Archive of Our Own

It starts as a joke, kind of.

They’re on the couch after lunch and practice, just sitting beside each other. Shane has Ilya’s head in his lap, running his hands through his curls absently while he watches a documentary.

“We need to go to the plant store,” Ilya says suddenly.

“What?”

“We should have a beautiful garden, lots of flowers.”

“Ilya. We don’t know anything about gardening. And when the fuck are we going to have the time?”

“Eh, we find time,” Ilya says. He looks back down into his phone. “Pansies are in season. We should get lots of them.”

“Why are you so set on having a garden all of a sudden?”

“Someone on Twitter said I was a pansy. I looked it up — it is beautiful flower. Also means faggot.”

Shane chokes on his spit. He tugs lightly on Ilya’s hair. “You want to plant a garden… out of spite?” Ilya looks up at him, expression so clearly saying well, duh, as he nods. “I mean, we could probably plant at least some flowers if we have an afternoon off.”

Shane looks out at the garden, at the pale expanse of the lawn and the bare, bony bushes left from the previous owner. He doesn’t know shit about plants, but he thinks it would be nice to have some color out there. Plus, the thought of doing something as mundane as getting his hands dirty and planting flowers with Ilya makes something warm bloom in him.

Ilya’s grin widens. “We go on Thursday.”

And that’s how Shane finds himself en route to the garden centre on a random Thursday, him in the driver’s seat and Ilya passenger. It’s a one hour drive, which Shane has taken upon himself since Ilya is hopeless anywhere that isn’t Boston or the freeway in a sports car. He’s also periodically been completely drawn into his phone.

“I feel like you,” Ilya says, drumming along to the music on the radio with his fingers. “I have researched. I have a list, Shane. What have you done to me?”

“You’re the one who wanted a garden. Not my fault you decided that you wanted tomatoes and then wanted to grow the best tomatoes in Canada.”

“Ah, in North America,” Ilya corrects, “Boston fans will be so angry. Their best player leaves them for shit team to win Cup and grow best tomatoes ever.”

“I don’t think Boston is known for their tomatoes.”

Shane keeps his eyes fixed on the road, but he knows Ilya has raised his eyebrows in that way he does by the tone of his voice. “That is the part you have a problem with?”

“Well,” Shane says, “Ottawa isn’t shit anymore. But it kinda was when you joined. And you were Boston’s best player. Tomatoes are, like, Italian.”

“Shane. Do I need to explain to you how greenhouses work?”

The parking lot of the garden centre is nearly empty when they arrive, giving Shane at least a little hope that they won’t be absolutely mobbed by people looking for autographs or answers of why Shane would leave Montreal. Ilya gets out of the car first, and Shane shakes himself out of whatever funk came over him and walks after him.

Ilya doesn’t even bother looking at the baskets, but goes straight for a shopping cart. Shane walks up right behind him and leans over his shoulder to whisper in his ear. “Do I even want to know what the budget is for today?”

“Is okay, моя любовьmoya lyubov ,” Ilya assures with a pat to Shane’s cheek, “your husband is millionaire, he can afford it.”

Shane only almost rises to the bait and just huffs. He takes the lead into the warehouse.

“Hey,” Shane says quietly. “What about this one?”

He pokes Ilya on the shoulder, and points to a delicate flower standing on one of the shelves. Ilya leans in to look at the small blue flowers and then turns his gaze to the little info card placed helpfully on the table. Forget-me-nots. it says.

“We could maybe have a corner for your mom? If that’s not something you want, that’s fine, but I thought since you can’t really visit her anymore…”

Ilya grabs Shane’s hand, not looking away from the informational plaque. “Yes,” he says, “I would like that. She liked apple blossoms.” The fact comes seemingly from nowhere, a memory of something mentioned off-handedly when cutting fruit, buried deep in his brain and resurfacing.

“We could have an apple tree,” Shane muses. “Those take care of themselves, right? Best apples and best tomatoes in North America.”

Ilya laughs. “Yes.”

They pluck two forget-me-nots off the table and put them in the cart. Ilya pulls up the notes app on his phone. “We have faggot flower—”

“Ilya not in public!”

“—but we are still missing lots. Maybe we should talk to a staff member.”

“No, we can find everything ourselves.”

