Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Rose Landry, brief appearances by hayden

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Daemons, Same-Sex Daemons, Internalized Homophobia, Angst with a Happy Ending, Mutual Pining, Getting Together, Canon Compliant, Additional Warnings in Author's Note, dæmons as a metaphor for internalized homophobia, Shane Hollander-centric

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-10-04 Words: 22,179 Chapters: 1/1

i once killed the bird that made the wind blow

Summary

It won’t technically kill you, if you hide your soul so far away from the world that even you can’t see it. It won’t kill you, but fuck, it will hurt.

(Shane always keeps his dæmon out of sight, pushing the limits of distance as much as humanly possible, until he can’t anymore. Until Ilya Rozanov says his name, and something breaks.)

Notes

additional cws:
- there is a childhood flashback scene where several kids attack shane's dæmon, which he describes as being extremely violating; i don't personally consider this scene to be sexual assault, but i guess it depends on your interpretations of what it means to touch someone else's dæmon. this scene is motivated explicitly by homophobia and implicitly by transphobia.

- there's a looming theme of dæmon severance/intercision. it's probably not enough to use the real tag, but i think it's enough to be worth a warning.

additional relevant non-cw notes:

i haven’t read the golden compass in probably like fifteen years at least, so the lore may not line up perfectly with HDM canon. fortunately for me, philip pullman has stated that dæmons are really just a metaphor rather than scientific fact, so this fic does simply treat dæmons as metaphors and not facts. i’ve thus definitely taken some liberties with the lore.

it has also been years since i read the rime of the ancient mariner, so uh. the metaphor takes some liberties there too. anyways, i hope you enjoy nonetheless!!

To begin with: the distance between them is a constant feeling.

It is an ache that Shane has grown used to over the years—once it started, it never seemed to heal, even in the moments when he’s at Shane’s side—and yet he has never really found a way to deal with it. He can ignore it; oh, he’s gotten so good at ignoring it. He’s gotten so good at pretending the pain isn’t there.

But in the quiet moments, in the moments when he has to stop lying to himself about it, the pain cuts deep into his chest, carving him out into something hollow and empty and terrified all of the fucking time. This is what it means for your soul to walk beside your body, and this is what it means to then hide it from your sight.

Shane feels it more at some times than at others. On road trips, of course, when he soars above the team bus and keeps high in the sky, high enough that he’s out of sight. In locker rooms, when everyone else’s dæmons are winding between ankles or sitting on shoulders or curling up on the benches, and he’s on the roof of the arena. On beds in secret hotel rooms and then on couches in penthouses in Boston, with Rozanov—

Rozanov asks about his dæmon for the first time after years into whatever it is that they have, in the winter of 2016. Shane considers himself lucky that he’s gotten away with it this long before Rozanov found the guts to question him about it. Still, the question catches him off guard. A lot of today has caught him off guard—Stay. I’m not done with you yet. You like tuna melt? I can make two—and he might as well add this to the list.

“My dæmon is fine,” Shane lies. The well-practiced press conference answer comes out smoothly and tastes bitter. “It’s just how we’ve chosen to do things. I’m a private person.”

Rozanov studies him for a long, long moment, and Shane shifts uncomfortably under his gaze. He’s ready for Rozanov to ask a dozen follow up questions—Shane knows he himself probably would, if the roles were reversed—but Rozanov lets him get away with it.

The truth that Shane knows, and can never admit to out loud, is that he and his dæmon are not fine. This is how they have chosen to do things, and they both hate every second of it.

But this is what Shane wanted. This is what he asked him for, his kind, giving dæmon. This is what they agreed was best for Shane, and for him.

So he stays away when Shane goes to practice, when he goes to home games. He stays on the roof of the hotel when they go on road trips. The pain is so familiar that the sensation of dying barely even registers anymore. The feeling of the connection between soul and body being pulled taut, tighter and tighter and tighter, until every step feels like daring the line to sever, barely even phases him, barely scares him at all. It’s all so familiar that the familiarity hurts just as bad as the distance between him and his soul.

“It’s fine,” Shane says again, as if that makes it any more believable. “It’s not that bad, the distance. Once you get used to it. It’s a myth that it’ll kill you. More people do this than you think.”

Rozanov doesn’t look away from him. Sometimes people get uncomfortable when they realize he doesn’t have a dæmon anywhere near him. But Rozanov never has, and he doesn’t look any more uncomfortable now. He looks kind of curious, and kind of sad. Shane’s skin is starting to itch under his gaze, his cheeks starting to burn. He resists the urge to say, again, It’s fine.

“Okay,” Rozanov says, finally. “I believe you.”

Shane blinks. “You do?”

Rozanov shrugs, and shifts to press himself against Shane, throwing a leg over Shane’s waist. He kisses the corner of his lips, and then along his jawline and down to the side of his neck. It’s an avoidance tactic if Shane’s ever seen one, but he lets himself get distracted. He knows Rozanov doesn’t believe him, and there’s no point in fighting about it. It’s not going to change anything.

On the floor by the place where Rozanov’s feet had been, the great black dog of Rozanov’s soul lets out a soft whine. An oddly animalistic noise for a dæmon; but then again, Shane’s never heard her speak so it’s not out of character. Rozanov doesn’t bother to look away from Shane when he hushes her softly with a single word in Russian.

Without further interruption, he kisses at the hollow of Shane’s throat, and down, down, down, curling his tongue around a nipple and drawing out a gasp. Shane’s hands tangle in his hair, and the subject is forgotten in favor of a second round of sex.

Rozanov is good at that—at distracting him, at getting him out of his head.

But he can’t take away this pain. Not really. There’s only one way to make this violent tugging in his chest go away, and Shane can’t afford that. And once Rozanov’s blown him and they’ve both slumped back against the couch, completely breathless, Shane can’t help but sink into the hollow, hollow feeling. He can’t help but hurt.

Usually, it’s not this bad. Usually, he finds the pain manageable. He can function, can go about his day, can play hockey, can go out at night if he ever wants to. He can look at other people’s dæmons without feeling ill with jealousy, with pain, with loss, with regret. He can be as fine as a person can be, when they’ve cast their soul away from them.

Or: what it is, really, is that usually he can justify it. Usually, he can find enough reasons that he can tell himself that this was the right decision. When he feels the absence of him, when he feels that incompleteness, he can tell himself that this is for the best.

This way, he can play hockey without his soul being open and visible for anyone and everyone to see. This way, he can focus on his career and on his physical, human body without the distraction of his subconscious. This way, he can use the pain to narrow in on what’s in front of him. This way, there is one less vulnerability on the ice and in the public eye.

This way, no one has to see them. This way, no one has to see him. This way, no one knows he is different in more ways than the unignorable.

And it’s awful, this thing he’s doing. It’s awful to both himself and to his dæmon. He knows that. He knows it. He can feel it with every step further from him that he makes. He’s hiding his soul away, stuffing it in a box, walking himself closer and closer to the verge of self-destruction because he can’t be fucking normal about his dæmon and his dæmon can’t be fucking normal about him.

Sitting there with Rozanov, half exhausted and yet kept alert with a dull pain in his chest, Shane slips into that awful place where he starts to think that maybe he’s making the wrong choice. He’ll feel differently in the morning, he knows. But right now, at this exact moment, he finds that he’s missing himself.

Not the version of Shane Hollander that he is outside of these illicit moments. Not the version of Shane Hollander that he is on the ice. Not the version of Shane Hollander that he is around the team.

Rather, he finds himself—desperately, achingly, and with a hollow feeling of loss that he worries cannot ever be fixed—missing the person that he had been when he was a kid. Before so much fear took over. Before he started worrying about scouts, and then about media, and then about fans, and about his teammates and sponsorship deals and his brand and his mother. Before this thing with Rozanov, this thing that makes him so paranoid and yet so, so fucking happy.

It shouldn’t be like this. None of this should be like this. His dæmon is so far away, and it’s a tangible pain that hurts so fucking much.

Before Shane can recognize what’s happening, tears are spilling over his cheeks. As soon as he registers the tears, he’s scrubbing at his cheeks as subtly as he can. It must not be very subtle, though, because Rozanov’s eyes flick over to him immediately.

“Hey, hey,” he says, sitting up straight. “Hollander? What is it?”

Shane shakes his head, trying to get himself under control, but that aching in his chest is hollowing him out all over again. He feels like he’s being torn up into shreds of a piece of paper then scattered over the Earth. There’s no fixing this pain.

“I’m fine,” Shane tries to say, but his voice cracks in half. “I just—give me a minute.”

Shane squeezes his eyes shut, trying to count out his breaths and pull his shit together. He feels Rozanov’s hand come to softly land on his back, his thumb rubbing gentle circles against the top of his spine. He murmurs something softly in Russian, and Shane hates how calming his words are, even in a language Shane doesn’t speak.

When Shane opens his eyes again, Rozanov is looking at him. He looks contemplative more than anything else, though there’s concern laced through his expression too. His hand doesn’t stop in its careful ministrations of comfort, even after Shane’s looked over at him and then quickly looked away again.

“You are okay?” Rozanov asks tentatively.

Shane nods sharply, looking down at his hands. They feel so empty. He feels so empty. His entire soul exists in a physical form and he has banished it so far away. “I’m fine. Sorry.”

“No apologies,” Rozanov says. “Is…”

He doesn’t finish. Shane just shrugs a little listlessly, and that seems to be enough to answer the question that wasn’t asked.

Slowly, Rozanov puts his other hand to Shane’s chin, tipping his face towards his own. He studies Shane for a short moment, and then seems to come to a decision. He kisses Shane—deeply, closely, as intense as he always is; but there’s something newly tender about it, something forgiving, something almost adoring. Shane can’t help but kiss back. He’s never been able to resist him.

When a weight settles on his leg, just above his bent knee, it feels so natural and so right that Shane barely thinks anything of it. He feels like he just knows, instinctively, that this touch is a safe one. His hand goes to the warmth at his knee and finds fur. The softest fur he’s ever known.

Then Rozanov lets out a harsh gasp against Shane’s parted lips. Almost a moan; more of a harsh intake of breath and an exhale that gets caught on the roof of his mouth before it escapes. “Shane.”

“Ilya,” Shane breathes out, before he can think anything of it, and then he lurches back.

His hand flies away from Rozanov’s dæmon so fast that the motion nearly sends him spiraling off balance. As it is, the sudden movement pushes Rozanov away, his mouth still half wrapped around the sound of Shane’s given name. Rozanov is staring at him, wide-eyed, his lips parted and his hands in the air as if in surrender.

“Fuck,” Shane whispers. “I’m so sorry.”

They both, seemingly of the same mind, look down to where Rozanov’s dæmon is sitting at Shane’s feet looking up at them with bright eyes, as if nothing here is wrong, nothing is awful, nothing is coming apart at the seams.

“Is okay,” Rozanov says, and there’s something hoarse about his voice. He waves a hand non-commitally, but it trembles in the air. “She has mind of her own. Has never cared for…rules.”

“Rozanov—”

“Shane,” Rozanov says, and suddenly there’s something terribly fragile in his voice.

Shane looks at him, and then down at his dæmon, and then up at him, and he just needs to get the fuck out. He doesn’t care about the wreckage he’s leaving behind him, he can’t bear to look at it. He can’t bear to look at what’s on Rozanov’s face.

He’s fumbling around for a shirt—it’s Rozanov’s shirt, fuck, but he can’t go to the bedroom to find his own, not now that his self control is rapidly deteriorating—saying, “Stay—I can’t—team meeting in the morning, I forgot.”

He finds the shirt and he twists the fabric around and around his hands, stumbling past the dog that is Ilya Rozanov’s soul that reached out for him, and turns around one last time.

“You forgot team meeting,” Rozanov says, and he sounds hollow. Hurt.

“Thank you for the tuna melt,” Shane manages to say. His eyes catch on the dæmon, who is now sitting tensely at Rozanov’s side looking at Shane with a horribly human look in her eyes. “Uh—I’m sorry. This…I can’t.”

Rozanov half-heartedly extends a hand. He’s still sitting back on the couch, his lips freshly kissed, his cheeks flushed. Like his entire body has frozen in place; even his breath and blood both have stilled at the very moment that Shane jerked away from him. “Hollander.”

“I just—” Shane cuts himself off. His eyes go to the dæmon again, and his fingers itch with the memory of how soft she was. How gentle her head resting on his knee was. What it means that she reached out to him. “I can’t, I can’t do this.”

“Hollander,” Rozanov says again. He tilts his head just slightly, and the dæmon tilts her head with him. They both look lost, like they’ve been set adrift in an ocean they can’t navigate. Like they know something horrible about him, about themselves, and they can never, ever escape it.

“I’m sorry,” Shane tries. It’s not enough. It’s never going to be enough.

With that, he turns around and he gets the fuck out, and he doesn’t look back. He feels sick, feels rotten somewhere deep in his core. As if his soul has gone bad, has molded over, has started to deteriorate. Maybe it’s not a myth, after all, that parting from your dæmon will kill you. Maybe it just takes a while.

He can’t believe he touched Rozanov’s dæmon, and had done it so confidently, so carelessly. She had put her head near him—he doesn’t even feel sure, with the distrust of hindsight, that she had touched him first. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe he just did it on his own, and spread that awful rot inside of him all over his not-relationship with Rozanov.

