Archive of Our Own

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a hockey player in the midst of a competitive, adrenaline fueled game will, from time to time, do something a bit dirty. A check to the boards a bit rougher than needed; a chirp a bit more pointed than strictly required; a stick positioned just so to trip an opponent up. And, of course, from time to time, those moves will lead to something even dirtier – a glove dropped onto the ice, a hand curled into a fist, a pulse-pounding moment of action, soundtracked by fans beating furiously against the glass and howling for blood. 

A real, proper fight.

This was true for every player in Major League Hockey. Even for Shane Hollander.

Shane knew that if someone were to, say, take a poll of every player in MLH, most of them probably would not jump to a fighter as their primary description of him. Which was fair enough. He certainly never liked to start fights. Fighting tended to get you time in the box, and you could say a lot of things about the Montreal Metros but “they have a really good penalty kill” had never been one of them. And besides, one couldn’t score goals from the sin bin, and Shane really, really liked to score goals.

But hockey was a contact sport. Sometimes you got a bit physical. He wasn’t a dirty player – he wasn’t one of those guys who tried to go knee-to-knee, or punched other players in the back of the head or anything like that – but he wasn’t exactly perfect either. He’d shoved a few guys a little harder than he needed to. He’d timed a crosscheck just perfectly enough that the ref missed it. That was the nature of the game. All’s fair. 

So, too, was fighting. Shane had learned to throw a punch when he was eleven years old. He wasn’t notorious for dropping his gloves, but he had been the Captain of a team – there were times when it was expected of him. Times when a guy got too close to your goalie and you had to get in his face to remind him – not on my fucking ice, baby. Most of these events were the type of penalty-free shoving that the refs jumped in to dissolve right away. But more than once Shane had needed to send a real message, and a motherfucker had gotten punched. 

So: Shane’s first fight. It hadn’t exactly been anything to write home about. It was back when he was in juniors, right as it was starting to become clear he was gonna be somebody. His parents had sat him down and told him that it might be tough – that other kids would see him as competition, would maybe let their jealousy leak through on the ice, would get a little mean, play a little dirty. This was nonsense to Shane, all of fourteen, feeling out of sorts in his own body post a puberty growth spurt he’d had yet to fill out. Like, why be jealous? If those kids wanted to be as good as him they just had to put in the time. He put in the time. It wasn’t some accident of genetics that had made him good at hockey. He knew other sports were like that – there was a kid at his school who was probably going to end up 7 feet tall, and people straight up called him Raptor because, well, that was his destiny – it was written in his body.

Hockey wasn’t written in Shane’s body, not necessarily. He’d taken to the ice immediately, no kidding about that, but he hadn’t always naturally been the fastest one on the ice, or the most balanced, or the most poised. He’d worked for that. He put in the time at the rink, and when he was off the rink he thought about hockey almost exclusively. He read books about hockey and watched every game that he could get his hands on – there was no tearing him away from the TV screen on Saturday night. The way Shane saw it, jealousy was pointless – just get out there and be better.

(It wasn’t until Ilya that he understood, really – that sometimes your best just wasn’t good enough, that some people were just going to beat you anyway. But that jealousy had also always been caught up in arousal, so it was confusing for more reasons than one, really.)

Anyway, he probably should have seen the fight coming – his parents had flat out warned him – but he was still shocked when, after a fairly routine play, one of the kids on the other team snarled, dropped a glove, and slammed a fist directly into Shane’s face.

It wasn’t a good punch. Later, in proper professional hockey, Shane would get his shit actually wrecked – real punches with 250 pounds of pure muscle behind them. He’d have bruises on his jawline that lasted for weeks, nasty black eyes, burst capillaries, all the good stuff. Here, the punch mostly served to shove him back a few inches on the ice, grazing sort of listlessly against his left cheek. He nearly fell, mostly from the shock of the action, almost losing his balance. He hadn’t done anything on that play, not anything all that impressive anyway – he’d just gotten the puck off the kid’s stick, a little push that sent it careening back across the ice until another kid on Shane’s team had knocked it over the boards and out of play. Maybe he’d smiled a bit after the move, proud of himself for his stick work. Apparently that was too much.

“Think you’re fucking better than me, you fucking pussy?” the kid sneered, and went for another punch. This time Shane ducked. He felt a flare of annoyance. Who the fuck was this kid to call him that shit? He dropped his own glove, and – maybe almost to prove some sort of point vis a vis the pussy thing – landed a much better punch. The punk went sprawling backwards onto the ice, where he laid dumbly while the ref finally swept in to pull them apart.

His mom and dad weren’t exactly happy on the car ride home, but they understood. Shane hadn’t provoked the fight, and it made sense to defend himself when the kid was coming at him – especially after he mentioned the dropping of pussy. Yuna had scoffed “can’t go five minutes without being sexist about it, I guess.” They’d gotten home, put an ice pack on his cheek, and David had told Shane not to worry about it – that it was just jealousy, and that things would be different once he went pro.

So Shane shrugged it off.

And truthfully, David was right – things were different when he went pro. The fighting was worse, but it was also more specific. Guys swung more often in playoff games, for instance, and more often against players who held them to the boards for upwards of fifteen seconds. Some guys let the lightest of chirps dig into their skin like shrapnel, and you had to look out for them as the game went on because even if you weren’t the guy chirping sometimes they’d take it out on you. Some guys wanted nothing more than to trick you into throwing the punch first so they could ride high on the power play – chief among these guys was, in fact, the love of Shane’s life. No matter how much he tried to warn his team not to rise to Rozanov’s taunts, to let him win the fucked up little game he was playing, the Metros and their shitty penalty kill kept getting what Hayden called Rozanov’d. (This, of course, wasn’t a problem for Shane, who’d long conditioned himself to hear Ilya’s chirps as the foreplay they were, tail wagging happily at the sound of his voice like Pavlov's fucking dog.) 

All told he got into a couple scraps a year, but nothing to write home about – he didn’t instigate, he didn’t go too far. He kept his head level and focused on what it needed to be focused on: winning the game. Sure, one time he almost punched Scott Hunter’s lights out after a game, but whatever – he was emotionally compromised then, fucking sue him. Mostly everyone assumed that was a weird blip and let it go, and he and Scott maintained enough professional friendliness at league events that everyone figured it wasn’t personal, which it wasn’t. 

All of that to say that the more and more the media went on about Hockey’s Golden Boy, the more people forgot that Shane was, at the end of the day, just like any other professional hockey player. He knew how to throw a fucking punch. He just chose not to, most times, for strategic reasons. 

It became apparent that people had forgotten this very key fact almost immediately after he joined the Centaurs. 

There was a lot to love about being out and married and open. Shane could go around Ottawa with Ilya, could take him to the places he haunted as a high schooler, could sit pressed close to him in bars without anyone looking twice. Could hold his hand and kiss him in public, in front of strangers and teammates, no fears at all. And in Ottawa they were beloved – people actually stopped them on the street to say how happy they were for Shane and Ilya. 

Privately, Shane figured they were mostly happy to have the two best players in the league on their historically dinky team, but whatever. This was Shane’s historically dinky team, after all. His mother might have been a Metros die-hard, but Shane had been a kid in an expansion city – he’d lived and breathed the Centaurs until he got old enough to start thinking about not looking too loyal and fucking up his draft chances.

And anyway, Yuna had thrown all her Metros stuff away and gone all in on the Cens and their goofy logo the minute it all went south. The Centaurs had been the team that had welcomed him and Ilya with open arms, that hadn’t flinched at their love. So it was always going to be Shane’s team, in every way that mattered.

Really, the worst thing about being outed – besides the insane breach of personal privacy and Crowell breathing down their necks and the fallout in the Metros locker room – was that it gave certain weirdos an opening to think they could come at Shane.

It wasn’t that he didn’t see it coming. In fact, he’d half expected it. He’d been thrumming with a nervous energy before his first preseason game that he hadn’t had since he was still a rookie, wet behind the ears and barely old enough to vote. Ilya had assumed it was just new team nerves, and it had felt easier to let him keep thinking that. Not that he was trying to hide anything from Ilya, just – Ilya was already juggling all of Shane’s other insane, neurotic feelings. He could let this one slide. 

But the preseason had been smooth as silk. If any guys on other teams brought up his “new” relationship – new to them anyway – it was either purely congratulatory (a defenseman in San Jose who Shane was 99% sure he’d never spoken to before saying my brother’s gay dude, I think it’s cool as hell what you’re doing) or largely bafflement at his choice in partner (a journeyman winger Shane had first met ten years ago, now on the fourth line in Vancouver, saying I just feel like you could have picked a guy who hasn’t topped the player poll for most punchable in league four times, I guess). Shane wasn’t exactly thrilled by these comments either – when he was on the ice he wanted to focus on the game, not his personal life – but it was better than being called a slur, he figured. 

So, yeah, he let his shoulders drop a bit, his guard down. He’d gotten a therapist over the summer, Dr. Kayla, and she was helping him find – direct quote – “healthy coping mechanisms for dealing with anxiety.” 

“You can’t spend your whole life in fight or flight, Shane,” she’d said their second meeting.

“I think you underestimate how good I am at being in fight or flight,” he’d said back. Ilya would have laughed, probably, but she’d made a funny face and written something down in her notebook, which had not been reassuring.

Her point, which he did understand, was that now that the thing he was so afraid of having happened had happened and it hadn’t actually been that bad, he could probably stop tying himself in knots over the fallout from other potential bad things happening in some vague hypothetical future. Of course not every guy in the league would be accepting, and yes, even Dr. Kayla could admit that facing Montreal was likely to be – her words! – “a fucking shitshow.” But for the most part, even if people did secretly go back to their locker rooms and sneer about how he and Ilya were corrupting the sport or whatever, on the ice everyone just wanted to play the game and win the game. He could block people on his social media and decide not to look at what podcasters and op-ed writers said about him (“protecting your peace,” Rose had said, and Shane had nodded like he knew what the fuck she meant). He could try, at least, to let more things roll off his back. For the most part, he could let his guard down.

