Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories:

Gen, M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid, Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Ilya Rozanov & Svetlana Vetrova

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Svetlana Vetrova, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Ottawa Centaurs Team Ensemble (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Queer Families, Unconventional Families, IVF Pregnancy, Gay Shane Hollander, Bisexual Ilya Rozanov, Aromantic Svetlana Vetrova, Queerplatonic Relationships

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-12 Updated: 2026-05-22 Words: 19,815 Chapters: 3/?

As Alive as You Need Me to Be

Summary

There are probably easier ways to tell your best friends you want to stay than offering to have their child, but Svetlana has never been particularly good at subtlety.

Chapter 1: Summer People

Chapter Notes

This is a combination of both book canon and tv show canon, with the events of TLG and Svetlana's character in the show.

The Centaurs facility was disgusting in June.

Too cold inside. Too humid outside. Everybody carrying iced coffees that sweated through paper napkins and left wet rings on every flat surface. The whole building smelled faintly like wet pavement, stale gear, and industrial laundry detergent.

Players drifted through the halls in various stages of offseason decay. Expensive sneakers. Loose ties. Training shirts. Somebody had abandoned half a protein shake on top of the trophy case.

From somewhere deeper in the facility, Dykstra's country music blasted loud enough to rattle the walls.

Nobody had stopped him yet.

Ilya sat outside coach Wiebe's office with his jacket folded beside him and his tie hanging loose around his neck. One leg bounced restlessly under the chair.

Across from him, one of the new rookie defensemen sat ramrod straight with both hands clasped between his knees like he was waiting to be sentenced.

Poor kid looked terrified.

Ilya watched him for a second, then sighed dramatically.

"You look like they're about to execute you."

The rookie blinked. "What?"

"The interview," Ilya said. "Relax. They only kill one rookie every summer."

The kid stared at him in genuine horror.

Before Ilya could make it worse, Wiebe opened the office door.

"Rozanov."

Ilya pushed himself upright with a groan. "If this meeting is about leadership again, I quit hockey."

Wiebe snorted. "You say that every year."

"One day I mean it."

"You absolutely do not."

The office was too warm.

The GM had his suit jacket off already, sleeves rolled to the elbows. Somebody had opened a window even though it barely helped. Papers everywhere. Scouting reports. Development camp schedules. Trade speculation written on a whiteboard in messy marker.

Hockey never stopped. That was the problem.

Even after losing the Stanley Cup Final, the machine just kept moving.

The GM leaned back in his chair. "You should be proud of what this group accomplished."

Ilya nodded automatically.

"We're building something sustainable here," the GM continued. "The league sees Ottawa differently now."

There it was.

Always that.

The future. The next step. Next season.

Never: you lost.

Wiebe sat beside him, calmer as always. Legs stretched out slightly, coffee balanced on one knee.

"You doing okay?" he asked eventually.

It was quiet enough that Ilya actually looked at him.

"Yeah."

A lie.

Not a huge one. Just enough.

Because the truth was worse: he still woke up thinking about Game Six. The missed chances. The overtime goal. Shane sitting silent beside him on the flight home.

The GM kept talking.

"You and Shane are basically the face of the league now."

Ilya nearly threw himself through the window.

Instead he rubbed both hands down his face hard enough to hurt.

"Cool," he muttered.

By the time the meeting finally ended, his shoulders felt heavy enough to drag on the floor.

The hallway outside buzzed louder now. Staff weaving around each other. Players lingering because nobody really wanted to admit the season was fully over yet.

Somewhere nearby, Zane Boodram was arguing loudly on speakerphone.

"No, babe, listen to me. Pineapple on barbecue works if you char it first."

Then he said, "You are being close-minded right now."

He walked past carrying two iced coffees and pointed one tattooed arm at Ilya.

"You look rough."

"Thank you."

"You need electrolytes."

"You need to shut up."

Zane grinned. "Love you too."

Then he disappeared down the hall, still passionately defending grilled fruit.

At the far end of the corridor, near the windows overlooking the practice rink, Shane stood beside Svetlana.

Ilya spotted them instantly.

Like muscle memory.

Shane leaned against the glass in grey training clothes, one ankle crossed over the other. Coffee in one hand. Phone in the other. Calm posture. Quiet face.

Too quiet.

Post-Finals quiet.

Beside him, Svetlana stood with her tablet, talking to one of the hockey ops assistants. Big gold hoops. Cream blouse rolled at the sleeves. Dark curls piled messily on top of her head.

"Move media availability to Friday," she was saying. "Half these rookies skate like newborn horses already. If they lose a recovery day, their edgework is dead by Saturday."

The assistant nodded immediately. "Okay."

Nobody argued with Svetlana when she got that tone. Mostly because she was usually right, and partly because she had a way of looking at people that made them feel like they'd already lost the argument before it started.

Shane looked up first as Ilya approached.

The change in his expression was small. Still obvious. His shoulders loosened a little, his mouth softening faintly.

Without a word, he held out his iced coffee.

Ilya took it automatically and drank half of it in one go.

Shane watched him. "Jesus Christ."

"I'm dying."

"You said that yesterday too."

"I died again."

That earned the smallest twitch at the corner of Shane's mouth.

Svetlana finally looked up from her tablet.

She did the thing she always did: a fast structural assessment, checking for actual damage before deciding whether to be sympathetic or brutal about it.

"Your collar is catastrophic," she said in Russian.

Ilya looked down vaguely. "What?"

"You look like a nightclub owner who just got divorced and is not handling it with dignity."

"Hot divorced nightclub owner?"

"Medium. Maybe he owns one club. Small club. Bad lighting."

"You are so cruel to me."

"I am accurate." She was already reaching for his collar with the same brisk efficiency she'd used on him at twenty-two, fixing him up in the back of a taxi on the way to some Moscow party while he complained and she told him to hold still. Fast fingers. No patience for fussing. "You always dress like this when you're in your head."

"I'm not in my head."

"You've been in your head since Game Six, Ilyushka." She smoothed the collar flat and stepped back. "Better. Still sad, but presentable sad."

Ilya stayed still for it the way he always had. Then, because he was exhausted and because these were his people, he leaned sideways against her shoulder for a second.

Just briefly.

Warm skin. Familiar perfume. Easy.

His hip bumped lightly against Shane's at the same time.

Shane didn't move away either.

Across the hall, the rookie defenseman stared openly.

Ilya noticed immediately. "What?"

The rookie flushed. "Nothing. Sorry. I just..."

"He's trying to figure us out," Ilya said helpfully.

"There is nothing to figure out," Svetlana said. "We are Russian. We share things. Very socialist."

The rookie looked more confused than before, which was impressive.

From behind them, Wiebe barked out a laugh while passing with a coffee.

"You get used to it," he told the rookie.

"I genuinely don't think I will."

That finally made Shane laugh quietly into his coffee.

Small sound. Barely there.

Still enough that Ilya looked at him instantly, his whole face softening on reflex.

Svetlana watched it happen, the way it always happened: fast and helpless and completely obvious. She felt something move in her chest that she didn't have a clean word for.

Not envy. Not longing.

Something more like standing outside a lit window on a warm night. Comfortable where she was, but still aware she was watching it from the edge.

She looked back at her tablet.

The apartment smelled like lemon cleaner, takeout containers, and black tea.

Real Russian tea. Strong enough to wake the dead. Svetlana had brought it back from Moscow in bulk because Canadian tea tasted like hot water that had heard rumors about flavor once.

Anya was already stationed by the door like she had been appointed security. Nobody knew what she was guarding, but she took it very seriously.

Outside, Ottawa sat heavy with June heat, the sky still bright gold even though it was past eight. The windows over the living room were cracked slightly, letting warm air drift in against the AC.

The kitchen island had disappeared under camp paperwork. Schedules. Sponsor packets. Medical forms. Budget projections. Three separate spreadsheets Shane had color coded within an inch of their lives.

Svetlana sat barefoot on one of the counter stools in an old grey Team Russia hoodie and tiny black shorts, one leg tucked underneath her. Her curls were piled messily on top of her head. She had one ankle hooked behind Shane's calf absentmindedly while she read through emails, which he tolerated with the resignation of someone who had stopped noticing it weeks ago.

The guest room down the hall had basically become hers by accident over the last year. First a drawer. Then her hair products in the bathroom. Then shoes by the door. Then Shane asking if she wanted them to buy a better mattress for her room, which she'd agreed to immediately because the old one felt like rocks.

She hadn't examined the accumulation too closely. Some things were easier not to look at directly.

Shane stood at the counter pouring tea into three glasses held in silver podstakanniks her father had gifted her years ago. He had learned how to do it properly after Ilya made him watch three YouTube videos about tea culture. He'd taken notes. Of course he had.

Ilya watched him from the couch, sprawled diagonally across it.

"You make tea like grandmother."

Shane glanced over. "You complained the last time I microwaved water."

"Because that is disgusting."

"It's efficient."

Svetlana looked up immediately. "Don't defend it. I'm serious."

"I'm not defending it."

"You were almost."

"I really wasn't."

Ilya pointed from the couch. "Guilty face."

Shane rolled his eyes and carried the tea over. Ilya took his immediately, wrapping both hands around the hot glass. Shane sat back down beside Svetlana at the island, already opening his laptop. She shifted her ankle from his calf to hook over his knee instead without looking up from her screen. He didn't react.

"They've confirmed the hotel block," he said.

"Good." Svetlana pulled up her email. "Bauer approved the revised sponsorship package too." She stopped and stared at her screen. "Oh, for the love of God."

"What?"

She turned the laptop slightly so he could read it.

‘A more traditional family-friendly branding angle.’

She'd gotten that note before, in various forms, from various people, her entire adult life. A man at twenty four who'd introduced her as "basically my girlfriend, she just doesn't know it yet" at a dinner party and then looked genuinely confused when she'd left early and not answered his calls for a week. A well meaning aunt who kept sending articles about women who "found the one later in life." The smile people got when she said she wasn't seeing anyone. Patient, pitying, like she was describing a temporary condition.

Traditional. Right.

She closed the email.

"Less talking about mental health," she said. "More smiling children in matching hats."

"We are literally married gay hockey players," Ilya said from the couch.

"I know."

"What family are they imagining?" Shane asked.

"A tidier one." She picked up her pen. "I'll handle it."

Nobody asked how. That was a question you learned not to ask Svetlana.

"I hate sponsors," Ilya announced.

"You hate answering emails," Shane said.

"Emails are fake communication."

"You sent me three this morning."

"Mine were important."

"One was a YouTube link."

"Tactical analysis."

"It was a dog on a skateboard."

Svetlana didn't look up. "The dog had good posture."

"Thank you."

"Thats still not tactical analysis." She added. 

"You are both against me."

Shane's mouth twitched slightly.

Tiny smile. Enough.

Ilya's face did the thing it always did when Shane smiled. It softened immediately, helplessly, like he couldn't stop it if he tried. Svetlana felt the familiar warmth of watching it, followed by the thing underneath the warmth she was less comfortable with.

On the counter between them sat the newest Irina Foundation proposal packet. Mental Health & Athlete Wellness Panels Included.

That part always made the room quieter for a second.

The camp had gotten huge now. Registration vanished instantly. Kids flew in from everywhere. Agents called. Parents emailed essays.

But the mental health programming stayed. Always. Ilya had fought hard for that. He had sat in rooms with people who thought he was being dramatic and hadn't screamed at a single one of them, which Svetlana considered one of his more impressive achievements. She had watched him do it. She had edited his talking points at midnight and said nothing about the way his jaw went tight whenever someone used the word distraction.

Shane scrolled through a spreadsheet. "We need to finalize scholarship spots."

Ilya sat up. "How many applications?"

"Thirty two."

"Take all of them."

"Ilya."

"No kid gets turned away because of money."

"We're not turning them away. I'm saying we need to balance the budget."

Svetlana glanced between them. This conversation happened a few times. It always resolved the same way. She had stopped trying to shortcut it.

"CCM can increase the travel fund," she said. "Harris mentioned another sponsor."

Ilya nodded immediately. Shane sighed and typed it in.

A beat passed. Keyboards clicked softly.

"You called the NHL a bunch of old men terrified of change on national television," Shane said.

"Because it is."

"You cannot say that in sponsor interviews."

"I keep getting invited back."

"Because you're famous, not because it was appropriate."

"Same thing."

Svetlana laughed into her tea.

The Ottawa rink complex smelled like sharpened skate blades, melted ice, and cafeteria pizza by noon.

Fifty kids in matching grey camp polos made the building feel loud in a different way than NHL arenas did. Less tense. More chaotic. Sneakers squeaking. Water bottles abandoned everywhere. Somebody laughing hard enough to hiccup near the vending machines.

The camp ran like a real organization now. Separate locker rooms by age group. Printed schedules on every wall. Training blocks color coded by Shane down to the minute.

MONDAY: FORWARDS SKATING

TUESDAY: TRANSITION PLAY

WEDNESDAY: SMALL AREA GAMES

Shane had spent half of May on the spreadsheets. Ilya had provided creative input, which mostly meant distracting him and trying to personally adopt every sad looking scholarship applicant.

The younger forwards were on Rink B. Ilya's decision, obviously.

