Chapter Text
The day Shane Hollander realized he wanted a kid was a random Tuesday in October. It hadn’t, by any reasonable measure, started as an extraordinary day. If anything, it was painfully uneventful, which was saying something, considering Shane rarely found days that involved even a hint of hockey dull.
But it was, as things turned out, a dull day, because Ilya had been off at a meeting with Coach Wiebe as the captain, and his presence had been missed both by Shane and the rest of the team.
Afterwards, Evan Dykstra had invited everybody to his house to meet his and Caitlin’s new baby, the adorable two-month-old Evan had been parading around in photo form for weeks. (He had, at last count, seventeen shots of little Simon sleeping, taken from the same angle of the same expression, which Evan had insisted looked completely different. Because, look, he is pouting in this one, and here, he is smiling, see?
If you were to ask Shane, they were all the same shots of a baby, well, sleeping. But Evan had displayed each one with such unbridled excitement and fondness, that none of them had the heart to say that to him.)
And in the evening, Shane and Ilya had had a pleasant time with the rest of the team at Evan and Caitlin’s house, which sat in a quiet, family-friendly suburb. It hadn’t been exciting or anything, but it had a warm, lived-in coziness that Shane had ended up enjoying more than he expected. He had felt at ease there, surrounded by guys he had played with for three seasons already.
At some point, Ilya had taken little Simon into his lap, the baby letting out soft, curious noises as Ilya entertained him with gentle taps and small movements. Still, the moment hadn’t quite hit Shane then, even as he watched his husband be so, so gentle and steady with a two-month-old who could barely hold his own head up, even as the sight tugged at something warm in his chest. Because Shane had always known this about him. He had never once questioned that Ilya would be great with kids; It lived in his mind as one of those solid, unshakable truths, rising to the surface and settling through him in quiet waves whenever he saw his husband with a kid.
So it wasn’t really a revelation, or any kind of surprise, to see the fussiest baby Shane had ever met fall silent and content in Ilya’s arms, to see Ilya handle a baby he had known for maybe five minutes like he had done it his whole life, to watch Simon fit against him naturally.
Nor had the moment come when Ilya, who had noticed Shane being hesitant in the incredibly small baby’s presence, who had shied away from even holding him because he was afraid he would somehow get it wrong and end up hurting him, reached out for Shane’s hands and gently pulled him closer, so that little Simon, with his tiny yet surprisingly strong fingers, could curl his grip around Shane’s pinky and refuse to let go.
No, it was a much quieter moment when the thought had settled in Shane’s mind. It had come slowly, like a small tide moving around his feet, when they were back from Dykstra’s house and he was lying in bed beside his husband. He had received a single text from Lisa with a photo attached, taken candidly of the two of them together as Ilya carried Simon, capturing the moment Simon’s little hand had closed around Shane’s finger.
Shane had stared at the photo for a long time, long after Ilya had fallen asleep beside him. He’d taken in the quiet gentleness in the way Ilya held Simon, the way his gaze was fixed on Shane, soft and impossibly fond, the exact kind of heart-eyes Hayden had teased him about years ago. And then he’d looked at his own expression, the light in his eyes, the small, almost invisible smile tugging at his mouth, caught in the second he’d been focused entirely on Simon.
And Shane sometimes had trouble understanding his own feelings. Or, more accurately, he had trouble recognizing them when they showed up. He carried so many thoughts and emotions at once, all tangled together with his anxieties and fears, that it became nearly impossible to tell where the fear began and where the wanting ended. So he often needed a little nudge, a moment big or small, to separate the noise from the truth. To figure out which feelings were worth holding on to, and which ones he had to learn to move past.
And sometimes, that nudge came in the form of a photo taken with shaky hands, a little blurry at the edges, the lighting slightly off. Sometimes he needed something outside himself to point it out, something he could look at and finally see. See that his life wasn’t limited to the small box he kept trying to fit into. See that things could be good in ways he never planned for, if he let himself take even one step toward them.
Like meeting the love of his life on a freezing day at World Juniors, in a parking lot in the middle of Regina, Saskatchewan. Or getting to live through things he’d once considered impossible: being an openly gay man in the NHL, married to his teammate, playing beside him, winning Cups with him, sharing all of it with him, out in the open, where everyone could see.
So, sometimes Shane needed to see. To be reminded that it was okay to step out of that box, to not let his fears swallow him whole but push through them, because life had a way of opening up in places he never expected, cardboard walls giving way to reveal things he never imagined he could have.
And Shane was anxious, and he could trap himself behind those imaginary cardboard walls without even realizing it, but sometimes all it took was a candid photo from an otherwise ordinary day to carve a window into that wall and show him what sat behind it.
And what sat behind it was this:
They looked ready to be parents.
(Later, Shane would spend the rest of his day planning and sorting the small speech he had put together in his mind to bring the topic up to Ilya. He would map out the conversation in careful steps and decide on a quiet, simple dinner at home, imagining how he could bring it up as gently as possible.
But then he would slip under the covers that night, ready to fall asleep beside his husband, and he would catch him looking at the same photo of them with the baby, wearing the softest expression and a gentle smile on his face. And suddenly all of Shane’s planning would feel a little silly, silly enough for him to move closer, press a light kiss to Ilya’s shoulder, and say,
“Let’s become parents.”)