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Shane‘s nervous.
It’s not like he has any reason to be, given that he’s just basically doing his soul duty of being like, the best boyfriend in the entire world - but he still feels his leg starting to tap under the kitchen island as Ilya shoves shoves the flipper underneath his tuna melt a little too aggressively for Shane’s liking, the scraping sound making him wince.
Ilya doesn’t see it as he’s concentrating on making sure that the red sides are equally as brown as to not set off Shane's anxiety, but there’s also another reason.
Ilya’s deaf.
In fact, given the rabbit hole of research Shane has been doing the last couple of weeks, he’s pretty sure Ilya has been deaf his whole life and no one’s noticed.
Not even him.
The entire idea that it’s gone missed makes Shane‘s heart feel extremely heavy, almost as heavy as a scrambled eggs that he’s already battered his stomach with that morning.
The only reason that he hasn’t confronted Ilya about it is because he’s trying to figure out a way for him to…understand it.cUnderstand what the negligence of his homeland has brought upon him and while bad mouthing Ilya’s father is something that Shane’s parents do semi daily since meeting the guy (mostly his own mother who has taken Ilya under her wing like a baby bird; Shane likes to tease that he’s a loon, grinning when Ilya snarls like a feral wolf in return), Shane’s not one of those people to speak ill of the dead.
So here he is, in their kitchen in Montréal, trying to figure out how to tell his boyfriend but all those times that the coaches ever told him that he was not listening, all those times his father used to snide over him being lazy, all those times Alexei teased him for being airheaded, was really just… him not being able to hear them.
What would Ilya think of all of that?
Maybe this wasn’t the best idea after all.
“Shane. Shane, Дорогой-“ Shane’s pulled out of his spiral by a hand on his shoulder and he looks up quickly to find Ilya’s gaze narrowed on him. The slightly taller Russian eyes him up and down and it almost feels like a cold sweat breaks out over Shane’s forehead as he finally speaks. “Малыш, you have been staring at plate for centuries. You becoming Scott Hunter, yes?”
The joke lands and a startled laugh comes out of Shane’s chest. “You know he doesn’t appreciate the age jokes, right?”
Ilya, predictively, just rolls his eyes with a smirk. “Da, but I tell them to you so you get wrath instead.”
“Oh, throwing me under the bus, are we? I see how it is.”
“Nyet.” Ilya’s fingers grasp Shane’s chin, forcing him to look up as the latter grins. “You are too pretty to throw under bus.”
Shane could have probably just ended it right there, let Ilya kiss him before probably picking him up and fucking him against the kitchen island. He would as well, if Shane had given in the opportunity to escape.
Instead, Shane’s fingers closed gently around Ilya’s wrist, the corners of his mouth just perking up. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
Ilya made a whistling sound through his teeth. “Is code for serious talk, starting with that.”
“Yeah, serious talk. It won’t take long, I promise.” Shane tries to inject some sort of confidence in his voice, but it comes out a bit wavy, the stab of anxiety clouded with a slight bit of guilt as Ilya’s eyebrows do that thing where they draw in on themselves, painting worry across his face as Shane continues. “Can you come into the living room with me? You can bring the tuna melts.”
“Da.” Ilya looks confused and Shane can’t blame him, already wincing at the fact that as soon as Ilya’s plated the food, the slow walk from their kitchen to their living room almost takes decades instead of a couple of minutes.
Shane peeks outside while he’s waiting for Ilya to seat himself. It’s off-season, but Canada has always been known for having a lot of snow and it’s mostly slush and sleet at the moment, there’s still enough to decorate the entire entirety of their apartment complex as well as the grounds below in some faint sheet of white.
He turns back to see Ilya staring up at him from the couch, tuna melt abandoned as he watches shame with an intense look that Shane doesn’t want to place.
“Look, whatever it is you’re thinking, it’s not that bad.” Shane starts with, trying to go for a more placating tone than the one he used earlier. “I didn’t mean to make you think otherwise. I just wanted to ask you something.”
“…Okay.” Ilya’s head tilts forward, just a little bit and he can’t help but notice Ilya is also aiming his left ear towards Shane instead of his entire head. He suspected that was the one that Ilya was less deaf in than the other, but that wasn’t the point right now.
“Did you…ever miss stuff? When you were a kid?”
Ilya blinks, seemingly taken off guard by the question. “Miss stuff?”
