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Marleau having a one night stand with a puck bunny and he doesn’t ask her name until the next morning and she just kind of smirks and says “Jane. Tell Rozanov I said hi.” Cliff just turns white as a ghost and has a total meltdown thinking he just slept with his best friend’s girlfriend.

He acts weird for weeks before Ilya snaps at him to tell him what’s going on and he just shouts “I SLEPT WITH JANE!” and then immediately cowers. Like fully fetal position covering his face in case Roz started immediately wailing on him.

It's great.

(It's exhausting.)

Ilya's new in town, his first day as a barista at the coffee shop around the corner from Shane's apartment, and he tries not to be too obvious about how thoroughly charmed he is by the cute guy with freckles and a shy smile who pulls out a pair of reading glasses when he sits down in a corner with a book of short stories. They strike up conversation later when Ilya goes to clear his dishes and ask he needs anything else. Ilya thinks it's a bit odd when the guy asks to take his picture and then frowns into his phone for a bit. "We've never met before?" "Nope, first day on the job." "Oh, I just thought that maybe..." And yeah, because Ilya had felt it too, that pull of vague familiarity. That warm oh, there you are feeling that is certainly too early to feel, but at least it's not just him.

Of course this gets highlighted in Shane's journal ("new barista Ilya at the coffee shop - go back tomorrow"), and Shane keeps going back, eyes keep lighting up when he sees Ilya for the first time, recognizing him from the descriptions in his journal ("his arms are unreal" "his smile is so gorgeous" "wanna tug at his curls so bad") and the ever-growing collection of photos in his phone. Ilya eventually learns about Shane, and they start dating. Ilya becomes a regular feature in Shane's journals. The night they kiss for the first time, Shane writes a firm directive to himself for the next day ("I know it's gonna feel weird, dude, but TRUST ME ON THIS!!!") and Ilya is rendered speechless the following morning when Shane walks right up to him without the slightest hesitation, grabs his face, and kisses him within an inch of his life ("I told myself not to waste a single second not kissing you" "...I'm calling out from work").

It's not always easy. They develop a system, Shane texting Ilya a number 1-5 in the morning based on how he's feeling - 1 means he needs some time and space to process, 5 means he can't wait to meet Ilya. Some days Shane scrolls back through pages and pages of his journal, endless texts and photos - is too much work for Ilya? Ilya always insists no (a conversation, he can see, they've had several times). Shane tries to believe him. They look so happy in the pictures together.

Eventually Shane grows more comfortable trusting Ilya with his memories. Ilya reminds him of people he's met, things he said, places they went together. It doesn't bother him, the way it did when his parents did it. Ilya's reminders slide so easily into conversation, never patronizing or over-concerned. Ilya sees him, not the headlines, not the local gossip that makes its way back to Shane some days, not his stupid head ("not stupid," Ilya insists, pressing kisses to his hairlines "perfect, beautiful.")

HEATED RIVALRY: 1x05 "I'll Believe in Anything"

And the whole time, Ilya’s blog is part fandom stanning and part his own thirst traps. He’s known to have had quite a few online-only flings with other people in the fandom, but while everyone knows Shane lives in Montreal, how old he is, and that he’s out online but not IRL, his personal life does not feature on his blog because his blog is Serious. Immaculate tagging systems, a queue, everything. Meanwhile, Ilya posts in rapid-fire, untagged bursts at any hour of the day or night, and Shane can see that Ilya is hot, anyone with eyes could see that, but he just makes Shane so mad with his stupid blog and his stupid fanon ship, and yeah, Shane could just block him, but he needs to see what the Other Side is saying about the show so his meta posts can be timely and topical.

So it goes on like this for months, and things are getting dirtier and more pointed. Shane’s meta posts are responding directly to posts from Ilya’s blog, complete with carefully edited screenshots to remove Ilya’s username, but everyone knows who wrote them. And Ilya just starts tagging his thirst traps with Shane’s username to rile him up, writing things like this is what hot man looks like, Shane (because one of Ilya’s shipper arguments is that the guy Shane ships with the main lead isn’t hot enough for him).

And eventually, at the height of the ship wars, Ilya comes into Shane’s inbox and just says:

"Suck my dick."

And we get the "fuck you, you suck my dick" exchange from Vegas here except in a different font because Ilya is a little surprised and a lot turned on that fandom golden boy has such a dirty mouth. So Ilya says, "If you want me to suck your dick, you’ll have to be a lot nicer than that," and Shane says, "What do you want?" and Ilya is like, "Stop posting such boring metas. They put me to sleep, Shane." And Shane’s like, "So you do read them," because Ilya has this ongoing fandom joke where he reblogs Shane’s posts with tl;dr, and Ilya says, "Ah, is just to help practice my English," but Shane’s like, "Your English has gotten pretty good," because keep in mind he’s seen Ilya’s posts daily for months at this point. And Ilya’s like, "Is easier in writing. I will show you."

And that’s how Ilya gets Shane off for the first time, sending him the filthiest messages in a steady stream and making Shane blush and tremble as he touches himself. And they continue like that for a while, hating each other in public and getting each other off in private, and the fandom wars kind of settle into an icy stalemate. Neither side is willing to budge, but the anon hate is better, and Shane backs off Ilya’s posts a little, and Ilya stops rage-baiting him quite so often.

And at first it was just sex, but then one day Shane sends Ilya a fan edit he’d seen of Ilya’s OTP with the comment, "This isn’t bad, actually," and that’s how they start talking about other things, like how they got into the show, or other ships they’ve had in the past, and that turns into Ilya sharing how much he misses his mom (they used to watch TV together), and Shane’s fear of coming out to his parents. And Shane doesn’t know what they are, but he knows Ilya is so much more than how he seems in his posts. And Ilya knows he likes talking to Shane more than anyone else in his life.

And they might have just continued like that for who knows how long, except Hayden logs into Shane’s account one day to check something in the inbox of a now-defunct side blog they used to co-run (it was like one of those postcard confessions websites, except from the POV of the characters on their show; it burned bright and hot for a bit before submissions dried up). Except he ends up seeing it all—the months of back and forth, and the personal stuff too, stuff not even Hayden knew.

And he’s furious, convinced Ilya is just doing this to fuck with Shane, some cruel extension of the ship wars gone way too far. And he goes to reply to Ilya’s last message and tell him to leave Shane the fuck alone, but instead of responding privately, he posts the response to Shane’s main blog, to all the thousands of followers he has there. And even though he deletes it almost immediately, the internet is forever.

The fandom explodes. It would be one thing if Ilya’s message was horny—he’s known to carry on those types of relationships across the fandom—but it’s not. It’s sweet and earnest and nothing like the online persona people are used to. And suddenly the fandom is scouring through Shane and Ilya’s blogs and finding months of posts with secret nods to each other, like tags in a thirst trap that people thought were references to Ilya’s ship but now seem meant for Shane, a whole meta post from Shane about enemies to lovers that went viral for how many people it convinced to jump to Shane’s ship, now seemingly all about Ilya.

And their relationship is out there for everyone to dissect before they’ve even defined it for themselves. And Ilya is so worried that Shane will delete his blog and disappear from his life entirely, but when Shane logs on to see the damage, the first thing he messages Ilya is: