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Winning a third up with Montreal had not been on Shane Hollander’s bingo card.

It wasn’t, he supposed, the worst way to end his time with a team full of homophobic dickbags. It was damn near unprecedented, in fact. If Ilya hadn’t signed with the worst team in the league, none of this would’ve happened, he’s sure of it. If he were honest, Shane would have preferred it if Ilya had won, rivalry be damned. Or, quite frankly, literally anyone other than Montreal. Maybe even Toronto and Shane hated Toronto. Under no circumstances did he believe the rest of his team deserved this kind of reward. But, alas, there wasn’t much he could do do about it. Score fewer goals, perhaps. In hindsight, maybe he should have tried that, but scoring fewer goals was difficult for someone as allergic to missing the net as Shane was. 

The Metros season had completely fallen apart after Hayden had, oh so helpfully, revealed his and Ilya’s relationship to everyone on the planet with an internet connection – and probably a few more people without one. Since then, there had been shouting from his coach and seemingly endless amounts of meetings. So. Many. Fucking. Meetings. At this point, Shane had sat through at least three separate lectures with every single staff member who could find even the flimsiest reason to chastise him. Every time he thought the organisation had exhausted its supply of thinly veiled homophobia, someone managed to invent a new way to tell, in no uncertain terms, just how much they disapproved on his ‘lifestyle’ and the 'shame' he was bringing to the franchise. 

Half of Shane's team had been ignoring him since they found out about Ilya and the other half spoke around him, carrying on conversations over his shoulder as though he were a piece of furniture lingering unnecessarily in the locker room, rather than their fucking captain who had led them to two – now three – Stanley Cups. A few of them had even taken to feeding anonymous quotes to the media –their usual hatred for it be damned – questioning his leadership, or, more accurately, his supposed lack of it. Three cups wasn't enough to prove he was worthy to be the captain, apparently. Shane would've known exactly who they were even if they hadn't hidden behind the ever-pathetic "sources close to the team” bullshit. 

They were cowards. Every last one of them. That was Shane’s professional opinion. 

And then, somehow, against all odds, they had rallied. Shane still had no fucking idea how. Well, actually, he did. He’d scored more goals than the rest of his team combined while they floundered around like ducklings experiencing their first day on the earth. It was as infuriating as it was insulting. Maybe spite was performance enhancing, he'd mused back at the start of their final series. Whatever the reason, Shane had found himself lifting the Stanley Cup for the third time as a Montreal Metro while most of his teammates smiled with their jaws tight as if they were experiencing some kind of collective toothache that Shane wasn't in on and Roger Crowell stood on the ice to hand over the Cup looking like he had been asked to handle a live grenade rather than hand over a fucking glorified piece of metal to the best player in the league. 

Pathetic, honestly. 

But it was over now. Mostly, at least. He’d survived the playoffs with his limbs mostly in tact and the parade the day after when his now ex-teammates had somehow managed to become even worse hunger over versions of themselves. All that remained of his time with the Metros was his cup day. One last obligation, then he was free to say fuck you, Montreal and refuse to return to the city until his new team came and slaughtered them next season like Ilya would make sure that they would. 

Then, he could be done with the franchise forever. 

Thank fuck for that. 

*****

The email arrived at 10:14 on Thursday morning the week after the Cup final had cemented Shane as a 3-time cup champion. He was sitting at the kitchen island in one of Ilya’s hoodies and pair of sweatpants he wasn’t entirely convinced didn't also belong to Ilya, nursing a protein shake that he didn’t really need now it was the offseason but couldn’t quite get out of the habit of drinking anyway. 

Shane almost didn’t open it. That might, in hindsight, have been the smarter choice, but the unforunate problem with hindsight is that you only get it after the damage has already been done. He had, he would admit later, perhaps not been in possession of all his faculties at the time, still upset and angry over the way his stupid fucking team had treated him after he’d given so many years of his career to them, but that was neither here nor there. 

He looked over at his phone automatically, expecting a text from his mother asking when they were driving up to the cottage, or another email from Farah containing yet more paperwork to finalise his move to the Ottawa Centaurs. At this point, he'd signed so many forms that he was beginning to suspect the Centaurs' administrative staff were either sadists who were on a mission to destroy his right hand or secretly being paid by the pen stroke. 

Instead, of either of those things, the subject line read: 

Cup Operations Team: Cup Day Allocations

Shane opened the email without a second thought. He’d never been super into the whole cup day thing and had done his best on the previous two occasions to make as little of a spectacle of himself as possible during his cup day, although he knew that the vast majority of other players in the league very much did not feel the same way about it as he did.  As he opened the email, for a second his brain refused to process what he was looking at before he realised the problem wasn’t the email; the problem was that he couldn’t actually fucking read it. With a muttered curse, he reached for the reading glasses sitting on the countertop and tried again. 

It started like every other league email he’d ever received – minus the ones from Crowell himself telling him where to go shove it – with a bland paragraph thanking him for his participation in the 2020/2021 MLH season, as if the cup had been won as some kind of extravagant attendance trophy rather than through more blood sweat and tears than Shane could feasibly count. 

His eyes skimmed down the list of names and dates until they landed on his own, right at the bottom. That was odd; it wasn’t alphabetical. Shane’s brow furrowed. He scrolled back up, then down again, trying to work out what order the names were supposed to be in. Then his eyes caught on the date. He read it once, twice, then a third time, because apparently he thought that would somehow alter the reality of what was on the page if he just kept reading it over and over again. 

Unsurprisingly, that did not happen. 

Stanley Cup Player Day Confirmation.

Shane Hollander. 

July 10th, 2021.

“...Ugh." The sound that escaped him sounded somewhere between a groan and a whine. Shane let his phone fall into his lap before lowering his forehead onto the kitchen counter with an alarmingly loud thunk. 

Ilya appeared in the doorway not even a second later, a bag of Anya’s treats in one hand and a half-drunk coffee in the other. 

“What’s happening Shane?” He asked, cheeks red presumably from having just been outside working on his tan in the sun after spending far too much of his time under oppressive arena lights for the past few months.  

Shane looked up at him, then back down at the phone in his lap, as though there were even the slightest chance the email had vanished while he wasn't looking. The screen was still lit, as if his phone had decided that today, of all days, was the perfect time to stop locking itself so that Shane wouldn't be able to avoid the email. 

With another groan, Shane threw the phone in Ilya's general direction, pushed himself off the barstool and collapsed into one of the lounge chairs with absolutely no grace whatsoever. It was fine, it was the offseason, he had no reason nor desire to be graceful. Tilting his head back, he fixed the ceiling with a look of profound betrayal.

“They scheduled your Stanley Cup day on our wedding day?” Ilya said, more question than statement. Despite having a bag of dog treats in one hand and a coffee in the other, he'd somehow caught the phone and skimmed the email in approximately half a second. Fucking Russian reflexes. He gave a short, disbelieving laugh and shook his head as if he couldn't believe what he was reading.  “That has got to be on purpose, no?” 

Shane doubted it. He hadn’t told anyone on the team when he was getting married except for Hayden and JJ, and he doubted that either of them would have shared that information with any of the Metro’s staff, especially given that Shane wasn’t even under contract with them anymore. Then again, he’d also never thought that Hayden would be the one to out them to the entire world with some of the worst timing imaginable, so, really, what the fuck did he know?

July 10th. Their wedding day. Their actual fucking already-bought-the-suits-and-ordered-the-flowers wedding day. 

Ilya perched himself on the arm of the chair Shane had dropped himself into with his mug of coffee still in one hand, leaning over to look at the phone screen again, as though perhaps he, too, was hoping that the date would change under repeat observation.

If it had been any other year, if Shane hadn't just endured the season from hell with the Metros, he might even have laughed.Their wedding day. Of course it just had to be their fucking wedding day. Shane dragged his hands down his face hard enough to nearly take his skin off. This was fine. Great, even. Fantastic. After months of management treating him like an inconvenient PR crisis, making it abundantly clear they were only tolerating him because they still needed him to score goals, endless meetings and teammates whose comments ranged from mildly insulting to openly homophobic, apparently the universe had decided he still hadn't yet suffered enough. No, the universe had looked at the past year of Shane Hollander's life and thought, You know what this needs? One last kick in the teeth. A pièce de résistance, if you will.  So now he got to choose between his day with the Cup and his wedding. Great. Absolutely fucking wonderful.

