his face, the sun glinting through transparent wings like glitter in a pan in a river.

“It’s okay,” dream-Shane murmurs. “You’ll be okay. Ilya’s gone to get sugar water.”

The honey bee takes a faltering step forward, down the lifeline of Shane’s palm. Shane shivers at the strange crawling sensation, but he doesn’t flinch away. In his dream, there is nothing to be afraid of.

Behind him, there are footsteps creaking over the wood paneling of the porch. Ilya is coming back. Calling his name, saying that he’s got a little bottle cap of sugar mixed with water. Shane glances back for only a beat before turning back to the bee.

“We’re good, little thing,” Shane says in the dream. He feels as if he’s moving through molasses, or as if he’s seeing the world from underwater. “We’ll be okay, you and I.”

When he wakes up, there are tears drying on his cheeks, but he doesn’t feel sad at all.

That evening, they post their statement. They choose four photos of themselves, photos that they had barely allowed themselves to keep. Photos that they fought tooth and nail to keep private, to keep safe for their eyes alone.

Now they’re sharing them with the world, and Shane is terrified, absolutely scared out of his fucking mind, but they’re doing it anyway. They hit post.

“Did you know that honey bees do a kind of dance to direct other bees towards where to find nectar and pollen?” Shane asks. He stares at Instagram. His post is right at the top of his feed, and the notifications are starting to flood in. He can’t bring himself to read any of them yet, his eyes glazing over.

Ilya laughs a little. “You are full of fun facts. And some of them are even not about hockey. I love you.”

Shane almost manages to smile. He doesn’t think he feels any freer, doesn’t think he feels any better about the situation, but he does have Ilya at side and so things cannot all be bad. “I love you too.”

“Dance with me,” Ilya says suddenly, looking over at him. He’s beaming, but there’s something soft to it. Maybe it’s the sunset that they were supposed to be watching.

“What?”

The sun has long since gone down. Ilya stands up, reaching a hand out to him. They’re sitting on the balcony in Shane’s Montreal apartment, bare feet and t-shirts and warm in the springtime. They’ve never sat out here before, never allowed themselves to sit in such an obvious view.

Ilya wiggles his fingers. “Like honey bees, or whatever.”

“I’m allergic,” Shane says.

Ilya arches his eyebrows. “To dancing?”

“Asshole.” Shane takes his hand, and Ilya helps him to his feet.

He guides Shane’s arms to his waist, then drapes his own over Shane’s shoulders, fingers tangled loosely behind his head. There’s no music and no mood lighting—just the wind rustling in the trees, just the sound of cars in the distance, just the moon behind a ripple of clouds. Shane can barely make out Ilya’s face in the dark.

Still, he can tell that Ilya is smiling. He starts humming something soft and simple, an easy crooning melody that Shane finds himself swaying along to. He doesn’t know the song, probably wouldn’t recognize the title if Ilya were to tell him, but he likes to think it’s a love song. He rests his head against Ilya’s collarbone, and one of Ilya’s hands cradles the back of his head—and like this, the night passes, and then the sun rises.

They’re benched for a week. It’s one of the hardest weeks of Shane’s life, until the one that comes after that. Montreal and Ottawa face each other in the first round of playoffs almost immediately after he and Ilya are allowed back on the ice. His teammates treat him with cold, mistrusting expressions; they don’t want to share a locker room and they don’t want to share the ice. They don’t want to acknowledge him at all.

Montreal wins the first game—Shane plays like he has something to prove, because he does. He skates like something is chasing him, something that will kill him if it catches up. He skates like it will ruin him to stop and look behind. It probably would.

Ottawa wins the next two—Ilya is no small contributor to those wins. Shane is so fucking proud of him because there is nothing quite like watching Ilya Rozanov skate. There is nothing quite like watching him win. It’s been so long since he’s looked so fucking alive on the ice. Shane realizes, startlingly, that he hasn’t seen Ilya play like this in probably three years.

Montreal wins the one after that. Despite trailing in points throughout all three periods, Ilya looks fucking delighted when he watches Shane play. His gaze is bright on Shane, tracking him across the ice, and Shane’s not distracted by it but it does fuel him forward. Ilya’s eyes are on him, are always on him, are only on him. Ilya goddamn Rozanov in the penalty box and all he’s looking at is Shane. Shane spares a few glances towards him, and every time, Ilya looks like something out of a vision; brilliantly alight with color and life.

They blow Ottawa out of the water 6-1 in the fifth game of the series. Shane comes into the game roaring, chasing after the puck like it will kill him to lose this match. It might. He soars over the ice, sharp on the blades of his skates. He doesn’t take his eyes off of the goal. He barely puts eyes on the teammates who won’t talk to him. Who don’t trust him with the goal-scoring shot.

Ottawa wins the sixth game, though it’s a close one. Montreal puts up the best fight they can in Ottawa’s home arena, where numbers have finally started to grow in the stands. Coach Desjardins is fucking pissed at all the Metros, at the rookie mistakes they’re making in crucial moment. They should have had this kind of failure beaten out of them by now; winning against Ottawa should be muscle memory. There’s no one he’s more mad at than Shane, but Shane can’t even blame him for it because he’s pissed at himself too.

And in the last game—

“Fuck, tell me it was a mistake.”

J.J. sounds simultaneously desperate to believe it, and like he doesn’t think he ever can. Like, now that Shane is getting fucked by Ilya Rozanov, he doesn’t know how to play hockey for the team he’s carried on his back for a decade. Like, now that Shane has fallen in love with the worst person he ever could have, he can’t be trusted.

“What?” Shane stares at him, horrified. “You think I fell on purpose? That I let Ilya score?”

“I know what I saw,” Comeau says, standing up and taking a single step forward. “What everyone saw. It didn’t look like an accident.”

The shame and mortification and horrible guilt are all buzzing in his electric veins, in his exhausted muscles, in the bones of a body too worn down to keep running. He feels sick with this nightmare, with this accusation. He feels like he’s choking on it. Swallowing down a shame too big to ever hold inside of him without bursting open. A thousand tiny, embarrassed, guilty insects, spilling out all over this locker room.

He’s done nothing wrong. But Jesus. He’ll never be forgiven for this.

“You guys don’t actually think I fell on purpose, do you?” Shane snaps. He turns to face each of his teammates, daring them to say it. Daring them to insult him like that to his fucking face.

“No,” J.J. finally exhales. “I don’t think that.”

“Of course we don’t fucking think that,” Hayden says, finally breaking into the silence. “Come on, guys. Shane would never betray his team.”

He sounds certain of himself, but God, his eyes are flicking around the room like he’s just waiting for the rest of their teammates to turn on him too. And when they inevitably do, Shane isn’t actually confident about which side Hayden is going to choose.

“Fuck this,” Shane mutters.

He tears off the rest of his gear, every movement jerky and angry and sharp. These men were supposed to be his brothers, on and off the ice. They were supposed to trust him. He’s given them everything. Every little goddamned piece of himself has been given to their greedy, insatiable hands. And it’s not enough.

He storms out of the locker room without looking back. He will not give them the satisfaction of his hurt.

In his car, once his parents have gotten in their own ride and started their drive to Shane’s apartment, Shane sits back, pressing his head against the seat, and drops his mouth open as if to scream, but nothing comes out. Just a pathetic, whining breath.

