Chapter Text
The pub had the kind of lighting that made everyone look softer around the edges.
Amber bulbs glowed behind the bar, reflected in rows of upside-down pint glasses, and every surface carried that warm haze of Friday-night familiarity. Old wood polished by years of elbows and spilled beer, scratched tables crowded too close together. Somewhere near the dartboards, someone was feeding terrible music into the jukebox.
Shane liked this place because nothing ever changed in it.
Same awful framed photos of local hockey teams from fifteen years ago. Even their group always ended up in the same corner booth somehow, packed too tightly around tables meant for fewer people.
The ritual of it mattered more now that everyone was technically adults.
Not that any of them acted like it.
Luca was in the middle of an aggressively passionate argument about hockey statistics no one else cared about. Hayden kept stealing fries off everyone’s plates with zero shame. Cliff was half-listening while scrolling through his phone. Troy had his arm thrown over the back of the booth behind Ilya like he owned the place.
And Ilya...
Shane glanced toward him automatically.
It happened all the time. The glance. Muscle memory at this point.
Ilya sat relaxed beside him, one ankle hooked over the opposite knee, dark sweater pushed up at the forearms. Laughing at something Troy said. His head tipped back slightly when he laughed, exposing the long line of his throat.
He looked good tonight.
Not dressed up exactly, but sharpened somehow. Cleaner around the edges.
Shane noticed because Shane always noticed.
Not consciously at first. It had simply become instinct over the years, the same way he could identify Ilya’s footsteps before seeing him or recognize his laugh in a crowded place.
All those years of friendship rewired a person.
They’d met when they were children, after Ilya’s family moved from Russia to Montreal. Five years old, speaking fractured English with a brutal little accent and enormous dark eyes, standing in the middle of Shane’s kindergarten classroom looking deeply unimpressed by everyone.
Apparently Shane had walked directly up to him and asked if he liked dinosaurs.
Ilya had stared at him for a long time before saying, very seriously, “Only the violent ones.”
That had been it.
Friendship. Immediate and irreversible.
There were entire sections of Shane’s life that existed with Ilya threaded through them automatically. School lunches. Broken bones. Basement sleepovers. Hockey camps. Funerals. Apartment hunting. Drunken disasters in university.
Every version of Shane contained Ilya somewhere nearby.
Sometimes Shane thought knowing someone that long rewired your brain permanently.
“You’re not even listening,” Hayden accused from somewhere to Shane’s left.
Shane blinked slowly, dragged back into the conversation by the sound of his own name being implied.
“Hm?”
Hayden pointed a fry at him accusingly. “See? Exactly my point.”
“I am listening,” Shane said automatically.
“You absolutely are not.”
“You were saying...” Shane reached for his beer casually, stalling. “Something stupid.”
“Wow,” Hayden said flatly.
“That narrows it down zero,” Cliff added.
Laughter rippled around the table.
Shane smiled automatically, easy and practiced. He was good at this part. Good at smoothing into conversations, at making everyone comfortable, at becoming exactly the version of himself people expected.
Across the booth, Ilya was already looking at him.
Not unusual either.
Their attention had always worked like magnets. Effortless. Constant.
“What?” Shane asked.
Ilya shrugged lightly, though the corner of his mouth curled. “You disappear in your head.”
“That’s because all of you are exhausting.”
“Rude,” Hayden said.
“True,” Shane corrected.
Someone threw a napkin at him.
Laughter moved easily through the group after that. Familiar in the way things became after years.
Shane smiled automatically, the expression sliding into place without effort. He was good at this version of himself. Good at existing inside groups. Good at smoothing conversations along when they stalled, pulling quieter people back in, making everyone feel seen.
People liked Shane.
That had always been true.
The server arrived balancing drinks against one arm and dropped another basket of fries onto the center of the table. Ryan immediately lunged across two people for them with absolutely no hesitation.
“Jesus Christ,” Ilya said. “Were you raised during war?”
“Yes,” Ryan answered. “Canadian public school.”
Another burst of laughter.
The noise swelled and softened again around Shane like waves hitting shore. Comfortable. Easy.
Shane laughed into his beer.
The sound around the table swelled again after that, warm and overlapping and familiar enough that Shane stopped really tracking the individual conversations. He let them wash over him instead.
This was his favorite part.
Not even the talking.
Just this.
Being here, with all his friends.
Outside, rain tapped lightly against the windows, blurring the neon beer signs into watercolor smears of blue and red.
It felt like one of those nights that would never end.
Then Ilya set down his drink. Shane looked up.
There was something different in his expression. Ilya leaned back slightly against the booth, fingers still resting loosely around his glass. His expression hadn’t changed much, but there was a deliberate stillness to him suddenly.
“I have news,” Ilya said.
“Oh, no,” Hayden groaned. “You got another motorcycle.”
“I hope you crash this one too,” Cliff added.
“I did not crash the last one.”
“That’s an interesting point of view.”
Ilya ignored him.
The table dissolved briefly into overlapping commentary again, everyone talking over one another while Ryan attempted to defend the structural danger of suburban landscaping.
Shane smiled faintly into his beer.
Across from him, though, Ilya wasn’t really participating anymore.
His gaze moved once around the table.
Brief.
Measured.
Then it landed on Shane for half a second longer than everyone else.
Something tightened unexpectedly beneath Shane’s ribs.
“I’m getting married,” Ilya said.
For one odd second, nobody reacted at all.
The sounds of the pub rushed forward instead. Music. Glasses clinking. A burst of laughter from somewhere near the dartboards.
Then everyone spoke at once.
“What?”
“No fucking way.”
“You’re kidding.”
“To who?”
“Since when?”
“You hate weddings.”