Maybe god was in cahoots with Roger Crowell or Coach Theriault or both. That was the only possible fucking was this could have happened.  

Shane got to his feet and started pacing because if he stayed still for another second, he was genuinely afraid he might put his phone through the kitchen window. Actually, on second thought, that was a great idea; people might finally leave him the fuck alone. He stalked from the couch to the kitchen counter and back again, the email practically burned into his retinas. Of course it would be his wedding day. Of course the fucking Cup would choose that day to make an appearance, like some oversized silver embodiment of every complicated feeling he'd ever had about hockey, demanding to be acknowledged at his own wedding.

Well, the cup didn’t choose. Some absolute shithead with a broken calendar did. But. Still. It was the principle of the thing. 

His wedding. 

Had he mentioned it was his fucking wedding?

"I'm getting married and moving to fucking Ottawa after I spent my entire career wanting to stay in Montreal. I'm leaving the fucking city I've lived in for ten years and getting away from them, just like they wanted, and somehow they've still found one last way to make my life fucking miserable.”

Ilya winced. You knew it was bad when Shane dropped the f-bomb more than once in a five minute period. Unless he was on the ice, that is, then he was a potty mouth like the best of ‘em. 

Shane rounded on him, throwing both hands into the air as though personally offended that Ilya hadn't solved the problem in the last thirty seconds. He probably was. After all, he’d grown up with a mother who had an answer and a solution for everything. Unfortunately, even for Yuna, this might be a step too far, and for Ilya? Well. What the fuck was he supposed to do about it? 

"There are no options.” Shane said bitterly. 

"There are always options," Ilya insisted, although he didn’t sound overly convinced by his own words. 

Shane started counting them off on his fingers.

"I cancel the wedding, which is insane. I give up my Cup day, which they'll absolutely hold against me forever. Worse, it's like I'm letting them win. I move the Cup day, and then everyone will know exactly why and the media will camp outside our house for a month. Or I move the wedding..." He paused, grimacing. "...and my mother murders me with her bare hands.”

Ilya considered that.

"She would not use her bare hands," he said thoughtfully. "She would use something subtle and impossible to trace back to her.”

Shane closed his eyes with the most put-upon sigh Ilya had ever heard from anyone probably ever. Shane could be a dramatic bitch when he felt like it. Although, admittedly, this seemed like as good a reason as any. 

"Thank you, Ilya. That's incredibly helpful.” If looks could kill, Ilya would’ve been dead in a second but, fortunately for him, Shane had yet to develop laser eyes. 

Shane resumed pacing. He could feel the anger starting to fizzle under his skin again, that specific restless fury he’d spent most of the season tamping down behind clenched teeth and carefully worded interviews where he very much didn’t throw his teammates under the bus even though he really fucking wanted to. He hated it, he truly did.  He was so fucking tired of living two seconds away from losing his temper because every other day someone he'd once called a teammate found a brand-new way to remind him exactly what they thought of him. It would have been easier if he could just hate the Cup. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? He couldn’t. For all that hockey had made a fucking circus out of his life, for all that Montreal had made it painfully clear that winning could excuse almost anything except, apparently, being gay and in love with his rival who wasn’t even his rival anymore, the Cup was still the Cup. He’d bled for it. Broken himself and his bones for it. Carried it. Kissed it. Won it three goddamn times. Hockey was his entire damn life. Hockey was the entire reason that he had Ilya in his house now, had gotten engaged and was planning on marrying him in the fucking first place. They wouldn't even have met if it weren't for hockey. 

And now his Cup day was scheduled for his wedding day like the punchline to the world’s least funny joke.

Then, just as Shane found himself starting to grab at his own hair with frustration, he stopped dead in the middle of the lounge. He looked back at the email still glowing brightly on the screen, then back to Ilya, then back to the email. A thought, a horrible and beautiful, terrible idea bloomed in his brain. 

No, he thought to himself. Absolutely not. That was deranged. That was an appalling idea. That was—

Ilya narrowed his eyes at him, clearly able to see the cogs turning inside Shane’s brain at a mile a minute. “What is that face?”

Shane lowered himself back into the chair very carefully, as though the thought itself had knocked him slightly off balance with the weight of its insanity. 

“What face?”

Ilya pointed accusingly at Shane. “That face,” he said. “That is not your normal angry face. That is your plotting face.”

“I do not have a plotting face.”

"It is same face your mother makes when she is on phone with one of those fancy brands," Ilya said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Also same face you make every time you try to beat her at Yahtzee.”  Shane opened his mouth to object, then closed it again. He couldn’t argue with that as much as he wanted to. Trying to beat his mother at anything required a level of strategic planning that would've put the entire MLH's logistics to shame.

Having nothing else to say to refute that, Shane stared at the date on the screen agian, suddenly seeing it in a new light. July 10th. A minute ago, he’d thought that the universe was being cruel but perhaps… perhaps the universe had handed him a gift. A gift wrapped up in silver paper with a bright red bow and a tag that read: 

To Montreal, 

FUCK YOU. 

Love, 

Shane Hollander #24  

For perhaps the first time in his life, Shane thought to himself: fine, you wanna play that game? Fine. Then I’m gonna make it everyone else’s problem.

A laugh started somewhere low in his chest. It surprised him enough that he almost swallowed it, but once it started he couldn’t stop. It came out rough and disbelieving and a little manic, and Ilya set his coffee down entirely now, looking both concerned and interested in equal measures. 

“Shane.”

 Shane shook his head, still laughing.

“No, because—” He had to stop and press a hand over his mouth for a second. “No, that’s actually insane.”

“What is?”

“It’s fucking unhinged.”

Ilya leaned forward, his eyes already sparkling with anticipation, as though he knew Shane was about to suggest the single most harebrained idea imaginable. Ilya loved a harebrained idea, even though he absolutely did not know what that word meant. 

“Tell me.” He said. “Immediately.”

Shane looked at him, at the man he was going to marry. At the man who had, in Montreal management’s apparently expert opinion, ruined him. Corrupted him. Led him astray. The fucking Russian who had turned the good  Canadian captain of the Montreal Metros into a problem they needed to fix before they threw him away like trash. 

All at once, the pieces clicked together in Shane’s head. The wedding. The Cup. The absolute horror on half of Montreal management’s faces if he pulled this off. Roger fucking Crowell, the same man who had sat at his desk with a smug look on his face and told them, in no uncertain terms, that if they knew what was good for them then there was no way in hell they would they be getting married this summer.

Apparently, they did not know what was good for them. Or, at least Shane didn't, if this was the sort of things he was suggesting now. 

“They want the captain with the Cup pictures, right?” he said. Shane could hear the sarcasm dripping from every word of his own voice.

Ilya blinked, unsure where Shane was going with this. “Probably?”

“They want some nice, polished bullshit about leadership and Canadian history and what it means to bring a championship cup home to Montreal.”

“Yes,” Ilya said slowly, still not quite understanding what Shane was getting at. Shane’s grin widened.

Then I think,” he said, “that if they’re giving me the Cup on my wedding day, I should use it at the wedding.”

Ilya frowned. “Use it how? Like as glass for very large drink?” 

Shane opened his mouth, then he closed it, debating momentarily whether he was actually going to say this out loud, speak this ridiculous idea out into the eather. At this point, it’s not as if it could make anything worse, he thought, so, fuck it.

“As the cake stand.”

For one very long second, Ilya just stared at him, clearly unsure if he had actually managed to comprehend what Shane had just said, or whether his English had started to fail him once more. Then, all at once, he made a strangled, vaguely inhuman noise that had Anya’s ears perking up from where she had been sleeping in the corner this entire time and Shane hadn’t noticed, doubling over laughing. Like, fully folded in half in a way that really did not look like humans should be bending in that manner. His shoulders were shaking, one hand slapping uselessly against the couch cushion as if that might somehow help him stay upright. He laughed so hard he had to put his feet on the floor and brace himself so he wouldn’t fall off the couch. 

Shane, who had expected many reactions that ranged from concerned to vaguely amused to disturbed, definitely had not visualised quite this much delight. He felt something unclench inside his chest, a weight lifted that he hadn’t realised that he was carrying. 

“You think that’s funny.” He questioned, uncertain despite the evidence right in front of him that suggested Ilya found this idea absolute fucking hilarious.

