Chapter Text
January 2017
Shane honestly couldn’t tell you the series of events that had led to this moment. Well, he could, but it’d be convoluted and confusing and possibly another adjective starting with ‘C’ that might just explain how much of a goddamn shit show he’d found himself in.
All this to say, Shane was starting to wonder if there might be some service out there that’d allow him to hire someone to make decisions for him; not quite a cult, but maybe something cult adjacent.
“Are you sure about this?” Hayden whispered, looking just as nervous as Shane felt. Shane was well aware that some people (Jackie) might (lovingly) describe his friendship with Hayden as ‘clinically co-dependent’, but at this very moment he wasn’t going to look too far into the psychology of it all. The simple knowledge that his best friend was clearly as nervous as he was acted as some sort of nerve soother, some sort of indication that he wasn’t entirely insane for feeling this way.
“No,” Shane answered, then stood up anyways. He clapped his hands twice and cleared his throat and delighted just a little bit in the way the locker room fell silent. He was a well-respected Captain, he played a good game and did his best to be there for his teammates, people listened when he spoke, even if he wasn’t the sort of effortlessly charming, charismatic captain that some teams (*cough* Boston) might get to enjoy. “I have something I want to tell you all.”
“Finally gonna explain how you fumbled Rose Landry?” Mitty asked, elbowing Renaud in the stall next to him and shooting Shane a grin that was probably meant to be friendly teasing but came across as something more akin to a shark scenting blood.
Shane carefully swallowed down the biological instinct to turn tail and run and simply shot a teasing smile back, deciding that if he just acted like this was no big deal it’d simply be no big deal. He was well aware that this was wishful thinking, he’d very much like you all to refrain from pointing that out.
“Sort of,” he said, forcing out a half laugh that had J.J. visibly cringing to his left. Hayden and J.J. knew what he was about to say and the fact that they’d both immediately hugged him and reminded him they were best friends was the only thing pushing him forward. In another life, another time, he might’ve been able to hold onto the knowledge that sharing this with his team might lead to a day where he could live openly with the man he loved but in this life, this time, all he had was the knowledge that letting go of this secret, sharing this piece of himself, might just let him feel a little less like the walls were falling down around his ears at every moment of every day.
Telling Rose had loosened something in his chest, telling his parents had reminded him that he was so stupidly lucky to have that sort of love in his life, and telling J.J., Hayden, and Jackie had shown him that he’d still have a support system even if this all went pear-shaped, had told him that the relationships he’d spent nearly a decade building wouldn’t crumble overnight.
“I’ve been keeping a piece of myself locked away for a long time,” Shane said, forcing himself to keep breathing, he was nearly certain the action was manual at this point when it very much should’ve been automatic, but he refused to allow himself to think too much about that. “Rose and I broke up because we weren’t compatible, we’re still great friends and she’s an incredible person, but I couldn’t be what she needed and, more than that, she couldn’t be what I needed because I’m gay. I know this isn’t something you want to hear,” he said, pushing through the silence that sounded a little like abject terror (and maybe a little like a brewing hate crime) with the sort of hell bent determination that’d allowed him to become the number two overall draft pick, rookie of the year, an Olympic medalist, the captain of an NHL team, and a two-time Stanley Cup champion. “I know that this is shocking, and I know that this will change your perception of me. I just couldn’t keep lying to myself and when I stopped lying to myself I realized that I couldn’t lie to my team. It didn’t feel right to ask you to trust me to lead you on the ice if I was lying to you off of it. Feel how you need to feel, hate me if you want to, but please keep this amongst the team, I don’t feel ready for this to be shared with the world, but I wanted to share it with you. With the people who’ve been my home and my brothers for so many years.”
He felt Hayden’s hand wrap around his right forearm as J.J.’s hand landed on his shoulder and forced himself to breathe again. That was, almost certainly, the most words he’d ever said at once in any speech to his team. It was also, almost certainly, the last thing they’d ever expected to hear from him.
He’d prepared for anger, even possibly violence. What he hadn’t prepared for was absolute fucking silence.
The spell was broken by Comeau breathing out a snort of laughter.
Shane looked up and realized that several of his teammates were looking at him like they were hoping he was about to say this was all an elaborate prank. A couple of the younger guys, rookies he’d mentored and supported, were simply watching him for a reaction; not tense, not scared, not angry, simply watching. Somehow, Shane could tell that he hadn’t lost their respect, and that was enough to make his shoulders drop back down and his spine straighten out. The kids were alright; they simply couldn’t speak their support in this weird, vaguely (chronically) homophobic hierarchy. He nodded once to the group of 19 and 20-year-olds that made up their third line and let the soft smiles he got in response calm him just that much more.
“I’m not pulling a prank,” he said, turning back toward the room at large, his coaches were leaned against the door frame, looking like they wanted to tear him limb from limb, and Shane got the sinking feeling that he wouldn’t be spending the rest of his career as a Voyageur and, somehow, that didn’t feel like dying. “I’m not joking, I’m simply choosing to be honest with my team.”