“Yeah.” Shane fiddles with his sweatpants. “Like, when you were a kid, did you like, miss things? Like teachers calling out to you or friends or something like that?”
“What is point of this, Hollander? You are hockey player, not psychologist.”
“Don’t be an asshole, I’m asking you a question.” Shane hits back, a note of frustration in his tone.
“I am not understanding question.” Ilya dishes back what Shane is giving him, which Shane expected. He’s not the best at phrasing anything, so eventually, after some back-and-forth, he just comes out right with it.
“Roz, I think you’re deaf.”
That seems to set Ilya back a few steps, his back straightening as he looked up at Shane. “What?”
“Just- hear me out- or, rather- oh forget it.” Shane sugar’s head before he moved to the coffee table, quickly gathering up papers. “I noticed some things, both when we were off the ice and when we were on it, competing.”
He shovelled through the papers before settling on a specific one and presenting it to Ilya gently. “I took a few lists, cause I thought you might have ADHD like me; I think it runs deeper than that, though.”
Ilya took the offered diagram, looking at it in confusion. “What is…?”
“It’s a diagram of an ear.” Shane said plainly, looking a little weary. “I think that you have sensorineural hearing loss.”
“Senna sorrel- what?”
“Sensorineural.” Shane sat down next to him, palming the couch. “It’s just a big long fancy word for your ears just not working the way they were supposed to. That's why I asked you if you missed anything when you were a kid because you have all the symptoms for it.”
Ilya stared at the paper, the words in a confusing, tangling mix of both English and Russian. “So I catch disease, yes?”
“No, no, no-“ Shane set up a little straighter. “-you didn’t catch anything. Sensorineural just means you were most likely born deaf and didn’t just inherit it from skating around the ice like a maniac.” He looked down at the blonde with a sigh. “I’m probably looking into this too much, so you can just tell me I’m insane and then just roll your eyes and do whatever you gotta do to make yourself feel better and—“
Ilya shushed him carefully. He wasn’t looking at the paper like he was a stranger anymore; he looked at it as if it held all the answers in the universe.
“I do miss things. I used to miss Svetlana complaining about her father, as it sound like we were underwater. Sasha as well. He used to say dirty things. I could only hear them when he was in my ear.” Ilya lifted his fingers to trace the shell of his ear gently. “Father used to pay to put me in front of classroom, not back. Used to hit me cross head, like coach, said I was lazy.”
He swallowed hard, eyes becoming distant.
“I also missed her. She called out for me. On the day she die.” Ilya pursed his lips. Shane didn’t have to really snoop his memory for long to figure out who he was talking about. Irina. Ilya’s mother. “Alexei said she called for me at the top of the stairs, over and over as I walked out to wait for bus. I did not hear her.” The last part came out in whisper, or sounding like a 12-year-old that would soon find his mother slumped over in bed covered in her own vomit and cold to the touch.
Shane’s hand simply found his knee, thumb turning in circles over the bar skin as Ilya continued. “He beat me up after funeral. Saying I was cruel not to answer her, saying that I caused her death.” He looked at Shane with tears in his eyes. “He did not understand that I didn’t even know she was there.”
His finger smoothed over the paper again, the black lines and coloured patches of the diagram still leaping out to him as his brain tried to wait. It’s way through all the facts and all the memories. “You think this is why I am lazy?”
“You’re not lazy, Ilya.” Shane cupped his face. “You are one of the hardest working guys in the league. Your father never saw that because you were stuck in ways and so is your brother. You’re here now though, with me, with my parents, with your brothers in spirit on your team. This is just a hunch that I had for a couple of weeks.”
“Da, yes, but you know me better.” Ilya leaned into the touch, eyes flicking back down to the diagram along with the other papers that Shane held. “How we go about, uh, test for this?”
Shane immediately picked up the papers and shuffled them that they were even. “ I’m glad you asked, there’s a couple of specialists here in Canada that we can take a look at-“
The next time that Rozanov was seen on the rink, he now sported a pair of black and yellow hearing aids, shouting commands in English as he captained the next Boston Raiders match against the New York Admirals.
The best part, however, was being able to hear his team's cheers when they finally won 3 to 4.
That and when he was in the locker room getting charged and Shane came to say that he loved him before Ilya pinned him to a stall wall.
(Okay, maybe that last one might be the best part.)