permets-tu, darling?

like ilya took his time and spent a lot of time smooching shane to make sure he was comfortable and relaxed, which was very sweet and we love, but that also means a large window of time in which him accidentally eating an allergy beforehand could have Big Consequences.

and shane doesn't necessarily notice at first because he's a little nervous, still, but then. no yeah. yeah for sure The Worst Possible Thing To Happen At This Specific Fucking Moment is happening.

which means now shane has to use his epipen, ask for his phone so he can call an ambulance, and explain his allergies to this guy he's only hooking up with for the third time

AND HE STILL DIDN'T EVEN GET TO HAVE SEX

FOR FUCK'S SAKE

like ilya obviously wouldn't hold it against him, but i do think there would be a very funny mutual feeling of are you FUCKING kidding me that they got literally to naked and about to do it after two years of dancing around it ONLY FOR THIS TO HAPPEN

and i'm just imagining shane being ready for ilya to be frustrated or mad about it (because again! waited for two years! came over here! was hard and clearly ready to go and now his stupid allergies fucked it up!) only for ilya (who's sticking around because That Was Fucking Alarming) is sitting on the floor with him and idly rubs his back and just goes, "if you weren't sure, hollander, you could have just said so. jesus."

and it's such?? a relief?? he's not mad AND he can make jokes about this and isn't going to over-correct into treating shane like he's fragile??

and from ilya's pov, he now has knowledge about shane that shane is very obviously protective of, and he can SEE shane bracing for this to get used against him, which then makes ilya hold it a little more carefully.

and depending on how many movies for the franchise rose had filmed in montreal in the past??? not impossible that SHE was the montreal girl cap was always running off to see when they were in town. yes! it all makes sense!! rose landry is montreal girl, and hollander has STOLEN HER!!

which leads to the very funny idea of the boston team trying to be loyal to ilya and parent trap situations on nights out on the town to get ilya and rose to spend time together because SURELY cap can win her back! he's ilya rozanov!! of course he can do it!! manage to get them "accidentally" locked in a room together and NO chance cap doesn't win her back and steal her away from hollander!

TEARS IN MY EYES LAUGHING ABOUT THIS

oh MAN, one other player from boston got picked for all stars and another came along as their plus-one because listen. ilya has been carrying around a BAD FUCKING VIBE and they are. worried. he is in demon mode and very mean rn but he's their cap, so they gotta look out for him. and atp the whole boston team thinks they've solved the puzzle (they. have not. they have actually invented their own picture and cut it into pieces to MAKE a puzzle), so they send to the groupchat (the one without ilya called Potential Evidence For a Cold Case Episode One Day) that oh! landry is HERE, guys! she apparently came with hollander.

and OBVIOUSLY this is the perfect time to find space for cap and landry to get together 1 on 1 again! what if she came JUST to see cap!! (they needed to run this past like. at least one wag. but alas.)

and meanwhile rose came with shane as moral support in him trying to talk to ilya, but now ilya is avoiding them like the fucking PLAGUE.

BUT NOW IT DOES LOOK LIKE ROSE IS ACTIVELY SEEKING ILYA OUT.

BUT NOT FOR THE FUCKING REASON THAT THE BOSTON TEAM THINKS.

so the players are like SCORE. PERFECT. landry even asked one of them where cap was!! she WANTS HIM, guys. WE MIGHT SURVIVE AFTER ALL. ROSE LANDRY, WE WORSHIP AT YOUR FEET. PLEASE SAVE US.

so one of them distracts shane while the other goes to get rose, and rose is like "well, shane is busy, and maybe rozanov just needs to hear that shane wants to speak to him, and i can do that."

but now rose and ilya are locked in a room, rose doesn't want to say shane's part FOR HIM so she's just trying to set the stage by talking about what a wonderful person shane is and how he makes a great boyfriend and is so sweet and sensitive and-

and ilya meanwhile has his focus torn between trying to set her on fire with his mind, set himself on fire with his mind, and make his teammates (who are DEAD when he gets out of here) catch on fire with his mind.

"This looks cozy."