So he did.

In classic fashion, this was his first mistake. 

Really, though, it was mostly the mistake of the other guy – a twerpy little forward on St. Louis called Crooks that Shane had never been particularly impressed by. 

It was two weeks into the season, and the first stretch of games had been good. Better than good, actually. They’d won four out of their first five games, and the one they’d lost had been to a freak bouncing puck goal that no one on Earth could have properly saved. Losing to bad luck was annoying, sure, but Shane had watched the tape back and been proud of how the team looked. Things were gelling quickly, which hadn’t been a given. He knew he and Ilya made a great team – obviously, they were married – but he wasn’t on a line with Ilya. Instead, he’d been put on the second line with Luca Haas, fresh off a blockbuster freshman season, and a kid named Will LaPointe, who Wiebe had told Shane, in a very neutral tone of voice, had some potential. The implication – that Shane could bring that potential out – had been obvious, and Shane had set himself to work trying to mentor the kid into being a better winger now that he had a more solid presence on the line to work with. 

Haas was shy and sweet and spent long road trips sketching quietly, beautiful little slice-of-life shots – Bood telling a story, Ilya asleep on Shane’s shoulder, Troy and Tanner Dillion bent over an iPad scowling. LP was goofy and loud, regularly dared everyone else to shotgun beers despite not being really able to do it himself, and had made Shane watch four episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Go! on the team plane before Ilya had swooped in to rescue him with a stern stop stealing my husband and making him watch dumb bullshit, LP.

Needless to say, Shane loved them both instantly, and would probably die for them if asked to. 

The whole team dynamic had been so immediately good – looser than Montreal, probably due in no small part to Ilya’s utter inability to take anything too seriously, lest he break out in hives. It had just been good, had felt good, and so Shane had hit the ice in St. Louis with a stupid little grin on his face, feeling like a kid again playing for fun instead of the figurehead of a legacy franchise so weighed down with history it kept threatening to crush him into a fine paste.

And then this little nobody in St. Louis had to go and fuck it up.

It took Shane a second to even realize the kid was talking to him. The Jazz were down by one, and their fans were appropriately pissed off, banging on the glass loudly enough that Shane could barely hear anything on the ice that wasn’t shouted. But he’d looked up and caught the kid’s mouth moving, teeth clenched around his mouthguard like Shane still did, a nasty habit he was lucky hadn’t lost him a tooth yet.

“Sorry, what?” Shane said. He could practically hear Ilya in his head – so Canadian, apologizing for not hearing chirp properly. At least, Shane figured it was a chirp, given the kid scowled in annoyance instead of embarrassment. Embarrassment was usually what happened when people were giving him the I had your poster growing up speech.

God, when did he get old?

“I said,” the twerp sneered, all righteous fury, “that you’re a fucking disgrace to the game.”

It would be a lie to say that Shane’s immediate, kneejerk reaction wasn’t a spike of dread directly to his gut. This had been what he’d been afraid of, after all – that the exposure of his private life would mark him forever as some sort of freak. That it would take away from who he was on the ice (which was, honestly, one of the greatest to ever do the fucking thing). 

But he thought about his sessions of therapy, where Dr. Kayla had looked at him in a no nonsense way and said just because other people say it’s bad doesn’t mean it is bad, Shane. People can be idiots. Sort of famously, actually. He took a breath, then a second one, and he made a purposeful decision – this does not bother me. This kid is an idiot. He has no idea what he’s talking about.

Play had been stopped while the refs reviewed a possible foul on St. Louis – Shane could see them discussing in the booth, and could tell that it was coming to an end. He literally didn’t have time for this. Still, he hated not getting the last word. Ilya was right about him – he was a competitive, bratty little fucker when he wanted to be. “You sure about that? One of us has a point this game and the other doesn’t. Pretty sure your fans would agree you’re the disgrace right now.”

He started to skate away, but the kid reached an arm out and grabbed him back, suddenly in his face. “No, it’s you,” he spit, more or less literally. Shane winced at the spray. “You’re the one who’s a degenerate. I bet you let them all line up in the locker room and fuck you one by one you–”

Well. That wouldn’t stand.

So: Shane’s first fight, the kid had called him a pussy. At the time it had been a punchable offense, but the truth was that over the years getting called a pussy became sort of background noise in Shane’s life. It was a thing that he was a bit ashamed of, because he knew it was a word his mother hated, that she thought it was gross and sexist and everything that was wrong with hockey culture, but Yuna wasn’t in the locker rooms listening to these guys talk, where it came out of people’s mouths as easily as dude or bro, almost second nature. It wasn’t a defense of the word or anything, Shane didn’t like it either, it was just – he’d learned to pick his battles, right? He could shut down certain words in the locker room as captain, say he wouldn’t tolerate the f slur in English, French or any other language on his team, but if he’d objected to every pussy or cocksucker he’d just be viewed as “no fun,” and he always figured it’d be easier for the guys to dismiss the stuff he really cared about, in those cases.

(Of course, he learned that most of the guys had agreed to not say those words only within his earshot, and were actually in bars and strip clubs and secret group chats saying them all the time, but it hadn’t been happening in the locker room. There’d been other issues there, but if Shane had been hearing the f slur every day he probably would have been even more terrified to come out than he was, which was already pretty terrified.)

His first pro fight was about something else. His first fight in the pros had happened because some toothless backwater Alberta separatist motherfucker who’d been working mostly as a bench warmer in Anaheim and couldn’t hit the puck into the net if you paid him, which they fucking did by the way – an embarassing amount of cap space for a guy who hadn’t made All-Stars in near a decade – had shoved him against the boards late and sneered can’t believe they let you play, how do you even see the puck with eyes like that?

Shane knew he had to pick his battles. That was an easy battle to pick. Say something racist, get your fucking shit wrecked. 

So he’d dropped gloves. If he had it his way, by the time he was done the guy wouldn’t have ever been able to breathe through his nose again, but they got pulled apart pretty quick – Shane was the upstart, gunning his way to Rookie of the Year, and no one wanted to risk him being out a game or two with a broken nose if they didn’t have to. Hayden had been the one to swoop in and pull him away. When Hayden had asked later what the guy had said, Shane had brushed it off, allergic to the idea of getting attention for something like this. He could almost picture the stuffy diversity training they’d subject the guys to, that he’d be blamed for. Could almost hear the whispers from management – well, I know it’s a good look to have him, but is it worth it if he causes problems? Not worth it, in Shane’s estimation. This could stay between him and the Neanderthal. 

But the dude he punched apparently had no qualms telling the story. The angle he was going for was Hollander’s so freaking sensitive, but through sheer luck – or maybe just because pretty much everyone else hated this guy as much as Shane did – the story that had gotten out was Hollander will wreck your shit if you chirp him about him being Asian. 

He wasn’t the only Asian guy in MLH – hell, he wasn’t even the only guy of Japanese descent – but they were pretty few and far between and he was, by far, the most prolific of any of them, even just as a rookie. He’d expected some shit, and he’d known he had to shut it the fuck up on the ice. He knew that if he’d complained off the ice, he’d be a snitch or a pussy or whatever, the league Golden Boy looking for special treatment from upper management. On the ice he was just like any other player responding to a low blow. That was how you handled shit in hockey. 

After he got three good hits on that guy in Anaheim, it was very rare for him to hear overtly racist chirping again. He was sure guys were saying shit – again, later he’d figure the guys on his own team were probably saying it in rooms he wasn’t in – but, whatever. If it wasn't on the ice, there wasn’t anything he could do about it anyway, not without becoming a problem. And all Shane had ever wanted was to keep his head down and play some good fucking hockey. That was it. 

The way he saw it, this was similar. The kid was just young. He’d forgotten that Shane wasn’t the type of guy to let this shit slide on the ice, Golden Boy or not. Everyone had forgotten, as the years had gone on. Shane had been compared to Ilya so much, and Ilya got punched all the time – it was easy to forget that Shane had been in his fair share of fights too, because comparatively he sort of hadn’t. 

(Truthfully, Shane always thought he was only Hockey’s Golden Boy because they compared him to Ilya, and that even then the comparisons were largely unfair. Ilya’s arrogance was mostly playful, his standoffishness in interviews born of a lack of perfect comprehension of English, at least when he was younger. Ilya wasn't the arrogant asshole the league made him out to be - he'd just been cast in a part, same as Shane, and they both were being forced into scripts that never really fit either of them.)

The thing was that Shane had once rocked a motherfucker for being racist, and then people had mostly laid off on being racist, at least to his face. He wasn’t under the illusion that rocking a motherfucker for being homophobic would have the same result. In part, he wasn’t under that illusion because it had already breached the containment of being on the ice. Shane had already been labeled a problem, had already gone too public with the whole thing. It hadn’t been his choice to get outed, but it’d been one thing when guys like Dallas Kent were sneering slurs on the ice and Shane had to ignore them because he didn’t want to draw attention to the way it cut under his skin, to something true about him. He’d tried to let it roll off his back, the way he had become immune to pussy, to cocksucker, to the little robot noises some guys made when he was locked in on the ice. 

But now that he was out, Shane was suddenly exhausted by the idea of just having to let every slur roll off his back. He was immediately irritated – who the fuck was this guy to think he could talk to Shane Hollander like this? Call Shane a degenerate pervert, whatever – it wasn't true. Imply Ilya was cheating on him, also whatever – definitely not true. Call him a homo or a queer – well, those were true, and he was sick of feeling ashamed of either of them. But call him the f slur? Call him the f slur and end up sprawled out on the ice bleeding from your fucking nose. Those were going to be the rules.