Either way, he put his hand on her head and felt the softness of her fur, the gentle hum of a breath out underneath his hand. It’s the worst thing he could have done. It’s a cruel, awful betrayal of Rozanov’s trust, of the way he had let Shane into his home and let Shane touch him everywhere hands could reach.

He stops a few blocks away from Rozanov’s house, realizing only then that he has no idea where he is or where he’s going. Rozanov lives in the suburbs of Boston, doing a stupid length commute every day for practice and games, and Shane has no idea how to get back to the Metros’ hotel.

In the end, it takes him only a few minutes to find an Uber that will take him to the city, and from there it’s only an uncomfortable half an hour drive. He crosses his fingers that the driver doesn’t recognize him and doesn’t question why he would ever be here, and judging by the driver’s silence, he thinks he gets away with it.

Back in the hotel, Hayden frowns when he sees Shane come into their room. “Weren’t you going to stay at Lily’s tonight? I swear you, like, just texted me that an hour ago.”

“No,” Shane says shortly, but his voice cracks and Hayden’s expression immediately softens despite the tense, coiled up way Shane is holding himself.

“What happened?”

Shane shakes his head, pressing his lips together in a thin line, trying to keep himself under control. “Nothing. I’m, um. I’m going to go to the roof.”

Hayden bites his lip. If he starts lecturing Shane about the way he and his dæmon treat each other now, Shane won’t be able to fucking handle it, so before Hayden can say anything, Shane spins around on his heel to get out of there. For the second time that day, he finds himself running away from something that should have been fucking fine.

Hayden is his best friend—he means well with his lectures on health and safety and all the things Shane ignores when he pushes his dæmon out of sight and out of mind. But Shane can’t listen to it right now. He needs space, and quiet, and for his heart to stop beating so goddamn fast.

Hayden’s dæmon is an arctic hare called Anthurium. She’s a pretty, little thing, with bounds of energy and a lot of opinions that she doesn’t shy away from verbally expressing to Hayden and in Shane’s presence, but otherwise she mostly keeps to herself amongst the team. There is nothing shameful about her; Hayden is as proud of her as he is of his children, in a way that’s borderline cocky.

This is common amongst the people that Shane knows, particularly his teammates. On the other hand, though, there’s Shane.

He loves his dæmon. He loves him as best as he can.

But he’s not proud, not in the way that Hayden is. He doesn’t brag about him, doesn’t let him sit next to him, doesn’t want him flying above the rink during practice, doesn’t allow him to join him for events. There’s a shame surrounding his dæmon that Shane has never known how to deal with.

When he makes it up to the roof, ignoring a sign that says authorized access only and figuring that he’ll be able to get away with this given the circumstances, he’s met by his dæmon.

He is a beautiful thing. Shane should brag about him. He should be proud. He also knows why he can’t make himself.

“Hi,” he thinks, reaching halfheartedly towards him. “Marin.”

The great wandering albatross which is his soul blinks tiredly at him. In his head, he hears the dæmon’s deep, velvet voice ask, “Was Ilya good?”

That’s all it takes for Shane to crack. The tears are falling before he can even think about stopping them. He sits down heavily on the steps by the access door and drops his head into his hands, knees tucked against his chest. He rocks forward and back, letting himself fall apart completely. It’s only him and his dæmon here.

The albatross who is his soul beyond his body tucks his wings against his side and then steps close to Shane. Gently, Marin knocks his head against Shane’s shoulder. Shane lets out a shuddering sob.

He thinks about Rozanov’s soft smile, the way he leaned in for a kiss when he asked Shane to stay, the ease with which they were able to talk about hockey and tease each other and smile about nothing, the softness of Rozanov’s dæmon’s fur and how she had mewled at his touch and Rozanov had moaned and—

“Ah,” Marin thinks in his head. “I think you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.”

“No shit,” Shane thinks, the words blurring in his mind between the sound of Rozanov saying his first name and Rozanov talking about his regular girls. “Fuck, I’m so stupid.”

Marin shakes his head slightly in a move which may just be him shaking a bug out of his feathers. “No. You’re not stupid.”

When he thinks the words into Shane’s head, he doesn’t say You’re really just scared, but the words are almost there, which may as well be the same thing. At that moment, Shane hates him—hates Rozanov, hates Marin, hates himself; and he has no idea what he’s supposed to do with that.

Shane whispers, voice hoarse and spoken mostly into the palms of his hands, “I fucked up.”

“Yes,” Marin agrees, because he is the albatross which is Shane’s soul and deep down, Shane knows he shouldn’t have ended things the way he did.

“I can’t fix it.” Shane has stopped crying, and now he’s left feeling wrung out and exhausted with being in his own head.

Marin makes a disapproving noise in Shane’s head. He doesn’t agree, but he doesn’t get a say. He’s been soaring high above the suburbs of Boston for the past few hours, not sitting in Rozanov’s apartment and feeling terrifyingly exposed in front of him. So he doesn’t get to approve or disapprove.

As if the argument has already been lost, Marin stays quiet. Eventually, Shane presses a small kiss to his head; the tiniest sign of intimacy in a life where he cannot give his own soul any more than this tiny thing. Then he leaves again, goes back to his hotel room with Hayden and Anthurium, and Marin makes himself comfortable on the roof for the night.

This is how they’ve chosen to do things, Shane reminds himself. This is safer than any alternative. This is him protecting himself.

Back in the hotel room bathroom, it’s immediately obvious in the mirror that Shane’s been crying. The distance between him and his dæmon is tugging at his chest again, a knife digging into the dark between ribs. It feels like he’s dying, again and again and again. A constant death, one that’s always shooting through his chest in a firecracker of pain.

But he doesn’t know any other way to live now. This is just who he is. What he is. This is the way the world spins, and the way he’s decided to survive it.

“You okay, man?” Hayden asks, frowning at him from the other bed while Shane gets ready to sleep.

“Fine,” Shane murmurs, and it’s a weak lie, but he can’t tell the truth. He can’t.

What the fuck would he even say? That he’s been clandestinely hooking up with a rival team’s captain for the past six years? That his friend with benefits who he’s not even really friends with seems to want something from him that Shane can’t even imagine? That he so briefly touched Ilya Rozanov’s dæmon and she let out the softest breath and Shane wanted to keep holding onto Ilya forever?

He can’t tell Hayden any of that. He can’t.

Hayden is one of two teammates who has met Marin, and so he’s one of only two who knows Shane’s dæmon is male. He has surely made his assumptions about this, as J.J. probably has too, but Shane has done everything he could to avoid that conversation, and they’ve allowed him to do so. Just as Shane avoids thinking about it, they probably don’t want to know either.

When Shane sleeps that night, he dreams of being a kid again. He dreams of how he and Marin used to be. Marin wasn’t always kept hidden, wasn’t always a secret. Once, he had been in the locker room like all the other players’ dæmons, and he had shown off his shifts between forms like it was a game, and he had been the strongest, the best of all of them.

In the dream, this is where it ends. In the dream, things are playful and silly and they play hockey and there is nothing that can hurt them.

In the memory, this is not true.

Someone found out that Marin isn’t a girl. Someone else found out that Shane has never really thought twice about that, never been insecure in it. Parents started whispering, and so kids started whispering.

There were kids ages eight to ten on that team; kids old enough to know better than to do what they did. But they were also kids ages eight to ten, and kids can be cruel. When faced with someone different and when given the opportunity to prove that they themselves aren’t different, kids can forget to know better. They can forget to be better. It’s so much easier, after all, to be the powerful one in the room.

It was after practice—a day that still makes him tense up, triggering his fight or flight response when he thinks of it—and he’s not expecting it. No one had been weird to him in the days leading up to it, no one had said anything strange that would’ve tipped him off. Instead, it just happened, out of nowhere. He still isn’t totally sure if it was planned or not.

“What’s it like?” one kid asked, completely randomly, that day. “Having a male dæmon?”

Shane had shrugged, mostly focused on unlacing his skates. “Normal, I guess.”

Another kid scoffed, like he couldn’t believe the answer. The dæmon at his side was a cat, Shane remembers. A small gray thing with bright green eyes. “I’d hate it if Sequoia was male. It’s just weird. That’s not how it’s supposed to be.”

Someone snickers. “Are we sure Shane’s dæmon isn’t secretly a girl?”

“Are we sure Shane isn’t secretly a girl?” someone else asks, a sneer in his voice that sends a shiver down Shane’s spine.

He was sitting there with his skates and gear off but his compression shirt and pants still on, and he still felt naked. Exposed.

“If he’s not a girl,” someone adds, spitting the words out like poison, “then he’s definitely gay.”

Voice suddenly hoarse, Shane starts, “I—” before there’s a kid grabbing at Marin.

He barely scrapes his fingers against Marin’s fur—he was a dog that day, at first, one of the bigger-sized ones with hair that flops over his eyes; it was one of his favorite things to be when they were younger—and then he’s barking, making this awful howling noise, and Shane is shaking, standing up in his socked feet and feeling every crack in the tiled floor of the locker room. Marin is screaming, angry and shocked, in Shane’s head and he can’t think.

And then there’s a tussle of boys trying to grab at Marin, who shifts into a small bird of some sort and darts around the room, desperately trying to keep their hands off of him, and Shane is maybe yelling something awful at them, but he’s not totally sure.

He’s always so careful to keep his temper under control; his anger always bubbles under the surface of a clenched jaw and never, ever is allowed to manifest in his fists or words. Now, though, he’s yelling something terrible, probably, but none of them are hearing him over the sound of themselves and their dæmons yelling too.

Putting his hands over his ears to try to block out the sounds, to try to get away from the sensation of a thousand hands prickling over his skin, Shane realizes that his whole body is trembling. He squeezes his eyes shut, unable to bear any of this, and so he’s not looking when some kid’s hand grabs at Marin’s wing and yanks him down.

But despite not seeing it, he feels it. He can feel the tether between him and Marin go taut, strained by the sudden jolt. There’s a knife clawing between his ribs and Shane can never scream loud enough to ever tell anyone nearly how violated he feels. His eyes blow wide as Marin manages to wiggle out of the kids’ hands, but he’s so trapped in this locker room—they both are.

It feels like hours and hours of this before an adult notices the commotion in the locker room. It’s the coach who first catches sight of things, and comes crashing into the locker room with something fiery in his eyes to put an end to the nightmare.

The kids all lined up in front of the coach, pretending to be ashamed of their actions instead of feeling like they’ve been crowned triumphant in their self-declared power. He yelled at them for what felt like no time at all, in comparison to the time Shane spent shaking. Marin had disappeared into a vent at some point, melting into the body of a field mouse. He didn’t come back for a long, long time.

After the locker room cleared out—the entire team’s parents had to be alerted, and in the end, five kids were banned from the hockey program after witnesses testified that they had assaulted a dæmon in a way that can’t be taken back; none of this ever made Shane feel safe again—he sat for an hour on the floor, waiting for Marin to come out from the vent.

“They’re gone,” he murmured. Even in his head, his voice is low and shaky. The bond between them feels like it’s running hotter than usual, feels electric in their fear. “Please come back. We can go home now. Mom’s waiting outside.”

When Marin eventually crawled out, Shane cradled him in his palms and finally allowed himself to cry about it.

After that, Marin didn’t come into the locker room with him. He took the form of anything that could stay both safe from the building but also as close as possible to the people inside: birds that could perch on trees by the windows, mice that could crawl hidden under the stands, that kind of thing. They got used to the pain eventually. No physical tear in their bond could ever hurt as much as that day did, was the theory.

Sometimes, now, Shane isn’t so sure that he was right about it. But he’s come so far now, and he knows that the Metros probably wouldn’t be all that much better than his youth hockey team. There’s no going back, not on this.

So when, weeks later, Rose Landry asks about his hockey teams as a kid, Shane lies. He says the kids mostly forgot to make fun of him. He says that’s just how hockey was, on his old teams. He implies that he got through it to the other side unscathed.

He gets the sense that she sees right through him, but she doesn’t call him out on it. She just smiles and compliments him, and the conversation moves on. It’s easy to talk to her about nothing, Shane is finding. She has a way of guiding conversations forward and not minding when he stumbles along the way. She laughs in the right places and smiles at him when he fumbles a sentence, not teasingly but fondly.

It should be so easy to love her. It should come so naturally—she’s Rose Landry, for fuck’s sake. She’s kind and beautiful and, for some reason, she actually seems to like him for who he is.

She genuinely listens to him talk, attentive and interested the whole time, even though the only thing he really knows how to confidently talk about is hockey. She plays with his fingers and rubs the back of his neck but she always pulls away when she realizes that her touch is getting to be overwhelming. Most importantly, maybe, she doesn’t complain about any of it.

Shane knows very well that he’s not the easiest person to be around. He’s intense, and he has a single-minded focus on hockey that drives him forward and pushes everyone else away. He has a hard time reading between the lines or getting what facial expressions mean. The mind game that is every social interaction is not a game he excels at.

But Rose is brilliant at it. She seems to just get people in a way that, honestly, makes Shane a little jealous. She works hard to make what she wants come true, and along the way, she’s built a thousand bridges to people who love her and has never once struck a match to any of them.

Shane, meanwhile, lit a match so hot and so bright that it didn’t just burn the bridge down, it burned everything else down with it. He’s been playing unfocused, been trying so hard to drive Rozanov out of his mind and been failing so badly. He’s missing passes that he once could have done in his sleep, and every shot on goal feels just that much more difficult.

