Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Hayden Pike, Jean-Jacques Boiziau | J. J. Dagenais, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Yuna Hollander, Farah Jalali, Original Female Character(s), David Hollander

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Writer Shane Hollander, Oblivious Shane Hollander, Internalized Homophobia, Identity Issues, writing as therapy, but also as self-discovery, Ilya Rozanov lives rent-free in Shane Hollander mind, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander Is Bad at Feelings

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-06-09 Updated: 2026-06-11 Words: 4,882 Chapters: 3/?

A Completely Fictional Character

Summary

Shane Hollander is perfectly capable of identifying flaws.

He can identify flaws in his game.

Flaws in his team's systems.

Flaws in the way hockey romance novels portray professional athletes.

What he cannot identify, despite overwhelming evidence, is the reason every character he writes keeps turning into Ilya Rozanov.

A story about hockey, fiction, denial, and all the things Shane would rather not think about.

• Inspired by jane dutch by thisisnotthenerd

Chapter 1: A Totally Normal Experience

Chapter Notes

Ask Shane what he thinks about hockey romance novels, and most people who know him would probably answer for him.

At best, they'd say he appreciated the publicity. The way those books brought new eyes to the sport. Hockey, after all, was his life. The romance? Not so much. Shane had spent years cultivating the image of someone utterly uninterested in things like love, feelings, or any of the other distractions people insisted on making such a big deal about.

The funny thing was that the answer wasn't entirely true.

Not that he'd ever admit it.

It wasn't that he liked hockey romances. God knew some of them were painful to get through. Half the authors couldn't describe a play to save their lives, and the other half treated the culture surrounding the sport like an afterthought. Reading them could feel like watching someone explain hockey after having seen exactly three games.

Still, they had been useful.

Back when he was an awkward teenager getting relentlessly pursued by girls in high school, those books had given him something he desperately lacked: a script. A rough idea of what confidence was supposed to look like, how a guy was expected to act around, what to say, when to smile, when to pretend he knew what he was doing.

The mask hadn't fit perfectly. Most days it had felt about as natural as skating with the wrong stick in his hands.

But it had worked well enough.

And at that point in his life, well enough had been all he'd needed.

Then he got drafted to the NHL, and suddenly the mask needed adjustments.

High school confidence and professional confidence, it turned out, were two very different things.

Everyone had something to tell him. How grateful he should be for the opportunity. How many kids would give anything to be where he was. How he was going to become an inspiration whether he liked it or not. Most importantly, they told him he needed to look the part, confident, composed, and ready for the spotlight.

So he did.

Or at least he tried.

He went back to those novels, looking for guidance in the same place he'd found it as a teenager. He read more of them than he'd ever admit, forcing himself through hockey scenes so painfully inaccurate they bordered on physical torture. Every impossible play, every locker-room conversation that sounded like it had been written by someone who had never met a hockey player in their life, every superstar protagonist who somehow had endless free time between games and practices.

Still, he kept reading.

For a while, he convinced himself they were helping.

Then he got to know the Metros.

Really got to know them.

And little by little, he realized those books had given him a completely warped idea of what he was supposed to be.

The men around him weren't romance novel heroes. They weren't effortlessly cool, endlessly confident, or secretly waiting to sweep someone off their feet between road trips. They were loud, competitive, sleep-deprived disasters. Some were charming. Some were awkward. Most were far stranger than any fictional hockey player had ever been allowed to be.

And none of them seemed particularly interested in pretending otherwise.

Meanwhile, Shane had spent years building himself around an image that didn't actually exist.

The realization was both embarrassing and oddly freeing.

Life moved on after that.

Games blurred together. Games were won, lost, and argued about on sports networks for weeks afterward. Shane settled into the rhythm of professional hockey the same way he'd settled into every other part of his life: by working harder than everyone else.

The novels faded into the background.

Not completely. Every now and then he'd spot one in an airport bookstore or see a teammate's girlfriend laughing over a particularly dramatic excerpt online. Usually, he rolled his eyes and moved on.

