Chapter Text
Shane finds himself bracing automatically as he walks into the Centaurs locker-room, to the sight of Harris Drover and Troy fucking Barrett, already standing in there, chatting with some of his other teammates. It isn’t exactly a shocking sight to see the pair of them here, as it feels like they’re both constantly making a habit of invading every part of his life- Drover had been all over Shane during his first season as a Centaur, with his never-ending wheedling to get Shane to participate in different social media videos that didn’t even halfway meet the parameters of his contract with the team.
The off-season hadn’t been any different, with Ilya constantly inviting Barrett and Drover over for double-dates and to ‘hang out’, leaving Shane with less and less plausible-sounding excuses to escape his own home to avoid having to spend any time with the pair.
He ended up pleading with his mother and Farah to organise several photoshoots and events with sponsors, the kind that he hated and typically found every opportunity to avoid, just to get out of the house and get away. At least it meant his off-season had been a financially productive one- a small balm considering how underpaid he was by the Centaurs- even if it hadn’t been nearly as restful as Shane had hoped. Except now the pre-season training had begun again, and he no longer had any excuses to avoid spending time with his husband’s best friend or the Centaurs’ social media Director, not during his work hours at least.
“Hi Shane!” Drover greets him cheerfully, camera already held aloft, Drover no doubt already recording despite the fact it was the locker-room. Barrett is standing behind Drover with his chin hooked over Drover’s shoulder and his arms wrapped around the other man’s waist. Shane can see how his fingers are sneaking under the fabric of Drover’s shirt. He tries to imagine any wives or girlfriends of the other players standing in the locker-room with their partner practically feeling them up in front of everybody and fights the urge to grimace, knowing how quickly HR would be stepping in to shut it down. He wonders at the separate set of standards that make it so acceptable for Drover and Barrett to act so inappropriately in the workplace.
Then again, Shane thinks, it isn’t exactly new, this idea that Barrett has, that being gay means he gets to speak however he likes and act however he wants, and he doesn’t ever have to face the kind of consequences for it that other players would- and do.
Shane can’t help but wonder what it feels like to get to move through life with that sort of privilege. He definitely wouldn’t know. He never did a damn thing wrong, never spoke a word out of line, never turned a wilfully blind eye to a rapist, used slurs, or physically targeted other players on the ice for their ethnicity, and he was torn to shreds by the media and the fans after the FanMail video. Not that he’d ever expected the reaction to be any different.
He really doesn’t understand why Drover or Barrett- or Ilya, for that matter- would see how he gets treated online and think that he’d ever have any interest in building up any social media presence that isn’t strictly professional, when it’s been made so blatantly clear what the public’s reaction is when he invites them into his personal, private life, no matter how unwillingly. He doesn’t know how long he can continue being polite about it, either, when Drover keeps pushing and pushing, throwing around phrases like ‘internalised homophobia’ and ‘a need for representation’, like Shane hasn’t represented an entire race on the ice since the first time he had a camera stuck in his face by a reporter, back when he was nine years old.
Sure enough, Shane has barely placed his bag in his locker before Drover is trotting over, Barrett at his heels, camera still in hand and blinking red in the corner. “We’re making a series of videos for our social media as a welcome back to the team,” Drover announces with a wide grin, and Shane wonders if he needs to remind Drover- again- of the clause in his contract preventing any media which includes his image being published on any social media platforms without review and approval by his PR team. Drover keeps talking before Shane has the chance.
“The topic today is biggest relationship fails,” Drover says with a wide grin and Shane has to fight the urge to grimace.
It isn’t that he doesn’t understand the purpose behind teams and players engaging positively with social media, or the responsibility that he has to be part of that. Shane had, in fact, built up an excellent professional relationship with the Metros’ media team over the ten years he’d worked for the team. Margot, Zander, and Henri, his key liaisons in the department, had always been consummate professionals, who Shane had willingly worked alongside.