Then, a sob. And another, and another. Dry, heaving sobs; no tears falling from his eyes, just an awful gasping of breath and a trembling throughout his entire body. He thinks it’ll never end. He’ll just be sitting in the car in the parking garage in the aftermath for the rest of his fucking life, never moving forward and never moving on.

He blows his eyes open, trying to make the tears finally fucking fall, but nothing happens. Which is when his gaze catches on the windshield. On the other side of the glass, a honey bee has landed near the steering wheel. Shane freezes, his sobs halting. The bee doesn’t take notice of him, so he just stares at it for a long, long time.

When he was twelve years old, he died with bee venom coursing through his veins. Then he came back.

And what the fuck was any of it for?

Ilya calls him as soon as he’s off of the team bus and back in his house in Ottawa. Shane wishes desperately that he were still here in Montreal, but maybe he wishes more that he himself were in Ottawa. But it’s no use thinking about things they can’t have.

That dream he has of one day being in the same place as the heart which walks outside of his body usually feels further and further away every day, but right now it feels like he could touch it. It feels like he could reach out and take hold. It feels like he could own it. Live in it. Never let it go.

So when Shane asks, “Is there room for me on that roster, though?” and when Ilya replies, matter-of-fact and analytical and plainly honest that there so very much is room for him—Shane maybe starts to consider moving to Ottawa.

He was supposed to start and end his career in Montreal. He was supposed to get his jersey number retired and hung in the rafters with the banners of his Stanley Cup wins. He was supposed to be the kind of legend synonymous with one team. He was supposed to be worth his high draft pick number, worth his salary, worth the talk, worth the betting. He was supposed to be more than a shattered dream.

But this is what he is now. This is what he has.

Breathe. Someone else is dying when she should not, and so you will live when you should not.

The thing is that, in the end, Shane’s life has to mean something. He has to mean something.

Right now, he has to breathe.

Shane goes to Ottawa to watch the third game of the second round of playoffs, New York at the Centaurs’ home rink. He sits in the stands with his parents, and he tries to be subtle about it, tries to be like any other fan cheering on Ilya Rozanov, but he gets noticed anyway. He’s talked into taking pictures with a few fans, and into signing scraps of paper that people dig out of their pockets. He’s still who he is, and Ilya is still who he is.

All of the fans who talk to him mention something about the last game between Montreal and Centaurs. The need to talk about that game—about him tripping—seems to have overshadowed every sports broadcast and conversation since it happened, and that’s no different here and now in this stadium.

I heard that—well, I mean, did you really trip on purpose? I know you didn’t do it on purpose, I’m team Hollander all the way. Screw the Metros, right? I can’t believe you threw that game, totally fucked my playoff bracket. Dude, my dad is from Montreal and I think he tried to take a hit out on you. Are you really gay? You’re a terrible model; honey, get away from strangers.

Ottawa wins the game, and Shane knows that he should be ecstatic for his boyfriend and he knows that he should be cheering, but he can’t bring himself to even fake happiness right now. He is proud of Ilya, genuinely, but something in him is just so fucking tired that he can’t muster up the energy to express it.

By the time they get back from the rink after the match, it’s dusk. Ilya is clearly exhausted already, so he immediately starts getting ready for bed. Shane, meanwhile, sits at the kitchen island and stares at the wall. Finally, after he’s counted the square tiles about a dozen times over, he calls up to the bedroom that he’s going to go for a walk.

“At this hour?” Ilya asks, appearing at the top of the stairs. He starts moving towards Shane, who shrugs. “I know it’s warm, but it is also already dark outside.”

“I just…need to clear my head,” Shane says quietly. He’s already standing up and going to the door.

Did Rozanov really move to Ottawa for you? Probably wasn’t worth it now that your career is basically over. Thanks for giving us that game, Hollander. An honor to meet you. The boys are gonna go crazy for this, even though they all think you’re a traitor now. Can’t believe the Metros wasted a decade building you up only for you to give us the game. Hey, now, it’s not an insult, we’re just Rozanov fans.

Ilya follows him. “I’ll come with you.”

“No—” Shane wants his company so badly, but he also thinks that he’s suffocating on invisible bees and he doesn’t want Ilya to know him like this— “I’m okay. I’ll be back in a bit, okay?”

Ilya stares at him warily for a moment, before finally saying, “If you are not in bed in an hour, I’m coming to look for you.”

“Fine.” Shane doesn’t want to argue, thinks maybe he wants Ilya to come looking for him, so he doesn’t say anything more. He just puts his shoes on and turns to go, then closes the door softly behind him. He thinks maybe Ilya says his name, but he doesn’t stop to ask.

Outside, the world is dark but still in sharper focus than Shane thinks it’s been in a long time. The moon is bright and full above him, hanging in the sky like a silver promise. It illuminates the water, rippling over the surface and diving under. Some animal calls out in the distance, and the sound is unfamiliar despite all his years walking this path. There’s always something new, always something he can’t predict, can’t name.

He walks slowly, just following the path with muscle memory. The earth is damp and soft under his feet; it must have rained while he was inside the arena pretending that nothing hurts. While he’s out here, though, with the trees reaching over him and blanketing his every expression in shadow, he isn’t going to bother to pretend. He lets his face relax, lets the tension fall out of his body. He unfurls his fists and flexes his fingers. He breathes.

Shane keeps his eyes ahead of him, taking his time with every step in order to really look around at the world. In order to really see through the dark. The moon cuts through the branches of the overarching trees in slivers of light that shift with the wind. He steps on a cut of light, and feels a branch snap under his weight.

For some reason, the sound makes him laugh lightly. So he’s still part of the world, then. He’s still part of the ecosystem, of the spinning of the Earth. He’s still a cog in the set of gears that is life. He still has weight, still can influence the world around him. He’s still real.

The thought isn’t as comforting as he’d like it to be. He’s still real, and no one treats him like it, which might as well mean he isn’t. Contrary to Ilya’s efforts, he doesn’t know who the fuck he is anymore. He’s Shane fucking Hollander, who will give hockey his all even when it is fucking killing him. But he’s also Shane, and he has no idea what that means outside of hockey.

For some reason, Ilya loves that version of him, the version that Shane doesn’t know how to identify. He doesn’t know what Ilya would say if Shane asked why, but he finds himself more scared of the answer than not, and so he hasn’t asked.

The path is getting more uneven, rocks half-buried in the footpath and tree roots bursting from the ground. It wouldn’t matter if he weren’t walking in the dark, but the moon isn’t bright enough to highlight every obstacle, so Shane keeps himself walking slowly even though he kind of wants to run.

He and Ilya go running down this path every now and then. It’s private and quiet, somewhere that no one would ever go looking for them and no one would ever come across them accidentally. Anya runs with them too, sometimes, bounding along at Ilya’s side and panting as if it’s laughter.

Here: Ilya had pushed him up against a tree and Shane had kissed him thoroughly and passionately, hands wandering and breath out of his lungs and all thoughts out of his mind. Here: light had risen through the branches over the horizon as Shane watched the sunrise. Here: Ilya had stumbled over a rock and caught himself on Shane’s shoulder and they both went tumbling to the ground in a pile of laughter and teasing.

It’s a beautiful area, back here behind Ilya’s house. In the dark, though, each shadow seems just a little threatening. Here, now: he is so alone. Ilya is waiting for him at home, keeping their bed warm until Shane crawls back under the sheets with him. Anya will probably sleep at the foot of the bed, if Ilya lets her, which he always does.

