Ginger ale X Vodka

Ilya really fascinates me because he’s definitely also a victim in this au and we don’t really have a real world comparison as to how.

Like. We don’t have a real world comparison for “I thought I was in a happy marriage and actually the other person was locked screaming on the inside of their head.” We just don’t.

In my opinion, neither Shane nor Ilya consented to their sexual interactions over the last year. Consent needs to be knowing. Ilya did not know that Shane was cursed. He would have never consented to having sex with him if he knew. He has also been victimized by the curse in this way.

But the type of harm is different. And it’s one we just don’t have a real world equivalent to.

Shane had to experience the horror in the moment of being raped. He had to experience the horror of feeling himself participate in his own rape. He knew he wasn’t consenting to the sex when it was happening. But he had to feel his body participate anyway. He had to watch his body initiate a lot of the encounters. It was a horrible violation that he experienced in real time.

Ilya’s injury is different. He believed he was consenting in the moment because he believed Shane was consenting too. His horror and his violation happen in retrospect. He has to realize that he was the unknowing instrument for the rape of his own husband. And he has to live with that realization.

His entire world shifts on a goddamn dime. He thinks that he has a fantastic sex life and a very satisfied husband who loves his body just as much as Ilya loves Shane’s. He thinks Shane was walking up to him and literally asking for it. And he will have to look back on all of those previously happy memories and live with the fact that Shane was being raped in every single one of them. And I don’t see him being able to conceptualize “and, in a way, I too was being sexually assaulted because I was deprived of the knowledge I needed to meaningfully consent to the encounter.”

Like. The closest real world analogue I can think to this is when people consent to sex believing that they are having sex with a different person. Like if you think you’re having sex with one twin and it turns out that they lied to you and it was the other. He thought his very enthusiastic husband consented to sex with him and instead it was this awful fucking evil magic.

And even then it’s not a perfect comparison. At least with a twin situation you know that you are the only violated party. But the horror he has to live with is the fact that he was the instrument of Shane’s rape.

From a legal standpoint, Ilya is not criminally guilty of rape. There is a concept in criminal law called “mens rea.” It’s about the mindset of the person committing the crime. The law recognizes that what we intend and know in the moment something happens matters when we’re deciding whether you should be held criminally responsible for something.

For example, the police are not out here arresting every single person who ever gets into a car accident. The law recognizes that accidents happen. But if you get angry and purposefully drive in the back of someone else’s car, you will be arrested. Those two accidents could be identical in every other respect, but only one would be a crime because only one driver meant to do it. The difference between whether or not a crime happened sometimes comes down to what was going through your head in the moment.

Mens rea varies by jurisdiction and crime, but many jurisdictions recognize an intentional mens rea for rape. Ilya never once intended to rape Shane. And so legally he didn’t rape Shane. In this kind of universe, there would have to be some kind of statute imputing criminal liability for something like this to the person responsible for the spell. And I could see there being a different statute recognizing “some witch cast a curse that influenced someone into having sex with me and I didn’t know that they were under the influence of magic and had sex with them and now I have to live with the fact that my body was used to rape someone else” as its own form of sexual assault. You aren’t injured in the exact same way as the person who never would have consented to begin with, but you are still very much injured. I’d like to think the law in universe has codified a means of recognizing that injury.

It’s absolutely an injury Ilya suffers in this, and it’s not one that he had any real chance of wholly avoiding. Ilya was always going to participate in Shane’s rape at least once. The only real chance he had of avoiding it would be if someone else clocked the curse before he ever got home.

The curse initiates sex immediately upon seeing Ilya. It is the perfect spouse who is always eager. And I think it’s narratively important that in sex it is genuinely Shane’s perfect mimic.

There is no “something about the way he kisses is different” or “there’s no light in his eyes.” This thing moves exactly like Shane Hollander. It differs in Shane’s substance. In his values, desires, priorities, boundaries, interiority. It acts exactly how Shane acts in bed but suddenly it’s willing to have that threesome. It keeps his movements but gets rid of his boundaries.

Shane himself went into the first time it happened thinking that Ilya had absolutely no chance of spotting this in time to stop it. Ilya never had a real chance of completely avoiding his participation in Shane’s rape.

But he gets no comfort from that fact. Because even though he didn’t cast the curse, even though he didn’t know about the curse, he had opportunities to figure it out that he didn’t take. And that fact haunts him.

