Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Ottawa Centaurs Team Ensemble & Ilya Rozanov, David Hollander & Yuna Hollander & Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Svetlana Vetrova, Shane Hollander & Rose Landry, Anya | Ilya Rozanov's Dog & Yuna Hollander, Shane Hollander & Brandon Wiebe, David Hollander & Shane Hollander & Yuna Hollander, Shane Hollander & Hayden Pike

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Anya | Ilya Rozanov's Dog, Ottawa Centaurs Team Ensemble (Game Changers), Rose Landry, Svetlana Vetrova, Brandon Wiebe, Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Kip Grady, Hayden Pike, Roger Crowell

Additional Tags:

Post-Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), BUT: that insofar as, Canon Divergence - No FanMail Incident, Olympics, Winter Olympics, Established Relationship, No FanMail Incident, How Shane Becomes a Centaur Anyway, 2022 Winter Olympics, Team Canada, Coming out on their own terms, (and if that HAPPENS to be on a GLOBAL OLYMPIC STAGE then: that’s just a handy coincidence!), (and not at ALL to get what they want while also fucking over that bigot Crowell in the process; DEFINITELY not THAT), Fluff, (and I mean PURE FLUFF), Comfort No Hurt, True Love, Schmoop, Wedded bliss, Holiday Traditions, Wholesome family vibes, Ilya’s Relationship with Shane’s Parents is So Important to Me, Anya is the Most Spoiled Best Girl™ and Deserves It Entirely, Spousal Visas, Soft Domestic Married Love Making, Also: Wild Desperate Married Post- AND Pre-Game Shower Fucking, And DO NOT FORGET: Olympic Village Fucking!, These Boys Have RANGE, Oral Sex, Anal Sex, Rimming, Frottage, Fingering, What Would Shane Hollander Be Like If He Was Just…Genuinely SO FUCKING HAPPY?, let’s find out, The Ottawa Centaurs Being THE BEST BROS, My Love for Brandon Wiebe Is Showing, Canada v Russia Olympic Matchup, Protective Shane Hollander, Protective Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, CUDDLING there is so much cuddling, Physical Contact as SUCH a Love Language, Fuck They’re Just So In Love, Happy Ending, Uninterrupted Unmitigated Fluff with an Unrepentantly Happy Ending

Language:

English

Series:

Part 1 of reveal yourself and shine in the momentum

Collections:

a library of only the BEST FICS TO EVER EXIST ✨

Stats:

Published: 2026-02-18 Completed: 2026-02-23 Words: 31,613 Chapters: 4/4

long game (class acts never fail)

Summary

If you’d already decided love was more than enough, that being together was bigger than fear; if you’d already picked each other over everything else, already picked a season to make it known; if you’d exchanged rings and vows and you knew this was forever and—most significantly—no one’s idiot best friend accidentally outed you early with his stupid side-hustle video scheme: would you stick to the plan?

Or, would you play a slightly longer game to make your point; would you wait a couple extra months if it meant seizing the opportunity to go big, go bold, shove loving this much in the faces of the naysayers and the assholes and the bigots on an oh-so-convenient, quadrennially-available global stage?

~

Or: No FanMail. No outing. No forced free agency. Just their terms. Just their choice. Just their love.

So hell yes: Shane and Ilya use the 2022 Winter Olympics as their hard launch. How’s that even a question?

Scott Hunter’s gonna be so pissed at being upstaged that bad.

Notes

Because I was told by multiple sources that no one had come across a fic where they used the Olympics as their coming-out stage and while that doesn’t mean there AREN’T any fics that did that, it CLEARLY implies there are too few.

Posting will be quick because it was held to start today to follow the actual games: today/Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, then Sunday for the gold medal game/end of play.

And if you all like it enough, yell at me and maybe I’ll whip up a quick wrap up/‘what’s the fallout?’ chapter early next week.

Also, more broadly speaking: this is for cloudsurfing, because you single-handedly convinced me to try writing in this fandom and not keep all the bin-fic in the bin and I’m so grateful for that, but also insanely grateful for you and basically one of the only ways I know how to express that is by giving a person unsolicited fics so. Here is a fic! 🖤

My thanks also to the incomparable SilverRaindemon for having a read and cheerleading and just being an endlessly wonderful human, and to througheden for giving me the boost of confidence to pretend to write some of the stuff that’s actually about the hockey.

FINALLY: title credit to this song, where the minor title crossover was actually and honestly ENTIRELY coincidental.

Chapter 1: Spousal Visas and Other Stories

“They’re gonna want you.”

Shane’s propped in his…probably second favorite place: pushed back on the headboard to their bed, Ilya draped over his torso in any and all configurations—across his chest, against his shoulder, lined with his sternum, curled in his lap, with a handful of his pec: all varieties. No wrong position.

It’s wild, when Shane actually takes the second to think on it as he cards fingers through Ilya’s curls splayed out under his chin, scratches a little against his scalp for the moan he knows he’ll be rewarded with: the idea that any place or position on the ice barely touches his top ten, anymore. Not because he doesn’t love hockey.

He just…never expected learning how to love something else so much; so incomprehensibly more.

“Doesn’t everyone?” Ilya circles his wrist, sighs it out in out-upon dismay, the burden of his adoring public, and Shane’s lips quirk a little higher. His husband’s such an arrogant fuck.

God, but he loves him.

“You know what I mean,” Shane flicks the top of the ear not crushed against his chest; “they’re gonna want you.”

Ilya hums, and yeah, Shane does let himself sink into the way the rumble of it shivers from one rib cage pressed tight against the other. Follows the reverberations until Ilya mouths against the bottom hinge of Shane’s jaw, tantalizing as his lips drag, as his tongue teases just so:

“I think…no.”

Shane blinks, even if his hands keep playing in Ilya’s hair—he sounds so unbothered, like Shane can barely process.

Like of course Ilya would.

“They are,” Shane doubles down, tugs a little on a couple strands of Ilya’s hair to make his point, but not hard enough to excite him too much; “why wouldn’t they?”

That’s the main improbable point, really. The part Shane cannot run through his head and force sense from because: there is no why.

Ilya tips his head up and cocks a brow pointedly in Shane’s direction.

“Because they already have Shane Hollander?” and he says it so…infuriating simply. Like the obvious answer needs broken down into small words for a particular brand of moron.

And like Shane—naked under the perfect weighted blanket of his beautiful fucking husband, who he gets to lie like this with without a time limit, an expiration date, any sort of restriction or reservation or restraint—but he says it like Shane?

Shane’s currently that particular—if still deeply beloved—brand of moron.

“Ilya,” Shane tries to push, because he’s right, he knows that he’s right—

“If they ask, I will say no,” Ilya shrugs, unconcerned; uses the motion of his arms to better roll his shoulders under Shane’s collarbones; “thank you, but no.”

Shane—who is now currently in the unenviable situation of wanting to gape pretty goddamn dramatically at his unbelievable fucking husband, but equally he has no desire or motivation to remove Ilya’s sweet warmth from where it’s currently lulling soft and intimate, adoring with every lift of his lungs: yeah.

So Shane lets his jaw drop low enough so that Ilya can feel it against the crown of his head, and keeps it stretched there as long as necessary to draw a chuckle from the body pressed against him before he lets himself ask with a whine he doesn’t bother holding back:

“Why?”

Because Shane isn’t a particular brand of moron. Shane isn’t any brand of moron, not about this.

So yeah: he fucking well gets to ask why the obvious answer is somehow apparently so obviously wrong.

Ilya shifts, only just. Shane’s hands don’t even get jostled from brushing through his hair like devotion, like a metronome that counts through feeling more than time.

“Is publicity stunt,” Ilya sighs, arching into Shane’s touch unabashed; fucking gorgeous.

“Hardly,” Shane snorts a little, maybe roughs Ilya’s hair at the roots with his knuckles just a touch, a play on scolding his take on foolish suggestions.

“Maybe the optics are a perk, but,” Shane tips his chin down so he can speak closer to Ilya’s ear, make himself understood, and unmistakably at that:

“You’re Ilya fucking Rozanov,” Shane says, and it’s not even bravado anymore, or any hint of feeding his partner’s ego—it’s honest.

He’s Ilya fucking Rosanov.

And he’s Shane’s.

“You damn well know how exceptional you are,” Shane presses into the muss of his curls at the top of his head, now, holds his lips there until Ilya hums for the sensation, rather than taking the opportunity to launch straight into a rebuttal.

Shane’s had plenty of practice wrangling his husband by now to know the plays pretty fucking well.

“Especially in this role,” he adds on, taking quick to kissing Ilya’s scalp, the nape of his neck, the soft strips behind his ears at the first hint of his taking a breath to contradict Shane’s really fucking valid and entirely factual arguments—doesn’t even notice exactly when his fingers slipped to Ilya’s chest just below his shoulder, started tracing the telltale half-circle there, driving home his point.

“You brought the Centaurs back to, fucking, viability,” Shane murmurs against him, muffled with the soft intimacy of burying his face in Ilya’s curls; “single-handedly.”

“Hmm,” Ilya manages to sneak in a dissenting sort of grunt; “was a group effort.”

And even muffled in Shane’s chest, even half-distracted just as Shane’d planned by deft hands playing just so where Ilya’s far-too-sensitive above his clothes to even count as fair: he’s so earnest. So defensive of his boys. His team. His Centaurs.

Like that makes Shane’s point any less.

“That,” Shane underlines it with a similar point to his tone and a little more pressure in the curve of the letter he’s still drawing over Ilya’s pec; “that right there, that’s why they’re gonna want you,” because that conviction, that genuine belief that it’s no man alone on a team that builds it up and lifts it to greatness, that no one outshines anyone else by default, and Ilya’s still on the fucking video game covers but in his red-and-black where those colors never would have made the cut before and his immediate response when there aren’t any cameras and no one’s watching, while he’s half-dazed on Shane’s chest, is that it was a fucking team effort—

“Do you know how rare that is?”

Because Shane and Ilya might have been at this the same amount of time, but Shane…Shane’s head assesses the playfield different from Ilya’s—and thank fuck for that, generally. But what he knows for sure? Is that even the best Captains have other opinions, say other shit when the film’s not rolling.

And then there are the fucking worst Captains—

“Not rare,” Ilya buts in, refutes it simply like a given, then reaches for Shane’s chest, where his ‘C’ would be, reading every unspoken hint Shane’s been dropping, been rubbing dogged into his skin; “part of the job description.”

Shane wishes that were true. But even if it was: Ilya is…Ilya has become the type of leader they’ll write books about, the kinds he’s consistently harassed over being so boring, Hollander, I know David very well, now, and even he is not this boring, you can no longer blame genetics alone for this!

He smiles to himself a little, gives himself a moment to imagine 20, 30 years from now when his prescription’s stronger in his glasses, maybe he has to wear them for more than just reading, when they’re both more than merely going grey and their laughter lines are firmly etched and Ilya’s still finding a way to climb over Shane and pluck his book from his hands and toss it aside, dog-earring the pages without even looking anymore in a way that’s infuriating but so much more endearing, so much more, and then they, they’ll—

Shane gives himself a minute to breathe Ilya in and cement that future in the center of his chest: they were going to have that, now. They basically already did but: in public, for everyone to see and no one to even consider trying to hide—

Soon. Soon.

“No,” Shane gathers all that hope—still learning to settle in his chest without the devastating cut of impossibility, instead emanating the warm glow of yes and of course like a certainty—but he takes it all in his hands and keeps one buried in Ilya’s hair, but flattens the other firm, palm-splayed across his sternum:

“You turned a whole team around because you’re that committed, and you’re that ungodly talented,” Ilya’s neck cranes up with a quirked brow, which Shane traces before flicking at the end of it lightly, clarifying beyond question:

“And you know I don’t blow smoke up your ass for the hell of it.”

Ilya’s grin blooms slow but wide from that glorious angle Shane gets from above, where those impossible cheekbones rise up and the apples of those biteable cheeks peek before the corners of his lips give his joy away any further and Shane feels the weight of Ilya over his ribs with particular purpose as his pulse thumps a little harder for the fullness of it, skips the slightest bit even still as Ilya turns a bit to kiss over his nipple:

“True,” he drawls, almost pensive if his mouth wasn’t pursed over the quick-hardening bud; “you do many other, much better things with my ass,” and said ass isn’t anywhere near Shane, relatively speaking, but the force he grinds into the mattress with to reinforce his claim is undeniable:

“Too distracted to add smoke-blowing,”and Shane wants to blame just how self-satisfied Ilya’s tone rings out, but his own grin would betray him: the truth for why he reaches down toward that ass and intends to pinch but instead palms as much of one of those god-like globes of firm flesh, lets a thumb drop between the crease because he fucking can?

“Case, point,” Ilya enunciates and smacks his lips around the words as he arches a little to encourage Shane’s attentions, and, well.

Yeah. Shane wouldn’t even try to wiggle his way out of proving Ilya’s very obvious and wholly undeniable statement of the obvious.

Still though: what Shane doesn’t make a habit of doing with his husband’s ass remains worth driving home, because he wasn’t just building Ilya up—like that man needed it, definitely not in this; he was being honest.

And he was being fucking correct in his very honest assessment.

“You’re a generation-defining player,” he withdraws his hand on Ilya’s ass with the pinch he’d originally intended, before settling back to draw on his chest, the same curve, back and forth: “and then you’re a fucking exceptional human being to boot.”

Ilya catches the hand on his chest and lifts it to his lips, kisses the first line of knuckles, then mouths where Shane’s ring sits on his finger when it’s not held safe on the chain he’s taken to keeping around his neck.

“Biased, I think,” Ilya breathes there, gentle and more intimate than anything, voice soft and adoring as he licks around the metal.

“You inspired them,” Shane pulls himself back from the brink of giving in to ravishing his husband—again—to do what he was meaning to in the first place, and praise him in other ways.

“You pushed them just right to make them all the best they could be,” Shane says with passion in it, conviction even as Ilya does the vaguely-stony thing he does when he both disagrees and also feels a little uncomfortable with being called out, especially for praise like this, but Shane just keeps going, keep playing with his hair and loving him in all the ways he can, which is generally his orienting goal in life, these days.

“How many of those guys, really fucking talented guys, would have just,” Shane makes a frustrated sound low in his throat; “just languished on a shitty team that’d been forgotten and written off if you hadn’t lit that fire in them, and not only that, you didn’t just spark them and let it ride,” Shane taps for attention at the center point of the letter he’s still tracing on Ilya’s chest; “you tended it, you guided them, you lead them,” Shane tells him, the feeling in each word growing as his hand stills in Ilya’s hair and just grips, like he can make the words felt through sheer force as he takes the hand not tangled in Ilya’s curls and cups the man’s jaw, tilts him up to meet Shane’s eyes.

“You made that team, Ilya.” And over time, Ilya’s stopped looking away when his emotions get the best of him, when his lip starts to tremble and his eyes start to water. But that’s means that Shane’s also learned how to pick out the early signs that it’s coming, so he knows to move his hand in Ilya’s hair down, to pull Ilya tight to him, brace him straight against the rise and fall of his chest as he asks the question he started from, that still makes no sense:

“Why would you say no?”

Ilya rolls his neck and tips his head but stares past Shane at toward the ceiling, the glint of the bedside lamp catching on the ring before the crucifix where they hang bunched up to the notch at his throat.

“Is not for me,” he ultimately says, still mostly nonchalant in the question in itself, uninvested in a way Shane still sometimes struggles to grasp for things this big.

“You chose it,” he can’t help but push his point; “chose here,” and yeah, maybe Shane’s voice cracks a little, goes a tiny bit pitchy on that last word because, because…

“Chose you.”

Yeah. Yeah: Ilya’s the one who says it out loud, maybe, but that’s the bedrock of the whole thing. That’s…at least a part of what makes it matter this much.

Shane doesn’t realize his breathing’s gone a little shaky until Ilya’s lifting up, turning around and sliding, chest-to-chest up Shane’s body, bare skin sticking every few centimeters in a way that should be uncomfortable but mostly feels like home. Just another everyday given that Shane never expected could ever be his.

But then Ilya’s hands are on his face, framing it, looking at him with all the meaning, all the layers of what those words were built on between them: chose you.

“And then, so much more than even that,” and Shane doesn’t think he’s even breathing, though he doesn’t think thats the reason he cannot wholly wrap his head around anything that’s more than the way Ilya’s looking at him, and all that it holds:

“Somehow, incredible still,” and Shane used to worry that the way the look in Ilya’s eyes like this clenched and cradled between his ribs was a thing that might fade some day but no: no, this was a forever kind of bliss, he was sure of that now, especially as Ilya leans close and breathes out in pure fucking wonder:

“Somehow, you chose me.”

The way Ilya says it, kinda baffled by the only sure thing in Shane’s chest, and overflowingly in love—the only thing Shane can do is spread his thighs to catch Ilya’s where they’re loose now against him, hook him in place and fucking devour him until the bafflement dissipates, suffocates and only certainty, only pure fucking certainty gets to live next to that much love.

As it damn well should.

“I love you,” Shane pants between increasingly sloppy kisses, gasped between their quick-swelling lips; “there aren’t, fucking, words for how I love you,” Shane sucks a little longer, a little hard at Ilya’s bottom lip because it really is so much, it really is outside any vocabulary he ever learned or thinks exists to know, is gonna bank on the closest they’ll ever get being their bodies like this, because:

“Not just how much, but how,” and he grabs the chain around Ilya’s neck, presses the two impossibly precious items it holds to the impossibly precious chest it lays against, holds there for a sequence of breathes before he gathers everything: the ring and the cross and Ilya’s palm, all of it to crush against where Shane’s heart would give him away in an instant if there anything of any of this he’d even consider wanting to hide as he murmurs low, and presses tight:

“How it feels, what it does, how it makes,” and he holds Ilya there, and holds his eyes as long as he can stand against blinking, because he wants Ilya to feel it too, wants Ilya to see his fucking soul and know, in this moment like all the others:

Love is a word that doesn’t stretch nearly big enough.

“Lyubimyy,” Ilya whispers, surging into him this time to be the one to not just ravish Shane, but devour him, and Shane’s fucking ready, he’s always ready, he wants to live inside of Ilya as the peak aspiration of his whole goddamn being—and it’s a damn good thing neither of them actually care for anything like shame anymore, not like this, when they manage to rub just right as they both try very admirably to suck one another’s soul out their throats, so well that they shoot off for grinding like goddamn teenagers in the process.

Fuck, they barely even did that as teenagers.

So maybe it’s just long past due; making up for lost opportunities. Shane’s actually all for that, even if it means lying in the mess for a little while as they catch their breaths back.

Though—because Ilya is magic and a miracle and everything Shane needs in the world and everything he never even considered to want—because Shane’s husband knows him, Ilya doesn’t even wait to catch his breath before he dives, licks their mingled come from both their chests so that it’s just spit-slick between them when he collapses back atop Shane, where Shane—who knows his husband—cups Ilya’s face and cradles him like the precious thing he is, while he licks the taste of them both from that mouth with slow, unwavering devotion, the way they somehow make intimate the dirtiest fucking things they can draw between them.

“I still think you should say yes,” Shane pants against Ilya’s lips once they’re swollen almost out of shape: goddamn delectable.

“I think it will not matter,” Ilya runs the softest part of the pads of both thumbs under Shane’s eyes, close enough to brush his lashes and pull something dangerously close to but not quite a giggle from him for the sensation, before he manages to win a full-chested chuckle when he pulls back, just to lean in, quick and playful as he taps the tip of Shane’s nose with a pop of his lips:

“After all,” he drawls, reaching to pinch lightly at Shane’s nipple; “Iam not one in this room who will get this call.”

Shane rolls his eyes, then rolls his body to curl like a parenthesis around where Ilya flips beside him, the orientation of their bodies like this a practiced sort of dance as they catch their breaths still close enough to taste each other on the inhales, still close enough to bask in one another’s heat.