Then one afternoon, years later, he was at Hayden and Jackie's house.

The visit itself was unremarkable. Hayden was trying to convince him that his golf swing wasn't terrible, Jackie was pretending to believe him, and the twins were causing the kind of chaos only newborns surprisingly can make.

Shane had escaped to the kitchen for a moment of peace when he noticed the paperback lying face-down on the counter.

The cover alone told him everything he needed to know.

Hockey romance...

Against his better judgment, he picked it up.

A minute later, he was already annoyed.

Two pages after that, he was offended on a professional level.

"What?" Jackie asked from across the room.

Shane lowered the book slowly.

"This guy scores a hat trick, gets into a fight, flies to another city, attends a charity gala, falls in love, and has a six-hour conversation with the love interest."

Jackie blinked.

"Okay?"

"That's on one day."

She shrugged.

"Maybe he has a good manager."

Shane stared at her.

Jackie laughed so hard she nearly spilled her coffee.

The thing was, the book wasn't even the worst one he'd seen.

That realization hit him harder than it should have.

Because after all these years, after all the players, coaches, trainers, road trips, injuries, and locker-room stories he'd accumulated, he knew exactly how much material people were missing. The friendships. The superstitions. The absolute disasters some of his teammates became when left unsupervised. The loneliness of being on the road for months at a time. The pressure. The sacrifices.

The humanity of it.

Hockey wasn't lacking good stories.

If anything, it had too many.

People just kept telling the wrong ones.

For a long moment, Shane stared down at the book in his hands.

Then a thought crossed his mind.

A ridiculous thought.

A dangerous thought.

A thought that refused to leave.

Maybe, he realized, somebody should write one that got it right.

And, unfortunately for his future free time, he might actually be qualified to do it.

The sensible thing would have been to forget about it.

Shane had a career to manage. A recent captaincy to grow into. Endorsements, interviews, sponsorship obligations, training schedules.

He did not need a side project.

Unfortunately, the thought refused to leave.

Over the following weeks, he found himself making notes at odd hours. During flights. In hotel rooms. Waiting for practices to start.

Not plot ideas.

Observations.

The things the books always got wrong.

The way players talked to each other.

The bizarre superstitions.

The exhaustion.

The loneliness.

The friendships that looked suspiciously like family.

The fact that hockey players spent far more time arguing about restaurants and video games than they did about women.

It started as research.

At least, that was what Shane told himself.

One night, while reorganizing his notes, he opened a blank document and typed a heading.

"THINGS HOCKEY ROMANCE AUTHORS NEVER UNDERSTAND."

The list grew surprisingly fast.

By the time he reached page three, another realization had started to bother him.

Most fictional hockey players felt interchangeable.

Different names. Different teams.

Same person.

Real players weren't like that.

Take Hayden, for example. No romance novel would ever accurately capture Hayden Pike's ability to lose his phone three times in a single day and still somehow be considered responsible enough to raise children.

JJ wasn't any better.

Neither were half the people Shane had ever shared a locker room with.

The more he thought about it, the more he realized that personality was the thing those books missed most.

People were messy.

Contradictory.

Impossible.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard.

Without really thinking about it, he created a new document.

"Character Notes."

The first name he typed was Hayden's.

The second was JJ's.

The third appeared before he could stop himself.

Rozanov.

Shane stared at the name.

Then immediately closed the document.

A second later, he opened it again.

The name was still there.

Which, objectively speaking, was how computers worked.

That did not make him feel any better.

He leaned back in his chair and rubbed both hands over his face.

This was ridiculous.

Rozanov was an obvious choice.

A completely logical choice.

If he wanted to write realistic hockey players, of course he would think about Rozanov. The man was impossible not to think about. Half the league thought about him on a daily basis, on the ways he terrorized them, but still. Analysts talked about him. Reporters talked about him. Fans talked about him.

Shane happened to know him slightly better than most, or so the little voice behind his head thinks.

That was all.