Ilya looked up at him with tears in his eyes. “Funny? Shane, that is the funniest fucking thing I have ever heard.”

“It’s insane.”

“Da.” Ilya agreed, still wheezing and clutching onto his side. 

“It’s probably offensive to, like, several provinces. Definitely to Montreal.” 

That only made Ilya laugh harder. “Oh my God,” he managed. “Oh my God, you are serious.”

Shane leaned back in his chair, the idea taking firmer hold with every passing second. Why the fuck not? Nobody had ever said it was against the rules to bring the Stanley Cup to your wedding. Not even his big gay wedding. He was fairly sure it had shown up at at least one engagement party before. He'd seen photos of the thing in Vegas strip clubs, for fuck's sake. It had been to bars, beaches, fishing boats, swimming pools, and God only knew where else. Why shouldn’t he take the most sacred object in the sport and turn it into a prop for the happiest, gayest, least-Montreal-approved day of his life? Why shouldn’t he make it impossible for them to separate the legacy captain moment from the man he was marrying? Why shouldn't he make sure every photograph, every interview, every highlight reel, every nostalgic "Shane Hollander's day with the Cup" feature also included his husband? 

He could already see it. White cake, maybe some obnoxious cake toppers because fuck it, he could have obnoxious cake toppers if he wanted to. Flowers, too. Lillies, because they had to be, for Ilya. Silver gleaming underneath. They needed a bigger cake than the one they had chosen. He needed to call the caterers immediately, maybe needed to get Yuna in on the plan.

It was, Shane thought, maybe the first good idea he’d had in months, possibly ever. 

While Shane was cooking up some of the finer details of his ludicrous plan, Ilya had finally gotten himself under enough control to breathe again, though there was still a dangerous sparkle in his eyes.

“We have to do it.”

Shane snorted. “I knew you’d say that.”

“No, listen to me, we absolutely have to do it.” Ilya sat up straight, grabbing Shane’s wrist with both hands like this was now a matter of national importance. 

“There is no way the handlers let us.” Shane said, although, admittedly, if they didn’t he knew it would be about who he was marrying, not the fact that he was asking to take the Stanley Cup to his wedding, and that would be different problem entirely. 

“They let people drink from it.” Ilya insisted. 

“That’s different.”

“How?”

Shane opened his mouth and then closed it.  There wasn’t much he could say to that. People did absolutely heinous things with the cup every single year. Comparatively, this was pretty tame. Vanilla, even. 

“Okay, good point.” He said, then grimaced at the thought of where exactly the Cup might have been. 

Ilya nods seriously.“And it’s not like we are doing anything gross. It is a cake stand. It will be elegant.. Beautiful, even.”

That got a laugh out of Shane. There was going to be absolutely nothing  elegant about the enormous cup being used as a cake stand, but that was, perhaps, entirely the point. It would be garish and loud and impossible not to notice. God. He was really considering this. No, scratch that, He had already decided. He couldn’t possibly take back an idea that had clearly brought Ilya so much joy before it had even happened.  There was no putting the idea back in the cake box now, not after seeing the way Ilya's face had lit up before the plan had even properly taken shape.

Besides… The more he thought about it, the more it sounded less like an act of petty revenge and more like exactly the sort of Cup day he wanted. One that actually belonged to him.

All season, he’d been expected to take the high road. Be patient. Be gracious. Be the bigger person. Be understanding of the discomfort of his teammates who had never once extended the same courtesy to him. He was tired of being the bigger person. He was, frankly, interested in being an absolute fucking menace for once in his goddamn life. It seemed to have worked out well for Ilya, so perhaps it was his turn. And if the universe had set the stage for him this perfectly... well. It seemed rude not to give it what it wanted.

“I’m doing it,” Shane said, suddenly determined. 

Ilya’s whole face lit up with unabashed glee “We are using the Stanley Cup as a wedding cake stand.”

Ilya launched off the arm of the chair and grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling Shane towards him. “I need you to know,” he said, seriously “ this is one of the reasons I’m marrying you.” Ilya kissed him, still laughing into Shane’s mouth, all bright joy and terrible encouragement. When he pulled back, he was grinning like he’d just been handed the best gift of his life.

“Because of a cake stand.” 

“No because you’re my kind of crazy, and I love you.” 

And what could Shane say to argue with that? 

*****

Later that afternoon, Shane called the Cup handlers' office.

"You want to do what with it?" Denise, the secretary, asked, sounding genuinely taken aback.

Shane couldn't exactly blame her. Over the years, the two of them had spoken often enough. This would be his third Cup day, and the previous two had been refreshingly uncomplicated. He'd taken the Stanley Cup to the Montreal Children's Hospital where kids barely tall enough to reach the bowl had posed for photos with a trophy that, in some cases, was nearly twice their height. It had been wholesome, exactly the sort of thing the Cup handlers adored.

Golden Boy Hollander doing Golden Boy Hollander things and yada yada yada. 

If Shane was honest, it had also spared him from having to figure out what he actually wanted to do with the Cup. Visiting the hospital had mattered, and he'd never regretted it, but it had also been the obvious choice—the kind of decision nobody could object to, but also the kind of choice that required little to no actual thought and self-reflection on Shane's end. It's not like he could've said: "I'd like to take the Stanely cup to go and visit the guy I've been hooking up with for the last five years, please. Oh, he's the captain of the Boston Bears. Don't worry though, he'll be gentle." He can only imagine what they would've said to that. 

Shane suspected Denise had expected this phone call to be exactly like the last two, organised and sorted within about 5 minutes. No questions asked, no further information needed beyond a time and a date and a place to show up. 

Instead, what she'd gotten was Shane Hollander asking if it was technically against the rules to bring the Stanley Cup to his wedding. 

“For photographs?” She asked, because what other use could someone possibly find for the Stanley cup at their wedding?

“As a cake stand.” Apparently, that was it. 

Shane heard a deep sigh—the sort of sigh that suggested Denise had contemplated early retirement more than once that morning alone. He found himself wondering what kind of lunacy she'd already fielded from the rest of his teammates. The emails had only gone out a couple of hours ago. Surely there was only so much chaos professional hockey players could create in that amount of time. Surely.

"This is... an unusual request," Denise said at last, in a tone Shane couldn't quite decipher. "The Cup is not typically used as furniture.”

"Well, we aren't going to sit on it," Shane replied matter-of-factly. "It's a cake stand.”

Across the room, Ilya looked like he was about to collapse from silent laughter, one hand clamped over his mouth in a valiant but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stay quiet. Without looking away from the phone, Shane reached over and nudged him with a socked foot.  The corners of his own mouth betrayed him, curling upward despite his best efforts.

Denise, unfortunately, did not seem to share Ilya's appreciation for the distinction.

"Mr. Hollander…"

"Please," Shane said, throwing a pen from the coffee table at Ilya's head instead when kicking him did little to get him to shut up "Call me Shane. We are about to do something deeply stupid together.” The pen bounced harmlessly off Ilya's shoulder.

That earned him a moment of silence. Then, unexpectedly, a snort. 

"Ah," Denise said. "So this is revenge."

Shane blinked. She'd understood immediately, without him having to explain a thing. He wasn't entirely sure what he would've said if she'd asked for a justification. I'd like to use the Stanley Cup as a cake stand because my former teammates are a bunch of homophobic dickheads didn't seem like the sort of explanation that usually made it onto official paperwork. Shane considered lying, then decided against it. If he could get Denise onside, then this was the first step in the plan going ahead. “I prefer to think of it as a statement.”

“It is a statement,” Ilya stage-whispered from the couch loudly enough that Shane was sure that Denise would be able to hear him. “It says, fuck you Montreal.”

On the other end of the line came a suspiciously cough-shaped burst of laughter. Denise recovered with admirable professionalism. If Shane had been her boss, he would have given her a raise for that alone. 

"I'll... have to ask the handlers" she said, the amusement still clear in the tone of her voice. 

“Great,” Shane nodded emphatically, as if she could see him and wasn’t on the other end of the country on the other end of a phone call. 

“And possibly legal.” 

“Less great.“ There probably wasn’t anything lllegal about pissing off his team with the Stanley cup, right? They weren’t even his team anymore. He no longer had any legal ties to them, so surely….

