Archive of Our Own

Shane’s cards had not always been dangerous.

For a long time, they had been exactly what people expected them to be: neat, polite, affectionate in the proper amount, his handwriting clean across the inside of store-bought paper that said Happy Birthday or Merry Christmas or Congratulations in looping silver letters. He had always signed them warmly enough. Love, Shane.

Sometimes a little more if the occasion required it, sometimes a little less if he was writing to someone he liked perfectly well but wasn't very close with. No one ever cried over those cards. No one needed to sit down before opening them. No one looked at the envelope in their hands like they were about to receive life-altering information from a man who, in most ordinary conversations, would rather die than say any of it out loud.

Then, at some point, usually without warning, something changed.

He still gave them cards, but now he wrote in them properly, and that was a very different thing. Shane was careful with his words when he spoke, dry where other people were earnest, private where other people were obvious. On paper, apparently, none of that applied. Once he crossed whatever private line existed in his own head, he became alarmingly sincere. The cards stopped being cards and started being small emotional ambushes.

No one was ever ready for the switch.

That was the problem. Even after people knew it was a possibility, even after they had seen it happen to someone else, they still opened Shane’s cards like they were expecting paper and ink instead of a full account of exactly how much he loved them and why.

Shane had learned, eventually, to give those ones privately. This was not modesty. It was practical. There were only so many times a person could accidentally make a grown man cry in the middle of a birthday dinner before adjustments had to be made.

It became, over time, a strange little pattern in Shane’s life: first the ordinary cards, signed Love, Shane like anyone else in the world, and then, once he loved someone enough to trust them with the full force of it, the other kind. The kind people carried away to read again later. The kind that got folded back into envelopes with shaking hands. Shane never seemed especially embarrassed by the aftermath, which only made it worse.

He would hand over the card, watch a person disintegrate in front of him, and then respond with the calm patience of someone who had merely offered them a glass of water and not a handwritten account of exactly how much they were loved.

The first time anyone in his family began to suspect that Shane’s cards might, in fact, be a public health risk, Hayden was standing in the kitchen with one hand over his mouth and tears already running down his face.

See, Hayden had opened the card expecting a card.

That was the problem, really. He had known Shane long enough by then to expect affection, sincerity even, but not this. Not the particular, devastating precision Shane seemed to reserve for paper, where he could apparently say things he would rather swallow whole than speak aloud.

He had made some stupid joke about hoping there was cash inside. Then he had wandered off toward the kitchen with his drink in one hand and the card in the other, leaving everyone else in the living room with the cake and the noise and the rest of his birthday.

Shane, who had absolutely known what was coming, had let him go.

A minute later, he had gone suspiciously quiet.

I used to think some people were just born knowing how to have a best friend, and maybe I had just missed whatever lesson everyone else got when they were kids.

At first, no one noticed.

Why would they? The apartment was full enough, Jackie halfway through a story on the couch, somebody in the corner arguing about music, David trying to cut the cake with the intense concentration of a man who believed uneven slices were a moral failure. Shane was leaning against the kitchen island with his beer, one ankle crossed over the other, looking as calm as he always did when he had just done something quietly catastrophic and was waiting for the damage to unfold.

Then Jackie paused in the middle of a sentence and looked over toward the kitchen.

“Where’s Hayden?” she asked.

Shane took a sip of his beer. “In the kitchen.”

“That narrows it down.”

He only lifted one shoulder.

Jackie squinted at him for a second. Then she set her plate down on the coffee table and went looking, which was how she found Hayden standing at the far end of the kitchen with one hand braced flat against the counter, his head bent over the open card, and tears already running down his face.

I thought maybe I was too much, or not enough, or some combination of both that meant I was meant to love people from a little further away than everyone else.

“Oh my God,” Jackie said.

Hayden made a strangled sound that might once have been a laugh. “I know.”

Shane, still leaning against the island a few feet away, looked up at the sound of Jackie’s voice but otherwise did not seem especially alarmed. That, more than anything, probably should have warned her this was not a crisis so much as a recurring event. Hayden, meanwhile, was blinking rapidly down at the card as if there were any chance at all that the words might rearrange themselves into something survivable if he gave them enough time.

