the appearance of novelty and truth

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.” 

this is such a beautiful question thank you so much for coming to me with this 🙏 I think most of their fights are like Ilya needling and Shane going, "Do you ever the fuck up?" and then they don't talk for 10 minutes to 2 hours and come back and give half-hearted apologies that are mostly more because they are embarrassed than actually because they're actually sorry, but here are my top five actual blow up fights not in any actual order:

Ilya is telling Shane about how he used to skip school on his mama's bad days where she wouldn't be able to get out of bed and make her tea and Shane makes a face and says, "You shouldn't have had to take care of her. You were just a kid."

When Shane finds out Ilya let him win at rummy one time (because he didn't want to play the stupid card game, Hollander) and it deteriorates into yelling about if he let him win here, where the fuck else did he let him win?

Reoccurring blow up fights about Ilya going on medication that usually something like "I don't want to rely on pills for the rest of my life, Shane." "Well its that or I fucking uninstall the locks on the bathroom, Ilya!". These get especially worse after Svetlana visits and lets slip the one time Ilya did swallow a bunch of pills and she had to break down the bathroom door and stick her fingers down his throat when they were 15.

They are already having a fight about something (Shane scheduling a sponsorship meeting on a day off, Ilya telling the Centaurs that he can't go out because Shane won't let him, if Shane is being too hard on Haas, etc.) and Ilya goes, "Why don't you just get on your knees, Hollander?" and Shane is immediately madder than he's ever been in his entire life.