Across the room, Ilya sat upright, knocking all of the sofa cushions on to the floor as he did so. “Ask if they can polish it first,” he called, eliciting another snort from Denise. 

“I’ll see what I can do.” 

***

The phone call with Denise, as it turned out, must have gone well.

Well enough, in fact, that she regaled Shane with the entire conversation she’d had with the handlers in an email that suggested she was clearly enjoying this whole thing more than she probably should be, as someone who was supposed to be in charge of limiting the insane things hockey players were allowed to do with their sacred trophy. 

The handlers, two men named Rob and Michael, who, according to Denise, had spent far too many summers babysitting hockey players and their increasingly questionable life choices, had several things to say about it. 

First, they thought that using the Stanley cup as a wedding cake stand at a gay wedding between two hockey players in a notoriously homophobic hockey league was, “quite frankly insane.” As a same-sex couple themselves, however, they approved. 

Fair enough. Shane couldn’t argue with that. 

Second, it was still preferable to "the year we had to fish a cocktail shrimp out of it at three in the morning". Shane wasn’t sure what he thought about that comment; it wasn’t necessary the nicest thing to have his wedding compared to a shrimp-related incident, but decided to let that slide. He had to put up with hockey players on a daily basis, he got it, they were, quite frankly, fucking annoying. 

Third, and apparently the deciding opinion: “if it keeps us out of the strip club, they can do whatever the fuck they want with it.” Shane couldn’t argue with that logic. Maybe every other player so far this year had asked to take the Cup to a strip club. He could believe it. Hockey players, in his experience, weren't exactly renowned for their originality.

So, against all odds – and likely all good judgement – permission was granted. When Shane received the email confirming it, he stared at his phone for a solid minute before placing it on the coffee table in a manner better reserved for a loaded bomb and not the device that held the key to his own deranged plan. 

“Well?” Ilya asked, from where he was now, for some reason, doodling little dicks on the cardboard packet from the latest packet of cigarettes he had promised Shane who wouldn’t smoke and then smoked it anyway because Ilya was just annoying like that. 

“They said yes.” 

Ilya made a sound that Shane had only previously heard from him once before, when Ottawa had won the draft lottery against all mathematical probability and Ilya had proclaimed, far too loudly from where they had been buying condoms in the supermarket, “Thank fuck for that, I might finally get a teammate who knows how to play this fucking game.” 

This time, without racks of ultra-thin and ribbed and whatever else prophylactics to worry about, Ilya launched himself over the back of the couch, nearly ate shit on the rug, recovered with an irritating amount of grace for a 200lb man, and grabbed Shane by the face in a way that would have been threatening had it been anyone else. 

“You are incredible,’ he informed Shane, delighted.

“Mm,” Shane responded, because Ilya was grinning this from three inches away from his face and coherent thought was suddenly in short supply. 

“This is why I marry you.” 

“We’re not married yet.’ 

“Semantics.” Ilya said, waving his hand in the air. 

“Who taught you that word?!?”

Then Ilya kissed him instead of answering, the kiss hard despite the giggling, and Shane decided that, if he was going to do something absolutely deranged, there was nobody he would rather do it alongside. 

****

Yuna knew something was wrong the second Shane said, “I need your opinion on something,” in the overly neutral tone he used when he was about to say something she was’t going to like. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, she knew nothing good was ever going to come of it.

Across the room, Ilya was already biting the inside of his cheek in a way that suggested he was either trying very hard not to laugh or trying very hard not to make things worse. With Ilya, Yuna had learned those were usually the same thing.

“Okay,” Yuna said slowly, setting down her tea and taking a seat opposite the pair at the kitchen table, suddenly wishing she had David here for backup. God only knew what these two were about to drop on her this time. At least neither of them was going to be having a surprise pregnancy. Unless…

“Should I be worried?” 

“You don’t have to be worried,” Shane said immediately, which was not reassuring.  “It’s just—” Shane made a vague motion with one hand, then seemed to decide that wasn’t helping. “The Cup schedule came in.”

Yuna blinked. “Your Cup day?”

He nodded.

“And?”

Shane looked briefly at the ceiling, as if appealing to a higher power. “It’s on the wedding day.”

Yuna frowned. “That’s absurd. She sat back, crossing her arms in what Ilya said was her ‘Shane pose’ “Who approved that? Do you know?”

Shane shrugs. “Probably nobody. I don’t think they actually know when it is. Apparently God hates me personally,” Ilya snorted again, even louder this time. 

Yuna ignored him and fixed Shane with a more scrutinising look. His jaw was a little too tight. His shoulders were a little too stiff. The whole season had left him wound so tight she sometimes wanted to shake every person in Montreal with her bare hands or steal their sticks and smack them around the heads with them. Admittedly she probably wouldn’t have much luck attempting to rough up hockey players who were at least twice her size and three times her weight, but it was a nice thought. 

“So,” she said cautiously, as if she was dealing with some kind of wild animal rather than her own son in his childhood kitchen “what are you thinking?”

“I’m going to use the Stanley Cup as our wedding cake stand,” Shane said, without even a hint of hesitation as if it was a perfectly normal thing to tell your mother you were going to be doing at your wedding. 

Yuna blinked at him. That was… well she definitely hadn’t expected him to say that. “I’m sorry?” She asked, unsure if she’d heard him right or if she was hearing things. 

“The cake stand,” Shane repeated. “At the reception.”

“I heard the words,” Yuna said, still staring at him like he’d just told her he was going to give up on hockey and move to Tibet to live with the monks. “I am trying to figure out whether I heard them in the right order.” 

Ilya lost the battle with his self-control and dropped his head onto the table, laughing helplessly into the crook of his arm. 

Shane pointed at him. “See? He gets it.”

“I get that it’s funny,” Ilya managed, wiping at his eyes. “That is not same as being sane.”

“I need you to be honest with me,” Yuna said after a moment, tilting her head to look at Shane as if somehow looking at him from a slightly different angle might help her understand better what was going on inside his head.. “Is this funny petty, or is this ‘my son is having some kind of breakdown and I need to intervene because his fiancé won’t' petty?”

For a moment Shane didn’t answer as if he was truly considering the question. Then, he looked down and let out a short breath through his nose.

“Mostly column A,” he admitted. “Maybe.”

Yuna’s heart pinched.

“Oh, sweetheart.”

He made a face at the endearment, but didn’t move his hand away away when she reached for his arm across the table. 

“It’s just…” He shrugged,. “They want pictures. The captain-with-the-Cup thing. Like none of this season happened. Like none of them spent months acting like I was a problem they had to deal with. And I know it’s stupid.  I know it’s immature. But I’m so tired of them getting to decide what everything means and what I’m allowed to do with my own life. I’m so tired of them pretending they own every part of this. They don’t get to have my wedding too.”

Ilya’s expression had gone soft in that way it only ever did with Shane, as if, no matter how ridiculous the situation, he could always find the aching center of it.

“I just want one thing,” he said, quieter now, “one thing where it’s ours. Where if Montreal sees it, the message is very clearly go fuck yourselves.” 

Yuna looked at her son. At the anger in him, yes, but also the hurt. The weariness of someone who had been made to feel everything in his life was just there to piss off the people around him. He’d carried himself through the season with that stubborn pride she knew so well, hell the stubborn pride he had probably inherited from Yuna herself, but underneath it he had been cut open again and again by people who should have known better. Who should have cared to know better. 

Yuna considered what she wanted to say next. She was supposed to be the one who came up with all the ideas. There was a reason she was Shane’s manager as well as his mother… she should say something wise, something soothing perhaps? She wasn’t good at that, but she could try, for Shane, she… 

Instead,  a picture formed in her mind.  The Stanley Cup, polished to a stupid degree of shininess, solemnly displayed surrounded by white Lillies – because, of course, it had to be Lillies, this was a wedding not a rave, – while a wedding cake sat on top of it like a final, somewhat deranged, flourish. She could see it now: the faces of the team executives seeing the photos online. The same executives that had spent the last few months telling her beloved son how much of a problem he was, that his life was a problem. The public outrage would keep them busy for months, scrambling for a way to cover up something that was was too big to cover up thanks the size of both Shane and Ilya's followings. 

To her own surprise, she laughed. It escaped before she could stop it—a sharp, startled burst escaping before she could clap her hand over her mouth. Both Shane and Ilya stare at her as if she had suddenly grown a second head. 