“I never have been coming for your C,” he finds himself kind of spontaneously in need of saying it out loud, reaching to trace that curve against Ilya’s chest one more time, with deliberate care; “you know that right?”

Because he understands why it might have been a question other people would ask, or assume. But they…they didn’t know why Shane made the move he did. They didn’t know that the Shane Hollander who was thrust into a rivalry he never actually wanted to be part of was a person who was now as good as dead in the world at large, but also on the rink. That version of himself, who believed that hockey was the pinnacle of all things to strive for, and acted accordingly, faded away when he gave his heart to something else long before he vowed his everything to the same something in front of everyone who mattered, signed on a line that was pure formality, and yeah: this Shane still loves hockey. More than almost anything.

But the ‘almost’ there can’t fucking exist without a perpetual spotter for just how much heavy lifting it’s doing. The things he loves beyond hockey now aren’t many, but fuck, for what they are?

‘Beyond’ isn’t even a broad enough concept to touch them.

The biggest and most significant ‘beyond’ by fucking light years is, of course, the one staring down at him now, eyes dancing, expression so soft as he presses his lips to Shane again, an answer this time. An understanding and a trust that transcends words.

And Shane lets the gravity of it catch him up in its spell for a few breaths, then a few more, before he pecks Ilya’s lips back and speaks between the crease of his gentle grin:

“I was always after Bood’s A, though,” he confesses, honest but no small portion sly. “Still am.”

And Ilya huffs, then starts to shake, then starts to laugh and Shane feels the sun rise in his chest for it, because Ilya’s laughter, the unbridled and unburdened joy that almost only comes out here like this, just as them: Shane never saw it coming, but fuck if he wouldn’t take the trade in a heartbeat, if he was asked to pick between hockey and the glory of that sound, that untethered bliss.

But yeah: he means what he said, laughter aside. He never moved to Ottawa to be their captain; they were more than set—they were fucking lucky, and they all of them knew it. Shane was fucking lucky.

Just more reasons for why the other version of that same point was a no-fucking-brainer.

Because Shane Hollander, a better player than Ilya? Contextual argument to make, at best. And debatable, in all scenarios. Shane knows they both land stubbornly and immovably on opposite ends of that question, so they don’t really bother asking it.

But: Shane…above Ilya?

Fuck no; not as a habit.

And as if it needed hammered home, Ilya chooses that very moment to shift, lift himself up and plaster himself wholly over Shane, kissing him uncoordinated, unburdened, too fucking giddy for anything but the need to press their lips together and share that joy as a given, and yeah. Fuck yeah. Shane above Ilya? Never as a habit.

Definitely not as a rule.

_______________________

“Shane, Shane!”

The familiar ring of his name right out the goddamn tunnel into the fray of microphones stuck out in his general direction ssaults his senses, always has, but he’s good at hiding it, fielding the attention with good grace.

Especially when his team’s just decimated the Admirals in their own barn.

“Your communications director’s jumped on to help with Team Canada,” he picks out of the layers of voices; “any thoughts?”

That throws him for a bit of a loop: first question that gets shouted loudest not even about their impressive defense, or the now-pretty-standard hat trick out of at least one of their forwards, or—and this one Shane’s surprised no one’s picked up on yet, they’d spent so much time plotting out ways to deflect it graciously that the sheer lack of opportunity is…starting to feel like kind of a let down—but like, no one has asked past a few surface level comments about how often they’ve managed to orchestrate a power play, and specifically how Shane and Ilya have taken their time on the ice together to dominate in what would be at least an interesting (if not downright telling) fashion—but nope. Not a peep.

Shane guesses at least they’re interested in the Olympics, though—even if it’s clear they’re missing the fucking trail of breadcrumbs being sprinkled generously for them, like, embarrassingly.

But whatever. He’ll play.

“That they’re lucky to have him,” because that’s is his main thought on the actual question asked: “Harris is the best of his profession, and an absolute gift of a person to boot.”

“He posted that jersey shot earlier this week, everyone looks so great!” another reporter jumps on, and Shane recognizes his husband’s influence as he fights not to roll his eyes.

“Thank you,” he says, and at least he can answer the basic sentiment as honest as possible; “it was great having some of us together, already, on the ice like that at the same time.”

Of course it’d only been possible because it seemed like near-half the Olympic squad was made of Centaurs, probably could have just used their uniforms and donated the undoubtedly-sickening budget for the official kit, but: whatever. It’s the only reason anything went up this early on socials: Harris was already surrounded by a chunk of the team.

But that wasn’t the point, just now:

“So many people who know each other but only get the privilege to play together every, what, half a decade?” Shane gestures enthusiastically, and actually feels it when he adds:

“It’s so special, and we’re lucky to be a part of it.”

It’s just that these people don’t have a single fucking clue as to the extent of why it’s so special to Shane.

They will, the voice in his head that rumbles with that Russian lilt and simultaneously tingles his spine and placates his heart: it reminds him he just has to wait, just has to be patient—not just for that voice to be a tangible, wet-warm press of lips on his neck in mere hours, but for the whole fucking world to see what’s in his heart, what’s written on his goddamn soul.

Soon, he thinks. Nods to himself like his mother taught him, her mantra of enough softening, shaped a little gentler, a hell of a lot sweeter in Ilya’s deft hands to be hopeful, to call a pause instead of an end.

Soon.

And so he nods, and blinks, and tries to key back into the questions being fired his way.

“But he had to have known the speculation for the player half cut-off on the photo, on the far left next to yourself?”

Harris. Harris had to have known, is what they mean. Shane has no doubt about it, even if he didn’t already know the answer for a fact, but like hell if he’s going to engage whatever they’re angling at.

He is going to tilt his head and smile politely to see if they give themselves away any further for just how far from the truth they’re still digging.

“No one can seem to figure who it is, frontrunner for speculation seems to be Ross Marín, if he’s coming up from Columbus,” one voice tries to make the gossip-mongering of it all sound professional, authoritative even. It’s kind of embarrassing.

The sound of Ilya’s laughter for the spectacle in his own head makes his lips quirk.

“Or maybe one of the regular Olympic squad’s letting their hair grow out? You can see a little hint,” a simpering voice latches on, tugs at her own hair indicatively, maybe even an attempt at…seductively? With wide eyes like she can ingratiate her way into some exclusive…grooming tips?

What the fuck even is Shane’s life right now.

“You’re not actually asking me to, what,” Shane leans in a little, eyeing each of the specific reporters who’d chimed in; “spoil a lineup you literally have all the possibilities for from our regular season rosters?”

And he delivers it kindly enough, he was raised a certain way, but: yeah.

Yeah, the words themselves. That’s his husband’s influence rubbed off all over him.

(Which: Shane would never in his life object to anything of his husband’s rubbing off on any part of him, no matter how potentially inconvenient. He’s not in the practice of looking gift horses in the mouth.

Not anymore.)

“I don’t even know which photo you’re referring to, to know who was standing next to me,” lie—bald-faced lie. They’d only managed the uniform fitting, basically, what with their MLH schedules so far, and they’d been very careful about the framing of the images Harris took.

But good on Harris—not surprising—to have framed whatever he shot in such a way to have them all speculating on Marín of all people. Guy wasn’t nearly as tall as…anyone they should be guessing about.

“I will say some of the guys with us this year do like playing with hair styles about as much as they like playing the puck, so,” Shane shrugs, hopes he misdirects and confused them just enough with his choice of words, then tucks his hands under his arms as he bites down too big of a grin. “I can imagine who it could’ve been.”

There’s some overlapping din before Shane picks up a dumb enough question to be a good segue out:

“Give us a hint?”

He smirks a little. He lets himself smirk, just a little.

“And ruin their big reveal?” he asks back on a laugh they can’t fully understand, not yet, and it makes shutting them down that much sweeter as he shakes his head, tosses half over his shoulder as he walks away:

“Not a chance.”

_______________________

Shane doesn’t even look at the caller ID before answering—only like ten people can get past his Focus mode—but it does make for an interesting shift in his mood as he shovels the kinda-overnight-oats-but-kinda-not that Ilya swore were healthy, Hollander, I would not touch them with hazmat gloves so you know they are good for you, but they’re a little too good tasting for him to be wholly convinced.

(Also too good-tasting for him to stop eating them, at least not until the voice rings out through the kitchen from the speaker, with full-on laughing-fucking-judgement:)

“Were you aware that not only had we gotten back together, but we’re planning a wedding?” Shane’s so fucking lucky he swallowed his mouthful of not-quite-oats before those words echoed through the room because: fucking hell.

“You really should have texted me the heads up,” and Shane can fucking hear the height of her brow-raise at him across the line, like, so clear; “or were you going to just wait for me to get the ‘save-the-date’?”

Shane swallows the last dregs of his not-overnight-oats a few times more than probably necessary, takes a swig of the actually-halfway-decent mushroom coffee-adjacent…thing that he flat out refused to endorse until he tried it, but once that’s sorted, he takes a deep breath and leans back in his stool at the island in the middle of the kitchen before he measures his answer:

“It is not strictly my fault that the press will take perfectly straightforward statements and run in the absolute most-wrong direction,” he says, and it comes out…natural. Confident.

It feels new, still, being more…or really just less willing to smooth things over at his own expense, to roll over by default and do what’s expected of him.

Still new. But it’s good.

“Mmm,” Rose hums, pride in him for it, not condescending like Shane usually took that sort of thing, but like a best friend would—and that feels good, too.

“I do assume the statement made was a wholly non-specific reference to your lovely husband?”

She says that about Ilya like she means it, and Shane grins to himself twofold for it—they’ve warmed to each other, and that’s such a soft thing in Shane’s chest on its own, but then: his lovely husband.

His lovely husband.

Hearing those words will never not feel like the best fucking thing in the world.

“You would be incorrect,” Shane replies with a tiny bit of dramatics, and the quiet from the other side of the call is a challenge that he…does cave to. A little.

“Technically. You’re technically incorrect.”

“Details, Hollander,” Rose sighs heavily through what would probably count as a whine so long as Shane didn’t say as much to a tabloid; “I keep you around for the hot sexiness as much as the gooey romance. And the impeccable tea, so,” he hears her snapping her fingers before she demands:

“Spill.”

Shane, because he lives full-time now with his lovely husband, takes another, maybe-overly-leisurely sip of his mushroom-juice-stuff, and smacks his lips to the distinctly impatient drumming of perfectly-manicured nails.

And, because he lives full-time with his lovely husband: Shane maybe grins to himself for it.

“It was entirely unrelated, what they’re talking about,” Shane starts, in no particular hurry; “at least, like, specifically.”

“You forget I can tell when you lie,” Rose shoots back, unimpressed.

“It’s not a lie!” which: it’s not. And he is at least half as offended as the words come out to sound.

At least.

“Evading!” He can hear her accusingly pointing at him down the connection. “Lying by evasion!”

“Pretty sure it’s lying by omission,” Shane comments, because he constitutionally cannot help it. Like his boring, it’s fucking genetic.

“Neither of us have a college degree, asshole,” Rose reminds him dryly, not buying it for a second.

“The New Yorker was big in my house,” Shane defends, admirably even. He thinks.

“Talk, Hollander.”

Okay, fine: so Rose maybe doesn’t agree with his assessment on his defense. Whatever.

He launches into the shorthand of how spousal visas had been brought up with regard to new partners with the Foundation, completely unrelated to his own personal interests in the matter, and he’d very innocently and professionally sympathized with the complications of the process while expressing his hopes that his and Ilya’s positions might be able to figure ways to expedite some portion of the rigmarole.

Not his fault people thought (correctly, the fuckers) that his sympathies were a little too on the nose.

“So you’re telling me,” Rose summarizes pointedly; “the cat’s gonna be out of the bag, finally, pretty fucking soon?”

Because once she and Ilya got over both having seen Shane naked in bed—Shane’s own relationship with Svetlana had also helped tame the animosity, some hindbrain fair split of ‘best friends you have fucked and/or have tried to fuck’—but once they got past that? Rose was kind of the biggest cheerleader for both of them. Anya liked her. She was a part of their little family. She’d been at their wedding.

Ilya had fucking danced with her.

And, well: she’s not wrong that Shane’s a bad liar. Or else: his tells aren’t…nonexistent. He’s proven to be really great at hiding things, but, like…

He also kinda wants to share this.

“Umm, well,” he clears his throat, takes another sip of his now-lukewarm caffeinated mushroom water: “does February count as pretty fucking soon?”

“February?”

“The, umm,” Shane swallows again because, like, he hasn’t said it out loud, much, like this; “the tenth, specifically?”

At least for the first part. February 10th for the first part, and then…

And then—

“Oh my god,” Rose says, a little breathless, because Rose knows hockey, and she knows what happens every four years in February for hockey, and Shane can almost see how the pieces are coming together in her head without having to literally see her at all:

“Shane,” she half-squeals, an excited clap echoing down the line; “this is going to break—”

“The internet?” Shane guesses with a slow-spreading grin, because he’s heard that, from her specifically. More than once.

“Forget the internet,” she scoffs; “it’s not long for this world, not with something this immense on the horizon.” She gives her best on-screen sniffle for a choked delivery: “Farewell TikTok, we hardly knew ye.”

And Shane laughs, because…because it’s funny, but really he laughs because the joy in his chest is too big to contain, like, ever. And when he’s given an opportunity to let it bubble up and breathe the air proper, to bask in the sunlight?

He grabs it, and lets his heart shout through his laughter: I’m married to the fucking love of my life and I didn’t know that hearts could just keep growing for your whole life in order to be big enough if your loving just kept expanding every single second of every single day, and I didn’t know happiness could be something you could keep but look at us.

Fucking look at us, we goddamn glow with it.

“Shane, forget the internet,” Rose says seriously, but the kind that’s built on so much excitement: “this is going to whole-ass break brains.”

Shane laughs again for that, and decides not to dwell on whether it’s a good or bad thing that one of his best friends is so fucking ecstatic about…brain breaking.

“Also,” she adds, just as enthusiastic but this time a little more wicked with it:

“Scott Hunter is going to be so pissed.”

And Shane likes Scott just fine, but fuck.

Fuck, does he laugh for that.

Chapter 2: In His Heart of Hearts

Chapter Summary

Shane, in his heart of hearts, had always hoped for a version of this.

As in: Shane doesn’t remember even thinking about this sort of thing at all, until he met Ilya, and started thinking about so many things, so many fucking things he couldn’t have and then somehow, inexplicably, almost inarguably miraculously now could, now did—

So the only version he’d ever truly hoped for at all, looked basically just like…this.

Shane, in his heart of hearts, had always hoped for a version of this.

As in: Shane doesn’t remember even thinking about this sort of thing at all, until he met Ilya, and started thinking about so many things, so many fucking things he couldn’t have and then somehow, inexplicably, almost inarguably miraculously now could, now did—

So the only version he’d ever truly hoped for at all, looked basically just like…this.

“Yes, Mama Yuna,” and Shane fucking melts for how Ilya calls his mom that as a given now, like a single word in the vein of the random nouns he still call Shane and infallibly makes sound like synonyms for ‘love’; he melts for how Shane’s not even sure Ilya saw, or chose to stick with the name for his mom for the way her face had nearly crumpled for feeling the first time he’d used it years ago, took her a whole ten minutes to compose herself properly, which Shane’s pretty sure to this day remains a record; “Christmas Eve, arrive in sweaters, take photos, change to pajamas,” he ticks it all off on his fingers as he balances the phone in the crook of his neck while he adds ingredients from the fridge to the growing piles on island; “all arrived yesterday, Anya’s are especially beautiful, she is very fond of them.”

Shane mashes his lips around the grin that threatens to consume him while just remembering the call he’d gotten on his drive last night—he’d had a last-minute meeting before things closed for the holidays so Ilya had beat him hone, and Ilya’d called, demanding Shane pull over so they could FaceTime instead of waiting the whole twenty minutes he had left in his drive, so that he could fully appreciate their gorgeous girl in what—at least to Shane’s eyes—was a couture-adjacent fucking fur lounge-coat with matching booties for her precious paws, all in the classy shade of holiday red that wasn’t relegated to Santas and cheap stockings.

Meanwhile, Ilya and Shane got the matching loungewear with the obligatory plaid on the bottom. Seemed slightly uneven, but…Anya did prance like a diva in her little robe-thing and it was adorable, so.

It was fine.

“I bring smetannik or you want to make there?” Ilya is asking as he eyes his trove of supplies critically, listens, and then rushes to reassure:

“It only looks complicated, I swear this,” he says in his most-convincing tone; Shane knows the slip in his tone when he’s trying to get away with less than the full truth, and this isn’t that at all. “If even I can make,” he stops, definitely cut off my Shane’s mom having opinions, because that’s basically his mom’s gold-medal sport:

“Hmm, probably together we will do this, then, yes?” he decides, filling his arms carefully to put a whole shit ton of ingredients back in the refrigerator. “I will bring pryaniki already done, though,” he says decisively; “for your tea, before pajamas.”

And ah, yes: Shane knows those little honey balls his mother is weak for. Maybe also Shane is a little weak for them but the sheer volume his no-nonsense mother consumes lets him feel better about how many of them he ends up eating before dinner’s even served.

He startles back from the phantom taste of honey on the back of his tongue at the anticipatory inhale that rings out from the kitchen before Ilya says, deadly serious:

“Never will I ever say you should not make piroshki, Mama Yuna.”

Shane smirks at his husband’s dramatics—chest overfull but still somehow so warm, so light—and leans back on the couch, flips through his own phone as he grins to himself, because: yeah. In his heart of hearts, he had always hoped for a version of this, just like this: but before he’d known to even trust himself in the hoping at all?

He still hadn’t thought he’d ever get even a fraction of what he used to think he could maybe aim for; unrecognizable compared to what he has in from of him now.

Not that getting here was without bumps in the road, even a lot of them, but: it felt like, in taking it all in, especially this last year, it was almost like every bump was less a barrier to surmount and more a hiding place for more unthought-of things waiting patiently to fill his soul.

He’d just had to learn—had to trust the love he’d found to teach him, because the love he’d found believed in him already—to be brave enough to push past every attempt to stop him. Every attempt to convince him: enough. More is selfish. More is not meant for you.

It was Ilya, not just believing in him, but simply being, breathing in the world at his side, in his arms—Ilya was meant for all the things, and the best of them, without hesitation.

Shane would probably burn the world for that man.

Harder than even that, though, was figuring out how to say enough in his own interest, for himself. To ask for more, from the man who held his heart, because if he could trust Ilya with that, what on earth was there not to trust him with, wholly and entirely?

Scary as it was.

(But Ilya: Ilya believed he was brave.)

It’s how it’d started, or happened, because it was a thing he said, that’d spilled out of him and then became real in half a blink and it’d been…easy. It had been painful, but it had been like breathing through a hit. Pain that reminded you how good it was to be alive.

It’d probably helped that the words themselves had spilled out after Shane had spilled everything else in him, after he was wrapped around Ilya, skin still that towel-damp tacky that Shane had come to associate with the kind of clean that spoke to care, that kept the body, the heat, the heart he held dearest close to him just that little bit longer.

That’d probably helped it all come out how it did:

“Montreal hasn’t been good,” Shane had murmured, muffled in the swell of Ilya’s pec; “about the others saying, you know, about them being public,” he didn’t have to say more to be understood, he knew; he didn’t have to explain why he’d stayed still and just listened to Ilya breathing for a few moments, to the steady pump of his blood. Safe harbor in so many unchartable waters.

“Scott was one thing but then, then the Centaurs,” he’d said it, thinking first of the language they threw around about Ottawa, the rumours as much as the statements, the things Shane wasn’t self-important enough but also not fucking naive enough not to know weren’t at least half-digs at him personally, for his connection to the team; and then he’d thought of Scott, of Eric even, fucking just because of assumptions based on the Kingfisher, not even things people knew, things Shane only knew because Ilya still talked to Kip, and people didn’t feel the need to bite their tongue when Shane was half-wrapped around his husband whenever they went out where it would be safe (and sometimes where it wasn’t, because they were both guilty-without-any-shred-of-fucking guilt of being more daring, taking more risks, being more willing to get caught because they had nothing to hide: their hearts for each other weren’t a fucking thing to hide—

And fuck if Shane wasn’t so goddamn tired of pretending like it ever had been.)