Everything reminds him of Rozanov, of that afternoon they spent together. Everything recalls the memory of that day, and of how Shane left him. It doesn’t help, either, that the bond between Shane and Marin is feeling more and more strained, more and more painful, with every passing day. It’s always hurt, but never like this: never so much, never so constantly, never so overwhelmingly.

But these days, it’s all he can think about. It’s all that he can focus on—the pain in his chest aching, stabbing, searing at his heart. Marin has been spending a lot of time in the air, never going so far from Shane that it’s impossible to bear but still far enough that Shane feels his absence like a missing limb.

Wandering albatrosses are built to spend hours and hours in the air at a time, coasting on the wind and a single flap of their wings, because they spend most of their time at sea. Shane wonders, sometimes, if Marin would like to be closer to the ocean, if he would like to just fly far, far away from here. Sometimes, Shane thinks they could do it.

This is where Marin is on the first night that Shane spends with Rose—flying high above the city, keeping a careful eye on everyone and everything in it. Shane can feel the tug of the bond stretching out as Marin climbs higher and farther away. This is what he will blame for his terrible performance with her that night. She says she understands, but there’s a disappointed edge to her words that fills Shane with guilt.

“You know you can trust me, right?” she asks tentatively, once they’re lying in the bed and both feeling dissatisfied and embarrassed. Shane nods, but he isn’t looking at her. “And you can bring your dæmon here if you want to?”

Shane tenses next to her and, pressed shoulder to shoulder, she hurries to backtrack. “You don’t have to, I know—I’ve heard you talk about it, like, in press conferences and whatever. If you want to keep her private, that’s okay. I’m just…it must be uncomfortable, right? The distance?”

“It’s not so bad,” Shane tries to say, but the lie feels like it’s choking him in a way that it never has before. “My dæmon is…we prefer it this way.”

Rose turns her head to look at him, a small furrow at her brow. “But why?”

Rose’s dæmon is a bird too, but he’s not even a quarter the size of Marin. He’s a tiny little hummingbird called Samuel and he never seems to stop moving. He flits around the room in small bursts of color and energy, darting uncomfortably close to Shane every now and then, like he’s lost his depth perception and forgotten that he’s closer than he seems. He hovers around Rose’s shoulder as she moves about in public, circling her head every now and then in a blur of motion as if trying to protect her from paparazzi.

Samuel is beautiful, and Rose adores him. Shane likes him too—he’s talkative, filled with opinions, and Rose doesn’t mind direct interactions between him and other humans, so Shane has gotten to know him well. But he’s never met Marin, and Shane has no desire for neither him nor Rose to ever do so.

Shane shrugs a little, looking intently up at the ceiling. “It’s just better.”

“Shane,” Rose says, voice soft. “It doesn’t really seem like it is.”

“Why?” Shane asks sharply. His hands are clenched into fists so tight that even his dull fingernails are digging into his palms. “Does it make you uncomfortable not to see a dæmon walking around with me? Do you want to have an opinion on it? My soul is no one else’s business.”

Rose doesn’t flinch at his tone and she doesn’t look away from him. He can feel her eyes kept closely on him, and he’s terrified that he’s seeing right through him to the core of all his secrets.

“What makes me uncomfortable,” Rose says slowly, “is how uncomfortable you seem. How—unsettled.”

“I’m not uncomfortable.” The response is automatic, robotic, the words of someone who’s gone through years of media training. They are not, in any way at all, true.

Rose nods slightly, like she’s realizing that this argument was lost long before she got around to it. “Okay.”

She drops the topic after that, and Shane has no desire to bring it back up again. He kisses her cheek and then, with her assent, clicks the bedside lamp switch to plunge them into darkness. They go to sleep without talking much more after that.

Even without bringing up the topic directly again, Shane suddenly feels like he’s so much more aware of it than he had been before. The pain has always been there, the aching slit of a knife into his ribs, constantly digging deeper and deeper, but now that pain comes with something else. Now, he can’t stop noticing things.

Marin is in everything. He’s in the birds that line the stained glass windowsills of old churches. He’s in the call of gulls in the distance. He’s in the very act of playing hockey, in the way other dæmons pace at the sidelines of the rink and watch their games and practices. He’s in the locker room, when Comeau and J.J. get in a fight and their dæmons, a hyena and a fox, start circling each other like they’re going to pounce. He’s in Rose’s knowing glances, now that she’s made it clear that she sees how unsettled in his own skin he is.

Worst of all is when Shane steps onto the ice for their next game against Boston, this time in their home arena, and he sees Rozanov’s dæmon at his side. She’s a Newfoundland dog—according to Rozanov’s Wikipedia—and her head rises to just near Rozanov’s waist. She shines with full, healthy, beautiful fur.

She’s so soft, Shane remembers, and then his whole body recoils at the thought. He had no right to touch her. She had no right to want him to. He realizes also, then, that he has no idea what her name is. He’s never asked, and he’s never looked it up.

Rozanov is standing outside of the rink, all of his gear on except for his helmet, which dangles from two fingers. His other hand is tangled in his dæmon’s fur. Not stroking, just holding on, like he needs something to ground himself to. He’s talking to Marleau, but he looks subdued, not talking with his hands or laughing and teasing like Shane usually sees him doing before a match.

On the other side of him, Marleau looks angry. Looks completely fucking pissed off about something. He says something twice as animatedly as Rozanov is speaking, waving his hand aggressively, and then Rozanov shakes his head and Marleau seems to deflate. Shane’s stomach rolls over, terrified that Rozanov is talking about him, about what he did, about what they did—

But he wouldn’t do that. Shane knows that. Rozanov, too, has so much to lose from telling someone about Shane. No matter how awful Shane was to him, no matter how unforgivable, Rozanov won’t tell anyone. He can’t, not without giving up everything else, and Shane Hollander is not worth that. No, whatever hurt Rozanov feels will be secret, and silent.

Shane takes a deep breath, and something about that seems to signal Rozanov’s dæmon to his presence. She turns her head instantly, huffing a little when she catches his eye. Her gaze is so knowing, and it sends a prickle of discomfort curling around his heart. The knife of his distant, secret soul cuts a little deeper into muscle.

Probably Marin is somewhere above the arena, lingering in the clouds somewhere. Keeping out of sight. Probably he’s calling out to the other birds and getting ignored; maybe he’s entertaining himself by chasing after some of the sparrows. Or maybe he’s just sitting on the roof of the Bell Centre, staring out at the parking lot and trying to ease the pain of their stretched out bond. Maybe he’s curled into himself and sleeping. Maybe he’s unable to fly with the way he’s shaking; the same way Shane’s hands are trembling.

And Shane misses him so fucking badly. He misses being around his soul all of the time, instead of shoving it this far away from himself. He misses not being so afraid of his own soul, misses not being so terrified of it that he hides it in the dark where no one, especially not himself, can see it. He misses the way he would stroke over the soft of Marin’s plumage and he would make little trills at him. He misses the wind that would blow over him with a single beat of Marin’s wings.

Rozanov’s dæmon nudges his leg and his hand in her fur untwists and then gently twists again. He turns to look, and his face when he sees Shane is perfectly blank. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t smirk, doesn’t do anything.

He just stares blankly for a long moment, something tense in his jaw and something horribly hurt in his eyes. His dæmon whines just loud enough that Shane can hear, and Rozanov doesn’t hush her, doesn’t even look down—it’s as if to acknowledge her distress, or to acknowledge her at all, would be to admit something that he cannot afford to say.

This is why Shane cannot allow Marin to be in this arena. Rozanov’s soul is entirely open and on display here, and there is no way for Shane not to see it. There is no way for Shane to ignore it.

Marleau claps Rozanov on the shoulder and squeezes him gently, as if in comfort or concern, and then turns away again. No, Rozanov will not tell anyone about Shane but that doesn’t mean no one can figure out that something happened to him. His soul is standing on four legs outside the limits of his chest and she is so sad that it is impossible not to understand that.

The game is a mess. Shane is playing like shit and he knows it. They’ll take the win anyway, because any win against Boston is worth taking, but he feels awful about it. He barely contributed anything; he couldn’t fucking focus. There was a high, hurt whining in his ears the entire time that sounded suspiciously like a Newfoundland dog, and there was a sharp, killing thing in his lungs that felt like Marin’s pain.

He doesn’t feel like celebrating afterwards. Going to a club with Rose kind of feels like a nightmare right now. He wants to curl up in his bed and watch Marin settle in his nest, both of them moving through the apartment in silence. He wants to stop thinking so fucking hard, he wants to be taken out of his head, and he wants to never go back into it.

But he’s trying—he’s trying so hard—to be a good boyfriend, the kind of man that Rose will want to take home to her parents and brothers, who she’ll want to stay with, despite all the ways he fails her. So he goes to the club anyway. He pretends that a beer will fix the thing that’s wrong in his head tonight, and he tries to dance with her even though every beat of the song makes him more and more uncomfortable.

The club is busy and loud, bodies pressed against bodies, a thrum of energy pounding through the room in a way that’s already stressing Shane out. Marin is outside somewhere, circling, and Shane feels the distance now as fingers pressing into a bruise over his lungs. He feels breathless already, and he hates it.

He only gets a few minutes into dancing with Rose before he sees Marleau. Or, he sees Marleau’s dæmon first. He has a bird too—she’s a hawk of some sort, a rusty kind of red at her tail and a dappled brown across broad wings. She’s perched on his shoulder, her eyes searching the crowd for something. When he sees her, she seems to alert Marleau somehow, because he turns too.

Shane can’t fucking do this. Can’t face him, can’t face the other Raiders who are almost certainly there with him, can’t face Ilya Rozanov.

“Bathroom,” he manages to choke out, and Rose nods as he pulls himself away from her and she lets her hands drop. He’s almost immediately replaced by Miles, and he tries so hard not to feel like an awful person, but he can’t make himself—he can’t—

And there’s Rozanov, beautiful and swaying under the pulse of brightly colored lights. The lights melt over his skin, dancing over him as he dances with some woman with blonde hair and swinging earrings. Shane halts in place, his heart seizing, unable to look away.

Then Rozanov turns and finds him watching. He doesn’t stop dancing, doesn’t freeze in the way that Shane has. Instead, that hurt in his eyes from earlier in the day seems to double down and harden in his gaze. He has his hands on the woman’s waist, and he leans forward to kiss the skin just underneath her ear. Her eyes close and she drops her head back against his shoulder.

Rozanov doesn’t tear his eyes away from him, doesn’t look at her at all. The sight of him is breaking something crucial inside of Shane, maybe, or maybe it’s just digging a sharper knife into a wound that was already there. Maybe this is what it feels like to have a cut slit into the skin over your chest, and for someone else to claw the wound wide open with their fingernails. Maybe this is what it feels like to choke on your own ugly, beating heart.

Shane’s lips part, as if to say something, as if to say a name, but he can’t seem to make any noise. His heart is pounding in his ears even louder than the club music as he watches Rozanov stand there and watch him. He doesn’t think he could speak if he wanted to, and he doesn’t think he’d be able to hear his own voice.

In the back of his mind, Shane feels the sharp tug of his dæmon drifting further away. He feels it like a hand wrapping around his lungs and pulling. He feels it like a bullet punched straight through his chest. He feels it like a broken heart; he feels it like the sound of Rozanov gasping out his first name.

As he watches, Rozanov tears his gaze away and drops his attention back to kissing the woman’s neck. Shane shivers, or maybe he’s just shaking, or maybe he’s going to fucking die like this: watching his heart snap all over again into a hundred more shards of glass.

I can’t do this, Shane had said that afternoon. He had been clinging onto Rozanov’s shirt when he said it. Rozanov’s dæmon had been watching him like she understood something he couldn’t say just then, but Rozanov himself had been looking at him so lost, so startled, so unsure of what was happening and of what he did wrong.

I can’t do this, Shane had said, and he can’t deal with this right now any more than he had been able to deal with anything that afternoon. Rozanov closes his eyes and takes the woman’s earlobe in his mouth, and Shane leaves again, with his heart pounding in his chest and something on his tongue left tasting like shame.

He mumbles out an excuse and a goodbye to Rose and then he’s fucking gone. Then he’s in his car pulled over on the side of the road, sobbing into his hands, his forehead pressed to the steering wheel. He’s so fucking alone, and something in his heart has been ruined.

There’s a thump on the roof of the car, but Shane doesn’t flinch. He can hear Marin in his head, his voice a soft trill. “You’re crying.”

Shane takes a shuddering breath. Even with the distance between them closed, the bond still feels like a knife. It still feels like dying. “I’m not.”

Marin is laughing at him, in that crackly way he does. “You can’t lie to me.”

“Fuck off.” Shane doesn’t know when he started becoming so cruel to Marin, and he’s not sure when Marin became so cruel to him. Another choked sob. “Fuck.”

There’s a scratching noise above his head on the roof of the car, but Shane can’t bring himself to be mad about the dæmon fucking up the paint job on his car. He’s so tired of everything else that this feels like nothing. He refuses to lift his head from the steering wheel.

Behind his closed eyelids, he sees Rozanov under the lights of the club. He’s so handsome and it’s awful. Shane bites down hard on his lip. The pain does nothing to fix him, just as fucking up the bond with his dæmon has done nothing to fix him.