These motherfuckers had to remember who they were dealing with, here. 

Shane dropped gloves and punched the kid so fast that it took a long moment for anyone to even realize he’d done it – in particular the kid he punched, who was just blinking stupidly back at him as Shane hoisted him closer by the jersey.

“What the fuck did you fucking say? Say it again, you stupid fuck, I’ll break your goddamn nose!” Shane was shouting, but he was trying to get a point across. I dare you! I double dare you!

He was aware that someone – LP – was grabbing him by the shoulders and hauling him away. “Jesus, Hollzy,” LP was saying, “what the fuck did he say?”

It was nice to have the reassurance that Shane’s team knew he wouldn’t have punched the guy for no reason.

He looked up and caught Ilya’s eye. Ilya was still on the bench, but only barely – he was standing up, and both Bood and Barrett had clapped hands on his shoulders like they were physically holding him back from hopping the boards.

Shane mouthed I’m fine. Ilya frowned. The ref skated in and called the penalties – Shane went to the box, five for fighting, but the kid didn’t get shit for instigating because nobody had caught what he said except Shane. Way it went. St. Louis had been called on the foul anyway, so it was 4-on-4 for the duration, and Shane felt calm about it in the penalty box because the Centaurs, unlike the Metros, did have a pretty good penalty kill, all told. Crooks had gone to the locker room to get checked out. He wouldn’t say shit again, of that Shane was sure.

While he wasn’t going to forget the whole thing, he’d been prepared to mostly let it go – outside of the inevitable chirps from his teammates about being one scary fucker – except that afterwards, Ilya got weird. 

It started after the game, in the locker room. Shane had been initially reluctant to have their stalls next to each other, if only because he knew his physical reaction to Ilya’s body could be a bit, uh, difficult to control for him. It had been one of several conversations they’d had in the weeks leading up to the season starting – do we room together on the road? Do we stand next to each other in the locker room? Do we kiss in front of our teammates? Journalists? In the end, Shane had flat-out demanded they room together because it felt stupid to waste more time not sleeping in the same bed considering all the time they had already wasted; both of them copped to the fact that they’d be unlikely to not kiss each other in front of teammates, but would keep it reasonably chaste while working and would avoid too much public affection in front of journalists to prevent stories about it; and Ilya had asked, very politely, if Shane would consider taking the stall next to his. “I like having you in my, uh – side vision?”

“Peripheral vision,” Shane had offered.

“Yes,” Ilya said. “I want to look over and see you and know you are there, next to me. By my side.”

And, well, how could Shane say no to that?

So far it had been pretty nice, actually. The proximity allowed them to have quiet chats, just the two of them, which had become a little pregame ritual – discussing the plays almost Captain-to-Captain, even if Shane obviously wasn’t a captain anymore. They staggered their showers, Shane usually going first, politely averting his eyes while Ilya changed (Ilya had no such compunctions, just the other day leering so openly at Shane that Barrett had tossed a rolled up sock at his head and yelled keep it PG, Roz, Jesus!) but other than that no one had commented on the arrangement, at least not yet. 

There was a moment, over the summer, where Shane wondered if constant proximity to Ilya would diminish some of their fervor for one another. They’d had time together before, but there’d always been an end date to that time, a known stoppage. The time had always felt a bit like they were stealing it. Even at the Cottage, where they relaxed and lounged and spent hours together but separate, reading or on their phones, they still were jumping each other's bones most of the time, if only to make the most use of their free days. Shane knew that marriages, at least straight marriages, could result in diminished sexual activity – the guys on the Metros had bitched enough about their wives to make that clear, and truthfully Shane should have shut that shit down, but he’d been so afraid of someone turning the question back on him (and what would you know about marriage, Holly? When are you finally going to find yourself a girl, huh? You some sort of–) that he’d always kept his mouth shut and let Hayden handle it, like a coward. 

And really, maybe that was why Shane had punched that guy, if he let himself think about it. He’d spent so many years keeping his fucking mouth shut, letting stuff slide off his back – not because it didn’t bother him, but because he was always terrified of looking like it bothered him too much. There were things about him he couldn’t change – he was Asian, he was gay. The Asianness he’d been unable to hide, so that had been one thing, but for years it had felt safer to tuck the truth of his sexuality behind his teeth, to grin and bear it and chirp back instead of getting angry, just to be safe. Maybe, with the total implosion of his previous way of living, he no longer saw the benefit of being fucking scared, anymore. There was no putting the rabbit back in the tophat once the magician pulled it out, as his father liked to say. So why should Shane keep on acting like things were the same, when they very much would never be the same again?

Like he could read Shane’s thoughts (which sometimes Shane thought maybe he could), Ilya spoke to him from the stall over – nearly under his breath, low and quiet, just the two of them in a private moment as the locker room burst into noise around them, cheering their win. “You punched that guy, Hollander.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” Shane said back glibly. He risked turning to face Ilya, shooting a smug little smile in his husband’s direction. Stuff like this usually got Ilya hot – he’d been crazy about the not-even-fight Shane and Hunter had nearly gotten into all those years ago – but when Shane turned he saw that Ilya’s face was more neutral than he expected. He looked almost concerned. “My hand’s fine,” Shane offered, dumbly, holding it out so Ilya could see, thinking maybe that’s what was wrong, here. Ilya took it gently between both of his hands, tilting it side to side to look at the light bruising on Shane’s knuckles. 

“He said something. That kid. He called you a slur,” Ilya said. It wasn’t a question, not really – Ilya already knew the answer, because Shane’s actions on the ice had made the answer obvious. It was also at a slightly louder voice than he’d been speaking in before, a little colder. The bubble of their privacy burst – Bood, Hazy, Barrett, Dykstra, LP and Young, hovering in the stalls near them, all tuned in.

“Wait, shit, that’s what he said?” LP said. “I should have let you keep punching him man, fuck. I just figured he was saying some dumb shit about the game, or whatever.”

“It’s fine, LP, you did the right thing,” Shane assured. “I think I got my point across.” Dykstra whooped and draped his whole body against Shane’s back, arms going around his shoulders. Shane cringed a little – Dykstra smelled rank, alright – but he appreciated the show of brotherly camaraderie nonetheless. 

“So, what, now you are going to fight every guy who calls you a slur on the ice?” Ilya asked, a little roughly. A little, in fact, like he thought that was a bad or unrealistic thing to try to do. Which was insane, because that seemed like the exact thing that Ilya himself would do, so why was he giving Shane shit for it? It was a totally normal reason to punch someone, after all. 

“No,” Shane said. “Just the first few. I figure eventually people will get the message it’s a bad idea and stop fucking saying it.”

“Prison rules,” Young said, sagely, from the stall on the other side of Shane. Everyone turned to him, flabbergasted. “You know,” Young offered, when he realized everyone was staring, “you beat the biggest guy up on the first day so everyone knows not to fuck with you.”

“Kev, buddy,” Bood said, “what the fuck do you know about prison?”

“I’ve seen Oz!” Young defended.

Hazy frowned. “You’ve seen Oz? Seriously? You?”

After a pause, Young shrugged. “I’ve heard of Oz.”

“Okay, enough,” Ilya cut in. “This conversation is making me stupider. We have to stop having it before I get too dumb and cannot play hockey properly anymore, yes?”

Young shrugged, and Bood, Dykstra, and LP immediately turned to chirping him about being an idiot. Hazy, Shane noted, still seemed tuned in to what was happening with Shane and Ilya, but the goalie had a tendency to do that – freakishly observant, the guy was. Shane turned back to his husband. “You’re acting like you wouldn’t have punched him. Which I know is bullshit.”

Ilya sniffed, running a thumb along his nose. “Yes, but I get into fights, Hollander.”

Shane frowned. “I fight,” he said. He did! Not often, but just last year he and some clown on the Drillers had gotten into a shoving match because the guy had gotten in a nasty late hit on J.J.  

Ilya opened his mouth, likely to protest – although Shane still didn’t really understand what was bothering him so much – but he was saved by one Harris Drover swooping into the locker room, eyes playfully covered even though most of the guys had gone to the showers already. 

“Shane! They want you for media. You decent?” Harris said.

Shane smiled, fondly. He’d really grown to like Harris in his few weeks on the Cens – he understood why the man’s presence had made Ilya so immediately comfortable with the team. He never knew him as the social media guy, not really, but as a PR person he was doing a very good job with what Shane could admit was probably the most bizarre situation any PR person on any team had really ever had to deal with. There was no PR guidebook for so two of your players, who are, by the way, the most famous guys in the league, got married to each other over the summer and now play together all of the time. 

Harris had insisted on individual meetings with Shane and Ilya before the preseason, and then a larger meeting with both of them, and then another larger meeting with the full comms team, Farah, and Shane’s parents to go over what he was referring to as The PR Rulebook For the Season. He’d perfectly curated the list of journalists allowed in the locker room, and limited the amount of press passes handed out for other media scrums. He rejected all the gossip mags and anyone who’d previously written something salacious about the outing. “My number one priority,” he’d said to Shane at their one-on-one meeting, “is your comfort and safety as a member of this team. I do not care if it makes us look like assholes, I will protect that.”