“They’re not even decent to people who aren’t in their fucking orbit,” he’d said, recalling the downright vile comments whenever Fabian entered conversation, a fucking performer whose aesthetic was basically an expectation; “and shit, players who don’t even play anymore,” because there was Ryan, too, who very pointedly wanted nothing to do with the drama, was kind enough to help with the camps and they were lucky as fuck to have him because he was that good with the kids, but none of that mattered if someone in Shane’s locker room found a reason to sling slurs and the most absurd and disgusting fucking bullshit that could’ve just as easily be spat with Shane’s name there instead, or worse, worse, if they knew about Ilya—

“I don’t know if it’s gotten worse, or I’m just more,” he’d bit his lip, and Ilya’d followed it, had a thumb ready to soothe the skin as soon as Shane let go; “more attuned, maybe?” And Shane remembers how hollow he’d felt as he’d sighed, slumped further into Ilya’s hold and burrow closer into the crease of his arm where he’d been cradled just that tiny bit tighter with every breath Ilya took in, the expansion of his chest.

“It’s just,” Shane had tried to find words for how…how in an entire career of making ample decisions he didn’t have the capacity to articulate, this problem felt unique somehow. He’d remembered something Rose had said once—

a problem is something you can fix

And then Ilya’s hands had reached to frame his face, his eyes sharp but the kind of lethal that stood in front of Shane to protect to the blood, to the death as he’d intoned so low, so heady:

“Do not forget,” Ilya had tipped his chin and traced his slightly parted lips; “what that team fucking owes you.”

—and in that moment, surrounded by the man he’d pledged his life to long before he said vows out loud, signed a license or exchanged a ring: there, with him, Shane remembers being struck fucking dumb by how…simple it was. His relationship had been complicated because it never was a problem. It was a blessing.

His team was a…a problem, and…the solution was obvious. It was just going to hurt.

Not more than leaving it to fester, but. Painful, nonetheless.

He’d taken a deep breath, pressed a palm to the center of Ilya’s chest next to where his head was still burrowed as an anchor, a touchstone, and he’d…he’d just…

“When we planned for the summer, the contingencies we have,” Shane had stumbled to make sense, but not in his tone, and from then to now he stood by that fact counting for something: “we plotted out worst-case scenarios.”

Ilya had hummed, and Shane had closed his eyes and soaked up the sound through his skin, his ribs, the resonance grounding. Soothing.

Fortifying enough for him to say the next part. The painful part.

“We talked about the Metros letting me go.”

It’d always been an idea contingent on the news slipping out of their grasp, them losing control of the narrative. The bigwigs coming down on their asses. Fucking Crowell—

“As a very unlikely scenario.”

Yeah. Yeah, it was, but they’d mapped it out. Just in case. Always as a forced outcome, though.

Never as a…as a choice.

The solution to a probl—

“It’d made me kinda sick,” Shane had said, remembers the acid in his throat just for thinking it; “then. But walking in, every day,” Shane had just shaken his head and pressed his lips to the base of Ilya’s neck: home.

“Now it makes me sick all the fucking time,” he’d confessed, and while it’d stirred bile in him, fuck if he hadn’t felt the rush of relief in it all the same as he’d said, with force and feeling:

“Montreal hasn’t been good, about the others.” And they both knew what he wasn’t saying yet. And Ilya had gripped his chin and at least given voice to the part he took most personally:

“Montreal,” he’d growled, just shy of vicious; “has not been good to you,” and Shane…Shane hadn’t ever wanted to lose touch with the certainty of just how lucky he was to be loved like that; to be considered worth defense so clear-cut and sure.

“Then the playoffs were,” a mess, a goddamn mess—no one knew about them, even, save Hayden, but there’d still been snide comments about Shane’s dick doing his thinking on the ice, the wrong stick trying to score for how shit he’d played one night, one goddamn night across how many fucking years, how many goddamn cups for this team—and it hadn’t been chirping, ribbing.

It’d been cruel.

So yeah: he’d hoped idly, now and again, for a version of his life where he got what he wanted, how he wanted it, not just what the world thought he deserved with limits and restrictions he needed to be grateful to live within. And Shane…Shane, for so fucking long, had never been brave enough to expect even a fraction of just that.

But still somewhere, in his heart of hearts, he had always hoped, nonetheless.

And then he’d found the person who taught him there was more to hope for. Who believed, incomprehensibly, that Shane Hollander was brave.

Which is how he’d pushed, how he’d dared, that same night in bed with his husband:

“Having my number retired there,” Shane had said it, thick on his tongue for the first time he’d ever mustered the courage to string the thoughts together as a whole at all. “It was,” he’d sighed, shaky, Ilya’s hand stroking up and down his flank, ever-present. Never wavering.

“The top of the top,” Shane said it without meaning for it to come out bitter, but that’s what it’d done anyway: “pinnacle of my legacy,” and then he’d turned, tipped his lips to Ilya’s and kissed him slow, deep, full. Filled his lungs with just this man and all he meant; all he held.

“Before I knew what a legacy could be,” he’d dragged his lips across Ilya’s mouth, his stubble, his jaw, his neck, making a fucking point before he’d stated it plain, sliding his hand to the center of Ilya’s chest to be unmistakable:

“All it could really hold.”

Ilya’d threaded his fingers with Shane’s and lifted them from his chest to his lips, and Shane would have to be goddamn dead for that not to undo him, at least a little.

“Would you hate me playing on your team?” he’d asked it outright for the first time, and he hadn’t known what he’d expected, or what he’d wanted, still not good with knowing what he could hope for, dream for, let alone what he could expect from either gamble—

But Ilya has just kept kissing his knuckles, then his fingertips, then all the spaces between before he’d breathed to Shane’s palm and stared at him through his lashes:

“I can play wing.”

And Shane’s heart had skipped more than one beat in a row before he’d half-launched himself over Ilya, perched over his hips before he’d showered every inch of Ilya’s bare skin with the devotion of his lips, the unchecked worship, the immeasurable joy in him, the undying gratitude to be able to navigate this life with this man, this heart next to his own for always, for always—

“I can practice wing,” Shane had vowed, promised over one of Ilya’s nipples, then the other, nuzzling in between before he’d breathed deep and long because in what world would he do anything less?

“You’d be exceptional within a week,” Ilya had snorted even as he’d threaded his fingers through Shane’s still-sweaty mop of hair, drew circles against his scalp.

“We need depth at center,” he’d commented half-idly, the uniquely perfect way he put serious words into casual intonations, made everything feel taken to heart, intimate but also a given:

“We can both do what comes naturally,” and that was another perfect thing he always did, that Shane realized now with an absolute clarity he’d never appreciated properly in the beginning, the way Ilya said what he meant in so many levels, intentional and expressive and fucking perfect even before he’d really gotten his tongue around the language.

“But it would be fun trick to pull out once in a while, switching around,” and Ilya’d done it again, grinned as he’d cupped Shane’s ass, kneaded the curve with singleminded dedication; “when I want to play by your side.”

That last part, though: that was heartfelt. That was everywhere.

That was swollen, throbbing, perfect in Shane’s chest as he’d leaned up and nipped at Ilya’s lip:

“When I want to play by your side.”

“Hmm,” Ilya had caught his mouth quick, teeth a subtle pressure in the plushest part of Shane’s bottom lip; “depth at center maybe will still be a problem, then,” and Shane had laughed into the kiss that’d been inevitable, and all the ones that had tumbled gloriously after.

“You really wouldn’t mind?” he’d finally had to pull back, only just enough to pant the question between Ilya’s open lips because feeling was more real, but his brain was so often more loud. “It’d just be a call, probably Mom putting out feelers, first,” and he hadn’t been sure where he’d been going past that, but Ilya hadn’t let him bother figuring it out, kissing him deep again as he’d reached to frame Shane’s face and pull him close, close, closer.

“Shane,” he’d mouthed reverent, stealing the breath form his open mouth; “it would be a fucking privilege to play on a line with you,” and it hadn’t been about hockey, about sport, not wholly, not really: “not just now and then, All-Stars and charity games, but, all the time.” Then Ilya had pressed their foreheads together, brow to brow as they’d breathed, as he’d traced Shane’s face feature by feature like something sacred as he’d exhaled:

“Our team.”

And again: that hadn’t just been about the game, either.

“I want that,” Shane had panted, moaned a little; “more than I want your teammates, your locker room, your fucking dream of a coach, their acceptance,” and he’d wanted all of that, he’d wanted every story, every cookout, every glimpse of having a place to step into as Ilya’s partner whenever he wanted, when they were ready: he’d wanted it and then some.

But then: so much more—

“I want it to be ours.”

The way Ilya had kissed him had been a transcendent thing with teeth, hungry and otherworldly all at once, like the future reaching out and announcing the moment that would change the arc of your life, letting it shine blinding to be attended and embraced accordingly.

And then, breathless and because Ilya’s mind was sometimes loud, too:

“And the Metros?”

And Shane had clung to him a little tighter, a little bolder as he’d said without hesitation:

“You’re right,” because he was, he had been from the start: “I gave them everything, for a long time,” and Shane had thought maybe that was what’d taken him so long to get here: sunk cost, as if that team weren’t so fucking low on the actual list of everything he’s gained, every blessing to his name as a result of the years gone by:

“Then, everything changed.”

Ilya had watched him, wide-eyed. Waiting. Always ready to take in all of what Shane had to give.

Holy fuck, was he lucky.

“What the idea of everything itself even was, that changed,” and Shane had watched it, the moment the meaning in those words sank into Ilya’s soul: that ‘everything’ was their bodies tangled in this bed. Their hands and their lips pressed tight. ‘Everything’ was Ilya, and what they were together. What they’d become and all they could be.

“It doesn’t include them, anymore,” and saying it out loud hadn’t sounded, or felt, like anything but the truth; “they don’t have any place in my everything.”

And from that moment, one hand on Ilya’s cheek and one on his chest as he’d leaned to kiss him—those words haven’t felt anything but fucking right.

“Did you get the photo? With her little bow?”

Shane shakes from his reminiscing at the excited edge of his husband’s voice—still on the phone with Shane’s mom, it looks like, with Anya sat attentively on his feet with, yep, a red bow undoubtedly sent to match the rest of her Christmas lounge-set—and Shane just grins at them, tries to remember what he was doing on his own phone before he got lost a little in his head—

Messages. Right. Hayden, specifically.

Living and playing in Ottawa, now, has meant they’ve obviously seen significantly less of each other, and Shane’s holiday plans are all here, from Christmas Eve tomorrow with his parents, shifting tradition to allow for a quiet Christmas morning with Ilya—where Ilya was in charge of breakfast, no rules—that’d stretch to an undoubtedly less quiet rest of the day, then Bood’s Boxing Day cookout thing, which: Shane’s been to enough of them now to be actively looking forward to it, the food and their friends alike.

Their team.

Send me pics of the kids with their gifts tomorrow. Let’s try to find some time next month, before the Games?

He shoots the text to Hayden, feels like slightly less of an absent friend, and then his attention inevitably tracks straight back to Ilya.

His impossibly mesmerizing Ilya.

“She is very excited to see her beautiful babulya,” Ilya’s saying behind him, now, and their normally-calm Anya barks twice to Ilya’s laughter, sweet and expansive in Shane’s chest, always, as he raises the phone back to his ear; “you see? I say your name and she is,” and Anya barks one more time, almost on cue, sitting pretty and proud and panting up at Ilya to more laughter, this time his mother’s own in kind, loud enough to hear across the line.

God, god: this is Shane’s life now, and even a year ago—maybe especially, like, exactly a year ago—he couldn’t have imagined feeling so impossibly warm in every part of him, the fucking blood in his veins pulsing with a degree of bliss he didn’t think was a thing you could even know, until he knew it now.

“You did not have to get her anything, you have already ordered her all these fancy doggy clothes!” Ilya is responding to his mother, sternly but warmly, scratching behind Anya’s ears and this is Shane’s family. This is his world.

And even in his heart of hearts: Shane never could have hoped, let alone dreamed for what he’s gotten, what he’s been gifted with.

His whole fucking heart—the heart of his heart, which is Ilya; always Ilya—stretched like this, perpetually fit to bursting: it’s magical.

Shane’s barely able to wait for Ilya to hang up the call before he’s on him, propelled by need and love and joy—and what’s wild, maybe the most wild thing of all?

He’s met with the same things, lips to lips and chest to chest, in perfectly equal measure. No question.

Impossible—but here.

_______________________

It’s the first game of the new year—later than normal, but when Coach Wiebe couldn’t get them out of actually playing on the anniversary of the plane incident, he’d fought like hell to make sure it was gonna be at home. No travel required.

Even the assholes higher-up seemed to think that much was fair.

And it’s not like it’s the first time they’ve met on the ice since Shane came to Ottawa—and he’s actually looking forward to the prospect of getting a drink at least, maybe dinner with Hayden, possibly J.J. after—but…

Facing Montreal—no matter that the Centaurs have come out of every standoff the victor thus far—is still…stressful. At least a little. Will be for a few more weeks, for sure.

And then added to the fact that the fans seemed to be expressing gratitude for their team’s safe landing a year ago, if some of the signs Shane saw people carrying on the walk in were anything to judge by—yeah.

Shane was well aware what it was to be grateful for that plane landing safely. He…he didn’t need reminding.

He was grateful every goddamn day.

Maybe it was for the best that Montreal was here today—Shane couldn’t split the anxious buzz under his skin between the two worries without something giving way, so tangling them up as one seemed…maybe a silver lining.

Plus being able to walk close enough to Ilya to know he was here, alive, his, well: problem solved.

Mostly.

He still keeps his head down as they walk past fans and press alike, breathes carefully, keeps Ilya in his peripherals. Everything he needs.

“Ilya, Ilya,” Shane tries not to make it so obvious that he pauses in his own stride away from the fray of shouting reporters looking for a few early sound bites to hold over their networks until game time, but Shane’s not going to pretend listening to his husband’s unique brand of toying with these people, playing them like a fucking virtuoso, doesn’t turn him on something fierce.

And he deserves a distraction, he thinks. So. He just…slows his pace a little. No big deal.

“Are you concerned the official release for the Olympic rosters has you playing for the wrong country?”

Shane angles his side-eye a little more pointedly to put more of Ilya’s facial expressions in his field of vision.

“Does it?” Ilya asks, that quietly patronising curiosity in the lift of his brows. “Hadn’t noticed.”

“You’re down as forward,” one of the seemingly-more-caffeinated members of the gaggle pipes up; “but you’re listed with Team Canada.”

There’s a rumble of concern that passes through the collected masses and Ilya’s eyes just stretch wider, his brow furrow just that little bit more…pitying.

“And you checked your sources?” he says it like a suggestion, but Shane knows what veiled condescension sounds like on that impossible tongue. “Olympic officials do not take such things lightly, I understand,” he tuts lightly before finally shrugging: “I would not be much worried.”

The reporters take to talking over one another in a frenzy which, Jesus, did they even clock how Ilya’s just insulted their intelligence really fucking hard?

Well. Quite possibly not, Shane guesses, given what exactly he’d been insulting.

He seems to get his micro-dose of schadenfreude quick because he waves his hand and manages to prove that hey, he can command press attention with his shirt fucking on:

“I am looking forward to representing the country where my heart lies,” he puts a palm to his chest and nods forward with feeling that the reporters eat up—they know how he’s talked about Russia before, but Shane’s heart is tripping quiet in the background because he knows, he knows what’s really being said, what’s really being said to him—“and bearing that feeling to the world.”

Ilya gestures broadly and catches Shane’s eyes out of the barest corner of his own, impossible to call out save for the trill it sends through Shane’s pulse because: soon.

To the whole goddamn world.

“Today, however,” Ilya claps his hands and smirks a little, winks as he moves to make his exit: “I have a rink to sweep with many Metros, so.”

And Shane makes sure to walk a few good paces ahead of Ilya so it doesn’t look too obvious he’d waited for him, tries not to sink into how much it’s hit him just now, so close to the finish line, that he wants to. He wants to wait for Ilya and grab his hands or peck his lips after a goal or a game or the blessed release from the media scrum: fuck, but he wants.

It’s more than a little needy, how we waits just inside the doors for Ilya, but he’s expected: he presses his husband to the wall just inside, away from the glass, out of sight and Ilya’s hands are already out for his hips as Shane kisses him a little desperate, a little bruising, a little fucking helpless because they’re so close.

And yeah: maybe the memory of where they were last year makes it kick at his ribs harder, makes the wanting…want more greedily. More impatient as he tangles his tongue Ilya’s, sucks and swallows his husbands moan until—

Ilya pulls away to a whine Shane’s not exactly expecting to escape his suddenly unoccupied lips, but he’s long past being surprised when it happens, and he glances up in askance as to why they’re unoccupied, because shit, they’re not even out in the open, they—

“If the locker room is empty,” Ilya leans so their tender lips brushe with his words as he whispers, fucking tantalizing; “I will let you blow me before anyone else gets here.”

And Shane doesn’t think he’s maybe ever moved so fast outside his skates in his life, with the glorious soundtrack of Ilya’s laughter close behind him.

_______________________

The locker room is not empty.

Shane loves Haas, truly he does, but the kid’s still shaking off the rookie hero worship, plus he shows up everywhere German-train time style (are Swiss trains also famously on-time? Whatever). And honestly, Shane would normally appreciate that.

Or, maybe not normally, just: any-time-that-doesn’t-impede-getting-off-with-his-husband.

And Haas is so fucking earnest and still a little bashful and Shane can’t even be mad at him.

It’s not until closer to the game that he realizes: he kinda feels like he wants to be mad.

Not at Haas, specifically, but like—they’re playing the Metros, and that’s enough to spike in Shane’s blood on its own. It’s the anniversary of when Shane got his shit together because he’d actually had to think about a world without his world, and that doesn’t sting as much on its own because he’s shaped a better life since, appreciating how Ilya’s the fucking rhythm of his pulse as a constant, as a given, but: he never deleted those Instagram messages.

And then the reporters, tugging on that thread when they have a reason, a really good reason for waiting, and it’s just weeks, now, just days but being reminded how close it is hadn’t helped this time, it’d seared and Shane…Shane’s…

And now: Shane’s not starting, which rankles for entirely selfish reasons; he knows they can’t keep giving away just how well they’ve perfected him and Ilya sharing the ice across positions, but he didn’t get his hands on Ilya’s body, so he’d been stupid enough to open emails to keep from watching Ilya’s bare skin exposed any further and having to play when his time did come hard as a fucking rock—and being that stupid had led to the ill-timed revelation that he and Ilya had both been wrong: no phone call.

But Ilya’d been more right: they want him leading the national team, and Shane hates it so fucking much because…

Because much as it was an honour, he’s really gotten used to what it feels like to skate with his husband as his Captain—inarguably, and ask anyone, the better captain by a fucking…ocean, and then some.

And okay yes, fine, he’d fucking wanted his husband to be draped in the fucking flag with the ‘C’ on his chest, proof-perfect of the fruits of everything he’d worked for, everything he’d given up, every sacrifice Shane had overlooked for too long but now made a fucking point to never miss again.

Never.

So yeah, maybe he’d wanted to work some of that irritation, that disappointment, that righteous indignation out as quick as possible before it festered beyond its rights, but nooooo….

The phone’s still in his hands when it vibrates, almost makes him drop it with the force paired with the surprise; who the fuck—

No frowning, solnyshko

Shane breaks his whole maybe-five-minute streak of not looking at Ilya to find the gaze already on him, concerned but not worried, still playful and hopeful as he makes puppy-eyes and draws his fingers down from an exaggerated frown on his own face.

So of course Shane can’t help but huff a laugh, even if he can’t quite smile.