But right now, Shane is alone. The wind through the branches is a kind of haunting and, like this, Shane is one too. The dark of nighttime feels alive and, like this, Shane doesn’t think he himself is.

He’s not supposed to be, is the thing. He was supposed to die years ago. He wasn’t supposed to make it past twelve years old. Shane doesn’t believe in destiny, but he does believe that something broke in the universe when his life was exchanged for someone else’s death. Whatever life was supposed to be planned for her, the death that was supposed to be planned for him—none of it happened, and Shane thinks maybe something great and wide in the universe splintered at that moment. Time and space and reality all broke open and now the entire world’s been fucked up.

There’s not much he can do about that now. He can’t take it back. He didn’t ask for the deal, and probably neither did the woman who died, but either way, they can’t undo it now. It’s much too late for that.

But God, Shane wants to. He wants to let the bees’ venom wash over him and flood his nervous system. He wants the nighttime to succumb to something even darker. He wants his closed eyes to never open again.

He wants so many things. He wants to do the thing he loves most without sacrificing the person he is; he wants his friends to accept him and to trust him even if they know what they know now; he wants to make himself someone worthwhile, even if most days he doesn’t know what the fuck that would mean; he wants to love Ilya out loud and not be afraid, and he wants Ilya to love him too—

And that’s probably where he made his first mistake. He wanted something he could not have. He wanted something no one else in the world would ever let him keep. He wanted to be someone who’s worth it: worth enough to justify all the sacrifices Ilya has made, worth enough to justify staying on the Metros, worth enough that someone else has died for him to live.

But, at least for the last two, it’s been well proven now that he’s not. That he can’t ever be.

Which leaves Ilya. Ilya, who is worth it for Shane. Worth it in a way that Shane fears he himself is not. Not if he can no longer be the person everyone needed him to be. Not if he’s let everyone down.

I choose him, Shane had told Crowell. He doesn’t regret the choice, because he could never, not if it lets him hold his heart. He knows, too, that Ilya doesn’t regret choosing him in return—I already chose you, Hollander, he had said all those months ago. So the choice—the consequences—are not anything either of them regret.

But he still has to wonder if, in making this choice, he’s let other people down. If his mother wishes they had never been together. If his father wishes he had never walked in on them. If Hayden is never truly going to be able to reconcile Ilya with Rozanov, even after all this time. If J.J., despite his recent promises, is never going to trust him again.

Here’s the reality: in April of 2004, Shane Hollander died. It didn’t last. He survived what killed him. He was told that there were two people dying, and that, for some unknowable reason, he gets to be the one to live. And the question that comes from this reality is that Shane doesn’t know if he’s the one who should have gotten to come back.

He’s disappointed so many people. He’s let down an entire team of friends who were relying on him. He’s blown up all his mother’s hard work on his career. He nearly destroyed his relationship with Ilya by driving him to a deep loneliness over the weight of his fear.

So why the fuck was he the one to live, when every choice he has ever made has hurt either himself or someone else?

And the truth is that there will never be an answer to this. He will never know. He just won’t.

That was seventeen years ago to the day. He always gets a little weird on this day, but in conjunction with everything else happening, Shane is probably in a worse place than he’s been in a long time.

Lost in thought, he nearly trips over a tree root and loses his balance in the dark. He scrambles for balance, but doesn’t manage to catch himself before he’s hitting the ground. Letting out an undignified noise, one hand scrapes against a sharp rock as he lands flat on the ground, his knees bludgeoning into the dirt. His breath is caught in his lungs, the surprise of falling stuck in his throat.

Then he’s just lying there. Just lying there. Out of breath and covered in damp earth and one palm scraped to hell. He closes his eyes, trying to regulate his breathing again, but all that closing his eyes does is make him feel more vulnerable. No one is here to see him, but these days, it feels constantly like someone is watching and trying to get him. Someone is always at the periphery of his vision, waiting to pounce as soon as he fucks up.

But maybe now he’s fucked up beyond repair, and that monster waiting in the shadows has retreated. He finally manages to calm his breath, and he opens his eyes.

There in front of him, only inches away and lathered in moonlight: the body of a honey bee, sitting motionless on the ground. Bees flap their wings over 200 times per second, and this one is just sitting still. It’s frozen in place alongside Shane. Shane blinks slowly, as if hesitating mid-motion. The bee does not move.

It’s dead, he’s pretty sure. But if there’s one, he wouldn’t be surprised if there was a nest nearby. Bees don’t necessarily stay near their nests, but Shane can’t be too careful.

Slowly, he presses his palm into the damp earth and breathes in. On his exhale, he pushes himself up to sit. In the darkness, he loses sight of the tiny insect, but he doesn’t hear the buzz of it flying away. Standing up, Shane takes stock of his surroundings.

He recognizes the clearing that he’s arrived in immediately. Two summers ago, he and Ilya had sat here, for hours, in complete silence. Just sitting in each other’s company, soaking up the novelty of having time. It felt like nothing in the world could ever find them there. They were alone, together, and no one could stop them.

They didn’t have to hide, for just a moment. It was them, and the trees, and the lake glittering not too far away. A duck dove underwater and came up somewhere in the distance, and Ilya had laughed a little bit. Shane didn’t look at him, and he didn’t need to in order to know that Ilya was now looking at Shane.

Then Ilya tilted his head down, looking at their hands. Slowly, he moved: placing one pinky finger over Shane’s finger. Subtle, even in a place no one can see. It both broke Shane’s heart and made him feel so carefully loved.

Shane had looked down at their hands, and was suddenly so deeply overwhelmed by love for Ilya that he felt like he was choking on it. He loved Ilya so much in that moment, spilling over at the edges with it, bursting open at the seams.

The problem comes not with his love for Ilya but with his fear of everything else. His fear of loss. His fear of being outcast. It has nothing to do with Ilya himself, because Shane loves Ilya so much, and as best as he can. It has nothing to do with the shame over the act of love and everything to do with the fear of consequence.

He wanted to explain all this. He wanted to tell Ilya he loved him, that it’s not Ilya himself that Shane is scared of. He wanted to make sure that Ilya understood that it isn’t a shame over him, that it could never be a regret over this. He wanted Ilya to understand how wanted he is.

But he didn’t say anything. He couldn’t bring himself to ruin this moment with his sudden fear that he’s slowly suffocating them both by keeping the words locked in his chest where no one else can know.

So he stayed silent. He let Ilya’s fingers rest over his, just the lightest of weights against his skin. He let the sun and the trees and the birds alone watch over them. They can keep this secret.

Now, sitting in this clearing with the secret exposed to the world now, Shane doesn’t know what to do with himself anymore. Who is he without his secrets so close to his chest?

Who is he when standing in the middle of this empty clearing? Where the roots of the trees are bursting from the dirt and weaving back underground again, where the wind is tangible and an audible white noise, where the moonlight cuts through branches like a knife? This clearing is the tiniest of samples of an ecosystem so much larger than Shane, who stands alone here. Not a part of it, but not not a part of it either.

He looks down at his palms—one hand is all scraped up from a rock, and both hands are stained with wet earth. He wipes them off against his pants, for once not caring about the fabric. He feels a mess—the knees of his pants are wet with dirt too, and he still feels shaky on his two feet. The ground feels so uneven.