Once, Shane had to have a bucket of ice water poured over his head. It was for some charity thing the league had organised, Shane's fuzzy on the details now, but he knows there's a video out there somewhere of him soaked and spluttering, still shocked by the cold, even when he'd been braced for it.

Hearing Ilya's voice, cutting clear through the warm atmosphere, feels like that: like a sheet of ice water that Shane wasn't braced for.

Ilya's smile is all white teeth. "Hollander, you are not going to introduce me? I am hurt."

Shane feels paralyzed. Ilya's presence at his side feels gargantuan, impossible to ignore, like the suffuse heat radiating off a brick wall. But he can't turn his neck to look at him.

Distantly, Shane hears Rose introduce herself.

"Rose Landry, yes. I've seen your movie, the ah one with all the explosions. Ilya Rozanov."

"Oh, I know who you are."

Ilya has placed a casual hand on the back of Shane's seat. He's not touching him, but the small hairs on the back of Shane's neck stand up anyway. Shane becomes newly aware of his breathing, chest expanding in out in out. "Ah, I see. Hollander has already told you all about me. Only good things, yes?"

Rose's laughter is light. "No, I'm from a hockey town. Your name is anathema in my household."

Ilya cocks his head - Shane can just make out the movement in his peripherals. "But not Shane Hollander's? This is surprising, Rose - you do not look like a woman with bad taste. Hollander," and Shane almost jumps at being addressed, instinctively, stupidly turns to look up at Ilya who - who's getting closer, "move over, I need to ahh... Plead my case."

And suddenly Shane is in a booth, sitting across from a beautiful woman who he actually enjoys talking to, with Ilya Rozanov's body pressed up against his side, a constant burning brand; pretending to follow along with the conversation while his whole body is slowly being corroded by acid.

"So the rivalry thing," Rose says, because of course she'd bring it up of course. "You guys just play it up for the cameras, right?"

i'll never say never, but i don't currently have anything in progress!

i have been mentally microwaving the idea of exploring shallergies as a tangible way montreal starts shutting shane out. like it's bad enough if they didn't know about his allergies, discovered it, and then started being assholes about it, but also JESUS if they'd already known, been pretty cool about it the whole time (not perfect always, but a "oh wait, no, don't open that here. cap's allergic!" and the rest of the world didn't know, but his team did), and only after he comes out do people start "slipping" or "forgetting" or deciding when they're stateside to have team dinner at a restaurant that has peanuts on the tables and shells on the ground, and the "we don't want you to come with us" isn't directly stated. but boy oh boy. is it fucking loud.

and it also offers Big Ouchy thoughts for also then transferring to ottawa because yeah sure they're good about it now.

before anyone says anything: i hate this man. i think he's awful. the fact that shane is best friends with him is a personal insult to me. if a montreal public bus ran him over i would look the other way #withthepeople ✊

the problem imo is that rachel doesn't write him ironically. she genuinely has hayden telling ilya he doesn't deserve to live as a rebuttal to "what are you four, you can't eat mushrooms?" and seems to think this is harmless banter. like look at hayden. funny guy 🫵

BUT.

if you stop looking at him through the lens the books want you to and start looking at him through shane's, he makes a disturbing amount of sense

because hayden is safe. hayden is aggressively, boringly safe. hayden talks about his wag queen wife. hayden talks about his pink-frilly daughters. hayden got married at like 19. hayden is the human embodiment of heterosexual respectability. shane doesn't even have to do anything. just standing next to him makes him look straighter by association

and then after shane comes out? after he loses his team, his reputation, the media, basically his entire support system? of course he clings to the one guy who is at least vaguely kind to him

hayden isn't good. he's familiar. hayden isn't healthy. he's safe. hayden is the friend you keep because every alternative feels riskier

like hayden is stockholm syndrome. hayden is the prison you keep returning to because at least the bars keep the wolves out..

and i genuinely think that makes sense for where shane is emotionally

what i need, however, is the version of this story where shane has been married to ilya for five years and suddenly realizes there are people in the world who are kind without making him earn it. people who don't casually belittle him. people who don't make every interaction feel like surviving

bc i don't actually buy the idea that hayden was uniquely positioned to understand, esp considering hayden's family/personality! hayden "guessed," sure, but it was a joke, a stumble into the right answer. meanwhile jj spends years genuinely trying to understand what's going on with shane.

