Chapter Text
“I’ll ask again, is this really necessary?" Shane whines to his mom.
“Yes, Shane, you are bringing home twins. We’ll need the room when you all come to stay,” she tells him for what seems like the thousandth time.
“We live 20 minutes away. When will we all be needing to stay here?” He argues back.
“I’m not discussing this with you anymore. Please go up there and sort what is yours. If you don't, we are throwing it all away,” she says, shooing him up to the attic, which will soon be converted to a new bedroom and en suite. Shane has already made it clear many times to Ilya and probably his parents that he is not happy about the change to his childhood home, even if he hasn’t lived in it for nearly two decades.
Ilya shares a knowing look with David. Both men have long since learned that when Yuna and Shane get into a back and forth, it is best to stay well out of the way and let the argument resolve itself, usually with Shane sulking that his mother was right all along.
Shane reluctantly climbs the ladder as Yuna gives a triumphant ‘hmph’ and walks back to the kitchen.
“I should help him,” Ilya tells his father-in-law before following Shane up the rickety ladder.
-
“Careful of your footing,” Shane calls behind him when he hears Ilya come up. "Stay on the beams.”
“Yes, I am a grown man. I know how attics work moya lestnitsa.”
Shane huffs, "If anyone is a staircase in this relationship, it’s you.”
“Why, because you like to climb me?” Ilya teases with a slight, sultry tone that has Shane blushing and hoping his parents aren’t listening, even though they have heard Ilya say far worse over the years.
He decides to not warrant that comment with a response, so instead he gets straight to the business at hand. “I guess we just pick a box and get to work,” he says, crouching down beside one labelled ‘Shane Middle School.'
He notices Ilya settle beside him as he’s digging through the box and pulls out a battered old binder. “I remember this," he says in an excited whisper. "We were told to do a research project on one of our interests,” he tells Ilya, showing him the binder. “I did mine on the 94-95 lockout.”
Ilya smirks, "of course you did.”
“I wanted to do it on Kirk Muller, but the school library didn’t have any books on him. " Shane carries on, ignoring his husband's taunting tone.
“And they had books on a hockey strike?”
“Ottawa,” Shane replies as if that is an answer all in itself, “plus they had loads of information in the newspaper archive.”
Ilya shakes his head at the absurdity of how much Canadians love hockey.
“I can’t throw this out, can I?” Shane asks, looking at Ilya, batting his eyelashes.
“You want to keep school project on boring strike?” Ilya looks at him with a raised eyebrow and groans, "Shane, we don’t have space for all this in our attic.”
“It can go in the garage,” Shane muses, causing Ilya to groan again. “I worked really hard on it." He works those eyelashes even harder.
“Take pictures of it on your phone, then you can read all your 12-year-old thoughts on the fun hockey lockout whenever you want.”
Happy with this solution, he kisses Ilya’s cheek. "Do I ever tell you how smart you are?”
“Not enough,” Ilya mumbles and then lets out an excited gasp in surprise. "Shane, look!” He cries at a box labelled "Shane Skates" and pulls it towards them. He opens the box carefully, pulling out a tiny pair of ice skates. “Okay, we keep these. They are so cute,” he squeals.
Shane examines the skates in Ilya's hands. “Oh wow, they must be one of my very first pairs.”
“I can’t believe they used to fit you,” Ilya says, still with a squeal in his voice that makes Shane smile wide.
He takes the left one in his hand, running his fingers carefully across the blade. "Maybe we can try them on the twins when they’re older.”
Ilya snatches the shoe back from him. “Erm, no, they are from the 90’s. They are probably death traps. Only the best for our children,” he says dramatically, waving his hand, making Shane’s heart skip at the term ‘our children.'
"We will put these in little glass box in the trophy room,” Ilya continues. "Then when we are as old as Scott Hunter and need money for a care home, we will sell them. Make a small fortune from Shane Hollander's very first skates.”
Shane just laughs at his ridiculousness, pulling another box towards him. Upon opening, he realizes it’s not anything belonging to him. There are many papers headed "McGill," the university his parents both attended and where they met. Being the nosey Hollander that he is, he rifles through it anyway. Some old essays, which make him relieved to see that he is not the only one in the family who has clung to old schoolwork. “Oh, I think I know what this is,” he says excitedly, showing an old newspaper to Ilya, who is now trying to squeeze the old children's skates onto his hands like gloves.
Ilya carefully puts the skates back into their box so he can take the paper and read the headline, ‘Future MLH Star?: McGill’s very own David Hollander' and then the author underneath it, ‘Yuna Kato.’
