monochrome candor

June 2015

Shane returns to Montreal in a fugue state, his head a jumbled mess.

He turns off his phone as soon as he gets to the apartment (messages unchecked) and hops in the shower, determined to wash Vegas off of his skin. As he scrubs he practices his breathing techniques, trying and failing to center himself.

Ilya's words won't leave his mind, playing on an endless, echoing loop. It almost feels like a cruel trick Shane's brain is playing on itself, like it couldn't possibly be real.

Ilya couldn't really want him. Certainly not enough to sound as devastated as he did when Shane asked him to leave. That couldn't possibly be how it happened.

Except it is, and now Shane has to decide what to do about it.

If he hasn't already fucked everything up.

He sits down on the living room couch once he's done showering, clean sweats on, and thinks Okay. What's the play here?

Ilya likes him and wants to be with him. It sounds impossible but Shane has to believe it, because it's what Ilya told him straight out. Maybe he'll change his mind - maybe he already has - but for now Shane has to operate like it's true.

Ilya thinks Brian is bad for him. He thinks he makes Shane unhappy and Shane, reflecting on it for more than five seconds in the privacy of his own mind, can admit that he kind of has a point.

Things haven't been good with Brian for... a while. Shane tries to remember the last time he felt uncomplicatedly happy to see or hear from his boyfriend, and finds that he can't. Vegas wasn't anything unique but rather an escalation, the latest iteration of Brian ignoring Shane telling him what he wants and deciding he knows better.

He's always done that, hasn't he?

He also couldn't even be fucking bothered to congratulate Shane on winning MVP. A moment that he ruined with his shitty, attention-seeking behavior.

Shane pauses that train of thought, allowing the anger rising in his chest to ebb and flow away.

Maybe, he thinks charitably, this was all because Brian was feeling threatened. Clearly he had reason to be, even if Shane hadn't realized up until now. It's not just that Ilya likes Shane and wants to be with him, but Shane....

Shane wants...

He wants.

It's choking him, this want. Expanding in his chest, cracking his rib cage open, overwhelming and overflowing. It's as if simply acknowledging it has made it grow tenfold in size. How could this feeling exist inside him without him knowing?

Absurdly, Shane finds he's on the verge of tears. He blinks them away, embarrassed despite the lack of an audience.

He suddenly wishes he was still in Vegas, that he could run and find Ilya. Could tell him that he feels the same way, that he wants more, and then -

Well. Shane should probably break up with his boyfriend before he gets to the next part.

The thought sends a nauseating thrill down his spine.

He can't really be thinking about leaving Brian for another man, can he? Throwing away everything they've had in the past eight years, everything Shane has known since he was sixteen. He isn't even sure who he is without Brian.

But it's Ilya.

Shane picks up his phone. Swipes away the unread messages, heart hammering as he thumbs open his thread with Brian.

The Centaurs are playing in New York and Shane doesn’t travel with the team because of some, like, very minor injury, don’t worry, he’s fine. Scott asks Ilya to get a drink afterwards, but not at the Kingfisher, somewhere else, no reason. He is absolutely miserable to be confiding in fucking Ilya Rozanov about this, but he eventually confesses that he and Kip are getting divorced. 

He says that after he came out, there was all this pressure to make sure the story had a happy ending. He was with Kip when he came out, of course they had to get married! Maybe he didn’t really think about what it meant to actually be married, though. Everything just happened really fast. And, like — Shane and Ilya got married right after they came out. Does Ilya ever feel like they rushed into things? Did he feel that pressure to get married to make the whole thing more palatable? 

(For our purposes we are in book canon, Scott and Kip went from getting together to coming out in like six months and Scott doesn’t really know how long Shane and Ilya have been together.)

And Ilya is like, “Cool story, but my relationship has traveled more roads and suffered more obstacles than you could ever possibly imagine. One time Shane had to google because he didn’t know that the word for what he was trying to describe was ‘microagression’ and then he had to get out his Russian dictionary, but there’s no Russian word for ‘microagression’ so he kind of invented one, and then we could finally finish our argument about whether the Voyageurs were being a shitty team and also we were doing all of this over FaceTime because I was in Ottawa and Shane was in Pittsburgh. Actually getting married was a footnote at the end of the 200 page dissertation of things that we did to make that relationship work.” Because obviously a central tenant of Shane and Ilya’s relationship is that they do kind of think their relationship is better than everyone else’s and I don’t know, maybe they make some valid points! 

I also like the idea of Ilya being utterly baffled, like, “I have literally only ever made romantic choices that I knew would make the rest of the world unhappy, you’re asking me if I felt pressured to get married? And you think I would care about that? Grandpa, I cannot relate.”