“I always feel so safe with you,” Shane pants into the pillow as Ilya fucks into him. Shane flat on his belly on the bed, Ilya plastered on top of him like the world’s heaviest weighted blanket, their skin pressed together all the way from their knees to the nape of Shane’s neck. “So safe, so safe, I’m—oh, fuck, Ilya—“

Normally, Ilya likes these sweet nothings. More than once Ilya has come prematurely when Shane has spouted something unexpectedly sweet during sex, something like there’s nobody in the world who touches me like you do or I notice everything you do for me, always.

By all measures, this comment should get the same reaction. Instead, Ilya has to squeeze his eyes shut for a brief moment, hips stilling, as he focuses on thinking sexy thoughts so his cock doesn’t go soft.

Shane must take it as Ilya being overcome, though, or maybe he’s so far gone he doesn’t notice at all, because afterwards—once he’s rolled out of the wet spot and Ilya has laid a towel down on the mess, a temporary measure as they get their breaths back before Shane inevitably makes him change the sheets—Shane snuggles into Ilya’s arms like always, his breaths even and sweet.

“So safe,” he mumbles again, his lips pressed against Ilya’s collarbone now, and Ilya’s stomach twists with sudden nausea. “Love you.”

—

It isn’t that Ilya wants to hurt Shane. Ilya would rather cut off his right hand than hurt Shane. He would rather let leeches suck on his cock. If it came down to a choice between jumping off a skyscraper or hurting Shane, it would be a serious thought experiment, and only then because he knows him killing himself will hurt Shane a hell of a lot, too.

He’s just not sure that not wanting to hurt Shane is enough. Ilya’s mother, presumably, didn’t want to hurt him. She did anyway, when she swallowed an entire bottle of pills. Maybe for Ilya’s father it was the same. Maybe he never wanted to hurt Irina, or Alexei, or Ilya; maybe he was, genuinely, truly, doing his best.

For a long time, that thought was comforting to Ilya, a balm he pulled out to sooth himself when his father said something particularly horrible. It wasn’t that Grigori didn’t love him; it was just that he wasn’t very good at being a father.

Now, the same idea terrifies him. If that was Grigori doing his best, then that meant doing your best wasn’t always enough. And that meant Ilya doing his best wouldn’t always be enough. He could try his hardest for the rest of his life and still end up slicing Shane to pieces.

The problem, of course, is that there’s no easy solution. What is Ilya supposed to do? Leave Shane? Even if Ilya wanted to—even if he was not terribly, terribly selfish, and willing to burn the whole world to the ground for just one more day in Shane’s arms—that would hardly help the situation. They’re tied together, now. Ilya leaving might not destroy Shane the way that Shane leaving would destroy Ilya, but it would hurt him a hell of a lot. And that’s the whole root of the problem: Ilya never wants Shane to be hurt. Ilya wants Shane to be happy, always.

—

It’s not just Shane who feels this way about him. Couch Wiebe keeps throwing rookies Ilya’s way like spare jerseys, expecting him to make them feel safe and welcome. When Ilya does a publicity event at a local animal shelter, the shelter workers pass him tiny little kittens, no larger than the palm of his hand, without a second thought. And his teammates, with their kids—

“Uncle Shane and Uncle Ilya are great babysitters,” Ilya overheard Jackie, once, telling one of her Montreal WAG friends. “The kids love them so much. They’re safe.”

This is, Ilya supposes, the greatest praise you can get from a parent: the supposition that their children are safe with you. Of course, Jackie was a good mom, so she did her due diligence first. It was months after Shane and Ilya started dating before Jackie let the two of them alone with the kids. Months more before she called Ilya in to babysit solo. Ilya can imagine the private conversations she must have had with her children during those periods, carefully-posed questions about touches and feelings. He’s seen snippets of them on the children’s shows he watches sometimes with the Pikes, always an older woman with bright glasses and a towering updo brandishing a cloth doll at the camera, saying things like this is the no-no square.