“No?!” Ilya grins.
Shane just nods with a smirk.
"She was, how the rookies say, down bad,” Ilya laughs heartily.
“Oh yeah, she was down bad." Shane nods, smirking again.
Shane knows Ilya has heard parts of the story before, how his parents met when his dad was playing for the university team and his mom was trying her hand at being an amateur sports journalist. His dad being completely blind to how much his mom liked him and how he had not clued in to any of the increasingly obvious signals she was laying down. “I thought she was just nice to all the players,” his dad had said in the past, trying to defend himself. "Look at her. I didn’t think there was any way in hell she’d like me in that way.”
"David, you were captain of the hockey team. Everyone liked you,” his mom had laughed at him.
"Yeah, but you seemed too cool, like you should’ve been dating a fancy artist or a rock star,” he’d argued.
Shane had heard variations of this argument many times growing up. Ilya had surely heard it too since he’d been in their lives.
-
Ilya takes the article from Shane while giggling to himself, reading it. It was very clearly a declaration of teenage love, but from what he’s heard, poor David still didn’t get the message. Ilya knows his mother-in-law as a confident, strong woman who takes no nonsense from anyone. It’s difficult to imagine her as a love-struck nineteen-year-old.
He gets up still smiling and reading, leaving Shane now going through a box of his old artwork, probably drawings of Kirk Muller and Wayne Gretzky with hearts around them, knowing Shane.
Then Ilya hears the floor crack beneath him before he sees it. "Ilya, do not tell me that’s your foot going through the ceiling,” Shane warns, turning round to see Ilya with a guilty look on his face with his foot firmly through the attic floor and the Hollander’s hallway ceiling.
-
Luckily, Yuna and David found the whole ceiling incident a lot funnier than Shane reassuring Ilya that that part was being taken out anyway. Ilya now, however, must contend with a garage full of Shane’s childhood memories, from pet rocks to volcano science projects. 'Damn you and your happy childhood, Hollander,’ he thinks to himself, lying in bed, pondering how much love and support Shane’s parents must have given to him as a child for him to want to cling to every little memory.
Ilya’s thoughts then turn to what his in-laws were like when Shane was young. Did they fight with him about bedtimes? Shane insistent he could stay up to watch a West Coast game and not be grumpy in the morning. Did they hold their breath when he hit his teenage years, waiting for the day their little boy showed an interest in girls? Were they confused, disappointed even, when that day never came?
What were they like as new sleep-deprived parents? He wonders. What about when Yuna was pregnant? Were they as completely terrified as he and Shane are these days? What about before Shane came along, when they were newlyweds, not knowing where this life together would take them? As university students with little crushes on each other, wondering if the other felt the same?
Yuna and David are probably the most middle-aged people Ilya has ever known. While his mother had seemed so grown up when he was small, he realizes, now that he is approaching the age she was when she died, she was so very young. His father, on the other hand, seemed to have never been young. Ilya sometimes wonders if the man just spawned into the world at 65 years old.
It is weird to think of his in-laws as young, dumb kids, but they were a similar age he and Shane were when they met. Maybe they had even fallen nearly as head over heels for each other as they had.
He nudges his almost asleep husband next to him.
“Whaaaat?” Shane mumbles into his pillow.
Ilya runs his hands through his hair. "Tell me how your parents met.”
“You know how they met,” Shane says, yawning and trying to keep his eyes closed.
“No, I know the basics. I don’t know details,” Ilya clarifies.
Shane lifts his head up off the pillow and opens his eyes to look at Ilya sternly. “What makes you think I know the details?”
He knows Shane knows the details. He loves his parents. They are his third favourite topic after Ilya Rozanov and hockey. “You are an only child. Of course, you know the details. What else was there to talk about when it was just the three of you in boring Canada?"
Shane looks at him, horrified, and he realizes a language miscommunication may have happened here. "Well, they didn’t tell me about the sex and stuff,” Shane almost screeches.
“No, no, not the sex stuff." Ilya scrunches his nose up and rolls his eyes. “Everything else, tell me the story,” he pleads.
Shane whines with his voice still full of sleep, “Rozanov, it is very late.”
“I can’t sleep. Tell me a bedtime story, please," Ilya pouts, not giving up so easily. He knows he has got him the pout never fails.
“Fiiinne,” Shane groans dramatically, propping up his pillow behind him to get comfortable, and Ilya snuggles in beside him. “It all started at the McConnell Arena at McGill University…”