3️⃣

Shane squints at the new message, confused before he replies:

Goals?

He catches Ilya smirking at his phone before his own vibrates again:

Ha, no, more goals than that

Shane shakes his head, bites his bottom lip, then just gives up trying to figure out his husband’s game:

???

Ilya’s smirk twitches at the corners and he turns away, now, which does nothing but give Shane a full view of that sculpted fucking back, Jesus—

It takes him an extra couple seconds—plus Ilya turning and nodding down at Shane’s hands with a raised brow—for Shane to actually look at his latest text:

Fearing I will only come three times with your mouth like that, terrible angle for sucking my dick 😢

Shane’s glad he hadn’t taken a swig of his water because he’d have choked noticeably—not in surprise at the message itself but the timing, the way it jostled him straight from his own brain to stare up at Ilya, who was waiting with his exaggerated frown still in place, which, once he was sure Shane was watching, he parts as best he can, brings his thumb and forefinger up to informally measure fit, then shakes his head despairingly with regret in his eyes before lifting one finger—a pause, intentional—then stretches an equally exaggerated smile upward, which for the record would not have proven more ideal for fitting Ilya’s length, but of course he reaches to measure again, his fingers notably father apart, before he closes his mouth and wiggles a triumphant thumbs-up in Shane’s direction.

And fuck: for that? Shane can’t help but laugh. Smile, for real, and just laugh.

MUCH better 😊

Shane finds waiting on his screen when he looks down again, and he feels so much of the tension in him…not bleed out entirely but shift to a space where it’s manageable, where it could be contained until a time when he’s not required to shut his former team all the way the fuck down, and the only lingering tightness was in his groin, kinda unavoidable; the more-than-half-chub he couldn’t shake before they needed to roll out, and Shane is ready, he’s ready—

His phone on the shelf of his stall rattles, and Shane could ignore it.

But why would he be smart enough to do that?

👄🍆👍😋

Shane snorts, and waits until Ilya passes him so he can shoulder-check him playfully, affectionately: they walk out together, Rozanov and Hollander, Captain and his Alt, the team of them at the heart of this team, their team, and just thinking that always glows under Shane’s sternum, never fails to absolutely light him up and make him wonder idly how he’d ever thought his career, let alone his life, before this was a thing he could have lied to himself so fucking hard into thinking was full, was right. Was somehow everything it was meant to be.

But now: Shane bumps his husband half to express his not-entirely-real irritation, mostly just to feel him before they go out, and if he drops back a step to ‘accidentally’ brush his crotch—too padded to feel anything but the meaning unmistakable—against Ilya ass?

Well. That’s just the perks of the position.

_______________________

When they do, indeed, wipe the fucking rink with the Metros, Shane has to hold himself back from doing more than returning the sloppy kiss Ilya’s known for giving him—and everyone else—on their helmets alongside a fervent and genuine declaration of his love.

Which Shane appreciates, and feels himself bask under every time but it’s…it’s not the same.

He has to remind himself why they’re still doing this—not often anymore, and especially now that they’re so fucking close, for real this time, just weeks left until they take off to start practicing in earnest, get settled in the Village—but he does have to run it all through his head:

“I do not want to wait.” Ilya had told him in their bed, Shane tucked into his side, head over his chest.

“We’re not going to,” Shane had said with absolute certainty without even having to think about it—he still remembers how it had shocked him, how he’d looked for the panic but…it hadn’t been there.

How freeing it’d fucking been.

And Ilya: he’d kissed up and down each side of Shane’s neck, his jaw, peppered adoration over his cheeks and between his brows until he’d huffed a laugh, boneless and breathless so that when Ilya had rumbled against his mouth:

“Listen.”

There hadn’t even been a touch of the fear in him that was standard, the default setting in his chest not-so-long-ago. Curiosity, sure, but: he trusted Ilya. Ilya held his heart.

Ilya was his heart.

“I do not want to wait,” he’d said it deliberately, heartfelt, pressing his lips to Shane’s face with every word, underscoring the point, nipping at the base of Shane’s neck on that last word before he’d leaned back, weight still possessively, powerfully balanced pelvis-to-pelvis, thighs thick and strong around Shane’s hips as Ilya had leaned in, made sure every part of his body dispelled any possible misinterpretation of what he was about to say:

“But.”

And fuck if it hadn’t worked like a charm. Shane just remembers the feeling of being kept, and being safe, and his husband taking care of him before he’d ever thought to consider what he might need care for.

“I have been thinking,” Ilya had said carefully, dragging his lips slow up the tendons in Shane’s neck.

“Dangerous,” Shane had gasped out shaky, the teasing undercurrent barely even there for how breathy it’d wisped out: but Ilya knew him, so Ilya had heard.

And Shane had squawked when Ilya had bit at his earlobe in retaliation.

“I am seeing,” Ilya had resettled, regrouped after kissing Shane’s ear apologetically, sucking a little wantonly; “that we have,” and his hands had come to settle on his thighs, so his fingers could splay into the divots of Shane’s hips:

“Opportunity.”

Shane distinctly remembers getting a little distracted by the motion of those lips, the lilt of that accent around the syllables, before the word itself had landed.

“Do you remember when Crowell first called you in?” Ilya’d been running his broad palms up and down Shane’s sides by then, reading something Shane hadn’t even processed yet in his eyes, no doubt, but those words: did he remember?

As if Shane could have forgotten, the fucker, with his carefully-balanced bigotry that always skirted but never quite tipped the scale of impropriety, of scandal; his inconvenience at the truth of the real fucking lives of the people who make him millions, he’d—

Shane hadn’t been at all surprised when Ilya’s hands had started kneading the immediate tension at the memory, the thought of that asshole, out of Shane’s limbs, Ilya’s lips quickly returning to the task of pulling him back to the moment as he’d mouthed into Shane’s skin:

“What if we,” and he hadn’t needed to go further, because Shane could feel the anticipation in him, could read the set up even if he couldn’t see the landing.

“I don’t even know what you’re thinking,” Shane had confessed, grabbing for Ilya’s hand and squeezing hard; “but I know your brain,” he’d leaned the best he could to kiss at the closest part of Ilya he could reach; “and I know your particular level of petty,” he’d said that part with a smile in his tone that’d drawn a chuckle from Ilya that Shane could feel in his bones for how close they were.

“And I love both, so,” and with that Shane had been spurred, a visceral need in his blood to roll his body more fully atop of Ilya’s and drop kisses between his pecs, nipple to nipple quick with a longer pause above his heart.

“Whatever you’re thinking?” Shane had looked up, chin propped on Ilya’s sternum: “it fucks Crowell over?”

Because for all that Ilya could read Shane, sometimes before Shane knew the words themselves or what fucking book he was in—Shane could read Ilya like the veins on the back of his eyelids in the sun: automatic and ingrained.

So when Ilya’s lips had quirked, he’d known damn well the trajectory of the opportunity his husband had in mind.

“You said he didn’t want another Scott Hunter, yes?”

Shane had nodded because: yeah. Shane remembered vividly how quick that had flown out of the bastard’s mouth.

“No distractions, from the game,” Shane had parroted, the words fucking vile on this tongue.

“Gross, you said also,” and Ilya’s rage at that hadn’t dimmed in the slightest with time, even then: “slimy,” he’d spat the word out, repulsed, his arm tightening around Shane, protective in the way Shane had always melted for, but hadn’t even begun to appreciate how much it could undo him until he gave up trying even the slightest bit to fight it; then again what it would do when he let himself welcome it, ask for it without words in that Ilya just knew, and had been immediately so fucking eager to finally be allowed to give.

“So yes, it fucks him,” Ilya had snarled, the man so feared on the ice bearing his teeth but making Shane’s body feel so fucking warm, tingly because it had been unmistakable, then as much as now, who Ilya was going into battle for; “and in a way he will never…” Ilya’s pause had been a blanketing sort of rumble, a reassuring hand on Shane’s back, steady, but like if that feeling could emanate out from the inside, and the threat in his next words weren’t directed at Shane—no, they’d been in such solid defense of Shane—but still Ilya had wrapped him up for a soft landing, fuck, but how Shane loved him—

“In a way that he will never able to…” Ilya’d sucked in a breath through clenched teeth, something predatory in it that’d shivered delectable up Shane’s nerves, in spite of everything; “wash clean, you might say.” He’d tilted his head, and met Shane’s gaze with intent:

“I would imagine some journalists might start looking into say, team histories, even. Legacies,” he’d drawn the words out almost sinister, and goddamn: vengeance was hot as hell on his husband, but then vengeance in the name of them, of what they had?

Fuck.

“Take up much time from his busy schedule,” Ilya had sneered, and Shane?

Shane hadn’t wanted to wait. Ilya’d said straight out from the start that he hadn’t wanted to, either.

But they’d watched so much bullshit go down in their goddamn league around things that didn’t matter to anyone but the consenting adults who happened to love each other, and worse still: watched the opposite get swept under the rug, not just turned a blind eye to but coddled.

Fucking…Kent.

Shane wanted to love Ilya everywhere, in every way. But if he’d learned anything these past years—so many years—it’d always been that who he told, or who knew it out loud or didn’t, even when it’d been himself who didn’t know it out loud: that shit never changed his heart. Never touched the love.

So to wait, just a little longer, wasn’t going to change how Shane felt. How his blood beat for Ilya. How his soul had reached for the man along with his outstretched hand a goddamn decade ago and never let go; was never going to.

Which had meant the only real thing to do was lean in and kiss Ilya fucking stupid, swallow his moans and his pants and his gasps of Shane’s name, agreeing wholeheartedly to an outcome before ever ironing out the plan—something that used to scare the fuck out of him, placed absolutely out of the question in Shane’s protective bubble preferable order, but was something that he was realizing, coincidentally or no, had been working out…pretty fucking well for him for what was amounting to a pretty fucking long time. Particularly with this man at his side.

Likely only because this man was at his side.

So Shane had broken the kiss, panting, just to lean back in, fast and fierce to seal his enthusiasm with one determined peck as he breathed between Ilya’s lips:

“Done.”

“Twenty-three days.”

Shane snaps back to the locker room where almost everyone was still celebrating while Shane had been flipping through memories, but Ilya’s chin is propped on his shoulder, now, his voice wet and warm just below his ear.

“Twenty-three days,” Shane repeats, because he doesn’t need context, or to have not been lost in his head a second before, to know exactly what that means.

But Ilya must read something in him, because he turns, hides them a little from the room even though he doesn’t need to, not with these guys, and even though it will be entirely obvious either way that they’re up to at least something: Ilya still shields them as he frames Shane’s cheeks in their locker room, with their whole team nearby, and the moment he starts peppering Shane’s face with kisses for each point he makes, the world narrows, the celebration dims: it’s just them.

Which is the whole world.

“And we will be on a plane,” a kiss to the corner of his lips; “and we will be checking into our hotel,” a kiss to the bow below his nose; “so we can be insufferably lovestruck tourists,” a kiss to his temple, that drags over between his brows and draws a shiver; “for a few days,” a sequence of pecks down the bridge of his nose: “before the ceremonies.”

And so when Ilya captures his lips full-on, Shane’s mouth is curved in a tranquil kind of smile because yes. Yes, this is the plan. And once they’re there, it’s a simple countdown cushioned in affection, and revelling in one another, and playing the game they love, and love all the more for how it gave them this. How it gave them each other.

Shane tilts his chin, asking for one more kiss before Ilya goes and does more…captaining.

Ilya gives him four, and leaves him breathless before he turns back to the team.

Twenty-three days.

He can do this.

Chapter 3: From Here On Out

Chapter Summary

“Come here,” Ilya reels him in from the wrist as they pass between street lights, stopping them and pulling off his glove to cup Shane’s face.

“You are beautiful, lyubimyy,” he whispers, stroking Shane’s cheekbone, heedless of the cold.

“If that’s me,” Shane whispers, words a cloud around them in the frigid air; a little breathless with just how heady it is: the touch, outside, in public even with no one around; “then what the fuck’s the right word for you?”

“Lucky,” Ilya answers without hesitation, adding an extra thump to Shane’s heartbeat for how much he means it, how deep it runs as Ilya strips the other glove from his hand and holds Shane’s face between both; “man who is lucky beyond his most wild dreams.”

Coach calls Shane in for a chat just as he’s about to head out for the last time before he and Ilya fly—he’s curious what’s so pressing, when Wiebe will be joining them as soon as practices get underway, he and Ilya are just begging off the convenient extra weekend they don’t have a regular game, here.

“Have a seat, kid,” Wiebe says as soon as Shane comes in, taking one himself on top of his desk, not behind it. There’s something about the familiarity, the same-team energy woven into everything Wiebe does that never fails to kinda floor Shane; that…someone can coach this way, and successfully, at that.

“Honestly, I just wanted to check that you’re still,” Wiebe shrugs a little but with a small kind of grin; “planning what you’re planning, for the Games.”

Shane nods, hums: would maybe have been rankled at being questioned if it’d been anyone else.

But Coach: he was the first one they told, largely to see if it was possible, outside Farrah and the people handling the expediting of Ilya’s residency documents—once the visa was solid, which they wanted ironclad before they jumped into anything bigger in terms of scale, they knew it was going to be a tight turnaround to see if Ilya would even be eligible to switch counties with the IOC: the issue of citizenship was something they were lucky enough to have the pull and the money to push through (and yes, of course the sex they’d had when Ilya’s passport came in the mail had been singularly fucking exceptional), but whether the Olympic Committee would view Ilya’s case as falling in line with the necessary parameters, exceptions for unsafe conditions in country of origin without a bid for asylum seeming paper-thin but they were going to try everything they could when everything else was so close of a call, the length of time he’d been in Canada, and since he’d last represented Russia…

It’d been a knife’s-edge, basically, and Shane hadn’t realized how much he wanted to do this, not to screw over the Commissioner or throw his sexuality in anyone’s faces, but because he and Ilya had fought to love each other and at the core of it, Shane thinks all he ever wanted beyond just Ilya, and a future and a life together, was to be able to tell the world.

Waiting, and knowing it’d be a tossup if they could even pull off Ilya’s originally petty-plan-of-revenge, and then ultimately the best idea either of them could have come up with for declaring that they were each other’s everything, to everyone, alongside shutting down—by actions and not just words—any critique that the ‘fucking queers’ couldn’t play at all, let alone play better together: that’d had hammered home just how much this mattered.

“You’re doing it for you, though, right?”

Shane snaps his head back up to Coach Wiebe, who’s eyeing him with a brand of seriousness the man’s rarely shown before.

“Because, and, fuck,” he huffs a laugh, shakes his head; “makes sense the second person I tell outside my wife is you, Hollander, since the first was your husband,” and Shane leans in when Wiebe tips his head back and runs a hand through his hair, feels the shift in the room:

“But I know what being not-strictly-heterosexual in this sport means, what it looks like. Feels like,” and oh, fuck: Shane had research Brandon Wiebe’s MLH trajectory before he made the move, extensively, and so many things make sense, so many questions he’ll never ask seem to answer themselves in at least relative likelihood—and Shane feels a fresh wash of resentment for the leadership of the sport he loves for it.

“And as much as what the thing you’re planning will mean to a lot of fucking people, including a lot of old fucks like me,” as if Brandon Wiebe wasn’t younger than some of the guys still playing, a trailblazer in coaching at all in his own right at his young age; “outside of whatever shitstorm it also brings down?”

“We’re doing it for us,” Shane cuts that off at the pass, immediate; “loving each other is something we don’t want to hide anymore,” and it hasn’t been for so fucking long, too fucking long, and that very fact might be what spurs Shane to add, uncompromisingly:

“The way I love him is something that deserves a,” he feels his lips curve up at the thought, just a little, his chest bright beneath the ribs: “a world stage.”

Wiebe matches his grin and nods to himself.

“Good,” is all he says, like he agrees, like he’s gonna be cheering for them when they step out and show everyone their hearts for one another. “Not that it’s not obvious, when someone knows to look,” Wiebe adds with a certain softness to his grin, then, almost proud, and Shane basks in it a little where far too recently, being seen would have turned his world upside down—instead of like now, where it makes his whole body warm, to be looked at and known for the most important part of his life.

“Just making sure,” Wiebe nods to himself like he’d gotten what he wanted out of the asking, and now could let it rest.

And not that Shane needed evidence, but the talking heads had had a lot to say when Wiebe was announced for the Olympic coaching staff, mostly in the lines of what the fuck, given his lack of experience, age, and the only-fairly-recent ascension of his team. But Shane had known better then—had known the moment he shook the man’s hand as an official Centaur—and knows sure-as-shit right now: Wiebe didn’t earn his spot just for the optics.

He’d earned it for being maybe the only coach who saw his players, who cared like this, and made all the difference for it in the end results.

Shane makes a mental note to say as much to him, maybe when they’re back. Medals in hand.

He grasps the thread closest to him, for now, though:

“How big of a problem will it be,” he asks, not because it’ll change anything in their decisions or their plans, but because Shane cares about Wiebe, too: “when we—”

“Not your problem, Hollander,” Wiebe waves him off with an eye roll and a smirk; “s’what I get paid for.”

Shane can only imagine the polar opposite of the response to that question if he’d still been in Montreal, and it’s not as if he’s doubted that choice since making it but: reinforcement that it might have been his best professional move, at least in recent memory, is always nice.

“And I obviously don’t think it’s a fucking problem at all, so.”

It’s a close to the conversation, if that’s what was wanted. But Shane…hears the other option underneath, so he pushes:

“But.”

Wiebe grins, a little tight.

“But.”

Coach leans back and crosses his arms over his chest, blowing out a slow breath:

“Crowell’s going to flip, obviously,” Wiebe says, knowing Shane and Ilya view that as a feature, not a bug; “but in honesty?” Wiebe shrugs again.

“You’re gonna be so much better placed against him when it’s the world watching, rather than just the League, here, like with Hunter,” and Shane sees it, laid out that plain: to try and hide the League’s response after undoubtedly going some degree of viral would be near-on impossible—so it couldn’t be as virulent as Shane knew they’d want to make it.

“No matter what I can or can’t do?” Wiebe pulls Shane’s attention back with the kindness, the sure-soberness in his tone.

“I have your back. Both your backs,” and he means it, and again: Shane’s struck by how fucking lucky he is to be here, on this team, in this place. “The whole team does, you know that.”

And he does. It hadn’t been empty of stress, coming out to the team because it was an early necessity for eventually telling whatever came together as the National Team: but the Centaurs were…incredible. Better even than Ilya’s absolute confidence had made Shane pretty confident they would be. Even before he’d come out, even before he was their Captain’s husband, they’d embraced Shane. And Shane had loved them all for it—somehow in months feeling just as, if not more connected to the family of this team than he ever had with the Metros.

Which had been a little sad, but Shane tried not to dwell. It’d been hard to, even for Shane’s brain, when he was surrounded by that much unwavering support every day.

Which is what leads Shane to say, unequivocal:

“You’re the best coach I’ve ever had,“ he tells Wiebe, earnest and honest; “this is the best team I’ve ever played for,” and yeah, sure, there was only one to compare to but: given which it was, it was saying something. “I’m lucky, and I’m grateful,” Shane says, and appreciates how Wiebe looks a little poleaxed, but pleased, like he deserves to be.

“Feeling’s mutual,” Wiebe says warmly in reply; “you’re one of us, much as anybody.”

And Shane had felt it, almost from the start, but hearing it? That meant something…specific. Special.

“And even if you weren’t?” Wiebe is tacking on; “you’re Roz’s,” and of course that shoots heat through Shane’s veins, for someone to see it and say it out loud like a given; “and every man here would go to war for him.”

Shane laughs a little, joy and agreement colouring it all, and then he asks a niggling question he probably shouldn’t:

“How the fuck did he not get Captain?”

Wiebe looks conflicted for a second, like he definitely knows but isn’t sure if he should say.

“Players didn’t get the vote this year, obviously,” he eventually gestures toward Shane, who would know because he was never asked; “and you’re still who people see when they think ‘Canadian hockey’.”

