Chapter Text
Chapter One - Shane
Shane’s alarm went off at 5:15AM as it does every morning. He was already awake, laying in the guest room bed staring at the ceiling. Well, his bed now he supposes. The house was quiet - not the peaceful quiet, but the other kind. The kind that feels like thick static prickling between two people who no longer talk about anything that really matters.
He heard a second alarm go off down the hall, meaning it was now 5:45AM and he’d been lost in his thoughts for a half hour longer than he should’ve allowed himself. Their staggered alarm system was something Shane had devised when they’d first moved in together - it allowed them to move through their respective morning routines in an optimal sequence, but now it just felt like added distance between them. They really don’t do anything together anymore, do they?
Shane swung his legs over the side of the bed, rubbed his hands over his tired eyes, and stood to pull a t-shirt over his head. As he made his way to the stairs, he noticed the door to their bedroom - Ilya’s bedroom - was cracked and he could hear the shower running.
The kitchen was theirs in the way everything in this house was theirs - mutually occupied, but somehow separate. Shane’s vanilla protein powder next to Ilya’s chocolate one, Shane’s blue and green striped Anthropologie mug hanging next to Ilya’s chipped “Virginia is for Lovers” one from a past weekend vacation of theirs. He’d told Ilya stupidly a couple months ago that he didn’t need anyone making his coffee for him, that he could do it himself. He was wrong, of course. The ratio of almond milk and sea moss drops (don’t judge him, they’re really good for skin health) has never been correct since and Shane’s succumbed to just drinking his coffee black now.
He stood at the counter with his mug in both hands, staring out into the backyard. They’d moved into this house almost two years ago now - right before their wedding. Their secret wedding. It had just been the two of them, Shane’s parents, Rose, Sveta, Hayden, and a few bottles of champagne. Past-Shane couldn’t imagine he’d be standing alone in that kitchen two short years later, tensing his own body when he heard his husband descend down the stairs.
“Morning,” he heard Ilya’s greeting from behind him. He turned to see the man grabbing a protein shake out of the fridge, already dressed in his team-issued sweat set, ready to get to the arena for morning practice. Shane could smell the cedar wood soap, the one that came in the brown paper wrapping with cyrillic lettering Ilya had delivered each month. Soap for men who are not afraid to smell like forest, Ilya had translated once, Very masculine. Very serious soap.
“Morning.”
“See you at practice, yes?”
Shane nodded and finished his coffee, turning to add his mug to the dishwasher. He could feel Ilya pause for a moment before leaving, grabbing his coat and heading out the front door. They didn’t even take the same car to and from practice anymore. Ilya had said he wanted to start arriving earlier anyway, something about being able to prep as captain. Shane just figured it was an excuse to not have to spend any more time together than necessary. He doesn’t blame Ilya at this point. Shane knew he was cold to his husband, he just… didn’t know how to stop.
It had been about a year since the photograph.
It was a Saturday night in March, a rare off-weekend away from hockey. They’d driven just outside of Ottawa to a dinner spot they’d frequented over the last year - the kind with mismatched chairs and a hostess who didn’t watch hockey. Ilya liked the roast. Shane liked that no one knew who they were.
They were lucky, truthfully, that Ottawa had changed ownership and pursued them completely separately to build out a new program. It was a dream scenario. They could play together on the same team, live in the same city, be seen in public as just teammates without much suspicion as they slowly but surely let the rival narrative fade.
They’d gotten comfortable. Little things like not bothering to take their rings off when they drove out of the city for dinner, like Ilya resting his hand on Shane’s knee, even for just a brief moment. Shane hadn’t moved it, because why would he? They were safe in a restaurant they’d been to plenty before without incident and quite frankly a part of him was tired of being hidden away. So for a warm, human moment, he let it stay.
The angle was wrong. Or right, depending on your perspective. Someone three tables over, a girl in her mid-twenties - not your stereotypical hockey fan, but someone who was clearly chronically online and lacked boundaries - had captured the moment. Ilya’s hand on Shane’s knee, both rings somehow visible. The photo had been posted to Twitter with a simple, “I’M STARTING A RUMOR?!!??? #HOLLANOV”
They’d finished their dinner and left the restaurant, not knowing that by midnight the photo would have four thousand retweets and a full analysis with red marker annotations in a major MLH subreddit.