“Shane,” Marin says in his head. Shane doesn’t move, doesn’t acknowledge that he heard. “Maybe it’s time we stop pretending.”

Shane holds his breath, suddenly more scared than upset, terrified in a way he’s never been before. He and Marin don’t talk like this; he and Marin barely talk at all. The distance between them sometimes feels just as much mental as it is physical, like Shane has so far removed himself from his soul publicly that even he can’t reach it in the privacy of his head anymore.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Shane says aloud. The words hang in the empty car like lingering tear tracks.

Marin makes this awful noise at that. The kind of noise that breaks open a quiet, starless night and turns it into a threat. Shane feels like he’s standing in the middle of the road, watching as headlights come careening towards him, hearing a truck horn blaring like an omen.

He hears above him, as the albatross which is his soul beats his wings once, and then takes off. Then, following his sudden absence, a sharp pain shooting out of his heart and stabbing into his lungs. Shane gasps, suddenly breathless around the empty space inside of him.

The pain doesn’t stop, doesn’t fade. Marin doesn’t come back.

Shane just adjusts to it. Adapts to it. Clenches his hands around the wheel, determined to stop crying, determined to stop feeling so weak and wrong.

Like this, he goes back to his apartment. Rose is waiting there, sitting on the front steps with her arms folded over her knees. Guilt immediately floods through him when he sees her—still in that silver, glittery dress; the one that dips between her breasts and hugs her ass, though there’s now a jacket loosely draped over her shoulders. She’s beautiful, and Shane can barely meet her eyes. Samuel rests on her shoulder, tucked into the collar of the jacket.

“Hi,” she says. Her voice is quiet. “You left so suddenly, I wanted to come check on you.”

Shane nods stiffly. “I, uh. Just needed to clear my head. I went for a drive.”

“Oh,” she says. It’s awkward, strangled.

Then she pats the concrete step next to her, a clear invitation. After a split second’s debate, he sits down. Leaning his elbows on his knees, his head hung over his thighs, Shane tries to ignore the hurt in his chest in favor of paying attention to what Rose is saying.

“I’ve been waiting here for a while.” She doesn’t look at him, instead tilting her face up to the dark sky. There’s no moon tonight, and the porchlight is a weak yellow glow on her cheeks.

“Sorry,” Shane murmurs.

Rose exhales slowly, a puff of breath hanging in the air in front of her. “No, I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“Your dæmon got here before you.” Rose looks over at him, something so sad and so sorry in her expression that it makes Shane feel sick. “I didn’t mean to—I know you didn’t want me to…I was just here, and then—and we only talked a second, but…”

Shane swallows hard. He’s already cried so much today, he didn’t think he had anything left in him. But his eyes are watery in a way that he doesn’t want anyone to ever see.

“He’s wonderful, Shane,” Rose says softly. “Why are you hiding him?”

Shane huffs a dry, bitter laugh; barely a noise in the back of his throat. “You know how hockey is.”

Next to him, Rose nods, her mouth in a thin line. “There are no gay players in the league?”

Shane shrugs. He wants to say that having a male dæmon doesn’t make him gay, he wants to argue about it, he wants to cry about it. But she won’t believe him when he says it, because he doesn’t even believe himself when he says it. “At least none who have said it publicly.”

In the dark and the cold, the words feel much more terrifying than he wants them to. They linger in the air with his breath, and he shivers in the silence. Rose pulls her jacket tighter around her.

“Okay,” Rose says. “Shane, I…I don’t think I'm right for you.”

Shane breathes out. The pain that’s always in his chest spikes, and he tries not to shudder. Somewhere in the distance, he hears a seabird cry out. He tries, “I know the sex stuff—is a problem, but—”

“It’s not a problem,” Rose says. “A problem is something you can fix. We’re more like a square peg in a round hole—ew. Forget I said that. We’re just…we’re not meant to fit. And it’s really fine. I just don’t think we can keep trying.”

Her words are gentle, and every one of them is true, but they still ring in Shane’s head like the toll of a funeral bell. He can hear Marin in his head, his voice low and nakedly honest, Maybe it’s time we stop pretending.

He tries to say something, tries to find the words for what this is and what this means, but Rose shakes her head, touching his cheek and tilting his gaze towards herself. She searches his face for a moment before offering him a small smile. “It’s okay, Shane. You don’t owe me any explanation.”

Shane wants to laugh. “I feel like I kind of do.”

“You really don’t.” Rose’s voice is firm, but gentle. She looks over at him, and she doesn’t look mad or upset or hurt at all. She looks a little sorry, if anything. She turns away again, looking up at the sky. The porchlight makes her look a little ethereal, though if she’s a dream or a haunting, Shane isn’t sure. “Can I ask if you’ve ever been with another guy?”

The breeze threads through Shane’s hair, making his flushed cheeks go cold. He shivers, swallowing hard. In the corner of his eye, the shadow of an albatross. He nods, the movement so small that he doesn’t know if Rose can see it.

She takes that answer with more grace than Shane could have ever asked her for. “Have you ever told anyone that before?”

Of course he hasn’t. Who would he tell? Who would ever understand? A tiny shake of his head.

“Was it different with a guy?”

“Of course,” Shane murmurs.

He closes his eyes, pressing his thumb to the corner of his eye to push away a tear, and then blinks hard. He looks up at the sky. There are no stars, no moon, and only the ambient light of the city glows above them. He sees the shadow of a bird anyway, great and imposing and elegant.

Rose follows his gaze, tilting her face up. Then she closes her eyes. “Was it better?”

There is a pain in his chest that he thinks is unrelated to the distance between him and Marin. It wells in his body like grief, and he feels himself drowning in it. He thinks of Rozanov, of his dæmon’s head resting on his knee. He thinks of Rozanov, pressing a kiss to his shoulder in a movement that’s adoring rather than sexual. He thinks of Rozanov, one hand touching himself in the showers. He thinks of Rozanov, catching him when Shane lunges forward for a desperate kiss. He thinks of Rozanov—

“Yeah,” Shane whispers, feeling the word fall past his lips with the tidal wave of grief that’s building in his chest. “Yeah, it was—it was better.”

“Has this guy met your dæmon?” Rose asks, and Shane shakes his head once before she continues. “Why not?”

Shane chuckles, sounding and feeling both bitter at the circumstances and yet so tired of lying. “Because then he’d know.”

Rose looks over at him, curious more than anything now. “Know what?”

“It wasn’t supposed to mean anything,” Shane says quietly. “But if he knew—knew that my dæmon is—then he’d know that I’m—that it means more to me than it does to him. Everyone else would just be speculating, if they found out, but he’d know.”

Rose nods slowly, clearly thinking that over when Shane falls into silence again. “Would that be so bad? If people speculated?”

The memory comes back to him so easily, as if a lever has been pulled and the moment is being slotted into place in his mind like it had never left. He shoves his hands below his thighs to keep them from visibly shaking. His feet had been so cold in that locker room, standing in only his socks on the tiled floor. Marin had screamed so loud in his head and all those other boys’ hands reaching and grabbing had been so suffocating, had seared their judgment and their hatred into his body forever.

“Yes.” Shane knows this to be true. The wind howls above them, and Rose shivers under her jacket.

“Would it be that bad if it was just him? And he knew?”

Shane nods, once, then rapidly again and again. Rozanov cannot know what Shane feels for him, cannot know that Shane wants him so badly, all of the time. It would ruin this thing they have, where they don’t talk and they don’t stay the night and they don’t say each other’s first names—

But that secret they shared is probably ruined anyway. Shane presses a knuckle to the corner of his eye, and tries to take a breath.

“He wouldn’t…” Shane trails off, voice failing him. Rozanov’s dæmon was so soft under his hand.

Next to her, Samuel takes flight again, darting away from Rose’s shoulder and shooting upwards. They both follow his flight with their eyes, not saying anything. He disappears amongst the shadows only for a moment, and then blinks back into view, hovering near Rose’s head. She smiles watching him, and Shane suddenly feels so horribly broken inside that he wonders if he can ever be fixed.

“I tried,” Shane whispers. “I tried really hard not to want…”

He doesn’t know what the end of the sentence is. He’s tried so hard not to want Rozanov. He’s tried, too, not to want Marin at his side again. He’s tried so hard to cut himself up into pieces that don’t ever collide: pieces that other people can respect and pieces that need to be kept secret at all costs; pieces that other people can see and pieces that even he finds too ugly to look at.

“Shane,” Rose starts, and it’s gentle. “It’s okay. It is. I promise. You’re gonna be fine.”

Shane shakes his head, and he wants her to be right, but he’s spent so much of his life refusing to want anything at all that it now feels unbelievable for Rose to be saying he could want something like this and it would be okay. Because, in so many ways, it wouldn’t be okay.

He can’t ever have someone like Rozanov or something like Marin, because the risk is so great. He would lose so much if he allowed himself to want to have them.

“I think it’s going to kill me.” Shane’s voice is low, subdued, and he didn’t realize it to be true until he was saying it, but it is. It is true. “Hiding Marin like this. Always staying so far away from him. Pretending this, um. Being…pretending it isn’t real. It’s going to kill me.”

Rose doesn’t bother lying to him. She says, softly, “It’s already killing you, Shane.”

Above them, the albatross circles, high up in the sky. Shane can feel their bond stretch out from the porch steps to the atmosphere, and he can feel the line draw itself taut and then tug, and he can feel it as Marin starts to come back down to the ground. He can feel all of it, and every second is a layer of pain that has not gone away in years.

Looking up, Shane can see Marin above them, just a shadow in the sky. At his side, Rose is looking at him carefully. For once, he doesn’t flinch under the softness of her gaze.

“We’re going to be friends,” Rose decides. “Best friends, okay? And I’d like to meet your dæmon for real, one day.”

“He’d probably like that.” Shane finally turns away from the sky and looks beside him. “You were a really good girlfriend, you know. You’ll make someone else really happy one day.”

Rose laughs, her head dropping forward. By her ear, Samuel chirps something at her, and it makes her laugh again. “Thanks, Shane.”

“You deserve the best.”

Rose grins at him. “I know.”

It makes him laugh lightly, and he feels, suddenly, like he’s let go of something that’s been weighing him down for a lifetime. He can breathe the crisp, fresh air for the first time in a decade, as if he’s no longer trapped in that stale locker room. Until now, he hadn’t even realized that he’d been choking on the memory like that.

“I should get back to my hotel,” Rose says, inhaling deeply. They both stand up, and then she reaches out to squeeze his arms. “Don’t let it kill you, okay? Take care of yourself. I’ll text you.”

Shane nods. “Okay.”

A hug goodbye, and then Rose disappears around the block, where Miles has apparently been waiting with a car this entire time. Shane stands on the porch for a long time afterwards, until his whole body is numbed by the cold and his mind feels just as frozen over. It’s not until he’s about to turn around and go inside that Marin lands on the porch.

Rose was right—he really is a wonderful bird, Shane thinks. His body is a pure, snowy white, unstained by color. Right now, the porchlight above them casts Marin’s white feathers in a kind of golden glow.

His wings stretch out forever when he’s flying and tuck in neatly against his back when he’s sitting still. He’s clearly a male albatross, with only the edges of his wings darkening with black, rather than all of the plumage there. He has a large almost-pink bill, lighter at the tip. Shane wants to love him, but he’s so ashamed of what he represents.

For a moment, he and Marin just stare at each other. The pain in his chest does not lessen, does not ease up, despite the fact that they’re standing so close.

Wandering albatrosses can have a wingspan of as long as three meters, though the longest recorded wingspan was half a meter longer than that. They fly mostly by gliding rather than flapping their wings, and can stay airborne over the ocean for hours with their wings spread out wide. They are beautiful, proud, determined creatures.

At the time that Marin settled, he had never taken this shape before. He was clumsy while trying to walk rather than fly, and he’s still much better at landing in the nearest body of water than he is on the streets. Shane couldn’t hide his surprise when Marin told him that this would be how he was staying, and had asked if this was him asking to move closer to the ocean.

Marin had laughed then; a low clicking, clapping kind of sound. It seems to surprise them both. Shane had waited for Marin to explain himself after that, but he never did.

Now, staring at each other, he wonders again. It’s an incredibly inconvenient shape, one that requires him to spend most of his time soaring in circles above Shane, one that stumbles ungracefully when walking on land, and Marin still sometimes seems unsure how to move around within the confines of his body.

But that being said, still: he’s beautiful.

It’s the kind of smooth beauty that’s impossible not to see; and he’s so strong and so bold, even when Shane is hiding him. When he takes off into the sky, there’s a rush of wind under the flap of his wings that Shane wouldn’t be surprised to find out is what makes a hurricane crash over Boston. When he soars across the sky, shadow blotting out the sun for the briefest of moments, Shane can’t help but keep his eyes turned up to the daylight long past when his retinas burn.

He takes a breath, gaze washing over Marin under the light of the porch, thinking only of him in the sunlight over the water.

Finally, out loud: “I’m sorry.”

Marin blinks at him, clearly not having expected that. For all that he can understand Shane, it seems that Shane can still surprise his dæmon. He asks, in Shane’s head, “What for?”

“What I did to us,” Shane says, quiet but out loud. “I hid you. And I shouldn’t have.”