Ilya conducts his own counter-interrogations. He loves his teammates, but you can’t be too careful. He notes what bruises the kids have, where they are and how bad they are and how often they get them. He watches the way the kids act, when their parents come through the door, calling out, honeys, I’m home! In the end, there are no red flags. Ilya has good friends. They are good parents.

—

Ilya always kept a punching bag in his gym. Shane, on the other hand, kept a quiet corner for meditation and yoga. This, Ilya thinks, demonstrates clearly the fundamental difference between them, the different ways they respond to the world.

When they move in together, they give their shared gym both a punching bag and a yoga corner. In some ways, this is worse, because it means while Ilya is hammering out his fury on an innocent leather bag, that yoga corner is staring back at him from the mirror, taunting him for his inability to control himself.

Today, Ilya’s fury is directed at Chris Eaton, who slammed Shane so hard into the boards that he had to be taken off the ice for fifteen minutes and evaluated. His fury is a little bit directed at Shane, too, since Shane refused to let Ilya deck Eaton afterwards. It’s not worth it, he had said, firmly, and Ilya, reluctantly, had obeyed.

But before Shane was even back on the ice, Eaton had gone for another disabling hit, this one against Haas. Ilya had hit him, then. Ilya might not be an enforcer, but he is the captain, and there are lines that can’t be crossed in front of him.

Now, Ilya has been hammering the bag for long enough that he’s lost track of time. When he sees Shane enter the gym behind him, he stops immediately, stilling the bag with one hand. His breath is coming hard and sounds wheezy. He’s probably been at this too long.

But Shane doesn’t chide him, just slides up behind Ilya and settles his hands on Ilya’s waist.

“You were right about Eaton,” Shane says.

Ilya swallows hard. “Is no surprise,” he says. “I’m always right.”

Shane huffs, pressing a kiss to the sweaty nape of Ilya’s neck. “Come upstairs,” he says. “Take a shower. Dinner’s ready for you.”

—

Shane and Ilya come out, and suddenly they can travel without needing to concoct a reason for being in the same city. It’s one of Ilya’s favorite things, to be able to check into a hotel room together, Shane folding his hands neatly on the front desk, Ilya lounging with his elbow up beside him, getting to say Yes, one room, two keys.

So when Shane has business in New York, Ilya follows him. There’s a photoshoot for Speedo that runs late into the afternoon. Shane had banned Ilya from coming to the shoot itself, worried about getting hard in his skimpy little swimsuit, and Ilya, delighted by the image, hadn’t argued.

Instead, he texts Kip, who shows up to meet Ilya at the Kingfisher just before dinner time. He’s not alone: he’s got a six-foot-tall teenager in tow, who ducks his head when he sees Ilya. “This is Brandon,” Kip says, slinging him into the booth opposite Roz. “He’s Scott’s new rookie. Be nice.”

“I will be nice, Mr. Grady, sir,” the kid rushes to assure him, and Kip laughs.

“Oh, buddy, I wasn’t talking to you.”

Ilya would have heard, if there was another out player in the league. But out or not, this kid is definitely gay. Ilya can tell from the way his gaze keeps flitting, wonderingly, around the bar, the way his eyes linger on the pride flags, the black-and-white photos from the ‘80s of activists marching down Wall Street, the pronoun button on Kyle’s well-muscled chest.

At some point, Brandon uses male pronouns when talking about an ex-partner, and immediately he stiffens up like a wet t-shirt thrown out into the Siberian winter.

Kip glances between them. “Roz is cool,” he says, rubbing a hand over Brandon’s shoulder. “I don’t know if you missed the memo, but he’s very gay.”

Ilya waves a finger in the air pointedly. “Bisexual! I am bisexual.”

Kip rolls his eyes. “I was using gay as a blanket term, but, yes, very bisexual. How do you feel about the word queer?”

“Does it include bisexuals?”

“Yeah, it’s another blanket term.”

“What the fuck does any of this have to do with blankets?”