The room fell back into silence, only broken this time by Theriault clearing his throat, looking at Shane like he wanted him to walk into oncoming traffic, and saying, “my office, now.”
Shane nodded, shook off J.J. and Hayden, and walked across the padded floor and chose to stop thinking about how it felt like he was walking to the gallows.
* * *
“How’d it go?” Rose asked the moment Shane opened the door.
Shane couldn’t help it, he laughed.
Somewhere around the 30 second mark, tears sprang up, the laughter turned hysterical, and the next thing he knew he was sliding down the wall near his entry way, his ribs aching and his throat burning with the force of his sobs. Rose dropped down next to him immediately, not a care in the world that they were sitting on a floor that was ever so slightly grimy from snow covered shoes and Shane had the ridiculous thought that everything that’d gone wrong with Ilya was worth it if it ended in him having a friend like this.
Well, maybe not everything seeing as he was still absolutely, desperately in love with Ilya Rozanov, but having Rose as a friend was a rather good consolation prize, even if it didn’t necessarily soothe every aching shard of his fractured heart.
“Awful,” he finally choked out. “My rookies didn’t seem pissed, but everyone else was. Coaching staff and management want to keep me locked away but they can’t bench me without good reason and the only thing keeping me on the team right now is my no trade clause because if they use the morality clause they’re opening themselves up to lawsuits.”
“Can you waive your no trade?” she asked, her voice gentle and her arms wrapped around him like she could hold him together by sheer force of will; she was doing a pretty good job of it, honestly.
Shane paused and thought back to that moment in the locker room where it’d started to feel like retiring as a Voyageur was no longer in the cards, thought about how he’d always assumed that would feel like heartbreak. But now he knew what heartbreak felt like, he knew that there was more to life than hockey even if hockey was so much of what made him him. He didn’t want to give it up, that was for damn sure, but he might just be able to stomach giving up Montreal.
“I could,” he admitted quietly, thankful that the look in Rose’s eye communicated that she understood just how insane of an admission that was for him. She smiled, something warm and comforting and knowing and Shane would’ve kissed her if he weren’t incredibly gay. “But if I waive it now and they can create a narrative I honestly might get pushed out before playoffs, we’re still a month away from the trade deadline.”
“Would that be so bad?”
Shane paused once more; paused and tried to imagine a world where he was playing somewhere else in April, where he wasn’t leading the Voyageurs toward the Cup that’d make them a dynasty. It hurt, honestly. It felt a bit like a stab wound to the chest to realize that the versions of his teammates he’d seen today would probably rather get rid of their gay Captain than win that third Cup. It wasn’t about hockey anymore; it was about him.
He hated that, he hated when it became a game of politics and optics, when people forgot the love of the game that’d pushed them to this level. But if they were going to make it about him anyways, he might as well be a little selfish, he might as well do what he could to get something like joy out of the hellscape he’d created simply by choosing to be honest.
I mean, really, he hadn’t even told them he was gay for Ilya Rozanov. Well, he’d told J.J. and Hayden but that blow had been lessned by the fact that all three of them had been piss drunk, hiding from Jackie so she wouldn’t tell them it was time to go to bed. It was probably the fact that they were acting like 14-year-old boys who’d gotten their hands on their first sip of stolen beer that had the pair of them simply looking at him like he was insane before Hayden decided that the whole rivals situation made even more sense when framed as years of suffocating sexual tension. J.J. had laughed so hard beer had come out of his nose and all the sudden everything was fine. He knew, though, that it’d take his two best friends time to actually process the fact that he’d spent so long pining for Ilya Rozanov, he also knew that he could never tell the rest of the team. Their reactions wouldn’t be anywhere near as charitable.
All this to say, he’d been kind. He could’ve gone far more nuclear.
“You’re already locked in for the All Stars, right?” Rose asked after he didn’t respond.
“Yeah,” Shane answered, pulling in a deep breath and forcing his nerves to let go of the constant buzz of anxiety that’d been following him since the week prior when he’d sat across from this wonderful woman in a restraunt in Old Montreal and finaly admitted that he was gay. “I could have my agent drop the clause right before All Star Weekend and it’d get lost in the hype, it’d give Montreal the break to decide what they want to do and I’d be in a place where I could subtly talk to other Captains, see what’s out there, see what teams might need depth at center right now.”
“You could always play wing, too,” Rose said, settling fully on the floor next to him and wrapping both her arms around one of his now that it was clear she didn’t need to quite literally hold him together any longer. “You’re fast, a versitle player, you see the rink like no one else. Don’t limit yourself.”
Shane felt his lips tug into a smile almost against his will as he listed a bit to the side and rested his head atop Rose’s, “why do I feel like you’re not just talking about hockey.”
“Cause I’m not,” she teased, poking his side before cuddling closer. “I’m really proud of you,” she said, her voice slipping back into something serious, even as her tone remained warm. “You did an incredibly brave thing, Shane.”
“All because of you,” he said quietly, “you let me be honest and helped me be brave so thank you.”
The smile she sent him was blinding.