“You were scared,” Marin says. His voice is an echo in Shane’s mind.

Shane nods sharply. Marin waits. A beat of silence passes. Then Shane confesses, “I thought hiding you would fix this thing in me. The thing I don’t want people to see. But it didn’t change anything. It probably can’t.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

Shane bites his lip. Marin’s eyes flash as he tilts his head at the exact right angle under the porchlight. He’s waiting for the answer he thinks Shane is going to give, the answer that will only hurt them both all over again. He’s waiting for the rest of their lifetime of hiding to start; a lifetime of distance, a lifetime of hurt that doesn’t heal.

Shane says, “I think I want to start over and try again.”

It’s terrifying, to say the words out loud. It changes everything, even just the way he stands silently on that porch with his dæmon. He feels as if he’s breathing differently.

But at the same time, the world keeps spinning. His key still works in the door when he goes inside. Marin still sticks by him, a steady second heartbeat. The sun rises the next morning, and the new year comes over Montreal with a whisper of frost and celebratory fireworks. So life continues on.

The first time Shane brings Marin out for a public hockey event is for All-Stars in 2017. It looks like it breaks Ilya’s heart.

They’ve been slowly working their way up to this, him and Marin. They started by having Rose over at Shane’s place, where Marin settled on the couch next to Shane and watched Samuel distrustfully while the two humans got wine drunk and watched bad sports movies. Rose didn’t blink an eye at his presence, and that set Shane at ease in a way that he didn’t think he’d ever feel about someone seeing his soul walking on two legs with a wingspan twice his height.

Encouraged by Rose’s easy acceptance, Marin came to the Pike house with him once. Jackie had smiled brightly at the sight of Shane with a dæmon—she had always been more uncomfortable with the idea of Shane being alone than Hayden was—and welcomed them both inside with a wave of her hand.

Marin didn’t speak to them, still choosing to communicate only non-verbally to Shane, but the Pike children loved just having his presence around anyway. Their only question was why no one had ever told them that birds could get that big. Marin had preened under the praise, and all of it made something warm and grateful bloom in Shane’s chest.

Now, he’s standing at the door to a hotel bar in Tampa, trying to look more confident than he feels, his eyes immediately searching for Rozanov and glazing over everyone else. Rozanov is sitting at the bar, loosely gripping a bottle of beer, his eyes firmly on something in the opposite direction of Shane. Shane can tell that it’s very, very intentional.

In the arch of the door, Shane takes a deep breath. He can feel the tug of distance between him and Marin, who hates confined spaces where he’s forced to walk instead of fly and instead decided to land on the patio and wait for Shane to make his rounds. This is not nearly the worst distance that they’ve forced themselves into, and right now, it even feels like a true choice. That’s not something they’ve known in a long time.

It’s not until he’s standing a few feet from Rozanov that he sees where Rozanov has pinned his gaze. He’s staring at Marin intently, as if he recognizes him. Marin is sitting quietly by the door, picking at a feather with his bill, oblivious to Ilya Rozanov’s eyes.

Shane tenses slightly when he sees where Rozanov is looking, but he refuses to back out now. He refuses to let his fear win this.

Drawing the chair next to Rozanov out, Shane sits down and tries to remember to breathe. He nods at the bartender, asks for whatever Rozanov is drinking and hopes it’s good.

“So, what, are they out of ginger ale?” Rozanov asks. Then, with a popping emphasis to the word, “Captain?”

“I’m feeling a bit wild,” Shane says. He smiles a little, tries not to feel so proud of himself just for sitting next to Rozanov in front of other people. “So this should be fun, huh? I’ve always wondered what it would be like to play on the same team.”

Rozanov still won’t look at him; his eyes are still focused on the albatross which is Shane’s soul. “Have you?”

The conversation is awkward, stilted, in a way that it wasn’t last time, before Shane committed his unforgivable breaches of Rozanov’s trust and both touched his dæmon and fell in love with him. Still, Shane pushes forward, refusing to let this die without fighting for it.

Then, Rozanov finally looks away from Marin. Says, “You’re looking very pretty today.” Shane gives him a questioning look and Rozanov shrugs. “More confident, maybe?”

“Maybe,” Shane says thoughtfully. He isn’t sure if he’s been feeling more confident lately. It’s more like he’s settled into something—into his heart, into his body, or maybe into his soul—that he’s spent the rest of his life dissociated from. “If I, um. If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell anyone?”

Rozanov raises his eyebrows at him. “Well, it depends.”

“Seriously,” Shane says, and Rozanov relents.

Shane takes a breath, letting his eyes drift away from his own hands and towards where Marin is sitting in the grass by the patio. Marin turns his head to meet Shane’s eyes, and there’s something reassuring in the look that Shane isn’t sure Marin’s given him in years.

It makes him brave, kind of. It makes him brave enough, at least, to start to say, “The bird you were looking at just now.”

Turning to look where Shane’s focus has gone, Rozanov looks over at the albatross; still sitting there, waiting patiently for something that might never happen. “What about it?”

“He’s mine,” Shane says, exhaling the words. “I’ve never…not many people have seen him. Before this, anyway. He’s always been a secret.”

Rozanov whips his head around to stare at Shane. Rozanov’s soul, in the form of a beautiful water dog who cares so deeply for him, who he has never once hidden from anyone, lets out a small huff from where she sits at his feet. Rozanov’s eyes flick down to her, and then back up to Shane, who sits with tense shoulders and waits for him to say something, anything at all.

A beat passes. Then, carefully, “He’s very pretty, Hollander.”

Shane cracks a small smile. “Like you think I am?”

Despite his attempt to keep his expression angled away from Shane when Rozanov turns to look back at the albatross, Shane can see something awful etched over the visible lines of his face. Something broken, something hurt, something that Shane doesn’t know what to do with.

“Do not make fun of me now,” Rozanov says quietly, his voice a low, wounded thing. “Do not do that to me.”

Shane swallows. “I didn’t mean—”

“No.” Rozanov cuts him off there, and Shane goes quiet. A horrible moment passes in which Shane is terrified that this thing between them really has shattered for good, the wreckage beyond salvaging. Then, “Rose Landry has been good for you.”

“What?”

Rozanov licks his lips, thinking about something that Shane isn’t following. Shane’s eyes trace the flick of his tongue and the shine of his lips, even though he knows this is not at all an appropriate time.

Then, slowly, as if spelling out a math problem, Rozanov says, “You have kept your dæmon hidden for as long as you have been in the league, and you have never really told anyone why. And now, Rose Landry, and you are more confident, yes? So you bring him here?”

“Oh.” Shane studies him carefully; wonders if that’s actually heartbreak written on his face or if the sun is in Shane’s eyes and blinding him to Rozanov’s nonchalance. “I mean, no. She’s—she was good to me. But this wasn’t her. She’s not actually, um. Really in the picture anymore.”

Rozanov takes a long drink from his beer, and Shane realizes that he’s been gripping his own bottle so tightly that the label is soaked in the condensation under his hands and the paper is peeling off. He takes a drink, and waits for Rozanov to speak again.

“So you and her are not…” Rozanov trails off, not looking at Shane.

“She’s great,” Shane says, “but we’re just not compatible, I guess.”

Rozanov stares at him for a long moment, and then he just nods. He looks back at his nearly empty bottle of beer, picking at the corner of the table with one hand. Shane watches him for a moment, and before he excuses himself to go make the rest of his rounds, he swears that he sees Rozanov start to smile, just a little bit, before he covers his mouth with his hand.

Later that afternoon, the day before the All-Stars match is scheduled, Shane sits by the pool and watches Rozanov. He’s playing with a group of other players’ kids, their dæmons scattered around the edges of the pool. Rozanov’s dæmon sits on the other end of the pool, panting in the Tampa heat, her watchful, knowing eyes tracking Rozanov as he swims laps with the kids.

Near her, Marin sits happily in the pool water, having already assured Shane that the pool is chlorine-free with the intention of allowing dæmons to swim. The kids playing with Rozanov avoid him without problem or discussion; it’s long been built into their muscle memory to avoid touching other people’s dæmons, and it’s very clear that the albatross, outside of his natural habitat, belongs to someone.

Shane’s gaze shifts between Rozanov, his dæmon, and Marin on a strange kind of loop. Marin isn’t paying much attention to any of it, just drifting pleasantly. Rozanov’s dæmon, meanwhile, watches Rozanov carefully. Every now and then, though, when Shane is looking at Rozanov, he catches her out of the corner of his eye looking at him.

Not acknowledging that, Shane watches Rozanov and doesn’t seem to be able to write the affection off of his face. He can’t help it, right now. The sun is bright and his dæmon is so close by and Rozanov is laughing and the kids are laughing and the world hasn’t ended. The world, instead, is a new kind of beautiful. Shane feels like he could fly, right now.

And playing with him—oh, playing hockey with Ilya Rozanov is everything that Shane has ever dreamed that hockey could be.

He feels electric, feels alive in a way that he hasn’t in years and years. They keep pace with each other, not ever holding back or slowing down. They leave everyone strides behind them, and Shane feels like they’re the only people on the ice. He doesn’t even remember the name of the guy on the other wing or what team he usually plays for.

This is everything that hockey should be. This is everything that it can be, when there’s so much joy in it. When it’s so fucking fun.

It’s probably the best game that either of them have played in a while. This is why they’re the two best in the world, the only two who can keep up with each other. This is why they have broken almost every record in the league between the two of them several times over. This is the kind of hockey that they’ve always been meant to play, both Shane and Rozanov reaching the peak of themselves and then soaring even higher with the other at their side.

And it’s just so much fun. The game doesn’t count for anything. There are no stakes. It’s just Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov on the ice, and they’re having fun.

Hockey hasn’t been fun like this in so fucking long. Not since that pain in his chest started restricting his breathing so painfully; not since he hid his soul away from the world and it started to kill him. But here, like this, Shane scores a goal and Rozanov smacks a kiss to his helmet and Shane catches himself grinning like he’s never scored before.

Above the rink, since unlike Shane, most people can’t stand to have walls between themselves and their soul, the dæmons who can fly are either perched in the rafters or circling the air above the ice. Shane and Marin debated having him sit on the roof of the arena, like he usually does, but in the end, Shane found a surge of bravery amongst his wells of fear.

He hasn’t played a game with Marin so close by since he was nine years old. In his professional career, he’s never been able to breathe this easily, never been able to narrow his vision like this without it hurting. He’s never not relied on the pain to help him focus on the game in front of him. It’s been fucking years since he’s felt this free on the ice.

Marin is twice the size of the second biggest bird in the air above them, and his shadow moves against the ice alongside Shane. Somehow, it’s not distracting at all. Instead, Shane finds a new comfort in his presence—a kind of comfort that he thought had been pulled violently out of him that day in the locker room as a kid.

Rozanov scores the last goal off an assist from Shane, and they collide on the ice in a celebration, and there’s a caw in the air that makes them both look up at Marin. When they look back down at each other, Rozanov grins at him, and neither of them actually say anything, but Shane thinks he’s starting to understand Rozanov completely anew.

Later, after they’ve thoroughly beaten the opposing team, Shane sits by the ocean. Marin has taken off into the sky, soaring above the sea. He’s not too far away from where Shane sits on the shore, digging his bare feet into the sand, and the pull of the bond between them barely aches in comparison to how far they’ve strayed from each other in the past. Shane can still see the outline of him between the shore and the glow of the setting sun.

He looks so free, flying above the sea. He looks like he’s where he’s meant to be, and Shane won’t begrudge him from enjoying it when he’s spent over a decade hiding in locked rooms and on high up roofs. He calls out loudly, wings outstretched in their locked position, and Shane remembers he loves him.

Shane sees the dog first, before he catches sight of Rozanov. She bounds up close to Shane, near but not touching. She seems to smile at him, and then Shane lifts his gaze to find Rozanov approaching.

When he reaches Shane, the dæmon barks once, and then runs towards the water. Rozanov doesn’t seem too upset by her running off, just huffs a small laugh at his dæmon’s behavior.

They watch her for a moment, and then Rozanov sits down in the sand. He says, quietly, “Found you.”

Shane smiles, ducking his head so that Rozanov doesn’t see. “So you were looking for me?”

“Of course not,” Rozanov says.

In the water, Rozanov’s dæmon chases after a wave, jumping into the sea and then coming back to the wet sand, and repeats the game, again and again. Shane watches her, then looks up to where Marin is circling.

“She loves the water,” Rozanov starts, something fond in his voice. “Also she is going to be impossible to dry off tonight.”

Again, Shane finds himself smiling—small, but genuine. “What’s her name? I’ve never asked.”

“Karolina,” Rozanov says. He sounds a little sad when he says it, though Shane isn’t totally sure why. “My mother’s dæmon named her after an author my mother liked. I’ve never read any of her books, but I’ve always meant to.”

Shane hums. He nods towards where his dæmon is soaring in a great arc over the sea. “His name is Marin. I have no idea why.”

That startles a small laugh out of Rozanov. “No curiosity in you, Hollander?”

Shane shrugs, and that makes Rozanov smile too. They sit in the quiet of the ocean for a moment, listening to the waves crashing against the shore. Karolina barks at a bird that’s sitting in the water. It flaps its wings almost violently, tossing saltwater around it, and then takes off into the sky.

“Oh, I looked up that word,” Rozanov says, suddenly. “Compatible.”