Their faces only made her laugh harder. 

“Oh my God,” she said, mostly to herself, already losing the fight completely. “Oh, that is awful.”

Ilya’s eyes lit up. “Right?”

“That is atrocious,” Yuna gasped, bracing herself against the table. “That is so tacky. So vindictive. So completely—”

Shane stared at her like he wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or offended. Had his mother gone insane or was this… actually a good idea? Ilya could never be trusted to tell him whether or not something was a good idea, but his mother… well. Yuna always did know best, as much as Shane was sometimes loathed to admit it. 

“You think it’s funny?” He asked, in disbelief. 

Yuna straightened up, wiped at the corners of her eyes, and looked at him with as much dignity as she could recover.

“I think,” she said, “that it may be the funniest thing you will have ever done.”

Ilya slapped a hand on the table in triumph. “Thank you, mama Yuna!”

“Do not thank me,” Yuna said, though she was still smiling. “This reflects very poorly on all of us.”

“It reflects worst on Montreal,” Ilya said.

“Oh, it really does.” Yuna shook her head in disbelief. “Can you imagine? After all their talk about their precious culture? And then the internet wakes up to wedding photos of their captain using the Cup as a cake stand to marry the man they all blamed for ruining him.”

Shane let out a startled laugh as some of the tension in his shoulders finally gave way.

“That easy, huh?” he asked.

“Please.” Yuna waved a hand. “After the year you’ve had? If this is the form your healing takes, who am I to stand in the way?”

She moved back toward her long since forgotten tea tea, then stopped as a new thought hit her.

“Wait,” she said. “Will the cake be secured somehow?”

All the joy drained from Shane’s face. “I hadn’t thought that far.”

Yuna closed her eyes briefly. “Of course you hadn’t.”

Yuna pointed a finger between them. “Listen to me carefully. If you are doing this—and apparently you are—then I refuse to let you humiliate yourselves with a collapsed cake. If you’re going to say fuck you to an entire city, it has to be done properly.”

Shane looked at her in disbelief “You’re helping?”

“I am helping because I gave birth to you and I have standards.”

Ilya put a hand dramatically to his chest. “Yuna, this is why I love you.”

“You are not my favorite yet,” she informed him even though all three of them knew that Ilya was, in fact, her favourite child. 

“Yet,” Ilya repeated smugly.

Shane rolled his eyes. “Don’t encourage him.”

“It’s too late,” Yuna said. “I’m fully on board now.”

She picked up her tea, took a thoughtful sip, grimaced at the now cold liquid, and added, almost casually, “You should make sure the photographer gets a close-up shot when you cut the cake. Even better if you can get one where you can read the inscription of your name on there.”

Shane stared at his mother as if he’d never seen her before. Truly, he should have known she could be just as bad as Ilya when she wanted to be. 

Yuna smiled into her cup.

Really, if Montreal was going to insist on making her son’s happiness into a scandal, the least they deserved in return was a beautiful, high-resolution photograph of exactly what Shane thought of them.

*****

On the morning of his wedding day, Shane woke up at five-thirty and immediately knew he was not going to be able to go back to sleep. For one brief, blissful second, he lay there in the half-dark, missing the sound of Ilya sleeping next to him because Yuna had insisted, even if this was the least traditional wedding to ever be. 

Today was his wedding day. His actual wedding day. And also, apparently, his cup day. 

The Stanely cup was, at that exact moment, somewhere in Montreal and scheduled to arrive at their wedding venue, also known as Ilya’s backyard,  exactly 2 hours and 30 minutes from that very moment. Honestly, what was his life? How did he get here? What had possessed him to think this was a good idea? 

“Go back to sleep.” The voice of Ilya inside his head scolded him just as he always did when Shane was thinking too loudly and Ilya somehow seemed to be able to sense it, even while unconscious. How he did that? Shane would never know. Instead of listening to imaginary Ilya, he stared at the ceiling and let his thoughts run wild, because his soon-to-be husband was not there to tell him off so he could do whatever he liked. 

Shane had, at various points over the previous six months, imagined a variety of different scenarios for what his wedding day might look like. For one, he had imagined it not happening at all. When they had been first outed, he had been deathly afraid that Ilya would somehow suddenly just disappear in the night, taken away from him by some Russian agents for the heinous crime of loving Shane. What Shane had not imagined, at any point, was laying in his bed on the morning of his wedding with a calendar alert on his phone reminding him that his Stanley Cup Player Day would begin at 8am sharp. Of course he fucking handn’t. The very notion was ridiculous. 

The universe, Shane thought, had a profoundly fucked sense of humour where he and Ilya were concerned. 

Sighing dramatically at his own existance, Shane rolled over and checked his phone. There were, to his surprise, already messages. 

Yuna: are you awake? 

That one was to be expected. His mother seemed to be allergic to sleeping past 4:30am. Even Shane, who himself was very much an early bird, was not that bad. 

Lily: good morning husband-adjacent. Still alive. Your mother did not kill me over Yahtzee. 

Shane stared at that one for a second and felt something in his chest loosen. He typed back before he could think about it too hard. His mother would absolutely judge him for speaking to Ilya before the wedding, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. 

Jane: still alive also 

Jane: you? 

The typing bubbles appeared instantly. Apparently Ilya, who very much was not a morning person, wasn’t able to sleep either. Knowing Ilya, he was probably too busy rubbing his hands together imagining all the many different people were going to react to the stunt they were going to pull today. 

Lily: tragically yes

Lily: also I had nightmare that cake tipped over 

Lily: it was Rose 

Shane snorted. 

Jane: don’t let Rose anywhere near the cake. 

Jane: actually you shouldn’t go near it either 

Lily: wow 

Lily: on my wedding day 

Lily: you would speak of me like this 

Lily: rude.

***

The backyard looked beautiful. For a backyard that had been hastily fashioned into a wedding venue in the space of a few hours, that is. It smelled of freshly-cut crass and, for once, Anya’s extensive collection of questionable looking dog toys were not littering the entire lawn. Someone had – almost certainly David – swept the patio, trimmed the hedges, and somehow convinced the climbing roses to behave themselves for exactly one day. Yuna had stung up an alarming amount of fairy lights between the old maple trees when Shane hadn’t been looking so that he wouldn’t be able to protest.

“You did this?” He’s asked even though he already knew full well that it had been her. Yuna had simply shrugged like she hadn’t been climbing all over the garden while already dressed in her wedding regalia. “Someone needed to make it look presentable.” She said as she gave him a pointed look as if to say and that someone should have been you. “But you looked busy.” 

He had been busy. Mostly he had been busy having a fruitless argument with the florist his mother had hired about whether they really needed that many lilies. Apparently, the did.  He had to admit, they looked absolutely stunning even if he still had his reservations about the sheer number of them. This was not a spectacle after all. And then, the piece de resistance, next to the table draped in crisp white linen, sat the Stanley Cup. White lilies surrounded its base in neat arrangements, their petals bright against the silver. Balanced carefully above the bowl of the cup on, presumably, some kind of well disguised and hopefully well secured platter, was a four-tier wedding cake with white icing and tiny hand-piped flowers. Just as Shane had imagined it. There were no questionable figurines of hockey players on the top like Shane had requested, but Shane couldn’t bring himself to complain about it too much. His mother was probably right. That would have been tacky and this wedding was anything but tacky, thank you very much. 

Despite the fact that this entire ridiculous idea has been entirely his won, Shane doesn’t know what to think as he stared at the Stanely cup sitting there with a wedding cake perched on top of it. 

Ilya, who seemed to have materialised up from nowhere like an excitable puppy already, dressed in his wedding suit and looking wonderfully dapper, took one look at the cake and cracked up into a fit of giggles, before taking his phone out of his photo and snapping a photo with it. 

“That is,” he declared loudly, “the single greatest use of the Stanley cup in its history.” 

The cup handlers, who were required to stay at the wedding to keep an eye on the cup but didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves without any actual cup-minding to do, didn’t seem to know whether or not they agreed with Ilya’s statement. 

Since the moment they had arrived, Shane had gained a long list of things they had witnessed people do with the cup. Everything from drinking out of it to going fishing with it to taking it to some of the most questionable nightclubs in Las Vegas and letting scantily clad pole dancers take photos with it in positions absolutely nobody needed to see. Shane thought, privately, that he could have done without that information before said Cup became the cake stand at his literal fucking wedding, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Ilya, on the other hand, had been absolutely enthralled with their stories and continued to press them for the most gruesome details they could recall. Of course he fucking did. Ilya probably had taken it to the strip club when it had been his turn. Shane wouldn't have put it passed him. 

