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There were a lot of rewarding things about raising kids - and truly, Shane loved his kids, and pretty much everything about them. There were times where he looked them as they ran amok in the garden or snuggled beside Ilya on movie nights when he couldn’t believe that they were actually his, that this life was something that he got to keep. Shane had dreamed of the white picket fence, a wife and two-point-five kids, and he had imagined that his would make him happy because it was what you were supposed to do. But then, those dreams had shifted.
There’d been Ilya.
There’d been Ilya, and there’d been the home that they’d shared together in Ottawa when they played for the Centaurs together, full of pictures that they had taken of themselves and kept, and years of happy memories and laughter and ordinary moments that they had gotten to share. It was more than Shane had ever dared to ask for, and it had been his - all of it, for as long as he wanted it, which was forever. There’d been a team who’d supported them, and friends, like Hayden and Jackie and Rose and Svetlana, who they had gotten to keep, and then there’d been Anya and Toes (Ilya had named the dog Dostoevsky, but Hayden’s kids hadn’t been able to pronounce this and Toes had stuck), and then there’d been the choice. Ilya, stepping away from hockey - and a baby. A season later, Shane had followed him to the cottage where they made their family home. And a year after that, another baby had come.
Watching Yelena and Nika grow… Shane understood, now, what Hayden had meant when he had waxed philosophical about fatherhood changing you. Shane didn’t think that he would ever be the same person that he had been before the girls, and he didn’t think that he would ever want to be. It was blessing, being their dad, getting to know them and their funny personalities and their hopes and their dreams. No, he wouldn’t change any of it.
Except… maybe bedtimes. Fuck, Shane was so exhausted.
Yelena was five and Nika three, and one thing that they had in common across the two years that separated them was a deep-rooted desire to never go to bed. It had been subtle, at first; Shane and Ilya would tuck them in and both girls would demand just one more story, please, which would be granted, because Ilya (...and Shane) were pushovers, when it came to it, and reading was the sort of passion you were supposed to nurture in your kids.
Shane’s mom had a saying that she loved: give an inch, they’ll take a mile.
He understood that now, because it had only escalated from there. From being thirsty, to wanting to show Ilya and Shane a very long, very intensive dance routine, and then, at last, to straight up refusing to go to bed.
And Shane and Ilya had tried everything, from bribery to grounding to taking themselves off to bed, convinced that the girls were simply worried that they were missing out. But none of it had fixed it, and the girls had gotten more and more stubborn, fixing their heels now that they knew victory was in sight, and Shane was at the end of his rope. Embarrassingly, he thought that another week would drive him to point of complete and utter collapse. He had not realised how important sleep was to him until he didn’t have it anymore, but now it was all he could think about.
Ilya accused Shane of still holding fast to his athlete’s schedule, despite being retired. This was, to a point, true - Shane loved a schedule - but it was mostly that Shane had helped raise new borns and teething infants and sleep had now become a precious sort of commodity that he was constantly chasing. At least as an active hockey player, having the shit hit out of him almost every day, whether that be a game or practice or just Ilya being competitive on the practice rink at the cottage, Shane had gotten his eight hours. He never got them now. His girls were early birds too, to add insult to injury.
Shane needed sleep. He was not above using dirty tactics to do so.
Bedtime was supposed to be seven (all the parenting books said this was the optimal time to ensure that children between the ages of three and five got ten to thirteen hours of sleep, which was integral to their growth) but they were lucky if either of them were down by quarter to eight, which meant that both Yelena and Nika would be tired and upset, and everything was way more likely to spiral out of control. Then, the precious few hours that Shane and Ilya got to spend together and decompress before their inevitable crash would vanish - and Shane liked spending time with his husband. He missed getting to spend time with his husband that didn’t involve sprinting after eloping kids or being covered in various kid gunk.
Something needed to be done. And when nothing else was working…
“Do you remember how you got me to go to bed when I was little?” Shane asked his dad, on the phone after a particularly brutal night. “You think it would work with the girls?”