By the time I got old enough to know better, I had mostly accepted that maybe I just wasn’t going to have that. Not the way other people seemed to. Not the easy, obvious kind. Not the person who just fit.

They did not.

I told myself it was fine. I had good people around me, people I cared about. But there was always this quiet ache underneath, this sense that I was standing just outside a room where everyone else had already found their seat.

Jackie looked from Hayden to Shane and back again, her eyebrows climbing higher with every second. “Did you—”

“Yes,” Shane said.

“Jesus Christ.”

Hayden laughed again, properly this time, but it came apart in the middle and turned into something else. He lowered the card, looked at Shane like he was personally responsible for every emotion currently ruining his birthday, and then covered his eyes with the back of one hand.

And then you showed up and made me feel a little stupid for ever believing I had missed my chance. You made room for me so naturally I didn’t even realise, at first, how badly I had wanted someone like you in my life.

“This is so fucked up,” he said thickly.

Shane’s mouth twitched. “It is birthday card.”

“You cannot say all this to somebody in a birthday card.”

“I already did.”

“That’s not a defence.”

“No?”

“No!"

Jackie, who had apparently decided very quickly that this was the funniest thing she had seen all week provided one did not look too closely at the tears situation, leaned one shoulder against the doorway and folded her arms. “What did he write?”

Hayden made a helpless gesture with the card.

You just... stayed. And then you stayed again. And somewhere between all the staying, I stopped bracing for you to leave. You gave me a kind of friendship I used to think belonged to other people. You made it look easy. You made me feel wanted in ways I didn’t know I was still waiting for.

Hayden lowered the card very slowly, stared at Shane for one raw, disbelieving second, and then crossed the kitchen in three quick steps and grabbed him. Not dignified. Not measured. Just both arms around Shane’s shoulders, face tucked hard against him, the card crushed between them as Hayden finally lost the last of the fight he had been putting up.

Shane made a soft oof sound as the beer bottle got trapped awkwardly between his wrist and Hayden’s side, then set it down on the counter without complaint and put both arms around him.

There he was.

One hand settled between Hayden’s shoulder blades. The other came up to the back of his neck. He rubbed slowly up and down, patient as anything, while Hayden clung to him and laughed wetly into his shoulder in the humiliating, broken way people did when they were crying too hard to be at all charming about it.

Jackie looked at Shane over Hayden’s shoulder.

Shane looked back, entirely composed, and gave her a small OK sign.

That made her snort out a laugh she tried very hard to turn into a cough.

“You absolute menace,” she said.

Hayden, still folded into Shane’s shoulder, lifted one hand blindly and flipped her off.

“See?” Jackie said. “He’s emotional and rude. You’ve really done a number on him.”

“I’m aware,” Shane said.

Hayden pulled back just enough to glare at him with a face already going blotchy. “You wrote me a psychological attack.”

I love everything about being your friend. I love how easy you make it to stay. I love that somewhere along the way you became family to me without asking permission first. I didn’t know, before you, that I could still have this. A best friend. A brother. A person I trust with my whole heart without ever needing to say it like that out loud, because somehow you always knew anyway.

“I wrote you birthday card.”

“You need to stop saying that like this is normal.”

Shane tilted his head, considering. “It is normal for me.”

“That is the least reassuring thing you’ve ever said.”

Jackie held out a hand. “Let me see it.”

Hayden clutched the card to his chest at once. “Absolutely not.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No. I’m serious. I’ll die.”

“You’re already dying.”

“I can die more.”

That got an actual laugh out of Shane, brief and quiet and impossible not to feel rewarded by. Hayden made an offended sound at it and shoved weakly at his shoulder, which only made Shane’s expression soften.

I don't know what I did to deserve you. I don't know what stars aligned or what I did right in a past life to land you in this one. But I am so grateful. I am so, so grateful. And I want you to know that I see you too. I see how hard you work, how much you carry, how quietly you hold things together for everyone around you. I see the person you are when no one is watching, and that is the person I am most proud to know.