So far, that had largely amounted to a pretty easy start to the season. Personal questions about Shane and Ilya’s marriage were verboten in the room. Their dynamic as players was fine to talk about – Shane was running out of ways to answer the question about how it felt to not be a Captain anymore (I’ve always thought Rozanov is a great Captain. He commands a lot of respect in the room, and the guys all love him. There’s no reason to fix something that’s not broken, and I never came to this team expecting the captaincy given the success he’s had.) – but nothing more intimate than that. Of course, some reporters were asking questions that were thinly veiled questions about Shane and Ilya’s marriage – is it odd reporting to a different Captain might be genuine from one reporter, but from another it really meant is there trouble in the room sharing space with your husband? – but Harris and Shane had figured there was only so much they could do to prevent that type of questioning anyway. He knew as the season went on that the questions might get tougher – any sense that he was performing less well than last year would be called out, blame placed either on his inability to gel with a new team, the fact that he abandoned the legacy dynasty he’d help build, or “distractions” in the locker room (the very fact of his marriage). 

In theory, this would be the toughest day yet. They were on away ice, which meant Harris didn’t have nearly as much control over who was in the room – he still shut down inappropriate questions, directed everyone back to hockey, but there’d certainly be an obnoxious curveball or two thrown in. Plus, Shane would have to answer for the fight. And he didn’t want to say yeah, the guy called me a slur so I decked him. It was the same shit as the racist chirp from years ago – it was better to handle it on the ice and to not let word of it leak out into the larger room.

Luckily, Shane was media trained within an inch of his life. He was prepared for this.

“Yeah, I’m decent,” he told Harris. “Send ‘em my way.”

Ilya frowned again, quite serious. His eyes darted across Shane’s face, looking for something, but Shane just smiled and shrugged. “Shouldn’t be that bad. Not my first rodeo, you know?”

Ilya’s frown deepened, weirdly, but before Shane could ask the expression slipped away entirely, replaced by a big, fake cocky grin that Shane knew well – Ilya’s playing the jester face. It was odd to see it here, in a room Ilya felt comfortable in. It was odd to see it directed at Shane, now that they were married. “Media does not want to talk to me, Harris? I am neglected! Forgotten! Replaced!”

Harris rolled his eyes. “I’d say you should punch someone next game, Ilya, but I’d really rather you didn’t.”

Shane reached over and squeezed Ilya’s bicep twice – a little reassurance. “I’ll see you in twenty, okay? Meet you on the bus?”

“Okay,” Ilya said, and leaned forward to kiss Shane gently on the lips before pulling back and heading to the showers. 

“He alright?” Harris asked.

“I don’t really know,” Shane said, and he could tell Harris knew how much he hated admitting that by the sympathetic look the man shot him.

“We’ll be quick as we can,” Harris promised, and went to let the reporters know Shane was available. 

The first questions were delightfully inane – how do you feel about the power play tonight, Shane? and How did you find the holes in St. Louis’ defense? No one butted in with a stupid personal question or a suggestion that Shane and Ilya’s relationship had somehow poisoned the game – maybe that was because they won, or maybe it was just because no one in St. Louis really gave a shit about them, who could be sure? 

Finally, though, the topic turned to what everyone was really interested in.

“Shane, you were involved in an altercation with Leon Crooks in the third period today, any comment on that fight?”

Shane shifted, crossing his hands behind his back and clasping his wrist. It was an old, reliable trick – he had a natural tendency to want to tuck in on himself when he was nervous, put his thumbs in his pockets and slump his shoulders inward. He always forced himself to do the opposite in front of media; to square his shoulders and present his chest to the camera, boldly. “Your Superman pose,” Ilya had called it flippantly, once, years ago – when they were still pretending at casualness – and while Shane had reacted indignantly at the time, had insisted he never did it and sworn to himself he’d never do it again, years later he could admit his husband had a point. And hey, it worked. 

“You know, it’s a physical sport, an emotional sport,” Shane said, as blandly as he usually talked to the media, voice flat and affectless. He knew the tone hadn’t helped the “hockey robot” reputation, but it was a good shield – people tended to be surprised to discover he was actually, deep down, sort of an emotional headcase. “Things get heated sometimes. It’s not ideal, you know, you never want to serve the penalty, but it’s what happens.”

“You’re not typically known for fighting, Shane,” another reporter chimed in. “Did Crooks do something to provoke you?”

Another tip from Shane’s trusty how to deal with the media guide – try not to lie. You don’t always have to tell the truth, and you almost never have to tell the whole truth, but a lie can be obvious, spotted, and most importantly contradicted. He by no means had to – or wanted to – come out and say yeah, Crooks and his stupid tweedy little grade 7 mustache he’s trying to grow out called me a homophobic slur, ma’am, but it would also be dumb to claim Crooks had done nothing. Particularly if Crooks was going to spread his own version of the event, which he surely would – both to the media and to the guys in the room. 

“You know, heat of the moment, sometimes you get carried away,” Shane said. “It a tough game, his team was in the weeds, sometimes you say something you don’t mean.”

This bit, now, was aimed directly at Crooks and anyone who heard Crooks’ version of events – you said it once, and you got punched. I am going to assume you didn’t mean it, and so next time I won’t punch you. Unless you fuck up again.

Do not fuck up again.

“So he did say something?” the reporter asked. 

“Shane’s answered the question,” Harris chimed in, sounding bored. Shane resisted the urge to shoot him a thankful little glance. The reporter furrowed her brow in frustration because, of course, Shane hadn’t really answered the question, but she let it drop.

“Shane, your penalty minutes have gone up this season compared to this time last season on the Metros,” another reporter added. 

Shane waited for a beat and then spoke. “Have they? I didn’t know that.”

“Do you have an answer for that?” the guy prodded.

Shane furrowed his brow, playing dumb jock. “I didn’t hear a question.”

The reporter clearly clenched his jaw. “Do you have any thoughts on why your penalty minutes have gone up on your new team?”

Shane frowned. He really hadn’t known his penalty minutes had gone up, and he was pretty sure if he actually went back and tracked through that they were likely only up by one or two two-minute minors, at least before his major tonight. He really had no idea what this guy was trying to get at. “Like I said, I wasn’t aware they had. So I can’t really answer that. But, you know, there’s lots of reasons penalty minutes change. The schedule is different every year, we play different teams at different times. Line-ups are different, refs are different. This season’s not last season, I’d be surprised if everything was the same, I guess.”

“Shane–” the guy said, clearly wanting to continue, but Harris abruptly stepped forward, clapping his hands cheerfully.

“Alright! That’s it for tonight folks, Shane’s got to get back to his team. Thank you all.”

Shane blinked in Harris’ direction, a bit confused – it was a pretty early end to the scrum. When the two of them were alone, Shane raised an eyebrow. Harris shrugged, looking a little cagey. “I just didn’t like that guy’s tone. I don’t know,” he said. “You should get out of here, I think the team’s waiting at the bus.”

A sudden wave of exhaustion hit Shane, and he was more than happy to agree and forget the whole thing even happened. 

On the bus he found Ilya immediately, sitting in his usual seat – on the aisle, leaning across said aisle to yap merrily with Bood and Boyle. When he saw Shane his smile softened, and he shifted to let Shane cross over his legs and drop into the window seat next to him. Ilya twined their hands together immediately, and Shane let the warmth of the action wash over him – he got to have this now. He got to have this forever. No one on this team balked or scoffed or looked disgusted when they held hands. “You are alright?” Ilya asked, squeezing twice. 

Shane let his head drop against the seat, his whole body relaxing for the first time since warm-ups that afternoon. “Yeah, I’m alright.” He lolled his head over to look at Ilya.

Ilya was doing that searching thing again. Shane really didn’t know what it meant – he wanted to ask Ilya, but the bus probably wasn’t the best place to do it. “Okay,” Ilya said, after a moment, and squeezed his hand again before turning back to his conversation with Bood.

And the thing was that Shane meant to talk about it when they got back to the hotel room, but he’d been so bone tired that he’d passed out basically the minute his head hit the pillow. He was asleep before Ilya was even done brushing his teeth, which was sort of crazy, although he still awoke in the morning clinging to his husband like an octopus, which was their usual way of things. 

(He’d also awoken briefly, in the middle of the night, to Ilya frowning at his iPad. A bit odd, given it was usually Shane who reviewed tape obsessively post game, but Shane had been too tired to do more than nuzzle into Ilya’s side and fall back asleep again.)

In the haze of the morning – lazy, sleepy blowjobs in the shower and then a slightly too rushed dash to the lobby to make their plane – Shane had forgotten the whole thing, and the questions he had went unasked and unanswered. 

It wasn’t until his second fight that it would all come to a head. 

The second one happened at home, but the story was otherwise much the same. This time they were playing Winnipeg, and the chirp – if it could be called that – came from a guy Shane actually knew. He’d played an All-Star Game with Samberg once, a few years ago. The guy had been generally pleasant, if a bit of a hick – maybe that wasn’t strictly polite, but Shane could be a bit bitchy, he knew. Samberg certainly wasn’t someone he’d ever be friends with, but so far the guys who’d actually had more than cursory conversations with Shane over the years had been mostly nice about his relationship (the Metros notwithstanding, of course). Which is why it was a bit of a surprise to hear, at the start of the third period, Samberg lean over and just straight up call him a slur. 

Again. Wouldn’t do.

Shane’s gloves dropped, and he got in four solid hits, cracking the cartilage of Samberg’s already crooked nose satisfyingly beneath his fist, before the refs pulled them apart. Shane took his five for fighting on the chin, and the crowd in Ottawa was apocalyptic over it, screaming at the ref and cheering incessantly for Shane. He could hear the chants of HOLL-AN-DER! reverberating through the stadium. It was almost enough to make him smile.

Until he caught Ilya’s eyes on the bench.

Ilya was furious. It was obvious – the way he was glowering at Winnipeg across the bench, nearly hateful. He must have felt Shane looking at him, though, because he turned to catch Shane’s eye. Something complicated crossed his face – something Shane couldn’t parse – before it shuttered back into neutrality. When Shane finally returned to the bench after his penalty, he tried to get Ilya’s attention – to see what was wrong – but Ilya had shook his head firmly. “We will talk about this later, Hollander,” he murmured, into Shane’s ear.