He wants to take a step forward, or a step back, but he can’t make himself move. He tilts his head up to the sky, up to the moon. He hears Ilya, in the back of his mind, Do not forget what that team owes you. He hears J.J., Is Coach sending you home? Then fuck off and go home. He hears Hayden, Do you have any idea of what it will do to him if this secret gets out?

He hears Ilya, I am thinking only about you right now. A million memories. Thank you for those. Whatever happens, I am with you. Safe in your heart. I believe it.

When he opens his eyes and drops his gaze forward again, he sees it. The nest. It’s buried in a hollow of a tree, just a single lump of a shadow barely five feet away from him, illuminated by the reflection of moonlight on the lake. Just underneath his skin, Shane can feel the electric buzzing of the insects, even if he can’t hear any of them. They crawl along the lines of his veins, and they dance at his joints, and they call out to the bees hiding in that nest so close by.

Shane stares at it for a long, long time.

He takes a single step forward. His mind sinks deep into that buzzing which is constantly running within him. He allows himself to drift into it, and he lets go of everything else.

Tell me it was an accident. I know what I saw, what everyone saw. It didn’t look like an accident. Get out. Get out. Get out.

Shane steps forward again. An earth-damp hand twitches at his side, as if he’s thinking about reaching out for the nest. The buzzing in his mind is so loud, almost as loud as all the other memories colliding there: his first steps on the ice, his name being called at the draft, his first goal in the NHL, his first Stanley Cup win; the Metros as family, standing in wedding photos and holding babies and offering drives home to drunk rookies; and through it all, in the background, in the foreground, in his heart, Ilya Rozanov.

There is a debt on Shane’s life, owed to a stranger he will never meet, that he will never be able to repay. This is a memory that he will carry with him for the rest of his life, and it is not a memory he can ever forgive himself for.

But when he’s with Ilya—none of that seems to matter. When he’s with Ilya, he doesn’t feel guilty for not being dead. When he’s with Ilya, he feels real and he feels alive. There’s no sense of debt or tax or succumbing to the buzzing of bugs in his head. There’s just the two of them, at their best and at their truest, and there is just love.

It’s like, in loving Ilya, Shane forgets that he needs to be forgiven. Forgets that he needs to earn every good thing in his life. He forgets that everything he has, he owes to a stranger’s death. Instead, he feels human and beautiful and wanted and good, despite it all.

But Ilya isn’t here right now, and so Shane isn’t thinking about that. Rather, he’s thinking about the bees. He’s thinking about how 10,000 to 60,000 bees can kill him so easily.

Honey bees are social creatures; they have an organized colony with their own basic caste system. Every bee has its own job, and it must fulfill that role in order to keep the colony healthy. So they work together in what some people call a superorganism; they function much like individual cells within a larger body.

Or, they function much like how a team is supposed to: thousands of little insects all working together to keep the colony alive; each of them vital in their own way. Thousands upon thousands of bees, all a part of something bigger than any one of them. All a part of a bigger goal than anything they could ever want individually.

It pays to be a part of something bigger than yourself, Shane thinks. It gives you a purpose and a place. It gives you a future and it gives you acceptance. Beyond that, being the best at the thing bigger than yourself makes you worth keeping around.

Shane takes another step towards the nest. The tree looms dark and solid in front of him like a death sentence. It is, in its own way. There’s the buzzing in his ears that never goes quiet.

As if in a dream, he starts reaching his hand out. His fingers tingle with the movement, like he hasn’t moved them in a while, and he takes another step. He hears the awful, haunting buzz of insect wings, louder even than the wind.

Then, in the distance, “Shane! Shane!”

Ilya’s voice carries into the clearing like something out of a dream. Shane doesn’t take his eyes off of the nest, but he does remember now that he has to breathe. He looks at the nest, and the shadow of the hollow of three looks back, and he breathes.

He can so easily imagine the buzzing of bees. The movement of thousands of insects in the space around him. The way that the air seems to come alive, the way it seems to become something tangible, something that shifts and changes, that takes flight and then lands.

And in the back of his memory, crawling towards his mind’s eye, the periphery of his vision: he is twelve years old again. Someone that he wants to call a friend but has never talks to outside of hockey is at the end-of-season cookout with him and twenty other kids, and he has a baseball in hand. He winds his arm up and he whips the ball towards Shane.

The ball comes hurtling towards him like a premonition. With a feeling of dread that crawls up his stomach and into his throat. He watches, standing perfectly still, braced for the ball to hit him in the face. Waiting for the bloody nose, waiting for the laughter—Shane Hollander, not good for anything but hockey; Shane Hollander, who can’t keep up with us—and waiting for his mother. She has always had to fight his battles.

One day, there will be something that no one else can save him from. One day, there will be something he cannot survive.

But the baseball never hits him. It hurtles in his direction as if the dark side of the moon, and the throw misses him. The ball, instead, goes flying into the shadows of a tree.

Most bee nests are in dark, hidden places. Little nooks and hollows and hiding holes. This nest was in the branches, and it should not have been there. It isn’t normal behavior. But whether or not it was supposed to be there, the nest was in the branches all the same.

This is how Shane Hollander dies the first time. The nest comes crashing to the ground and breaks open. Shane barely has time to turn around and look at it before they’re on him. Surrounding and suffocating. Making the air come alive with the buzzing and beating of wings. The light breeze seems to vibrate and Shane collapses. He stops feeling the stinging at some point, but there is a sharp tightening in his chest and he cannot breathe.

He remembers the events of this night only vaguely, if he’s being honest. The memory is like a dream: it seems to be malleable, shifting form and time and color definition every time he thinks back to it. Was it a baseball or just a plastic ball? Was it nighttime or dusk; could he still see the sunset when he closed his eyes? Was he wearing pants or shorts; did the bugs get more of his arms or his legs?

The clearest part of the memory is the voice that came to him after he closed his eyes. The cadence of the words, the poetics of them. The slow speed at which life and consciousness bled back into him as the voice spoke. The weight that settled in his chest and still lingers with him as an adult.

It comes to him just a little heavier now than it usually does. It seems to swell in his body and come flooding out of his mouth. His lips part, and he almost expects bugs to come spilling free. But all that comes is a weak sob, one that might be help or might be Ilya.

Fuck. Shane stands there in the dark of the full moon, in the shadows of the trees, in the terrible looming pain of the nest, and he can’t help but feel fucking pathetic. He can’t help but feel so fucking weak.

The bees in his head are so loud. The dark is so great around him. There is only him and the moonlight and the bugs. There is only a haunting, there is only a grave he is digging.

Then, his name, a third time. Closer now. Coming nearer.

Shane breathes through his nose, closing his lips in a tight line again. He thinks about the voice which gave him life again. He thinks of the woman who died in his place. Would she think that his life is worth her death? Would he think that the trade should have been for his death instead?

When he told Ilya about that night, when he explained how he came back to life and how he will always carry that, Shane is pretty sure that he didn’t believe it. He’s pretty sure that Ilya thought he was making it up and had done so long enough ago to actually believe it now, or that he’s just crazy in general.

But despite that, Ilya stayed. He had knelt at Shane’s side and kissed his knee and confessed his love all over again as if it were a promise. He had loved Shane through it all: these terrible haunts and his horrible guilt and all of the ways with which Shane has been damaged. All of the ways he is damaged.

And now it’s the middle of the night and at some point during these thoughts Shane ended up barely a few feet away from the bees which could kill him, and Ilya is still looking for him. Ilya is still trying to find him in the dark.

He hears his name again. He hears a buzzing from the hollow of the tree. 