after the plane crash, jj clocks that something is wrong almost immediately. he sees a guy who's miserable, fixated on ilya rozanov, and carrying around feelings he doesn't know what to do with. he's sympathetic. he's concerned! he starts trying to set shane up with other men because he's working with the information he has and trying to help.

then there's the charity. jj is right there helping run the thing, using his cup day for it, watching shane and ilya spend increasingly ridiculous amounts of time together. from jj's perspective the problem is pretty obvious even if he doesn't have every detail. if anything, he's paying closer attention than hayden is.

which is why i always kind of wince when shane brings up "well hayden guessed." bc a) so did jj by that logic, and b) bc i don't think he realizes jj doesn't care abt the solving a mystery bit of it/failing to solve it. jj is upset because he thought they were best friends.

and honestly, i think he had reason to think he'd be someone shane could trust. jj has spent his entire career navigating a sport where standing out can make you a target as a black man in a predominately white sport. he's learned how to read rooms, smooth things over, and survive by understanding people. not in the same way shane does, obviously, but enough that i can see why it hurts to realize your friend spent years carrying something alone and never once considered coming to you.

and no, shane didn't owe him that trust. nobody owes anybody a coming out. but i do think jj is justified in being hurt by what that realization says about their friendship.

and then even after all of it, jj keeps showing up. he goes to shane's house. he rebuilds the friendship. he shows up to the wedding. he stays.

@amarriageoftrueminds NOW we're cooking 🍳 okok. i do think shane deserves jj, but i also agree he has some apologizing to do (as jj apologized pretty quickly after his 2 comments post-hollanov-outing). jj's not perfect either, & i do think shane was under pressures and stressors that jj will never fully comprehend, & possibly no one else ever will, not even ilya (ilya played in BOSTON…an american team. shane is basically a god playing in montreal habs of all places. his every movement is probably tracked on twitter for god's sake).

they both have a lot of growing to do, esp shane yes, & i do think that first yr in ottawa is crucial to shane's dev. i think he needs to have a giant fucking breakdown over all of it. everything he's carried. he was perfect, he was golden, he lived as a ghost in his own life for nearly 30 years, and it still didn't matter, & he was outed anyway, & ilya almost died anyway & he lost everything he was afraid of losing anyway (his team, reputation, friends, respect, public opinion). his paranoia wasn't unreasonable when you look at the consequences he actually faced, exactly as he'd predicted.

Aren't you guys always crowing about how you actually protest, unlike lazy Americans? Stop taking "why don't you have AC?" as directed at you personally and start directing it at your governments. It should be ILLEGAL to rent apartments that reach unsafe temperatures. No hospital should be run without AC. No school should either---it's putting children at risk. And if the grid can't handle it, then the state needs to invest in the grid. This isn't an optional thing, it has to be done, the same way places with earthquakes have to build buildings that won't fall down and places that flood have to build drainage. This defensive individualising of the problem is only going to delay fixing it further.

This is a governance problem and the response to this heatwave should be understood as a massive, critical failure on the parts of the UK, French and German governments.

it's just so much more interesting to me that this period of self-actualization would also make him reckon with hey, i'm thirty now. i'm finally far enough removed from all the hazing & bullshit that came with being the Only One playing white-man hockey in the OHL/juniors/fuckass nowhere canada. why wouldn't that change the kinds of friendships he gravitates toward? why wouldn't he end up really close with this burly sweetheart trinidadian king who loves barbecuing & is an impressive first-line vet w zero hero worship of him, or maybe even rebuild things with jj who should be closer to shane than hayden all things considered...

THIS IS WORSE. It’s so much worse.

When you hear “there’s no AC” you probably are thinking like…oh that’s rough, but still I’ve dealt with those temps. My old place didn’t have AC. It can’t be that bad.