Shane, because he was endlessly patient, took that in stride. He sat through the rest of the period – a win, but only by one point, annoyingly. Harris spared him from media, thankfully, but he watched Ilya’s back as Ilya stalked off to do his own. He showered, and changed, and hovered by Ilya’s stall until Ilya came back, and then he drove them both home.

They didn’t talk the whole ride. Shane hated it, felt the temptation to fill the silence with noise – meaningless chatter, the way he had on the ride to the Cottage all those years ago – but he held himself off. Ilya liked the silence, he knew. Liked to compose himself before big conversations.

Which this apparently was going to be. 

They entered the house, and Anya trotted over happily to greet them. Ilya bent down to pat her, lovingly, while Shane gathered their bags and took them upstairs – their normal post-game routine. Shane hopped in the shower; he knew Ilya would be taking Anya for a walk around the block. This, too, was normal, although they swapped off who showered first and who went with Anya from game to game. The normalcy felt comforting to Shane. He knew whatever was wrong – and he was sure something was wrong, even if he couldn’t exactly figure out what – it would be okay. They would be okay. Always.

By the time Shane came downstairs, Ilya had finished with Anya and was leaning against the kitchen counter, posture deceptively casual. He had his ankles crossed and his arms crossed. His eyes, though, were alert, tracing Shane’s movements carefully.

“Alright,” Shane said. “It’s later. Let’s talk.”

“Yes,” Ilya said, but then he remained silent for a long moment. Then he cleared his throat and squared his shoulders. “What happened with Samberg tonight. It cannot – I don’t want. . .” He trailed off with a sigh. “I do not want you fighting anymore, Shane, okay? Twice in one season, it’s – it’s enough.” 

Shane was dumbfounded. Of all the things he expected, that wasn’t one of them. “What? I don’t – what?”

“You heard me,” Ilya said, although he was suspiciously not making eye contact. 

“He called me a slur, Ilya,” Shane said, trying to keep his voice level – to match Ilya’s energy, the odd calmness that usually meant Ilya was hiding his real emotions deep under the surface of his skin. 

“I know,” Ilya said, composure cracking a little, something pained crossing his face for just a moment, gone as quick as it came. “It is – I am telling you as your Captain that you do not fight when this happens. You tell me, and I will handle it.”

“So, what?” Shane snapped, suddenly irritated. This conversation was fucking absurd, after all. “You’re telling me I can’t fight? You can’t control that, Ilya!”

“I am saying this as your Captain. It is bad for the team,” Ilya said. He was aiming for calm, but there was tension underneath his voice, like he was straining to not rise to Shane's annoyance. “Bad to put us on the penalty kill–”

“Oh fuck off.” Shane was well and truly pissed now, could feel his face getting red with it. “You know that’s not what this is about, don’t treat me like I’m fucking dumb. You’re telling me you’d be this mad at any other guy on the team punching someone who said that shit to him?”

“Shane,” Ilya said, warningly.

“Or, fuck,” Shane interrupted. “You’re telling me if someone said that shit to you you’d like it slide? You got a game misconduct for beating the shit out of Dallas Kent when he did that a few years ago. How is that different? Where the fuck do you get off telling me I’m not allowed to react like anyone else would?”

“You were very mad at me about that game misconduct,” Ilya said.

“That is so not the fucking point and you know it,” Shane said. “Do not act like that is the same thing at all as me getting personally annoyed you almost got yourself hurt defending my stupid honor when we were supposed to be in the goddamn closet. You are seriously standing here and trying to tell me, a professional hockey player, that I’m not allowed to fight! You’re not my Mom.”

His Mom had, in fact, sent him a series of texts about his behavior – both tonight and in St. Louis – that Shane had been choosing to ignore. He didn’t want to expose his parents to more than they needed to know. They had never known about that racist piece of shit all those years ago, after all. It was easier, keeping them a bit in the dark. Easier to let them think Shane was just losing his composure, or something. 

Although, probably, they could see through that. Probably they both knew why Shane would react the way he did. He chose not to think about it. 

“I am not telling you anything,” Ilya hissed. “I am asking you, as your husband–”

“Oh, I thought I was talking to my Captain, not my fucking husband,” Shane yelled, anger spilling out of him. “Because my Captain having a professional suggestion is one thing, but my husband abusing his status as Captain to try and tell me what I can’t do is fucking bullshit. You don’t get to ask me not to fight, not as my husband or my Captain. You don’t get to bring our personal lives onto the ice, Ilya, you promised.” It had been another discussion, before the season. At work, Ilya was Shane’s Captain and his teammate; yes, they were also married, but the job was the job. Neither of them would treat the other too differently from any teammate. Playing through injuries, working too hard – these were normal things, and they couldn’t ask the other to stop being hockey players for the sake of protecting them. 

So why, now, was Ilya doing this? 

“You promised,” Shane repeated. 

Ilya squared his shoulders, looking, if anything, more riled up. “This is – I am trying to protect you, Shane–”

“Seriously?” Shane threw his hands into the air, at a loss. “Protect me? I’m a fucking professional, Ilya, I can throw a punch and I can take a punch. Or, what – you think I can’t?” A sick feeling flooded through Shane, suddenly. All these years, Ilya had never once made him feel like less of a man for any reason. Had never suggested that anything about him was weak or small. He’d never implied that Shane was lesser for being Asian, or for being a bottom, or for – for fucking anything.

Except. Except maybe now he was? Maybe now he was finally admitting that – that what. He didn’t think Shane was capable? Didn’t think Shane could defend himself? Thought Shane needed his big strong husband to come and fight his battles for him? “Do you think I’m – I’m fucking weak or something? That I can’t–” He had to cut himself off, throat suddenly tight, tears threatening to spill.

The fight left Ilya immediately. His body slouched forward, a bit, a puppet with the strings cut, before he moved, deliberately, across the room to take Shane’s face in his hands. “No. No, Shane, that is – of course you are capable. Of course. I would never think that about you.” He let out a harsh breath. “I just – I just don’t want you to fight, Shane. Not as your Captain, you are right. That was – that was unfair of me. I am asking you this as your husband. I don’t want this for you. I don’t want you to fight.”

“You don’t treat me like I’m breakable, Ilya. We don’t do that to each other,” Shane said. His voice sounded stupid and wet to his own ears. Humiliating, to be crying about this, really. “So what is this?”

Ilya sighed and dragged a hand across his face. “It is not that I think you can’t fight, Shane, I–” he paused. Shane had never been great at getting people – he had a tendency to take everyone at their words, to miss sarcastic undertones and exaggerations. To make up for this he tried to study the faces of the people he liked best, to make sure he understood what their expressions meant, which he could use to interpret their words. A part of him would always wonder if he should have tried harder at that with the other Metros, the ones who weren’t Hayden or J.J. He could clock Hayden’s mood from the exact way he rolled his eyes, or huffed out a laugh, or said son of a bitch, but he’d never bothered to study Gil Comeau, and had ended up taking sure, Hollander, we support you man on its face when it hadn't been true at all. 

For years, Shane had been frustrated by his inability to read Ilya the way he’d learned J.J or Hayden, his mother and father. He’d been convinced of Ilya’s casualness towards him – of Ilya being unaffected by their time together – because he hadn’t understood just how much Ilya had practiced forcing his face into that expression. The careful, neutral blankness very rarely meant Ilya didn’t care – it almost always meant he cared too much, and was trying desperately not to show it, a defense mechanism from his shitty childhood that he’d never truly been able to drop. 

He’d gotten better, over the years, of letting Shane see underneath it – or Shane had gotten better at forcing him to drop it. Or both, probably. It had started in Tampa Bay, Shane snapping that wasn’t my question, a perfectly aimed punch under Rozanov’s armor. After they were engaged, before the outing, on an otherwise quiet night, Shane had whispered I need you to let me in into the darkness, face tucked into Ilya’s neck, neither of them having to make difficult eye contact. He had been thinking about the Boxing Day fight, about the depression Ilya hadn’t felt comfortable mentioning. I need you to let me help you, Shane had said. You can’t scare me off by being sad or scared or mad at me. I don’t want to guess how you’re feeling. I just want to know how I can help.

Ilya had buried his face in Shane’s hair – had kissed him one, two, three times on the temple – and said yes. I will. I won’t shut you out, Shane, I promise.

They’d gone through a lot of changes in the past year. They’d been outed – gone from intensely private to shockingly, blindingly public. They’d moved in together after years of having, at most, a handful of weeks in the summer and stolen nights and weekends during the season. They’d started working together after years of very explicitly working against each other, at least professionally. And, of course, they’d gotten married, although that had felt fundamentally like the least significant change, at least in terms of the day to day of their lives. Shane had already known they’d grow old together; the piece of paper had done less material daily change than the living together thing had. 

Shane didn’t think any of these changes would change them, at least not fundamentally. He had so much security in his relationship with Ilya. After years of uncertainty, he knew that they could weather anything. They’d managed to find their way to each other through years of bad communication, lack of clarity. They’d hurt each other, badly, accidentally and maybe sometimes on purpose, and still found their way back together, to forgiveness and understanding. It’d be work, sure, but it’d be work like hockey was work – it’d be something he loved to do, something he woke up every day excited to do, something he’d want to do for as long as he possibly could. 

The point being that Shane saw it on Ilya’s face – the moment he let the mask fall, like he remembered he was talking to Shane and not some stranger, and that he’d promised to let Shane in. Even if it would be a difficult conversation. 

“It is not that I think you are breakable. Obviously you are not.” Ilya sighed, slumping against the kitchen counter. “I am an asshole, yes?”