There was absolutely no reason to make this weird.

Feeling marginally reassured, he reopened the document.

The problem was that the notes kept coming.

Rozanov hates interviews but secretly enjoys making reporters work for answers.

Rozanov notices things people assume he misses.

Rozanov is smarter than he lets people believe.

Rozanov laughs hardest when he's trying not to.

Rozanov pretends not to care about almost everything.

The list continued.

And continued.

And continued.

By the time Shane stopped typing, he had nearly four pages.

Four.

Pages.

Hayden had barely made it past a paragraph...

Shane closed the laptop and went for a run.

It didn't help.

The worst part was that Rozanov was one of the few people Shane could realistically use as reference material.

Not because he was special...

Not because Shane spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about him...

Simply because there weren't many people Shane knew in that context.

If someone asked Shane to describe attraction, he would struggle.

If someone asked him to describe flirting, he would probably quote something he'd read in a book ten years ago.

But if someone asked him to describe what it felt like when Rozanov looked at him from across a crowded room...

Well.

That was different.

Purely from an observational standpoint.

Obviously.

Writers needed observations.

That was called research.

The fact that Shane could describe the exact expression Rozanov made before a sarcastic comment.

Or the way his voice changed when he was genuinely amused.

Or the way he sometimes stared for a second too long before looking away.

Those were simply details.

Character details.

Useful details.

Important details.

The sort of details any writer would want.

Shane repeated this to himself several times.

Unfortunately, the argument became less convincing every time he did.

Because the more notes he wrote, the less they sounded like observations.

And the more they sounded like affection.

Which was a problem.

A significant problem.

One that Shane chose not to examine too closely.

The obvious solution was to stop using Rozanov as a reference.

Simple.

Reasonable.

Entirely achievable.

Shane lasted approximately eighteen hours.

The problem was that every time he tried to write a character, he found himself comparing them to Rozanov.

Not intentionally.

Just automatically.

A fictional captain would make a joke.

Shane would immediately think of three different ways Rozanov would make the same joke, all of them worse.

A character would flirt.

Shane would reject the dialogue because Rozanov would never say something so rehearsed.

A character would walk into a room.

And somehow Shane would find himself wondering how Rozanov managed to command attention while simultaneously acting as though everyone around him was an inconvenience.

It was becoming irritating.

Professionally irritating.

As a writer.

Obviously.

The fact that the observations occasionally drifted beyond hockey was unfortunate.

But unavoidable.

If he was going to write romance, he needed to understand attraction.

And if he was going to write attraction...

Well.

There was only one person he could realistically use as a reference.

Not because he was interested in Rozanov.

Not because he spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about him.

Simply because Rozanov represented a unique data set.

A very specific case study.

An anomaly.

A statistical outlier.

Shane stared at those words for a moment.

Then deleted them.

Even he wasn't buying that explanation anymore.

Chapter End Notes

Hello!
This is the first fic I've ever published, so please forgive any mistakes you might come
across.

I absolutely loved the idea that thisisnotthenerd explored in their "Jane Dutch" fic, and it got me thinking about how Shane might have used writing as a way to process things he wasn't ready to admit to himself.

The result is... this.

I have more in mind to develop this, but this I just the start...

I hope you enjoy it!

Chapter 2: A Sudden Realization.

Chapter Summary

Despite his best judgment and with a completely objective mindset, every male lead Shane creates somehow turns into Ilya Rozanov.

Shane would very much like to understand why, even though the answer it's in front of his eyes.

Chapter Notes

The first draft of the character was supposed to be objective.

That lasted less than a day.

By the second page, Shane had already abandoned any pretense of creating someone original.

The fictional player was eastern european.

Irritating.

Talented enough to be infuriating.

Possessed of an almost supernatural ability to get under people's skin.

He smiled too much when he was causing problems.

He smiled too little when he was happy.

He pretended not to care.

He cared entirely too much.

Halfway through the description, Shane stopped typing.

The resemblance was becoming difficult to ignore.

Which was fine.