“Shane. My love. Do you know the name of anything?”

“No, but there are plaques—”

“We will be here forever. Anya will be so sad. I will talk to people and you can be my strange husband standing silently behind me.”

Shane takes a deep breath. Given that it’s a Tuesday morning, the garden centre is mostly empty aside from the two of them and a scattered handful of retirees. There are still a few employees milling around dressed in gloves and work pants and branded T-shirts. There’s an elderly couple arguing over by the berry bushes, and an employee dutifully ignoring them as she restocks rosemary a shelf away.

Ilya seems to have picked his victim, and Shane follows him with their cart to minimize damage.

“Hello!” Ilya’s booming voice echoes across the tables. The employee, to her credit, doesn’t flinch. She just turns around, sunny smile already plastered on her face.

“Hi! Can I help you guys with anything?”

“Yes!” Ilya nods. He gestures to Shane. “My husband and I are starting a garden.”

“Oh, that’s exciting! I see you’ve already got some stuff in the cart.” Shane takes a step back as the employee peeks into their cart. “Okay, lots of pansies , that’s a good pick when they’re in season. Forget-me-nots are one of my favourites, too… okay, some greens. This is a great start!”

“Thank you,” Ilya preens. “We are looking for some specific plants.”

“We’re complete newbies,” Shane blurts, and the employee’s attention turns to him, “I mean, uhm, he’s researched but Google can be wrong, so you should probably tell us if we’ve done something wrong.”

The employee waves her hand. “There’s no wrong way to have a garden, honestly. The most important thing is probably making sure things are getting the right amount of sun and water, but if you’ve researched—” she looks to Ilya, “that shouldn’t be a problem. It’s pretty easily accessible. But I’ll walk with you, just in case.”

Shane grabs onto the cart again, trailing behind as Ilya and the employee — Shauna, as they learn when Ilya asks her name — around the store. He’s beginning to feel as if he needs to call in backup from Dad. Ilya and Shauna are discussing hedge nutrition and the pros and cons of pellet fertilizers. Maybe this is what other people feel like when he’s talking about hockey.

“любимыйlyuubimy?” Ilya asks. Shane looks up, and he’s holding up a pot of something. Shane blinks. “Shauna says this is good for shade, so maybe the part of the garden closest to the driveway, yes?”

“Yeah, sure,” Shane says. He doesn’t really have any strong opinions on the garden. He’d just seen the Forget-me-nots and been struck by something. He’s left the grand artistic visions of the specific layout and flowers to Ilya.

“Is there anything else you want before we let Shauna do her job again?”

Shauna, who’s been fussing with cutting yellowing leaves off some sort of puffy flower on the table next to them, shrugs. “This is my job.” She looks to Shane, expression carefully neutral.

“Yeah, um…” Shane glances at Ilya, and then looks back to Shauna. “What about apple trees?”

Planting a garden, as it turns out, is kind of rotten fucking work. Apparently, the 100-odd gallons of soil they bought and dragged home is absolutely necessary, even though there’s already a bunch of dirt in the entire yard. The dirt that’s already there isn’t good enough and they need to dig it up and replace it with the new dirt before they can plant the flowers. They had to lock Anya inside the house once they actually started filling the pits because she kept digging up the good dirt, too.

“Ilya, you’re gonna get a sunburn, come here.”

“Is ten degrees, I will not get sunburn,” llya says, quite literally elbows-deep in what will become one of the flowerbeds. “You put cream on me this morning. Is enough.”

“The sun is out. You’re gonna get a sunburn.”

Ilya is in only a tank top, back fully exposed to the April sunshine. It’s been about four hours since the last application, and Shane is in no mood to listen to him whine about how scratchy is under armor is against the raw skin of his sunburn. Sunburnt Ilya means whiny Ilya for at least a week, maybe two if he’s unlucky. Ilya grabs one of the potted perennials. He’s very clearly intending to ignore Shane and the tube of sunscreen in his hand.

“Ilya, baby,” Shane says, and he knows he’s hooked Ilya in by the way his shoulders twitch just a little. He tamps down on a smile as Ilya trods up to the deck. “Thank you,” Shane says curtly.