Shane readily forgot about his intention to bleach his brain when his mother walked out onto the patio carrying a box of candles he had no idea what she was going to do with. Yuna stood in front of the table, giving the cup a cursory once over, before nodding her head in approval, or as much approval at one could muster for such a ludicrous sight. Then, as though struck by a sudden revelation, she span around and looked around the backyard as if she were looking for something. She looked at the table, looked back to the yard, and then rounded on Shane with an annoyed look on her face. 

“Shane.” She said in her most disapproving tone, eyebrows raised. 

“What?” He asked, indignant. He absolutely did not deserved to be on the receiving end of that tone on his wedding day. 

“Why are there no chairs?” 

Shane blinked back at his mother. “Why would we need chairs?” He asked, frowning with genuine confusion. 

His mother stared at him as if she was wondering if he’d hit his head on something. 

"For the wedding.” She said slowly, in a voice she might have used to talk to a small child. “For the guests…” 

“The guests can just stand.” Shane shrugged as if this little detail absolutely did not matter and he had no idea why his mother had decided to make such a fuss over it. 

"They're going to be here for several hours."

"They'll manage."

Yuna looked towards the sky for a brief moment, as though asking for strength to deal with her idiot of a child. Then she sighed.

"Shane, sweetheart…" She said, in a much kinder voice this time. "...how many people do you think are coming?"

Shane shrugged.

"I don't know."

"Take a guess."

“Like..." He glanced around the empty garden."...ten?"

His mother's expression became one of profound disappointment. “Ten?" She said, aghast. Okay, sure, they didn’t have many family members for Shane to invite and Ilya’s family were either dead or wouldn't want to set foot in Canada knowing this wedding was happening, but still. Did Shane seriously think that there were barely going to be double figures at his wedding as one of the most famous people in Canada? 

"I invited, like, five people."

"Ilya invited people too.” She said, because he had, lots of them in fact, and why didn’t Shane know this? 

"He said he invited 'a few.’" Shane shrugged. 

“He invited his entire team, Shane.” Yuna said, as the unmistakeable sound of a car door slamming somewhere in front of the house makes Shane jump, as if he had forgotten that people would actually be arriving at some point. 

Shane scratched his head awkwardly Ah, Shit.  Shane had forgotten that just because his team sucks and most of them would rather get into a fistfight with a bear than attend his wedding, Ilya actually has decent people on his team with whom he was actually friends. Shane had literally met them. Multiple times. Had attended some of their weddings, even! He really should have thought about that. Oh well, there’s hardly anything he can fucking do about it now. 

****

Soon after Yuna tells Shane off the the chair-debacle and everyone, cup handlers included, goes on a mission to hunt down anything even vaguely resembling garden furniture, the guests begin to arrive Watching them filter in, Shane finds himself wondering how he'd ever convinced himself they might struggle to hit double digits. That had definitely been an oversight. Then again, as he had begun to realise lately, hindsight had always been one of his stronger qualities. Foresight, apparently, not so much. Maybe next time he should just let his mother organise the whole thing. Not that there was going to be a next time. One wedding with the Stanely Cup as a very inconspicuous guest was more than enough for Shane, thank you very much. 

The Centaurs arrive d mostly together, having apparently discovered a newfound enthusiasm for carpooling when free wedding alcohol became involved. Almost without exception, each one of them came to a complete stop in front of the cake table and stared at the Stanely Cup like it was something out of a fairytale, rather than a giant vaguely cup-shaped metal object that sat in a cabinet doing fuck all for most of the year.  

Finally, Bood let out a low whistle . “Well.” He said, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck. “Never thought I would see this so up close.”

"I always figured if I saw the Stanley Cup in person, it'd be because I'd paid a fortune for Finals tickets.” Young commented.

"Or because security was dragging us away from it while he tried to perform a heist," Chouinard added, amused. 

“Maybe we’ve finally got a chance of getting a turn with it with Shane joining us.” Dystrka said, slapping an uncomfortable looking Shane on the back as he walked over to greet his soon-to-be team mates. 

“Cup as a rookie, imagine.” LaPoint said dreamily, receiving enthusiastic nods from LaPoint, Haas and several others Shane was not sure he could remember the names of while they weren't wearing their jerseys. And, damn, he’d forgotten that half the centaur’s roster were practically still in diapers. Man was he starting to feel old. 

Curiously, nobody seemed even remotely concerned by the fact that the most prestigious trophy in professional hockey was currently being used as a cake stand. Maybe they were just too starstruck by the Cup to notice. Or maybe hockey players simply just didn't like cake. Ilya does, but then Ilya has always had to be the exception to every rule. Shane could see it go either way. 

*****

Svetlana appeared in the garden a few moments later, arm and arm with Ilya. As, of course, his best woman. It definitely wasn't weird for Ilya to have his former hookup as his best woman. Absolutely not. What would be weird about that? Shane’s was there too, somewhere, but Rose wasn't allowed within five feet of the cake until long after the ceremony because she somehow always managed to knock over everything within a five meter radius even when she wasn't moving or touching anything. His mother was, at that exact moment, doing his best to distract her and keep her indoors. 

Svetlana was, as per usual, impeccably dressed with not a hair out of place despite having spent the better part of the morning making sure that Ilya actually ate his breakfast so he wouldn’t knock himself out with vodka later and checking that he hadn’t dropped his cufflinks down the side of the sofa again. She made it exactly three steps out onto the patio, took one look at the cup, one look at Shane, then stalked back towards the house, her hazardously high heels clacking on the flagstones. 

"I need more vodka for this," she said simply, as roughly half the Centaurs stared at her like they'd just witnessed the descent of Venus herself. The straight-ish ones, anyway. Not that there were many of those on the Centaurs, now that Shane thought about it. He can’t really blame Svetlana. If he hadn't been about to get married himself, he'd probably would have been knocking back shots with her, which was saying something, considering Shane hated vodka. If he thought he could still stand upright, recite his vows without slurring, and successfully marry the love of his life afterwards, he'd be tempted. The giant silver trophy loomed over the ceremony like an especially judgmental chaperone and it wasn't doing much for his nerves. Alas, he did not want to embarrass the shit out of himself, so he decided to leave the vodka alone. Probably a wise decision. 

****

When the gate creaked open next, Hayden walked in first, sunglasses perched on top of his head, an alarmingly expensive-looking bottle of champagne tucked under one arm and one of his twins tucked under the other. Jade, Shane assumed. She was the only one of Hayden's children who tolerated being carried around like an oversized family dog whenever she started causing trouble. JJ followed a step behind with a gift bag in one hand, looking exceedingly pleased that he wasn't the one currently wrestling a small child. Jackie didn’t appear to be with them, and Shane could only assume she had been left somewhere behind them, heroically attempting to untangle the remaining children before they reached the ceremony. 

JJ and Hayden were halfway through saying hello to everyone before they noticed the table, with the Stanley Cup standing beside it in all its very unsubtle glory. Hayden stopped so abruptly that JJ walked straight into his back.

“No way,” Hayden said in disbelief, his mouth falling open as JJ shoved him in the shoulder. The forgotten child tucked under his arm immediately seized the opportunity to wriggle free and sprint toward freedom. JJ barely spared her a glance as he leaned around Hayden's shoulder to get a better look. 

"Oh, come on.” He said, then he started laughing. 

Hayden spun around, spotted Shane attempting to slip quietly past them, and immediately grabbed him by the sleeve.

"Oh no you don’t."

He hauled Shane back toward the table and pointed dramatically at the Stanley Cup, as though Shane might somehow have overlooked the enormous silver trophy currently supporting his wedding cake.

"You used it as a cake stand?!”

"It seemed like the obvious choice," Shane said, as thought this was a perfect normal thing to do and Hayden was the strange one for questioning whether his ex-captain had lost his mind. 

Ilya wandered over just in time to hear the accusation and Hayden rounded on him immediately.

"This had to be you, Rozanov.”  Hayden screeched, pointing at Ilya’s chest, although there wasn’t nearly as much conviction behind his words as there usually were when he was accusing him of something. Which is to say, almost every time the two of them were forced to interact, even when he was about to become Shane's literal husband. 