They had always been appreciative of Shane’s clean public image, respectful of his wish to keep his personal life private, and approving of his willingness to engage in short clips and interviews focused on hockey, leadership, and fitness. They had also been pleased with how he took the time to workshop with them how to best engage the new, diversified audiences that his endorsements with brands unrelated to hockey had brought the team.
The only time Shane had ever felt the boundaries between his professional and personal lives had been pushed by the social media team was when they’d pushed for him to agree to the documentary about his cottage, but even then, it had been the rivalry angle that had driven the push for his involvement, the league always keen to release material that hyped up the contrast between Shane and Ilya, like a cottage surrounded by nature and a garage filled with expensive sports cars.
It’s been a jarring transition- one of many- to experience the lack of professionalism of the Centaurs social media team. Instead of consummate professionals liaising to promote and showcase the elite athleticism of players competing at the highest level of their chosen sport, it feels more like the social media team are a group teenagers making click-bait videos catered towards views and fan reactions, instead of genuine engagement.
In particular, Drover always seems focused on catering to current social media trends, ones entirely unrelated to hockey. His ongoing efforts in prying into the private lives of the team sits uncomfortably with Shane, who has always been clear about his choices to maintain a staunch separation between his personal life and his professional career. He has never willingly let the public have open access to his personal life outside of hockey, and he never plans to; he has been firm with Drover that the relationships and experiences in his life irrelevant to his career do not exist for Drover to use to boost the views of a fan base that is already ravenous to pick Shane apart; he does not owe anyone a window into his life outside of work.
And yet, Drover continues to push, with Barrett always egging him on, like Shane is the problem, for refusing to work with Drover, instead of Drover being the problem, for failing to respect Shane’s boundaries.
“I’ll have to pass,” Shane says now, having no interest in discussing ‘relationship fails’ with anyone except his therapist, who is well-compensated and has signed an NDA, on top of the legal requirements of his profession to keep anything discussed in their sessions confidential.
Barrett scoffs, rolling his eyes. “Big surprise there,” he says, and Shane is careful to maintain a neutral expression in response to the dislike for him that Barrett doesn’t even have the decency to attempt to hide, not like Shane does. Barrett always has lacked any sort of professionalism.
“Aww,” Drover is practically pouting, even as he looks like he’s trying not to laugh. “But we’ve already got Ilya’s perspective- are you sure you don’t want to tell people your side of the tuna meltdown?”
For a moment, Shane thinks he misheard.
“The what?” he repeats before he can stop himself. Drover’s smile widens, his eyes practically gleaming with excitement at Shane’s almost unprecedented engagement in one of his videos. Across the locker-room, Shane spots how Ilya, who had been in conversation with Bood and Hayes, freezes in place, his eyes widening as he turns sharply towards Drover, whose eyes- and camera- haven’t left Shane.
“The tuna meltdown,” Drover repeats. “You know, when Ilya called you ‘Shane’ in bed after you spent years ‘meeting up’,” here, he waggles his eyebrows ridiculously, “and you totally freaked out about being gay for your future husband, so you ran off and started dating Rose Landry!”
“Holly, you did what?” LaPointe, close enough to overhear, asks with a loud, raucous burst of laughter.
“Yeah, he left Roz naked on the couch, covered in come, wondering what the fuck had just happened,” Barrett snickers, which makes other players who are close enough to overhear start laughing too. Ilya, Shane distantly notes, isn’t laughing. His face has turned pale, his expression holds the panic of a man who’s just witnessed a car run a red light and is now barrelling towards an oblivious child, making no attempt at hitting the brakes. Shane wonders what his expression is doing. Maybe he’ll ask to see Drover’s footage, after.
“Imagine the Hollywood star Rose freaking Landry being your gay panic rebound!” Crows Young, elbowing Haas. Haas just wrinkles his nose. The expression on his face is far more accusing than it is amused, the flicker of his pale blue eyes in Shane’s direction holding only the perpetual disdain that Haas seems to hold for Shane, despite an entire season and playoff run spent on the same line.