Writers borrowed from real life all the time.

That was normal.

Healthy, even.

The problem appeared when he tried to create the love interest.

Because every fictional relationship needed two people.

And there were only so many places a person could pull inspiration from.

Shane stared at the blank page.

Then, reluctantly, he began typing.

Not a hockey player.

That much was obvious.

The entire point of the exercise was to remove the complications.

No rival teams.

No media scrutiny.

No impossible schedules.

No professional expectations.

No constant reminders of what they were supposed to be.

Just two people.

Meeting.

Talking.

Getting to know each other.

The sort of thing that should have been easy to imagine.

Instead, Shane found himself drawing from memories.

A conversation in a hotel hallway.

A text message sent at two in the morning.

An argument that somehow became a joke.

A look across a crowded room.

The words on the screen began to blur.

Slowly, Shane leaned back in his chair.

Because he had just realized something deeply unfortunate.

He wasn't writing a fantasy.

He was writing edits.

Corrections.

Tiny revisions to moments that had actually happened.

Moments he had apparently memorized.

For no reason whatsoever.

A completely normal thing to do.

Shane closed the laptop.

Then reopened it.

Then closed it again.

The problem, unfortunately, remained.

The problem wasn't the male lead anymore.

That part had been easy.

The fictional version of Rozanov practically wrote himself.

The problem was the female lead.

Or, more specifically, who she kept becoming.

Shane had started with a blank page and a simple objective.

Remove the complications.

Remove the rivalry.

Remove the NHL.

Remove the expectations.

Remove everything that made his actual life impossible.

The result should have felt like fiction.

Instead, it felt alarmingly familiar.

The heroine laughed at the same things Shane laughed at.

She got annoyed by the same things.

She organized her schedule the same way.

Thought the same way.

Worried the same way.

By the third chapter, Shane was forced to admit something unfortunate.

He hadn't created a character.

He'd created himself.

Or some version of himself.

One with longer hair.

That realization should have stopped him.

It didn't.

Because the more he wrote, the more the story became less about hockey and more about possibility.

Possibility was dangerous.

Possibility suggested alternatives.

Different choices.

Different lives.

Different outcomes.

The fictional Russian winger met the heroine at eighteen.

Just like Shane had met Rozanov.

They hated each other immediately.

Just like Shane and Rozanov.

Then they kept finding reasons to see one another.

Just like…

Shane stopped typing.

The cursor blinked.

The room was silent.

Slowly, carefully, he reread the last twenty pages.

Then the twenty before that.

Then the first chapter.

By the end, his stomach hurt.

Because he finally understood what he had actually written.

Not a romance.

Not really.

A wish.

For several minutes, Shane sat motionless.

His brain worked desperately to find another explanation.

Any explanation.

Writers borrowed from real life all the time.

Coincidences happened.

Patterns emerged naturally.

People projected themselves into stories.

All perfectly reasonable.

None of it explained why every happy scene involved Rozanov.

None of it explained why every version of the future he'd written somehow included him.

None of it explained why removing the rivalry hadn't removed the feeling.

That was the part that terrified him.

Because Shane had always blamed the rivalry.

The intensity.

The secrecy.

The competition.

The adrenaline.

The fact that Rozanov was the only person in the world who truly understood what it felt like to be Shane Hollander.

Those things made sense.

Those things were manageable.

Feelings were not.

His eyes drifted back to the manuscript.

To the scene he'd written only an hour earlier.

A quiet moment.

Nothing dramatic.

No sex.

No grand declarations.

Just two people sitting together after a long day, comfortable in each other's presence.

It was, objectively speaking, one of the most romantic scenes he had ever written.

And it was based almost entirely on a memory.

"Oh."

The word escaped before he could stop it.

Shane stared at the page.

Then at the ceiling.

Then back at the page.

"Oh, fuck."

Chapter End Notes

So...

Apparently I wrote another chapter in less than 24 hours. I have no explanation for this and am choosing not to examine it too closely.