"You like tiny children because they worship you."

"They understand greatness."

"Or you bribe them with Gatorade."

"Leadership strategy."

Now he was on the ice with twelve kids between eight and eleven, weaving through cones while they chased him like ducklings.

"Head up, Teddy bear!" Ilya shouted, skating backwards. "If you stare at puck the whole time you die."

One little girl gasped.

Max Riley, running the next drill over, snorted loud enough to echo. "You cannot tell children they'll die."

"I motivate."

"You traumatize."

Ilya ignored him. "Okay! Again! Faster babies. You are all NHL superstars. Very expensive contracts."

A ripple of giggles spread across the ice.

The little kids loved him. Not because he was gentle. Shane was gentler. They loved him because Ilya treated every small success like overtime in Game Seven. A clean pass got dramatic screaming. A good shot got him dropping to his knees pretending to weep over their talent.

One little boy nearly fell on a backward pivot and looked devastated.

Ilya skated over instantly. "Hey. Hey." He crouched to eye level. "You know how many times NHL players fall?"

The kid sniffed. "How many?"

"Constantly. Shane falls all the time."

Across the ice, Shane looked up from the older teen group immediately. "I absolutely do not."

Ilya pointed at him. "Propaganda."

The teenagers laughed.

That group was different. Fourteen to seventeen. Serious faces. Junior prospects already calculating scouting reports and draft rankings and whether one bad camp could ruin everything.

Shane was better with that age group. Calmer. Less overwhelming.

He stood near the boards explaining skating posture to a nervous fifteen year old whose shoulders had climbed up near his ears.

"You're too tense."

"I know."

"Physically tense." He adjusted the kid's elbow carefully. "Relax your upper body."

The teenager nodded.

Shane demonstrated smooth edges, controlled posture, economical movement.

"Again."

The kid tried it.

Better.

Shane nodded once. "There you go."

That tiny bit of praise made the kid light up like a contract.

Near the benches, Svetlana sat with two clipboards balanced on her knee while three different people needed things from her at once. Revised lunch numbers. Late equipment shipment. Scheduling conflict Thursday.

She handled all of it without looking up from the sponsorship packet she was annotating in red pen, with a level of aggression that had become a camp tradition.

A teenager from the older defense group hovered nearby.

"You're pacing," she said without looking up.

He stopped. "Sorry."

"You want something."

A pause.

"How do you know if juniors are actually interested in you?"

She looked up.

He was sixteen, maybe. He had the familiar posture of a kid who'd been told he had potential so many times it had stopped meaning anything. Waiting to be seen accurately instead of just encouragingly.

"You ask good questions in interviews?" she said.

"Yeah."

"You talk to scouts after games?"

"Sometimes."

"Then they're interested. Scouts don't make small talk with players they've written off. It's boring and they're lazy."

He almost smiled. "That's it?"

"That's it." She held his gaze for a second. "You don't need to be an NHL player at sixteen. You need to become one at twenty two. The kids who burn out trying to skip that part..." She shook her head. "Don't be that."

He nodded slowly.

Then, because she couldn't entirely help it, she added, "Your crossovers out of the corner are weak. Work on that."

He blinked. "I thought you weren't a coach."

"I'm not. I just watch too much hockey and have opinions about everything." She went back to her paperwork. "Go."

He went.

By lunchtime the rink dissolved into noise.

Ilya came off the ice last, helmet under one arm, younger forwards still trailing him.

"Seriously," one kid insisted, "who hits harder, you or Coach Pike?"

"Pike," Ilya admitted. "But he is ugly, so."

From down the hall, Hayden Pike yelled, "I can still hear you, asshole."

"Good!"

The kids laughed.

One tiny blond boy bumped into Ilya's leg trying to keep up.

"Sorry, Dad..."

Silence.

The kid froze. Absolute terror spread across his face. "Oh my God. I mean Coach Rozanov. I didn't mean..."

He looked seconds from crying.

Ilya crouched down in front of him before the panic could spiral. "Hey. Hey, sweetheart. It's okay."

The kid blinked hard.

"You didn't do anything wrong."

"I'm sorry..."

"No." Two fingers rested lightly against the side of his helmet. "No apologizing. You're good."

Svetlana stood a few feet away.

She watched Ilya crouched, voice low and completely unguarded. That specific gentleness only ever appeared when he wasn't thinking about it. Something pressed against her sternum and stayed there.

There had been a woman in Boston years ago who'd told her very calmly that dating Svetlana felt like being cared for by someone who always had one hand on the door. Svetlana had laughed. It had taken her three months to stop thinking about it, and another year to stop waiting to feel differently than she did.

The little boy laughed. Ilya stood and slung an arm around his shoulders, steering him toward lunch.

When they started walking again, Ilya glanced back once.

Shane was still watching him. Quiet. Warm. Completely gone.

Svetlana had already turned back to her clipboard.

She needed a minute.

Because she didn't. Had never wanted it, and had stopped waiting for the wanting to arrive sometime around twenty five. Sometimes she still didn't know what to do with that.

The apartment was wrecked by the end of camp week.

Not dirty exactly. Just lived-in to death.

Half the counter buried under Gatorade bottles, Sharpies, camp schedules, and unopened mail. Somebody's hoodie over a dining chair. Damp towels in the laundry room from kids getting shoved into the rink fountains after the final scrimmage.

Outside, rain hammered the windows in thick summer sheets.

Ottawa thunderstorms always felt aggressive.

The air still smelled like melted ice and rink rubber. Nobody had changed out of sweatpants. Nobody had cooked. Thai takeout spread across the floor instead.

Svetlana sat cross-legged with a carton of noodles in her lap, dark curls frizzing slightly from humidity. Shane leaned against the couch with a beer. Ilya was flat on the hardwood with one sock half-off like he'd collapsed mid-motion and never recovered.Anya was on the couch, occupying exactly 80% of it despite being the size of a small inconvenience

The TV played some terrible reality show at low volume.

Nobody was watching it.

Camp always left them like this. Wrung out in a way that had nothing to do with skating, it was the sixteen-year-olds who'd quietly asked hard questions after panels, the scholarship kids who'd looked stunned when nobody told them to stop talking about their anxiety, the ones who'd just needed someone to say you're good and mean it.

"I think one of the kids called me sir today," Shane said.

"You are deeply thirty," Svetlana replied.

"I'm thirty-two."

"In hockey years," Ilya mumbled from the floor, "you should be put down gently in forest."

Shane nudged his leg with one foot. "You threw out your back reaching for your phone yesterday."

"Couch is too low."

"That's an old person sentence."

"It was aggressive couch."

"The couch is fine."

Svetlana pointed a chopstick at him without looking up. "You've complained about that couch since fall. Get a new one."

"Last time we picked a couch it took six months."

Svetlana snorted softly. She reached over and stole a dumpling off Shane's container without asking. He moved it slightly closer to her in response without looking up.

Thunder cracked close enough to rattle the balcony glass.

For a minute nobody talked.

Just rain outside. The low hum of the dishwasher. Shane slowly peeling the label off his beer bottle. Svetlana's chopsticks clicking softly against the carton.

"I forgot how exhausting sixteen-year-olds are," Shane said.

"You love sixteen-year-olds," Ilya said.

Shane looked briefly horrified. "That sounded terrible."

Svetlana inhaled wrong and spent several seconds coughing.

Ilya rolled onto one elbow, grinning sleepily. "Cancel worthy quote."

"Thanks."

"You gave that nervous winger from Calgary a full therapy session after lunch."

"He was upset."

"He missed one pass."

"He thought everyone hated him."

"Because he's sixteen," Svetlana said. "Sixteen-year-olds think spilling juice is social death." She pointed a chopstick at Shane. "You collect damaged teenagers like little stray dogs."

"That's—" Shane considered it. "Accurate, actually."

"I know."

"You are supportive uncle," Ilya told him from the floor.

"And you cried because a child drew you with laser eyes."

"That kid saw my essence."

"It looked nothing like you."

"It captured my energy."

Shane laughed quietly into his beer, and Ilya softened on reflex across the floor and Svetlana watched it with the exhausted fondness she'd been watching it with for years, followed by the quieter thing underneath.

Part of her liked it. That they were so completely and securely in love. That nobody needed anything from her she couldn't give. That she could exist in this room the way she existed in it fully, comfortably, on her own terms and it was enough for all three of them.

Outside, lightning flashed white-blue.

"It's weird thinking about how long we've been doing this already," Shane said.

"Camp?" Ilya said.

"Hockey."

That shifted the air slightly.

Shane rubbed the back of his neck. "The league starts acting like you're ancient after thirty."

Ilya pointed at him from the floor. "Don't."

"I'm serious."

"My sun, you are only thirty-two."

"Exactly. One more lower-body injury and they start discussing your legacy in documentaries."

"Shane."

"I still have, like, eight years left in me., but —”  Sane sighed and pushed his hair back “There's never really a good season for life stuff anyway," he finished, quieter.

"Mhm," Svetlana agreed.

"Seriously. No good time to move. Or get surgery. Or plan a wedding. Or—"

He hesitated.

Ilya looked over. "Or what?"

Shane shrugged one shoulder. "Kids."

The room went still.

Not awkward. Just, attention sharpening.

Ilya rolled onto his side to look at him properly. "There's not even good season for buying couch."

"That discussion lasted six months."

Svetlana pointed at him. "Then buy one."

Shane looked at both of them with exhausted affection.

Then, quieter: "I used to think maybe after retirement."

Ilya blinked. "What, kids?"

"Maybe."

Rain hammered harder outside.

Svetlana set down her carton.

"You've thought about this before," she said.

Shane immediately got defensive. "Not seriously."

"You researched it," Ilya said.

"A little."

"You researched babies."

"One night."

"During playoffs?"

Shane rubbed both hands down his face. "I was curious about Canadian surrogacy laws, okay?"

Ilya stared at him. "You researched surrogacy laws during playoffs."

"I couldn't sleep."

"Shane."

"I know."

"That is extremely—"

"I know."

"—you."

Shane laughed helplessly into his hands. "I know."

"Apparently paid surrogacy is illegal here," Shane said eventually.

"Why?" Ilya asked.

"It gets complicated. They don't want people pressured into it for money. It can be exploitative, especially for women who need the money."

Ilya was quiet for a second. Then nodded slowly. "Okay. Yeah. That makes sense actually."

Svetlana looked at her noodles. "You can still do it. Just can't pay for the carrying itself. Expenses and medical costs are fine."

"Right," Shane said. "That's what I read."

Ilya looked at her. "You knew this already?"

She shrugged.

"When did you look it up?"

She turned a noodle around her chopstick. "Few months ago."

"Sveta," Ilya said.

"I'd do it."

The words came out before she could make them into something less exposed. She pulled apart a clump of noodles that didn’t need separating.

"I'm serious," she said, keeping her voice even. "I—" She stopped. Started differently. "I always know when someone starts wanting things from me I can't give them. Every time. I can feel the shift." She shook her head slightly. "I've never been able to stop it from happening or stay anyway. That's just — that's just how I am."

Nobody said anything.

She hated that they weren't saying anything.

"But this—" She gestured, vaguely, at the apartment, at the takeout spread across the floor, at the two of them. She didn't want a husband. Didn't want someone waiting for her to arrive at a version of herself she kept failing to become. There had been a man she'd dated for almost a year who'd proposed over a dinner she'd thought was casual, and the worst part hadn't been the proposal but the genuine shock on his face when she'd said no, like she'd been presenting as someone who was building toward something and he'd only just noticed she wasn't. She'd left the restaurant alone and cried in the taxi, not because she'd hurt him, though she had, but because she still couldn't tell if there was something missing in her or just something different.

"You'd make terrifyingly good hockey children," she said, voice coming out faster than she intended. "And if they inherit Ilyushka’s impulse control we’ll need reinforced walls. My father would forgive the entire ‘out of wedlock with gays’ situation if they are talented." She was talking too quickly. She could hear herself doing it. "And obviously I'd want visitation rights—"

"You basically live here," Ilya said.

"Exactly. I've invested years into this household. I have standing through sheer accumulated presence."

"You've only been here for a season, and you still rent an apartment downtown."

"I'm being efficient with my assets."

"You are insane, Sveta."

"You've known this."

"I know, but—"

"I'm not saying tomorrow," she said. "I'm just—" She finally stopped. Looked at them. Really looked. "If you wanted to. I would want to."

The TV screamed fake outrage at something.

Rain battered the windows.

Shane was very still, beer forgotten in his hands, staring at the floor like it had said something interesting.

Svetlana watched him and felt the vulnerability of a real thing said out loud and left there.

Because that was what she'd done, wasn't it. Not offered to carry a child. Not made a practical proposal. She'd told them she wanted to stay.

"I'm joking," she said. "Mostly."

"Mostly," Ilya repeated.

She pointed a chopstick at him. "Don't make it weird, Ilyushka. "

"You made it—"

"I said don't."

Shane cleared his throat and reached for another beer. "I think Wyatt accidentally adopted three campers today."

Coward.

Svetlana smiled into her noodles and let him change the subject.

Ilya did too.