“Poor Cap,” Haas says, very pointedly. “He must have been heartbroken.”
“I bet he was! Definitely a relationship fail, there, Holly,” LaPointe teases, leaning in to elbow Shane, the kind of playful roughhousing that Shane would usually side-step, or do his best to avoid without looking like he’s trying to avoid it.
He doesn’t this time. He’s too busy reeling from being struck by a metaphorical blow that he hadn’t expected or known to brace himself for. Nausea rises in him, the thick, molten heat of humiliation burning his throat. His mouth tastes of copper pennies, salty-metallic. Adrenaline, he notes, distantly. It’s the same adrenaline that now pulses through his veins, his most primal instincts warning of danger, an urge for fight or flight.
There is a kind of theoretical black hole that he can feel in his chest, its inescapable gravity threatening to swallow all the light and warmth he keeps tucked away for Ilya in his heart and soul as quiet shades of grief paint his world in grey. Devastation envelops him like a hug, its frozen fingers lovingly carving out those pieces of himself he thought sacred and protected.
It is a fatal kind of severing, he thinks, one that slices through him, leaving him oddly detached from his body; as if he’s looking down at himself, at flesh and bone knit together by gossamer threads frayed by the violent storm of emotion he distantly acknowledges yet can barely recognise as his own. Shane wonders if this is what people are talking about, when they describe how it feels when a heart breaks. A wound that has been so violently torn open, yet one that bleeds only where nobody else can witness it.
“Oh,” he says aloud, with an eerie sort of calm that in this room, only Ilya knows him well enough to recognise as the warning sign it is. His husband looks horrified as he meets Shane’s blank gaze across the stretch of locker-room that separates them. Shane smiles back at him, the perfect, polished media smile that his mother taught him, because she didn’t want him to just survive hockey as a prodigy that dared to not be white, she wanted him to thrive- and he had. Never let them see you flinch, he remembers. If you bleed, swallow it. Always return it with interest.
Ilya’s expression shifts fully to horror and a creeping dread. Shane would almost be touched by how well Ilya has learned to read him, at how well his husband is able to see through to the truth behind the precise designs of the masks Shane wears, but in this moment, every softness inside him has been scoured away. Only fresh-bleeding wounds over old scars remain.
“Shenya,” Ilya begins to say, starting to step forward and lifting his arms, reaching out to Shane as if the gaping chasm between them, the deep gouging cracks in the foundation that he had always believed to be steady, is something that Ilya can cross, now, in this moment. All the noise and chatter in the locker-room is gradually dying off, Ilya’s tone and expression alerting the other Centaurs and Drover that something has gone very wrong, in the way that Shane’s perfectly media-trained tone and expression had not.
Shane doesn’t let Ilya speak- he can’t risk the chance that his husband’s words will only trigger the fragile faultlines in his chest, that they won’t cause the shifting tectonic plates within Shane to widen the cracks that have formed in his heart until the distance between them is insurmountable.
“If we’re talking about relationship fails, did Ilya also tell you the story about the first time we fucked?” Shane asks Drover, and by default everyone else in the locker-room. He observes the way Ilya flinches back; it’s a full body movement, as if he’s just been full-body checked into the boards. His outstretched arm falls limp to his side as he recognises that the distance between them is not one that he can cross, not in this moment. “It’s a funny story too,” Shane says, his voice calm and steady, a complete contrast to the violent turbulence of emotions within him. It feels like he’s standing behind a thick pane of glass, a mere spectator, a bystander to the carnage that is beginning to unfold before him.
“After two years of him blowing up my phone every time Montreal and Boston played each other, I finally agreed to let him fuck me,” Shane tells Drover, tells Barret, tell the whole fucking locker-room. “And it was great! Ten out of ten loss of virginity, would absolutely recommend. Except then he said we were nothing, ghosted me for half a year, and broke the six months of silence by telling me ‘I want you to suck my dick’. Hilarious, right?”
