For Sale: Fire Extinguisher, Never Used

This really is the “And Someone Escalates” fic. Everyone’s just Escalating shit all the time in Sochi. Svetlana is escalating. Shane is escalating. J.J. is escalating. Carter is escalating so goddamn much that the only reason why he knows that true love exists is because he sees it when he looks at Shane and Ilya. Scott Hunter Is Also There And Not Happy About It But He’s Escalating Too. Yuna and David are escalating. The Boston Raiders are escalating this entire situation in a way that absolutely no one wanted them to. The 44th President of the United States Barack Obama is escalating because this fic turned into shameful political RPF.

There is one person in Sochi who at no point purposefully tries to escalate anything. And it’s Ilya.

Ilya does not think he’s fucking getting out of this. He only agrees to come back with Shane to begin with because Shane Hollander is a crazy person who was as safe as present circumstances could allow and decided to flee from safety into a country filled with angry people who wanted to kill him for making out with the nation’s favorite hockey player against a wall. Like. Ilya doesn’t go back to save himself. He goes back to save Shane.

He just doesn’t think Shane’s plan is going to work at all. It shouldn’t have worked. He thought the Canadian delegation would refuse to shelter him. But he also thought that Shane was too stubborn to just turn around and leave him. He went with Shane so that Shane would go back to his delegation and he’d get Shane to stay with them after they turned Ilya away. He was already fucked but Shane didn’t have to be.

But then Shane + the Ally Squad gets him in the car. And Ilya was not expecting that. He never thought they’d even give him a chance.

Escalation is in Ilya’s best interests. And it is only in his best interests. That’s why he doesn’t want to do it.

Ilya is fucked from the second that video is released to the public. He was already on thin ice with their loss in the Olympics. Then there’s a viral video of him initiating a kiss with another man and a bunch of internet assholes start memeing about how Putin himself is gay for Ilya. Like he’s just fucked.

Ilya has absolutely no way to walk this back. He knows that if they find him in private he is going to “kill himself” and if they find him in public he’s going to be arrested for a crime he didn’t commit and either “kill himself” in police custody or just rot in prison for decades. Ilya is incredibly intelligent. He’s able to read the situation in minutes and realizes that he’s not getting out of this.

Svetlana wanted him to escalate this from the start.

She was with him when he was outed. She wanted him to let her smuggle him to his gay lover the Hockey Prince of Canada and see if Shane Hollander could use his influence to get him the fuck out of Russia alive. Ilya refused because that would put both Svetlana and Shane at extreme risk, and he wasn’t willing to put either of them in danger. But Svetlana was like “fuck it, we’re doing my plan anyway,” and went directly to Shane with it, who immediately matched her fucking energy and forced his delegation to meet them in the most public possible venue in front of a mob of the press and wrung a Pulitzer Prize winning photo out of the ensuing drama. She knew she liked him for a reason.

Even when Ilya is taken in by Canada—even when America decides to negotiate for Ilyas release—he doesn’t think he’s getting out of this. Everyone else is trying to escalate because that gives Ilya his best odds. But he’s trying to deescalate because he knows he’s making Shane’s odds worse.

Neither of them think this is resolving by the end of the Olympics. This is the kind of prisoner release deal that typically takes months to years to broker. And Russia wants Shane Hollander out of its fucking country the second he finishes competing.

The Olympics Committee is going to lose its entire shit even harder at Russia if they as the host country start revoking the visas of foreign competitors to keep them from competing. Thats flirting with an attempt to rig the goddamn Olympics. Their athletes will be slapped with the longest goddamn ban in the history of the Games. Shane will be allowed to impose on Russia’s hospitality until the final buzzer of the Olympic finals and not a second longer. They expect his ass to be on a plane out of their country that night.

Shane has told his delegation in no uncertain terms that the only way he boards that plane is if Ilya’s holding his hand.

Shane feels this terrible certainty that Ilya’s chances at escape have a direct relationship to his proximity to shane. The Canadian prime minister is going to pull his support for Ilya’s rescue the second he gets Shane Hollander off of Russian soil. For all America’s helping them now, does that remain true in six months, with half of Hollanov safe and the other fading fast from the public’s attention? Ilya isn’t even an American citizen.

So much of the pressure for Ilya’s rescue comes from the fact that a very beloved Olympian from another country has chained his safety to Ilya’s. If Shane is safe, then Ilya is much more unsafe. Shane wants to be in the line of fire. Because he’s trying to provide Ilya with cover.

But it’s a gamble. There are much higher odds of Shane ending up in serious trouble than of Ilya escaping it.

They have a few days before Shane’s visa is revoked and they were warned that these deals can take months to negotiate. Shane is refusing to leave quietly. He’s going to end up in deportation proceedings and do something medically fucking crazy like punch a cop to save Ilya and then they’ll just both be sentenced to rot in Russian prison for the rest of their lives. Ilya has argued with Shane about this at length. And Shane knows he’s probably right about how bad of a plan this is.

But Shane just can’t escape this awful certainty that if he leaves this country without Ilya, then he will never see him again. Negotiations will fail, and America/Canada will decide that they can live with them failing because Ilya’s not even their citizen. Shane being in danger makes it harder for them to just… give up. So he’s decided. He’s going to make sure he stays in danger until Ilya’s safe.

And J.J., Carter, and Scott are all in on the goddamn pact.

J.J. isn’t going anywhere without his fucking boy. If Shane is staying, so is he. He will punch the same goddamn cop.