After that they talked about safer things. Max Riley nearly fighting a homophobic rink volunteer. Zane sending fourteen photos of Milo in tiny Centaurs merch. Wyatt teaching nine-year-olds how to chirp.

Normal things.

But something underneath had shifted.

Not broken. Just opened.

By one-thirty, Svetlana stood and said goodnight in Russian.

"Sveta," Ilya said.

She stopped in the hallway doorway.

He was still on the floor. Looking at her with the particular expression she'd known since they were eight, like he was trying to say something large and hadn't found the shape of it yet.

She thought about the guest room. The tea. Shane asking about the mattress like the answer was already obvious.

Everyone else seemed to know when to stay. Maybe this was the closest she'd ever come.

The silence felt larger than she'd expected.

"I know," she said.

She went to bed.

Shane locked the balcony door.

Ilya turned off the kitchen lights.

The storm kept rolling over the city.

In bed, lightning flashed dim blue through the curtains.

Ilya lay on his back staring at the ceiling.

Beside him, Shane shifted under the blankets.

Awake too.

Neither of them said anything.

But after a minute, Ilya moved one hand slowly across the mattress until it bumped against Shane's wrist in the dark.

Shane turned his hand over automatically and linked their fingers together.

Outside, thunder rolled low across Ottawa again.

Neither of them fell asleep for a long time.

Chapter End Notes

The words in italics are Russian.
Edit: I completely forgot about Ilya's dog so I added her in.

If you liked this fic please leave a comment or come scream at me on tumblr piracypiranha

Chapter 2: Before Anything Happens

Chapter Notes

The apartment smelled faintly like lemon cleaner and 50 SPF sunscreen.

Not because anyone had gone to the lake yet.

Just because Shane had bought the sunscreen three days ago and left it beside the keys on the kitchen island like that alone might eventually get them into the car.

Half-packed bags sat lined up by the front door. Shane's overnight bag had been zipped shut since Monday morning and then quietly reopened sometime Tuesday night.

It was Thursday now.

Anya slept sprawled across Ilya's stomach on the couch with all four paws twitching in dreams. Soft merle fur everywhere. One floppy ear covering part of his wrist.

He scratched under her chin without looking at her.

On the television, some renovation show played muted and ignored.

Shane walked through carrying a roll of garbage bags, took a breath, looked toward the hallway, and disappeared into the laundry room instead.

A minute later he came back with two beach towels.

"You already packed towels," Svetlana said without looking up from her laptop.

"Hm?"

"The blue bag."

Shane looked down at the towels in his hands like they'd appeared there mysteriously.

He stood there another second. Then folded them again anyway.

Rain started lightly against the balcony railing.

Shane disappeared toward the bedroom. Ten seconds later he reappeared holding his phone.

"I should probably stop by the rink tomorrow before we leave."

Svetlana looked up. "For what?"

"They still haven't sent the revised physio schedule."

"You checked that already."

"I know. I just—"

He stopped.

Ilya reached automatically for the remote and muted the television even though nobody had been watching it.

The apartment went quiet.

Rain against glass. The low hum of the refrigerator. Anya sighing into Ilya's chest like she paid the mortgage here.

Svetlana closed her laptop.

"My landlord emailed me again about renewing the parking lease," she said casually.

Neither man answered immediately.

"Thrilling," Ilya said eventually.

"He'll increase the rate in September."

"Capitalism is disease."

"Mhm."

Another pause stretched long enough that Anya sat up and looked between all three of them suspiciously.

Ilya scratched behind her ears. She climbed halfway into his lap despite already being there.

Shane sat down at the opposite end of the couch. Not close enough to touch. Close enough that his socked foot rested lightly against Ilya's ankle anyway.

Outside, thunder rolled somewhere distant over the city.

"The cottage dock probably still needs replacing," Shane said quietly.

"You said that last summer."

"I meant to fix it."

"Also 2022."

"It's concerning now."

"Adds excitement."

Svetlana snorted softly into her tea.

Rain thickened outside.

Nobody mentioned the cottage again that night. The bags stayed half-packed by the door.

At two-thirty in the morning Shane was sitting on the kitchen floor surrounded by tabs he should not have opened.

The apartment was dark except for the under-cabinet lights and the glow of his laptop screen. Rain tapped softly against the balcony windows.

Canadian fertility law.

Ontario parentage recognition.

Travel restrictions during pregnancy.

NHL scheduling projections.

A reddit thread titled: HOW DID YOU KNOW YOU WERE READY?

He closed that one immediately.

Shane leaned back against the cabinets and stared at the ceiling.

The problem was he couldn't stop turning the idea around now that Svetlana had said it out loud. Not surrogate. Not abstract hypothetical. Svetlana. Specifically. Who kept spare clothes in their guest room and reorganized their kitchen without asking and knew when Ilya was lying before Shane did sometimes.

That was what had broken something open in him.

Kids after retirement. That had always been the plan. Finish hockey first. Get stable. Then maybe think about parenthood somewhere around forty with a house and fewer flights and knees that didn't constantly hurt.

Instead now he couldn't stop imagining Svetlana pregnant during an NHL season.

Road trips.

Medical appointments.

What if she got sick in Vancouver or Boston or halfway through California.

What if they did this and hockey stopped being the most important thing in the room.

His chest tightened.

Because he wanted that.

Didn't he.

That was the problem. He didn't know if the tightening was fear or something else. He didn't know if he was scared of losing hockey to this or scared of how easily he could imagine it.

Both, probably.

The bedroom door creaked softly behind him.

Shane closed the forum tab on instinct.

Bare footsteps across the hardwood. A pause.

"...Why are you sitting on the floor in darkness like girl in a romcom."

Shane exhaled once through his nose. "Go back to sleep."

"No."

The fridge opened. Bottle. Cabinet. Glass.

Then Ilya appeared beside the island in loose sweatpants and flattened hair, looking at the number of open tabs.

His expression shifted immediately.

"Oh," he said quietly. Not surprised. Just familiar.

"I wasn't trying to stay up," Shane said.

"You say this every time."

Ilya lowered himself onto the floor beside him with the graceless heaviness of someone still mostly asleep. Their shoulders bumped together.

On the couch, Anya lifted her head. Checked the room. Found only them. Flopped back down.

Rain moved steadily outside.

Ilya read part of the screen silently.

"You are deep in nightmare Google."

Shane laughed once. Humorless. "Yeah."

Silence settled over the kitchen. Tired. Warm.

"I always thought we'd do this later." The words came out before he meant them. "After hockey. Buy a house somewhere permanent. Figure out normal life first." He stared at the screen. "That was always the plan."

Ilya stayed quiet.

"And now I'm trying to imagine Svetlana pregnant while we're still in season."

The room felt smaller after that sentence.

Shane leaned his head back against the cabinet. "I genuinely cannot tell if that's insane or weirdly inevitable."

Ilya's mouth twitched faintly.

Shane laughed under his breath. "Like if this was anyone else, I'd still be treating it as some abstract future thing." His fingers tapped against the laptop edge. "But it's her."

Softer. More dangerous.

Because Shane trusted Svetlana in ways that had stopped feeling unusual gradually enough he hadn't noticed. The way she silenced his phone when he'd finally fallen asleep after a loss, the way he'd started buying her preferred yogurt without thinking, the easy wordless coordination that had happened so gradually he couldn't locate when it had started.

Somewhere over the last year he'd stopped thinking of her as Ilya’s best friend. 

His brain kept snagging on what that meant.

"There is not a good season to do this," Shane said. "There never will be."

Hockey logic. Life logic. The exhausted realization that waiting for everything to become manageable meant waiting forever.

Ilya stared at the glowing screen.

Then at Shane. Sleep-creased face. Crooked glasses. Anxiety spiraling visibly enough it practically vibrated.

And underneath all of it: wanting. Not certainty. Not readiness. Just the frightening realization that he wanted this enough to be scared by it.

"I know," Ilya said softly.

Somewhere down the hallway, a floorboard creaked.

Neither of them noticed.

The next morning Shane was short with both of them.

Not cruel. Not even particularly obvious about it. Just clipped in a way that landed slightly wrong on everything, too quick to end conversations, too still when Ilya said something meant to be funny, too focused on his phone during breakfast.

Svetlana noticed before Ilya did.

She said nothing. Made coffee. Slid a mug toward Shane without comment. Let the silence be what it was.

Ilya noticed twenty minutes later and immediately tried to fix it by being louder, which made things worse.

"I'm fine," Shane said, when Ilya asked directly.

"You have a face like you are calculating something extremely unpleasant."

"I'm not calculating anything."

"You are always calculating."

"Can we just—" Shane stopped. Set his phone down. Pressed both hands flat against the counter. "I just need a minute. Okay? I'm not— I'm fine. I just need a minute."

Ilya went quiet.

Svetlana drank her coffee and looked out the window.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Eventually Ilya moved from the island to the couch, pulling Anya up beside him, and turned on something mindless on the television. Low volume. Not watching it.

Shane stayed at the counter.

After a few minutes Svetlana refilled her mug and went back to her laptop.

The apartment breathed around them.

By the time they finally loaded the car two hours later, Shane had loosened back into himself enough that they could all pretend the morning hadn't happened. He held the car door for Anya. Argued with Ilya about whether the fishing rods needed special cases for transport. Let Svetlana reorganize the trunk without offering an opinion.

Not fixed. Just quietly set aside.

The drive north took almost four hours because none of them seemed capable of leaving Ottawa efficiently.

Shane needed to stop at the arena "for ten minutes," which became forty. Ilya remembered a specific coffee place across town. Svetlana went back upstairs from the parking garage for "one thing" and returned with an entirely different bag than the one she'd gone for.

Nobody acknowledged any of it.

By the time they crossed the city limits, the sun was already high and hot through the windshield.

Anya immediately claimed the backseat. Technically she had a dog hammock and travel setup because Ilya had once read an article about canine spinal safety and overnight-ordered three different restraint systems. In practice she spent the drive with her head wedged against Svetlana's thigh while Shane drove and Ilya twisted halfway around in the passenger seat every few minutes to scratch behind her ears.

"You are harassing her." Svetlana said eventually, her own hand already behind Anya's ears.

"She likes attention."

"She is asleep."

"She likes sleepy attention."

Anya thumped her tail once without opening her eyes.

"See?"

Shane snorted softly.

The farther north they got, the quieter the world became. Ottawa traffic first. Then strip malls. Then subdivisions. Then just long stretches of highway bordered by dark green trees and flashes of lake water through the gaps.

Svetlana rested her forehead against the window and watched the landscape flatten into summer.

She understood suddenly why Shane became different here. Looser. Not less controlled, just less braced. Even his driving changed. One hand on the wheel. Elbow against the window. The residue of the morning mostly gone.

At one point Shane reached over without looking and rested his hand briefly against the back of Ilya's neck.

Automatic. Absentminded.

Years of repetition inside the gesture.

Svetlana looked away before either of them noticed she'd seen it.

The cottage sat at the end of a narrow gravel road surrounded by pine trees thick enough to swallow sound. Dark wood siding. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the water. A wide wraparound deck. Kayaks overturned near the shore.

Anya launched herself out the second the door opened and sprinted toward the trees.

"Anya!" Ilya yelled.

She ignored him completely.

"Your daughter doesn't respect authority." Svetlana observed.

"She is an independent woman."

“Is he going to say that about real kids too?” Svetlana let herself wonder.

The air smelled like warm pine needles and lake water baking in the sun. No traffic. No city noise. Just wind through trees and water against the dock.

Svetlana stepped out and took in the house.

Something shifted in her chest immediately.

Because this wasn't neutral territory. Not the apartment near the arena with its constant movement. This felt older. Private. Accumulated.

Shane grabbed bags from the trunk. Ilya wandered immediately toward the lake.

"Still cold?" he called.

"You ask every year," Shane said.

"And every year I hope climate change has improved my swimming experience."

"Jesus Christ," Svetlana muttered.

Ilya grinned over his shoulder.

Inside, the cottage was cool and shadowed from the trees.

Large open kitchen. Long wooden dining table scarred with water rings and knife marks. Massive windows facing the lake.

Family photos lined one wall.

Shane as a gap-toothed kid holding a fish almost bigger than his torso. Teenage Shane in hockey gear beside his parents. Ilya and Shane on the commercial set at seventeen, looking directly into each other's eyes and laughing. Then later ones: Shane and Ilya at the lake in hoodies. Anya, freshly adopted and tangled in a blanket. One from two summers ago of Shane laughing at something off-camera while Ilya looked at him with such naked affection it made Svetlana's chest do something strange.

She looked away.

"Yuna printed the ugly hiking photo," Ilya said from the hallway, scandalized.

"She loves that photo."

"I look sunburnt."

"You looked happy."

A pause. Tiny hesitation. "Well. Yes."

Shane disappeared upstairs with luggage.

Svetlana stood alone for a moment in the kitchen while lake light moved slowly across the floorboards.

She could hear Shane upstairs opening drawers without hesitation. Could hear Ilya outside calling for Anya like she'd been lost for years instead of thirty seconds.

The cottage held their life everywhere. Nothing curated. Nothing performative. Just accumulated evidence of repetition.

Summer after summer.

And now she was here too. Not visiting. Not stopping by.