Bees aren’t active at night. There shouldn’t be any sound of the like. But he hears it anyway.

The wind rustles the branches and the shadows shift and Shane flinches when he thinks he sees a bee dart towards him—but nothing comes closer. Nothing comes from the hollow where Shane suddenly isn’t sure there even is actually a nest. Shane stares, and he waits, and nothing happens. Nothing happens, and he is still afraid.

There’s the sound of footsteps behind him. Shane doesn’t turn, but he’s positive that it’s Ilya behind him. No one else knows his jogging route and no one else should be out at this hour in the first place. The footsteps slow, and then come up behind him.

“Shane?” Ilya’s voice is tentative, concerned. Almost scared.

Shane inhales through his nose. Says, “Sorry.”

“Why?” Ilya asks, and he sounds even more scared now.

A shadow flits amongst the branches in between moonlight and dark. It disappears into the hollow, out of sight of the moon. Shane shivers. He didn’t realize, until now, how cold he is.

“You should be sleeping right now,” Shane says. His voice sounds dead, mechanical, even to his own ears. “Just because you have one day off between games doesn’t mean you can stay up all night.”

“I can sleep when you’re back in bed with me,” Ilya says carefully.

Shane is quiet for a long moment. The buzzing isn’t any softer in his mind. Another miniscule shift in the dark in front of him: a bee, or maybe a ghost. He flinches at a brush of wind, terrified of the touch of an insect. His mouth is so dry that he isn’t sure he can speak. At least, not with words that make sense. Not with a voice that other people can hear.

“Come back home, Shane,” Ilya says softly. “You’ve been out here for two hours.”

Shane tries to swallow, but it feels like he’s choking even when he breathes. “Sorry. I lost track of time.”

“I know.” Ilya steps forward, and Shane feels a hand rest against the side of his arm. “Come home, sweetheart. We can talk when we’ve gotten you warmed up.”

“I’m not cold.” It’s a lie, and Shane knows that Ilya knows it.

Still, Ilya says, “Okay. Come home anyway. Shane, please.”

He sounds scared in a way that Shane hasn’t ever heard before. Shane didn’t think he could feel any more guilt than he already did, but he figures now that he’s constantly pushing his body to the brink and his mind might as well get to the edge too. The tremor in Ilya’s voice fills Shane with shame, and he cannot bring himself to turn around.

Shane blinks hard, and when he opens his eyes, the shadows have shifted once more in a way that makes him wonder again if the nest is even there at all. He blinks again, and the shadows are back to fill him with terror all over again. He can’t ever forget not to be scared, he can’t ever forget to be calm, he can’t ever forget not to be steady, but—but Ilya makes him feel so safe to fall apart in his arms. 

“Sorry,” Shane says again. He doesn’t move, but he says anyway, “I’ll come home.”

The hand on his arm tightens its grip. Shane focuses on the sensation of it, as if Ilya’s touch is the only thing tethering him to this life. Maybe it is—maybe Ilya really is the only thing that keeps Shane sane, if he’s ever been sane. Sometimes he feels like he’s lost his grip on more than just his career. Sometimes he feels like Ilya is the only thing that he’s been able to keep hold of in the storm.

Ilya’s voice is soft, understanding, even as he holds Shane tighter. “What’s going on in that head of yours, Hollander?”

Shane doesn’t have an answer to that. He doesn’t know what’s going on in his own head either.

But he once promised to be honest with Ilya, and they both do their best to keep that promise even years later. So he says the only true thing he can think of. He says, to the nest more than to Ilya, “I’m scared.”

“What are you scared of?” Ilya sounds like he knows much of the answer, but he needs to ask anyway. He needs Shane to say it out loud.

“I don’t know,” Shane says. “Everything. Bees.”

Ilya hums. There’s a flash of light on the ground, just a plain wash over their feet, and Shane realizes that Ilya brought a flashlight with him. Ilya puts his other arm around Shane’s waist, and he can feel the cold press of the flashlight against his skin where his shirt is riding above his hip.

He could ask Ilya to shine the light at the tree. He could ask to illuminate the hollow where his fears lie. He could ask Ilya to reveal what’s in the dark. Maybe there’s not really a threat there. Maybe the danger is in his head.

But maybe it’s not. And then what the fuck is he supposed to do?

“Fuck,” Shane mutters. “I know it’s—”

“No,” Ilya says immediately. “It’s all scary. What’s happening right now.”

Shane lets out a small sob, then throws his hand over his mouth. Ilya rests his head on Shane’s shoulder, a familiar weight as Shane’s eyes well with tears. He tries to laugh, tries to say, “Don’t tell me I’m brave,” but it comes out weakly.

Ilya manages more of a laugh. “Was going to say I have your EpiPen. If there are bees to be afraid of. I cannot protect you from everything, but I can do this.”

“Oh,” Shane whispers. “Okay.”

Finally, he forces himself to turn. To face Ilya for this single, brave moment. The flashlight is still pointed at their feet, illuminating nothing but dirt and rock and leaves, but Shane feels like he can see Ilya clearly in the ambient light anyway. Ilya, after all, has always been the thing he could see the easiest.

“Hey,” Ilya says. He looks scared, and somehow adoring. “Ready to go home?”

Shane swallows. He looks at Ilya for what feels like a long time. The Earth spins the entire time. The rest of the world carries on, and Shane doesn’t care about any of it. All he cares about at this moment is Ilya holding him. The buzzing in his head vibrates under his skin like it’s trying to get out, like it’s trying to burst free of his body and break him open, leaving him bare and exposed and open and completely vulnerable in the woods.

But with Ilya looking at him like this, Shane wonders if it would be so bad to break open and be seen—he thinks, here, he would be loved anyway.

“Ready,” Shane whispers.

Ilya nods, then shifts to take Shane’s hand in his own. Shane had forgotten how gross his hands were—dirt and scraped and torn up skin—until Ilya took his. Shane flinches away, saying, “My hands are disgusting. I fell.”

“Don’t care,” Ilya tells him. “I want to hold your hand. That okay?”

Shane takes a breath through his mouth. “Yeah. It’s okay.”

Ilya squeezes his hand tightly, like a last reassurance. There’s dirt between their palms, but mostly it’s just warm. Mostly Shane can just feel Ilya. Not the dirt, not the insects, not even the tangible wind. Just Ilya.

Then Ilya says, quietly, almost as if haunted, “Please don’t scare me like this again.”

Shane tenses, but they keep walking. Ilya tightens his hold again, and keeps talking when Shane doesn’t answer.

“I was worried about you.” Ilya takes a breath. “I am still.”

“Sorry.” Shane isn’t sure how many times he can say it before Ilya stops believing him. He isn’t sure how many times he can say it before it stops meaning anything in the first place. He says again, “Sorry.”

Ilya is quiet for a long time, like he’s decided if he wants to say something. Then he shakes his head like he’s clearing his head of a thought. He brushes his thumb in a small circular movement against Shane’s hand. Shane looks at him out of the corner of his eye, and there’s a hard, anxious line to the set of Ilya’s mouth.

“What is it?” Shane keeps his eyes trained straight ahead, and he feels sick. “Ilya.”

“Today is the day my mother died.” Ilya takes a breath that shatters something important. “When you did not come home—”

He breaks off, unwilling to finish the sentence. But Shane doesn’t need him to say it—he gets the idea.