By sunrise, every major sports outlet in North America had latched onto the story, plus something called Deux Moi on Instagram. Shane woke up groggily to 34 missed calls and Ilya already sitting on the edge of the bed, stating very calmly, “We’ll get ahead of this,” and calling Yuna.
Shane could not get ahead of it. He couldn’t get ahead of anything. His nervous system was shutting down, listening to his mother talk at the speed of lightning from Ilya’s speakerphone. He listened as Ilya handled everything, while he got lost in the swirling wood patterns of their floorboards and felt the thing they’d built - the world of secret where he and Ilya existed together as partners, without an audience - crumble around them in real time.
They released a joint statement confirming the marriage. It was simple, three sentences, and thanked everyone for their support. It asked for privacy and discretion. It said nothing about their love, their happiness, the fact that Shane had asked Ilya to marry him in bed at 2AM and Ilya had said, “Okay,” like it was the simplest, easiest decision he’d ever made in his life. The statement was something Shane had always been afraid of - his most private things translated into corporate, PR-speak and laid bare for strangers to dissect.
Ilya had fought for more - he wanted something closer to, “We are married and in love. If you have a problem with that, you can fuck off,” but this was quickly vetoed. It was in Ilya’s nature to face things head on. He’d spent so many years of his life being diminished by other people’s discomfort, he was finally at a place where he wanted desperately to refuse to be made small.
Shane could not do that. Shane could barely do the three sentences. That press conference was the worst 18 minutes of his life - a room full of cameras and microphones picking up their carefully crafted answers to questions that were technically respectful, but functionally invasive. In that room, he was simply a machine operating at peak efficiency.
Ilya had been magnificent. He'd handled most of the speaking. He was warm and candid and disarming. The final question had been directed specifically to Shane. “Are you happy?” Shane had simply repeated their statement, “Yes, we appreciate the support of our friends and family, and our team, and our fans,” which really answered absolutely nothing.
The real answer was, “Yes, the best thing that ever happened to me is sitting right beside me and I’m madly in love with him.” It was right there, but Shane couldn’t get the words out. Couldn’t even approach them. The gap between that truth and what actually came out of Shane’s mouth may have been the first crack in the foundation.
He could tell he was hurting Ilya. His Ilya. His incredibly understanding, compassionate husband who understood his brain and his anxiety and his completely overloaded nervous system. At night, Shane clung to him and tried desperately to physically communicate everything he couldn’t say out loud in that room. For the time being, it was enough, and they would get through it. They had to.
The fallout came in waves. The first wave was loud. Opinions. Everyone had one - sportswriters, commentators, podcasters, fans, strangers on the internet who were problematically invested in the lives of two men they’d never met. The takes were relentless and spanned from supportive to hostile to analytical. Think pieces were written. There was a period of about eleven consecutive days where they trended in some way or another and Shane couldn’t open his apps without seeing his name or photo staring back at him.
Most of the coverage was kind, but the posts that bothered him the most were the ones that criticized his playing. Now any mistake he made, instead of being attributed to an overloaded schedule or simply a play-gone-wrong, was attributed to him being distracted by his own media circus. Maybe they were right. Shane couldn’t stop himself from spiraling down his own game tape rabbit holes at night, rewatching himself and overanalyzing every thought that had been going through his head along with every movement he’d made. He could feel himself becoming obsessive - he couldn’t let any of this affect his game. He’d worked too hard, his parents had sacrificed too much, for him to become the best player in the league. He needed more than anything to continue to prove he still was, regardless of what was happening in his personal life. He’d occasionally let Ilya pull him to bed, but most nights his husband was already snoring deeply by the time he climbed under the covers.
The second wave was worse. They weren’t stupid. He and Ilya both were getting checked more than usual. He heard the chirps and saw other teams laughing as their eyes combed over the Ottawa bench. At first, their own teammates had been loud, vocal defenders of theirs, but over time they’d all just sort of accepted that homophobic assholes would be homophobic assholes and it was better to just beat them than try and punch every derogatory comment out of their mouths. That didn’t mean they didn’t still bother Shane though.