“No,” Shane said automatically. Then he thought about the fact that he’d called Ilya an asshole, like, earlier that day, and decided to amend his statement slightly because, okay, fine, it was a little bit of a lie. “Well, not when it matters.” Ilya would tease and cajole, but he’d never hurt Shane. Not intentionally. Not anymore. 

(Or not without a safeword, anyway.)

Ilya smiled softly, all affection. “You are the only man on Earth who thinks that,” he said. Shane opened his mouth to argue but Ilya moved, crowding into Shane’s space and pressing their lips together to shut him up. “I am an asshole on the ice, okay?” Shane considered for a second and then nodded, allowing Ilya the point. “I have a reputation. I get lots of time in the sin bin. I chirp and chirp and chirp until even nice old men like Scott Hunter get sick of me and punch me across my face to shut me up. And then I score on the power play, very strategic.” Ilya grinned, a little mockingly, and Shane rolled his eyes, aware that the look on his face was the one Hayden called vomit-inducingly love struck. “You, Shane . . . you are not an asshole. Not on the ice.” Something like discomfort crossed Ilya’s face briefly. “You are hockey’s Golden Boy. Captain Canada. You never had a scandal until. . .” he trailed off and gestured up and down his own torso, self-deprecatingly. 

“I don’t think of you as a scandal,” Shane said, fiercely. Because he didn’t. Sure, when it had happened the outing had been the worst thing that had ever happened to Shane. It had felt like the end of the world. But the amazing thing about the worst thing ever happening was that then you had to live through it. Shane had survived it, and had come out the other side better than before. Not grateful it happened, not exactly, but – well. No, actually, maybe a little grateful it had happened. Grateful he’d survived it – grateful he’d learned he could survive it. Because that meant he could survive anything. He could survive Montreal turning on him, losing the team he’d tried so hard to build. And more than that, he really had come out the other end happier than he’d ever been in his life. He’d spent so long being scared, and it turned out that living scared had been so much worse than the scary thing happening. Funny how that worked. 

“I know,” Ilya said, and kissed him again to underscore it. “But rest of world. . .”

“Since when do you care what the rest of the world thinks?”

Ilya sighed again. “You do not get into fights on the ice, not usually. Or you didn’t. Now you suddenly do. And I know these fights are because little bastards who’d never dare before have grown spines now. Think they can call you slurs and get away with it. They forget who you are. But. . .” Ilya wore an expression Shane knew perfectly well – the face he made when he was having trouble putting exactly what he was thinking into English. Usually Shane would give him the out – say it in Russian – but he knew he needed to actually understand what Ilya was getting at here, so instead he stayed silent while his husband figured it out. 

It took probably half a minute, and when Ilya spoke his voice was much gentler. It reminded Shane of their first few nights at the Cottage, in 2017 – the way they’d drop to almost whispers after sex, lying in bed together, like talking too loudly would shatter the bubble they’d built around themselves. “There are people who think that you have ruined your image by marrying me. You marry me – you come to my team. Then, suddenly, after years of being Golden Boy, you are getting into fights on the ice. Racking up penalty minutes. They will not say oh, it is because he is being called slurs now that he is publicly married to a man. They will say it is Rozanov. He is becoming too much like Rozanov. Rozanov is a bad influence, has ruined him. They are already saying that, Shane. That fuckhead reporter in St. Louis who asked about your penalty minutes – that was what he was saying. That I am the reason for your penalty minutes going up. I watched your press after you fell asleep. Read his stupid fucking article about it.”

Shane blinked, shocked. “But he’s wrong,” he said, because, duh. “My penalty minutes aren’t even really up.”

“You’ve gotten into two fights so far this year, Shane. When was the last time you served a fighting penalty?”

He could admit it had been a minute. 

“So people say this,” Ilya continued, “and then, maybe. . .” He dipped his head from side to side, a gesture Shane couldn’t help but think was very Russian. “Maybe you think that it was not worth it. That they are right. That marrying me was a mistake.”

“Ilya, I’d never think that.” Shane was abruptly aware that he was afraid. Afraid the way he’d been on Boxing Day last year – afraid that Ilya didn’t know how much Shane loved him, that Shane had fucked it all up by being too private, too finicky, not open and caring enough out loud. “I won’t ever regret marrying you, not ever. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I love you. I don’t give a shit what anyone else has to say about that.”

Ilya gave him a disbelieving little look. Not a mean one – just a slight scrunch of the face that said Shane, really?

“I’m learning not to give a shit what anyone else has to say,” Shane amended, with a huff an annoyance that he knew was actually horrifically fond. To be loved is to be known, or whatever. “Dr. Kayla says it’s a process.”

“Dr. Kayla is a smart lady,” Ilya said, smiling broadly. 

He leaned back down to kiss Shane again, and Shane let himself get lost in it for a long moment before remembering this was a serious conversation and he needed to focus. They had to resolve something here. He reluctantly pulled himself away from his husband’s perfect mouth. “Don’t distract me,” he groused, slapping Ilya lightly on the pec. Ilya flexed it quickly as he did so. Obnoxious! (And sexy.) “Ilya, baby, seriously–” The baby was a low blow, Shane knew that. He saw the way Ilya immediately went lax at the pet name, almost liquid in his pleasure at hearing it out loud. But he needed Ilya to listen, alright? “I don’t care if they think I’m some sort of goon now, or whatever. I mean, they already think I threw a playoff game–”

Shane’s intention had been to point out how ridiculous it all was. He obviously hadn’t cheated. What the morons in the media and on Twitter and TikTok said had no bearing on lived reality. Again, Shane wasn’t grateful for The Trip – it had really, really fucking sucked, alright? – but it had sort of shattered the last bit of his brain that still thought it mattered what everyone else thought about him. Everyone else was a fucking idiot. They didn’t know him, not like the people who loved him did – not like Ilya did. 

But instead of being comforted by Shane bringing this up, Ilya flinched. Subtle, small, but Shane noticed it. He would have noticed it even if they weren't pressed so closely together – it was the exact type of microexpression he’d been desperate to understand for years. The smallest bit of hurt let through before Ilya had the chance to stuff it away under his masks. 

“What?” Shane asked, feeling wrong-footed. God, how was he fucking this up?

Ilya sighed again. “They only think you tripped because of me Shane. They think that you and I hooked up and I made you start throwing games for me.”

“But that’s not true,” Shane said. For a moment he remained blind to the cause of Ilya’s distress before it abruptly clicked into place, like Arthur Pike snapping two Lego bricks together in his living room. “You care. You care that the press or Twitter or whoever thinks this about you.”

“This is a surprise?” Ilya said it a little meanly – a neat little defense mechanism Shane had recognized for the first time in Tampa. I’ll push you away first. No luck with that anymore, Rozanov, not now that they were married.

“I always thought you never gave a shit about any of that,” Shane admitted. 

Ilya sighed. “When I met your parents they thought I was an asshole.”

“They realized very quickly that you weren’t,” Shane defended.

“Yes,” Ilya allowed. “But first thing your father said – weren’t there any nice men in Montreal?”

Shane felt that stab him right underneath the ribs, in the soft flesh near his heart. “My dad loves you, Ilya.”

“I know. I know.” Ilya said, rubbing his thumbs across Shane’s cheekbones soothingly. “Now he does, yes. Now that he knows me.” He shrugged, then, a little uncomfortable movement, body tight once again. “But at first he and your mother, they thought – they thought anyone else would be better for our son.”

They didn’t mean it, Shane wanted to say, but he knew they did. They’d gotten over it, but they’d meant it, at first. They’d wondered. They’d thought to themselves, God, of all the men in the world, what possessed Shane to pick this one? And he’d been too sick with his own nerves to even defend Ilya in the moment, to snap that he didn’t want a nice man in Montreal, because he had the most perfect man in the world right next to him.

Hayden had thought it, too, had needled and whined and snarked at their relationship whenever he could. He had offered to set Shane up with other men for months, until one day, on a roadie in fucking Colombus of all places, Shane had finally snapped. There will never be any other men, Hayden! It’s him, always. Forever. Do you get it? This is it for me. And I will pick him over you, but please don’t fucking make me. That had finally shut Hayden up, and after that he’d started trying a little more – not always, but it was a start. 

“Everybody in the whole world thinks I will ruin you,” Ilya said, thumbs still dancing across Shane’s cheeks. “I don’t want to prove them right. If you are suddenly a fighter, suddenly a man with a hundred penalty minutes, people will say it is because I have ruined you. I don’t want to ruin you.”

There were tears in Ilya’s eyes, and he was blinking furiously to hold them back. Shane pulled him closer, tucking his face into the juncture between Shane’s shoulder and neck and tangling a hand into his hair, the other splayed out against his back, palm against the ridges of his spine. “You can’t ruin me, Ilya,” he said, soft but serious, firm, steady. He needed Ilya to know. “Whatever they say, whatever they think, it won’t ever be true.” He paused, pressing a kiss into the side of Ilya’s head; his neck was getting wet, Ilya obviously letting the tears spill over.

It was strange, maybe, how much of a relief it was that Ilya was crying. Not that he was sad, but that he wasn’t trying to hold it in. That he knew he didn’t need the armor or the masks in front of Shane.

“Dr. Kayla says that I can’t control what people think about me,” Shane said, after a moment of silence. “That what they think of me isn’t who I really am, and I need to accept that instead of trying to change what they think or who I am. So . . . so we can’t stop people from saying that type of shit, right? But you and I will always know it’s wrong. Always. You and I will know you never asked me to throw a game, and you’re not the reason I’m fighting more.” He paused. “Is that enough?”