Is it cliché? Possibly.

Will Shane look at an alarming amount of evidence and still refuse to admit he might have romantic feelings for Ilya?

Absolutely.

Shane is stubborn, deeply committed to being wrong, even though he really think he isn't, and fully intends to find literally any explanation except the correct one.

Hope you enjoy it, and leave a comment, I really appreciate it. 💖

Chapter 3: A Case Study.

Chapter Summary

Shane is absolutely not in love with Ilya Rozanov.
What he has is a lack of data.

To solve this problem, he decides to conduct proper research into love stories, relationships, and human emotions.

The only flaw in this otherwise flawless plan is that his primary sources are his aunties

Chapter Notes

Okay, so maybe, and really only maybe, because he clearly needed to do more research before reaching any definitive conclusions, he had feelings for Rozanov.

That didn't mean he was in love with him. Love was a very big word, and Shane had always found it slightly concerning how casually people used it. There were plenty of explanations for what he was feeling that didn't involve something quite so dramatic. The most obvious one was that he and Rozanov had been sleeping together for years.

People didn't spend that much time with another person, see them in that many different situations, and share that level of intimacy without developing some kind of attachment. There was trust involved in a relationship like theirs. Vulnerability. Familiarity. A certain degree of emotional investment was probably unavoidable.

That didn't automatically make it love.

In fact, Shane was fairly confident that it didn't.

The manuscript was also easier to explain now that he thought about it. The reason his subconscious kept turning his relationship with Rozanov into a romance wasn't because he secretly wanted one with him. It was because he didn't have any other meaningful point of reference. If he was trying to write a convincing love story, of course his brain would draw from the closest thing he had available. The fact that the source material happened to be Rozanov was unfortunate, but not particularly significant.

At least, it shouldn't have been.

The more Shane considered it, the more convinced he became that the real problem wasn't his feelings. It was a lack of data. He had spent years reading romance novels written by people who clearly didn't understand hockey, and now he was trying to write a romance novel despite having very little firsthand experience with actual romance. It was hardly surprising that the results were less than ideal.

What he needed was another perspective.

A real one.

Someone with an actual love story.

Someone who had managed to build a healthy, functional relationship and could explain how those things were supposed to work in practice.

The solution, once he thought about it, was obvious.

Research.

Proper research.

And if that research happened to prove that his fixation on Rozanov was completely normal and not indicative of anything more concerning, then all the better.

The thing was, the only real love stories Shane knew belonged to his parents, and to Hayden and Jackie. If he suddenly started asking either of them questions about love, they'd become suspicious almost immediately. His parents would nag him about it. Hayden would pry. Jackie would be worse.

He'd rather eat a puck than explain why he was suddenly interested in romance and love, and more about love stories. 

The only other option was his aunties, which was not an option he ever imagined needing.

It had been years since he'd spent any real time alone with them. Properly alone. Maybe not since he was a kid.

It wasn't that he didn't love them. He did. He respected them, too. But his aunties were ruthless. There was a reason his mother was still a little afraid of them.

They knew everything about everyone. Not just the important things, either. Somehow they possessed an endless archive of personal dramas, family feuds, secret engagements, spectacular breakups, and every scandal that had rippled through Toronto's Japanese and Korean Canadian communities for decades. Shane had no idea how they gathered the information, only that they always had it.

Which meant they would probably figure him out within five minutes.

Maybe three.

His grandmother was the unofficial ringleader of the group. Beside her was Mrs. Sato, her best friend since before Shane had been born, even before his mother was born, and Mrs. Sato's neighbour, Mrs. Choi, who seemed to appear wherever the other two went. Then there was Aunt Keiko, technically his great-aunt, though she'd never tolerated the distinction. To Shane, they had always simply been his aunties.

Growing up, summer visits to Toronto had meant long afternoons trailing after them from house to house while they drank tea, played cards, and exchanged stories that somehow lasted for hours. They pinched his cheeks when he was little, bragged about his hockey when he got older, and fed him constantly regardless of whether he was hungry.