Ilya held both hands up, smiling in a way that was probably intended to look innocent but very much had the opposite effect. "Don't look at me," he said. "This was all Shane.”

Hayden slowly turned back to Shane, hands on his hips. He looked, Shane thought, remarkably like an indignant emperor penguin. 

JJ, meanwhile, was still studying the display in front of them. His gaze moved from the Cup… to Shane… to Ilya… and then back to the Cup. 

“We really should have realised.” He said rubbing a hand down his face.

"Realised what?" Shane and Hayden asked in perfect unison.

"The date," JJ said, rubbing a hand down his face. "We spent two weeks trying to work out why you'd picked some random Saturday.”

Hayden groaned. "Neither of us put it together. Man, we are so stupid.”

"In our defence," JJ said, "we assumed Shane would use his day with the Stanley Cup like a normal person.”

“Yeah man,” Hayden jumps in. “Couldn’t you just take it to a strip club like everyone else?”  Then seems to consider his words and how, if that had been what Shane had chosen to do with his cup day, everyone would probably be even more confused than they were at that very moment, standing at Shane’s wedding with the Stanley cup taking its place as a cake stand. 

"...Yeah," Hayden admitted. "You know what? Actually this makes a lot of sense.”

****

The ceremony itself is, somehow, beautiful.

Shane had spent most of the morning convinced that it would be impossible for anything moving to happen in a backyard where the Stanley Cup was being used as a cake stand, but apparently he had underestimated the power of Ilya in his wedding suit. The second Ilya starts walking toward him, Shane forgets about the Cup. He forgets about the excessive amount of white lilies and the fairy lights he had insisted he didn’t want. He forgets about the fact that half the Centaurs are shuffling awkwardly behind his mother because nobody had forced him to arrange enough chairs and so they are stuck with his parent’s questionably green plastic garden furniture. He forgets, briefly, that Montreal exists at all.

Ilya Looked ridiculous. Ridiculously handsome and ridiculously happy. Svetlana walked beside him as his best woman, one hand tucked through Ilya's elbow. Her expression was as severe as ever, though Shane knew her well enough to recognise what it really means. She was trying very hard not to cry. She deposited him in front of Shane with the air of a woman handing over something priceless and gave Shane a look that clearly said, Don't fuck this up. Rose, meanwhile, stood behind Shane doing nothing of the sort, instead choosing to spend her time staring at Svetlana over Shane's shoulder with a dreamy look on her face. Apparently Svetlana has that effect on everyone except him, Shane thought, and only refrains from dramatic eye rolling because that would be undignified at his wedding.

There are vows. Afterwards,  Shane can remember saying them, but he doesn’t remember any of what he actually said. But it’s fine, because wedding vows are stupid anyway. He remembers Ilya's hands wrapped around his own, warm and steady despite everything. They hadn't written their own vows, and Shane had suddenly been very grateful for that, because he had been fairly certain he would've dissolved into a puddle before making it through the first sentence. He remembers Ilya promising, with complete sincerity, to tolerate Shane's "terrible decisions” instead of whatever it was he had been supposed to say. Half the garden had laughed and his mother had nodded along with it as though she had agreed with his assessment. Shane chose not to acknowledge that. 

Most of all, he remembered the way Ilya had looked at him, as though his entire word had been reduced down to the patch of grass they were standing on. 

The officiant absolutely butchered Ilya’s name, but it was fine, because the MLH commenters in Boston had been worse and so really this was an improvement. Before the ceremony, Shane had considered saying part of his vows in Russian, but hearing that absolute monstrosity leave the officiant's lips, he had been glad that he hadn’t. That would have been far too much butchering of Ilya’s native tongue for one day. Any more and Ilya might've decided to jilt him at the altar after all and Shane wouldn’t even have been able to blame him. 

And then they were married. Like actually married. Not the plastic ring exchanging, wedding with Hayden’s children, kind of married, although, in his heart, Shane would always consider that to be their real wedding. No, this was a real wedding. The kind that came with paperwork full of legal jargon because Shane definitely hadn't signed enough of that this summer and really couldn't wait to sign more. 

People cheered  and someone shouted, ‘finally,” as if they hadn’t learned of Shane and Ilya’s relationship literally a matter of months ago, and even then only then because some idiot had posted a video of them kissing online. Shane didn't even have to look to know it was either Hayden or JJ because they were both exactly the sort of people who would heckle a wedding.  Little Luca Haas started crying and Shane assumed it was because he had just witnessed the future he'd always dreamed of for himself. Either that, or because his teenage Hollanov-shipping heart had finally had every one of its prayers answered. Once again, either option was equally likely. 

Ilya kissed him once. Then, after pulling back just far enough to smile at him, kissed him again, apparently deciding the first one hadn't been sufficient. Always an exhibitionist, that one. Shane could only imagine what a younger Ilya would’ve been like if he hadn’t come from a country that would’ve had him lynched for such things. 

Even Svetlana looked suspiciously emotional. She caught Ilya looking at her as they start back up the aisle —or, more accurately, the garden path— and immediately fixed him with a murderous glare.

“I am not crying,” she said in curt Russian. 

Ilya was about to response when, seemingly out of nowhere, the photographer appears. She materialises with the determined faces of someone who knows far too well that she has a very limited window before several dozen hockey players start drinking enough champagne to fill the Nile, probably after they’ve claimed, multiple times, that they don’t like champagne and would rather drink beer like real manly hockey players. 

"Cake photos," she announced without the slightest hint of preamble. 

Shane liked her immediately. He appreciated someone who was efficient and didn't needlessly mince their words. 

The Stanley Cup gleamed beneath the cake, still surrounded by white lilies, somehow managing to look both majestic and very out of place. Another ripple of laughter spread through the guests as they all turned around to stare at it because apparently nobody had gotten used to it yet but they’d also somehow all forgotten it was there.

JJ already had his phone out.

"It was right there," Hayden whined, sounding personally disappointed in himself. "The signs were all there."

"I expected better from us," JJ agreed.

"I didn't," Svetlana said, appearing beside them with a glass of vodka, a feather boa, and her arm around the waist of Rose Landry who had clearly already had a bit too much to drink for so early in the day. Maybe Yuna had been plying her with alcohol to keep her away from the cake, or she'd needed some dutch courage to attempt to get with Svetlana. Shane couldn't blame her, honestly, Svetlana was intimidating. If that was the case, it seemed to be working. 

The photographer positioned Shane and Ilya in front of the table before pressing the cake knife into Shane's hand. Ilya frowned.

"Why do you get knife?"

"Because you can't be trusted with sharp objects," Shane replied automatically as he rolled his eyes and handed it over anyway. Ilya only had one Stanley Cup to Shane's three, after all, Ilya could cut the cake if he wants to. Gotta take every opportunity he has with it, and all that. 

Before Ilya could move, Shane pointed a warning finger at him.

"You are not smashing cake in my face.”

Ilya looked genuinely offended, as if to say ‘how dare you think so lowly of me’. "I was going to wait until after photographs.”

The photographer lowered her camera just enough to say, with a sigh that suggests she’d seen the exact same argument play out a million different times at a million different weddings, “Please cut the cake before you start having a domestic.”

After a few more moments of glaring at one another challengingly, they cut the cake, Ilya’s hands draped over Shane’s. The first slice comes away crooked. From somewhere in the crowd of people surrounding the table, Shane overhears a groan of disapproval. Glancing over, he recognises the look of abject horror written all over Wyatt Hayes' face. Ah, right. He’d forgotten that Hayes had recently become obsessed with the Great British Bake Off and now had very strong opinions about the appropriate way to treat a victoria sponge. Oh well, there wasn't much he could do abut it now. 

Ilya, face gleeful, slid the first slice onto the server and lifted it triumphantly into the air as though they'd just won another championship, rather than managed to cut a slice of cake in a just about vaguely acceptable manner. 

The Centaurs erupted into cheers because they were children. Shane immediately understood why Ilya liked his team so much. Boodram started clapping like they are back on the ice. Young yelled, “Beautiful form!” and Dykstra, for reasons known only to himself, started a chant of “Cake! Cake! Cake!” until Lapointe smacked him upside the head and told him to shut up.