The entire table erupted into disbelief so immediate and chaotic that two people at the next booth turned to stare.
And Shane… Shane laughed too.
Automatically.
Reflexively.
Because the words themselves made no sense.
“Sure you are,” he said easily. He reached for his beer as he said it, already expecting the conversation to turn into a joke. Already expecting Ilya to smirk. Roll his eyes. Call them idiots for believing him.
Ilya looked directly at him.
Didn’t smile.
Something cold slipped silently beneath Shane’s ribs.
The room narrowed instantly.
The sound around him stretched strangely distant, voices muffled under rushing blood.
“…you’re serious.”
Ilya held his gaze.
“Da.”
Something inside Shane’s chest misfired. The word snagged strangely in his brain.
Married.
Not dating.
Not seeing someone.
Married.
There should have been warning signs.
That was the first coherent thought Shane managed to have.
Some indication.
Some conversation he’d missed.
Because Shane noticed things about Ilya. Always. He noticed haircuts and moods and exhaustion and when he switched brands of coffee.
How had this happened quietly enough for Shane not to see it coming?
“To who?” he heard himself ask.
“Svetlana.”
Of course Shane knew Svetlana.
Beautiful in a quiet way. Dark curls. Elegant posture. Intelligent eyes that missed nothing. She’d known Ilya for years through family friends, drifting in and out of holidays and summer gatherings and celebrations. The kind of woman people described as poised. Beautiful in a composed kind of way.
Shane had always liked her.
That was the problem.
There was nothing obviously wrong with her for Ilya.
No glaring incompatibility Shane could latch onto. No disaster logic. No absurdity.
She made sense.
Which was somehow the worst possible thing.
“She’s beautiful,” Hayden was saying somewhere nearby.
“How long has this been happening?”
“You kept this secret?”
“When’s the wedding?”
Questions crashed over each other.
Ilya answered somewhere in the chaos, but Shane barely heard him.
His heartbeat had gone strange.
Too hard. Too slow.
Like his body couldn’t figure out the correct emergency response.
He became abruptly aware of his breathing. Or the lack of it. The inhale catching too high in his chest.
Ilya’s eyes kept flicking back toward Shane.
Waiting.
And Shane understood suddenly, with horrible clarity, that Ilya cared what he thought.
The realization landed heavy and intimate in the center of his chest.
So Shane did what he always did.
Performed normalcy.
He forced air into his lungs. Smiled on instinct.
“Jesus,” he said, voice almost steady. “Congratulations.”
Something shifted briefly across Ilya’s face.
Relief.
Tiny enough most people would have missed it.
Shane didn’t.
The realization landed a second later, slower and heavier than it should have: Ilya had been waiting for his reaction.
Maybe not even consciously Ilya had needed his approval.
And Shane had given it.
Of course he had.
“Thank you,” Ilya said.
Softly.
Only for him.
Shane picked up his beer because he needed something to do with his hands. The glass felt slippery suddenly.
The rest of the table kept talking, demanding details, making jokes about bachelor parties and divorce statistics and whether Ilya would finally stop living like a man emotionally allergic to commitment.
But Shane felt strangely removed from all of it now.
Like he was sitting one inch outside his own body.
Across from him, Ilya smiled at something Cliff said.
Engaged.
The word kept catching oddly in Shane’s head.
Engaged.
Getting married.
Marriage implied permanence.
Not temporary.
Not casual.
Permanent.
The thought settled slowly and heavily inside him, and Shane felt something in his chest shift painfully out of place.
Because permanence meant futures.
Shared apartments. Holidays. Decisions. A life that would gradually stop being shared with Shane.
The realization stole air from his lungs so abruptly he nearly coughed into his drink.
The pub suddenly felt too warm.
Too loud.
Too bright beneath the amber lights.
And the worst part was that everything around him remained perfectly normal.
Everyone was happy.
Of course they were.
This was good news. Wonderful news.
Shane laughed in the right places.
Nodded when expected.
He couldn’t actually hear his own voice correctly anymore.
He became bizarrely aware of tiny physical things: the damp ring his glass left on the table. The pressure of his collar against his throat. The way condensation slid over his knuckles.
A sharp burst of laughter rose from the end of the table.
Ilya was talking again, animated now under the barrage of attention, hands moving as he explained something.
“You okay?” Hayden asked quietly.
Shane looked at him too fast. “Fine.”
Hayden’s expression said he didn’t believe that for a second.
The celebration rolled onward around him.
Another round of drinks appeared.
Someone proposed a toast.
Shane realized abruptly that he could not stay here much longer.
Everything was happy.
Perfectly reasonable.
And somehow Shane felt like the floor beneath him had cracked open silently while everyone else kept drinking.
A laugh escaped him at the wrong moment. Too delayed.
Ilya glanced toward him again instantly.
“Are you okay?” Ilya asked, leaning towards him.
There it was again.
Concern.
Affection.
Familiarity carved deep enough to survive decades.
Shane smiled before the silence could stretch.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just tired.”
It sounded believable.
He’d had years of practice.
“Actually I should go,” he added. “Early morning tomorrow.”
He stood abruptly. His chair scraped against the floor.
Protests followed him while he pulled on his coat.
Only Ilya watched him carefully.
Shane shoved a smile onto his face because he’d spent his entire life learning how to do exactly that.
Ilya studied him one second longer.
Then nodded once.
“Drive safe.”
Shane nodded.
He pulled the door open before Ilya could look at him any longer.
Rain drifted cold across the street, turning the pavement glossy beneath the neon lights. Somewhere behind him, Cliff shouted loud enough to make the whole table laugh again.
Shane could still picture Ilya without turning around.
He started walking toward his car.