The thing was, he wasn’t sure what else he could do, beyond letting Ilya fight his battles forever and sentencing him permanently to the penalty box. Which, everything else aside, would be bad for the team. They needed their Captain on the ice.

“Look,” Shane said after a long pause when it became clear Ilya wasn’t going to answer, his husband still snuffling quietly into his neck. “Look, it’s – if you don’t fight my battles then the narrative would be wow, Rozanov really tanked Hollander, right? Now he’s a fighter, or whatever. But if you do, then the narrative is Hollander is so soft. He needs his husband to fight all his battles.”

Ilya pulled away, abruptly affronted. “You are not soft,” he snapped at Shane.

“And you aren’t going to ruin me!” Shane snapped back. Ilya scowled at him for a long moment before groaning and dropping his head back onto Shane’s shoulder. Shane took it as the victory it was.

“No one who matters thinks you’re ruining me,” Shane said, softly, right into Ilya’s ear. “Not my parents, not our friends, and not our team. And no one who matters thinks I’m a soft idiot who can’t throw a punch. So what do we do?”

It was a genuine question. They were married now. They played together. They were a team. Shane wouldn’t do anything unless Ilya was comfortable with it, and he knew it was the other way around, too. That now that he’d voiced his opposition to Ilya fighting Shane’s battles, Ilya never would again, unless he felt he truly had to.

Ilya sighed and heaved himself up to look Shane in the eye. “Now,” he said, “we play hockey.” 

Well. It was very obvious when he said it like that.

“Now we play hockey,” Shane agreed. “And sometimes when a guy calls me a slur, I’ll deck him. Even if it lands me in the sin bin.”

Ilya nodded. “And sometimes when a guy calls you a slur I’ll deck him, because he fucking deserves it.”

Shane nodded himself and leaned forward to press a kiss to Ilya’s left cheekbone, just below his eye. “I can live with that," he said. 

"Okay then,” Ilya agreed. Then, a sudden burst of mischievousness broke out across his face. Gone was the serious mood – they’d had the conversation, and Ilya was clearly ready to move on. “What will we do when someone calls me a slur then, hm?”

Shane made a face of mock surprise. People hadn’t really been doing that, but it was mostly because they knew Rozanov would throw a punch – it was delusion that made them believe Shane wouldn’t. “Well,” Shane said, tone light and teasing and airy, “that’s totally different. If someone calls you a slur I reserve the right to bring a gun onto the ice and shoot them dead.”

Ilya grinned, playful and wide, pulling Shane closer by his hips. “You’re a hypocrite, Hollander,” he said in a sing-song.

“That’s Hollander-Rozanov to you,” Shane said back, because at the end of the day he wasn’t the Golden Boy – he was a dirty fucking player, and he knew how to throw a goddamn punch.

Sure enough, Ilya’s eyes darkened. Shane knew just how to play his husband – the joint last name was an easy button to press. “Well in that case, Mr. Hollander-Rozanov–” and, alright, a shiver went through Shane too when he heard it out loud, sue him – “I suppose we must come up with an adequate penalty for hypocrisy.”

“Sounds terrible,” Shane said, already breathless. And then Ilya bent down to kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him, and Shane knew what he always knew at the end of the night – that they’d be okay. That they were a team. That nothing would ever tear them apart.

— 

In the end, despite their new agreement, it was a couple of weeks before anyone went after Shane on the ice again. Perhaps word had gotten around about what his fights had been about, or perhaps even hockey players were smart enough to do the math on why, exactly, Shane Hollander might suddenly be starting fights with players he never would have bothered with before. Either way, for a moment no one tried it, and Shane let the peace settle into his bones – he spent a few wonderful weeks just playing very good hockey and getting chirped about normal stuff. The Centaurs went on a little tear, the season shifted into gear properly. 

He loved playing with Ilya. He knew he would, but now that the newness of the thing had worn off he could truly appreciate how right it felt. For years Shane had always assumed the best hockey he’d ever play would be against Ilya, when he wanted to prove something – to himself, to the crowd, mostly to Ilya. But he could freely admit now that he was having more fun than he had in years. His stats were slightly different, yes, and Ilya was right – reporters did want to pin that on his relationship, on his new team. They wanted to tell a specific story – that Shane Hollander, multi-Cup winner, had lost something by being in the relationship he was in; that it had changed him. 

But Shane didn’t think being slightly off place on his goal total this year compared to last was as damning as some commentators thought. On Montreal, he was always the top scorer by far – he had more help on the Centaurs with Ilya, Troy, Bood, and Haas in particular. It just made sense that on a slightly more well-rounded team he wouldn’t have to pull quite as much weight. Plus his assists were up, and he was already on a longer point streak this season than he’d managed all last season. It was easy to point to a goal total as the crowning achievement of a hockey season, but Shane knew his MVP awards came from more than “total goals scored” – there was a reason those were two different awards, after all. 

Plus, Shane knew the real truth – the Shane Hollander who’d won three Cups with Montreal had been just as in love with Ilya Rozanov as the one now on the Centaurs married to the man. If the commentators wanted to find the before and after of Shane’s relationship and tie it to his career, they were always going to fail – Ilya came before any of the glory had, and Ilya would be around long after it was gone. 

It had taken slightly longer to get his husband on board with this line of thinking. Shane could see Ilya frowning at his phone, scouring the articles that were being posted – Hollander Says “There’s Nothing To Worry About” With Goal Slump (the slump being he was, at the time, four goals behind where he’d been the season before) and When Will Hollander’s Adjustment Period With the Centaurs End? (Shane had felt pretty well adjusted by the time pre-season was over, thanks). It was, honestly, kind of an interesting role reversal. For so many years Shane had been the one who fretted over his public image, over what people were saying. Now he felt a bit freed from it, mostly because it was all so ridiculous. Ilya, conversely, couldn’t stop wondering if he was dragging Shane down somehow, to Ilya’s level. Which was insane, of course, because all Ilya had ever done was lift Shane up, really. 

It had taken some convincing and light bribery – Shane had gotten very good at expertly deploying blow jobs as a tactic over the years (it helped that they were mutually satisfactory, of course) – but he finally managed to pull Ilya away from reading the articles obsessively. It helped that nothing else had come up in the intervening weeks. Shane had not gotten in a fight since that second one, and while Ilya had been punched once by a defender from the Presidents, he’d been quick to reassure Shane that it had nothing to do with their marriage and everything to do with the fact that Ilya called the guy a third rate minor leaguer whose birthday wish to play professionally must have come true. Which, yeah, alright, maybe Ilya had that one coming. 

Still, it wasn’t like Shane thought it would never happen again. He knew that people were likely still saying shit in their team group chats, or to their wives or girlfriends or mistresses. He knew that people were certainly still saying it on Twitter, but he’d forfeited those log-ins to his mother and his publicist years ago and left it behind him. It wasn’t that he thought other players were suddenly super cool with the gay thing, or the marriage thing, or that they all woke up and decided they didn’t care – but the league had ended up fining Crooks for “unsportsmanlike conduct” when it turned out someone had gotten pretty good cellphone footage of what he’d said and they couldn’t pretend not to know, so Shane figured at the very least people were trying to protect their paychecks. 

Still, Shane had had a feeling it would happen again the day it did, mostly because of who they were playing. The guy who tried it the third time was somehow even more pathetic than the other two – mostly because it was Shane’s old teammate, Gil Comeau. 

Look: the thing with Montreal was that Shane was actually pretty sure most of them didn’t care about the gay thing. Or, at least, they didn’t care while the gay thing was still theoretical. The way they saw it – or, the way Shane assumed they saw it now, with the benefit of hindsight – was that he’d never really dated around anyway. It wasn’t like he’d shown up with a secret long term boyfriend to join the WAG chat. No one actually had to confront the fact that he was gay, not really – not like the Admirals had to with Scott Hunter, at least – so they could just lightly ignore it. Pretend Shane was still the same old boring Shane, and assume that he probably went to a room to power down after the games were over and only come back when it was time to play again, never having a real social life whatsoever. No gay stuff here! Just hockey! 

A couple of them, however, had obviously not been cool with it, and Comeau was the leader of their little pack for sure. Where Comeau got the audacity, Shane frankly wasn’t sure. He really wasn’t a good enough player to be talking such shit, but that was the way of the world – the good players tended to let the hockey speak for itself. 

Where it all went wrong with Montreal was twofold – it was the Ilya thing, and it was the timing of The Trip. The Ilya thing would maybe have been a hard sell no matter what; Rozanov was not well loved by the Metros, even once he’d left Boston behind, and there were always going to be baseless accusations of game fixing and throwing once their relationship had gone public. Retrospectively, Shane felt a bit foolish for not having thought that part through, although he was sure that if they’d been able to come out on their own terms the publicity team they would have worked with probably would have talked them through some options. 

The other thing was, of course, that they lost to the Centaurs in that playoff game.

He tried really hard not to be the type of person who thought too much about what could have been or what might have happened, because he knew his brain could be a bit of a prison – that he could hyperfixate on the bad to a detrimental extent. There were things you could control, things you could learn from, and things you could fix. There were bad plays and bad passes that could be worked on and tweaked and improved. But hockey was also a game of luck and physics and a ton of variables you couldn’t control. If Shane lost sleep over every rouge bouncing puck, or every inane accidental penalty or incredibly stupid ref call he’d never sleep again. So he tried not to torture himself by thinking about all the ways things might have been different. If he hadn’t tripped was the most obvious, but there were other ones – what if they’d been playing a team besides the Centaurs? Would Montreal have turned on him so quickly if that loss had involved a team where he wasn’t romantically involved with the captain? Maybe, or maybe not. If the Centaurs hadn’t made the playoffs, if Shane hadn’t tripped, if J.J. hadn’t had that goal overturned for offsides, if Comeau had been defending Ilya like he was supposed to. There were so many variables, and Shane was really only responsible for one of them: he’d tripped. It’d been an accident. There was nothing he could do about it now. 