Especially if he said he wasn't hungry.

Every visit ended the same way: Shane sprawled on somebody's couch, overfed and half-asleep, while the aunties talked around him as if he weren't there. They'd slip him extra slices of watermelon, homemade sweets, butter tarts, bowls of cut fruit, and bags of snacks for later. By the time his mother came to collect him, he'd be carrying enough food to survive a minor natural disaster.

The annoying thing was that he'd loved every second of it. 

Which was exactly why asking the aunties anything was a terrible idea.

The second he mentioned love, relationships, or feelings, four pairs of eyes would narrow in unison. There would be tea. There would be snacks. There would be questions disguised as casual conversation.

Shane had spent twenty-three years learning how to avoid being interrogated by his mother's side of the family. He wasn't about to lose now.

He just needed a strategy. A normal reason to ask about love stories.

A reason that had absolutely nothing to do with Ilya Rozanov.

He stared at the ceiling of his apartment.

Maybe he could ask about his parents. That was normal, right? People get curious about their parents all the time.

His parents had one of those stories everyone in the family seemed to know except him. Whenever it came up, somebody would laugh, his dad would become mysteriously interested in whatever was happening across the room, and his mother would roll her eyes and insist everyone was exaggerating.

Which usually meant they weren't.

From what Shane had managed to piece together over the years, the problem hadn't been his mother's family. His grandparents had apparently adored his father from the beginning.

The resistance had come from the Hollanders.

Not his dad, obviously.

The rest of them.

He didn't know all the details. Nobody had ever sat him down and explained it. But he'd overheard enough fragments over the years to know there had been arguments. Disapproval. Relatives who thought David could do better. Relatives who eventually learned they were wrong.

His grandmother had once described the entire thing as "a lot of nonsense."

His mother had agreed.

His father had looked like he wanted to disappear into the floor. 

That was probably a promising sign.

People only got embarrassed about old stories when the stories were good, or when the aunties knew them.

Unfortunately, the aunties knew everything.

Still, asking about his parents would be safer than asking directly about impossible relationships.

Hypothetically.

Probably.

Shane frowned.

The fact that he had thought his… situation with Rozanov as an impossible relationship felt like information he should not examine too closely for the moment.

He had to wait a few more days before they had a game in Toronto, but that was still better than nothing. The extra time would give him a chance to work out exactly what he was going to ask and, more importantly, how he was going to ask it.

Because showing up and suddenly requesting detailed information about love stories was a good way to get himself interrogated.

He needed a reason. A believable one.

The story about his parents was probably his safest option, but even that required some preparation. If the aunties sensed he was fishing for something, they'd immediately start wondering why. Once they started wondering, it would only be a matter of time before they arrived at conclusions Shane wasn't ready to hear out loud.

The question about his dad's family had at least the advantage of being real.

He'd wondered about it for years.

The Hollanders lived in Ottawa, just like they did. Not all of them, obviously, but enough that it always seemed strange how little contact there was. Growing up, Shane had learned not to ask questions about it because nobody seemed eager to answer them. Family gatherings happened with his mother's side. Summer visits happened with his mother's side. Holidays, birthdays, celebrations,those memories were all crowded with cousins, aunties, grandparents, and family friends from even before he was born. 

The Hollanders existed more like background characters.

He knew their names. He'd met some of them. Occasionally a Christmas card would appear. Every now and then his father would mention an uncle or a cousin in passing. But there was always a distance there that Shane had never fully understood.

When he was younger, he'd come up with his own explanations. For a while he'd wondered if some of them were racist. It wasn't exactly a sophisticated theory, but he'd been twelve.

That possibility had quietly fallen apart a few years ago when a distant cousin had found him on Facebook. One accepted friend request had led to another, and before long Shane had spent an entire flight scrolling through family profiles. There had been interracial marriages relatively recently, adopted children, relatives whose lives looked far more unconventional than anything his parents had ever done.

Whatever the problem had been, it probably wasn't that.