Kip laughs at him, and explains, and it isn’t necessary—Ilya knows what a “blanket term” is. He reads the New Yorker. But he gripes and groans about English very dramatically anyway, flicking his wrists a little looser than he maybe usually would, and the kid lets his shoulders down slowly, in a matter of inches.

Later, when Ilya buys them another round of drinks, he tells Kyle to give him a bottle opener and leave the beer caps on. He passes the kid an unopened bottle and lets him crack it himself, so he knows there’s nothing wrong with it.

Kip raises an eyebrow at him, but Ilya figures it can’t hurt to be careful. Who knows what this kid has heard about him. What he thinks.

—

“Sometimes, I just want to throttle you,” Shane had said, once, during an argument. Ilya can’t really remember what the argument was about, now—the dishwasher, maybe, or the water heater. Something stupid and domestic. But he remembers how Shane had clenched his fists, his jaw, his whole body tensing up into a block of coiled muscle. He had looked like a hockey player, then. He had looked like he looked sometimes, on the ice, the desire to win pouring out of him like fury.

Ilya hadn’t been afraid of him, of course. This was Shane, who he had never even seen yell at Anya. Anyway, Ilya was too busy being afraid of what he himself might do—afraid of the reciprocal anger that rose up in his own chest, buzzing through him like an electric current. It felt like desire, and Ilya knew how bad he was at sublimating his own desires, at least when it came to Shane.

Before he could do anything, he had turned on his heel and gone outside and jumped into the lake. It was only May and the water was still freezing and he was fully clothed when he did it. But the shock felt good to his system, the way his lungs seized and screamed in the cold. By the time Ilya had dragged himself up onto the dock, Shane was standing on the back deck, gaping at him. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he had demanded, but Ilya didn’t mind. His own anger was gone now, replacing with bubbling humor. He laughed at the look on Shane’s face, and then he trooped up to the house to kiss him.

—

In general, Ilya has no particular love for Hazy’s superhero movies, but he doesn’t mind them as much as oust of the other guys do, so he often gets roped into re-watching them. On plane rides to games; in Hazy’s living room when Lisa is working some long overnight shift and Shane wants a night to himself.

Hazy likes to keep up a steady commentary during their viewings. It drives Shane crazy, but Ilya finds it interesting. He likes hearing what random things Hazy’s brain has come up with today, how it differs from whatever he said when they watched this movie last month.

“Do you even really like any of these guys?” Ilya asks, after Hazy spends five minutes picking apart the logic behind yet another random mutant’s powers. “Seems like you think they are all stupid.”

“The writing can be stupid, that does’t mean the characters are,” Hazy says, as if this is not the most nonsensical distinction that Ilya has ever heard. “Anyway, some of them are good. Like FlameBro.”

FlameBro is the very original name for a character who bursts into flames when he gets angry. Probably, they wanted to name him something like Flaming Man, but the studio owners said it sounded too gay, so they adapted. Probably, they brought in a bunch of fraternity brothers to workshop the alias.

“Why do you like him so much?” Ilya asks. FlameBro is one of Ilya’s least favorite characters. He’s too unpredictable. Out of control, sometimes. Ilya can’t imagine being around someone like that and not being constantly on edge.

Wyatt waves a hand through the air. “Oh, come on, man,” he says. “You can’t say he’s not inspiring. He’s been so much, and he still wants to do good.”

“He hurts people all the time,” Ilya points out. “When he loses control. Not very heroic."

Wyatt shakes his head. “He does his best, and it doesn’t happen very often.”

Ilya raises an eyebrow at him. “He just gave an innocent woman first-degree burns when he got mad at her mugger,” he says.

Wyatt tilts his head. “Okay, sure,” he says. “But he saved her from the mugger, yeah?”

And there’s something wrong with that logic, Ilya knows. He just can’t explain it. He settles for tugging his blanket more securely over himself and not saying anything at all.

—

Shane lets Ilya knot his wrists to the headboard and it doesn’t make Ilya’s stomach twist. Shane lets Ilya blindfold and gag him and follows his every instruction to the letter and it doesn’t bother Ilya at all, because he knows that if it got to be too much for Shane, he’d use his safeword. They had practiced it so many times. Once or twice, Ilya had even deliberately pushing past the edge of comfort just so he could confirm Shane would call it when he needed to.

