Let's see how this goes...

Hudson Williams, #1 Shane Understander

I think Shane was a character who, soon as I read him, made all the sense to me. I felt immediately a kinship and an ownership over Shane. I was like, “I need to be the only person to tell this story. I get it. I want to be the person to be Shane and I want to spend time with him.” [x]

(sources below)

ilya rozanov asks shane to be his boyfriend, attempt 2: might fuck around later and marry a woman lol. yeah i have one in mind. she's really hot :) her dad was a goalie :)

I got a comment on a fic that is less than a year old and it was mostly an apology for being a comment on an "old fic" and how late they were in commenting.

Fandom is not trends.

Fandom is a cross between a library and having a slumber party with your friends.

That MADE MY DAY.

I think we're sleeping on the idea of baby shane who has been skating since he could barely walk, doing this specifically with HOCKEY penalties.

*yuna and david fighting for their LIVES not to laugh* "what word, baby?"

"i said" *look around for witnesses and lean in to whisper* "frick" *big eyes to make it clear how serious this is* "that's a five minute penal-y"

david because yuna is having to hide her laugh by pressing her face into his shoulder: "well, buddy, go on then"

Not seeing Rozanov is not an option, so instead Shane picks out a few other cities to regularly go out by himself in. He'll go for a long walk, maybe sit down somewhere for a drink, and then catch a taxi back to the hotel an appropriate amount of time later. It's honestly pretty nice, unwinding by himself in this way, and now disappearing after games is not a thing specific to Boston! It's just another strange Hollander quirk!

Unfortunately, he fails to account for the guys on the team jumping on the most obvious explanation for all these disappearances, which is that Shane now has a girl in every port.

Word about this starts to spread quick, because it is so out of character for Shane, and pretty soon half the league is under the impression that he's some secret playboy.

@scunthotter

and finally whoever the handler is just "sorry, she's still in training." and ilya is just "ah, a professional in training. what a smart girl." "yeah, she's training to be an anxiety service dog. :)"

and ilya just looks RIGHT at shane, who is suddenly

oh my GOD, they had been fighting about getting another dog because ilya wanted anya to have a sibling and shane wanted to call it at one dog because what if the next one ISN'T good and now they're going to have two dogs AND one is a problem-

so they're already miffed at each other, and shane is convinced ilya keeps somehow signaling this dog to come over because he's being an asshole about their fight about dogs, the exchange about her being an anxiety service dog happens, shane avoids eye contact COMPLETELY and manages to fully escape standing next to ilya

but then ends up retreating to an empty conference room that the dog and handler also happen to go to as a break place for the dog, and the handler is like no worries if not it's okay but do you mind letting her practice tasking? it's really okay if not but she seems really eager-

and what is shane going to do? say no i won't help out with training this dog? no.

in their household, she is dogtor rosie because she has a degree even if she doesn't use it (ilya made it, it hangs on the fridge), and when shane tries to appeal to ilya to help him call rosie off when she's tasking, ilya shakes his head and refuses

dogtor rosie is SO good at this! she's a little angel (and sometimes menace), and i adore her.

i can also maybe picture anya picking up the basics of some of these moves/behaviors after the two dogs have spent some time together and she's seen rosie receive positive attention/praise for doing so. (ilya is for sure providing that, even if shane himself is more unsure at first)

all of a sudden, anya is also now fetching things With Purpose when she senses that someone is upset/anxious. she doesn't have rosie's discernment or training, so she's not grabbing water bottles or prescriptions (even if they are for the wrong person), but she is bringing whatever random item feels right in the moment. she has the spirit!!!

also the idea of anya frantically looking around for an item to give shane when rosie goes to grab the empty pill bottle from the counter because she WILL go looking for it if they don't leave it there for her is SO cute and funny to me. incomplete list of items anya has prescribed shane to make him feel better:

his sunglasses

ilya's keys

yuna's purse

a pair of tongs for the grill

her leash AND rosie's leash

a pillow from their bedroom

her stuffed hockey stick toy

the empty pill bottle when she got there first, prompting an annoyed rosie to try and take it from her because that's HER item!! give it!! meaning it actually did work because shane is now having to ref a sibling squabble over helping him with an empty bottle of medication that wasn't even his to start with

and @hardlyhinged adding your tags here because Best Wiggly Girl hopping the boards and getting carried off with a puck in her mouth is SO delightful to me

shane projecting his own issues on a random dog?

Hmm. Let's see if I've thought about this enough to form coherent sentences about it.

The TL;DR of this whole thing is that Shane is a dyed in the wool pillow princess when it comes to kissing and that both he and Ilya like it that way. That's the headcanon.

The terribly long-winded explanation is this:

Shane had a girlfriend when he met Ilya, as we know. A girlfriend that he liked well enough and probably didn't think about as much as he should have. Textbook comphet, which Shane will realize in hindsight when he's thirty and married to a man. But Shane at seventeen has a girlfriend and a crush on Ilya Rozanov that he has relentlessly gaslit himself into perceiving as sensible admiration of an equally-matched player and latent rivalry being born.