Ilya grumbles about being treated like a child when Shane liberally douses his arms and shoulders and neck in cream and rubs it in. He makes sure to pull Ilya in by the neck when he gets that far, though, and presses a sound kiss to his lips. He lets his mouth fall open and lets any noises escape freely, and by the time he pulls back there’s not a trace of irritation left in Ilya’s expression.

Shane puts the sunscreen on one of the living room side tables and goes to grab his shovel to return to the steadily growing pit in which they’ll put the apple tree. He had no idea trees were so fussy — the hole is huge and needs to be filled with the fancy new dirt, of course the most expensive kind, and then it needs to be watered, like, an insane amount for the first few days.

They have an away game in two days, so Shane has enlisted his father to dump about twenty gallons of water on it daily while they’re away. Something about this tree is making him anxious. The nice employee in the register at the garden centre told them it probably won’t bear fruit until next year, and Shane has maybe convinced himself he’s going to kill the tree before then. It would be terribly disappointing if the tree died before it had even flowered once.

He steps back to assess the pit, and deems it ready. He goes to grab the tree, undresses it from the plastic wrap around the roots and sticks it in the hole. Then an amount of dirt that shouldn’t surprise him given that he just spent about an hour getting just as much dirt out goes into the pit. He goes to grab the hose (also a new purchase) and just leaves it on the ground to run water into the fresh soil. Shane takes a step back to look at the apple tree.

In comparison to the neighbour’s tree (which he is very grateful for, because apparently apple trees “need a friend” to grow fruit) it isn’t much to write home about, but standing in their disaster-zone of a garden, Shane can see it ten, twenty years from now. The branches thick enough to support a macrame hanging chair, flowering with white and pale pink blooms in spring. He sees Ilya, holding their kids up by the armpits so they can reach and harvest the fruit in late summer, playing soccer with the fallfruit.

He looks over to now-Ilya, swearing in Russian over the dahlia tubers, a smear of sunscreen on his shoulder where Shane didn’t fully rub it in. He calls over, “tree’s planted!”

And Ilya looks up. Shane would dig a million stupid pits and buy a thousand bags of soil just for the smile on his face.

For a while, there isn’t really much in their garden except for the obscene amount of pansies. Nevertheless, Ilya preens for a full day when they get back from their roadie and Willa and Andrew compliment the new flowerbeds. “Told you it was good choice,” Ilya says into his shoulder in the shower, hand already palming Shane from behind.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Shane grouses, before turning around and pressing him up against the shower wall.

The forget-me-not that Shane picked out is nestled with some of the perennials, even though it’s apparently annual. There’s a petunia sapling in their kitchen window that caught Shane’s eye while they were shopping which will replace the forget-me-not when it’s over-bloomed. The garden is precisely the kind of organized chaos that Shane associates with Ilya, plants picked with the heart and planted based only on instinct.

Except…

Except there’s clearly spaces for the things Shane’s picked out. The spots are evenly spaced out in the garden so that everywhere you look there’s at least something of Shane’s. It makes something inside him go all warm and fuzzy.

Ilya’s arms snake around his waist as he’s looking out through the kitchen window at the garden. “Admiring my hard work?”

“More like my hard work, Rozanov,” Shane fires back quickly. “Don’t act like Anya didn’t do more digging than you.” He pauses for a second, melting into Ilya’s embrace. For a while, they don’t say anything while Shane sips his coffee and the Keurig spits out Ilya’s.

“Thank you,” Ilya says quietly.

“What for?”

Ilya’s arms squeeze him a little tighter. The Keurig has finished the coffee. Shane stays where he is, looking out at the pansies and forget-me-nots and the bush sage . Ilya kisses his neck. “Coming with me to garden centre. Digging stupid, huge, fucking hole. Planting flowers and tree for Mama.”

Shane takes a hand off his mug to lay it over Ilya’s. “I love you.”

Ilya kisses all the way up his neck until he can press his cheek to Shane’s and look out the window with him. “I love you, too.”

He chooses not to mention that he’s noticed Ilya leaving him spots, in the same way he never said thank you for the forget-me-nots for Irina. Ilya knows that he knows, that he’s grateful. Instead, he says, “your coffee is done. Don’t let it get cold.”

The day the dahlia tubers actually break ground, Ilya wakes Shane by sticking his phone in his face with the screen at full brightness. It’s rare that Ilya wakes up before Shane, even more so that he wakes Shane up.