Shane feels himself scowl a little. Shitty reason, when Ilya’s the better natural leader by far.

“Plus no one could guarantee everything would fall into place in time to bank on Rozanov.”

Fine. That made sense.

He guesses.

At least Wiebe is kind of agreeing without saying as much that it should have been at least a consideration between the two of them; that maybe it would have been.

“He’s your alternate, it won’t be any different than it is here, I’d suspect,” Wiebe reminds him, and yeah. Yeah, that’s true.

They lead like they do everything, now: as a team. Together.

That won’t change.

The reassurance of it tingles through his veins as Shane takes his leave, Wiebe wishing Shane a good flight until they see each other later next week, ready to squeeze some practice in before the Games began.

Hearing that out loud makes it all sound so…immediate. Soon.

A rush of anticipation starts to build in Shane because sure: the Olympics.

But more, more:

No more hiding.

_______________________

They never opt for plane seats that don’t let them sit next to each other, so: they’re the two seats on the right for their red eye, a surprisingly empty flight, armrest pushed up and the two of them pressed close under the dimmed cabin lights.

It helps, too, to combat the way the nightmares had started plaguing Shane after the Centaurs plane last year had…

Just another reason Shane’s grateful they play together, now. They don’t have to fly without each other generally, as a rule. It…it’s so much kinder on Shane’s heart.

Speaking of—

“Our first time, our first Games,” Shane mouths in the dark against the skin under Ilya’s chin.

“I knew it was,” Shane purses his lips and kisses, holds until Ilya shudders, until his blood’s up enough to feel beneath Shane’s mouth as he whispers:

“This.”

Ilya’s breath shivers, and his arm around Shane tightens, so Shane tucks his head closer into Ilya’s chest, comfortable. Home.

“My heart knew, then, too,” Ilya nods, kisses the top of Shane’s head and cradles him so fucking close. “Had known for a while.”

“Mmhmm,” Shane hums in agreement; it might have been from the very first moment he’d reached out and said Ilya’s name as a question, the first time they’d touched at all.

“I did not have the words to even make it make sense, to me,” Ilya breathes, like just, comfort in the warmth through Shane’s hair, through Shane’s chest as Ilya’s lifts beneath him.

“God knows I didn’t,” Shane moans a little, regretful for the time they could have had, but grateful for the path that led them to this, here, now.

“You were,” Shane nuzzles closer a little; “you were kind.”

Ilya snorts, just a little short of being discernible above the sounds of the plane.

“Was not kind,” Ilya protests flatly. Shane turns a little, to be able to see Ilya’s face if he looks downward just a bit.

Of course he already has.

“Did you tell me to leave that night, so that it’d be safe?” Shane asks a question he’s asked around before, but isn’t sure if he’s ever asked so straightforward like this before. “To keep me safe?”

Ilya’s breath shudders, gives away whatever answer he’s about to say with the grip of his arm around Shane before he speaks a single word.

“Was not only reason, don’t give me,” Ilya swallows, dropping another kiss to Shane’s hair; “unearned credit.”

Shane arches his neck to kiss at the line of Ilya’s shirt-neck, nip a little in scolding because Ilya deserves everything, has earned so much.

“But yes,” Ilya finally concedes with a little grin; “was a reason.”

“Was your family another?”

Shane regrets saying it when Ilya stills, but is grateful he doesn’t tense, that they’re beyond that at least; but the way Ilya’s chest expands on such a deep, steadying sigh under his head, it’s—

“I’m sorry,” Shane says, both for bringing it up now but more, so much more for why it was ever necessary to begin with, why Shane was so, so…

“I’m sorry, I—”

Ilya’s hand cups his chin, lifts Shane’s face again and presses a single finger over his lips:

“We are not sorry for this, things like this,” Ilya reminds him of what they’ve long settled between them, caressing around Shane’s lips, tracing them reverently. “Not anymore.”

Shane’s a little breathless, dares to let his tongue lap a little at Ilya’s finger, drawing a smile from his husband before Ilya deigns to answer Shane’s question, his suspicion:

“Yes,” Ilya tells him simply; “also that.”

And Shane had…like Vegas, as much as Sochi, it’d always been also about Ilya’s family and Shane had barely bothered to ask, never—

“I’m sorry I made things about me, when they weren’t,” Shane rushes the words, kisses Ilya’s fingertip when Ilya glares soft at him for dodging their no more apologies for these things agreement. He sighs, concedes again, when Shane drops another kiss, looks up at Ilya through his lashes, wide and unfiltered for feeling.

“Eh, it is fair, now, probably,” Ilya says pushes his finger a little further into Shane’s mouth, nothing obscene but nothing innocent. “Most all things are at least a little about you.”

Shane feels the flush rise in his cheeks, the flip tumble in his chest.

He takes both of Ilya’s hands and squeezes them fucking tight.

“I wanted to be there for you, then,” Shane breathes, drops his lips to Ilya’s collarbone.

“You were,” Ilya tells him, simple and sure; “thinking of you made it,” he hums while he looks for the word he wants:

“Survivable.”

Shane moans a little, hates that word, that it was as bad as Shane had feared then and worse, undoubtedly, and all Shane had done was—

“You are here, now,” Ilya reads him like a book, like always, now; “being with you makes it not,” he shakes his head almost more to better rub against Shane, to press into him and breathe him in: “not survivable.”

He pulls Shane closer, murmurs tight to his ear:

“You are what makes it all worth living.”

God. God.

“We were always something, Shane,” Ilya whispers into him, a little choked, a little thin. Shane had…asked once, when he was feeling particularly sad and insecure—when Montreal was weighing on him, and the distance was killing him—something he feels significantly less of now, but he remembers asking, and remembers Ilya’s whole face breaking open, giving Shane every answer he’d ever needed: he hadn’t meant it. He hadn’t meant it then or ever, and Shane’s heart had broken open for knowing it for sure like that, for sure and he’d kissed Ilya stupid before even giving the man a chance to speak.

So technically: he’d never heard Ilya say it like this, about this.

Not that he’d needed to. But:

“From the beginning, we have been something,” Ilya exhales low, just behind Shane’s ear, both his arms now wrapped around Shane’s chest, pressing him tight to his own as Shane melts into him and sighs, so full, so full of just, of just:

“Everything.”

Which is the answer to it all, isn’t it. For them, between them, it’s just:

“Everything,” and Shane closes his eyes and lets Ilya’s heartbeat lull him into something close enough to sleep to relax him down to the cells, until the lights come back on to ease them into daylight where they’re set to land.

_______________________

“I think they’ve settled on testing my faculties. Like a feeble old woman.”

Shane puts his mom on speaker while he unpacks his suitcase—he knows they’re only in the hotel for a few days before they move to the Village; they’d debated just staying here but as captain and alternate they’d both agreed it meant something to be there with the handful of younger guys who were experiencing the whole thing for the first time, plus, for them, it kinda…was a first time, so—

’So soft, Hollander,’ Ilya had said so fondly when Shane had suggested as much, propped on his naked chest, then he’d promptly ruined the process of Shane trying to catch his breath by initiating round two—

“What?” Shane asks his mother once he runs her words back through and still…can’t make heads or tails of them.

“They sneak around like I genuinely cannot hear or see them,” she sighs, clearly doing dishes in the background; “I think they must have decided your mystery draw back to Ottawa was my severe hearing loss, or maybe some kind of degenerative eye disease.” Her tone’s so dry and judgemental, and ah.

It’s true the press has been frothing over the why of Shane’s new contract in Ottawa. The first week they’d seen his parents being good neighbours visiting Mrs. Rian after her knee replacement following a nasty fall on the ice, and decided one of them was probably dying, since that’s the only possible reason they could be leaving a hospital and their son could have left Montreal. Once that hadn’t seemed plausible anymore, they’d cycled through a good couple handfuls of increasingly absurd theories to make sense of Shane’s very simple and straightforward statement on the matter:

I am moving to be closer to family, and luckily that had also meant joining an organization with future opportunities best aligned to my professional goals.

Just because he couldn’t straight out say ‘being even two hours from my husband is starting to fucking hurt too much’ didn’t mean they had to be so fucking…obtuse, not to mention rude, with the way they chose to make nonsense out of that statement.

“Which seems extreme to move your life, but,” his mother seems to still be trying to make sense out of it, at least to some extent—Shane has to appreciate how much Ilya’s rubbed off on him, there, because he is his mother’s son but he gave up making sense of the press response to this, and the persistence so many months later, ages ago; “people will believe anything but the easiest truth that’s sitting right in front of them, if they’d just look.”

“Jesus,” Shane sighs, whines a little because, it’s his mom. She knows him. “I’m not even in the country!”

“I think we’ve already established the collective intellect on display, here,” his mom says, droll as hell. “That would be too reasonable by half.”

Shane sighs, folding his last pair of track pants for lounging in after luxurious strolls with his beloved husband, and putting them into the very well-crafted chest of drawers in the suite they’ve booked.

“It’s…” he tries to find a silver lining in his mother’s predicament of less-harassment-more-perpetual-annoyance by the press; “better this than where you started, I guess?”

“Hmm.”

He winces. That’s…not an agreement. Not from his mother.

“Are you…mad about it yet?”

Fuck, he sounds like a little kid, asking that.

“Nope, never,” she answers, her tone lilting up a little; “it’s annoying, but there’s an element of a game being afoot in it.” If she weren’t doing the dishes, he could see her smirking over a glass of wine, swirling it a little sly as he huffs a laugh.

“Okay, Sherlock,” he teases her, possibly breathes out a little sigh of relief.

Possibly.

“Plus you and Ilya deserve your grand reveal,” she adds, her tone warming significantly, the shift to mom swinging wide from manager; “he’s waited so long.”

Shane purses his lips.

“We have waited so long.”

Because like…that’s important. He doesn’t like how those words…landed in his chest.

“Yes, of course,” his mom’s saying; “it’s not a judgement, sweetheart. I just meant, he was ready first.”

Was he? What counted as ready? They pushed in different ways, both their therapists had told them as much, and sometimes that momentum had pushed them farther, not closer—but they got here. They collided.

It was blinding. It’s still blinding: a supernova for forever in Shane’s chest.

“I didn’t love him less,” Shane feels the need to say, to make known and for now, the only person he’s got to tell it to besides Ilya himself—and he damn well knows—so the only person he’s got to make the point plain to is his mother: “not less, or later, or, like I didn’t, leave him pining or something while I was just,” his voice cracks a little: “aloof.”

And yeah: okay. Maybe he does still need to remind himself that his love was equal, was enough, was stratospheric even if it still looked different than Ilya’s in a lot of little ways. His heart is only full of that man. He belongs to that man.

His life is that man.

“I know, baby,” his mom says, not pitying but…she does see him, for better or worse: “I know.”

Shane nods, breathes deep, checks that his luggage is empty before he zips it back up and sticks it in the far back part of the closet near the door.

“Have I told you how proud I am of you, though, for being that willing to say as much, and to be so fierce with it?”

And that, his mom just coming out and saying as much: this time it doesn’t hit wrong at all, it just…hits, and expands, and swells in his ribs because his heart is that full.

His life is that full, and how’d he get that, how’d he…how did he get this lucky…

“Mom,” he starts, a little helpless, a little desperate, a little overwhelmed in the best way by feeling.

“Shane.”

And his name like that, from her: he’s seen.

But also: seen so differently from how Ilya sees him. And he’s struck by just how much Ilya has expanded not just his heart, his capacity for feeling and loving but…fuck.

Fuck, but his whole goddamn world.

“Honestly, though,” his mom’s voice is veering back to manager-mode, and Shane can’t help but grin—enough; on to business; “now that we’ve got all the possible hiccoughs accounted for,” and her smirk is audible when she adds on:

“This is going to blow Scott Hunter’s little smooching display out of the water.”

And Shane laughs because it’s not a competition, but again: he lives with Ilya. He loves his husband.

Of fucking course he’s a little gratified that they’re going to absolutely steamroll anyone else’s attempt at declaring love for their partner. Their love deserves to.

“When do you guys get in?” Shane asks once his laughter dies down.

“Oh, we’re not missing a second this year, sweetheart,” she says, like she’s offended by the question even having the potential to suggest otherwise; “we’ll be in early on Sunday before the opening on Monday.”

Shane nods, and he glances at the door, tries to listen for footsteps of Ilya’s return from the cafe across the street before he asks in a rush:

“And you’ve got the passpor—”

“Shane,” his mother says, patient and fond but firm; “you booked her her own seat in first class.” And yes. Ilya had booked his parents tickets.

Anya coming was Shane’s surprise for his husband, so that ticket was all him.

“She has absolutely everything she needs.”

Right. Good.

The door swings open, and Shane feels his lips stretch for the grin that rushes through him immediate and like sparklers in this blood, as Ilya juggles coffees and pastries: adorable.

Fucking beloved.

Now he has everything he needs, too.

_______________________

They wait until most things are closed to go out, to stroll without a destination in mind—they’ve spent most of their time so far being less annoying lovestruck tourists and more horny not-even-newlyweds in their hotel. So much for seeing the city.

Shane doesn’t regret a single fucking second. They can come back here another time. Any time.

They have all the time in the world.

“Come here,” Ilya reels him in from the wrist as they pass between street lights, stopping them and pulling off his glove to cup Shane’s face.

“You are beautiful, lyubimyy,” he whispers, stroking Shane’s cheekbone, heedless of the cold.

“If that’s me,” Shane whispers, words a cloud around them in the frigid air; a little breathless with just how heady it is: the touch, outside, in public even with no one around; “then what the fuck’s the right word for you?”

“Lucky,” Ilya answers without hesitation, adding an extra thump to Shane’s heartbeat for how much he means it, how deep it runs as Ilya strips the other glove from his hand and holds Shane’s face between both; “man who is lucky beyond his most wild dreams.”

That changes the whole fucking cadence of Shane’s pulse, not least for how Ilya draws Shane’s lips to his own and kisses deep, with purpose, not just to taste but to savour, and Shane lets it melt the chill, lets it melt the whole of him to spill into Ilya who moves, nips up Shane’s jawbone, kisses around his eyes, his brow, then draws back but replaces the heat with his palms, keeps him safe, warm:

“Your nose is all pink,” Ilya beams at him, his golden man and his golden heart swiping a thumb over the tip of Shane’s nose; “wanted to eat you.”

And his golden man with his insatiable libido cants his hips forward just the slightest bit, but dear god, that slightest bit gives away the persistence of his own erection despite the chill.

Not that Shane’s any less aroused, his own cock hard enough to feel through the length of his coat.

“You can, absolutely,” Shane mouths along Ilya’s cheek; “but how about not here, yeah?”

“Hmm,” Ilya is close enough Shane can feel the way his breath condenses against his skin, like a kiss atop a kiss:

“True,” he assesses, a little put out but grinning broadly nonetheless: “am too fond of your dick to let it catch frostbite.”

Shane can’t help but snort, and tip forward into Ilya’s strong chest, warm arms.

“Thank you, yeah, that’s important,” Shane chuckles, and when Ilya joins him, chest shaking under Shane’s head, Shane just laughs all the harder.

“I was admittedly thinking more along the lines of let’s not get, like, ejected from the country before we even play a game,” Shane glances up at Ilya, but can’t even pretend he’s the slightest bit irritated; isn’t more just…floating on a kind of joy he never thought he’d get to know.

“Hmm,” Ilya hums again before pulling back, pulling Shane in for another peck to his lips before declaring: “secondary concern.”

Shane just smiles at him, so goddamn in love, and doesn’t stop smiling as Ilya slips his gloves into his pocket and hooks his elbow with Shane’s playfully to lead him farther down the street, unhurried. Luxuriating, just in each other.

“Hand?” Ilya eventually holds his out while he asks for Shane’s as if it’s not a given.

Shane sheds his own glove to thread their fingers together. Like normal couples.

Like anyone else in love.

Ilya slips their joined hands into the deep recesses of his pocket, not to hide, but to keep him warm, the way he cups their hands so close, rubs his skin so careful.

“I love this,” Shane says, breathless now for new reasons, heart beating high in his throat for new reasons, too.

“I love this, too,” Ilya leans over, kisses Shane’s cheek, then the corner of his mouth, and oh.

This is what it’s like, then.

This is what forever’s going to look like, from here on out.

_______________________

Scott raises an eyebrow at the large…box that Kip is carrying into the kitchen of the penthouse they’re renting for the Olympics—because like hell he’s going to spend the whole Games away from his husband.

Like, flat-out: fuck that.

“What’s that?” he dares to ask when the actually-kind-of-fancy, like possibly handwoven, basket lands on the countertop with….actual force. Shit.

“Are you,” Kip asks carefully, brows furrowed before looking up and meeting Scott’s eyes; “friendly, at all, with Ilya Rozanov?”

Scott frowns, both for the question and the edge of…worry, in Kip’s gaze.

“Friendly? No,” Scott huffs half a laugh at the suggestion alone; “he’s an asshole, mostly,” because he…he’s not as bad as Scott used to think, sure, but that doesn’t mean he’s not kind of a dick.

“Did something,” Kip starts, hesitant, that worry gleaming a little brighter; “happen?”

“What do you mean?” Scott asks, leaning in, tracing Kip’s face, his lips.

“He sent this,” Kip gestures to the side at the basket—gift basket, then, that tracks for the style and size—even as he leans heavy into Scott’s touch.

“The card says,” and Kip’s voice cracks a little for it because, because…

Scott grabs the cardstock sticking out of the lid, and reads:

With greatest sympathies for such heartrending tragedy visiting so cruelly upon your household

Wow. That’s…wordy. And over-the-fucking-top.

“Is there anything I should know?” Kip asks, his voice strained, and his eyes are…oh fuck, they’re wet.

“Probably just that Ilya Rozanov’s an asshole, as stated,” Scott says firmly, holding his hand out for Kip to meet, trying to read Kip’s worries from his face: something threatening them, and their relationship, or something threatening Scott, his wellbeing in one way or another.

“And only that,” Scott adds with a long kiss to Kip’s slightly trembling lips, which he holds until Kip starts kissing back in earnest, until the turn of his eyes stops veering toward fear, or impending devastation.

“If he genuinely thinks Russia is going to take us this year, he’s delusional,” Scott says dryly, and then kisses Kip again until it’s a sweet thing between them, and nothing less.

“Delusional asshole, got it,” Kip nods, and Scott studies him a long moment before nodding, satisfied.

“Mmmm,” he goes back to his smoothie, because: routine.

“He’s easy on the eyes, though, to be fair,” Kip says, starting to rummage through the basket-thing, now that it’s been deemed a dick move, rather than some kind of…omen.

“Legitimately his only redeeming quality,” Scott says around his straw because: he’s not blind.

“Also, these are gourmet, and this,” Kip lifts sweets, chocolates and fruits and candied-things Scott is certain he’s never seen before in his life, and then a long, delicately-thin-necked bottle: “this is, like, top shelf vodka.”

Scott glances at it and…yeah. Yeah, that’s…fucking expensive vodka.

“Is any kind of vodka usually in gift baskets?” Kip asks, the adorable way his face scrunches when he encounters anything he suspects is a gap in his knowledge based on tax bracket making Scott powerless but to kiss him with a shake of his head and the decision to concede that:

“Okay,” he sighs; “maybe two redeeming qualities.”

Because, again: only a Russian would add fucking vodka to his taunting-basket, but it is stupidly nice vodka.

“Unlike yourself,” Kip sets the bottle aside and wraps arms around Scott’s neck; “who is made entirely of recommending qualities,” he kisses him, licks all the blueberry-banana from his tongue: “no redeeming required.”

Scott moans because: why shouldn’t he?

“How about a demonstration, for some of those—” he sucks on Kip’s tongue for a few long seconds, pushes the remainder of his smoothie safely away from whatever follows:

“Redeeming qualities?”

Kip pushes him against the edge of the counter and, well.

Good thing he got the glass out of the way in advance.

