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2016, Montreal
Shane is in a club, Rose pressed to his front, Miles just behind him, hot breath on his ear. It’s loud, and his head is pounding almost as much as the bass from the speakers behind the DJ, but he can’t bring himself to move away just yet.
A flicker of blonde hair in the crowd catches his eye from near the door that almost looks like—
Shane turns away.
“Have you ever been with a guy?” Rose asks, her voice so gentle that Shane wants to cry. Her hair is up and off her neck, in one of those casual looking styles that must take longer than it looks, and wearing an off-the-shoulder dress. She looks gorgeous, Shane must just be tired that he’s not reacting how he should. He can hear the sounds of cutlery and glasses clinking from the table nearby and he’s been forcing himself to make eye contact throughout dinner.
At her prompt, his brain supplies about a hundred images of Ilya in a second, from his body in the shower that first time, to an x-rated a highlight reel of their years of ill-advised hookups, culminating in how he wound up sat opposite to Rose, in this restaurant on a Friday evening: all because Shane ran away at the first sign of vulnerability in Ilya’s house back in Boston months ago over a fucking sandwich.
He nods.
If Rose noticed his odd pause, she’s kind enough to pretend she didn’t.
2017, Montreal
Shane sits in his parents living room with his arm in a sling and a raging headache and watches in shock as Scott Hunter kisses a man on the ice. He thinks, impossibly, about shaking hands with Ilya aged seventeen and feeling a shift in his life’s trajectory from then on.
His text chat with Ilya has been dormant for over a year, and even before that it was mainly door codes and dates, interspersed with the occasional after-hours facetime call. It feels weird to have immortalised the exact day of their last hookup through something as a banal as a timestamped imessage. Ilya had come to visit him in the hospital after he'd gotten hit, he'd found out from Hayden, but he'd been asleep. He wonders what they'd have said if he had been awake.
But there, on the night that Scott Hunter comes out, a new message flashes on his screen.
Lily: Maybe I should have let Hunter win cup years ago
Lily: If this is what happens when he does.
They’ve both grown up since that handshake. Most of the time, it feels like they grew up together, even when apart. Intrinsically linked.
Shane smiles, and feels suddenly bold when he replies.
Jane: You wish you could kiss me on the ice, Rosanov
The next time they play Boston, Ilya skates up to him at the start of the match.
“Hollander, where is your girlfriend?”
“We’re not together, uh, anymore.” He replies.
A smirk. “Shame.” He skates away just as quickly.
After the game, he has another message.
Lily: 1701
He sighs, and calls a taxi.
“Sooooo,” Rose says, a smile on her face and her glass of wine sloshing dangerously as she lounges on Shane’s sofa. “You and —“
“Rose!”
“We’re in your house, Shane! I can say his name here, its not like he’s Voldemort.”
Shane rolls his eyes and throws a pillow halfheartedly in her direction. He’s glad that they are genuinely friends now, that she was true her word and kept texting, but right now she is making him regret a few of his life choices. She bats the pillow away and they bicker until the episode of the show they’ve put on in the background ends.
“You seem happier lately.” She says, quietly, like she’s giving him an out to pretend he didn’t hear it if it makes it easier.
“Yeah, well.” He shrugs.
“Have you talked?”
Shane thinks back to last time, when Ilya was in Montreal last week. Shane was a little preoccupied to talk, for most of the hour they had, but Ilya had. A Lot. Not about anything to do with emotions though, and he figures Rose doesn’t want those details. “Uh. Not…really.”
Rose lets out a noise that sounds something like “Men.”
His phone pings on the coffee table in front of them, he knows what it is and ignores it.
“It’s casual, Rose, that’s all it was before, that’s all it can be now.”
Rose looks shrewdly at his phone screen, with a banner containing a green owl telling Shane to do his Russian lesson before midnight. “Are you sure?”
“Drink your wine before it winds up on my carpet, that’s hard to clean.”
2018, Boston
It’s been good, the past year.
Since Hunter’s coming out, things between him and Ilya had largely gone back to how they’d been before. They hook up when they’re in the same city, text between, and firmly talk about nothing that could be anything more than casual.
They make it to just over a year before things change. Not bad, all things considering.
“I am going to come out, start of next season.” Ilya says slowly, from above him where Shane is leaning on his chest in Ilya’s bed. Montreal had played Boston and won and Shane was basking in the win. Or had been until just now.
“What?” He jolts up and turns around to look at Ilya, who’s studiously examining his nails with forced casualness.
“I will have been here for long enough, I can apply for citizenship, there is nothing stopping me.”
He doesn’t successfully hide the hurt in his voice when he replies, “Nothing?”
Ilya looks at Shane keenly like he’s the crazy one. “This is just fucking.” He says, tone flat. That’s what they both need it to be, even if they both know it hasn’t been ‘just fucking’ for a while, now. Then, “You are going to stay in closet until you retire?”
And well, yes, but he wasn’t phrasing it like that. Hunter hadn’t been made a pariah, but it wasn’t like anyone had come out after him, either. They had always known it would be different for them, coming out intrinsically tied to their relationship.
Ilya takes Shane’s silence as confirmation and sighs, says something in Russian as he turns to look up at the ceiling.
“I have lived long enough like this. I am safer now. I am good player, they will not do anything to me. I have to do this for me.”
God, Shane wishes he had Ilya’s certainty. He knows the two of them would never be able to come out together, but one of them? It wouldn’t be the end of the world. Shane is glad it’s Ilya.