“What?”

Rozanov bites his lip. Stares out at the distant horizon. “Compatible. I thought I knew what it meant, but I wanted to be sure.”

“Oh.”

Rozanov takes a breath. “So you and Rose Landry are not…”

“Yeah,” Shane says, a low murmur under the wind. “Not compatible. Not in that way, anyway.”

A small, short nod. The wind is louder than their breath, as if covering all their secrets. The sun is almost down, leaving them in the privacy of a full dark. Shane watches as Marin soars up, up, up, and then comes swooping down, skidding across the water until he’s sitting prettily on the waves, bobbing with the turning of the sea. Karolina barks again, maybe watching him, maybe not.

“When do you fly out?”

Rozanov looks down at the space between them. His hand inches closer. “Early.”

“Same. Columbus.” Shane’s thumb touches his, resting gently on the back of Ilya’s hand. No one can see them here.

“Toronto,” Rozanov says quietly. He looks up, straight at the shadow of an albatross in front of the sinking sun.

Shane asks, “What room are you in?” and Rozanov tells him.

They sit there for a while longer, just enjoying each other’s presence even when there’s nothing to say. The song of the sea is doing enough talking for them both. Marin drifts amongst the gentle caress of the waves, and Karolina has finally made the plunge fully into the water. Rozanov scoffs at the sight, probably thinking of how he’s going to have to towel her off before they get back into the hotel lobby, but it’s still fond.

Rozanov is the first to get up and leave, saying something about never getting her dry anytime tonight if they don’t start heading back to his room. Shane smiles, small and private and mostly just to himself, as he watches Rozanov walk away. Karolina pads along at his side, shaking herself off every now and then and splattering him with water. He stumbles in the sand, and Shane hears his laugh glow in the twilight.

It’s not long after that when Marin joins him on the beach. He bumps his head against Shane’s shoulder, a small sign of comfort, and Shane knows he has to be brave sooner rather than later. He has Rozanov’s room number. It’s his turn now to take a leap of faith, to knock on his door and hope that Rozanov might answer.

He stops at his room door first, where he had been half debating leaving Marin inside. The albatross which is his soul is doing the bird version of scowling at him, though, and so Shane bites down on his lip hard enough that he remembers the severity of the hurt in his chest when they’re apart. The pain is a constant in his life, and he works so hard to dull it as much as he can, but he can never truly ignore it.

Even recently, when they’re close to each other, the pain lingers in him. It’s like his body doesn’t know how not to succumb to the cut of the knife, even when it’s not present. It’s milder when they’re close, but it’s always, always there.

“Fine,” Shane mutters aloud. “C’mon.”

Marin clicks at him, and they make their way up two floors to Rozanov’s room. For some reason, this walk doesn’t fill him with the usual paranoia and shame that comes with meeting Ilya Rozanov in a hotel room in secret. He’s nervous and anxious and scared and all that comes with it, but he also—right now, the guilt isn’t there, so neither is the paranoia.

When he steps into the room, Marin is right behind him. Shane can feel the tug of their bond as he sticks right at Shane’s side, and then finds himself a little spot between the bed and the wall with the window shades drawn. Karolina raises her head in interest when she sees him, and then just as quickly lays back down again on the floor by the foot of the bed.

“This looks serious,” Rozanov says, looking at him carefully.

“It’s not.” Then Shane thinks for another second. “I mean, yeah. I guess. Can you just sit down or something?”

Rozanov does not sit down, but he does shift some things around on the desk so that he can lean against it, and right now, Shane will take that. Rozanov is trying to look casual and unaffected in his posture, but he’s very clearly tense and he’s looking at Shane like he’s scared of what comes next. Shane can’t blame him for it.

Shane, sitting at the foot of the bed and leaving a good amount of distance between him and Karolina, takes a breath. “It’s not just me, right?”

“Not just you, what?”

Shane resists the urge to grit his teeth. “You feel it too, don’t you?”

Rozanov won’t look at him, staring instead at his feet like it’s the most interesting view in the world. “Feel what?”

Staring at Rozanov, Shane can feel the tension bleeding out of him and it’s making Shane even more tense than he already was. He swallows hard, trying to breathe around the anxiety in his throat.

“Last time we were together,” Shane says quietly, bravely, “it was different.”

Rozanov’s jaw tightens visibly. “What was different? That you ran away?”

“Look, I’m—” Shane cuts himself off, trying not to be as harsh as he’s sounding right now— “I’m sorry I freaked out, okay?”

“Freaked out over nothing,” Rozanov says, but it’s clear that he doesn’t believe it. He’s staring at the dæmon which is his soul, who sits nearby Shane, who lifts her head and stares back at him. He doesn’t flinch away, but his hands clutch the lip of the desk tightly.

“It wasn’t nothing,” Shane says. Rozanov doesn’t answer, and Shane scoffs. “Don’t act like that. This is hard enough without you being an asshole.”

Rozanov exhales, and it’s controlled, measured, in a way that he clearly isn’t feeling. “What do you want, Hollander? We get together, we fuck. It’s simple.”

“Simple,” Shane repeats, unable to believe him for a second. His dæmon had reached for Shane, and Shane had instinctively reached back, and Rozanov had said his name like he wanted all of that, and—and none of that is simple.

“It’s simple for me.”

“Bullshit,” Shane snaps. Rozanov finally looks up away from his dæmon, his face unreadable as he stares at Shane. A breath, and Shane can’t stand it anymore. He looks at his hands and clenches them into fists, then lets go. “I think I’m gay.”

Because he’s a fucking dick, Rozanov bursts out into laughter and Shane really doesn’t know what he expected out of this conversation, what he expected from Rozanov.

“Yeah?” Rozanov asks, an incredulous laugh still in his voice. “What makes you think that?”

“Fuck you.” Shane can’t stand the sight of him, and he never wants to look away. “You’re not gay.”

Rozanov exhales, waving a hand. “No, not completely.”

“Yeah, well,” Shane says, swallowing, hoping that drills the point in for him. “I think I am. Completely.”

“Okay!” Rozanov says, throwing his arms up. “So you’re gay, so what?”

Shane glares at him, his hands clenched into fists around the bedding he sits on. “Well it’s kind of a big deal. To me, at least. Sorry if I’m being boring again.”

Rozanov stares at him for a moment, like he can’t believe that Shane would throw that old comment back in his face now, and then he drops his head down with a frustrated groan. Shane hates him so much.

Finally, after a long moment, Rozanov straightens up and goes over to sit heavily on the bed next to Shane. Karolina shifts only just enough to allow him to be there, then settles her head on his foot. He doesn’t look over at Shane.

“Why are you telling me this?”

Because I’ve never told anybody of my own volition before. Because I don’t know what to do about it. Because I want you so badly, and it’s killing me not to tell you even when I know you don’t want to hear it. Because you have always had all of me, so I might as well give you this too. Because there is no one else in this world who I want to see me like this.

Shane says, instead of any of that, “Who else am I going to tell?”

Rozanov seems to concede that point, his head tilted just a little further down. Shane continues, unsure if Rozanov is going to stop him or not, unsure if he wants to be stopped or not. “It’s not just being gay. It’s you. It’s this.”

Possibly Rozanov’s eyes are closed. Possibly he’s trembling. Possibly Shane is making things up because he himself is shaking.

“Being gay is one thing,” Shane says, “but fucking your archrival is—is another thing.”

Rozanov exhales slowly. “That’s why it is a secret.”

Elsewhere in the room, there’s the small click of a bird that’s unhappy. Shane is well familiar with the sound. At Rozanov’s feet, Shane sees Karolina shift her weight so that she can look up at the human she is a part of. Her fur is smooth, shining a little in the dim light of the hotel room. Only one lamp is on, Shane notices, and wonders if the mood lighting has anything to do with Rozanov hoping he would come by.

“I know,” Shane says quietly. “But last time—and for the record, I am sorry about last time, okay? I’m sorry I freaked out. But—before that. It was nice.”

“It was,” Rozanov murmurs. It sounds like it’s killing him.

“It felt like we were something.” Shane is pushing this so hard, he wants this so badly, and now he’s kind of just waiting for Rozanov to break. He didn’t think he’d get this far.

Rozanov shakes his head, just once. “We can’t be something, Hollander.”

“Would you want to be if we could?”

Rozanov sounds like the words are strangling him. “We can’t.”

Looking intently at him, Shane pushes again. Waits for the cracks, for the give, for the fight or flight. “That’s not what I asked.”

“What does it fucking matter?” Rozanov snaps, and Shane feels like he can hear the breakage.

“I don’t think I can keep pretending I don’t like you anymore,” Shane says, voice hard. He’s not angry, he truly isn’t, but fuck, he wants the world to be different so badly that he might tear it all down and start it over from scratch just so that Ilya Rozanov will say he loves him back.

Rozanov flinches. “You don’t like me.”

“Yeah, I do,” Shane says, insistent.

Shaking his head, Rozanov tries for a scoff but it just comes out like a breath. “Don’t. Don’t fucking do this, Hollander.”

At their feet, Karolina sits up. Shane, every time he’s near her, finds himself surprised all over again about how big she is. She drops her head on Rozanov’s knee, looking up at him with big, watery eyes. Rozanov puts his hand on her head, tangling his fingers in the thick fur there, and takes a steadying breath.

“I wouldn’t be able to go home again.” Rozanov looks at him, and something in his expression makes Shane want to cry a little. “Ever. Do you get that?”

“Because your family?”

Rozanov throws his hand up, letting go of his dæmon. He snaps, “Because Russia! I would not be able to go back to Russia!”

At the sudden noise, Karolina lets out a short bark and both Rozanov and Shane look down at her. Carefully, slowly, Rozanov brushes a hand through the fur on her head again. That seems to settle her, and she lays down at his feet again, giving his shin a friendly bump on the way down.

“What would happen to you?” Shane asks. He feels frozen in place, staring at Rozanov.

He’s trying so hard not to let it show, but Shane can see the way his expression is beginning to crumple into something teetering on broken. He says, “I don’t want to find out,” and Shane is going to accept that answer for now, but it’s clear that Rozanov knows exactly what would happen, and he does not want to imagine it.

While thinking, almost desperately grasping at the idea, of the people in this world who would fight to protect Ilya Rozanov, Shane comes up with a very short list. “Would your parents…”

Rozanov closes his eyes. “My father is police. My brother is police.”

“And your mother?”

“Dead,” Rozanov says. His voice is flat, but still simultaneously failing in being completely emotionless.

Shane swallows. “I’m sorry.”

“I was young,” Rozanov tells him, in the way you say it when you are still grieving someone. “She was…she was very depressed, for a long time. My father thought intercision would fix it. Make all the bad emotions go away. It did not work.”

“Jesus,” Shane murmurs, sucking in a sharp breath.

Rozanov shrugs stiffly, his eyes on the ground where Karolina lies. She presses her head against his ankle, but it doesn’t seem to do enough to comfort him. Probably there is nothing that could make this better.

Intercision—the process of completely severing the bond between a human and their dæmon—is a terrifying idea, even to Shane, who has spent almost his entire life distancing himself from his dæmon. It’s a painful, cruel form of a lobotomy, one that has yet to be outlawed in most places, despite the campaigns that come and go.

“It was awful to watch,” Rozanov murmurs. “And I couldn’t forgive him for it, but now he is sick and he doesn’t even remember what he did to her.” A pause. Then he adds, as either an afterthought or a secret he does not want to share, “Or to me.”

Shane glances down at Karolina, who nuzzles her head against Rozanov’s ankle again, but doesn’t move from where she’s lying on her side on the floor. He isn’t sure he wants to hear the answer, but he thinks maybe he needs to know it.

“What did he do to you?” he asks, voice subdued. They’re pressed shoulder to shoulder, and Shane can feel how tense Rozanov’s entire body is coiled, even as he lets out a slow breath.

“He didn’t cut the bond, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Rozanov turns to Shane, then seems to think better of eye contact and drops his face down to his hands again. “After my mother died, I was…I didn’t handle it well. Karolina, um. She kept me going.”

He stops for a moment, swallowing visibly. Shane doesn’t look away from him.

After a breath, Rozanov continues. “And then my father decided that the best way to make me less…soft, and lazy, like my mother was, would be to stretch the bond so much that I couldn’t rely on a dæmon anymore. After that—after the stretching, we couldn’t talk anymore. I can still feel the tie, I still have my soul, but…she is more of a dog than a dæmon, sometimes. I think because she does not always know how else to be. She often forgets that she had ever been anything else, and I cannot tell her.”

Looking down at Karolina on the carpeted hotel room floor, Shane can’t help but feel something horrified burning in him. Horrified that she and Rozanov had gone through that, horrified that Rozanov seems almost resigned to it rather than so fucking angry at his father and so terribly hurt.

Then he looks at Rozanov, and the furrow of his brow and the laughter lines at his eyes, and Shane feels horrified, too, that this awful thing had been done to him while Shane has, this whole time, been choosing it. Marin, sitting between the bed and the wall, hidden from view, is so quiet in Shane’s head and heart that he almost starts to doubt that he’s even still there.

“I’m so sorry,” Shane tries to say, but it comes out as barely a whisper.

Rozanov shrugs a little. “There is no fixing it now. And we are okay, me and her. We can’t—we are not like other people and their dæmons anymore, but we are okay.”