NO. The lack of AC trickles down into every facet of dealing with the heat in a way that slowly and quite literally boils you alive. It’s not just “oh my apartment is hot this sucks”, it’s “there is nowhere you can go to cool down and if you overheat there is no help available”

For most there’s no AC anywhere. Anywhere. The coolest place available is maybe your local church, or a shopping center. Both will kick you out around 8pm, the hottest part of the day. In France and Spain in particular, the time zone is wrong (Hitler’s fault—we’re still aligned with Germany instead of the UK) and the sun doesn’t set until 10-11pm. Heat is still being actively pumped into your living spaces at 10pm.

And the temps do not meaningfully drop overnight. (Which you might expect if you’re from the American west. Southerners do understand this.) Many people live in stone walled buildings that just keep heating up. This is very literally the experience of being in a stone oven. And there’s no way to drop the temperature. You can’t escape it.

If your body temp climbs to unmanageable levels and you start experiencing heat exhaustion, you can call the hospital…most of which also do not have AC. I’m not sure how they’re treating people, I guess with ice packs? There’s already been a handful of deaths in my city, and that’s before any kind of post-wave reporting. These are real time reported deaths.

Anyway I want you to really, really internalize the sense of panic that starts to set in when you’re in these circumstances. The animal brain really starts to go wild when there’s no options and no escape. That’s why Europeans are posting about suffering.

I’m imagining a scenario where hook up era Shane and Ilya have never fucked without protection so it hasn’t actually been an issue for them so far. And, yeah, maybe sometimes Shane gets a sore throat after blowing Ilya, and maybe his lips get all tingly if some of Ilya’s cum gets on them, but like, Ilya is well endowed? So of course he’ll feel the after effects of an enthusiastic blowjob sometimes, they’re just a bit rough, ya know? (And of course he has his post sex mango #hismango so any other symptoms he just attributes to that guilty pleasure, and not anything else he may have consumed)

But then they’re in the cottage and doing it raw for the first time, and it feels amazing and Shane is so hot and bothered by the idea of Ilya Filling Him Up but then the well fucked tingling of his hole starts to get more intense until it kind of burns? And he’s whimpering a little, shifting and squirming when he should be boneless beneath Ilya warming his softening cock, enough that Ilya is ripped out of his own post sex contentment to notice and ask what’s wrong, and then he’s gasping at the redness around Shane’s hole, afraid he’d been much more rough than he thought. And maybe coincidentally they’d just opened a new bottle of lube, or used an oil based one they usually couldn’t with condoms or something, so they both think that’s the issue, a change in ingredients or some kind of batch recall; their theory seems to be confirmed when cleaning up seems to help soothe the burn, and they go back to fucking with condoms and water based lube because that seems safer.

Anyway this happens a few times but they still don’t quite work it out until Ilya gives Shane a facial and bright red welts appear on his face exactly where his cum had landed (and we can imagine Shane fielding questions about what caused those marks as he waits for them to fade, his cheeks blazing so hot you can’t even see where the welts are anymore) Several frantic google searches later and the pair of them are going through the five stages of grief at the idea that Shane might be allergic to Ilya’s semen now, so of course Shane is googling specialists at 3am and getting them to sign extensive NDAs so they can fix this problem as soon as possible because he will NOT let his allergies ruin this for him.

And then the doctor recommends the (actual! Real life!) treatment plan of desensitisation therapy where Shane is prescribed a regime of slowly increasing his exposure to Ilya’s cum, first diluted and then in increasing strengths to get Shane’s body used to it again, and obviously Hollanov get all horny about it because of course they do. And then when they succeed, the literal medical advice is to continue having unprotected sex a few times a week so the sensitisation doesn’t return and so they put it in their joint calendar and Ilya treats it with the seriousness he treats all of Shane’s shallergy stuff while they’re both like ❤️yay ❤️ at having medically necessary raw nasty sex.

I've noted before that my favorite punchline on Tumblr is "hang on, gotta look something up/okay that's funny."

Let me explain why:

It is a way to say "I don't get it" without blaming the joke or the teller.

It is a tacit admission of ignorance without shame or judgement.

It assumes responsibility for acquiring the knowledge the respondent doesn't already have.

It cues other people who Don't Get It to do the look-up themselves, allowing them to get that full impact of Getting It without derailing the post with explanations.

It gives subsequent readers, whether or not THEY got the joke, a little frisson of good feelings when they realize that someone else is now In On The Joke.