Shane was so competitive; it would be easy for him to be competitive about this. But he wasn’t, because he was perfect, and he was good, and because when he used his safe word Ilya kissed him all over and covered him with praise until he shivered with glee.

This is different. When Shane says, in bed, I feel so safe with you, and means in life in general; when he cuddles under Ilya’s arm on the couch, folding himself up into a man half the size that he is so he can curl under the bulk of Ilya like a maiden from a fairy tale; when Ilya comes up behind him suddenly, accidentally grabs him too roughly, yells at him in anger, when all of that happens and Shane doesn’t so much as flinch—

That worries Ilya, because that means Shane isn’t on guard. Shane isn’t ready to defend himself, if something happens. And things can change so quickly. Ilya would know. You should always be ready to defend yourself, even against the people you love most in the world. Maybe especially them.

—

The first time Ilya meets David and Yuna, he expects a shovel talk. Not right away, but then Yuna and Shane are out in the yard saying God-knows-what, and Ilya is left alone at the kitchen table with David, and they manage a two-line exchange about Russian vodka before they both fall into an awkward silence that breaks only when Ilya blurts, “Are you going to threaten me?”

David blinks at him, face blank, and Ilya elaborates, “You know, you own a shotgun, you will kill me if I hurt him, this sort of thing? I have heard this is common thing for fathers to do in the West.”

“Um,” David says. “No. I wasn’t planning to. Are you going to hurt him?”

“God, no,” Ilya says quickly, then looks down at his hands, twisting together, and amends, “I mean, I hope not. But maybe you should do it anyway.”

He can feel David’s gaze on him, as pricklingly perceptive as Shane can be, sometimes, when they’re talking or fucking and Ilya’s guard is down and Shane looks at him with those big eyes that see straight through him like he’s made of glass.

“Sorry, son,” David says, and Ilya’s heart catches in his throat. “I don’t think I can give that to you. Try Yuna, maybe. She’s always been the fighter in our relationship.”

But Ilya doesn’t get a moment alone with Yuna for the rest of the day, and when he finally does, it’s weeks later, and he’s already met her half a dozen times, and it’s too late to ask for anything like that. It sounds too ridiculous. Please threaten me on your son’s behalf, Ilya imagines saying. Please tell me not to hurt him so I’ll have another reason not to do it. I’m afraid I need another reason. I’m afraid of myself.

It would scare her, probably. She would probably tell Shane, and then Shane would be alarmed, and then there would be a conversation that Ilya doesn’t want to have, a conversation that could end in very bad places. So Ilya keeps to himself, and tells himself that he doesn’t need backup. If Ilya hurts Shane, he’ll kill himself. David, Yuna, any of Shane’s friends—in this they were extraneous. If Ilya ever hurt Shane, he would handle the situation on his own.

—

Are you safe there? had been one of the first things Ilya had asked Shane, after the FanMail video leaked and the Metros revealed themselves to be house-sized pieces of shit.

Shane hadn’t understood. I mean, yeah, I’m at home, all good here, he had said, and Ilya had had to explain.

Do you think they will do something to you? he had pressed. Do you think—

He hadn’t wanted to say it, so he hadn’t. It didn’t matter; Shane had understood. Shane who had such a hard time with subtle cues, Shane who needed everything to be said explicitly, Shane who liked the literal. Shane had looked through the phone at Ilya—on FaceTime, because this could not wait until they were in the same city, not anymore—and said No, Ilya. It’s not that kind of thing.

He had seemed sincere. More than that, he had seemed sure. Ilya trusted Shane's judgement. For the first time since he saw the news, Ilya took a long, deep breath.

—

“I think maybe you should not say that,” Ilya says, one day after Shane has done it again—waited until Ilya was deep inside him, and Shane was rutting against the sheets, to say I feel so safe, here, with you.