“It’s still awful.”

Rozanov shrugs again, not meeting his eyes. He blinks hard, once, twice, and then averts his gaze, turning his head away from Shane and choking on a cry that he can’t pass off as anything else.

“Hey,” Shane starts, reaching for him, trying to find him and trying to love him as he deserves. “Hey.”

“Sorry,” Rozanov whispers, but his voice breaks.

Shane shakes his head, and then he crawls into Rozanov’s lap, holding his arms around Rozanov tightly. He doesn’t force eye contact, doesn’t force him to say anything more. He just holds him close, rocking back and forth.

He’s murmuring soft assurances, words so quiet that he isn’t even sure Rozanov is hearing them, but he says them anyway. “It’s okay. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

Rozanov’s arms slowly move around Shane, then hold onto him like he is the only lifeboat in a terrible storm. His face is still turned away from Shane, seemingly embarrassed by his tears but not able to stop them from falling. Shane keeps whispering softly into the crook of his neck, cradling his head.

For a long time, they just sit there at the edge of the hotel bed, holding each other and trembling. For a long time, this is all there is.

When Rozanov has cried himself dry and tired, he pulls back from Shane only slightly, not seeming to want Shane to let go of him. His eyes search for something in Shane’s face. He says again, “Sorry. Sorry, I should not—”

“No,” Shane says, gentle even in the interruption. He looks at Rozanov carefully, swallowing his desire to kiss him. “Don’t be sorry.”

Rozanov shakes his head slightly. His voice sounds somewhat wrecked. “You did not come here for this.”

“I came here for you,” Shane says. A breath, and a beat of silence. Then, “This is okay. I’m with you, Ilya.”

Rozanov stares at him for a long time. Shane’s heart pounds in his chest, almost unbearably fast, as he waits for him to say something.

Finally: “Okay, Shane,” Ilya whispers.

Then he leans forward to kiss him, and it’s so gentle, like this thing between them is fragile and Ilya is terrified that he’s going to break it. Shane presses in closer—firmer, insistent, and sure in his touch. Ilya could never break this, not when Shane needs it so badly. It only takes a moment before Ilya gives in and parts his lips, finally letting Shane show just how much he wants him.

From there to all the days after that, the world seems to just…slow down. Time seems to slow down. His heartbeat feels quieter, less frantic all of the time. Everything feels more settled, more stable. It’s like he’s been sprinting forward, desperately trying to outrun something, for years and years and years—and now he’s resting. He’s slowing his pace a little, taking life at a wander rather than a race.

He doesn’t think it’s an obvious change about him, until a few weeks after coming back from All-Stars when Hayden says, “So your dæmon’s been around more and more recently.”

They’re sitting in a hotel room in Boston with the lights already off, both of them winding down in order to get some sleep before their evening match tomorrow, and Hayden’s question catches Shane entirely off guard.

He tenses immediately, then forces himself to relax as much as he can. He shrugs. “I guess.”

“Good,” Hayden says, mostly like he’s not sure what else to think rather than because he actually thinks it’s good. Then, a little more confidently, “That’s good, Shane.”

“Yeah,” Shane murmurs. He’s sitting up in bed, staring at his phone even though he knows the screen in the dark is terrible for his sleep. But he’s texting Ilya, and he doesn’t want to say goodnight yet.

Hayden is looking at him, though; Shane can feel his eyes. He asks, “Is he going to come to the game next week? Your dæmon?”

Shane pauses in the middle of typing, instantly forgetting what he was going to say. He’s thought plenty about the home game scheduled against Boston: about how he’s going to get to see Ilya in person again, about how much he’s been looking forward to that, about all the places he wants to kiss him; and, too, about how the Metros are going to thoroughly beat the Raiders, about how Connors has been in a slump recently and they can take advantage of that, about how their starting goalie is out for the next few games at least with a sprained wrist.

He has not factored any thought about Marin into the game next week. He hadn’t even considered it to be a possibility that he might bring his dæmon into the arena with him.

But despite all the progress he’s made recently, the idea of his dæmon in such a public space filled with such an aggressive energy terrifies him. Even just the thought of anyone seeing Marin and understanding the things Shane has only just recently begun to accept makes his heart curl up in his chest and shiver.

“Probably not,” Shane says quietly. “It’ll probably be the same as usual.”

The usual means the Marin will make himself comfortable nearby but not inside the arena; either sitting on the roof or darting between the clouds and soaring in circles above it. TD Garden is near enough to the water that he might wander that way. The usual means that the painful ache in his chest and that slicing of the invisible knife will take over his body once again.

Once, this felt necessary. The pain felt like protection.

Now, Shane almost can’t stand it. Now, it hurts so much more than it ever has before.

In the dark, Shane sees the shadowy outline of Hayden nod once. He doesn’t argue, probably thinks it’s as lost a cause as it’s always been before, but for the first time, Shane almost wishes he would try one more time.

He finds time to see Ilya before the game, despite knowing that it’s a terrible idea. He says as much to Ilya, and then goes to him anyway. When Ilya lets him inside, he’s grinning, annoyingly smug that Shane had shown up despite his protests.

“I thought you said it was a terrible idea,” he says, pushing Shane up against the front door as soon as it’s closed.

Shane rolls his eyes, one hand pressed to Rozanov’s chest and the other arm slung over his shoulder. “I thought you didn’t care.”

“I don’t,” Rozanov murmurs, and then kisses him deep and filthy and desiring. Shane doesn’t hesitate to kiss him back.

The world slows down here, too, standing in the entryway of Rozanov’s apartment. Time pauses for a bit, just while they carve out this little bit of time for themselves. While they’re here—tangled up in each other, bodies pressed together, tight and sweaty, the bedsheets getting kicked to the floor—nothing outside of this bedroom matters.

And again, later, time pauses for them. The world puts itself on hold for the two of them to share it alone.

When Shane sits in the stairwell to answer Ilya’s call, there’s a window at the stair landing behind him. Outside of the window is a perfect view facing the roof of the building next door. On it, there is an albatross watching Shane through the glass.

“Maybe you could teach me Russian someday,” Shane says, keeping his voice low amongst the echo.

“Yeah, okay.” Ilya still sounds sad and exhausted, but he sounds lighter, too. “Only useful phrases.”

Shane can’t help but smile. “Like what?”

“I don’t know, like…‘harder please.’ Or, ‘yes sir.’”

“Fuck you,” Shane says, huffing a laugh.

“No, more like, ah, ‘fuck me, please.’”

Shane rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. He turns to look to the side, catching sight of the window. The albatross which is his soul is keeping careful watch over him, but for once it doesn’t feel shameful to be seen.

“How about…” Shane thinks for a moment, then closes his eyes, says, “‘I wish you were here right now?’”

A beat. Shane holds his breath. Then Ilya says something in Russian, something soft and lilting, like it might be a promise. He exhales, and he swears he can hear, outside, an albatross calling up to the sky.

The next time that Shane sees Ilya in person is brief, because not even five minutes into the game, Shane is on the ice and he’s not moving.

There’s a screaming pain in his head, like something’s been cracked open and his entire brain is spilling out, and something about his shoulder feels wrong. His eyes keep drifting shut and someone is telling him to keep them open, but he can’t seem to figure out how to do that.

There’s a knife cutting deep into his chest, too, and then someone nearby swears loudly. “Where’s his dæmon? We can’t get him into the ambulance until—”

“Tell him I’m okay,” Shane mumbles, then slurs over Ilya’s name. “He’s gonna—gonna worry.”

A hard, low voice answers him. “What—no, no, Shane, keep your eyes open for me. Where is your dæmon? We need to take you to the hospital.”

“No, ‘m okay, it’s okay,” Shane tries to say. He isn’t sure that it comes out totally right.

That low voice is starting to sound panicked, yelling out to someone who isn’t Shane. “Someone figure out where his dæmon is, now!”

Shane closes his eyes, unable to resist it anymore. Someone swears violently, and then whatever he’s lying on starts to tremble under him as he’s wheeled somewhere else. He doesn’t know what happens after that.

In his dream, he is in his youth team’s locker room again. Marin is sitting at his side in the form of a dog. He’s looking around the room, and something that Shane can’t figure out has him tense and on guard. Shane is unlacing his skates, fingers working quickly through the knot.

“What’s it like?” someone asks. “Having a male dæmon?”

Shane shrugs, but in the dream, he feels slow and lethargic as he tries to move. Like he’s stuck in molasses. His voice sounds like he’s talking underwater when he replies, “Normal, I guess.”

There’s a sharp scoff, and Shane looks up to find a kid staring down at him with his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed. “I’d hate it if Sequoia was male. It’s just weird. That’s not how it’s supposed to be.”

Shane looks down at Marin, who sits tensely next to him. He looks about thirty seconds away from baring his teeth and growling. Shane puts a hand on his head, trying to calm him because he isn’t totally sure what’s happening.

“Are we sure Shane’s dæmon isn’t secretly a girl?”

Someone laughs, the sound cruel and mocking. “Are we sure Shane isn’t secretly a girl?”

“If he’s not a girl, then he’s definitely gay,” another kid spits.

Shane opens his mouth to defend himself, and no words come out. Instead, the entire ocean comes spilling out in a rush, in a tsunami of saltwater and seaweed and sand. It floods the entire locker room, and the water level continues to rise and rise and rise. The kids around him, his former teammates, are frantically treading water, but meanwhile Shane is sitting at the bottom of the ocean of the locker room, staring blankly into the dark sea.

The dream shifts. Sunlight starts to thread through the water, illuminating the now-sunken, underwater locker room again. All of the other kids have disappeared. Shane continues to stare straight ahead, unblinking, unflinching, and then the sunlight starts to glow over his own face, warming his skin. He tilts his head up to the surface.

“You look pretty,” someone says, and Shane would know that voice, those words, anywhere.

Shane finally blinks, and when his eyes open again, Ilya Rozanov sits next to him. On his other side, the great Newfoundland dog pants loudly, apparently unbothered by the water surrounding all of them.

“He’s very pretty too,” Ilya says, nodding towards the ground by Shane’s feet. Shane doesn’t look, not yet, because there is a paranoid, sick feeling in his chest that says he does not want to see what Ilya is looking at. “Like you are.”

“Ilya,” Shane says. His words bubble under the water.

Ilya waves a hand, motioning towards the ground again. “It feels like a knife, yes?”

“What does?” Shane asks. Everything feels like a knife to him.

Ilya’s gaze softens a little, in the way that Shane has only recently begun to be allowed to see. He points to the ground, and Shane finally forces himself to look. Wrenching his gaze away from Ilya, Shane turns his gaze downwards.

There, on the ground, an albatross. An arrow through his chest. He’s breathing pained, labored breaths, wings splayed out around him, and Shane knows instantly that he is going to die. Blood blooms over the white plumage, staining the snowy feathers with a dark, crimson red. The albatross looks up at him with glassy eyes, as if to apologize for something, and Shane’s soul lurches out of his body.

With a terrified gasp, he breathes in the entire ocean, and then he wakes up.

In the hospital, they tell him that he’s been given a lot of drugs, so it’s normal if he’s feeling a little disoriented. They tell him he has a concussion and that he fractured his collarbone. Then they say that he got lucky.

Shane processes all of this information slowly, chewing it over before he thinks he really understands it. Mostly, he keeps his eyes on the albatross who sits at the foot of his bed. Part of him wonders if none of the nurses can see him, like maybe Marin has suddenly gained the power of invisibility. Part of him wonders if laws about patient confidentiality extend to dæmons. Most of him is too tired and too drugged up to care right now.

Early on into his being conscious again, Hayden stops by. He looks exhausted, like he’s been sleeping as well as Shane has been; which is to say, not at all.

“Never scare me like that again,” Hayden says, voice rough. “Jesus Christ, Shane. We were so worried.”

Shane smiles, a little moved that they care so much. “Sorry.”

Hayden nods tightly, and accepts the apology without much protest. “I, uh. How much do you remember?”

“I had the puck, wasn’t looking ahead. Got hit.” Shane stops there. Thinks for another moment. “That’s about it. Did we win?”

“Okay,” Hayden says quietly. Then, “Yeah, we won. Helped that Rozanov seemed freaked the fuck out, because he ended up benched for most of the game. But I mean, God, we were all freaked. No one was playing well. It was mostly luck that Gagnon got a goal in, honestly.”

Shane swallows. “Has anyone told him I’m okay?”

“Gagnon? Sure, the team chat’s been kept updated, and the coaches told us what they knew as soon as they knew it.”

“No,” Shane says, voice going small. “Rozanov, I mean. Does he know I’m okay?”

Hayden frowns at him. “I have no idea. Does it matter?”

“Yes, it matters,” Shane snaps, more harshly than he means. Then it hits him, what he’s implying, and he kind of just deflates. “Sorry. No. Um.”

“Okay,” Hayden says slowly. He stares at Shane for a long moment. “Shane, if there’s…if there’s someone you want me to contact for you, I can.”

Shane probably sounds as miserable as he feels when he murmurs, “No. It’s…no.”

Hayden lets that sit between them for a long moment, like he’s waiting for Shane to change his mind. When Shane doesn’t say anything else, he just kind of sighs. Then his eyes dart to Marin. “There’s, uh. Something else you should know.”

“What is it?”