“Okay,” Jackie said after a moment, her own voice suspiciously tighter than before. “Maybe don’t let me read it actually.”

Shane glanced at her. “Good instinct.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Have you done this to other people?”

Shane looked thoughtful for exactly long enough to be annoying. “Yes.”

“How many other people?”

“Enough.”

“Shane.”

He smiled into Hayden’s hair and said nothing.

That was answer enough, apparently, because Jackie just shook her head once and pushed away from the doorway, muttering something under her breath that sounded a lot like unbelievable. But she was smiling when she went, and when she passed back through the living room a minute later and David asked where Hayden was, she only said, “Emotionally compromised,” and kept walking.

Hayden stayed where he was for a while.

I still don't know what I did to deserve you. But I'm not going anywhere. And if you ever need someone to make room for you the way you made room for me— I'm already here.

Long enough that the music changed. Long enough that the candles on the cake had to be relit because apparently nobody was willing to drag the birthday boy out of his breakdown until he had finished having it. Shane did not seem to mind. He kept one hand on Hayden’s back and the other at his neck, steady and absentminded, as if this were not the direct and foreseeable result of his own choices.

Eventually Hayden pulled away enough to wipe at his face and look down at the card again. “Friends and brothers,” he said, his voice wrecked all over again. “For the rest of our lives?”

Shane, because he was apparently determined to kill him properly, only said, “Yes.”

Hayden stared at him for a second, then dropped his forehead to Shane’s shoulder with a low groan. “I’m gonna be sick.”

“You’re okay.”

“I’m not okay,” Hayden said into his shirt. “You can’t just— You can’t just write things like that down.”

Shane’s hand moved once, slow over the back of his neck. “Seems like I can.”

“Shut up.”

“Okay.”

Hayden laughed despite himself, which turned into one last broken little hiccup of crying and then, finally, into something he could live with. When he straightened properly, his face was a mess and his dignity was long gone and the card in his hand already looked handled too much to ever lie flat again. He looked at Shane with the dazed, exhausted expression of someone who had just survived a weather event.

“You’re insane,” he said.

Shane considered that. “Maybe.”

“No, like, clinically. Someone should study this.”

“Probably.”

Hayden looked down at the card again, then folded it shut with exaggerated care, like he no longer trusted himself to look directly at it for too long. “I’m keeping this forever, by the way. And if you ever die before me,” Hayden said, still sniffling, “I’m getting buried with it.”

Jackie’s voice floated in from the living room. “Jesus Christ.”

Hayden didn’t even turn around. “Mind your business.”

Shane, infuriatingly calm, rubbed one thumb once over Hayden’s shoulder and said, “That seems little impractical.”

“Don’t start with me.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Well, stop saying.”

Shane’s mouth twitched. “Okay.”

Thank you for being my person.

And that, more or less, was how the family learned that Shane’s cards had become a threat to public safety.

----

By the time Ilya learned about Shane’s cards properly, the people closest to Shane had already developed strategies.

Some of them practical. Some of them emotional. Most of them, as far as Ilya could tell, inadequate.

It was Yuna’s birthday, and the card itself did not look especially alarming. Cream envelope. Shane’s handwriting across the front. Nothing about it to suggest disaster. And yet when Yuna picked it up off the table, she handled it with the careful concentration of someone who knew there was at least a moderate chance this was going to end with her in tears. That, more than anything, was what caught Ilya’s attention.

He looked from the envelope to Yuna, then to Shane.

Shane, noticing the look, only lifted one shoulder.

Interesting.

Yuna opened it slowly. Not suspiciously, exactly. More like a person who had every intention of reading every word properly the first time. The room kept moving around her while she did it — glasses clinking, somebody laughing in the kitchen, Hayden saying something to David that made Jackie snort into her wine — but Ilya’s attention, against his own better judgement, settled and stayed.

Yuna read the first few lines with a small smile.

Then the smile changed.

It did not disappear. It softened. Her mouth pressed together slightly at one corner, the way it did when she was trying very hard not to make a scene over something that had gotten under her skin faster than expected.