_______________________

“Ilya,” Shane leans against the door to their Village accommodations; “why are you breaking down the bed?”

Ilya glares at him as if he’s insulted by the question.

“We should probably try to seem like we did this the right way—”

Ilya scowls at the cardboard bed frame, half-flattened and piled in a corner already, like it’s personally done him offence. When they just got into the fucking room.

“The ‘right way’, for me and my husband,” Ilya enunciates viciously, stomping another of the segments under his full weight; “is not to sleep on,” and he rolls on the balls of his feet to make it flat to the floor; “fucking shipping box.”

He kicks the formerly-three-dimensional structure into the corner with an amount of force worthy of a different fucking sport.

“Also,” Ilya grabs him, pulls him and kisses up his neck; “much as fucking you through the mattress is a goal of mine always,” and Shane ducks to kiss him properly, to suck at his lips and feast on his tongue before Ilya lets him go to glare intently at the broken-up boxes:

“I am less a fan of it in literal sense.”

Shane cackles, and Ilya grins, grabbing his hand and dragging him to the stack of boxes that had been waiting in the room when they arrived.

“Those are our mattresses.”

“Oh, so,” Shane recognizes the labels, knows what’s inside but can’t help the opportunity to harass his husband; “it’s just the need for special shipping boxes to be our beds, gotcha.”

Ilya spins him around and pins him to the wall next to said boxes, swallowing Shane’s laughter.

“Mattresses in boxes,” Ilya growls against his lips; “one for each, put together, makes perfect bed.”

Shane leans back just at the waist, smiles at him as Ilya stares, Ilya’s body still holding his in place from the hips.

“Harris recommended it highly,” Ilya says, suggestively: they both know Harris…would know what they needed decent mattresses for.

“How long does it take to set them up?” Shane gasps, his pants getting tight, and quick.

“Hmm,” Ilya hums, delicious between his lips; “too fucking long.”

Shane happens to know the fucking boxed mattresses are basically roll-out-and-lie-on-top affairs, but then Ilya’s reaching down and pulling at the waist of every layer at once, laying Shane bare to the knees and taking his length in hand, thumbing the slit with the same rhythm he kisses Shane stupid with, spreading Shane’s precome as soon as it beads and tracing Shane’s teeth, thrusting his tongue less in line with Shane’s bucking hips and more like an extra heartbeat, wild and unrestrained and reaching, reaching, reaching—

Fuck, yeah, Ilya was right.

Anything other than this, now, would have taken too fucking long.

_______________________

Shane leans in and pecks Ilya’s cheek before they huddle in for the captain’s speech—which means Shane and Ilya giving a joint pep talk to their guys:

“You clean up good,” like that’s news, or like Shane hasn’t seen Ilya in his Olympic uniform before, but.

But.

“I get dirty very good, also,” he turns, and captures Shane’s lips full on, unabashed and buzzing with energy—they both are.

“Oh, I’m well aware,” Shane isn’t even embarrassed that he damn near purrs for how turned on he fucking is right now, because, like…

“Is it weird that this is basically like seeing you in my uniform all over again?”

“Of course it’s weird, it is you,” Ilya turns and grabs his chin; “weird and boring,” then he pulls him in to capture his lips, mouthing against him:

“Love of my life.”

“We’re fucking as soon as we get back to our room,” Shane moans between breaths before they pull apart.

“I’m sorry,” Ilya’s hand slides to cradle Shane’s neck as he eyes him hungrily: “was that in question before I put on very-bright uniform?”

“Alright, perpetual-newlyweds,” Hayden slides an arm in between them and half-heartedly tries to bat them apart.

“We weren’t doing anything!” Shane protests, which is true.

Especially not just then. Anymore.

“You were talking,” Hayden counters with a raised brow; “and you two doing that is more of an,” he gestures a little wildly; “an in-love thing than most things I’ve seen or done in my whole fucking life,” then he frowns, rolling his eyes as he mutters:

“It makes me feel like a bad husband.”

“That seems like, hmm, what is it?” Ilya oversells the process of considering the right words, and Shane tries not to laugh for it. “A ‘you’ problem?” He pretends to look to Shane for confirmation, but his eyes dance too bright.

Shane just shakes his head and leans to kiss Ilya full on the lips once more, and ignores whatever Hayden has to say about it.

_______________________

“What a shocker out of Team Canada with Ottawa’s prize captain stepping out on the ice in red!” the commentators say from the television in their room.

“He’s been resident in the country just long enough, but I expect his star status did him some favors with logistics,” another voice adds on over the footage from their first game earlier that day.

“The timeframe had to be impossibly close,” the first speaker nods in agreement.

“Probably why no one made a clear statement in adva—”

“Bozhe.”

Shane startles; Ilya had been going to get them dinner to eat in here, together; Shane hadn’t been paying attention to how much time had passed because, well:

“You’re getting hard from watching the walkout.”

Yeah. That. That’s why he hadn’t been paying attention.

“Of fucking course I am,” Shane huffs, dropping his head back against a pillow; “but I was already hard.”

“Yes,” Ilya hums, sitting on the bed next to Shane and sliding the full breadth of his palm over the aching bulge in Shane’s underwear; “I know.”

He did know. He’d told Shane if he was still hard when he came back, they’d eat dinner cold after Ilya tended to more pressing matters.

And Shane could have gotten off himself but…why the fuck would he do that when it could be Ilya who made him come?

Plus, just:

“Look at us,” Shane nods to the screen, where it’s playing the slow motion reveal of Ilya in his Team Canada uniform at Shane’s side, not a single step behind.

“Jesus,” Shane breathes, all of it hitting him like it’s the first time all over again; “look at us.”

Ilya keeps his hand on top of Shane’s dick but doesn’t delve further as he blankets his body, slides up his chest and kisses him long, hard—sees what Shane sees in the footage. The literal light at the end of a long fucking tunnel. The peak of the mountain they’ve been climbing their entire adult lives.

Together.

It clenches his heart so fucking hard, it’s so big; it’s so much.

“I love you,” Ilya exhales, warm and expansive just under the swell of Shane’s bottom lip.

“Mmm,” Shane dips his chin and kisses Ilya with his whole heart and soul in it: “I love you.”

And if they ride that feeling for a while, before Ilya even moves to tend to Shane’s cock, purpled with neglect, it’s actually kind of totally fine because Ilya’s more than happy to lavish him with extra care for the struggle.

And, well.

Dinner can wait.

_______________________

They’re the first to get to the showers the next afternoon, before they warm up for their semifinal game, but that doesn’t mean much—they may have figured out they’re only sharing the facilities with their own team at this point, and maybe not every one of them wants a shower before the match, but they won’t be the only ones, so they won’t be alone for long.

Which it why Shane makes a point of not letting his eyes linger on his husband’s statuesquely glorious form for longer than a few seconds at a time.

And is likewise startled as fuck when a hand wraps around his hip and reaches down.

“Ilya,” Shane gasps, turns on a fucking dime.

“The fuck.”

But Ilya’s hand doesn’t stop, even as he holds Shane’s eyes deliberately as he sinks to his knees in the communal fucking Olympic showers.

“You do not want?” Ilya gazes up through wet lashes, shower droplets making them sparkle and fuck, fuck—

“It’s not about wanting, Jesus, it’s—”

“Quick, then,” Ilya cuts him off and brings Shane’s tip to his lips; “is in the allowed, what you call,” he lets his tongue circle the head as he thinks for a moment before letting the rims of his mouth drag along Shane’s cock as he pronounces carefully, seductively:

“Maneuverings.”

Fuck, fuck, and he’s not wrong. They’d agreed that their sex life had to be more tame around the games, they couldn’t risk even the slightest pull or twinge of the wrong muscle that could jeopardize their play. Ilya hadn’t liked it, but he’d agreed with the necessity.

Shane hadn’t liked it either, he was just better at swallowing his disappointment. And like, better at patience in general.

Usually.

But blow jobs were very much…on the ‘allowed maneuvers’ list. Fuck.

“Ilya, the rest of the team,” Shane’s protest is half-hearted, at best, especially since Ilya’s slurping around his length, almost fully taking him down his goddamn throat and swallowing around the girth of him just to make Shane quiver.

“Is early still, we will be very fast,” Ilya gasps as he pulls off, not just to talk but to let the heat of the steam play against the way he aims his breath in a stream, cooler by comparison against his sensitive, absolutely dripping cock; “very thorough,” and he licks up the rock-hard vein the traces base to tip before swallowing Shane again, bobbing along the whole of him with absolute concentration and a speed Shane’s never been faced with before.

So it’s no surprise that he comes quicker than he thinks he ever has before, straight down Ilya willing, waiting throat.

Holy fuck.

“Is good luck,” Ilya says as he stands and pulls Shane’s mouth to his, lets him taste himself from Ilya’s tongue and smirks as Shane’s dick gives a pathetic little twitch for it, spent entirely but never unaffected by Ilya’s….everything.

“You didn’t suck me off before our first game,” Shane finds his words again once Ilya’s hands are massaging his shampoo into his scalp.

“Absolutely did,” Ilya shoots back, looking betrayed to have been forgotten in such a way.

“Not in the shower,” Shane rolls his eyes as Ilya pulls him under the spray and sends more heat than the water through him when he carefully shields Shane’s eyes from the suds and murmurs low behind Shane’s ear:

“Semantics.”

Fucking New Yorker word, right there.

“You’re not superstitious, anyway,” Shane points out once Ilya’s very thoroughly and very efficiently soaped them both up and down, as promised; “neither of us is.”

Ilya turns off the water and walks to grab two of the towels off a shelf across the room:

“Maybe not,” he concedes, looking…too fucking pleased.

“But Pike is,” his grin spreads full once the words are out; “very much so.”

Shane tilts his head, trying to add up the pieces.

“And he is keeping everyone out, so.”

“Oh my god,” Shane says, knows he’s blushing but also that he feels more loose and ready to play then he’s felt in a while, so he lets the heat gather in his cheeks and the laughter bubble up from his chest all in one go:

“Oh my god,” and then Ilya’s laughing, and they both probably take more time catching their breaths than any other portion of the time they take up in the shower, on the kindness of Hayden’s weird sports-oriented paranoias.

_______________________

They beat the US last night, and thereby assured they’d be playing for gold. There’d been celebration, of course; and they had two full days between so…yeah.

Ilya’d fucked him hard enough to feel it now, come morning, given there was ample time to recover his full…capacity of motion before they took the ice for the final game.

He comes up to the table Ilya’s perched at with a good chunk of the rest of the team, pushing the final minutes of breakfast before the meals switch out. Shane had his food before his morning workout—which had been a larger meal and a shorter workout for…reasons.

One has to rest certain muscle groups if one is going to…regain full capacity.

So he focuses instead on the absolute mess of Ilya’s…face and the entire square half-meter around him on the table.

“What are you eating?”

Ilya looks up, lighting up upon noticing Shane as he leans over the table to start sweeping up his husband’s crumbs.

He’s feeling very…inclined to look after his especially generous partner this morning.

No reason, of course. Just loving him that much. Always.

“Muffin,” Ilya says through a stuffed-full mouth that Shane might scold him for, on another day, or at the least eye him with a tiny bit of distaste.

Not today, though.

“Is very good muffin,” Ilya says, grabbing for his coffee so his mouth is more free for words; “you should try.”

Shane does narrow his eyes at that; he’s far more flexible with his meal plans now, but it’s way too close to lunch for him to be poking at even a snack without it throwing off his routine for the Games.

It’s only a few more days, after all.

“Would you eat one if I kept it and took it home for you?” Ilya asks, eyes wide; no right or wrong answer.

Fuck him. Fuck him for being perfect. For loving Shane so much that Shane’s own chest keeps cracking open farther and farther to hold the same measure of love between his own ribs. For being so generous.

“If it could somehow stay good that long,” he leans and breathes close enough that he could kiss—will, and soon—but he reaches to squeeze Ilya’s hand under the table in the meantime.

“I am very motivated,” Ilya says slowly; “and very resourceful,” and Shane can’t deny that; “and very clever.”

And Shane would never argue against that.

So he gets up, and crosses an entirely absurd route around the table to lean over Ilya’s shoulder and make it look like he’s reaching for the wrapping to take to the recycling, when what he really wants is to speak into his husband’s ear:

“How about you meet me back in our room in about five minutes and I can sample a taste, see if it’s worth the trouble.”

He walks out, doesn’t look back, but doesn’t need to.

This is a long practiced game, after all. Shane knows he can rely on Ilya to be prompt when it matters most.

_______________________

“Let’s get out of here.”

Ilya turns from where he was moving to start getting undressed for the evening, as their gold medal match is the next day. Early night and all.

“What?” Ilya asks, genuinely and understandably confused.

Adorably—but understandably—confused.

“Let’s get out of here,” Shane repeats, leaning to nip at the hinge of Ilya’s jaw.

“Coach was,” Ilya says slowly, but it doesn’t keep him from leaning in to how Shane’s mouth is exploring his jawline; “very clear about keeping curfew.”

“Sure,” Shane agrees with a nod; “let’s still get out of here.”

Ilya pulls back a little, eyeing him warily.

“Who are you and what have you done with my husband?”

Shane huffs a little laugh and kisses Ilya, deep and unmistakable.

“I’m Shane Hollander, I am your husband,” he punctuates that with a particularly hard and pointed kiss; “and your husband, is about to play the gold medal game with his husband next to him, and no matter how that turns out the whole world is going to know that my whole heart belongs to you and my whole life is being with you and,” Shane takes a deep breath, tries to…not tamp down, more cup precious and so so careful, the way everything’s come to a head tonight in his mind, in his chest, in his bones and his blood and his fucking cells, like it all decided to scream and leap for joy at once and Shane’s about to burst out of his skin for it—

“And I never thought it could be like this,” Shane leans his head against Ilya’s shoulder, and dissolves a little into the way Ilya’s arms come around him in an instant, no hesitation; “I never thought I could feel this, I never thought I could feel,” his breath catches, and he looks up at Ilya, desperate for him to see, and to know:

“I never thought I could be happy, like this,” Shane marvels, then grabs Ilya’s hand and presses it firm to his own chest as he exhales:

“It’s so warm, Ilya.”

And Ilya’s eyes are bright, water-limned where Shane knows tears are gathered in his own, the feelings to big for anything less.

“And I want to take a walk with my husband,” Shane says, his hand on Ilya’s atop his chest, locking fingers, still holding tight: “and just,” Shane’s breath trembles a little: “be with him. Soak it all up a little bit more.”

And Ilya blinks, gazes at Shane like he’s the only thing in the world, and then stands, kisses Shane’s knuckles and breathes in between them:

“Yes,” he nods, and nods, and nods like he’ll harness the sun if Shane were to ask: “okay, yes.”

They sneak out where the mobile homes are set up, mostly for the individual events that are wrapping up the next few days. Shane just wants a walk—nothing lengthy and nothing risky. Just a few moments.

Ilya leads them close to where they’d wandered when they first arrived, holds Shane’s hand inside his pocket again, keeps him warm.

“You know it will not end tomorrow, yes?” Ilya speaks low, almost afraid of the idea of Shane thinking otherwise.

“I know,” Shane reassures him so fucking fast; “god, I know,” he shakes his head with a smile, and reaches with his free hand to cup Ilya’s cheek: “that’s not how I mean it at all.”

He takes a few moments just to stroke that cheek, to touch, to be before he speaks:

“I want this moment, with you,” Shane tells him, barely blinking because: “I want you in this moment, just,” he shakes his head in wonder, eyes stretched wide; “etched into my brain for forever.” He pulls Ilya’s hand to his chest again because he can’t not, he physically cannot do anything but this—

“I want it pressed on my heart, I want it burned into the backs of my eyelids.” And Ilya is watching him like he’s the world, like Ilya doesn’t know in his own heartbeat that it’s the other way around.

“Every dream I had as a kid, everything I thought held everything, meant everything,” Shane says, voice strained, pitched thin as he reaches for Ilya, as he frames his face:

“And then I met you,” Shane breathes it like the fucking prayer to the universe that it is, always will be, nothing less; “and I learned what ‘everything’ really was.”

When the tear drops from Ilya left eye, Shane immediately brushes it away, soft; loving beyond his ability to express any other way.

“And here we are,” Shane holds his face, kisses the pulse in his neck, nuzzles against his cheek, below his chin; “and I get to have both,” Shane marvels, looks at Ilya like he’s more incomprehensibly magnificent than the stars.

Because he is.

“Somehow, I get to have all of it.”

And then Ilya’s hands are covering Shane’s, and Ilya’s kissing him within an inch of his life, but not before he makes sure Shane knows he understands, knows he’s right there with him for all of it, in just one word spoken with the breadth and depth of his whole precious chest:

“Everything.”

Chapter 4: In Your Arms I’d Start A War

Chapter Summary

Ilya goes down.

The hit’s dirty, of course it is, but it’s blatant in a way that Shane hadn’t even expected after the last period-and-half: after Ilya warning the team more than once, preparing them; after Ilya warning Shane specifically, hands on his skin and breath heavy as he kissed Shane fevered and fervent and told him in a tone that was so serious and so scared that Shane felt the intrinsic need every time to hold Ilya close but with a hand always open on Ilya’s chest like he could tame his frantic pulse as he told Shane about the KHL, about the culture, about the violence, about the way Olympic gold was treated, what it meant in a place so unlike where they were, unlike what Shane knew, so foreign from how he’d learned the game.

It’s a hit to the head, which is an automatic ejection, but that doesn’t fucking matter, because Ilya goes down for it, flat on the ice, and Shane…Shane knew what Ilya meant when he said his heart stopped to what it happen to Shane. He knew.

But he hadn’t known.

Chapter Notes

In case it wasn’t obvious: chapter title credit is here.

Shane doesn’t know what to fucking do with himself under his husband’s attention—he genuinely hadn’t thought his ‘approved maneuvers’ could undo him like this.

Maybe it’s the anticipation, the way this is a place they’ve never been, dialled past eleven: they’re not even just playing for the gold today, they’re playing together. Together.

And they’re playing Russia, which feels fated somehow. Cosmic. Unlikely and yet…necessary.

When they’d learned their opponent, when Russia knocked Finland ostensibly out of the medal running because the US were going to wipe the ice with them—and they did. Decisively.

But when Russia’d won, Shane had taken the very first opportunity to draw Ilya into his arms and ask, just ask:

“Are you good?”

Because that alone had asked so many other questions inside it: Are you okay? Does it hurt? Is it better more than it’s worse? Is it gonna be harder or easier, not to win but on you?

And Ilya had wrapped around him in kind and held so tight as he’d exhaled long against Shane’s neck:

“It is perfect.”

And there’d been no hesitation, Ilya’s tone so warm for Shane, for what they were going to do when that game was done, and then so sharp, so fathomless in its determination, its certainty: like he really had made his peace with Russia no longer being home, not even a little.

Like maybe this game, regardless of its outcome, would be the most final piece of that puzzle, to make Ilya know in the deepest parts of him: it didn’t even have to just be Canada.

But Shane would never not be standing beside him, holding to him, ready and waiting forever to be his home. Endless and unfailing and for always.

Maybe that was the real measure of where Ilya’s head, his heart was for how this was unfolding: that final piece.

On top of their…first piece in setting the tone, writing the narrative for the rest of their lives.

It’s heady as fuck, is what it is.

But it’s on the cloud of that pervasive headiness, the way it feels like it makes Shane’s heart pump fuller, like the chambers themselves can contain more now, against Ilya’s chest, his head over Ilya’s heart that sounds just as full, just as…beautiful, symphonic like it’s composed to match the song written in Shane’s goddamn soul, it feels that fucking perfect—

But that’s that cloud he wakes on, watching Ilya’s face for the minutes it takes for him to blink awake and meet him, eyes focusing but lips curling before they do, knowing—always knowing Shane’s presence. The shape of Shane in his arms.