Of course, Ilya’s not a piece of shit, so before he brings it up, he makes sure Shane isn’t still in the sunken place he goes to sometimes, during sex. He scrubs Shane’s back in the shower, and then he covers him in a blanket, and then he goes and makes him an afternoon smoothie, and now Shane is drinking it in bed while he scrolls through emails with his agent on his phone. Willing to contact the outside world: that’s the best cue Ilya has, that Shane is feeling like himself.

“Hmm?” Shane says, distracted. “What shouldn’t I say?”

“That you’re safe here.”

It seems to take Shane a moment to process the words. When he does, he drops his phone in his lap and turns to face Ilya head-on. He’s got that little furrow between his brows that drives Ilya absolutely fucking crazy. Ilya wants to lick that furrow, to bite it off Shane’s face. He feels like a zombie, sometimes, with how much he genuinely wants to sink his teeth into Shane’s flesh.

“What?” Shane asks. “Why wouldn’t I say that?”

Ilya shrugs, thumbing at his nose. “Does not matter. Maybe just is better if you don’t.”

“But I am safe here,” Shane says.

“Are you?”

Shane looks about as confused as Ilya has ever seen him. “Yes,” he says, very plainly. “I am.”

Ilya nods, once, twice, then opens his mouth to speak—and instead, humiliatingly, bursts into tears.

“Oh, shit,” Shane says, and sits there frozen for a moment before he’s lurching forward in a fumble of uncoordinated limbs to try to wrap Ilya up in his arms. Ilya lets him, even though it’s one of the most awkward shuffles he’s ever endured. As in-touch as Shane is with his body, as elegant and sexy as he can be with it on the ice or in the bedroom, he’s perpetually fumbling when he asks it to do something it’s never done before, even if it’s something that’s new in only the smallest of ways, the slightest change in the way a hip is sprawled open, a hand laid somewhere he doesn’t expect it.

“It’s okay,” Shane says, petting Ilya’s back with one hand. He’s got Ilya’s head tipped against his chest and his legs pretzeled around him in some vaguely-yogic pose and the net effect of it is that Ilya feels like a lump of pork bundled securely in a soft pillow of pelmeni dough. The two of them, together, they could be swallowed up in a single bite.

“It’s okay,” Shane says again. “I’ve got you.”

Ilya closes his eyes. It’s better like this: the world reducing itself down to the red light that filters through his eyelids. His face is wet and his lips taste of salt. And Shane’s hand is on the back of his neck, pressing firmly in the same way Ilya’s father used to. Had his mother done that, too? Ilya can hardly remember now, but the image feels right. Familiar.

Shane says, “You’re safe here too, you know.”

ok here’s the thing it stresses me out when people say they trust me bc im like nO don’T TRUST ME I don’t kNOW WHAT IM DOING and that is like, for much lower stakes things than like, someone trusting me with their life. like I don’t like it when people say they trust my recommendation for a restaurant for dinner, you know? and I am not nearly as fucked up as ilya. anyway what I am saying here is that if I were ilya and Shane was just sort of laying himself on top of me like hi I trust you not to hurt me ever :) :) :) I would be like oh my godddddd pls don’t say that plssss stay on guard around me plssssss protect yourself. to which Shane would, of course, say no :) thank you :) I trust you :) and I (ilya) would have a mental breakdown

anyway idea for this fic came from reading gatorade galas & moscow mules by toraten (https://archiveofourown.org/works/76866546) which has a line where Shane internally thinks about how Ilya is the safest place in the world. and while I have written lines nearly identical to that in prior fics independently, something about reading it in someone else’s work got me thinking in a new way about what would happen if Shane actually verbalized that thought to ilya, and how ilya would respond to it. so!! here it is.

pls remember ilya is not a reliable narrator, his views of himself are not my views of him

haven't read tlg so don't know if shane and ilya are togehter or not when the video leaks so just suspend your disbelief if im wrong

as always, I live in fear of accidental plagiarism so please let me know if anything in here is too close to something you’ve read in another fic!!