She went still after that, eyes moving more slowly over the page, one thumb braced against the fold of the card as if holding it steady had become a task requiring concentration.

Ilya frowned a little.

Across the room, Shane had gone very still too, not tense, just attentive in that quiet way of his.

That was also interesting.

Yuna finished reading and stayed where she was for a second, looking down at the card.

Then she looked up at Shane with tears in her eyes.

Ilya sat up before he could stop himself.

Not in panic. Not exactly. More in confusion. Shane had not said anything. He had given his mother a birthday card, and now she looked like she was trying not to cry in front of the entire family.

Then Yuna crossed the room, put one hand against Shane’s cheek, and pulled him into a long, quiet hug.

No one interrupted.

That, perhaps, was the strangest part. No jokes, no commentary, not even Hayden, who seemed to recognise the moment on sight and wisely kept his mouth shut. The room simply adjusted around them, giving the embrace the sort of respectful space people made instinctively when they knew something meaningful was happening and had no desire to cheapen it by pointing.

Shane folded into the hug at once, one arm around her waist, the other coming up between her shoulder blades.

When she finally let him go, she kissed his cheek and said something too low for Ilya to hear.

Shane answered with that little private smile of his, the one that always looked like he was trying not to be more openly fond than the situation allowed.

And because apparently the entire Hollander family was committed to behaving like this was perfectly ordinary, everyone moved on.

Ilya, naturally, did not.

Later, when he had a chance to see the card — whether Yuna showed him, or Shane left it somewhere, he learned what had been in it.

Happy birthday, Mom.

I know birthday cards are supposed to be shorter than this, but apparently that’s not happening, so you’ll have to live with it.

The last year made me realise again how lucky I am that you’re my mother. I know that isn’t exactly new information, and I’m sure I’ve been aware of it in some form my whole life, but some years make you understand old facts more clearly, and this was one of them.

You’ve always been strong in a way that made hard things feel manageable, even when they weren’t. I think that’s one of the first things you ever taught me without meaning to. Not that life would always be easy, because obviously it wasn’t, but that difficult things could still be lived through. That panic was not the same thing as disaster. That people could keep going. That love could keep a house steady even when everything else felt uncertain.

You’ve always been supportive in a way that never felt performative or conditional. You were just there. Constantly. Quietly, when quiet was what was needed, and loudly when it wasn’t. I think I probably took that for granted when I was younger, which is what children do when they grow up inside something solid. They assume it’s ordinary because they’ve never had to imagine life without it.

The older I get, the more I understand that it wasn’t ordinary at all. Not everyone gets someone as steady as you. Not everyone gets a mother who makes it so easy to believe they are loved that it becomes part of the architecture of their life. I did. I do. And I know how lucky that makes me.

You made home feel safe for me. You made being loved feel normal, and I think that’s one of the best things a parent can do for a child. You gave me a place where I could grow up without having to wonder whether love would still be there when I came back to it. That is a bigger gift than I think I knew how to measure when I was younger, but I can measure it now.

And I think, over the last year especially, I’ve understood again how much of who I am rests on things you gave me so naturally I barely even knew to name them at the time. Patience. Stubbornness, probably. The ability to keep standing up when things are difficult. The certainty that loving people properly is worth the trouble.

I hope one day I can be even half the parent to my own children that you’ve been to me. If I can make them feel even a fraction as safe, as supported, and as loved as you always made me feel, I’ll think I did something right. More than right, actually. I’ll think I was lucky enough to pass on one of the best things I was ever given.

I love you very much. Happy birthday.

Love, Shane

It was, Ilya thought upon reading it, an absolutely deranged thing to hand a woman in a folded piece of paper over birthday cake.

And perhaps worse than that, it was beautiful.

That was the point where Ilya understood two things at once.

First, that the stories about Shane’s cards had not been exaggerated.

Second, with a small, sinking feeling he immediately resented, that eventually one of those cards was going to be his.

The thought arrived whole and unwelcome.

He wondered, against his will, what Shane would write to him.