“Good morning,” Ilya murmurs, sleep-slurred but still so fucking warm that Shane can’t help but lift his head and kiss him, press himself chest-to-chest, heart-to-heart because today…

It’s today. The day. The games sure, but…

Today is their day.

And Ilya reads it, knows it in Shane’s lips, meets it in the way their mouths move, and then their hands, and then their bodies as Ilya flips them slow, so tender, stroking up Shane’s muscles and just feeling, just mapping Shane because he can and fuck, fuck, the way it makes Shane feel, lights him up anew every time, outshines whatever he thought was thr pinnacle of love and lust and giddy joy in him before, every goddamn time: to be touched not like he’s a commodity to sell to the masses at just the right angle in just the right lighting, or an instrument to refine for performance and wins and cups, but because he’s him, and Ilya has always touched him like there was a worth in him that was immeasurable.

And then his lips, his fucking lips: so lush and so worshipful, dragging and licking, sucking and nipping and tracing with the blunts of his teeth, fucking conducting the tremulous heaving of his lungs as that mouth follows the touch of his hands sometimes, then dancing to play counterpoint others, never once letting Shane do anything but climb and climb and climb and…

When Ilya meets the bulk of his thighs he doesn’t split his attentions so much as he doubles down on the execution of his ministrations, both hands picking a side to devote to and suckling his way from the backs of Shane’s knees and up, to the firm meat of the muscles that Ilya knows, massages like a pro, draws moans of every fucking kind of pleasure imaginable as he works the flesh there, kisses over the tightest spaces as they release to his whim, his skill, his devotion, eases them farther and farther apart until Shane’s lifting his legs on an instinct Ilya awakened inside him so many years ago, that’s just more ready, more able to relish and revel and luxuriate now than before, when it was rushed and stolen—not like this. Not for a long time. And not anymore.

Not ever again.

Shane’s breath catches as that reality settles between his lungs—it doesn’t matters how many times that happens, it fucking arrests him, grabs his heart in its hands, Ilya’s hands, and pumps it with the realization that their love was always right, their love was always that big, that exceptional.

Their love was always enough.

Shane can’t help but haul Ilya up, or pull at him enough to convince him to pause his single-minded work and lift, chest heaving as it drags against the full hardness of his cock straining up for Ilya’s weight to graze just so against the bared vein lining the underside and fuck, fuck, but as Shane paws Ilya, needy and uncoordinated and a little unfocused for the wetness already in his eyes, as he catches Ilya’s lips and sinks into him, feels their pulses vying with each other against their flush chests for bragging rights—I love more, but I love bigger, but I love endless, but I love—

With all of it flooding Shane with every beat of his blood, he realizes all over again: he was made to belong to this man.

His body, his heart, his soul: the whole of him was made to be stripped unvarnished to him, because this man would love what was left beneath everything. Would love Shane as he was, under everything.

Maybe all the more for it.

He lets Ilya’s mouth go only for the inconvenience of breathing, gasping, and Ilya strokes over his face—tears he didn’t even know he’d shed collected and wiped so gently clean—before he’s kissing back down to where he’d been, Shane spreading his thighs back to where they’d been, inviting: heart pounding because he loves, and he wants.

And they’re on the fucking precipice of a brand new forever.

Ilya kisses the creases of his thighs, breathes deep like he’s savouring before he licks the lines of skin, kisses under Shane’s sac but leaves it untouched save for the laboured puffs of his breath as he fits his palms around both thighs and lifts, as he draws Shane in to the perfect closeness and brings the backs of his now-well-loved-knees over Ilya’s broad shoulders before he dives, laps a circle around the rim of his hole on display, just as Ilya likes best, just as Shane had unraveled for it from the beginning, from the first —had fucking blossomed as a man, as a human, as a soul in the fucking universe somehow not just for feeling in the magnitudes Ilya has unveiled to him, but for looking into eyes that looked into him and despite every reason not to, every complication and every hurdle, and every…every voice of so-called sense that could never have hoped to be heard over the way his heart had come alive for this man, this man.

His husband.

Despite everything: Ilya chose him. Ilya chose him.

And now they have this.

Now: they’ll get to keep this.

Ilya’s tongue is and always has been an uncanny sort of marvel, some secret, greater wonder of the world that only Shane gets to appreciate, and good great fuck does he appreciate it: Ilya treats every pucker of him with equal care and adoration, coaxing it to release for him, to give up to him, to unveil his secrets, as if Shane would keep any from him—not anymore.

But Ilya licks, and sucks the softest bit before licking more, before licking in, loosening him until the muscles beneath the skin start to go lax, start to form new ridges for him to play with at the tip of his tongue, to taste along the buds of it and moan deep from his chest between Shane’s legs, Shane’s and Shane’s alone above everyone, when he could have had anyone: this is Shane’s.

He is Shane’s, and Shane is his.

The hole of him starts to get needy as his pulse hits harder, the teased-furls fluttering, wanting, pulling at Ilya’s tongue and Ilya doesn’t even pause when he slides a finger next to that tongue, the extra stretch just that little bit further inward causing Shane’s moan-peppered panting to catch on a gasp and then a deeper kind of moan, pulled from somewhere more primal, more animal in him as Ilya twists, then starts to alternate which side of his relentlessly thrusting tongue a finger moves to caress Shane and tug in a nudging way, something too full of knowing, of daring, of unflagging and overabundant adoration for fucking, or even calling it making love: something other. Something deeper and so much greater and Shane suspects might be a gift only they get to touch.

Once Ilya takes two fingers to slide alongside his tongue to not tease, more like greet Shane’s prostate with, fucking, fond delight as Shane shoots up from the mattress—which has served them so fucking well, his husband is a genius unmatched in every single goddamn way imaginable holy hell—

He doesn’t last for shit, at that point, quivering and whimpering, legs giving out any semblance of their own strength and defaulting wholly to Ilya’s hold, Ilya as safety and stability and trust incarnate, who’d never let Shane fall.

Except to pieces: glorious and crystalline under his touch, in the face of this love.

Which he does. Good god, he does.

And Shane’s not even entirely sure he’s ever been unmade quite like this in all their years together. He didn’t know that was even possible.

What a fucking revelation.

Ilya flips them again, so that Shane can lie on top of him, can rest against his chest and fall into how he breathes, lets that slot his pieces back into place, stronger than before—more made up of Ilya every time.

Time doesn’t seem like a concept worth spending energy on sorting out as Shane coasts the rise and fall of Ilya’s breath as it settles far before his own, but he knows it passes—time, that is—counted only by the pulse under his ear, so when his own breath returns enough, and his mind clears from only bliss to bliss-and-some-cognition, he mouths into Ilya’s skin:

“Do you think they’ll get it?”

“Hmm?”

Ilya drops a questioning kiss to the crown of his head.

“When we show them.”

Because that’s what it’ll be. It’ll be colliding on the ice with open arms, kissing as soon as their helmets are off. It’ll be obvious like it’s always been, probably.

But it’ll be intentional; it’ll be known.

Shane’s still kinda floored why how little fear there is left in him; how much his skin tingles just…thinking of it. Knowing it’s almost here.

“Like, all at once?” Ilya asks, because of course he understands what Shane’s saying.

Will they see that you’re my best reason for breathing? Will they understand what you mean?

“Does it matter?” Ilya asks, not dismissively at all; so gentle. His hands on Shane so steady.

“No,” Shane answers, because faced with the question bald and open that way…makes the root of the answer obvious. It’s just that—

“But?” Ilya bumps his head to Shane’s, encouraging. Shane burrows into him a little: shelter. Sanctuary from every storm in that chest, these arms.

“I want them to,” Shane admits, with more force than he’s expecting; “I want them to see you next to me and understand…” Shane’s rubs his face against Ilya’s skin as he breathes out:

“All of it.”

Ilya is quiet for a beat, and then asks, a lilt to his tone:

“All of it, hmm?”

Shane butts his head into Ilya’s pec at that, the tease well-placed, so knowing.

“I mean, okay, not,” he nods down to their still tangled bodies.

“But they need to respect the fact that you’re what runs through my veins,” Shane flattens his palms tighter to Ilya’s chest: “so, whatever they need to know, to get that through their heads?”

Ilya glances down, grabs that hand and holds their joined ones there; tight.

“I want them to know all of that.”

Ilya hums, and uses his free hand to trace idle swirls on Shane’s stomach.

“Could drop to my knees and give you blowjob on the ice,” Ilya proposes, his words delivered dead serious; “would maybe be quicker for getting through their heads.”

He smacks Ilya across his abs, which are already shaking with suppressed laughter.

“My heart’s not in my dick, asshole.”

“Hmm,” Ilya sounds doubtful, even as he snuggles Shane just that little bit nearer; “close, though, no?”

Shane shakes his head into Ilya’s bicep, but can’t wipe his smile away, and eventually Ilya kisses his hair and murmurs low, so Shane hears from the outside as much as from the inside where he’s plastered to Ilya’s chest:

“Ya tebya lyublyu,” and he kisses Shane soft, slow, lingering; “bol'she vsego na svete.”

And Shane shivers, holds closer; he knows all those words.

“You could probably say that,” Shane tells him, more than a little choked up; “and they’d get the memo.”

“Mmm-mmm,” Ilya shakes his head, near-immediately, and Shane looks up, question clear in his eyes.

And Ilya’s hand is on his cheek instantly, gaze on him, shining with unshed tears, overcome but ecstatic for it as he reaches, cups Shane’s face entirely, holds to him as he whispers fiercely:

“Only I get to see this.”

“This?” Shane asks, lost but not so much looking to be found, maybe ever again, for the way Ilya’s tracing, mapping his face and gazing with weight of his whole goddamn soul:

“Your heart, here,” Ilya breathes, thumbs glancing over Shane’s cheekbones; “magnificent.”

And Shane doesn’t know what to do to stop the tears, to hold back the pressure of them building so strong, and stronger with every torrential beat of his heart trying to leap into Ilya’s fucking hands, because god, just…god.

He leans, and he kisses Ilya as hard and deep and full of whatever heart’s on his face and in his chest and his lips and anywhere else, everything, all of it, all of him.

They only part to breathe, and Shane doesn’t know how else to express how fucking in love he is, how much he’s no longer relegated to being just one soul in one body because Ilya’s let him be more, given him more and how can he, how can…

“Can I blow you before we have to leave?”

Ilya’s smile is blinding—he knows how to read the whole of Shane just from his face, after all.

Doesn’t stop him from sitting up a little, so Shane can slide down his front easier, and leaning before he gets too far to mouth at the shell of his ear:

“And you say your heart is not in your dick.”

Shane nips at his hip on the way down because: no. It’s fucking not.

But like: this is more. It’s probably always been that, and so much more.
_______________________

“They will play dirty,” Ilya had said early on, in the Centaurs dressing room, and now again here, with the whole of Team Canada hanging on his every word, his tone commanding in a way Shane rarely heard it. Somber.

Kind of hateful.

“They will come for us because of who we choose to be,” and Ilya makes eye contact with every single player, because not all of them are queer, of course, but every single one of them—at the very least—is playing alongside people who’d suffer if Russia had the final say.

“They will come for what they know for sure, and they will come exactly the same for what they just suspect, no difference,” and for that he only looked at Shane, because everyone gathered there knew what tonight was going to end with, for the two of them, no matter the colour of the medals they got placed on their necks.

“They will forfeit World Championships for this game,” Ilya tells them in earnest, deliberate: “they will not follow the rules.”

And Shane remembers the stories from the Sochi games, what Ilya eventually told him about his father, the ministers, the gala and the government and everything, everything—the IIHC means nothing compared to the gold and these men won’t just break regulation, they will break people in order to do it.

“They are not skilled enough as a team, they do not work together and they do not know how,” Ilya says with a fire in him that Shane knows the spark behind, the memories of a last time that still stung, the words he couldn’t say to a father already fading, but who never gave what Ilya’d deserved; “they cannot play the puck against us. So they will try to play the man.”

Ilya’s gaze narrows, sharpens:

“Do,” he slaps his hands together, a violent sound, commanding; “not,” and again, again;

“Let them.”

The crack of Ilya’s hands together was a warning, but so much more a rallying call, with everyone in the room smacking something in unison, be it thighs or sticks or the sides of their stalls.

Shane had maybe never been more proud, or more turned on, by his husband in all their years—which was fucking saying something.

“They will come for me,” Ilya says when the noise naturally ebbs, too stoic to actually be feeling nothing; to stoic to not be feeling everything; “because they’re fucking pissed,” and even with the vehemence in that single word, Shane knows it’s not anywhere near the thing coursing through Ilya’s veins: “that I picked this team, this country,” he points mean by fully to the floor, to their collected squad, but his eyes lock on Shane after he’s surveyed everyone else because no matter how many other choices Ilya’a made in this, for this: he’s chosen Shane first.

He’d chosen Shane before Shane had even earned it and good fucking god, he was gonna spend the rest of his life grateful for it. Earning it every goddamn moment of every goddamn day.

Ilya blinks, breaks the physical spell between them even though the resonance, the rhythm of it is a thing that Shane’s blood beats every second, wouldn’t know how to go back to a time before it was shaped around Ilya-Ilya-Ilya, and them.

Ilya looks away before his eyes harden, darken, before he’s stone-faced and a little vicious, like he doesn’t want that to fall on Shane, his Shane before he growls:

“They are mudaki, scum, worst of worst,” he spits out, disgusted in a way that’s thick in the air, impossible to ignore; “we cannot underestimate how low they will,” he sucks at his teeth, looking for a word despicable enough in English to fit and then giving up because Shane figures one probably doesn’t exist: “crawl to try to make themselves feel big. Worth winning anything at all. Anything.”

Ilya takes a deep breath, two, lets his eyes close for a long second and then rolls his shoulder back, looks back up, a glint back in his eye that’s sly, cunning: confident.

“But,” he draws out, walking the room and clapping every man on the shoulders as he passes them, gripping Shane’s tight halfway through as he leans over him and declares without room for question:

“We are the better team. And we,” he lets go, and Shane misses his touch but he just follows the energy of his husband make the rest of the round of the room, clapping any missed shoulder before he signs his point off;

“Are prepared.”

And they are. They have been: working on it, preparing for this, together and apart for months. Ilya made fucking sure of it—it wasn’t like they hadn’t faced Russian players before, hadn’t played beside them, but Ilya knew what an Olympic team looked like. What their angle was. Their mentality.

And Ilya loved his team too fucking much to leave them wide-open to any of it.

When the noise in support of Ilya’s speech dies down, they all turn to Shane, because, yeah: ostensibly the captain. But what’s he even gonna say, save maybe:

“There’s a good fuckin’ reason I backed him for this,” he points a there ‘C’ on his uniform and everyone laughs.

“What he said,” Shane’s transported to a press room years ago, his foot knocking against Ilya’s and he smiles: fuck, but how far they’ve come.

“Let’s destroy these motherfuckers.”

The roar of their team is appropriately deafening and then head to the tunnel, pumped, tone set, ready.

Ilya nudges his shoulder before they’re close enough to be seen for it, and fuck, yes.

So fucking ready.

Shane goes in, knowing he’ll be leaning hard on two things: his speed, and his stick handling. He’s always been known for both but…he needs to tweak his strategy, change up where he speeds and where he lags, how he maneuvers, when he dekes, who he passes to and where—but he starts without Ilya on the ice.

Within the first three minutes, he really wishes he hadn’t.

Not because the line they start is bad—anything but, really; Shane wins the faceoff, and they score inside the first minute, because Ilya’s not wrong: they’re the better fucking team—but he and Ilya together will always have an edge. There’s something that doesn’t fit in words about knowing another body the way they do, on and off the ice; reading the smallest hints like they’re blasted on billboards just because you’re that intimately familiar, because you know a person on top of knowing a player.

But they’ve trained for this, they’ve prepared mentally as best they can and then some, all of them, so it’s the lack of that gut-sure knowing without Ilya at his side, waiting for the pass that Shane has to blame for the way he’s laid out on the fucking ice, hard, two-minutes-forty-one into play.

It’s a calculated move, Shane can tell that before he’s even down: angled just right, at the perfect moment to make it look legal, incidental, just wrong place wrong time, Shane being collateral damage from an innocent slip on the ice as you fucking do sometimes, as Shane notoriously did before he left Montreal so it’s even more hypocritical for him to call foul just because he knows better when it comes to this team, this game; knows Number 52 shouldn’t have even been near him by rights—

But the fact that he knows it, that he can acknowledge the angles and think it through and be fucking pissed about it: that ticks the first box.

Because ever since he broke his collarbone, if Shane took a bad enough hit for the whistle, he’d made a checklist, a ritual before he got back up that made sure he was okay enough to get back up and fucking play, but also a way to signal to Ilya that he was alright, that even if he was still down he was there, that he was just…taking inventory.

Because Shane will never forget the day Ilya told him, wrapped around in bed him after a much less serious hit, carefully avoiding bruises as he seemed to stare into them, charting the way the darkened by the second as he barely breathed:

“You do not only scare me,” Ilya had pressed his lips to the notch of Shane’s throat, trembling as he grasped for Shane’s hand to squeeze:

“My heart stops when you fall. Every time.”

So Shane makes sure the first thing he does, always, is reassure that heart back to beating, best he’s able to.

He starts with his hand up, as best he can get it within Ilya’s line of sight: I’m here, I’m okay.

He ticks a finger down for each part of his body he surveys for motion, for pain: cognitive ability’s already sorted so, one down.

Feet and ankles, solid.

Knees to hips: sore where he went down, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Deep breath: doesn’t hurt, doesn’t strain.

Neck, and this one’s always deliberate: he turns toward Ilya.

He meets those eyes, and holds them until the terror bleeds free and then tests the theory, makes sure he’s steady when he stands, and yeah.

Okay.

Okay, he’s good.

He’s good, and he’s going to fucking—

Shit. He was planning to make Number 52 wish he’d never been born but it looks like that fuckface is nowhere to be found. Smart.

But: okay then. Fucking okay.

He’s just gonna have end this whole fucking Russian team.

Shane doesn’t throw his weight around on the ice, generally speaking; it’s just not his style.

But that doesn’t mean he has none to throw.

He hasn’t risked it before now in the Games, knowing whenever they went head-to-head with Russia they’d need every element of surprise they could pull, so while he waits for Ilya to swap in—he catches him arguing, crowded up close to the boards, ready to jump in probably since the moment Shane went down in the first place but: strategy.

They have to be strategic, and the time they spend on the ice together: they’d plotted it out carefully, the coaches and the team, they’d all brought their best to the table and they’d charted out where Shane and Ilya would overpower the Russian line, would confuse their defence to the point of uselessness, would both go home with a hat-trick and a fucking half—but they had to wait for Russia to swap their left wing, before the right people were in place for the best execution of their planning, before Shane could move over, let Ilya center him.

Which meant it was Shane’s job, now, to take Number 37 on the left out.

Which: he didn’t like admitting, or really thinking too hard about but—he could do that. He could do that and not even give them enough time for the power play while he was out—if he was called on it at all.

Shane had even asked Ilya if it was okay to call Rose and ask for some acting tips, ways to make intentional hits into minor penalties for the far more critical Olympic eyes, and far from prevaricating on the proposal, he’d asked Rose to drop by to give them all a lesson on convincing the refs that, in his words: oh no, they’re very Canadian and would never play without perfect integrity ever in the whole of the world!

She’d asked if she should make sure she dressed conservatively—Dallas Kent’s story still a top hit for hockey news—but when Shane had assured her that a very high proportion of the team was, in fact, very not straight and most of the rest were happily married, she’d warmed to the idea quickly, citing particular experience with such an audience.

Shane had snorted at that, remembering the dinner where they’d broken up and how it’d turned out to be one of the most meaningful nights of his life: setting him on the course to the here and now, where he’d never not want to be.

But fuck, he does need to ask her if her batting average for gay boyfriends has improved at all in recent years—no one’s stuck long on her arm, but he doesn’t always get the details of the whys.

Either way: she’d given them some key pointers for looking very convincing when you wanted to sell remorse haggled down to the price of a two minute minor versus a risk of misconduct.