“Shane,” Ilya says, helpless. There is a quiet devastation on his face as he tries to close the distance between them only for Shane to take a step back, because if Ilya touches him right now, if he makes this real instead of some horrifying nightmare that Shane is just desperately waiting to wake up from, then Shane will break into pieces and there is nobody here he trusts enough to help put him back together. Not even Ilya, not right now. “Malysh, please,” Ilya begs. “Please let’s talk just us. You will be so upset later, if you tell everyone all these things now.”
“You’re right,” Shane says, and his voice shakes slightly. He isn’t sure if it’s from the anger or the grief or that sick feeling of humiliation. “I’m going to be… horrified, I think, to know that there are so many people who now know about some of the most intensely private, difficult, and heartbreaking moments of my life. And I’m going to be devastated, too. But I’m surprised that you realise this, when apparently you didn’t see any problem sharing with Drover to post on social media one of the most distressing, profoundly vulnerable moments in our relationship like it’s just a- a punchline.”
He lets out a harsh, strangled laugh that scratches and claws at his throat, vicious and damaged and broken. “The ‘tuna meltdown’,” he repeats the phrase that Drover used, shaking his head slightly. “The fucking ‘tuna meltdown’. Do you actually think that all the shame, terror, depression, and grief I was struggling with as I tried to accept being gay while constantly surrounded by toxic masculinity was just some kind of ‘meltdown’? That everything that happened that day was just about you saying my name?”
“Shane-” Ilya tries again, but Shane just speaks over him.
“Do you have any idea how excruciatingly isolated I felt? You were the only person who knew I was gay, and you blew me off and ghosted me every time I tried to build any kind of connection between us that wasn’t about sex! Oh, except when it was on your terms, of course! Every wall against emotional intimacy between us was built by you and crossing it was only ever permitted on your terms, but how dare I freak out and leave when you decide to change how our relationship worked, again, without actually talking to me first?
“And how dare I hurt your feelings by dating a woman? It’s not like you were out getting photographed hooking up with a different woman every week! It’s not like my lack of visibly dating or picking up women meant I was constantly targeted on the ice by racist, homophobic shit-head players like Barrett, who made sure I knew just how much some chink fag bitch didn’t belong playing hockey!
“I used to have panic attacks before games against Toronto because I knew Barrett and Kent would spend the whole game targeting me and trying to hurt me, just because I’m Asian, and just because they assumed I was gay. Every single game against them, I was so fucking terrified that it would be the one where their hate-crimes caused me to suffer a career-ending injury, but surely none of that would give me any reason to feel so ashamed and terrified of my sexuality that I thought being dead was better than being gay, and that I may as well try to make it work with a woman because jumping in a river with my skates on was the only other option I had!
“Not that there wasn’t a part of me that did die every time I forced myself to have sex with a woman, when I so desperately didn’t want to! But I still forced myself to try and fuck the gay away, even when it left me fucking numb and hollow and dead inside, because I knew that no matter how excruciating it was, it was still the only way I could stay safe and be accepted! But I’m so sorry that it hurt your feelings, Ilya! You just go ahead and tell everyone all about me panicking over you saying my name while fucking! Because why not? We’ve clearly established just how hilarious you think these intensely, profoundly private, vulnerable moments in our relationship I’m still struggling to process are, so just go ahead and share it with the world, so they can all have a good laugh!”
The locker-room is dead silent when Shane stops talking, except for Ilya’s ragged breaths. There is a wild, desperate look in his husband’s eyes, a shattered expression on his face, but Shane can’t bring himself to feel even a sliver of soft-bellied empathy. “We both know that you’ve been careless and cruel to me before,” he says quietly. “But when you vowed to love, honour, and protect me, I thought you actually meant it. Apparently, that’s really my biggest relationship fail.”
If he’d taken a knife to Ilya, Shane thinks it would have hurt his husband less.
“Don’t you fucking dare follow me,” he tells Ilya, then he turns and walks out of the locker-room.