“They couldn’t take you to the hospital until they found your dæmon,” Hayden says quietly. “They didn’t want you to be too far away from each other.”

Shane frowns, brow furrowing as he tries to figure out why Hayden is being so cagey about this. It makes sense to him. “Okay?”

“It took them a minute to find him,” Hayden continues. He turns away from Marin and back to Shane. “It was, uh. A fan who was running late to the game found him on the street outside of the arena. Seems like when you went down, he fell, too.”

“Oh,” Shane whispers, suddenly feeling kind of faint. He looks to the foot of the bed, where the giant bird is tucked into himself and sleeping peacefully. He doesn’t look too hurt, physically, at least.

Hayden sighs heavily. “No one can really confirm anything, and it all was such a rush of confusion, just trying to get you both out of there, but—but there are some rumors going around. About your dæmon being, um. Male. Most people are saying that it’s just stupid gossip, but…not everyone.”

Shane closes his eyes. Tries to remember how to breathe, and tastes saltwater instead. He says, “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” Shane repeats. He opens his eyes. “Okay.”

Hayden looks at him for a long moment as if Shane is a puzzle made up of only one solid color, the kind of puzzle that he doesn’t know how to begin to solve. Then he nods sharply. “Okay. Well, uh. I have to run, but I have a card from Jackie and the kids. I’ll just leave it with you. Get some rest.”

“Thanks, Hayden.” Shane closes his eyes again, assuming that Hayden leaves the card on the bedside table.

It’s not long before he falls back asleep, and this time, he doesn’t dream at all.

Only a few hours after the next time he wakes up, Ilya finally comes into the room. He closes the door behind him quickly and quietly, like he’s scared that someone is chasing him. It brings back soft memories. Ilya lifts his head to see Shane, and he looks wrecked.

Shane says his name, drawing it out, awed all over again by the privilege of being able to say it. Ilya doesn’t look any comforted by it. At his side, Karolina nudges his thigh gently.

“I, um.” He pauses. “I just wanted to—are you okay?”

Shane nods his head, a little roll of a motion. “Concussion and a fractured collarbone. Out for the playoffs, but…could have been worse.”

Ilya swallows. “Marleau feels terrible. He did not mean to hurt you.”

“I know,” Shane promises. A small smile still lingers. “Part of the game. We all get our bell rung eventually, right?”

“Right,” Ilya says, but sounds like it’s killing him to say it.

Not able to stand that, Shane reaches a hand out to him, beckoning him closer. Ilya is breaking, and so Shane wants to hold him. This is a new thing, but it is a good one, he’s pretty sure. “Hey, hey.”

He motions again for Ilya to come over, and he finally does, hushing him softly as Karolina pads over silently. Shane smiles; closes his eyes. “Yes—better.”

“You scared me,” Ilya says quietly, after a moment.

Shane opens his eyes at that. He’s genuinely sorry when he says, “I’m sorry I didn’t text you last night.”

Ilya is stroking the back of Shane’s hand with his thumb. It’s so soothing that Shane wants to fall back asleep again.

“No, it’s okay,” Ilya says, trying to assure him of something.

Shane hums. “I was excited about last night. I’m mostly mad at Marleau for fucking that up.”

“He feels really bad.”

“You know,” Shane starts, feeling brave with the way Ilya is rubbing his hand so softly. “I had a whole plan to ask you something.”

Ilya shakes his head slightly, like he doesn’t want to hear it or just isn’t ready. “Maybe it’s better if you just rest now.”

Shane barrels through that, and says, “I was gonna ask you—”

“Hollander…” Ilya trails off at the end of the name, almost sounding worried about what he might say after it.

“Will you come to my cottage this summer?” Shane asks. He’s smiling, though Ilya still looks so grave. “Don’t go to Russia. Come to my house. We’ll have so much fun. It’s so private, no one will know.”

Ilya stares at him for a moment, and something breaks in him. Shane can see it happen in real time, can see the way his hope rises, and the way reality cuts back into it with a knife. “Hollander, you know we can’t do that.”

“We could have a week or even two,” Shane says, because apparently he wants to feel the knife too. “We’d be completely alone. Together.”

And just before the door opens, just before Ilya wrenches his hand out of Shane’s loose grip, he says, quietly, “Maybe. Maybe.”

But then the door is opening for a nurse and he is tearing his hand away and he is saying nothing hopeful at all anymore. He and his dæmon leave the same way they came: quietly and hurried, as if they believe they are unwanted.

Shane thinks about that conversation a lot through the rest of his hospital stay, and then afterwards when he goes to stay with his parents.

He thinks about how weary Ilya had looked, how scared and stressed he had been. He thinks about how no one thought to tell him about Shane being okay, because why would they? He thinks about how Karolina had looked just slightly more ragged than her usual pristine form. He thinks about how Ilya had held his hand, loose and gentle and comforting. He thinks about how Ilya had said, Maybe.

He’s under no illusions of hope that maybe will mean yes. He knows why Ilya is so afraid, because he’s afraid too. He knows why Ilya might not want to accept his offer, and about how all of those reasons outnumber the reasons he would want to take this risk.

Once he’s allowed back on screens for short periods of time, Shane starts scrolling through Twitter. He doesn’t have to try very hard to find where the rumors Hayden spoke about are circulating.

It’s mostly speculation and gossip. No one got any pictures of Marin and no one from the hospital gave up the secret. Some people that knew Shane as a kid have made statements confirming the truth, but they’ve mostly been dismissed as clout-seeking comments. Shane hasn’t made a statement about it and no one has real evidence other than conjecture and word-of-mouth, so this time, he gets away with it.

He knows that he will not always be so lucky. Marin wandered free during All-Stars, can be commonly seen around the Montreal skies when the Metros are in town, and isn’t actually all that far away from Shane at the end of the day. He’s out of his natural habitat and he’s easy to spot on a clear day. Surely some stranger interested in birding will eventually identify him as male, and surely some fan will eventually identify this specific albatross as Shane’s dæmon.

But for now—for now, life continues on as if nothing had happened. The dream he had on that first night in the hospital comes back to him often now, always mixed in with nightmares of Marleau crashing into him and the ice hurtling towards his face.

He doesn’t mention either of these things to Ilya. They have both, somehow, found the bravery to keep talking as much as they can afford to before they break their own hearts. It’s not much—it’s random texts throughout the day, it’s brief video calls at night in dark rooms, it’s quiet longing on short phone calls—but Shane takes it all hungrily.

It’s all that either of them can give and take right now. It’s all that they can have.

Until Scott Hunter blows up every limitation Shane has ever believed to chain them all. Until Hunter wins the Stanley Cup and then he makes an even bigger statement. Until Hunter, in one swift fell move, takes the unspoken social rules of the league into his hands and he breaks every one of them. Until Scott Hunter kisses a man on center ice as if it is simply a dream coming true and not the changing of the entire world.

Shane doesn’t know if it’s going to be a good change, if it’s going to be a real change, or if this is going to backfire and crash apart and take every gay player burning down with it, but—but he knows something is beginning.

He knows that Ilya is calling him, and he’s saying, “I’m coming to the cottage,” and everything Shane wants is bursting into technicolor.

Having Ilya at the cottage—inviting him into the most private, sacred, safe place that Shane has ever been able to call his own—is terrifying, in some ways. In other ways, Ilya steps inside and he gazes out all of the windows and Shane watches him take it all in, and it feels right. It feels perfect. It feels like everything that Shane has wanted for years and years and years.

Usually, Shane feels weird about having other people in his space—rarely does he even host people at his apartment in Montreal. But here, Ilya makes himself at home, and Shane actually wants him to. Getting to see Ilya settle into the cottage is like getting to see Ilya settle into his life.

Marin loves sitting on the water or soaring over the acres of land while Shane and Ilya go on hikes, and Karolina seems to be overjoyed to chase after the butterflies and rabbits in the yard. They both—Ilya and his dæmon—fit perfectly here. Shane and Marin fit perfectly alongside them.

One evening, Shane and Ilya sit and watch Karolina bound around the grass while they eat their dinner, laughing when a butterfly lands on her nose and surprises her so badly that she sneezes. At the sound of Ilya’s laugh, she comes running back to the table on the patio. Instead of going to Ilya, though, she comes to a stop right in front of Shane. Then she looks at him expectantly, waiting for something.

Shane looks between the dæmon and Ilya. Ilya is watching him, chewing at his lip absentmindedly. He says, sounding a little unsure, “Is okay. You can touch, if you want.”

“Are you sure?” Shane asks. His heart is suddenly so loud in his chest that he thinks Ilya can probably hear it too.

Ilya gives him a short nod, leaning back in his chair with his eyes focused on Shane. “Like I said in Tampa. She knows better how to be a dog than a dæmon, most of the time.”

She’s kind of drooling everywhere, which Shane doesn’t know how to feel about, but she looks up at Shane like she’s smiling, and he caves. He reaches for her tentatively, giving her so much time to move away from his hand, but she just sits patiently in front of him and waits. It’s as if she’s waiting for him to be ready more than like she is preparing herself for it.

Carefully, Shane puts his hand on top of her head. Her fur is so soft under his hand, and thick and well-groomed. He scratches his fingers gently against her, and she closes her eyes. Next to Shane at the table, Ilya sucks in a sharp breath.

With that sound, Shane pulls away—it seems to have been enough to have made Karolina happy though, because she opens her eyes again and then trots happily back to Ilya. She puts her head on his thigh, and he strokes through the fur at her head gently.

When Ilya speaks again, it’s quiet. “She likes you.”

Shane studies him carefully, waiting, sensing that there’s more to the statement than that. It takes a long moment before Ilya continues. He keeps his voice lowered, like this is a night of secret-telling, but his eyes are steady on Shane’s face, searching for something.

He says, softly, “I like you.”

A breath. A beat. The call of an albatross above them. Karolina, next to Ilya, chasing after the sound and then bounding back. Ilya’s hand in her fur, the memory of Shane’s touch probably lingering with them all.

Shane tells him, honestly, “I like you, too.”

The words make Ilya break into a smile that he quickly fails to bite back and hide. He ducks his face away, looking back down to Karolina at his side. Shane wonders what it feels like—their bond—when it has been stretched to the point of not being able to connect with each other. Ilya had said he can still feel her, but if she’s not in his head, Shane isn’t totally sure what that means.

He himself can still feel Marin at all times, even when they’re holding themselves apart. He can still feel the bond pulling taut between them; he can always feel the knife.

When they’re so close by, too, he can feel the bond. When they’re near each other, though, like they are now, Shane can feel him like a second pulse. In the great wide sky of forever that arches above them, Shane can see him now, circling, and the feeling tugs in his chest.

Marin soars even higher as Shane watches, and then he lets his gaze fall to look at Ilya. It feels like they’re home, together.

On their last night of their summer, he and Ilya go out to the backyard with a blanket, which they spread out on the grass, and then they lay down. Ilya is a little quiet, but it’s been a long, beautiful day, despite the future looming over them, and so Shane doesn’t really think much of it.

Instead, they just lie there without talking, staring up at the twilight sky. It’s still blue all above them, dusted with darkness; beautiful watercolors of a sunset are beginning to reach over the horizon as the sun melts away.

Shane closes his eyes at some point, just focuses on the sound of his heartbeat and Ilya’s breaths beside him. There’s a soft nudge of something cold against the underside of his jaw, and Shane smiles to himself without opening his eyes.

“We’re safe here,” Marin says softly in Shane’s head.

Shane breathes out slowly. Silently, he tells Marin, “Yeah. We’re safe.”

The cold press of his bill to Shane’s skin pulls away, and Shane opens his eyes. Marin stares at him for a long moment like he knows something that Shane doesn’t, and then Shane sees his strangely human-like eyes shift to Shane’s other side.

Turning his head, Shane finds Ilya staring at him. He smiles a little when Shane catches his eye. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Shane whispers.

Ilya’s smile turns just that much softer, and Shane feels him lock their pinkies together. “I’m glad I came here.”

“Me too,” Shane says. He looks back up at the sky, where a scattering of stars are starting to glitter in the absence of sunlight. “And I’m not so terrified anymore.”

“Me neither.” Ilya breathes out audibly, slowly.

Something about the repetitive steadiness of breathing sets Shane at ease. For a moment, he lets himself revel in the feeling of Ilya’s pinky hooked around his own, like a promise, maybe. He turns to his other side again.

Marin looks at him and tilts his head. Offers him a short trill, then opens his beak up to the sky and calls out as if it is the first time he has ever been allowed to make a noise. Maybe it’s the first time that he’s really felt free enough to. He beats his wings, and then he’s taking off.

Sitting up, Shane watches him soar into the oncoming wind over the lake. In the grass in front of them, Karolina lets out a low, excited howl and takes off towards the water, barely more than a shadow in the dark.

Ilya sits up too, then, and shifts so that their hands are intertwined, not just their two fingers. He’s watching their two dæmons too, a gentleness written over his whole face. After a moment, Ilya looks back to Shane again, and lifts their clasped hands to his lips.

“I love you,” Ilya murmurs, soft and honest. There is no fear and it takes no hesitation for Shane to say it back.

Now finding himself smiling, Shane tilts his face up to the lightest glow left in the sky. Marin calls out again; Shane’s beautiful, brave seabird coasting freely over the mirror of a lake at dusk.

And here, like this, with love, Shane is finally and entirely flying.