Which only made the mystery more interesting.

And, conveniently, gave him a perfectly reasonable excuse to ask questions.

At least, that was the story he planned to stick to.

The more he thought about it, the more reasonable it sounded.

People asked questions about their families all the time. It wasn't suspicious to be curious about things nobody had bothered to explain when you were a kid. If anything, it was probably strange that he'd waited this long.

The problem was that the aunties had known him since birth.

His grandmother liked to claim she could tell what mood he was in from the way he took off his shoes at the front door. Mrs. Sato swore she could identify a lie just by looking at his eyebrows. Aunt Keiko insisted both of them were being dramatic, while somehow possessing an even more alarming success rate.

Shane wasn't sure how much of it was true.

Not enough to bet against them.

By the time the team arrived in Toronto, he had rehearsed several versions of the conversation.

The first was too obvious.

The second sounded like a job interview.

The third somehow made him sound as if he were writing a university paper on family history.

He discarded all of them.

Fortunately, the aunties rarely waited for people to begin conversations. They treated silence as a challenge.

His grandmother's house looked exactly the same as it always had. The same flowerpots by the front steps. The same wind chime hanging near the porch. The same smell drifting from the kitchen before he'd even made it through the front door.

He barely had time to take off his shoes before his grandmother appeared and wrapped him in a hug.

"There he is," she said. "Too skinny."

"I'm not skinny."

"Mm."

"You say that every time."

"And every time I'm right."

Behind her, Mrs. Sato appeared carrying a tray of tea.

"He's thinner than last time."

"I'm literally not."

Aunt Keiko glanced up from the dining room table.

"His face looks tired."

Shane looked toward the front door.

Briefly.

His grandmother caught the look immediately.

"Don't even think about it."

"I wasn't."

"Your eyebrows moved."

"My eyebrows can't move suspiciously..."

All three women exchanged a glance.

Mrs. Sato patted his arm.

"Oh dear."

The terrifying thing was that they genuinely seemed to believe they were making sense.

Twenty minutes later, Shane was seated at the dining room table with enough food in front of him to feed half his team. The aunties had settled around him with tea cups in hand, discussing neighbourhood gossip with the focus of intelligence analysts reviewing classified information.

It occurred to Shane that he had made a serious tactical error.

There was no good moment to casually introduce a question into a conversation that already, somehow, contained three separate scandals, two engagements, and an ongoing argument about somebody's nephew.

Still, he hadn't come all the way to Toronto to lose his nerve.

"So," he said, reaching for his tea, trying his best to sound non-chalant, "how did my parents  meet?"

The conversation stopped.

Not gradually.

Immediately.

Three pairs of eyes turned toward him.

Across the table, Aunt Keiko smiled.

It was not a reassuring smile.

"Oh," she said.

His grandmother set down her teacup.

Mrs. Sato leaned forward.

And Shane knew, right there, with absolute certainty, that he had walked directly into a trap.

Chapter End Notes

Hi!

I honestly don't know what to say this time except that I hope you all like my take on Yuna and David's love story. I know the usual route would be making Yuna's family the source of the conflict, but I always felt it made more sense for the resistance to come from David's side instead.

I have a general plan for their story, and I think it'll give Shane something interesting to compare his own situation to, while also him staying firmly in denial about some very obvious things.

Also: the aunties.

I really wanted Shane to have a bigger family. Yes, he's an only child, but that doesn't mean his family begins and ends with his parents. Especially in immigrant families, it always felt more realistic to me that there would be grandparents, family friends, honorary aunties, distant relatives, and a whole network of people who helped raise him, or that he knew that cared about him.

And yes, I chose Toronto as Yuna's family's city partly because of it's large Asian communities. I'm not even going to pretend otherwise. But it also made sense to me from a historical perspective. For many immigrant families, Toronto would have been one of the most recognizable destinations in Canada, especially for people arriving decades ago.

Anyway, thank you for reading!

I hope you're enjoying Shane's completely normal and definitely not emotionally motivated "research project".