Ilya’s sin in this is just being a kind of shitty and unsupportive spouse. It’s just him at the end of the long game. There were inconsistencies in Shane’s behavior that he didn’t follow up, with the biggest being Shane’s career shift. Shane’s spent the past ten years like “bury me in metros blue.” Even in the long game itself, Ilya explicitly does not think that the media backlash would be enough to ever make Shane leave Montreal because he loves that team too much. And in this case, he’s right about that. But he doesn’t inspect the oddity of Shane signing with the Centaurs at extreme discount and a severe demotion, because having Shane with him all the time on his team is his dream. He checks out. He puts love blinders on. And, in fairness, he is struggling with a mental health condition that puts him at a disadvantage in recognizing and empathizing with Shane’s mental state. But he still makes choices during this time, and those choices will haunt him, with the biggest being his canonical strategy of offering sex whenever Shane expressed emotional upset.

He knows for a fact that Shane tried to signal that he needed help and Ilya responded by raping him. He didn’t know that’s what he was doing at the time, but that doesn’t make him feel any better about it.

I think Ilya’s already sort of unpacked and come to regret his strategy of using sex as a response to Shane’s post-trip upset well before the curse is broken. It’s one of the reasons why he blames himself for how “depressed” Shane is.

There’s a scene where Ilya and Shane overhear their colleagues talking about Shane at all stars. Shane’s there as Ilya’s spouse. He wasn’t invited as a player for the first time in his career. His reputation never recovered from the trip and in fact got worse because the curse didn’t do shit to repair it. They overhear other players laughing about what a joke Shane is now and how could he bear to show his face this year. Ilya is pissed but the real Shane manages to get out a jab about how his problems still exist after Ilya fucks the self esteem back into him, which surprises both Shane and the curse, because Shane hadn’t managed to get anything out in months.

Ilya thinks he was unsupportive and destroyed his husband’s self worth. Shane was at the lowest point of his life, came to him for support, and Ilya basically told him his fears were stupid and gave him a blowjob about it. Like. Ilya is very verbally dismissive of Shanes fears around the trip. He consistently framed it as a self-image issue. Shane would express concern around ever being signed again and he’d snort and say “of course they will.” He’d express concern about people thinking that he tripped on purpose and Ilya would dismiss it with “no one with a brain thinks that.”

Which doesn’t really address the issue. Shane has to deal with the reality of the media and the public ripping him to shreds right now. It’s nice to say that no one with a brain thinks he tripped on purpose, but it does jack all to actually address the actual problem Shane’s raising of almost every single teammate and coach he’s ever had as well as the media thinking he tripped on purpose. It’d be like if Ilya went to Shane and said “I’m really struggling with my mental health right now. I feel like I’m worthless and my life is not worth living” and Shane replied “don’t be ridiculous you are SO important and have so much to live for” and just. Ended the conversation there. Like. Nice sentiment, completely fails to address the actual issue.

Ilya’s looking back on the last year and thinking that Shane tried to get support for him and he told him that his fears weren’t real but he can always give him a blow job about it. And then Shane’s entire reputation did in fact tank the way Shane was afraid of. Of course Shane stopped coming to him. Like. He thinks he made Shane feel like that his problems weren’t important to him and he wouldn’t be there when Shane needed him. Because. That’s sort of what happened.

I think he had a period where he was looking back on the last few months and became really haunted by just how empty Shane’s seemed since the trip. Small things started to stack up. Shane wasn’t spam texting him screenshots of properties on zillow anymore with mini treatises about how the architect was on DRUGS when they designed this house DRUGS Ilya because look at this shit. His like, five hour phone calls with The Woman Shane Tried To Love Instead Of Him just… stopped. The bookmark in his book never moved unless he was reading with Ilya. The only ginger ale that left the fridge were the cans Ilya physically handed to him. At one point he drove all the way to Montreal to pick up a box of the pastries that Shane missed the most when he got on his diet in an attempt to spark something out of Shane. And Shane smiled like goddamn sunshine and kissed his cheek and said how much he missed these and how lucky he was to have a husband that was so good to him and then he didn’t eat a single fucking pastry unless Ilya handed it to him first. He’d count those stupid things every time he came home and just like the ginger ale cans, their number never went down.

The curse’s imitation of humanity is inherently imperfect. It can’t want anything for itself the way a person can. It cannot replicate Shane’s desires or interiority. And that’s what Ilya ends up missing. But he misdiagnoses the issue. He thinks of how depression robs you of your passion and energy and thinks that’s why Shane seems so empty now.

And the fact that he actually noticed something wrong tortures him. He knew that something was up with Shane for months before the curse was broken. If he had only thought of taking him to a curse breaker instead of being so sure it was a mental health issue, this would have been over for Shane months ago. He went through months of being raped, of being trapped, of counting goddamn whorls in the wallpaper, and Ilya could have ended it if he just thought of it sooner. He wants a goddamn time machine so he can save Shane sooner and kick his own fucking ass.