Here.

Upstairs, Shane called down. "Sveta?"

"Yeah?"

"You can take the room across from ours. The window faces the lake."

Ours. So casual. So completely automatic.

Svetlana looked toward the staircase.

Then toward the windows overlooking the water.

Outside, Ilya was lying flat on the dock beside Anya with one arm thrown over his eyes like a man recovering from battle instead of a car ride.

The lake stretched out endlessly blue behind him.

By the time the sun started setting the lake had turned dark blue glass.

The heat broke sometime after dinner, leaving the air cool enough for open windows. Pine trees shifted outside. Somewhere down the shoreline a boat motor hummed briefly and faded.

Ilya had taken Anya for a walk nearly forty minutes ago. One quick loop before sunset.

Shane stood barefoot at the kitchen counter making coffee despite the hour, in grey sweatpants and an old hockey shirt so washed-out the logo had almost surrendered entirely.

Svetlana sat on one of the stools watching him move.

He didn't need to think here. At the apartment, even relaxed, Shane still carried the low-grade tension of proximity to hockey. Here he moved automatically. Opened the correct cabinet without looking. Grabbed mugs from the second shelf.

"You make coffee like a chemist," she said.

"I'm measuring."

"You weighed the beans."

"That's normal."

"That is supervillain behavior."

Shane snorted quietly. The sound settled into the room.

She smiled into her own mug.

She could picture this with terrifying clarity. Early mornings at the cottage. Coffee before sunrise. Shane reading something half-awake at the table. Ilya asleep on the couch with Anya sprawled across him. Someone cooking breakfast badly. Windows open to the lake.

A child somewhere in the background eventually.

Not fantasy. Fantasy was easy to dismiss. This felt logistical. Possible in a way she hadn't let herself think about until very recently.

And terrifying for exactly that reason.

"My mom asked if you were coming to dinner tomorrow before she asked if I was," Shane said.

"Because I answer her texts."

"That's fair."

The screen door banged open. Anya came crashing through first, trailing lake water and pine needles, followed by Ilya at a jog with wet shoes and an expression of complete spiritual satisfaction.

"The dock needs replacing immediately," he announced.

"I've been saying that for three years," Shane said.

"I nearly fell through."

"You did not nearly fall through."

"It wobbled under Anya. I thought she was going to die."

"Oh my God."

Svetlana handed Ilya the extra mug before he could ask for it. He took it without noticing, already arguing with Shane about load-bearing capacity, and she turned back toward the window and let the sound of them wash over her like something she'd been listening to long enough it had become weather.

The Instagram memories surfaced the next afternoon.

Ilya unlocked his phone on the dock and immediately recoiled.

8 YEARS AGO TODAY.

"Oh, absolutely not."

Svetlana looked up instantly from her laptop inside. "What?"

"My phone has produced evidence against me."

She was already crossing the deck toward him.

The first story loaded.

Shaky vertical footage. Purple-blue club lighting. Bass loud enough to distort the audio. Twenty-five-year-old Ilya in a sheer dark shirt unbuttoned low enough to qualify as public indecency, his mama's golden cross hanging over his collarbone. Eyeliner smudged. Eyes that were either dilated or very happy about something.

He was yelling something in Russian at the camera, but the microphone barely picked it up over the music. 

Svetlana barked out a laugh so suddenly she folded sideways against the railing. "I still can't believe everyone thought you were straight."

Shane appeared in the doorway. "What is—"

She turned the phone toward him.

Shane stared. "Jesus Christ."

"I was a fashion icon," Ilya said.

"Your tits are out," Svetlana said.

"Tastefully."

"You look like that bisexual vampire from the film but bigger."

"I look like a man who is having incredible time."

"Both can be true," Shane admitted with a laugh. 

The camera swung wildly across a Moscow rooftop bar filling the screen with cigarette smoke, gold city lights and someone dancing in the background. Then younger Svetlana appeared in a tiny silver dress and knee-high boots, hair enormous, lipstick dark enough to look dangerous.

Someone off-camera: Coolest people in all of Russia!

Twenty-five-year-old Svetlana raised both middle fingers proudly.

"What the fuck was this night,m?" Shane said.

"Genuinely unclear," Ilya said. "There was definitely cocaine involved."

"I don't remember," Svetlana confirmed. She clicked forward. A taxi. Svetlana filming Ilya dramatically smoking out the window, monologuing about destiny.

Subtitle added by drunk Svetlana in English: HE THINKS HE INVENTED SADNESS.

"You were living in Boston then," Shane said. "Both of you, right?"

"Mhm." Ilya mumbled, he had been in his seventh season with the Bears. Svetlana had moved there six years earlier for work and somehow never fully left after that. At twenty-five they had orbited each other like matching weather systems. Too loud. Too emotional. Too awake.

One more story. A bathroom with graffitied walls. Ilya on the counter holding a vodka bottle while Svetlana zoomed aggressively into his face.

"You are having a breakdown," her younger voice announced.

"I am becoming an icon."

"You are becoming drunk."

Then the camera flipped. Svetlana's own face filled the frame, flushed skin, glitter smeared under her eyes, expression sharp and furious underneath the drunk.

"My father thinks I should become a respectable woman," she informed the camera.

Young Ilya gasped theatrically offscreen.

Both of them dissolved into hysterical laughter. The video ended abruptly.

A brief quiet settled over the dock afterward.

"That fight was awful," Svetlana said.

"You called me crying," Ilya said immediately.

"Because he kept calling me Svetlana Sergeyevna like I was a corrupt government official, not his fucking daughter. "

She could still hear the shape of it. Formal. Cold. Disappointed. Respectable woman. The same argument in different clothes her entire adult life.

"He told me I was wasting my life," Svetlana said. One shoulder lifted and fell. "Drifting around unserious men instead of building something to be proud of."

"You were building something serious," Ilya said automatically.

"We were doing tequila shots off model's tits."

"You got there eventually."

Shane laughed quietly.

Watching them now, easy and overlapping and impossible to fully separate, he could barely connect any of this to the imagined threat he'd constructed back then.

"I genuinely think both of you together would've killed me at twenty-five," he said.

"I would've loved you instantly," Svetlana corrected. "Then killed you."

"Probably."

Ilya announced: "We're boring now."

Svetlana scoffed. "You got fined by the league three months ago."

"Homophobia."

"You broke Kent's nose."

"But..." Shane looked around the dock slowly. At the cottage glowing through the trees. At Anya draped across his feet. "I don't think boring is bad."

The water moved quietly behind them.

Nobody disagreed.

The next afternoon was hot enough that even the lake looked lazy.

Sunlight spread white-gold across the dock. Music from somewhere across the water dissolved into static before it arrived.

Shane had given up on scouting reports and fallen asleep under a baseball cap in a deck chair. Svetlana had claimed the dining table inside with her laptop. Ilya had attempted to help with emails for approximately nine minutes before becoming unbearable and retreating to the dock.

"You are useless in summer," Svetlana called through the open windows.

"I am built for winter sports."

"You are built for attention."

Ilya flipped her off without looking up. "I love you too."

Anya lay sprawled beside him, panting dramatically into the heat.

Inside, Shane's phone buzzed against the table. Svetlana reached over and silenced it without looking up. He'd done the same for her during a call last week, stepping in front of Ilya mid-sentence to redirect him without breaking her concentration. Small things. The accumulated grammar of people who had quietly learned each other.

The cottage went quiet. Tree branches overhead. Water against the dock. Old wood settling in the heat.

Then the screen door banged open.

Svetlana appeared carrying two glasses of iced tea.

"You left your phone inside," she told Ilya.

"Good."

"Six missed texts."

"That means I am at peace."

She snorted and sat at the edge of the dock, feet in the water immediately.

A minute later Shane emerged, slower, still half-asleep. "You have sunscreen on?" he asked Ilya.

"No."

"Ilya."

"I am Slavic. We do not burn."

"You're going to get skin cancer."

Shane sat down beside Svetlana with a sigh, knees bent toward his chest. Anya immediately abandoned Ilya to climb halfway into Shane's lap.

"Traitor," Ilya said.

"She likes the parent who enforces structure."

"You are fascist to her."

"She cannot eat rocks."

"She is exploring."

"She threw up a pinecone yesterday."

"That is between her and God."

Svetlana laughed hard enough that some tea spilled onto her wrist.

And something about it, Ilya's warmth, the lake light, the sound of her laughing  maybe, made Shane smiling without realizing

Anya stretched across both of them like she'd been there always.

Something in Ilya's chest went terrifyingly soft, and suddenly he could help but think about it:

Little wet footprints across the cottage floor. A child running full speed toward the lake while Shane yelled something about life jackets. Light curls bouncing. Freckles across brown skin. Green eyes narrowed in stubborn concentration.

Svetlana's nose. Shane's eyes.

Tiny hands reaching for Anya's fur.

Laughter echoing through the house.

Summer after summer after summer.

The image arrived so fast and whole it nearly knocked the breath out of him.

And the feeling underneath wasn't fear.

Just happiness. Enormous and immediate. Like his body had recognized something before the rest of him could catch up.

"Oh," Ilya said out loud.

Both of them looked at him immediately.

"What?" Shane said.

Ilya sat up. The vision still lingered at the edges of everything. The dock. The windows. The light on the water. Still possible. Still close.

He looked between them. Then laughed once under his breath, almost disbelieving.

"I just imagined a kid here."

Silence.

Svetlana went very still.

"She had your freckles," Ilya said to Shane. "And Sveta's curls. Green eyes, which makes no sense probably, but." He gestured vaguely between them. "She was running through the cottage completely soaked. Anya was chasing her. You were yelling about safety regulations."

"I would," Shane said quietly.

"You would ruin her fun immediately."

"I'd keep her alive."

"Yes."

His voice had gone softer.

Ilya looked back toward the lake.

"I thought I'd feel terrified if it ever became real," he said.

Svetlana's fingers tightened slightly around her glass.

"And?" she asked.

He smiled. Small. Wondering. Almost disbelieving.

"It made me happy."

The words settled over the dock gently.

Nobody moved.

Then Anya sneezed violently into Shane's lap and ruined the entire atmosphere.

Shane jerked backward. "Jesus Christ."

Svetlana started laughing first. Ilya nearly fell sideways off the dock.

And something inside the sound changed shape permanently.

The lake had gone dark blue by the time the conversation settled into honesty.

The dock creaked softly. Warm wood. Damp towels beside them. Cottage windows glowing gold through the trees.

Anya twitched in her sleep between Shane and Ilya.

Nobody moved inside.

Svetlana kept her eyes on the water.

"I think part of why this is terrifying," she said slowly, "is because I know what people think my life is supposed to become."

Neither of them interrupted.

"The respectable version." Her mouth twisted slightly. "Husband. An apartment somewhere expensive. Children eventually. Maybe I become softer." She gestured vaguely at herself. "Less this."

"You are very soft," Ilya said immediately.

"Ilyushka. I threatened a league rep over email three days ago."

"He deserved it."

"Probably." She folded the towel tighter. "I spent a very long time thinking I would eventually feel differently. That maybe I just hadn't reached the part yet."

Shane watched her.

"It never happened," she said. "I kept waiting." A short laugh under her breath. "God, I tried."

At sixteen she'd let a boy from school walk her home for three months because all her friends said she obviously liked him. He brought her flowers once. Held her hand at a skating rink while she counted the minutes until she could leave. Then one afternoon he kissed her in the stairwell of her apartment building with the solemn concentration of someone trying very hard to do something correctly.

Afterward he'd smiled at her like they'd crossed some invisible threshold together. Svetlana had smiled back half a second too late.

That night she'd stared at herself in the bathroom mirror wondering if everyone else was faking it too and simply better at it than she was.

She'd gotten better at leaving before anyone looked at her that way.

But here she kept not leaving.

Something in Ilya's expression shifted.

He leaned sideways until his shoulder pressed against hers. His fingers slid slowly down the outside of her arm in one long automatic stroke.

Comfort so practiced neither of them seemed aware of it.

Svetlana swallowed once.

"The frightening part," she said, still looking at the water, "is that sometimes I still think there's something wrong with me because of it."

"No."

Both men at the same time.

The force of it startled all three of them slightly.

Svetlana laughed weakly.

Ilya's hand stayed around her forearm.

"There is nothing wrong with you," Shane said quietly.

"You say that because you like me."

"I say it because it's true."

She looked down.

That was the problem, really. They loved her in the exact shape she existed. No negotiations attached. No future version required.

"I don't want the life everyone keeps expecting," she said softly. "And I stopped being scared of that somewhere along the way because—" She hesitated. "Because of you two."

The air between them went warm.

"I don't feel alone with you," she said.

Ilya looked at her like she had physically done something to him.

"Oh, Sveta."

She laughed, embarrassed. "I hate this conversation."

"You started it," Shane said.

"Ilya started it by hallucinating children."

Ilya squeezed her arm once. "You are my favorite person," he informed her.

Shane looked over. "Wow."

"You also," Ilya said quickly. "My two favorite people."

"Greedy," Shane said.

"I can have two."

His gaze went back to the lake. Quieter.

"I spent a long time thinking happiness was temporary," he said. "Like maybe some people get it for a while and then it disappears."

Svetlana looked at him.

She knew exactly where that came from. A Moscow apartment with a thundering voice echoing down the hall. His mama's absence like a missing wall. The years before Boston. Before Shane. Before stability had stopped feeling like luck.

"But now." He smiled faintly. "I wake up beside my husband every day. And you are always there somewhere yelling at somebody or stealing our groceries." The smile widened slightly. "And I think maybe I just get to keep it."

Shane went very still.

Something moved sharply in his chest.

Because three years ago those words would have frightened him.

He remembered the jealousy physically. Hot and humiliating. The impossibly intimate woman from Ilya's past who spoke Russian too fast and understood parts of him Shane couldn't access yet.

Now Svetlana adjusted the thermostat every night because Ilya always forgot. She knew which foods he couldn't eat after a long road trip. Anya cried when she left for more than two days.

Nothing about it felt threatening.

Shane looked at her now wrapped in a blanket and lake snell and fading dusk light.

And what he felt was home. Not romantic. Not possessive.

Just real.

"I thought I was supposed to feel weirder about this," he admitted.

Both of them looked at him.

He laughed once, already embarrassed.

"Because the first time I met you, I was convinced you were going to steal my husband."

Ilya made a delighted choking noise. "Oh my God, yes."

Svetlana blinked between them. "What?"

"Our wedding," Ilya said, grinning. "He spent the entire reception glaring at you."

"I was not glaring."

"You looked homicidal."

"I did not—"

"You absolutely did. Sveta kept asking me if something was wrong."

Svetlana turned slowly toward Shane. "You were jealous of me? At your own wedding."

"In my defense," Shane said, "you arrived two hours early wearing a backless black dress and kissed him on the mouth."

"It was a goodbye kiss. I was being funny."

"It was not funny."

Ilya was already laughing hard enough to lean into Shane's shoulder.

"And then," he continued, "you disappeared together for forty minutes."

"We were smoking."

"You came back with glitter on your eyelashes."

Svetlana opened her mouth. Then paused. "That could have been from my dress."

"It wasn't, it was your body glitter. " Ilya said cheerfully.

"I was justified," Shane agreed.

"We were charming," Ilya said, offended.

"We looked like divorced oligarchs reconnecting at a funeral." Svetlana added. 

Shane bent forward laughing.

Ilya stared at both of them with deep personal injury.

Svetlana patted his knee absentmindedly. "You'll survive."

And watching them, easy and overlapping and loving and impossible, Shane felt the last ghost of the old jealousy dissolve into something almost funny.

Just part of them now. So thoroughly he couldn't locate when it had happened.

The dock settled quiet again. Three of them shoulder to shoulder in the darkening air while the lake moved softly below.

Then Ilya said, quietly:

"I think if we do this, the kid would be very loved."

"I'll book an appointment."

The next two days at the cottage Ilya stopped treating it like a hypothetical.

"Anya is going to hate the baby at first," he said over breakfast on Sunday, completely conversationally, while reaching for the coffee.

Shane looked up from his phone.

"She'll adjust," Ilya continued. "Probably. She's territorial but she also cried for an hour when the camp kid left on Friday. She'll be fine."

Shane set the phone down. "Ilya."

"What?"

"Can we—" He stopped. Started again. "Can we not talk about it like it's already happening?"

Ilya blinked. "It basically is. We're going to the clinic."

"We haven't booked anything yet."

"We talked about it."

"Talking about it isn't—" Shane pushed both hands through his hair. "I just need it to still be a decision. Okay? Not something that's already decided."

Ilya stared at him.

The kitchen went quiet.

Svetlana, who had been reading something on her laptop at the dining table, did not look up. But she stopped scrolling.

"Okay," Ilya said finally, carefully.

"I'm not saying no," Shane said immediately. "I'm not—that's not what I'm saying."

"I know."

"I just—"

"I know," Ilya said again, softer this time.

Shane exhaled. Picked his phone back up without looking at it.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Eventually Ilya refilled his coffee and went out to the dock. Anya followed him immediately, tail low, reading the room.

Svetlana finally looked up.

Shane wasn't looking at her. He was staring out the window toward the water where Ilya had settled with his coffee, legs dangling over the dock edge.

"He's not trying to pressure you," she said.

"I know."

"He just already lives there. In the future." She paused. "He always has."

Shane was quiet for a second. "I know that too."

She looked back at her laptop. "It's okay to not be there yet."

He didn't answer. But some of the tightness in his shoulders loosened slightly.

Outside, Ilya threw a stick for Anya into the shallows. She crashed in after it immediately and came back looking tremendously pleased with herself.

Shane watched them.

His face did something complicated.

Then he picked up his coffee and went outside.

Svetlana listened to the dock creak under his weight. Heard the low murmur of Ilya saying something she couldn't make out. Heard Shane laugh once, short and reluctant.

She went back to her emails.

The lake had been warm enough to swim by Tuesday, which Ilya treated as a personal vindication.

"Climate change," he announced, wading in to his knees.

"That's not the win you think it is," Shane called from the dock.

"Tell it to my swimming experience."

Svetlana sat in one of the Adirondack chairs at the shoreline with her laptop balanced on her knees, technically still working. In practice she'd been reading the same paragraph for ten minutes.

The afternoon had gone soft and golden. Anya had given up on swimming after her third failed attempt to retrieve a stick that had sunk and was now asleep in the shade behind Svetlana's chair.

Shane was watching Ilya from the dock with his arms crossed and the particular expression he wore when he was pretending not to be charmed.

Ilya was attempting a backstroke.

"Your form is terrible," Shane said.

"I am at peace with the water."

"You're going to swallow a fish."

"The fish and I have come to an understanding."

Shane's mouth twitched.

He sat down on the dock's edge, swinging his feet over the water.

The afternoon hung around them, slow and thick with heat.

After a while Ilya waded back toward shore, dripping, and dropped into the grass near Svetlana's chair without asking.

"How's the coach's email," he said.

"Finished."

"You've been staring at it for forty minutes."

"I finished it forty minutes ago."

He looked up at her. "What are you actually thinking about?"

She glanced at him. Then back at the screen. "Nothing."

"Sveta."

"The appointment," she said finally. "I keep thinking about the appointment."

He waited.

"Not in a bad way," she said, which was mostly true. "Just—" She stopped. Tried again. "I keep thinking about what the doctor is going to say. What all the tests are going to say." She closed the laptop. "What if something's wrong. Medically."

Ilya was quiet for a second.

"Then we figure it out," he said.

"That's very easy to say."

"Yes," he agreed. "Still true."

Svetlana looked toward the water. Shane had lain back on the dock now, one arm over his eyes, face turned toward the sun.

"I'm not scared of the process," she said. "I've thought about that. I'm okay with the process."

"What are you scared of?"

She was quiet long enough that Ilya didn't push it.

"That I'll want it," she said eventually, "and something will stop it from happening."

Ilya reached up and found her hand where it rested on the arm of the chair. Just held it for a second. Not saying anything.

That was the right thing to do.

She'd always hated when people said the right thing immediately. Ilya had learned that years ago in Boston. He was good at silence when it counted.

On the dock, Shane's arm dropped from his eyes. He was looking at the sky.

The three of them stayed like that for a while. The lake moving softly. Anya snoring in the shade. The afternoon going slowly golden and warm.

It took five phone calls, two recommendations passed through Rose's network, and an amount of late-night research Shane refused to discuss before they found a fertility clinic discreet enough to make him stop opening browser tabs at three in the morning.

Half the challenge of being famous was locating professionals who wouldn't sell your medical information to tabloids.

The other half was walking into the waiting room.

Minimalist. Aggressively calm. Eucalyptus. Soft piano. Abstract paintings selected in a laboratory specifically to soothe people undergoing emotionally devastating decisions.

Ilya hated them immediately.

"They chose these in a lab somewhere," he murmured.

"Stop," Shane said.

"I am just observing."

"Observe quietly."

The receptionist smiled with the practiced warmth of someone who recognized them and had chosen not to acknowledge it, which was its own specific kind of acknowledgment.

A few couples scattered across cream-colored couches pretended not to look.

Svetlana read the intake forms for the fourth time. She already knew every answer.

Then Dr. Singh appeared.

Mid-forties. Elegant navy dress under her lab coat. Intelligent eyes carrying the specific quality of someone who had watched a great many people try to explain complicated desires and had developed tremendous patience for the gap between what they meant and what they said.

Her office overlooked the river. Diplomas arranged precisely. A small orchid on the desk trying hard to make the room feel less clinical. It almost worked.

She sat across from them with a tablet on one knee.

"So," she said warmly. "I understand we're discussing gestational surrogacy with Ms. Vetrova as the intended carrier."

Before either Ilya or Svetlana could respond:

"She's not the surrogate," Shane said.

Dr. Singh blinked once.

Shane glanced briefly toward Svetlana. "She's the mother."

A small silence.

Dr. Singh looked at Svetlana. Then at Ilya. Then back at Shane. It lasted perhaps two seconds, a rapid professional recalibration of an arrangement she had clearly read differently from the paperwork. Her expression didn't shift dramatically. But something behind her eyes did. A quiet repositioning.

Her pen moved.

"Understood." She adjusted something on the tablet. "Then let's talk about what structure feels right for your family."

The word family hit Ilya somewhere behind the sternum.

Shane went still beside him.

Svetlana reached for her water glass.

She had known this word was coming, had watched it appear in every euphemistic pamphlet they'd read . And still, hearing it spoken out loud in this particular office, in this particular context, with these two particular people sitting beside her, something in her chest did something sudden and involuntary.

She took a careful sip of water.

"What are the preliminary testing timelines?" she asked.

Dr. Singh glanced at her tablet. "Full hormone panels and ovarian reserve testing typically take—"

"Sorry," Ilya said quietly, just to her, while Dr. Singh was checking something. "You okay?"

Svetlana kept her eyes on Dr. Singh. "Fine."

"Sveta."

"I'm fine." She glanced at him sideways. "Ask me later."

He held her gaze for a second. Then nodded.

Dr. Singh continued. "Given Ms. Vetrova's age and medical history, initial markers look promising. Before proceeding we'll need full hormone panels, ovarian reserve testing, infectious disease screening, uterine evaluation, and genetic carrier screening."

Svetlana nodded with the composure of someone discussing quarterly projections.

Only the slight tension in her jaw gave her away.

"General process: IVF using Mr. Hollander's sperm and Ms. Vetrova's eggs. We'd recommend creating multiple embryos and freezing extras for future use." Dr. Singh glanced between them. "From retrieval to transfer — several weeks to a few months, not including preliminary testing."

Several months.

Calendar-real. Hockey-season real.

Shane stared at the desk for a beat too long.

"I also want to discuss legal parentage early," Dr. Singh said, "because Ontario law can become complicated with nontraditional family structures."

Svetlana crossed one leg slowly. "Complicated how?"

"Three-parent legal recognition is possible but requires excellent reproductive counsel before birth. The law," she added, with the faint dry precision of someone who had watched it happen many times, "tends to move more slowly than families do."

Shane was already mentally cataloguing next steps. Ilya could practically hear the spreadsheet opening.

"Practical considerations," Dr. Singh continued. "Travel during pregnancy will require planning. Early on, restrictions are minimal. Later trimesters — stable monitoring access, reduced physical stress, long-distance flights become complicated near the end."

"What week?" Shane asked.

"Shane," Ilya said.

"It's a reasonable question."

"He is always like this," Ilya told Dr. Singh.

"I find it helpful," she said pleasantly.

Svetlana smiled into her water glass.

Dr. Singh looked between all three of them.

"There's never perfect timing for children," she said. Her voice softened slightly. "Especially not in careers with public visibility and demanding schedules." A pause. "But you already seem unusually aligned. That tends to matter more than people expect."

The sentence settled softly into the room.

Nobody answered.

Because she was right. The emotional part had already happened on a dock beside a lake. This was just paperwork catching up.

Outside afterward, while Shane was dealing with the parking validation, Ilya found Svetlana standing slightly apart on the sidewalk, looking at nothing in particular.

"Hey," he said.

She looked over.

"The word," he said.

She didn't pretend not to know what he meant. "It's fine."

"Sveta."

"It surprised me." She exhaled once. "That's all. It just—" She stopped. Started differently. "I've spent a very long time not being someone's family. On purpose. Because it was easier." She looked at the ground for a second. "And then she just said it like it was obvious."

Ilya waited.

"Because it is obvious," she said, quieter. "That's the part that surprised me."

He didn't say anything immediately.

Then: "Yeah."

She laughed once, short and slightly watery. "Don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm doing something significant."

"You are."

"I know. Stop witnessing it."

He put his arm around her shoulders instead, pulling her sideways into him. She let him. After a second she leaned into it.

Shane came back from the parking machine and stopped when he saw them.

"Everything okay?"

"Fine," Svetlana said.

"She had a moment with the word family," Ilya said.

"Ilya."

"She's okay now."

"I could have told him that myself."

"You would have said 'I'm fine.'"

She opened her mouth. Closed it.

Shane looked at her for a moment. Then quietly: "Yeah. Me too, actually."

That surprised her enough that she stopped pretending.

The three of them stood there on the sidewalk for a second, they looked slightly ridiculous, carrying folders full of medical paperwork in the blazing Ottawa sun, before Ilya started walking backward toward the parking garage again.

"Our child is going to be so cool," he announced.

Shane choked on air. "Oh my God."

"She is getting yours and Sveta's hockey brains and—"

"Please stop scouting our unborn child like a draft prospect," Svetlana said.

"Too late." Ilya spread his hands. "First overall pick. Generational talent."

"It's not even an embryo," Shane said.

"Generational potential."

"You are not scouting the fetus."

"Future franchise player."

Svetlana laughed hard enough she had to stop walking for a second.

And just like that, the fear loosened around all three of them.

Chapter End Notes

I did my best with research, but please assume that all information regarding IVF and Canadian law is incorrect.

If you liked this fic please leave a comment or come scream at me on tumblr piracypiranha

Chapter 3: The Space Between Knowing

Chapter Notes

By the second week of July, the apartment had stopped feeling like somewhere people lived and started feeling like somewhere schedules passed through.

A stack of printed prospect reports slowly colonized one end of the dining table until Svetlana finally clipped them together and moved them into color-coded folders because otherwise Shane reorganized them every six hours.

The cottage still lingered in small ways. A canvas bag of damp towels sat forgotten beside the laundry room. Pine needles kept appearing in impossible places. Anya smelled faintly like lake water no matter how many times Ilya brushed her.

Ottawa had reasserted itself quickly. Svetlana knew it was happening because her phone started vibrating before eight every morning again. A development coach asking for revised skating transition data from rookie camp. An analytics coordinator requesting updated aging curves for defensive pairings. Three separate calendar invites for preseason planning meetings she was apparently expected to attend despite none of them existing when she'd left for the cottage.

One afternoon she walked into the kitchen to find Shane already at the counter with coffee and her iPad charging beside him.

"You have a meeting at ten," he said.

"I know."

"You also double-booked yourself at one-thirty."

"How do you know that?"

"You left your calendar open."

"That feels illegal."

"You had two tabs overlapping."

Svetlana took the mug he slid toward her and said nothing else about it. Behind him, Ilya wandered in wearing sweatpants and a Centaurs training shirt, hair still damp from the shower.

"You have captain's skate at eleven," Shane said without turning around.

Ilya poured himself coffee. "I regret teaching you how shared calendars work."

"You didn't teach me. I learned independently."

"That is worse my sun."

He leaned sideways into Svetlana's shoulder while waiting for the kettle to reheat. She rested her cheek briefly against the top of his head without looking away from her phone.

Ilya tilted his head just enough to murmur against her shoulder.

"You're not sleeping properly again."

She huffed. "Neither do you."

"Yeah, but at least I don't pretend that's healthy."

Shane looked between them. "I assume you're insulting each other affectionately."

"Obviously," Svetlana said.

Training camp hadn't started yet, but July for players like Shane and Ilya was never really offseason. Captain's skates. Voluntary workouts that weren't actually voluntary. Prospect development camp. Meetings with trainers. Calls with coaches about line combinations. And because Ilya was captain, things kept finding him first.

A rookie called one evening asking whether living with veterans was "supposed to feel this supervised." Someone from player relations texted about organizing rookie dinners after two prospects apparently tried to expense milkshakes and custom gaming chairs to the team card. The coaching staff wanted Ilya's opinion on which first-years looked overwhelmed at development camp and which ones were just pretending not to be.

Svetlana watched him spend twenty minutes talking a nervous nineteen-year-old through where to buy groceries downtown while simultaneously throwing a tennis ball for Anya with his other hand.

"You know you're not legally responsible for all of them," she said after he hung up.

Ilya pointed at her with absolute seriousness. "You also start bossing people around when you're nervous."

"That is different."

"No. You just make it scarier."

Shane snorted from the couch without looking up from game footage.

By mid-July he had started quietly re-entering his annual spiral of preparation. Tablets full of faceoff clips. Penalty kill reviews. Opposing centers broken down shift by shift. At the cottage he'd left most of it alone. Here it returned almost immediately.

One night Svetlana woke at one-thirty and found the living room dark except for the television glow. Shane sat cross-legged on the floor in sweatpants with an iPad beside him and three clips paused mid-play on the screen.

"You know camp is still weeks away," she said.

"I know."

"You're studying the Admiral's fourth-line zone entries in July."

"They changed neutral zone structure after Christmas."

She walked closer. The screen showed the same sequence replayed from three angles. Shane had notes open already: small neat bullet points, timing adjustments, defensive spacing, faceoff recovery routes.

He noticed her looking.

"I'm not stressed," he said.

She sat down on the couch and didn't answer. He watched another replay. The apartment breathed around them.

A door opened down the hall. Ilya appeared wearing one of Shane's old hoodies, looked between them once, took in the film clips, took in Shane on the floor at one in the morning, took in Svetlana on the couch.

He crossed the room, bent down, and kissed the side of Shane's head.

"Come to bed," he said.

"In a minute."

"You said that forty minutes ago."

"You timed me?"

"I know you."

Shane paused the clip. He stood slowly, stretching one arm with a wince from old shoulder damage.

"Both of you," Ilya said, glancing at Svetlana.

"I'm fine here."

"Both of you," he repeated.

She got up.

On the way past, Ilya caught Shane's wrist and pressed an absentminded kiss against his knuckles. Shane made the reflexive face, the brief protest against being perceived, but stayed there for half a second longer than necessary before pulling away.

Svetlana went to her room. She could hear them behind her, low voices, the soft close of the bedroom door.

The clinic initiated quickly once they decided to move forward. Testing, bloodwork, baseline appointments. The procedural machinery of it was relentless and unglamorous in equal measure.

One Tuesday morning Svetlana spent forty minutes discussing transition support rates for Ottawa's AHL prospects before driving directly to the clinic so someone could measure her uterine lining. The two realities sat beside each other without apology. Hockey and biology, both running on their own schedules, indifferent to the fact that she was trying to hold both.

By Thursday afternoon Shane was reviewing penalty kill adjustments over FaceTime while simultaneously trying to answer a message from the reproductive lawyer about Ontario parentage documentation. He had both devices propped against the kitchen island at angles that let him see both screens, and Svetlana watched him attempt this for ten minutes before taking the FaceTime device out of his peripheral vision.

"The penalty kill can wait," she said.

"I was almost done."

"The lawyer cannot."

He looked like he wanted to argue. He didn't.

The legal consultations were straightforward in the way only very expensive things are. Ontario recognized up to four legal parents under specific circumstances. Courts cared less about biology than intent, whether all parties had clearly documented that they meant to parent before conception occurred. So: declarations of intent, parentage agreements, contingency planning. The lawyer, Marianne, walked them through it twice, with the steady precise delivery of someone who had watched many people realize mid-sentence that they had not fully understood what they were agreeing to.

At one point she asked, very matter-of-factly, how public they intended the family structure to be.

Shane looked instinctively toward the windows. "As little as possible."

Ilya stretched one arm across the back of Shane's chair. Not dramatic. Barely noticeable. Shane leaned back into it.

Svetlana looked down at the stack of paperwork in front of her and signed where indicated. Her own name in triplicate on forms that would eventually describe who this child belonged to, legally, structurally, on paper. Strange. Not wrong. Just strange, the way all large things felt when reduced to signatures.

Outside afterward, July heat pressed against the sidewalks.

Shane stood beside the parking meter already checking appointment times on his phone. Then Ilya took it out of his hand.

"You need to stop looking at schedules for ten minutes."

"I'm scheduling medical procedures."

"You are standing outside in direct sunlight having a breakdown."

"That is not—"

"It absolutely is." Ilya kissed him once, quick and absentminded. "Ten minutes."

Shane exhaled like the concept offended him on principle.

They started walking toward the car. After a moment, Shane said quietly: "I hate that I can't control any of it."

He wasn't talking to either of them specifically. Maybe to the sidewalk.

"I know," Ilya said.

That was all.

By August the city began reorganizing itself around hockey again. Players drifted back in waves. Equipment shipments arrived at the arena loading docks. Group chats that had gone dormant in June exploded back to life with workout schedules, dinner plans, complaints about conditioning skates.

The apartment changed with it. Hockey bags reappeared by the front door. Shane's sleep schedule shifted earlier without him consciously deciding to.

Media day arrived with the inevitability of a recurring bill.

The morning of, Shane stood in the bathroom tying his tie with the grim concentration of someone preparing for minor surgery.

"You know they ask the same questions every year," Ilya said from the bed.

"That somehow makes it worse."

"Yuna has media trained you to perfection. Just say 'we're taking it one game at a time' like you do every time."

"I did not—" Shane stopped. Adjusted the tie. "That's called professionalism."

Across the apartment, Svetlana was already halfway through answering emails with one earring still missing. She found the other one in the pocket of her jacket from two days ago, which suggested she had been moving too fast for long enough that small things had started slipping. She put it in and went back to her phone without acknowledging this.

By the time they arrived at the arena, the building already felt transformed. Camera equipment lined the hallways. PR staff moved with clipboards and headsets. Players in suits pretended not to hate all of this. Svetlana disappeared almost immediately after credential check-in into the machinery of hockey operations, where she was always already working before anyone else had started.

The morning dissolved into repetition. Photos. Interviews. Questions about offseason training, expectations, leadership, chemistry. Shane answered like someone who had been doing this professionally for over a decade. Ilya was looser, smiling more easily, occasionally derailing answers into jokes that made PR staff visibly age in real time.

Between rotations, Ilya found himself tracking Svetlana across the arena without deciding to. Her moving through the space quickly, tablet under one arm, talking to development coaches, then video staff, then leaning over the boards with the particular posture she had when someone was telling her something she already knew. He'd been doing it for ten minutes before Shane appeared at his elbow.

"You keep looking for her."

Ilya turned. Then stopped.

Because he was. Not possessively. Not anxiously. Just the way he tracked Shane in crowded rooms. Constant, automatic. He had no idea when it had started.

Across the rink, Svetlana glanced down from the stands and lifted one hand briefly toward them without interrupting her conversation.

A PR assistant dragged Ilya away for another interview.

Later, during a break between rotations, Shane found Svetlana near the tunnel entrance reviewing practice schedule grids.

"You've been here since seven," he said.

"So have you."

"I'm paid more."

She snorted and looked up from the tablet. "You surviving?"

"You'd think I'd be used to all the attention by now."

"You hate this," she agreed. A pause. "You doing okay? Actually."

He looked at her. Not the practiced look. The real one, slightly exhausted and doing nothing to pretend otherwise.

"Yeah," he said. "I think so."

She nodded once. Went back to the tablet. Over her shoulder, Ilya emerged from another interview setup still wearing his public smile. Then he spotted them. His shoulders dropped a fraction, expression shifting back into something genuine, the way it always did when he found the two of them in a room full of strangers.

The video room was too cold, like every room in every arena built for watching people make decisions under fluorescent lighting.

Svetlana stood at the front beside the projection screen while preseason clips rolled silently behind her. Most of the coaching staff sat around the long table. Brandon Wiebe leaned back listening while one of the assistants frowned at the screen with the determined skepticism of a man who disliked being told numbers could know things before he did.

At the far end of the room, Shane sat beside Ilya still half-dressed from practice, damp hair pushed back, Ilya's unlaced skates making small sounds whenever he shifted.

Svetlana clicked to the next clip.

"You're overusing the first line during preseason games. Especially late in periods."

The assistant coach shrugged. "They're our best players."

"We have Hollander in second line. And they're noticeably slower by the third game in a four-day stretch. They're recovering badly after travel, you can see it most clearly in decision-making speed."

"It's August," the coach said.

"And they'll still have knees in April."

That got a quiet laugh out of Wiebe.

She moved on. Line combinations. Which players naturally stabilized each other. Which ones became reckless together. Which younger players performed better beside veterans who communicated more on ice.

Luca Haas stared at the screen with the dawning expression of someone realizing he'd been psychologically profiled.

"You stop passing when you're tired," she told him.

"I don't."

Three clips played back-to-back.

The room laughed. Luca looked betrayed. "You tracked that specifically?"

"I track everything."

He subsided. The assistant coach was already writing something down. Then he looked up.

"The defensive pairing data, we're not adjusting Eriksson's minutes based on this. He's been on a conditioning program since July and the load numbers don't account for that."

Svetlana looked at him steadily.

"We can revisit after the first preseason game," he said. Not hostile. Just certain.

A pause.

"Fine," she said.

She pulled up the next slide. Wiebe caught her eye briefly, not apologetically, just acknowledging, and she moved on.

Shane watched from the back of the room. There was no part of his life she wasn't already load-bearing in, and watching her accept a loss with the same precision she accepted a win clarified something he'd been trying to articulate since July.

"One more thing," Svetlana said. "Stop assuming exhaustion makes players mentally tougher. Sometimes it just makes them injured."

The assistant coach started to answer. She pulled up another chart before he finished. By the time he stopped talking, she'd already disproved him.

Wiebe rubbed a hand across his jaw. "Okay. We'll adjust it."

The call came on a Wednesday afternoon.

After weeks of appointments and hormone schedules and legal consultations serious enough to require nondisclosure agreements, the future apparently arrived at 2:17 in the afternoon while Shane was reorganizing the pantry and Svetlana was answering emails about preseason roster reporting and Ilya was lying upside down on the couch with Anya sprawled across his stomach.

Shane's phone buzzed against the kitchen counter.

All three of them looked at it.

Nobody moved.

Then Shane picked it up.

"Hi, yes." The polite controlled tone. "This is Shane Hollander."

Ilya muted the television.

Svetlana closed her laptop halfway.

"Okay."

"Mhm."

His free hand flattened against the counter.

"How many made it to blastocyst?" Shane asked.

Svetlana stood.

The doctor spoke for another minute. Shane listened without interrupting. Occasionally glancing toward them. Occasionally not.

"And after PGT-A?"

A longer silence.

Then Shane exhaled once through his nose.

"Okay." A pause. "That's good."

When the call ended, he set the phone down on the counter very gently.

"Eleven fertilized successfully." He looked toward Svetlana. "Five made it to blastocyst. Four came back chromosomally normal after testing."

Silence.

Not because the number was bad. Because suddenly it wasn't theoretical anymore. Four viable embryos frozen somewhere across the city in a laboratory under their names.

Then Ilya said, carefully: "So technically. We are winning."

Svetlana laughed. It escaped her, pure adrenaline, and she immediately pressed her hand over her mouth.

Shane looked at Ilya with an expression of genuine exhausted offense. "That's your reaction."

"I don't know anything about embryo statistics. Four sounds solid."

"It is solid," Svetlana said. Then heard herself. "Statistically."

Ilya pointed at her. "You're doing it."

"I know. Stop." She crossed her arms. "Did they grade them?"

Shane checked the portal. "Two AA. One AB. One BB.

Ilya looked between both of them. "I have absolutely no idea what any of those letters mean."

"Embryo quality grading," Shane said.

"You researched that."

"Yes."

"Of course you did."

Shane opened the portal again. His face had gone very still.

Svetlana crossed toward him. "Four is good." He looked up. "You don't have to solve the next six months right now."

He didn't argue.

Ilya stood from the couch, crossed the kitchen, touched Shane's wrist, then leaned in and kissed him once. Soft. Brief. Familiar enough to survive being witnessed.

Shane made the reflexive face afterward. Ilya kissed him again anyway. Then stayed close, shoulder brushing Shane's chest.

No joke this time. Ilya just looked at him. And after a moment:

"We made something."

Shane went very still.

Ilya looked like he hadn't entirely meant to say it out loud. But he didn't take it back.

Svetlana looked down at the counter. Four embryos, real enough to measure, real enough to grade. Something had shifted from possible to actual while she wasn't watching.

"Implantation rates?" she asked. Her voice came out lower than usual.

Shane cleared his throat and reopened the portal.

Ilya went to steal someone else's glass of water.

The procedure room was softly lit and aggressively clean, with muted cabinets, a rolling ultrasound machine, and a chair in the corner holding folded blankets no one had touched

Dr. Singh reviewed the chart while a nurse adjusted something near the machine. Svetlana lay back against the raised exam chair and stared at the ceiling and tried to locate the part of herself that was good at being in medical contexts. Usually it was easy. Usually clinical spaces organized her. Right now the ceiling tiles looked like they were very far away.

"You'll feel pressure from the ultrasound first," Dr. Singh said. "The catheter itself is typically painless."

Across the room, Shane sat forward with both elbows on his knees. He had already asked about medication timing, activity restrictions, implantation windows, follow-up bloodwork, what symptoms were meaningful, what symptoms were progesterone side effects, whether hydration mattered, whether sleep quality affected outcomes. At one point Dr. Singh had looked at him over her glasses and said, "Mr. Hollander, there is no amount of perfect scheduling that can guarantee implantation." Shane had gone quiet for almost three full minutes. Now he watched the setup process with his hands very still on his knees.

Beside him, Ilya lasted approximately forty seconds before standing again.

"You are making everybody nervous," Shane muttered.

"I am already nervous."

"You are pacing."

"I have nowhere to put my body."

Dr. Singh smiled faintly.

The nurse dimmed the lights. The ultrasound image appeared on the monitor in shifting grey shapes. Cold gel spread across Svetlana's abdomen. She kept her eyes on the ceiling, tracking the texture of the tiles, the small water stain in the far corner, the hum of the air conditioning.

"Everything looks good."

Ilya moved closer. Shane stood too fast, catching himself.

On the screen, a thin bright line appeared.

"That's the catheter."

Svetlana swallowed.

The embryologist entered for less than thirty seconds carrying something impossibly small. The room became even quieter. Shane's hands clasped together so tightly his knuckles went white. Ilya stopped moving entirely.

Dr. Singh guided the catheter.

Then: "There."

Nothing happened. No dramatic shift. No physical sensation announcing transformation. Just a tiny flicker on the monitor. The catheter removed. Medically anticlimactic.

"That's it?" Ilya said.

"That's it."

Svetlana lay there for a moment after. Dr. Singh reviewed the next instructions, progesterone, estrogen, activity today, blood test timing, but the sound of the room had changed. That word again. There. As if locating something. As if indicating the beginning of a place.

Her chest tightened so sharply it startled her.

Ilya noticed first.

"Hey," he said, moving beside her chair.

She looked at him. He had the expression he got sometimes, the one that wasn't performing anything, that was just present, completely present, watching her.

For one terrible second she thought she might cry. Not from happiness exactly. From scale.

"I think I'm going to throw up," she said honestly.

"That would be perfect timing," Ilya replied.

A startled laugh escaped her anyway.

Shane looked up from the instruction packet. "Are you nauseous?"

"Shane."

"What? It could matter."

"It has been thirty seconds."

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

Dr. Singh paused at the doorway. "Now we wait," she said.

Either the embryo would implant or it would not. No amount of love or intelligence or carefulness could control that part. Ilya reached over and touched the back of Shane's neck once in passing. Then he leaned down beside Svetlana and pressed a kiss against her temple. Unhurried, careful, like he was trying to put something there that would stay.

She closed her eyes for half a second.

Outside, the world looked offensively normal. Traffic moving. People drinking coffee. Somebody laughing across the street. September sunlight on the sidewalk.

Shane checked the medication schedule before they reached the car.

Ilya took the instruction packet out of his hands.

"If you read that one more time," he said, "I will physically eat it."

"I need to know the timing."

"You already know the timing."

"Ilya—"

"No. Done."

Shane allowed himself to be steered toward the parking garage.

Svetlana walked beside them slightly slower. One hand resting against her own stomach before she realized she was doing it. Then immediately dropping away again.

Too soon. Too frightening.

Still.

The nine days distorted time in a way none of them had anticipated.

Days one and two were almost manageable. The transfer had happened. The biology was either working or it wasn't. There was a strange calm in having run out of things to do. No more appointments, no forms, no decisions. Just progesterone twice daily and the instruction to go about ordinary life, which they attempted with varying degrees of success.

Training camp continued. Players got cut. Media obligations multiplied. The season kept approaching with the indifferent momentum of weather.

By day three the calm had curdled.

The progesterone created symptoms clinically identical to early pregnancy symptoms, which the clinic had warned them about explicitly, which did not prevent any of them from treating every physical sensation as potential data. Svetlana caught herself cataloguing things. A cramp, a twinge, a particular tiredness. Then immediately translating each one into progesterone side effect because it was too early to know anything, because symptoms meant nothing at this stage.

Shane, by day three, had built a medication tracking spreadsheet color-coded by dosage timing and refill dates. Svetlana found him updating it at midnight.

"You realize the embryo cannot read Excel," she said.

"It's not for the embryo."

From the couch, Ilya said: "He made a separate tab for symptom logging."

"They asked about gastrointestinal symptoms."

Ilya kissed Shane absentmindedly while walking through the kitchen later that morning.

Svetlana nearly inhaled coffee. Shane looked deeply offended. Ilya kissed him again.

Days four through six had a different texture entirely.

The waiting stopped feeling like patience and started feeling like something being done to them. Time moved strangely. Evenings arrived too quickly and then refused to end. Svetlana found herself in the middle of a sentence in a staff meeting, fully present and competent, and realized she had lost track of what day it was. Not what day of the week, but what day of the nine. She had to count backward from the transfer date on her fingers under the table.

Ilya googled implantation timelines at two in the morning and woke Shane up to report that day five or six was statistically the most common implantation window.

"That was yesterday," Shane said flatly.

"Or today. It depends on the embryo."

"Go to sleep."

"What if something is happening right now?"

"Ilya."

"I'm just saying—"

"Go. To. Sleep."

Ilya went to sleep. Then woke up an hour later and googled success rates for AA-graded embryos and upset himself badly enough that Shane confiscated his phone until morning.

The first preseason game against the Toronto Guardians should not have mattered as much as it did.

It was September. Half the roster still looked sunburnt from summer. Systems sloppy. Timing uneven. But Toronto always changed the temperature of a room. The arena felt louder than preseason should. More cameras. More league staff. More attention around the Guardians than anyone in Ottawa thought they deserved.

Svetlana sat three rows behind the bench with a tablet balanced on her knee. Headphones around her neck. Coffee gone cold.

She had sent Ilya a report that morning. Short. Clinical.

Collision exposure elevated. Recovery markers below baseline. Recommend reduced preseason minutes.

He had read it while making coffee, kissed the side of her head, and ignored every word.

Now he circled center ice with that particular stillness Shane recognized. Too much pressure with nowhere to go. She watched him from behind the bench and ran two separate sets of numbers in her head simultaneously. His shift data, his acceleration patterns. And the other math entirely, the one she'd been running since the procedure room: day two. The embryo was either attempting to implant right now, in real time, while Ilya took a line rush against a team he personally despised, or it wasn't. The hockey and the biology were happening in completely separate systems, indifferent to each other, and all she could do was watch both.

The puck dropped.

Immediately Toronto's winger cross-checked Barrett after the whistle. Not hard enough for a penalty. Just enough.

Ilya turned before the officials even reacted.

"Already embarrassing yourselves?"

The Toronto player grinned. "Missed you too, Rozanov."

Boodram muttered, "Here we fucking go."

Shane closed his eyes briefly from the second line.

By the second shift Ilya was playing mean. Not dirty. Hard enough that everyone noticed. Finishing checks harder than necessary. Slashing after whistles. Talking constantly.

Svetlana watched the numbers climb on her tablet. Impact load. Shift length. Acceleration spikes.

She leaned toward Wiebe. "He's overextending on retrievals."

Wiebe barely looked away from the ice. "I noticed."

On the ice, Ilya stole the puck at center, cut past one defender, and took a hit hard enough that the glass shook. He got up smiling. Shane's stomach tightened. He knew that smile.

The second period got worse.

A Toronto defenseman took a run at Luca Haas after a whistle. Ilya crossed the ice immediately. Gloves still on, no actual fight, just chest-to-chest fury and the particular brand of venom that made referees intervene on instinct.

Svetlana watched him slam the bench door after another shift and bend forward, breathing harder than he should have been this early, and understood that this was not about Toronto. Some players went quiet under pressure. Ilya became kinetic. And the thing he was trying to outrun tonight had nothing to do with the score.

He couldn't hit his way to a positive beta result.

Late in the third, Ilya took another huge hit trying to force a play through traffic that wasn't there. Bodies crashed together. For one sharp second Shane lost sight of him entirely. His chest seized.

Then Ilya emerged upright, shoving somebody away and jawing at three different people simultaneously.

Fine. Technically.

Shane exhaled.

As the teams separated, one of the Guardians said something passing Ilya. He stopped instantly. Every muscle in Shane's body tightened.

But Barrett got there first, steering Ilya physically toward the tunnel while Boodram skated backward talking loudly enough to interrupt whatever was coming next.

"You're buying dinner if you get suspended in preseason," Barrett informed him.

"I am innocent."

"You threatened three people."

"Allegedly."

By the time Shane reached the hallway outside the dressing room, Ilya was still pacing. Hair damp. Eyes bright. Energy sharp enough to cut.

Shane watched him for three seconds.

Then said: "What the fuck was that."

Ilya looked over. "We lost."

"I don't care about the game."

"Then what—"

"You were throwing yourself into everything that moved."

"I was playing hockey."

"No." Shane's voice stayed low and controlled in the way it only became when he was actively containing something. "You were trying to outrun something."

Ilya opened his mouth. Then closed it.

The hallway went quiet beneath the arena noise. After a moment, Ilya said: "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't explain me to myself like that, right now, in a hallway."

Shane went still. That wasn't what he'd expected.

Ilya looked away. Down the hall. He looked exhausted, more than the ice could account for. He pressed the back of his hand briefly against his own mouth, the thing he did when something was too large to come out cleanly.

Shane didn't have the right words. So instead he crossed the space between them and put one hand on the back of Ilya's neck. Not pressure. Just presence.

Ilya went very still. He stood there, not quite accepting it, not pulling away. Then, slowly, his head dropped forward.

Down the hallway, Svetlana appeared at the far end. She took one look at both of them and stopped walking.

Ilya exhaled once through his nose.