Shane blinks at the offensive light, squirms under the weight of Ilya straddling his waist. “Shane, look!” his husband says, like he’s a kid and presents have appeared under the tree overnight. “You are supposed to be morning person. Wake up, look. Our child.”

Finally, Shane’s eyes focus enough that he can see the ridiculously bright screen. It’s a picture, zoomed in and mostly dirt, but there in the middle… “Is that the dahlias?”

He looks to Ilya and finds him with a wide grin on his face, nodding. Shane manages to extract a hand from the covers and give Ilya a high five. Ilya leans in for a kiss, breath a waft of spearmint because he knows that Shane won’t kiss with morning breath but halfway there is acceptable when it’s Shane who hasn’t brushed yet.

“Can we have breakfast in the garden today?” Ilya asks against his lips.

So they have breakfast in the garden. Ilya makes them egg on rye sandwiches, and Shane makes smoothies and they bring it all out and eat on the edge of the deck next to the flowerbed with the pansies. The morning dew is still clinging to the wood, and it’s a little too cold. Ilya drags blankets from the couch and they sit together while Anya runs laps around the lawn.

By the time the season ends and they’ve won a Stanley Cup with the Centaurs, the garden is in full bloom. The apple tree has a few shy blossoms and the leaves are looking healthy. The pansies are still going strong after careful pruning according to David’s instructions. Their last stretch of home games before finals saw them going back to the garden centre for a horde of pelargonium in a variety of colors. Bees buzz around the bush sage. The magnolia bush that was basically the only thing in the garden when Ilya moved in has exploded in a riot of blush pink flowers, and the currant bushes are starting to bear fruit.

When the entire team has consumed their body weight in alcohol and mostly slept it off, Shane and Ilya move all the deck furniture onto the lawn when they host a final celebratory dinner. The team file in, all varying degrees of awed at the state of the place. Wyatt actually asks for a tour, which Ilya happily gives and which ends up drawing in more members of the team.

Shane sits back and watches, resting his chin on a drawn-up knee in one of the lawn chairs. Bood sits next to him, leaned back in his own chair. “It’s nice to see you guys have settled in.”

Shane smiles without taking his eyes off Ilya, who is now rooting around for any ripe blackberries to hand to his captive audience. “Yeah,” Shane agrees, “it really is.”

“It wasn’t like this last year.”

It wasn’t like this last year. Shane’s first year with the cens, his first year after moving back to Ottawa. Still reeling from being outed and ousted from his old team, from taking a huge pay cut to play second line on a team only struggling slightly less than they were before Ilya joined. Ilya was still adjusting to his new medication, even after sifting through the truly bad options during the off-season.

Bood knocks him lightly on the shoulder, and Shane finally tears his eyes from Ilya. Dykstra and LaPointe are playing rock-paper-scissors for the last blackberry. Bood raises his eyebrows and Shane flips him the bird. He’s fucking allowed to be in love with his own husband in his own house. Bood graciously lets it slide without chirping.

The rest of the team comes back, fingers stained with blackberry juice. Ilya doesn’t hesitate to sit himself down in Shane’s lap. He offers a handful of red currants. “Trade you for kiss,” he says.

“You’re ridiculous,” Shane says, but takes two and presses a kiss to Ilya’s lips before popping them in his mouth.

Bood gracefully doesn’t comment, again, but Shane can tell he wants to. He nods toward the apple tree. “What kind is that?”

“Oh,” Shane says, “it’s, uh, a Melrose, I think it’s called?”

He nods. “Nice. I’ll try to remember that. You’ll have to tell me if it’s any good. My neighbor has this, like, insane fucking apple tree. She gave us a bunch last year, and some apple sauce. Milo loved it. I asked her what kind, but she couldn’t remember. Said it’d been there forever, apparently.”

Shane lets his head drop onto Ilya’s shoulder, glancing up at him as he answers. “Yeah. Still a few years until we’ve got “give stuff away to the neighbors”-harvests, but we’ll let you know.”

“Mm, yes,” Ilya agrees softly, “no apple sauce for toddlers, yet. But maybe soon.”

“Yeah,” Shane breathes. He bites his lip to stop the stupid grin from taking over his whole face. “Soon, maybe.”