What do teenagers do? In my experience, a lot of kissing. And kissing can BE sex. It's low-stakes compared to everything else but when you're seventeen it feels very...adventurous, for lack of a better term. It's all very new. Canonically, with book Shane, there was some petting and some oral stuff in the mix. But these were probably not the main event in a lot of cases. When Yuna stepped out to run down to the bank and David was at work and Shane and his high school girlfriend were alone in the house for ten minutes, they probably made out.

Shane finds it difficult to get out of his head. This is known. He wants to be perfect at everything, first try. Assuming that his girlfriend was equally inexperienced, as teenagers overwhelmingly are, then she probably didn't have much to compare him to. That probably didn't stop Shane from being in his head about it. How much tongue is too much? And how should he move it? And he's a man, he's by default expected to be the 'aggressor', the one to take charge--but should she initiate it? Should he let her decide when to introduce the tongues? Not to mention being in his head about, like, the million other things you think about when you're talking about bodies. Smell and taste and the appeal of those things.

So he's never been able to turn his head off about kissing. Especially the kind of kissing that involves tongues. Shane's discomfort with the physical aspects of their relationship is, imo, a major driving force in Shane breaking up with his girlfriend after the draft. He just can't figure out how to be comfortable with her. These issues will come up again with Rose, but in the intervening years he'll have convinced himself that he was simply young and inexperienced with that girlfriend, or maybe just not into her, because--

Because with Ilya, it is so immediately different. And it starts with the way they kiss. Shane never really got turned on by the kissing, you know? Like yeah, it was nice. Or whatever. It was fun, if he felt like he was doing good at it that day. And he'd get hard if things escalated, because he was seventeen and of course he's going to get hard if there's a hand on his dick.

But Ilya puts Shane against the wall and kisses him and Shane is just...immediately turned on. Immediately aching. He's never felt anything like it in his life. He's been hard before, fucking of course he has, but the way that it feels like Ilya's body is causing it is so completely new. And the kissing is a big part of it.

Ilya likes to just start tongue first. Shane is laying on that bed in room 1410 and Ilya's tongue is in his mouth and it feels like a fucking epiphany. There's no question of should there be tongues. When there should be tongues. How long do they kiss before the tongues happen, how do the tongues get introduced, how much tongue should there be--

Ilya just. Does it. Puts his tongue in Shane's mouth. It's one of the hottest things that's ever happened to Shane. And it keeps happening. Ilya comes at him at the beginning of a hook-up and Shane knows that all he has to do ALL HE HAS TO DO is open his mouth. And that's gotta be a relief. That's gotta feel so fucking good for someone who couldn't get out of his head enough as a teenager to let himself do teenager things.

We see Ilya initiate almost all of their kisses (A major exception being Room 1221, but Ilya immediately begins to dom Shane after the initial kiss and the kiss is relatively? chaste). We SEE Ilya go tongue-first. And yes, of course we've seen Shane kiss all over Ilya's face, we've seen him kiss Ilya's LAP, but I've looked for it and we just--we don't see Shane move his tongue the way Ilya does.

In the end, like I said, it's an element of Ilya's casual dominance. As much as Shane feels better when he's being submissive, when he's letting Ilya control their sex and drive the narrative of their hookups because Shane just DOES NOT want the responsibility of thinking, Ilya feels better when he's dominating Shane. In moments of lost control, it makes him feel better to have Shane in front of him, pliant and willing and outright asking Ilya to take control. That's one of the reasons I find the Tampa scene so compelling. Their dominant-submissive relationship is on full display in that scene, even though Shane is the one offering comfort and Ilya is being comforted. In order to comfort Ilya, Shane places himself INTO a position of submission. And then he lets Ilya put his tongue in his mouth.

To make it perfectly clear: This is not me saying that Shane is a straight up pillow princess. I truly believe that nothing could be farther from the truth. Shane Hollander gives head like his mom was a hoover and his dad was a car wash. There's nothing pillow princess about that, or the way he backs it THE FUCK up when he thinks Ilya is taking too long to put it in. This is a phenomenon that exists EXCLUSIVELY for kissing--and sometimes not even kissing during sex, because we've seen Shane bite Ilya's lips. But with regards to, for lack of a better term, making out? Yes, all evidence points to Shane being quite happily passive about it, and Ilya enjoying that aspect of their sex. The hands are moving! The hips are moving! But the lips are saying "Fuck me with your tongue while I lay here and take it."

So. Yeah.

*shane* loves being praised and told how good he is, so he decides to flip it around and try it on ilya because that always goes so well with stuff like techniques in bed

but ilya gets hit with "fuck, you're so good to me" and 0.0 and before he can even START to recover from that, shane (who is still in the zone, eyes closed, just fully Lost In It) doubles back with a "god, you take such good care of me"

and ilya fully almost blacks out