“I still can’t believe this is the first time I’ve seen the Stanley Cup in person,” Holmbert said, apparently now having gotten over his Cup-related trance enough to recognise that it was, in fact, being used as a cake stand. 

Young nodded with complete seriousness.

"It's what it would've wanted."

"No, it isn't," Dillon said.

"You don't know that."

"I feel like I do."

Chouinard sidled over to one of the Cup handlers. Rob, Shane thought, although the two looked oddly alike. The man immediately looked wary—the unmistakable expression of someone who has spent far too many summers supervising professional hockey players and now carried a deep-seated mistrust towards them. "On a scale of one to ten," Chouinard asked, "how cursed is this?”

The handler considered the question. “Honestly? About a three.” 

“A three?| JJ repeated,, flabbergasted. “The people on twitter are going to absolutely crucify them and you think this is a three?!?” 

The cup handler just shrugged. “You’d be amazed what people do with that thing.” 

That was,, apparently, all of the encouragement the Centaurs needed. Immediately, they started firing questions at the cup handlers, who steeled themselves to drop a decade’s worth of cup-related lore on a group of very impressionable hockey players. This was, perhaps, a bad idea given that, with Shane joining their team, their chances of actually winning the cup and getting a cup day for themselves was substantially increased, but who was Shane to judge? 

While most of their guests were keeping themselves busy interrogating the cup’s keepers, Shane and Ilya enjoyed their first moments of marriage together, ignoring the way the photographer kept snapping photos with a flash that definitely did not need to be as bright as it was. Shade fed Ilya the first bite using his fork while Ilya, undignified swine that he was, choose instead to stick his finger straight in the icing and offer it to Shane. 

“Ugh,” Shane groaned  as he sucked the remnants from Ilya’s proffered finger, “that is way too sweet.” 

“It is cake!” Ilya says, giving Shane a dirty look. “It is supposed to be sweet.”  Ilya wiped icing from the corner of Shane’s mouth his his thumb and then licked it straight off his face when he didn't quite get it all because he was, apparently, unbothered by the fact they are standing in front of Shane’s entire family,  all of their friends, and there was a photographer taking photos that were most likely going to end up plastered all over the internet for the entire world to see. 

The Stanley Cup stood beneath it all, silver and lilies and cake, catching the light like it knew exactly what kind of trouble it is causing and was more than happy to be a part of the whole mess. 

Eventually, Ilya stepped back, pulled his phone from his pocket, a determined look appearing on his face. He started scrolling through the photos the photographer has somehow already sent over to his phone, because of course she had. There were several contenders, he decided, the Cup surrounded by lilies, the cake balanced elegantly above it, Shane and Ilya holding the knife together, Shane looking at Ilya instead of the camera, his eyes glowing with pure unadulterated happiness, a look Shane had seldom seen on his own face, even as a child. 

Because he was Ilya Rozanov, he picked the worst possible one. Or the best possible one, depending on who you asked. The photo showed both of them mid-laugh, cake knife in hand, the Stanley Cup beneath the cake, white lilies spilling around its base. Shane’s face is turned toward Ilya, open and impossibly endeared. Ilya is looking directly at the camera with his tongue out and his eyes shining like he knows exactly what he’s doing. It is, in all the wrong ways, so very them. At least, Shane thinks, it's not one of the ones of Shane sucking on Ilya's finger. He might have had to throw the phone over the fence if Ilya had tried that. 

“Don’t you dare caption it something insane.” Shane warned him, even though he knew that is exactly what Ilya was going to do and he was powerless to stop him. Did he even want to stop him? Honestly, at that point, He was pretty sure Ilya could ask him to do anything and he would agree because he was just high on life and the happiness of the wedding he never thought he would be able to have, Stanley cup or no Stanley cup. 

Ilya hit post before Shane iswasable to read what he had written, presumably because he knew that Shane would object to it, or at least ask him tone down whatever nonsense he had decided to spout. 

Shane snatched the phone. The post was already live. It looks so out of place, somehow, on Ilya’s feed that has, for so long, been full of posts or random objects that act as a shrine to their entire relationship that only Shane would have been able to understand. It is, Shane thinks, rather liberating. Even since they were outed, they have rarely posted content of themselves together. 

The caption reads: 

Best day with Cup. Also married love of my life. Sorry Montreal.

“You are the worst person I have ever met.” Shane told him, even though he actually thought the compete opposite. Ilya was his favourite person, the best person he had ever known and he was truly blessed that the other man came into his life, even if it did take them upwards of 10 years to get to this point. 

Ilya looked down as the first notifications begin to pour in. Hayden peering over his shoulder while Svetlana took one look and then wandered off, dragging Rose with her, still sipping her vodka. Shane, quite frankly, would rather not know. 

It turned out there were very few combinations more irresistible to hockey fans than the Stanley Cup, a wedding, and the promise of chaos.

There were thousands of congratulations from fans who have followed Shane and Ilya for years, people declaring that this was somehow both "the gayest thing ever" and "the most hockey thing ever" at the same time. Someone wrote that if the Cup had a favourite day in its entire hundred-plus-year history, this would probably be it.

Current and former players joined in. Some congratulated them on the wedding, while others congratulated them on what several described as "the funniest use of the Stanley Cup ever."

The cup handlers, from somewhere in the crowed, tweeted: @Cup_Handlers_Official We’re just glad it’s not another strip club. And there are no fish. Please no more fish. That becomes almost as widely shared as the original post.

Some of the Centaurs got in on the action, too. @Evan_Dyks_Ottawa When I prayed to get to touch the Stanley cup, this is not what I meant. 

JJ read that one aloud and nearly choked laughing. Shane, despite himself, started laughing too.

Naturally, not everyone was thrilled.

A handful of both Ilya and Shane’s former teammates posted vague comments about “what an embarrassment” and  “How about respecting tradition?” and the need to "remember what the Cup represents,”  Others complained that hockey has become "too political," apparently on the grounds that two men getting married beside a trophy now constituted activism. A few simply announced that Shane has disgraced the game forever. Those comments were immediately buried beneath thousands of replies pointing out that the Stanley Cup has previously been used as a cereal bowl, a baptismal font, a swimming pool accessory, a stripper's pole, and, according to the cup handlers themselves, who seem to have decided – for lack of actual cup handling to do – to turn becomes twitter warriors instead, survived an encounter with a herd of wild horses in Arizona.

Compared to all that, holding up a wedding cake seemed almost dignified. Very dignified, in fact. 

The loudest outrage, Shane noticed, came almost exclusively from people with Montreal logos in their profile pictures. He decided not to read any further. They weren't his teammates anymore and, quite frankly, they could get fucked. In a moment of weakness, he tweeted as such. It was fine. If someone asked about it, he could just blame Ilya. His husband would take immense pleasure in taking responsibility. Anything to throw shade at Montreal. 

@ShaneHollanderOffical Happy wedding to me. #FuckMontreal 

For a moment, he worried about what the other guys at Montreal might say to Hayden and JJ for their presence at this spectacle, but decided that was, unfortunately for them, their own problem to deal with. They could choose to leave Montreal if they wanted to. And if they didn't... well. Then that was up to them. Shane was done trying to make everyone happy. This was his day, his life, and he was not going not be made to feel bad about it. 

Instead, he handed the phone to Ilya, stole another piece of cake directly off his husband's plate, and les the internet argue with itself for once. For the first time in a very long time, none of it felt like his problem anymore.

Shane wrapped an arm around Ilya’s waist and pulled him close, brushing their noses together. He could smell the excessively sweet cake lingering on Ilya’s breath.

“You’re happy?” Ilya asked, in a quiet voice, just for him. 

“Yeah,” Shane said, the most confidence he has felt about anything in a very long time.  “I am.”

Ilya’s smiled at him, eyes glassy with unshed tears. The photographer snapped a photo, and Shane could only imagine how in love they must look in it. Perhaps Shane would share that one. Maybe he would even share one of the cake eating photos, if he was feeling brave.  

Behind them, Hayden yelled, “Can we eat the historic cake now?” And Shane just nodded, for lack of ability to say anymore words in that moment. 

Ilya laughed, and Shane kissed him, because he could  Because he was allowed. Because this was their wedding, and the Stanley Cup was holding up their cake, and the whole damn world could look if it wanted to.

It was, Shane thought, a perfect way to have his cake and eat it too. 

#FuckYouMontreal