The tragedy of Ilya in this to me is that he does fuck up but he actually recognizes it and tries to fix his mistakes. He realizes he hurt Shane and actively tries to repair what he broke. He starts pushing to fix Shane’s reputation. He starts pushing Shane to go to therapy. He doesn’t accept the curse’s claims that he’s happy because he can tell something’s wrong. He fights just as hard as he did in 2014 and then some to win the goddamn Stanley Cup because he thinks it’s the first step in reminding the world that his husband is still Shane fucking Hollander and he’s got the Stanley Cups to prove it. He wishes for Shane’s happiness in part to help him and in part as a promise to Shane and to himself that he can fix what happened last year and make Shane happy again.

And then. Clang.

Ilya fucks up in this, do not get me wrong, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t also a victim here. He is still a victim, just of a very different harm than the kind of harm Shane experiences. They undergo different injuries. He has to live with the fact that he was the unwitting instrument of his own husband’s rape and that never would have happened were it not for this fucking curse. Whoever fucking did this does not get absolved of that just because Ilya was also a kind of shitty partner at the start of the curse.

But Ilya doesn’t get the mercy of thinking of himself as a victim after this. He thinks of himself as Shane’s rapist. He is so unbelievably fucked up from this.

I genuinely do not think they can do their recovery processes anywhere near each other, at least at the start. Their traumas are too tangled up in the other.

Shane’s torture gravitated around Ilya. It wore his face. When he left Shane would be trapped in stasis. When he was there Shane’s existence had to be dedicated to serving him. Laugh at his jokes fold his laundry suck his dick never say no. The fact that Ilya didn’t know doesn’t change all the messy fear and the pain and anger he now associates with Ilya’s face.

And seeing how bad Shane is left from this would be directly detrimental to Ilya’s own recovery. Every time Shane wakes up in a panic or takes a three hour shower trying to feel clean again, he’s going to drown in the guilt of that. This is something they legitimately cannot help each other through. There is a wall between them now. It would take a lot of time and work to tear that down again.

And there’s so much tragedy in that. They’ve been circling each other since they were 18. They were the person the other felt safest and most comfortable with in the whole world. And that safety and comfort has been taken from them.

I think it’s even more tragic in light of Ilya’s family history. He watched his father kill his mother. Not directly, but in her spirit. He was hard on her and crushed her emotionally and didn’t support her, and eventually she killed herself.

I think when he started to recognize how empty Shane had become, he grappled seriously with the fear that he would do to Shane what his father did to his mother. He wasn’t the best version of himself when they got married. Shane was hurt and Ilya didn’t support him and he even mocked him for what happened and now Shane just was… on autopilot or something. Empty. He tried so hard to make Shane happy again because he wanted to be a better man to Shane than his father was to his mother. He promised himself that he would not be the man who destroyed Shane Hollander.

And then. Clang.

Ilya doesn’t go see Shane in the hospital after the curse is broken. He does his own stint in a facility, and then he correctly assumes that seeing him or hearing his voice would hurt Shane’s recovery. But they think of each other every single day.

The first thing Ilya hears about Shane after the curse is that he’s awake, he’s coherent, he doesn’t think Ilya did this to him, and he wants Ilya to be alive. He’s demanding a suicide watch and refusing to cooperate with the investigation until he gets one.

I think that does more to get Ilya through the initial fallout than anything else. Shane wants him to be alive and Ilya doesn’t want to hurt him anymore than he’s already been hurt. So he stays alive.

At first they get news of each other from other people. In the first few days, all Ilya really hears is that Shane’s refusing all visitors. And Shane doesn’t hear anything about Ilya beyond the confirmation that he’s on a suicide watch, in part because he refuses all visitors so the only information he gets is what the police tell him.

Eventually Shane lets Hayden and J.J. in. The only people getting through before then was Rose Landry and poor fucking Carter Vaughn, who didn’t actually think Shane would let him in to begin with and was sort of fucking wrecked to learn that he got in by merit of sending one (1) sympathetic text post-trip, never telling Shane he liked him better post-curse, and also being in a different fucking country than Shane for most of the curse so Shane doesn’t blame him for never figuring it out. Like. The poor fucking guy showed up with a fucking get well card and a balloon fully expecting to drop it off at the desk and be shown the door like every other fucking person who tried to see Shane Hollander and instead found himself having the saddest fucking conversation of his life with Shane about his niece’s new pet turtle and how he and his wife are learning how to play Go together because sending one fucking “hey man I’m so sorry to see what you’re going through let me know if I can do anything for you you don’t deserve this” text a year ago was for a while the only sign Shane had that someone cared if he fucking died. He got fucking jumped on his way out of the hospital by Shane’s care team begging him to come visit again because Carter had gotten farther in one pathetic and turtle-centric conversation than everyone else save Rose had gotten since the curse broke. He doesn’t even live in this country.