“It worked like a charm for you,” David said solemnly, “but use it carefully. If you do it too well, they’ll never sleep again.”
Shane pictured that future in his mind and found it terrifying. “I can’t do nothing,” he sighed. “I thought hockey was exhausting, but this - this is something else.”
And in hindsight, if Shane had thought about more in depth, he would have maybe told Ilya his plan, talked over and explain it all. But he hadn’t - he was running on so little sleep that it was sending him crazy, taking on the warning that he’d either solve bedtimes forever or send them staggering several steps back. He just wanted to sleep.
He put the plan into action the next night. It was ten to seven and Yelena had decided that she needed to reorganise her dolls into some kind of order that she couldn’t tell Shane or Ilya and made sense to only her. Nika, toddling after her, kept knocking the dolls out of line, moving them out of order, which meant that Yelena was constantly reorganising them and they were constantly wrong. This was the sort game that went on for hours; they’d done it before and the worst part was that Shane couldn’t help them to hurry it along, because he didn’t know the order and couldn’t worked it out and only managed to mess it all up.
“You know,” Shane remarked casually, careful not to look at his husband, whose curious gaze he felt prickling at the side of his head, because he knew that he wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face if he did, “I’m really surprised that bonhomme sept heures hasn’t come to visit us yet.”
There, the bait had been tossed out. Hook, and line -
Yelena looked up from her dolls, brow crinkled. “What is - bonne sept heures?” she asked, curiously.
- sinker.
“Bonhomme sept heures,” Shane corrected, and then shook his head theatrically. “He’s just a story, I’m sure.”
“No! No! I want to know!” Yelena cried, and crawled forward and up onto the couch beside him.
As nonchalantly as he could manage, Shane settled back into the couch. On the couch opposite, Ilya sat, scooping up Nika and setting her in his lap, hugging her comfortably against his chest even as she mashed a sticky hand against his cheek.
“Well,” he began, lowering his voice. He was not the best at putting on the voices for story telling, but he had never heard any complaints and he always tried his best. “They say that bonhomme sept heures wears a tall top hat and a raggedy coat and has magical powers. And when it gets dark, he walks around and around all the places in Quebec - and sometimes, he ends up in Montréal or even Ottawa. And if he sees children that aren’t in bed by seven, he…”
Shane trailed away significantly, noting the way that Yelena leaned in, hanging on every words. He’d kept his voice low and lowered it throughout so that they had all had to lean forward to hear them. The silence was as taut as a straining, stretched out piece of hair.
“...Gobbles them up!” Shane yelled.
At this, Shane swooped forward to grab her, hoisting her up by the waist and spinning her around. She shrieked, tiny fists beating ineffectually against his back as he slung her over his shoulder. Thankfully, she was giggling, high pitched signs of amusement as Shane bounced and flounced and danced across the room with her held like a ragdoll, though he was careful that she did not knock against any furniture.. Apparently more mindful of Nika being smaller, Ilya jolted in positioning, which wobbled her back and forth, and she giggled at the squawking sound that he made directly into her ear.
“Is jus’ a story?” Yelena asked, breathless as she giggled. Shane set her down and watched her stagger away dizzily.
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
Yelena gasped, rushing over to tug Nika off Ilya’s lap. “Quick!” she cried, still helplessly laughing. “We need to go sleep! Before the - the -”
She looked at Shane.
“Bonhomme sept heures,” he supplied.
“Yes! Before he comes to get us!”
Yelena scrambled up the stairs on all fours, yelling a very insincere apology over her shoulder when Shane yelled for her to go slow and be careful and sensible on the stairs. Nika toddled after her, not quite as quick as her sister but equally determined. Shane could scarcely believe his eyes - both their girls, willingly going up to bed on time - and when he looked at Ilya, sat rigidly on the couch, he knew that his husband was just as disbelieving.