“I know. This is huge, Ilya.” Shane says. He doesn’t say anything else. There will be more speculation once Ilya comes out, and hockey still comes before anything for Shane. They both know that, have the whole time.
Ilya coughs, once, awkwardly. “You should go, I have early start tomorrow.”
Shane leaves. It’s becoming a habit.
2019, Boston
Ilya comes out and the world doesn’t end. The NHL is still standing, however Ilya’s newly publicist and social media manager must have been working overtime managing the negative responses and his profile, and stopping Ilya from stopping the negative responses himself. There have been a few nights where he’s gone rogue on twitter, and Rose had sent him the highlights the next morning. Ilya becomes a “bi-icon” overnight, as the kids say.
He’s right, the timing was perfect to keep the focus on the games, to see how he’s still the star they love, to see his playing and forget the rest. It works.
Shane watches from the sidelines.
The first time they meet on the ice a few weeks after the announcement, Shane skates up and shakes his hand tight. He is so, incredibly, unspeakably proud.
Ilya grins, “Cannot have them thinking you are homophobe now, can we?”
“Fuck off, Rosanov.”
Boston wins. The crowd cheers.
2022, Vegas
They still see each other, every so often someone in the league brings up the rivalry again, or they get paired together for a promotional or something. Its not the same, but it’s okay. It’s not even that awkward. They both knew how this would end, Shane is frankly surprised they’d gotten as many years as they had.
Ilya gets photographed leaving bars and clubs with men and women, the monthly article about whether Shane and Rose are back together every time they’re photographed together appears and they laugh about it over the next dinner they get. Shane tries to hook up with a few guys, even attempts to date a guy he met at the bar at the last awards show that ends almost as soon as it started.
Neither of them announce a relationship.
2024, New York + Boston
Shane is in a bar in downtown with Rose, Hayden and Jackie when Ilya Rosanov retires. They’re playing the Admirals tomorrow, but Rose was in town for filming so he’d gone up a day before to visit.
The world doesn’t know it yet, not really, but Shane does as they lift him off the ice on a stretcher. He saw him fell on his weak knee. You don’t get hit at that angle at the speed he was going at 33 and play again.
Shane knows this fact. That is why he stands up and pushes his bar stool back with a screech. No other reason.
“I need to go to the hospital.” He tells them, already getting out his phone for a car.
Rose nods, Hayden’s eyes are still on the screen, and Jackie is picking up her phone to check the news. “Let us know if you need anything.”
He hugs them all quickly, and then heads to Ilya.
This feels like deja-vu. His collarbone twinges in sympathy.
The first thing he says is: “I’m sorry.”
“What for?” Ilya says, lying prone in a hospital bed. He looks bad, but at least he’s conscious currently. “You weren’t defenceman who slammed me into boards.”
“No.” Shane says, and thinks, for everything. For the fact that my biggest fear is losing hockey, but it turned out it was also was losing you. For walking away all those years ago, for not fighting harder, for your shitty knee that eventually let you down. “I am sorry though.”
“Is okay.” Ilya slurs, quickly on the way to falling back under again. “I will do something else.”
So, maybe, might Shane.
2026, Ottawa
Shane gets to 35.
No major injury, no catastrophic exit.
(unlike some people.)
He finishes his contract and doesn’t re-sign. He has been planning for this.
He has been planning for this ever since he left Ilya’s hospital room in Boston two years ago and thought that a sudden end to his hockey career would kill him. So he planned. And, when the end of the 25/26 season comes around, he announces his retirement, and the start of the hockey school he and his mom had been working on for the last year and a half.
And then, he too, does something else.
2026, Boston (one and a half days later)
With secured American citizenship, Ilya had remained and settled in Boston. Shane had checked the address was still correct through Hayden, who had raised an eyebrow and then checked with Marlow.
Shane knocks on the door.
Ilya opens the door shirtless. Of course he does.
“Uh. Hi.”
“Shane? What are you doing here?”
“Can I come in?” He asks, and steps through as Ilya nods quickly.
He stands in the entrance-way of Ilya’s living room. “So… I retired.”
“I saw.” Ilya says, then smirks. “More boring than me.”
“You were seriously injured, Ilya—“
“Am fine now.”
“Its been— anyway, it doesn’t matter. I uh…” Shane pauses, takes a deep breath and looks straight down at the floor. “Will-you-go-on-a-date-with-me?”
When Shane finally looks up, Ilya is staring at him.
“A date?”
He nods. “Yeah I, uh, have a reservation if you want to go now, or we can plan it for another day but. If you want—“
Ilya is kissing him.
He’d be lying if he said he could ever forget what it was like, but it had been long enough that the memory was like a faded image of the real thing, now in full force and right in front of hm.
Ilya pulls back just long enough to whisper “I want.” Before resuming right where they’d left off.
Later, they’re lying on the sofa with take out boxes tossed haphazardly beside Ilya. Shane’s shoes are thrown by the door, the rest of his clothes folded in pile beside them.
Ilya’s arm is slung around his body, a hand running through his hair. He is so utterly content.
“I never expected you to wait for this, you know that right?” Shane says. “I don’t even think I knew I was waiting, and then, well.” He indicates between them.
“I know.” Ilya shrugs. “It wasn’t a choice, just, happened.”
Shane laughs. “What, no nice people in Boston?”
“No,” Ilya says, pulls Shane even closer against his body, “But he’s here now.”