Then he stopped wondering at once, because that way lay humiliation of a very particular kind, and Ilya had no interest in making himself ridiculous over a hypothetical birthday card months before his birthday. It was paper. Folded paper. That was all.

Still, the thought had lodged itself somewhere inconvenient.

He did his best to forget about it.

It helped that Shane never mentioned it. There was no smugness, no little look across the room, no indication at all that he had noticed Ilya noticing anything. He simply went on as usual, which in some ways made it worse. If he had teased him once, if he had said something dry and unbearable that gave Ilya an excuse to be annoyed, perhaps the whole thing would have settled properly.

Instead it was left alone, which meant it stayed where it was, quiet and unhelpful, surfacing only now and then at moments that made Ilya feel faintly insane.

Shane, months later, signing his name at the bottom of a thank-you note and Ilya, absurdly, having to look away.

Stupid.

He ignored it.

Mostly.

It did not help that Shane kept happening near him. Shane at the kitchen table, pen in hand, writing something with his hair falling forward so Ilya could see the pale nape of his neck. Shane in the doorway of the bedroom, shirt untucked, humming something off-key while he folded laundry with irritating competence.

Shane asleep on the couch one Sunday afternoon, mouth slightly open, one arm dangling off the cushion, and Ilya standing there with a blanket in his hands like an idiot, staring at him for thirty seconds before he draped it over him.

He almost pushed Shane's hair back from his forehead.

He didn't.

---

By the time his birthday came around, Ilya had done an admirable job of not thinking about Shane’s cards.

Shane, infuriatingly, gave no sign of planning anything catastrophic.

He was perfectly normal about the whole thing. Maybe a little too normal, actually, which should have been suspicious, except Shane was also capable of making breakfast with that same flat, innocent expression while concealing any number of terrible intentions.

He kissed Ilya good morning, wished him happy birthday into the side of his mouth like he was not ruining his life by inches, and then went about the rest of the morning with the calm efficiency of a man who had absolutely nothing to hide.

It was a quiet day by design. No dinner out, no family descending on them in waves, no need to sit through a room full of people singing at him while he figured out what to do with his face. Just the two of them at home, which was how Ilya liked most things that mattered.

There were flowers on the counter from Yuna, a bottle of wine already open by the time the food was finished, and the easy sort of peace that settled over the apartment only on nights when neither of them had anywhere else to be.

Shane was in one of those moods that made him impossible to resist.

Not unusually affectionate, exactly. He was always affectionate with Ilya, in the thousand ordinary ways that had long ago become the structure of their life together. But tonight there was something especially soft in him, some extra looseness around the edges, some private satisfaction he was trying not to show too openly and failing at only because Ilya knew him too well to miss it.

He kept touching him in passing. A hand at the small of his back while reaching around him in the kitchen. Fingers brushing his wrist when he handed him a glass. A kiss stolen from the corner of his mouth for no reason except that Shane, apparently, had looked at him and decided he wanted one. 

By the time they finished dinner, Ilya was more interested in getting his hands on Shane than in behaving like a reasonable adult.

This was, in his view, an entirely appropriate use of a birthday.

Shane was rinsing plates when Ilya came up behind him and put both hands on his waist.

“You are very clingy tonight,” Shane said, though he leaned back into him immediately.

“It is my birthday.”

“That is not answer.”

“It is excellent answer.”

Shane laughed softly and turned in his arms, damp hands settling briefly against Ilya’s shirt before he dried them on a dish towel abandoned somewhere over his shoulder. He looked good like this — sleeves pushed up, hair a little messy, mouth still pink from wine, familiar in a way that kept taking Ilya by surprise even now.

Domesticity should have made him less devastating by now. It had not.

Ilya kissed him before he could say anything else irritating.

Shane made a pleased sound into it at once, one hand finding the front of Ilya’s shirt and bunching lightly there while the other came up to his jaw. It started as the sort of kiss they had a hundred times a week, easy and thoughtless and part of the shape of their evenings, but it did not stay that way for long.