He hadn’t ended up inviting most of the Metros to his wedding. They had been his brothers, yes, but Ilya had a brother too, and that guy wasn’t invited either. Shane didn’t want anyone there who would cause a problem, and by the end he figured the only guys who wouldn’t were J.J. and Hayden, and even both of them felt like they were on thin ice sometimes. 

In the intervening weeks, a few guys reached out in a sort of weird olive branch way, although almost none of them were still active Metros. Miity, who was now the backup goalie on the Philly Fantasy, had sent a nice email congratulating Shane on his marriage and apologizing for not saying anything sooner; a guy named Schatz who’d been in his rookie season the year before apologized via DM and admitted he didn’t really know what to say in the chaos of the locker room. Shane knew there were probably more guys in the room who felt defensive of him – or at least who didn’t outright hate him – if only because J.J. and Hayden had formed a little coalition of Metros players that Hayden referred to as the "Anti-Asshole Committee." But Comeau and Drapeau definitely hated Shane – whether it was for the gay thing, or the Ilya thing, or The Trip thing, who could say? A year ago Shane had been in shambles wondering what these guys thought about him – now he just couldn't muster the energy to care. 

The point being: Shane had known the Metros were going to be a shitshow, but he’d been oddly prepared for it. He and his therapist had talked at length about what he could prepare for and what he could control; he and Ilya had talked at length about what to expect and what they could do to protect themselves. Even the coaching staff had chatted with Shane ahead of the game, which had been extraordinarily kind. 

So it wasn’t shocking that Gil Comeau skated up during the third period TV time out to spit at Shane’s skates and call him a slur with all the venom he could manage. 

What was shocking was that Shane, oddly, didn’t really feel like punching him afterwards. 

For a brief moment he wondered if maybe this was the ultimate end result – if, officially, slurs were now like pussy or bitch and didn’t affect him anymore. Because if that was the case, well, honestly it’d be kind of sad? Shane didn’t want to live a life where he was so used to getting abuse hurled at him that it bounced off automatically. He wanted it to be shocking and upsetting – because he wanted it to be rare, something he never got used to hearing.

But no, that wasn’t it. He was certain if anyone else had said that, he’d want to lay them out. It was just . . . Comeau himself. There was something deeply pathetic about the whole thing. The Metros were down two goals and were minutes away from pulling Drapeau from the net. Ilya had drawn a number of pointless penalties out of them, and at one point Shane had seen Troy laugh out loud at some pathetic attempt at a chirp from Laine. Overall the Metros weren’t having a bad season – Shane had pulled a lot of weight, but he’d been one guy on a team, not the whole thing – but they certainly weren’t showing their best against the Centaurs. 

As Kevin Young had said earlier that day - Shane Hollander lives rent free in their fucking heads, or whatever. 

Maybe it was that Shane had sort of seen it coming, at least from Comeau, or maybe it was just that there was something sad about the whole affair. Or maybe – maybe it was that Shane realized that Comeau wanted a fight. He wanted Shane to punch him, so he’d have the excuse to punch back – to put all his anger and hate into his fists and then into Shane’s face. And, frankly, Shane didn’t want to give him the chance. Shane didn’t want to fight Gil Comeau – he wasn’t worth fighting. Laying him out on the ice wouldn’t prove anything and it wouldn’t stop him from being an asshole next game; it would just give him what he wanted, which was Shane’s attention.

God. Sad.

So instead of hauling off and punching Comeau, Shane instead did the one thing his gut told him to – his immediate, unfiltered reaction. 

He laughed.

Comeau’s face did a complicated thing – he looked a bit like he was worried Shane had suddenly and abruptly gone nuts. 

“Oh my god, sorry,” Shane said, which was really more of an automatic reaction than something he meant. “Sorry, I just–” and then got another look at Comeau’s stupid face and burst into laughter again. Because, well, mouth wide open shock looked pretty fucking funny on the guy! 

“Have you lost your goddamn mind?” Comeau asked. He sounded genuinely kind of concerned. Almost sweet, if he hadn’t opened up the interaction by calling Shane an actual slur. 

“Sorry, sorry,” Shane said, bending over to catch his breath. Across the ice a ref was looking at them with something approaching concern, starting to make his way over to break up a fight that wasn’t actually happening. “Sorry,” Shane repeated, finally calmed down. “Just – Jesus, I sort of expected something more interesting from you I guess. You know a guy for ten years and all you can come up with is the most boring slur on Earth? Me, I would of made it personal.” He thought of what Ilya might say in this situation – probably something about Comeau being a third-rate player on a second-rate team, or something about him being on this third wife in five years. Something good. Shane didn’t think quite quick enough for that, but he was sure if he asked Ilya in the locker room later he’d get a real Greatest Hits of deranged, wildly personal chirps. 

Comeau was looking at Shane like he’d absolutely lost his mind. “What the fuck?” Then he abruptly got angry again, face contorting with it. “Jesus Christ. I knew you’d sold us out for dirty Commie dick, but you’ve really completely changed, huh? Guess you had to grow a personality to stop the biggest manwhore in the league from cheating on you.”

That, again, caused Shane to nearly buckle with laughter. When he looked up, tears in his eyes, he could see Ilya frowning at him from the bench, which strangely made him laugh even harder. It was just so absurd! Commie dick! Like it was 1980 and Brezhnev was still in charge and they were playing the goddamn Miracle on Ice. And a cheating joke! It was almost too much. “Gil, buddy,” Shane said, when he could catch his breath, “I know you’re obsessed with me, but I didn’t realize you cared so much about my sex life. Worried about me getting cheating on! How thoughtful.” He decided to take a page from his husband’s book and coo obnoxiously.

The ref who’d been worried earlier finally arrived, skating to a stop in front of them. “Break’s almost over – all good over here?”

Comeau opened his mouth to answer but Shane beat him there, waving his hand dismissively. “Oh, all good. Just having a lovely catch up with Montreal’s 22nd Best Player.”

Comeau sputtered indignantly. “22nd? Rozanov gives Pike 14th now!” And then, probably realizing how that sounded, he groaned and rolled his eyes. “You’ve gone fucking insane, Hollander. Certifiable.”

But by that time Shane was already skating away, prepping to take the face off.

After the game – a 6-2 slaughter with two empty net goals from LP and Bood, respectively – Ilya cornered him in the locker room. “What did Comeau say? You were laughing?”

“Oh, he called me a slur,” Shane said, breezily, still high on the victory of winning.

Ilya looked utterly lost. “You . . . were laughing that he called you a slur?”

Shane looked at his husband. He took in the glorious, sweaty mess of Ilya’s hair; the beautiful planes of his chest, which were of course exposed because Ilya was apparently chronically allergic to shirts post-game, not that Shane was complaining. He looked Ilya in the eyes – he’d always been a little weird about eye-contact, feeling overexposed by it, but he had the least trouble with Ilya. It always felt a bit like coming home, meeting Ilya’s ice-blue gaze across a room. “

“Yeah,” Shane admitted, softly. “Yeah, I was.”

He thought he could explain it, if Ilya asked – could explain how pathetic Comeau seemed, in that moment. Could explain Shane’s expectations that the game would be harder fought, or would feel more wrought. Shane could tell Ilya the truth, which was that these few weeks on the Centaurs had felt so immediately warm and wonderful in a way the Metros never had felt. It wasn’t that those guys always hated him, but maybe it was that their love was inherently conditional – they were not Shane’s friends, not really. They were his coworkers, and their caring for him depended exclusively on what they could get from him. Their love only extended as long as their win streak.

The Centaurs had been scrappy little nobodies for a lot longer than they’d been contenders. Guys like Bood and Dysktra had spent years being perpetual losers – the butt of all the jokes on the official MLH social media websites. They were winning now, yes – there were expectations now, yes – but Shane still thought that they could slip right back into a losing streak and probably still be fine. That no one would decide to blame that on an individual player. Shane was pretty sure that if Ilya had been the one to Trip, in that last playoff game, no one on the Centaurs would have had anything to say except bad luck man, but at least you fucking tried. And sometimes, realizing that almost made him cry – for a younger version of him, maybe, so suffocated by his own expectations, by a team that didn’t really stand by him. Or maybe for a younger version of Ilya, facing that same shit in Boston. Or maybe for the version of Ilya now, learning to live with his depression, finding a family in Shane’s hometown. Or maybe for Shane, now, learning how to let loose and be himself at fucking 30, finally freed from all the chains he’d tied around his own ankles, a fat cinder block of fear and doubt that nearly sunk him to the bottom of the ocean.

Shane could explain all of that, probably, if Ilya had asked. But Ilya didn’t ask. Instead, he smiled – small and warm, like he understood. Like he saw underneath Shane’s skin. Which he probably did. How lucky was Shane, that Ilya had been so patient? That Ilya had taken the time to peel back all his layers and love him anyway? Ilya smiled, and Shane smiled back, and then Young burst into their little bubble to throw his arms around them both and declare that the husbands are buying drinks tonight, baby!

“You are okay?” Ilya asked, when Young had moved on to terrorize Haas and LP instead.

“Better than okay,” Shane said, because it was the truth. He reached out and put his hand across Ilya’s cheek – he could feel it when Ilya started the smile, the muscles in his face pulling up. He loved that feeling. “But if you feel like punching Comeau next time we face Montreal, by all means do.”

Which caused Ilya to laugh properly, from his belly – Shane’s favorite sound the world. “Okay,” his husband said, grinning wide, eyes sparkling. “Just for you baby.” 

And then he reached a hand out, and Shane took it, twining their fingers, and they headed off to face the press together.