juliathephantom

imagining shane hanging out with his parents and while he's away from his phone doing something with his dad a call comes in. yuna sees this and goes, "shane, someone's calling you!"

Shane writes hockey romance* novels in his spare time and publishes them under a pseudonym (John Dutch) and no one knows except his agent.

Shane slips so easily into subspace that it's honestly a bit of a problem. Sometimes all it takes is a firm kiss and a pat to the cheek and Ilya can already see Shane drifting a little. You can see it in the bathroom in Vegas, how he almost let himself go, how he had to pull himself back when Ilya left the room. And that was early on in the situationship era. As his trust in Ilya grows and he starts letting him shoulder more of the weight Shane is constantly lugging around through the sheer effort of being himself, it only gets easier and easier for him to go to that floaty place where he doesn't have to worry about anything but doing exactly as Ilya wants.

At some point after the cottage but before the public outing TMZ does an article on “Ilya Rozanov’s most high-profile hookups” which is essentially just a list of Instagram models with paparazzi shots and blurry cellphone pics of Ilya at the club. Shane scrolls through it, absolutely seething, because he is Ilya’s most high-profile hookup - maybe not by their metric, which seems to be Instagram followers, but Shane hasn’t heard about a single one of these women, apart from Svetlana whom he wouldn’t have recognised if not for Ilya talking about her. The guys are talking about it in the locker room, as if Ilya’s a legend for getting with all of these supposedly very desirable women (although that is decidedly not the way the guys phrase it) and Shane is absolutely furious because he can’t tell anyone that none of these women got to keep him. He is the only one who’s gotten to call Ilya his. He is the only person Ilya’s been in love with.

This is a good reminder that there is a lot of texture and complexity to people; every human contains lots of aspects that would be completely unrelated if not for the fact that the same person experiences them. It’s easy to forget this, and compress the people you meet into a caricature; even celebrities usually end up being famous for one thing alone. But even something as glorious as the first space travel by a living human does not fully encompass a life.