Yes! he mouthed, unwilling to say it aloud in case he jinxed it. It took all he could do to stop himself from doing a little happy jig right there in the living room - but that would be premature before the girls were actually asleep, so he settled for trailing them up to their rooms, Ilya following close on his heels, just as eager as him apparently to see whether the magic of bonhomme sept heures would hold fast.
And it did - that was the thing. It worked.
Yelena and Nika accepted one story - just one! - and then let Shane and Ilya pull the covers up and over them to tuck them in, chattering sleepily about bonhomme sept heures with the same excitement they talked about the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. Shane could not even remember it working so well on him, and he prayed that that meant it would work for a very long time indeed. He thought that he would probably be heartbroken if he and Ilya managed to use it to get more sleep only for it to lose its efficacy later; the yearning for bed, he thought, would be all the worse for knowing how it could be.
Shane took Ilya by the hand. “Come on,” he urged, voice barely a whisper, as if it would be loud enough to stir the girls. “Bed.”
But Ilya was strangely quiet and taciturn, and the look on his face was far less pleased than Shane had thought it would be at the prospect of getting to spend more time together. It was strange, he reflected, not to have Yelena and Nika glued to their sides. They were so clingy before bed, and it was so sweet - to have one of the girls snuggled against them, to hear their little voices piping up with their little questions, knowing that these two lives were theirs to nurture and love and protect. Maybe Ilya was missing that - maybe he wished that bedtime was not an issue that Shane had solved. Maybe Shane should have asked him - but Shane had thought that Ilya would have been just as eager as Shane had been to spend more time together, even if it was just to sleep in each others arms.
They got changed in a strange, charged silence - but Ilya still wrapped himself around Shane like an octopus as they slid under the covers together, one leg slung over both of Shane’s and his arms pulling Shane closer to his chest. He could not be too upset then, Shane realised, and took a deep, steadying breath.
“I didn’t think that would work as well as it did,” he admitted, feeling the rise and fall of Ilya’s chest underneath him. “My parents used bonhomme sept heures -”
Shane felt it then. He felt the way that - when he had said bonhomme sept heures - Ilya had flinched, just ever so slightly.
“Ilya,” Shane asked, drawing his husband’s name out slightly, “are - are you scared of bonhomme sept heures?”
Ilya scoffed. Shane could not see his face but pictured perfectly the way that he knew Ilya was rolling his eyes.
“Of course not,” said Ilya. “Scared of, what? Stupid Canadian bedtime story? No, Russians do not do this.” But then there was a beat, where Shane struggled for a response, and Ilya asked, in a voice almost imperceptibly smaller and wobblier, “does he really look like that?”
“You are scared!” Shane said, twisting in Ilya’s arms to look him in the face.
Ilya scowled. “Am not.”
“Do you think the girls are scared of it?” Shane said. Did Ilya think he had been mean in inventing bonhomme sept heures for Yelena and Nika? They had seemed to like it, but maybe Shane had made a mistake, or -
“No,” said Ilya, grudgingly. “They enjoy this - this bonhomme sept heures.”
Ilya butchered the French pronunciation.
“It’s okay if you’re scared of it,” Shane said soothingly. “I was scared of it too, when I was a kid.”
“Yes, When you were small child. I am not small child.”
“Did you not have the boogeyman in Russia?” Shane asked curiously.
“We have Baba Yaga s zheleznymi zubami,” replied Ilya. “Is cannibal witch, or sometimes helpful grandmother.”
Shane smothered a fond burst of laughter, pressing his lips to Ilya’s shoulder. He felt the moment that his husband sunk into him, releasing the tension that lined his shoulders between one moment and the next in favour of settling into their embrace.
“Don’t worry,” Shane said. “I will protect you from Baba Yaga and bonhomme sept heures.”
“You better,” Ilya muttered. “I will be very upset if you invite them into our home and leave me to fend for myself.”
“Never,” Shane vowed.