I think when Shane eventually lets Hayden and J.J. in, he asks Hayden to go check on Ilya for him and to not be a fucking asshole when he does. Hayden does and he doesn’t say a goddamn thing to Ilya about not noticing and Ilya cries like a fucking baby in front of Hayden fucking Pike when he hears that Shane wanted to know if he was okay. He makes Hayden tell him three times about how Shane looked (bad) and if he was sleeping (doesn’t look like it) and if the hospital was taking care of him (aggressively so) and about his war on goddamn grippy socks, which Hayden found out about because Shane had retained their fallen corpses to keep his hands busy whenever his brain got loud (often). He cries again before Hayden leaves and Hayden fucking Pike hugs him and he cries harder.

Like. I think Hayden ends up being their intermediary at first and he is not throwing any fucking stones about this situation. Hayden blames himself for this.

The police are still looking for the witch who cursed Shane, but pretty much everyone thinks this was motivated by Shane’s outing or the trip or both. And the first domino to fall in that chain of events was Hayden fucking outing him on goddamn fanmail. Hayden’s got his own guilt to drown in. His best friend who saved the lives of his twin daughters spent a year in absolute hell because he couldn’t screen a fucking video.

I don’t think Shane and Ilya would be able to bear to see each other at first but they’d both want to know the other is okay (they aren’t). They’d use intermediaries at first.

Again, I like an open ending for this one where you get to decide if you think they’d make it so I won’t say definitively if they do either way, but I think that if they found their way back to each it would happen very very slowly and Shane would be the one setting the pace, especially at the start. Ilya would be petrified of hurting him by pressing too hard and reminding him of what happened. He’d wait for Shane to initiate contact.

I think they struggle in kind of opposite ways after this. I see Shane having issues with impulsivity. He Makes Decisions So He Can Remind Himself That He Can Make Decisions. But I think Ilya has a lot of difficulty trusting himself and his own judgment after this. He’s more hesitant. He doubts himself more than ever. I can kind of see them bumping into each other with that during the healing process. They have to learn how to communicate again.

Any communication would come slowly. A few texts that increase in frequency. Graduating slowly to phone calls that get increasingly longer.

I like the idea of them sending books back and forth to each other. I think Shane struggles being left with his thoughts after this. He needs to be reading something or watching a movie or listening to something whenever he’s not otherwise occupied. Like. That is not a man that can sit and wait patiently for his doctor’s appointment without something to entertain him. He is going to spiral if he has to think of all those hours and hours and hours and hours he spent staring at a wall.

I don’t think the curse often did anything to acknowledge Shane. Shane’s existence was treated as incidental. But he got the sense that sometimes it would punish him after he tried to wrestle back any control, and one of the ways that it did that was by blocking his line of sight so Shane didn’t have anything to count. Time would get very slippery for him when that happened. I don’t think Shane goes anywhere without a book or something after this.

I kind of like the idea of them mailing the same book back and forth with notes in the margins for the other. It’d be a kind of gentle point of contact. They get to glimpses of each other’s thoughts but they don’t have the pressure of direct communication, which they’re still relearning.

I think the hardest thing for them would be ever having sex again.

They would need years and to take things incredibly slowly. Ilya is not letting Shane or anyone else for that matter so much as bare a fucking ankle to his gaze without having them checked for curses, possibly multiple times. They would have to really reinvent the wheel on their sexual dynamic.

Which is a part of the tragedy in itself. They were a very sexually compatible couple before this. They had years to become comfortable with each other and learn what the other liked and they’ve been reset to more uncertain than when they were at their first hook up.

I think before this Ilya drew a lot of pride and satisfaction from just how good he was in bed and in particular with Shane Hollander. Perfect Golden Boy Shane Hollander would come undone under him and he loved that fact. He loved knowing he always knew exactly how to make Shane feel good.

That confidence and assurance is gone. He spent over a fucking year camped out in the honeymoon phase thinking he had at least kept his husband very satisfied in one area of his life and the entire time Shane was being raped. He is not drawing any comfort from the fact that the curse was perfect at mimicking of how Shane acted when he was having a good time in bed, at least not for a while. There would be constant check-ins.

They really gotta develop grade a communication skills if they want to make it. I don’t think it’s impossible for them to survive this or even to have sex again. They just have to take it slow and talk through a lot first. I feel like there’s I’ve sometimes seen a mindset of rape victims never being able to enjoy sex again but they absolutely can. I view Shane and Ilya as both having experienced sexual assault in this fic, their assaults and how they impacted them just took different forms, and they’re going to need a lot of time and help to process that trauma and figure out how to be comfortable with each other physically again.