It rarely did when Shane had had wine and nowhere to be. He leaned into Ilya more fully after a few seconds, mouth softening, body loosening, the whole of him warm and willing and so familiar that Ilya felt his own chest go quiet with it.

There he was.

He deepened the kiss a little, one hand sliding around Shane’s waist and the other to the back of his neck. Shane let himself be guided without resistance, smiling faintly against his mouth as if he knew exactly where this was going and approved of the route.

When Ilya nudged him backward, Shane went easily. When the backs of his thighs met the counter, he made that same little pleased sound again, and Ilya, because he was only a man and not an especially good one under these circumstances, lifted him up onto it without much ceremony.

Shane opened for him at once, knees parting so Ilya could step in between them, one hand settling at the back of his neck again while the other braced against the counter beside him. The position was familiar enough to make something low and affectionate turn over in Ilya’s chest.

Shane on the counter, warm and a little flushed, kissing him like he had nowhere else in the world he wanted to be.

Very nice birthday, actually.

Ilya kissed him until Shane was smiling helplessly into it. Then along his jaw. Then at the corner of his mouth again because he liked the way Shane giggled softly when he did that, as if being kissed in too many places in quick succession was somehow both ridiculous and deeply satisfactory. Shane’s fingers had found the hair at the nape of his neck by then, scratching lightly in the way that always made it harder for Ilya to think straight.

Manipulative, really.

Very effective.

He put one hand flat on the counter beside Shane’s hip and the other at his waist, thumbs slipping under the hem of his shirt just enough to feel warm skin. Shane shivered for him, immediate and honest, and tipped his head back when Ilya kissed his throat.

“You are spoiled,” Ilya murmured against his skin.

“It’s your birthday,” Shane said, breathless enough to be gratifying. “I’m being generous.”

Ilya smiled into the next kiss. “Is that what this is?”

“Mm.” Shane ran his fingers once through the short curls at the back of his head. “Don’t be ungrateful.”

As if Ilya had ever been capable of that where Shane was concerned.

He kissed him again, slower now, one of those kisses that made time go a little strange around the edges. Not urgent. Not careless. Just the steady, devastating sort of affection that felt too intimate to be shown to anyone else and yet had become so ordinary between them that it now lived in the kitchen between clean plates and half-drunk wine and the quiet hum of the refrigerator.

"There," Ilya said quietly, rubbing slow circles into the hollow of Shane's spine. "Relax."

"I am relaxed."

"You are kissing me like you are trying to climb inside my skin."

Shane pulled back just enough to give him an unimpressed look. "That was one time."

"It was many times."

Shane's face lit up, helpless and delighted, and he dissolved into giggles right there on the kitchen counter, legs tightening around Ilya's waist as if to keep him from escaping the sound. It was undignified and ridiculous and Ilya felt his heart melt so fast it was almost embarrassing.

He kissed the corner of Shane's smile, then the other corner, then his cheek, then his eyebrow for no reason except that Shane's giggles turned softer, breathier, when he did.

Ilya smiled, and kissed him properly. Shane melted into it, smiling against his mouth, fingers scratching at his scalp in that way that made thinking difficult. Ilya let his hand slide higher on Shane's thigh and felt him arch into him with a soft sound.

By the time Shane put a hand flat to his chest and gently pushed him back, Ilya was warm all the way through and in no fit state to discuss anything intelligently.

He frowned a little. “What?”

Shane was smiling at him, soft and pink and kissed senseless enough himself that it took some of the sting out of the interruption. “I have to get your gifts.”

For one dazed second, Ilya only looked at him.

He had, rather embarrassingly, forgotten all about gifts.

Not his finest moment.

Then the meaning of the words reached him properly, and something bright and stupid moved through him all at once. “Ah,” he said, eloquent as ever.

Shane laughed, quick and helpless, and leaned in to kiss him once more before sliding off the counter. “Stay there.”

“I’m not dog.”

“No,” Shane said, already halfway out of the kitchen. “You’re worse. Be good anyway.”

Ilya watched him go.

Then he leaned both hands on the counter behind him and tried, with limited success, to remember how to be a person for the next thirty seconds.

