Chapter Text
The first thing I notice is that Shane is being weird.
Not Shane-weird, not the usual hyper-focused, jaw-set, already-three-steps-ahead weird. This is different. Restless. Like he’s tuned half a notch too high and doesn’t know where to put the extra energy.
We’re at the hotel in Saskatchewan for the World Junior Hockey Championship. I’m sitting cross-legged on his bed, stealing fries from his plate, technically here because Mom pulled me aside before we left and said keep an eye on him in the specific tone she reserves for things she can’t quite articulate but knows anyway.
“I swear to God, Cait,” Shane says, not looking up from his phone, “if you eat another one—”
“You’ll what?”
He looks at me then, annoyed, distracted, already somewhere else. Shane was always somewhere else. Usually the future. This time it feels closer than that. Like something is already happening and he’s just waiting to catch up to it.
Two days before the championship game. Canada versus Russia.
In our house, that might as well have been destiny written on the calendar in pen.
Shane is on the edge of the bed now, hunched forward, elbows on knees, staring at my dad’s laptop like it owes him something. The screen light sharpens his face. Makes him look older. More serious.
“What are you watching,” I say.
“Hockey.”
I lean over anyway.
Of course it’s hockey. It’s always hockey. But this isn’t Canada footage, isn’t systems or line combinations or power play breakdowns. This is one player. Same clip, over and over. Slow motion. Rewind. Pause.
Ilya Rozanov.
Russia’s golden boy. Shane’s mirror image, if the mirror were cracked just enough to make it interesting. They’d been neck and neck for years first and second, second and first, depending on the week and who you asked. Slotted to go one and two in the draft this summer, in whatever order the hockey gods decided.
Shane doesn’t even notice he’s gripping the mouse too hard.
“How many times have you watched that,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. Then, a beat later, jaw tight: “He’s fast. But reckless.”
“Sure,” I say. “And you’re humble.” rolling my eyes
He shoots me a look.
But I see it.
The way his eyes go back to the screen. The way he rewinds again, slower this time, like he’s looking for something specific and hasn’t found it yet or has found it and keeps needing to confirm it’s real.
This isn’t study.
This is something else.
“Shane, relax, you don’t play him for another two days,” I say.
“I know.”
But the way he says it — flat and quiet and turned slightly inward — it isn’t nerves. Isn’t the focused pre-game energy I’ve watched him build and maintain my entire life.
It’s anticipation.
And underneath that, something I don’t have a name for yet.