"I keep thinking," he said, voice low, "about how there is nothing I can do. For any of it. For the clinic. For whatever is happening right now inside Sveta." He paused. "I am a person who can fix things. I can make things happen. And there is nothing—"

He stopped.

Shane's thumb moved once at the back of his neck.

"I know," he said. "Me too."

Ilya looked at him. The anger was gone from his face entirely. What was underneath it was just afraid.

"You don't have to protect us by destroying yourself," Shane said.

Ilya nodded. Once. Small.

At the end of the hallway, Svetlana came the rest of the way toward them without speaking. She touched Ilya's arm, looked at both of them. Said nothing about what she'd heard.

"Come on," she said.

They walked back toward the parking garage together.

On the fifth night, Svetlana woke at two in the morning and could not explain why.

She filled a glass of water and stood at the counter drinking it, looking out the window at the street below. Ottawa at two in the morning. Headlights moving through light rain. The signal light at the corner changing for nobody.

She put one hand against her own stomach. Just for a moment, in the dark where no one could see.

She'd been very careful, her whole adult life, about the shape of what she wanted. Not because she was afraid exactly, or not only that, but because she understood early that wanting specific things made you legible in ways that were hard to control. You could be seen wanting something and then not get it, and everyone would know. It was easier to want generally. To be adaptable.

But she had said "I want to" out loud on a dock in summer, to two people who had meant it when they heard it. She had signed the parentage forms. She had lain back in the procedure room and stared at water-stained ceiling tiles and let something happen inside her body that could not be taken back.

There might already be something there. There might be nothing.

She stood there with both possibilities for a long time.

Anya padded in from the living room and pressed herself against Svetlana's legs without being asked.

Svetlana reached down and scratched behind her ears. Outside, the rain came down a little harder.

After a while she went back to bed.

The morning of day six, Ilya made the mistake of being funny.

It was nothing. Shane was standing at the counter reading the clinic's instruction sheet again, the same one he'd read six times, and Ilya came in, saw the sheet, and said: "You know, I think if you read it one more time it will say something different."

Shane put the sheet down.

"Can you not," he said.

"I'm just—"

"I know what you're doing." His voice came out flat and too even, the register that meant he was past tired and past managing it. "You do this. When you can't fix something you make it into a joke so it feels smaller. And I cannot do that right now, okay? I cannot make it smaller right now."

Ilya went quiet.

The kitchen held the silence for a moment.

Ilya looked at the counter. Then at Shane. He didn't apologize, which was the right instinct, and he didn't push back, which was also the right instinct. He just stood there and took it.

"Okay," he said.

Shane picked up the sheet again. Put it down again. Pressed both hands flat against the counter and stared at them.

Ilya didn't leave. He refilled his coffee and sat on the counter and didn't say anything else, which was its own kind of answer.

Svetlana appeared in the doorway in yesterday's clothes, took in the scene, and went directly to the coffee maker without comment. She set a mug in front of Shane and one on the counter beside Ilya and stood with her own mug held in both hands.

"Day seven," she said.

Nobody responded for a beat.

"Six more hours and it'll be day eight," Ilya offered.

"That was genuinely useless information," Svetlana said.

"I know. I've run out of useful information."

"Same."

Shane lifted his mug. Set it down. Picked up the instruction sheet one more time and then, apparently recognizing himself doing it, pushed it to the far end of the counter.

"You know what's in it," Svetlana said.

"I know what's in it."

"Then stop reading it."

"I'm aware that's the correct advice."

She pulled herself up onto the stool beside Ilya and stole his coffee, which had more sugar in it than hers, and he let her without comment because he had been letting her do that since they were twenty-three in someone else's Boston apartment and certain habits had survived every version of their lives since.

The coffee maker finished its cycle. Outside, a delivery truck made a slow arc around the corner.

"I keep thinking," Shane said finally, to the far wall, "about how it's either already true or it isn't. Right now. And we just don't know yet."

Svetlana had thought the same thing in the dark two nights ago, standing alone at the counter with her hand on her own stomach. She didn't say so.

"Yeah," Ilya said.

"That should be less frightening than not knowing," Shane said. "Logically."

"It isn't, though," Svetlana said.

"No."

Ilya reached across and put his hand over Shane's where it rested against the counter. Shane didn't protest it. The three of them stood there together while the coffee cooled, not fixed, not certain, just still in the same room.

Day seven arrived with the specific misery of being almost over.

Shane banned Ilya from fertility forums after finding him reading a Reddit thread titled LOW BETA SUCCESS STORIES at two in the morning.

"This is not evidence-based."

"It is emotionally educational."

"It is psychological self-harm."

"Probably."

Svetlana started carrying her phone everywhere while pretending not to wait for anything. Even Anya seemed affected, following all three of them from room to room with increasing concern.

On day eight, a Thursday, none of them had anywhere to be.

Nobody suggested doing anything.

Shane sat on the floor with his back against the couch, legs stretched out, not watching the game footage open on his laptop. He'd paused it forty minutes ago. The pause symbol sat in the middle of a frozen frame of neutral-zone play he'd seen sixty times.

Ilya lay on the couch above him, one arm hanging over the edge, occasionally brushing the back of Shane's shoulder without any particular intention. Staring at the ceiling. Not his phone, not the television.

Svetlana sat at the kitchen table with a mug that had gone cold and a report she'd stopped reading three pages ago. She could see both of them from where she was sitting.

Nobody spoke for a long time.

Outside a car alarm went off and stopped. A door opened and closed somewhere else in the building. Ottawa doing ordinary Ottawa things on a Thursday afternoon.

Eventually Ilya said, to the ceiling: "What do you think it looks like."

A pause.

"Microscopic," Shane said.

"I know that. I mean." He paused. "Do you think it knows."

"No."

"I think maybe it does. I think maybe it can tell."

"That's not how cell division works."

"How do you know."

"Because I read about it."

"You read about everything. You don't know everything."

Shane didn't argue that. He turned the laptop screen off. The room got slightly dimmer.

Svetlana looked down at her cold mug. She thought about the procedure room, that tightening in her chest, that sense of scale. She hadn't been able to put it into a sentence yet.

"I keep thinking about the part where we can't know yet," she said.

Neither of them responded immediately.

"It's either already true or it isn't," she said. "And the waiting doesn't change which one it is."

Ilya's hand had stilled on Shane's shoulder.

"Yeah," Shane said, after a moment.

That was all.

Ilya reached down and pressed his hand over Shane's, not saying anything. Shane didn't protest it. The room held all three of them a while longer, still and quiet and not entirely okay.

The night before the beta test, Shane lay awake calculating timelines if the transfer failed. Beside him, Ilya shifted closer in the dark until their knees touched.

"You are thinking too loud," he murmured.

"You can hear thinking now?"

"Only yours."

Shane was quiet for a moment. Then: "What do you do when there's nothing left to prepare for?"

Ilya considered this with more seriousness than Shane had expected. "Usually," he said, "I eat something."

"That's your answer."

"Bodies need things. When brain is stuck, feed the body. Very sophisticated strategy."

"That's not—" Shane stopped. Then exhaled slowly. "That's not the worst thing you've ever said."

"I have many wisdoms."

Shane turned his head toward the ceiling. The apartment made its small familiar sounds around them, the refrigerator, the heat cycling on, rain starting very quietly against the glass. He had lived in this apartment long enough that all of it had become indistinguishable from quiet. From home.

"I keep thinking about what we'll do if it doesn't work," he said.

"I know."

"And I also keep thinking about what we'll do if it does."

Ilya said nothing for a moment.

"Both are frightening," he said finally.

"Yeah."

In the guest room across the hall, Svetlana was also awake. Phone face-down beside her. Hands folded over her stomach despite herself. She had been awake since one-thirty and had not moved to get water, had not turned on her lamp, had just lain there in the dark with the knowledge that tomorrow would end the waiting one way or the other. In seventeen hours they would know. She had been doing this long enough to understand that the thing that kept her awake was not fear of bad news. It was fear of what she would feel if the news was good. How large it would be. Whether she was prepared to be someone for whom this had happened.

She was still thinking about it when she finally fell asleep sometime after three.

The clinic blood draw took less than four minutes.

"We'll call this afternoon," the nurse said.

Then they were back outside in ordinary Ottawa sunlight.

"I hate this part," Ilya announced immediately.

"We know," Shane said.

Nobody ate lunch. Shane got halfway through reorganizing the pantry before forgetting what he was doing. Ilya wandered the apartment aimlessly enough that even Anya looked confused. Svetlana opened and closed the same email six times.

At half past three the clinic portal notification arrived.

The sound split the room open.

Shane looked at the phone on the kitchen counter. Ilya stopped moving. Svetlana stared at the screen.

Nobody reached for it. The moment stretched. No one wanting to be the one to collapse the possibility into a fact.

Then Shane crossed the kitchen and picked it up.

His face went unreadable as he opened the portal. His eyes moved across the screen once. Then again.

Ilya's chest hurt.

"What?" he asked.

Shane didn't answer.

Not for three full seconds.

Ilya counted them without meaning to. The refrigerator hummed. Anya's nails clicked once on the kitchen floor and then stopped.

Shane swallowed.

"Positive."

Nobody moved.

Positive beta: 146.

Recommended repeat testing in 48 hours to confirm appropriate progression.

Svetlana made a sound she didn't recognize as her own voice. Then laughed. It escaped her, pure adrenaline shock, and she immediately pressed both hands hard over her mouth.

Ilya sat down hard in the nearest chair.

He hadn't meant to. His legs just stopped.

He sat there and stared at the floor and didn't say anything. Didn't have anything. The number was in his head, 146, positive, recommended repeat testing, but it kept sliding off, kept failing to attach, kept starting over. Positive. He was still standing at the edge of it.

Shane still hadn't moved from beside the counter.

Svetlana pressed her hands harder against her mouth, still half laughing from nerves, eyes wet now. "This is insane," she whispered.

Ilya looked up.

Shane was frozen, holding the phone too tightly, face completely still the way it went when he'd hit the wall of what he could control and was standing very carefully on the other side of it.

So Ilya stood. Crossed the kitchen. Took the phone out of his hands. And kissed him. Not saying anything, just staying there for a moment, feeling Shane exhale against his mouth, feeling the tension go somewhere it could finally go.

Behind them, Svetlana sat down at the table very suddenly, like her knees had finished a job and were done now. Anya pressed herself against her legs immediately.

"We need the second beta," Shane said.

Svetlana looked up at him. His face had gone pale with the effort of containing hope.

"We know," she said.

Ilya stayed close to Shane. Then he looked over at Svetlana. Really looked at her. At the hands still pressed over her mouth, at the wet corners of her eyes, at the way she was sitting like something had just happened to her gravity.

"Hi," he said.

She laughed, startled. "We've been in the same apartment all day."

"I know. Still hi."

Anya did her anxious circuits of the kitchen. Outside, Ottawa continued its ordinary afternoon, indifferent and unaware.

They stayed there. Not saying much. Close enough that it counted.

The second beta came back at 341.

The nurse read it over the phone with the warm controlled professional warmth of someone for whom this was good news in the way good news was supposed to be: expected, earned, medical. Svetlana sat very still at the kitchen table with the phone held against her ear and said "thank you" twice and wrote the number down on the corner of a piece of paper even though she would not forget it.

When she came back into the living room, Shane was already on the couch with his laptop open, and Ilya was standing at the window looking out at the street, and both of them looked up at the same moment.

"341," she said.

Shane breathed out slowly.

Ilya turned from the window. He looked at her for a moment with the expression she could never quite translate, the one that had no performance in it at all.

"Good," he said.

"Good," she confirmed.

Shane set the laptop on the couch cushion beside him without looking away from her. His hands were resting loosely on his knees. He had been braced, she realized, since the first beta. Still expecting the other shoe. Still unwilling to put full weight on the floor until he was certain it would hold.

"That's more than doubled," he said.

"Yes."

"That's the right doubling rate."

"Yes, Shane."

He exhaled once. Not relief exactly. Something more like the careful lowering of something he'd been carrying at shoulder height.

Ilya sat down on the arm of the couch in a way that suggested his legs had made a unilateral decision about load-bearing. He pressed both hands over his own face and held them there for a moment, not speaking. Shane reached over without looking and gripped the back of his elbow.

They stayed like that for a moment.

"First ultrasound in three weeks," Svetlana said. She was still holding the piece of paper. She looked down at it, at the number in her own handwriting, and thought about the dock in summer,, about her own voice on a cottage afternoon saying she would want to like it wasn't the most frightened she'd been in years.

341.

Real enough to have a number. Real enough to call back in three weeks.

"Okay," she said quietly. To herself, mostly. To the number on the paper.

"Okay," Ilya said, from behind his hands.

Shane turned the laptop toward himself again but didn't open any tabs. He sat there with the screen dark.

Outside, September light had gone the specific gold it only reached in late afternoon, low and sideways through the windows, the kind of light that made everything inside look more significant than it was. Anya was asleep across the threshold of the hallway, one ear twitching. The apartment made its familiar sounds.

Somewhere under all of it, quiet enough that none of them had found the right words for it yet, something had started.

Chapter End Notes

If you liked this fic please leave a comment or come scream at me on tumblr piracypiranha