When Shane came back, he was carrying two wrapped boxes.

That, at least, restored some of Ilya’s higher brain function.

He straightened at once. “You wrapped it.”

Shane gave him a look. “Obviously.”

Ilya took them from him with what he felt was commendable restraint, though he was aware Shane was watching him closely enough to find even that amusing. The paper was dark blue, neatly folded at the corners, the tape almost invisible. Of course it was. Shane wrapped gifts the same way he did everything else: with irritating competence and enough care to make the result look effortless.

“What?” Shane said.

“You are very smug.”

“I’m not smug.”

“You wrapped something this neatly and brought it to me with that face. You are definitely smug.”

That made Shane smile, which was more or less an admission.

Ilya put both boxes down and opened the smaller box first.

Inside, nestled in tissue paper, was a stuffed loon. Not a cartoonish one. A proper one, soft grey and black with a white breast and a red eye that looked almost real, the sort of thing found in a museum gift shop rather than a toy store. The tag on its foot said something about conservation funding. Of course it did.

Ilya stared at it.

Then he looked up at Shane, who was watching him with that particular expression — soft around the mouth, trying not to look pleased with himself and failing.

"You are mocking me," Ilya said.

"No."

"You bought me a bird."

"A loon."

"Same thing."

Shane's smile widened slightly. "You cried the first time you heard them at the cottage. You pretended it was allergies, but you were standing on the dock at six in the morning with your coffee and you wiped your eyes twice."

"I did not."

"You did."

Ilya looked back down at the loon. Its eye was glassy and dark and somehow judgemental. "I hate this," he said, and tucked it under his arm lovingly.

Shane laughed, quiet and warm, and reached past him to the next box. "There's more."

He pulled out a flat package, wrapped in the same dark blue paper, and handed it over. Ilya unwrapped it to find a collection of items he didn't immediately recognise. Small packets. A roll-on stick. Something that looked like a miniature heating pad with a USB cord.

"What is this," Ilya said, not really a question.

"You said Icy-Hot patches don't work on you." Shane's voice had gone quieter, more practical, the way it did when he was being careful about something that mattered. "So I found alternatives. The roll-on is menthol and arnica, supposedly better for deep tissue. The heat pad is for your ribs — low setting, you can wear it under your shirt during meetings. The packets are herbal compresses, you microwave them. I don't know if any of it works, but—" He shrugged one shoulder, suddenly almost shy. "You won't admit your ribs still hurt, so I thought I'd try."

Ilya looked at the collection in his hands.

Then at Shane.

Then back at the loon, which he was still holding against his chest without meaning to.

"You researched this," he said.

"Yes."

"For how long?"

Shane's mouth twitched. "A while."

Ilya set the migraine aids down carefully on the counter. He kept the loon. He was, apparently, going to keep the loon.

"You are the worst person I know," he said.

"Okay."

"You make it very difficult to be normal."

"I know."

Ilya looked at the loon again. Its red eye gleamed up at him. He thought of the dock, the mist, the sound of them calling across the water while Shane stood beside him in a sweater that smelled like wood smoke, not saying anything, just there.

He pulled Shane in by the front of his shirt and kissed him. Shane made a surprised sound into it and then softened, one hand coming up to his jaw, the other settling at his waist.

When Ilya pulled back, Shane was smiling properly now, open and pleased and still trying to hide it.

He stepped closer, one hand coming up to rest light at Ilya’s waist, familiar and warm and entirely unhelpful. The touch was so easy by now, so ordinary, that it still had the power to wrong-foot him when he was already feeling too much. Ilya looked down at the gifts once more, then back at Shane, and felt something in his chest go very quiet with it.

He set the boxes aside before he did something embarrassing, like thank him too properly.

Shane watched him do it.

Then, when Ilya straightened again, he was still standing there with that same unreadable little look, one hand at Ilya’s waist, the other hanging loose by his side.

“What?” Ilya said.

Shane shook his head once, almost absently, and looked down for a second as if deciding something. Then he reached behind him to the counter. When he turned back, there was an envelope in his hand.