One particularly bad night after playing Ilya’s old Boston teammates, where Shane had been the butt (no pun intended) of several demoralizing and crude bottom-jokes and Ilya had actually snapped and landed himself in the penalty box, Shane had simply come home and collapsed face down on their bed without even taking his shoes off first. A still slightly-bloody Ilya had sat next to him and rubbed his back and placed gentle kisses to the back of his neck, but Shane could tell this was weighing on him too.
The third wave was internal. It started with small moments that escalated for no reason other than their mounting stress. A reporter asked Ilya about their home life and Ilya answered warmly, naturally, because that was who Ilya was. Shane had watched the clip back and felt the floor beneath him tilt because something that was supposed to just be theirs - mundane details about their Sunday morning routine - was now public. It was content. He’d snapped at Ilya that night. The conversation was tense and they’d both apologized, but it was the first moment since the photograph that their tones had been sharp with each other.
Then just three months ago, it was a fundraising gala. They were in tuxes and the evening had been lovely so far. Shane was honestly just trying to focus on how hot his husband looked. He almost felt like they were stabilizing, that they were turning a page where they could do things like this - sit at a big round table with their teammates and fancy dinner plates and just be two husbands who happen to exist together in a professional context too.
There were cameras roaming, capturing reactions to speeches and grabbing bits for socials. He didn’t want to be paranoid, but he could sense them hovering a bit more around him and Ilya maybe trying to get something of them that could go viral. His body reacted before his mind could. He felt Ilya’s hand on his knee, the same gesture that had gotten them into this mess months prior, and he’d pulled his knee back inward. It was a reflex. It wasn’t meant to be a rejection, but Ilya clearly read it as such.
He saw Ilya’s expression drop slightly, his hand retreating back into his own lap and smoothing over his napkin. He didn’t mention it. He didn’t have to. His charming performance simply resumed like nothing had happened, but his hand didn’t reach for Shane the rest of the night. Or the following night. Or the one after that.
It was the beginning of the end of something, they weren’t sure.
It wasn’t long after that the real arguments started. If something should be shared publicly, if they should attend an event together, if they should acknowledge moments of theirs on social media. The lines were quickly blurring between whether or not their relationship was a performance or reality.
They were not fighting about the same thing. They were never actually fighting about the same thing. Shane was fighting about control, about the loss of it. Ilya was fighting about visibility, the right to exist openly and refusing to retreat back into a closet the world seemed to be insidiously reconstructing around them… that Shane was reconstructing around them.
Shane wanted to protect what they had by hiding it. Ilya wanted to protect what they had by claiming it. Both impulses were born out of love for each other, but they were conflicting in a way that was destroying the very thing they were trying to save.
One night, Shane had gone to bed in the guest room, just needing some space after they’d thrown some heated, accusatory words at each other. Yuna had asked them over for dinner. Ilya had wanted to go, but Shane had claimed he needed to study game tape before their next match against Montreal, his ex-team. Ilya had looked at him in total exhaustion, “You always have film to study.”
Ilya had gone to his parents’ by himself. Shane had holed up in the guest bedroom without watching any game tape at all and ended up falling asleep there. The following night, he moved his phone charger into the guest room with him, the night after that a few things from his nightstand. He didn’t mean to, but suddenly he’d been sleeping there for two months. In a way, it was almost easier - the gut wrenching pain of sleeping alone as opposed to owning up to all of the ways he was hurting Ilya, hurting them. Shane figured he deserved it.
Now, the walls of the guest bedroom were a fortress. Ilya on the other side, slowly running out of patience and the capacity to wait, but they’d mastered a sort of dance around each other. A new normal. Shane was back to playing the best hockey of his life, so clearly something was working. It didn’t matter that he was drinking his coffee black and it was kind of gross. It didn’t matter that Ilya hadn’t made Shane’s favorite Russian dish, pelmeni, in weeks and he kind of missed it. He clearly couldn’t handle being Shane Hollander, the number one hockey player in the league, and Shane Hollander-Rozanov, husband to the only man who could rival that stat, concurrently and publicly. Something had to give.