And Shane intends to put that to good use, starting right fucking now.

Shane makes a point to poke at his skates, because he’s gotta ‘set the scene’, if he’s going to get one of these fuckers back for their tripping performance—if Shane’s gonna sell a problem with the runner when he catches the blade and makes a controlled sprawl to trip up 37, he should lay the proper groundwork.

He waits until they’re actually naturally in each other’s vicinity—not sloppy like that asshole 52 had pulled and had been ejected for, proof of Ilya’s conviction that the guardrails didn’t apply—and then he executes: 37 trips at the shins, and lands gloriously over the blades of Shane’s boots, doing enough to make them at least look off-alignment, which, added to Shane’s performance of concern for his opponent and the quick attention behind the bench for inspecting the equipment ‘fault’ and getting Shane his spares: two minutes, and only that because Russia challenged and the refs gave them grace.

Dumbasses.

But Hayes doesn’t even have to work while they’re a man down, the defence keeps Russia from the goal by at least fifty feet.

Then Shane’s out of the box, and Russia’s left wing is the new guy, the one they were waiting for: so Shane jumps to swap with Bood and Ilya leaps in at Center, and they’re set.

Shane would put money Ilya sinks his hat trick in literal record time—he’ll have to look that up later—but they’re seamless. No one expects how Shane plays Ilya’s wing, but Ilya can read how Shane goes from piston-precision to lazy and a little sloppy on the surface, back and forth to deke at unexpected angles, to play close to offsides but never crossing, to be intentionally lackadaisical, until Ilya’s in the perfect position near the crease to shoot: and every single one clears the net.

It’s fucking poetry.

Ilya gives him a meaningful look out the corner of his eye when they’re up 4–0, flicks his gaze to one particular player Shane had watched Ilya doing more than chirping at before the clock started, Number 16 and right: okay.

They’re going after him.

When Shane veers a little off course, noticeable to his time for him, the rest of the team reads the plan and shepherds the puck where it needs to go for Couillard, of all people, to start the fight for the puck with the right energy that earns him an elbow too close to the neck for Olympic refs to ignore and whether 16 gets booted for the game or not, he’s off the ice.

With Shane and Ilya primed for the power play.

They’re 5–0 in what feels like seconds, but the momentum gets cut by the clock: first period done.

And fuck, does it feel good.

The moment his helmet’s off in the locker room, Shane is kissing Ilya, ignoring his teammates stray amalgam of wolf whistles and groans: Ilya meets his fervour note for note, before leaning back and scanning Shane’s face, running hands down Shane’s frame.

“You are okay, from before?”

Not that they hadn’t proven that with four-fucking-goals, but Shane knows Ilya’s worries, Ilya’s fears, and he takes his hand, presses it to his chest long enough to let him feel it rise and fall enough times to sink in, before he lifts that hand a little farther to kiss a the knuckles:

“More than okay,” Shane breathes, and steals his lips one more time before the coaches get a say, and then Shane manages little more than “More of that, boys!” before they’re back on the ice.

This time, it’s Ilya who starts on his own—they’ve both put in more time than’s probably warranted, given Olympic standards, but Shane’s had more of the two of them, so it’s Ilya on the line with Bood and…Hayden.

Which is…a choice.

But when Ilya wins the drop easily and looks for his opening, the choice is clear.

And he trusts Pike, who delivers on the pass, and gets Ilya the assist for his fifth goal of the game.

And Shane feels…something wildly soft and surprisingly expansive at, yeah, sure, a professional call but.

It just feels good, watching these two people in his life working together.

The good feeling doesn’t last particularly long, though, because within a few short minutes of back and forth, and one close call on Russia putting any numbers up on the board?

Ilya goes down.

The hit’s dirty, of course it is, but it’s blatant in a way that Shane hadn’t even expected after the last period-and-half: after Ilya warning the team more than once, preparing them; after Ilya warning Shane specifically, hands on his skin and breath heavy as he kissed Shane fevered and fervent and told him in a tone that was so serious and so scared that Shane felt the intrinsic need every time to hold Ilya close but with a hand always open on Ilya’s chest like he could tame his frantic pulse as he told Shane about the KHL, about the culture, about the violence, about the way Olympic gold was treated, what it meant in a place so unlike where they were, unlike what Shane knew, so foreign from how he’d learned the game.

How fearful he was that they hadn’t been careful enough, that the Russian team would target Shane to hurt Ilya, who they already thought weak and an embarrassment for choosing to play MLH hockey in the first place, but would tar as a traitor the moment he confirmed everyone’s quiet suspicions as to why he wasn’t on the roster in Moscow, and stepped on the ice for Team Canada.

(And how fearful he was, still, even if they didn’t target Shane to get to him, just went after the love of his life because he wasn’t better, the fucking best and he was the obvious choice to lay out, to take an ejection for just to get him off the rink—)

And they had. Even if it hadn’t been particularly successful. But now.

Now—

It’s a hit to the head, which is an automatic ejection, but that doesn’t fucking matter, because Ilya goes down for it, flat on the ice, and Shane…Shane knew what Ilya meant when he said his heart stopped to what it happen to Shane. He knew.

But he hadn’t known.

Because Shane’s chest is too tight, his throat closed in on itself else he’d be screaming, he’s almost over the boards to go to his side, regulations be damned, he needs to know if Ilya’s okay, if he’s conscious, if he’s—

He sees the hand lift in his direction: Shane’s ritual.

He’s there. He’s there.

Shane heaves a sigh that’s half a sob, and feels a hand on his back to steady him—doesn’t know whose and doesn’t particularly care. He watches as Ilya counts his fingers through, just like Shane does, and holy fuck, is it torture to wait, fucking torture—

But then Ilya’s turning, giving Shane a smirk and a wink, and Shane can breathe.

The medics insist on helping him up and giving him at least a quick check before sending him back onto the rink, which Shane whole heartedly agrees on. He reaches for Ilya’s hand just out of sight and squeezes so fucking tight before he’s predictably tapped to take the ice in Ilya’s place.

And Shane thought he’d been bent on taking this team down before—no. Not even fucking close.

Because before, it’d been a personal inconvenience, and a thorn in his heart for the fear on Ilya’s face. Nothing lasting, but the latter always unforgivable.

But this time Shane had been looking at their opponents sneering, triumphant, milling around the ice as Ilya had himself up to get checked before he’d be allowed back out, and suddenly they’re not players. They’re not even quite people, and if they are, they’re very specific ones, over and over:

Ilya’s father. Ilya’s brother. The rest of his leaching family members who bled him dry from the heart of him. The government ministers he had to please. The police he had to appease. The powers-that-be he had to hide from, who were never going to let him see his mother’s grave again.

The whole fucking team was a symbol. A target. The embodiment of the heartache Shane’s love had done a great deal to soften, but could never erase, because those scars would fade but never disappear. Those wounds had been left to fester too long, and no one had cared to wash them clean, to bind them safe.

And Shane sees fucking red for it.

He’s never been a physical player, but fuck if he doesn’t throw every piece of himself, every early morning he’d spent on speed and strength when he’d wished he’d been in bed with Ilya still, every sunrise he watched with Ilya brewing their coffees while he committed to his yoga routine—and yeah, sure, at least half of that had shifted from obsessive control over something to optimum performance in his marital bed—but he rallies it, everything his body knows how to do and he dekes too many times before a shot, he moves to fast and too sharp for Ilya’s comfort, he knows he does, but he does his best to turn his brain off and just let his muscles move because he’s navigating the ice selfishly, he knows it, but if he can’t drop gloves, if he can’t flat out fight the assholes who would dare to touch his husband like that, but him in deliberate danger not as a part of the game, but as a fucking vendetta?

Yeah: if going after the puck when it’s not his to fight for means he can rough these fuckers up a little, Shane does not give a shit if it’s sportsmanlike, or ‘captain’ appropriate.

The more pain he can leave these assholes in, the better.

His other teammates know well enough how to help him maximize the man-down on the other side for a power play, and they’re up for two more less than halfway through the third period. It’s good.

Shane still wants fucking blood.

Given the givens, though, the best he can do is incur a minor penalty for excessive force against the boards, having used his full body weight to slam 74 hard enough he seems to have bit something in his mouth around his guard and spits red out to the ice for it.

It’s not as satisfying enough, but it’s still…it’s still good.

In the minutes he’s in the box, Drapeau doesn’t even get to see any action for how unimpeachable Dykstra is on defense—Russia wouldn’t even be able to see the goal line for how far and unfailingly he keeps them out. Shane watches Ilya, sat ready to jump, okay, and then makes himself watch his team and lets himself fill up with pride because: they’re good. They’re so fucking good.

This is what a gold medal team fucking looks like.

It’s almost lost on Shane when he’s out that they’ve got less than three minutes to go, he sees Ilya hop the boards and skate to his wing and knows that has to be at least partly Wiebe giving them the opportunity to finish together.

To be on the ice, maybe get one more goal in, before they claim their victory bigger than any title, any medal, any accolade can touch.

Shane turns to Ilya and smiles so wide it hurts, and Ilya matches him, eyes sparkling, knowing what Shane knows.

This is it.

Russia puts in an effort, he’ll grant them that—they’re actually more cohesive with their biggest names off the ice, the egos less suffocating: but they’re not a gold medal team, and even if they weren’t demoralizingly behind, they didn’t have a chance.

Ilya gets the puck with thirty seconds to spare, and flies with it, Shane on his heels, ready to assist where he’s needed, and they’re almost at the goal when—

Ilya looks over, catches his eye, and Shane blinks. There’s no…reason for him not to take the shot himself, they’ve both nabbed their hat tricks, they’ve both played a hell of a game, they’re—

Going to win with together, Shane feels the sudden absolute certainty press into the pounding of his heart, as Ilya passes him the puck and Shane takes the backhand and—

Scores, just before the final buzzer.

”E eto ot igroka s’samym slabym bekkhendom v mire, pozornyy ty loshara!”, Ilya screams as he grabs Shane under his arm, pulls him close and kisses his helmet over, and over, and over before the rest of the team starts pouring in, and they, they…

Shutout. They didn’t just fucking win. They dominated.

Shane dominated the fucking gold medal game in the goddamn Olympics alongside his motherfucking husband.

The love of his whole fucking life.

Oh my god.

He turns to Ilya and flips his helmet off as he moves to do the same for Shane, slower than if they done it themselves but they’re both of the same mind: they need each other.

Now. They need each other right fucking now, and—

Their helmets clatter, and Shane can feel the wave of the rest of their team skating toward them, cheering, screaming, losing their goddamn minds as they fucking well should; he can feel the sound of the whole arena pressing down around them, just as animated, but…

His heart’s louder. And the only thing it cares about is Ilya.

And when Ilya drops his gloves, and Shane’s follow close behind, and they grab for one another and their lips meet, and the sounds might swell or not, Shane doesn’t know; Shane doesn’t care—

Shane is learning for the first time what it tastes like to lick immediate victory off his husband’s lips, to feel how his tongue traces Shane’s joy, to wrap around him as best his uniform will allow and cling and hold and keep and—

Fuck. Fucking…

“Shane Hollander-Rozanov,” Ilya whispers between their lips, in the few moments they still have before they’re bombarded by the rest of the world; “Ya tebya lyublyu,” and Shane won’t ever get tired of hearing those words spoken as if Shane is somehow singularly worthy of them: never. Not ever.

“Ilya Hollander-Rozanov,” he answers into Ilya’s open mouth, hoping like hell, like he does every time, that it’ll slide down Ilya's throat and embed inside his heart just a little deeper this time than the last, every time; “I love you more than life.”

And they are descended upon—they only break apart this time because their teammates crash into them, but it’s okay. It’s wonderful. It’s otherworldly and unthinkable and a fucking dream come true and the first full, clear breath Shane remembers taking at all, possibly ever.

Because they’re gold medalists. Against fucking Russia, no less. But Ilya? In his arms, for all to see? Forever?

That’s the victory, here. That’s the real triumph.

_______________________

The celebration on the ice is mostly a blur: hugging, so much hugging and jumping and whooping wildly; Ilya doing a lot of his temple-kissing-side-hugging declarations of love but stopping to kiss Shane’s lips, unmistakably different until Shane laughs and bumps his head under Ilya’s chin as he kisses the space where the chain around his neck peaks out, in-between each round of congratulating; getting slammed jubilantly into the glass by his teammates, his family, in cyclical dogpiles; watching Ilya kiss Hayden on the side of his head and hug him particularly hard into his side like they didn’t half-hate each other the rest of all the time (then getting turned a little to the side, hidden by Ilya’s body when he came to Shane immediately after, as was the now-established routine, and getting slipped some tongue shamelessly in a way that lit Shane up but…maybe kinda felt like he was needing to do some extra shaking-off from kissing Hayden, specifically); being lofted into the air alongside Ilya, never alone—it’s a dream come true.

It’s…so many fucking dreams come true.

Memories start to differentiate themselves from an enmeshed sort of giddy blur around the point when they line up for medals. The Russians look murderous as they receive their silvers, sore fucking losers who don’t even deserve what they’re getting, in Shane’s opinion, but he’s wrapped in one of the many Canada flags that had been waved around, this one feeling just a little bit…extra large because he’s draped in it, and so is Ilya, and yeah they’re wrapped around each other underneath it but…it feels like it fits too well.

Ilya kisses his cheek, sloppy and gleeful with a satisfied ‘pop’, and suddenly Shane doesn’t actually really give a shit at all about the dimensions of flags or the unsportsmanlike conduct of the country that never deserved his husband, and would never ever get to hurt him again.

Ever.

Maybe Shane indulges himself in a little glaring their way—the kind that no photo would ever be able to label as such, just, Shane’s PR-version of unmitigated disdain—but mostly he just leans into his husband and surveys his own team, some of the best people he knows, fucking vibrating because: they did it.

They fucking did it.

When the medals turn toward their line of the ice, everyone stands a little taller—or else, everyone but Shane and Ilya, who more stand a little closer, a little more wide-eyed and wondering because the eyes of this rink, this sport, the world are on them and they’re tangled under a Canadian flag like that doesn’t turn Shane on enough, for the symbolism of what it means for them as much as the image burned behind his eyes for him to come to for basically eternity—his, this man is his—as if their hands aren’t gripped so tight it hurts beautifully and their eyes don’t slide to one another every few seconds until one of them grins, or blushes, or both.

How they hid for this long is a fucking mystery, Jesus.

But then the medals start going over their boys’ heads and they’re cheering, they’re clapping and shouting and celebrating each other all over again, and Shane’s caught up in it fast, immediate almost—Dykstra’s first, Shane doesn’t know the logic behind how they’re lined up if any even exists, but he and Ilya are the last at the opposite end, they have the best view, and Shane whoops loud before he grabs Ilya’s face and plants an almost aggressive kiss to his lips in sheer jubilation, not even realizing, and he stills once he does—

And Ilya is beaming, lips extra pink for the force of Shane’s kiss: in public. On camera.

Shane’s heart thumps hard as his own smile spreads, as he feels himself fucking glow, and then Bood is getting his medal and Ilya’s kissing Shane just as pointed and bleeding intent after they cheer appropriately for him.

It sets a rhythm.

They cheer their boys, and once they’re onto the handshaking? He and Ilya trade alternating kisses on national television.

International television.

And then suddenly: they’re the next in line.

Shane moves on instinct, settles the flag entirely over Ilya like a mantle, a cape: he looks goddamn majestic. Shane maybe does something incredibly rude and possibly disrespectful on like a global affairs level but: he needs to kiss Ilya properly, like this. On the lips.

He needs to.

So he steps a little in front of the person with the medal, and kisses his Olympic-winning, bona fide-Canadian citizen of a husband who is never going to be taken away from him, who’ll never have to leave because someone doesn’t like who he loves, or how much he is loved—Shane kisses him, then apologies to the woman who’s trying not to grin, and moves out of the way.

He watches the ribbon catch Ilya’s messy curls. He watches the weight of the medallion itself settle in the center of that beloved chest. He watches Ilya’s hand reach out to shake the woman’s, and then lift up to adjust the way the medal sits, or…

Or maybe not that at all.

No: Ilya’s fishing his crucifix out from his uniform, and bringing it out with his gold medal—but no. Not that either.

He’s putting it over his gold medal. First.

With his ring the most prominently placed component when he finally lets go, seemingly satisfied.

Shane’s heart skips at least three beats before it hits hard, shakes him at his bones.

Fuck, he loves this man.

Shane almost misses that he needs to bend his head a little to get his medal, but he’s allowed to have missed his cue: and where he’d entirely forgotten that he’d given up his Canadian flag swag to deck Ilya appropriately, as he deserved, Ilya himself hadn’t.

Because Ilya is draping Shane in the flag from behind, perfectly situated in one go because of course, and Shane’s blushing, he knows he is, but Ilya makes sure it’s on his shoulders, all settled properly, and then he moves to stand back to the side and—

No.

Shane’s hand darts and grabs his husband, his Ilya, and drags him right back where he was, where he belongs, and closer still from there, wraps him around Shane as much as the flag but better, stronger, tighter: he thanks the woman and shakes her hand, then grabs for the chain under his own uniform and flips his ring pointedly on top of the medallion. What he treasures most on the top, in all cases, in all ways.

When the officials with the medals move on, and the team is corralled for pictures, Shane knows the number of photos that must already exist of him and Ilya, now, circulating the globe. It makes him…smile.

Makes him lean back in his husband’s arms.

He’d have bet money on it, if that was his style, he’d have bet every cent he had from the start that winning gold would be amazing—but it wouldn’t touch the feeling of Ilya’s embrace, Ilya’s lips, Ilya’s heartbeat like his own.

He’d be a fucking billionaire on that bet now, if he’d made it.

“We have to go take team photo,” Ilya murmurs in his ear, but Shane just keeps smiling.

“Okay.”

When Shane doesn’t move, Ilya feels like he hesitates a little before he asks:

“You want to go, like this?”

Shane turns, because Ilya sounds…not surprised exactly, but not quite just curious.

“You want to be in photo together, like this?” As if they hadn’t been immortalized in pixels for posterity like this enough times already.

“Oh, no,” Shane answers, taking Ilya’s hand and leading him over to where their team is congregating. He glances back at Ilya who follows, and doesn’t look upset at the answer, maybe closer to disappointed, but not quite that either; more…dimmed.

But that’s okay, because Shane leans back and murmurs in Ilya’s ear:

“Was hoping we could take the front, you know,” Shane tries to suggest the standard pose with a wave of his hand; “so I could be the one kinda lying across your lap.”

And it’s a good thing Shane’s leading Ilya, because his husband freezes for half-a-second, then stumbles a little to catch up, his eyes so fucking bright, and Shane?

Shane just pulls him forward, so they’re side-by-side again as it always should be; kisses him from the side, but then the joy swells too big: the only thing he can do is fucking laugh, and when Ilya joins in—the ring of his laughter bright and full and without any restraint, without even a hint of fear?

Well.

Clearly it’s not just the touch of him that’s leagues better, more, than any fucking medal could ever hope to be.

Chapter End Notes

So! This chapter got long and the story is ostensibly finished so the fic is marked complete as of here—BUT!

IF you feel like YOU want to see the fall out the next day, or some press reaction, or some celebratory sex no longer governed by the ‘allowed maneuvers’ list, or some oral fixation involving one’s gold medal (which was the reason THIS FIC was written first, in case such a scene emerged), or erotic muffin-feeding or maybe just a glimpse of the tragedy that visited so crueller upon Scott Hunter’s household?

You should definitely let me know in a comment or something because I’d be willing to write more about these Olympic Champion!husbands, if there was a desire to read more about them 🖤

(also because if no one wants to read more of this, I have an ANGST^10000 with ALWAYS HAPPY ENDINGS thing to write the next instalment instead of over here, where Ilya’s unsent plane messages are set to arrive on Shane’s phone…well, momentarily-in-a-figurative-sense)