And God, he wishes he could reassure Ilya somehow, tell him that it wasn’t like that, that his fears were completely unfounded. He wants to tell Ilya that he hadn’t been staring at a nest of bees and wondering if death would reset the things that are wrong. He wants to tell Ilya that there had been no monsters in the dark, and that he hadn’t nearly called them onto himself.

But he can’t. He can’t tell Ilya any of that, not honestly. The reality is that there had either been bees or he thought there had been bees, and he stared at them for a little too long. The reality is that he lived when someone else should have, and he can never repay that in any way that matters. Now, walking away, it feels almost like he’s done it again—cheated death and life the same.

“Oh,” Shane whispers. “Ilya, I—”

Shane tries to stop walking, but Ilya shakes his head and pulls him forward. They keep moving, making shorter work of the walk than had taken Shane two hours the first time.

“And then I remembered what you told me about dying. With the bees. And I just—I got scared.”

Shane grips Ilya’s hand tightly, trying to ground himself in his familiar touch. Trying to focus on his words instead of spiraling somewhere deep in his own head.

Then what Ilya said settles in his chest in a different way. His voice is small when he asks, “Today?”

Ilya looks at him, then nods once. He glances away again, and Shane can almost see the end of the walking trail, where the path opens up to Ilya’s backyard. Shane stops, staring blankly at the back of Ilya’s head.

This time, Ilya allows him to pause before they enter the yard. He looks back. Guarded, he confirms, “Yes. Seventeen years ago, now.”

Someone else is dying when she should not, and so you will live when you should not.

A sharp intake of breath. It hurts somewhere deep in his chest, a kind of stinging or stabbing. Shane manages to choke out, “I’m going to be sick,” only moments before he’s letting go of Ilya’s hand to stagger away from the path. He catches himself on a tree trunk before he collapses to his knees, his head bent over, vomiting in the dark. He hopes Ilya can’t see him, hopes Ilya doesn’t ever understand this, hopes Ilya never puts the pieces together—

He throws up again, bile and spit and thick water. He’s never felt so disgusting in his life; both with spittle at the corners of his mouth and the awful sinking feeling in his gut. Seventeen years ago, they had both been twelve. Ilya’s mother had died that year.

Shane has never done the fucking math before, and he feels stupid for not putting it together until now, even if there’s no way for him to have known, even if Ilya had never mentioned the anniversary of his mother’s death before, even if Shane had never pried about it. Still, he should have known somehow. He should have added up the years, put together pieces of a puzzle that he wishes now had stayed incomplete.

He sinks to his knees, head still bent over, coughing, choking, and he can’t breathe in a way much worse than when he hadn’t been able to as insects were crawling over his lips. Ilya stumbles over to him in the dark, rubbing a hand over his shoulders.

“Shane, what—” Ilya stops talking when Shane cuts him off with a wounded noise. “Hey, hey. Let it out. Is going to be okay.” 

Shane can’t bring himself to say he’s sorry again, can’t bring himself to ask for Ilya’s forgiveness even if he should be begging on his fucking knees, kissing Ilya’s feet right now. He doesn’t know if there are any words in the English language that can ever even begin to explain his guilt, and his regret, and his shame. Maybe they exist in Russian, but Shane can still only barely string a sentence together. Maybe Irina Rozanova would have the words, but she’s not here, and she never can be. All there can be now is Shane, and that’s never going to be enough.

He squeezes his eyes shut, tears leaking out and streaking down his cheeks. Ilya kneels next to him, and seems to have decided that Shane is done being sick, because he tilts Shane’s face towards him with his pointer finger and then wipes the corners of his mouth with his thumbs.

“Sweetheart,” Ilya says softly. “Talk to me, please. You’re freaking out.”

Shane opens his mouth, then promptly snaps it shut when he feels like he’s going to throw up again. He’s choking on the words, unable to spit them up without spitting up his guts with them.

He can’t tell Ilya that truth. He can’t ever tell Ilya the truth that he’s put together now.

But it’s also not fair to keep Ilya in the dark. It’s not fair to keep him stuck with Shane without knowing this terrible thing. It’s not fair to let Ilya believe that Shane’s life is a miracle and not the thing that fucked up his childhood. It’s not fair for Ilya to continue to think that Shane’s life was worth the exchange made for it.

Fuck. Fuck.

Shane lets out a weak sob, his hand going to his mouth and knocking Ilya’s hands away from his face. Ilya doesn’t seem phased by it, just moving his touch to Shane’s shoulder. In the dark, the moon seems to make Ilya’s hair glow, and seems to deepen all the frown lines at his eyes and the concern in the set of his lips.

There is nothing in his expression but worry for Shane, but concern that Shane is hurting, but a wish that he could fix it. This has always been the way Ilya loves: taking care of Shane, sacrificing for him, giving him everything without question, all to make Shane comfortable. This is not a love that can last once he knows the truth.

“Your mother died when you were twelve,” Shane whispers. He needs Ilya to figure it out on his own, because he himself might completely break if he says it out loud. “And we were born a month apart. So I was twelve too.”

Ilya frowns at him. “Yes.”

“She died today,” Shane says, slowly, as if that will make the conclusion come to Ilya faster. “In the springtime. When we were twelve.”

“Yes,” Ilya says, and he sounds composed but there’s an undercurrent of impatience that grows the longer that Shane draws this out.

Shane takes a shaky breath, one that rattles and trembles in his chest, as if it were a simple hollow space guarded by his ribcage. He quotes, quietly, “‘Someone else is dying when she should not, and so you will live when you should not.’”

Ilya stares at him. A long moment passes where they just stare at each other. Shane’s entire heart walks outside of his body and, right now, he is watching something irreparable in it shatter completely. Something complicated and unknowable passes over Ilya’s face, shifting and unsure, until he swallows visibly and then shutters his expression off entirely.

“Please say something,” Shane whispers hoarsely.

Ilya opens his mouth, and then closes it. Somewhere in the distance, there’s the call of a bird waking up before the sun. Somewhere in the distance, there is a grave in Russia that should not exist. Somewhere in Ottawa, there is a cemetery that should have one more child’s grave than it does. Here in the misalignment of the world, Shane is still breathing and Ilya is staring at him so blankly that Shane knows he must understand now.

Ilya says, “The first time you told me this, I believed that you believed it. I did…did not know if I did.”

“Oh.”

Shane squeezes his eyes shut, his mouth pressed tight in a thin line, lest he say something horrible, something he can’t take back. His mouth tastes disgusting and he feels on the edge of vomiting again, and he so desperately needs Ilya to come closer to him. Close enough to touch, close enough to feel, close enough to be inside of his hollow ribcage.

He knows Ilya’s not going to come any closer to him now, though. He murmurs, “I don’t think it will bring her back if I die again.”

Ilya doesn’t say anything, but there is a sharp intake of breath. Shane opens his eyes as Ilya’s hand on his shoulder squeezes tightly. He can’t bear to meet Ilya’s gaze, and instead focuses his own eyes on the cross that hangs from Ilya’s neck. Shane’s ring hangs right next to it. This has never filled him with so much shame as it does now. He should not have any of what he has. He cannot justify having it.

“Let me finish.” Ilya takes a heavy, trembling breath, and Shane nods, keeping himself quiet.

Ilya shifts slightly on the ground, sitting on his folded legs instead of squatting in front of Shane. He puts a hand to Shane’s chin and tilts his face up to himself. He looks at him for a long moment, studying every inch of Shane’s face as if he is memorizing it before he says goodbye. Shane doesn’t know how to breathe anymore.

Then Ilya nods, as if he’s decided something, as if he’s found something in Shane’s eyes.

“I still do not know if I believe you now,” Ilya says quietly. “But I’m glad you are alive, Shane Hollander. Either way. I am glad you’re alive. Okay?”

“Your mother—”

“My mother made a choice.” Ilya’s voice is hard, but it isn’t sharp. It’s forgiving, and leaves no room for argument. “She was struggling. She was in a lot of pain, I think, all of the time. Pain that she didn’t have any help with fixing. She was…she was sad. And she loved me as much as she could, but I could not fix the sadness for her. Maybe in another world, she would not have done what she did, and she would be here. And if she was, Shane, she would love you.”

Shane shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut again. There’s a thin buzzing underneath the sound of Ilya’s voice, and it’s breaking his heart. “You don’t know that. You won’t ever know that.”

“I do,” Ilya tells him. There is a wound in the sound of his voice that can never heal, not really, but Ilya keeps going anyway. “She would love you because I love you, and I know that, so it is enough.”

“Ilya,” Shane chokes out.

He opens his eyes in time to see Ilya shake his head slightly. “You did not kill her, Shane. And I am happy you are alive. Trust me, sweetheart. Please.”

Shane isn’t sure how he finds the strength, but he manages to nod once. He manages to say, “I trust you.”

“Good.” Ilya’s voice is low, his accent curling softly around the singular word. “We can go inside now, yes?”

“Okay.”

Shane still feels like he’s shattering, like he’s dying, but Ilya stands up and then offers him a hand, and Shane takes it. He lets Ilya help him up, and hands over all of his weight for his fiancé to catch. Ilya takes him carefully, and then leads them both home.

They step into the house silently, their synchronized breaths doing more talking than any words. Anya, sitting on the couch in the living room, only briefly lifts her head in sleepy acknowledgement when they enter. After they’ve both kicked off their shoes and lined them neatly by the door, they make their way to the bedroom. Ilya ruffles the fur on Anya’s back in response to her low whine as he walks past the couch, but doesn’t once let go of Shane’s hand.

“Shower or bed?” Ilya asks, once they’re inside the bedroom.

Shane is exhausted, worn down to the bones, but he also feels gross. His hands are still dirty and all of his clothes are earth-stained. “Shower.”

Ilya nods, then waves a hand to motion Shane forward. “I’ll join you in a minute,” he says, and then Shane leaves him in the bedroom while he goes to brush his teeth and start running the water.

It’s hard to keep track of time, right now. Shane doesn’t know how long he’s been standing under the scalding hot water of the shower before Ilya finally steps in with him. When he does, it’s obvious that he’s been crying. His eyes are red and still watery, his hair a tangled mess like he’s been tugging shaking hands through it. Neither of them mention it.

They shower in silence. Ilya makes a sniffling sound every now and then, squeezing his eyes shut tight and then opening them wide, but he doesn’t start crying again and Shane doesn’t push him to talk about it. Instead, Shane washes Ilya’s hair for him, lathering shampoo through the curls methodically, and then carefully combing it out with his fingers. It’s the only thing he can think of to do right now. It’s the only way he can think of to take care of him. 

When they both finally feel clean, they keep standing there under the water, holding each other. They just stand there, pressed skin-to-skin; letting the water wash over them like it’s cleaning them of something more than dirt, almost like it’s absolving them of something. Shane focuses on breathing slowly, carefully; drinking in Ilya’s presence in this moment instead of panicking about what comes after they step out from under the water and back into real life.

Eventually, the hot water starts to cool and Ilya reaches around Shane to turn it off. They stand there for another moment, just breathing, until finally stepping away from each other to dry off. It’s not until they’re lying in bed in the dark that Shane speaks again.

“There was a study done,” Shane starts, “last year, published in some journal somewhere—Brazil, I think? It doesn’t matter. But in the study, these scientists exposed these bees to a bunch of insecticides. And they were obviously toxic to the bees, but it was also found that the bees wouldn’t touch the insecticide samples if they were mixed with citronella. It was a complete deterrent.”

“Oh?” Ilya asks. He sounds sleepy, adjusting himself so that his head rests on Shane’s chest, one arm thrown over Shane’s stomach and the other tucked between them.

Shane nods. His eyes are open, staring up at the ceiling and suddenly feeling wide awake. “After I read an article about it, I bought all these stupid citronella candles. To try to keep them off my porch. And then I tried a bunch of other ones—citrus stuff, cucumber, mint.”

“Did it work?”

“A little, I think.” Shane forces himself to close his eyes, trying to will himself into being as tired as Ilya seems. “I liked the lemongrass ones the best.”

Ilya hums a little, and Shane squeezes his arm around Ilya’s waist, pressing his face against the crown of Ilya’s head. He breathes, and something in him steadies.

He adds, “It wasn’t until tonight that I realized that liking it probably had nothing to do with it working. I don’t know if it was really doing anything at all, honestly. But your shampoo has lemongrass in it. So I think it was really just reminding me of you.”

“Oh,” Ilya whispers. “Oh.”

You make me feel safe, Shane thinks. He says only, “Yeah.”

Both of them go quiet then. Maybe there’s nothing more to say, or maybe they just don’t have the words to say it. Maybe they never will, or maybe they’ll come in the morning.

They fall asleep like that, breathing each other in and thinking only of safety. It seems, now, as if something has changed irreparably. Not a bad thing necessarily, but something.

It feels like a fever has broken. Like they’ve risen over the peak of something terrible, and now there is only the come down. Now there is only moving on, and never looking back. Forgiving, and refusing to regret.

It’s a long, long night. And it passes nonetheless.

Summer comes. The sun rises brighter and more golden every morning, and sinks later and more brilliantly every evening. The spring warmth slowly fades into a burning thing, something that pounds against bare skin and leaves Shane sweating as he moves between air conditioned buildings. The hockey season ends, and May begins.

They don’t spend much time outside right now—it’s too hot, for one thing, and the temperature doesn’t cool down until late evening; outside of that, Shane can’t help but feel his heart stutter when he thinks too hard about that night in the woods. He can’t help but think of suffocating, of stinging, of being unable to differentiate between anaphylaxis and anxiety. So he doesn’t go outside all that much.

Ilya does, sometimes, when he needs space. He goes into his head sometimes, somewhere that Shane can’t follow, and while Shane tries to give him the room to work through things on his own when he needs it, Shane often finds himself wishing that he could follow anyway. But Ilya has allowed him the space to work through his shit, so Shane tries to give him the same grace.

It’s on one of those days when Ilya has disappeared to watch the sunset, having been a little lost in his own head all afternoon, and Shane had secluded himself with a book in the living room, a little lost in his head too, until Shane finally ventures outside to the hammock that Ilya lies on. Neither of them make much use of it—Shane doesn’t because he finds it uncomfortable and imbalanced; he isn’t sure what Ilya’s reasons are—so it’s a strange place to find him. 

“Comfy?”

Ilya had his eyes closed, just letting the sunset wash over him in a beautiful warmth, making his bare skin seem to glow. The ring and crucifix on his chain glitter.

Ilya opens his eyes, and smiles just a little. It’s soft, an unconcerned and unhurried kind of smile. “Very.”

“It’s getting cold though,” Shane says, rubbing his arms up and down. It’s only cold in the breeze, but Ilya doesn’t call him out on that. Instead, he just takes Shane’s hand in his own and squeezes it. “You never use this hammock.”

“Yes, well.” Ilya doesn’t elaborate.

Shane decides not to ask him to. If he wants to talk, he will. He changes the topic instead. “I made tacos.”

“Oh?” Ilya sits up, not letting go of Shane’s hand even as he manages to get out of the hammock. “Where is Anya?”

Shane nods towards the house, swinging their hands between them a little while they walk back. “Asleep. Want to watch the game tonight?”

“Not really.”

It’s the final round of the playoffs, and Shane—Shane surprises himself with it, but he laughs. He laughs, and it’s not even a lie when he says, “Me neither.”

It’s funny; he’s been playing hockey for the better part of three decades of life, and he never thought he’d get tired of it. He doesn’t think he’s tired of the sport now, necessarily, but fuck. Fuck, he’s so tired of the league. He’s tired of the sport being work. He wants it to be a game again. He wants to love it like one. He wants to be allowed to.

So maybe it’s time for a rest. He doesn’t give a fuck if Scott Hunter wins another cup. Right now, Shane wants to eat tacos with his fiancé and roll his eyes when he sees Ilya pretending he’s not feeding his dog under the table. Right now, he wants to rest. He’ll try again next season, with whoever signs him.

“Do you know what I want to do?” Ilya asks.

Shane rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. “Is it filthy?”

“No,” Ilya says, laughing. “I want to make a video.”

“That sounds filthy.”

Ilya bumps their shoulders together, grabbing Shane’s hand and pulling him a step back before they can enter the house. They stand on the porch in the gold of the evening, facing the sun over the lake.

“For Instagram,” Ilya explains. “I want to post about us.”

With only that for a warning, Ilya tugs Shane close to him, taking out his phone and turning the video onto themselves. Shane blinks. “Oh. Now?”

“Yes.” Ilya grins at him, presses the record button, and then starts talking. “Hello! I am Ilya, and this is my boyfriend, Shane. Say hello, Shane.”

Shane blinks again, looking at Ilya as if it will tell him anything about what Ilya plans on saying. “Um. Hi.”

“Shane, when are we getting married?”

“July,” Shane says, and he can feel his cheeks getting pink.

Ilya contorts his expression into something like surprise, and then it all falters and he breaks into a real grin. “July!”

It almost makes Shane laugh, and even without that, he can see how absolutely smitten he looks on the camera. For once, he doesn’t bother to clear his expression of that love, he doesn’t bother to cut it out of him, he doesn’t bother to hide it all away just because other people are looking. For once, he just lets himself be lovesick and lets it be visible.

“Still can’t believe it, huh?” he asks Ilya.

Ilya grins at him. “We are getting married. And then we are going to keep playing hockey, break more records, and win more cups. Yes, Shane?”

“Hell yes.” Next season—next season will still come.

“See you in October, hockey fans,” Ilya says.

He kisses Shane’s cheek, obvious and unignorable and impossible to play off as anything other than the love it is. Shane leans into him, laughing and so blatantly happy that he doesn’t know how anyone could ever hate either of them for this. With that, Ilya ends the video, and posts.

Later, they’re sitting by the fire pit in a comfortable quiet when Shane says, “Did you know that bumblebee nests are annual? There are new ones built every season.”

His hands are cupped around a steaming mug of lemongrass tea, and he keeps his gaze on his reflection in the hot water. He can feel Ilya’s shoulder pressed tight against his and he leans into the touch a little when Ilya says, “I did know that actually.”

“You did?”

“I’m not total dumb hockey player, you know,” Ilya says.

Shane snorts. Ilya is one of the best arguments against that stereotype that Shane knows of. “No, trust me, I know that.”

“Also, I did some research,” Ilya admits. “Recently. Some bees are annual, and will die in the winter. Like bumblebees. They last for six months, I remember. But honey bee nests can last for years.”

“Yeah.”

Shane looks away from the tea, tilting his head up to the sky. He can see above him, thousands upon thousands of little pinpricks of light in the fabric of the dark nighttime. He remembers that, the night he died, he had been able to see stars like this, too. He wonders vaguely what the last thing Irina Rozanova saw was, and then decides he doesn’t want to guess.

“Did you know honey bees are invasive to North America?” Ilya asks. “I learned that too.”

That draws a small smile from Shane. “Actually, they’re not invasive. That implies they’re significantly harmful to the new environment. Bees are technically considered to be introduced to North America.”

“They’re significantly harmful to some of the new environment,” Ilya argues.

Shane snorts. “I don’t think that apiologists are going to accept my allergy as a good enough reason to change their classification to invasive.”

“What the fuck are apiologists?”

“Honey bee scientists.”

“That’s not a real job.” Ilya sounds personally offended by this.

Shane grins, ducking head back down to look at his tea. “They’d probably say the same thing about playing hockey.”

Ilya considers that for a moment. Then he concedes, “Okay, me and bee scientists will agree to disagree then.”

“I’ll let them know,” Shane says, still smiling. He knocks his shoulder against Ilya’s side. “Thanks for trying to defend my honor though.”

“Always,” Ilya says, and it’s half a joke and half not a joke at all.

Shane turns his head to press a kiss to Ilya’s shoulder, and he can practically feel all the tension in Ilya’s shoulders slipping away. He rests his forehead against Ilya’s arm, closing his eyes, and exhales slowly.

He says, quietly, “Ottawa’s offer was emailed to me this morning.”

Under his touch, Ilya goes tense all over again. Shane can almost hear the sudden rapid pacing of his heartbeat. “Oh?”

“Yeah.”

They’re both quiet for a moment. Shane knows that Ilya wants him to join the Centaurs, and he knows too that Ilya is terrified he isn’t going to do it. He’s gotten a number of offers from other teams already—which he knows Ilya is aware of—but he’s been putting off a decision until Ottawa got back to him—which he’s not sure if Ilya knows or not.

Finally, Ilya starts, “Are you…”

Shane lifts his head, looking back up at the stars. Somewhere between 10,000 and 60,000 and a number infinitely greater than that stare back down at him. “Yeah. I think I’m going to take it. It’d be a small pay cut and a big change, but—but it’d be a good change.”

“Really?” Ilya sounds like he’s scared to believe it, but Shane can feel the way his eyes are burning into him. He’s breathless. “Holy shit.”

Shane sets his tea down on the ground by his feet, then shifts so he can sit on Ilya’s lap, facing him. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I’m going to do it.”

He cups Ilya’s face in his palms, pulling him close for a kiss. Ilya kisses him back, but he’s smiling too big to really deepen the gesture. Ilya pulls back, grinning, a laugh half lingering on his lips. “Holy shit, Hollander.”

Shane kisses him again, then adds, “Hollander-Rozanov, soon.”

“Hollander-Rozanov,” Ilya echoes, and he sounds fucking awed. “After all these years of Hollander versus Rozanov, I think I like the sound of this. I think I like this future.” 

Shane rests his forehead against Ilya, closing his eyes and just basking in his presence. For a moment, everything is gentle and quiet. The buzzing under his skin and in his head both go silent; a silence not like the final moments of a tragedy, but like the sudden breath that comes before the leap of faith. 

He lifts his head, and inhales through his nose, then breathes out through his mouth. Finally, he whispers, “Me too. I’m glad we get to see this future. I’m glad we get to start living it.”