Scott and Carter both decide that they have to keep themselves in the line of fire to give Ilya his best chance for the same reasons that Shane does—there is pressure on America and Canada to make negotiations succeed if their athletes are in danger. They aren’t even fucking friends with Ilya.

But they don’t want to leave him here either.

Ilya’s sitting here completely unable to help watching as Shane and the Ally Squad just start attaching pins to grenades so that if one goes off, they all go off, and he doesn’t want any of it. He doesn’t want to drag them all down with him. He is actively trying to turn himself over to Russia authorities so they don’t kill themselves trying to save him and Shane is like “if you fucking do that I swear to god I will find a way to DIE in this country”

They’re in their shitty tiny windowless room with one full bed to share when they’re with the Canadian delegation and Shane is shoving that thing against the wall and making Ilya sleep on the inside so Ilya can’t get out of the bed without waking Shane up. Shane doesn’t trust Ilya to not do something fucking stupid like try to turn himself into the Russian authorities while Shane is too asleep to punch cops.

I think Shane like. Physically crashes once the adrenaline leaves his body after the semi final match where he’s attacked on the ice. He really rose to the occasion in the moment and then the game ended and he was rushed back to his delegation’s pop-up consulate or whatever and suddenly the adrenaline wasn’t in his system anymore and he’s got an arm with a massive fucking gash that needs stitches and also it’s sort of sinking in for him that huh. someone just tried to fucking murder him during a game. Huh.

When adrenaline leaves your system after a near death experience, a lot of the time you start shaking. You experience sudden and extreme exhaustion. And I think all of that happens for Shane. He starts dropping shit. He loses all of his energy all at once. And it’s so funny, he uh. He can’t stop shaking. Fuck. Fuck.

Ilya drags him back to their tiny windowless room and makes Shane sit on the bed and takes his shoes and pants off just fucking gives up and rips his compression shirt down the middle and side to get it off because he can’t figure out how else to get it off without fucking up shanes stitches and Shane just sits there trying to figure out if he’s shaking or if ilyas shaking or if it’s both of them. Like they are fucking weird with each other after the attack during the semi-finals. Shane’s coming off a near-death experience and Ilya just spent a good five minutes living in a world where he got Shane Hollander killed.

It’s the first time in their relationship that they allow themselves be intimate with each other without any kind of pretext of sex. They’d always felt that they’d been a little too intimate with each other for this to be purely casual. Shane would do crazy things like kiss him tenderly on the forehead after the hookup ends and Ilya would get scared and bolt but not without one more lingering and longing kiss and then they’d spend months running from their feelings before they crash back into each other. But they’re always able to at least pretend that this was all just about sex. Any intimacy between them always happened before or after a hookup.

They don’t have that here. They’re not having sex after Shane almost dies on the ice. Ilya’s just trying to get the fucking bloody clothes off and to stop his own hands from shaking so badly because he thought Shane died he thought he fucking died Shane went down and then the player kicked and Shane’s arm went up but no one could tell if he got it up in time and then J.J. was tackling the guy to the ice and it turned into this massive chaotic fight between all of the players from both teams and Shane was still down on the ice in the center of all of it and Ilya couldn’t see no one could see where the blood was coming from but there was blood fuck in the moment it seemed like so much blood and Shane’s fuckin. Childhood friend Jake who he never ever talks about ended up forcing his way through to Shane and shielding Shane’s head from all the guys fighting around him with his own body and dragging Shane to his feet and getting him off the ice and Shane was clutching his neck the whole time the blood was everywhere you could track their path off the ice from all the goddamn red and no one knew where it was coming from if it was his neck or his arm and Ilya begging someone to tell him if he was fucking okay just fucking tell him if he’s okay please please please please please but it was chaos and no one knew not for what felt like hours and was probably no longer than five fucking minutes but Ilya still feels like the moment is going on and replaying in his head of Shane and all the blood and he doesn’t know where it’s coming from he doesn’t fucking know where it’s coming from. And Shane is like. Fuck. Sorry. He’s being so. Ilya doesn’t have to do that for him. Shane can do that. Sorry. Sorry. He doesn’t know why he’s so out of it. Just needs a second, he thinks.

And Ilya is like. Shut up. Just shut up.

They don’t talk about it. Ilya gets the clothes off and bullies Shane into lying down and lies down with him and holds him which they have never goddamn done outside of sex and they’re both shaking and not talking about the fact that they’re both shaking and Shane is like. Fuck. Fuck, wait, we need to switch sides. Ilya’s supposed to sleep on the inside.

And Ilya is like. No. They’re already settled. Just relax and go to sleep. Ilya isn’t going anywhere. Shane can complain straight to Obama if Ilya is gone when he wakes up. They’re fine. Everything is fine.

Shane passes out fast due to aforementioned adrenaline crash. Ilya is still awake for when a member of the delegation shows up at the door.

And Ilya’s like. Oh fuck. This is it. It’s finally happening.

He thinks that they’re going to tell him negotiations have failed and Russia has issued an arrest warrant that he needs to comply with. He thinks he needs to turn himself in while Shane is too asleep to punch cops.

He’s like. Allowing himself one last lingering gaze on Shane Hollander’s freckles and one last kiss to his slumbering brow and telling himself it was always going to end this way so he needs to deescalate this entire mess before it lands Shane, J.J., Scott, and Carter all in Russian detention with him and he’s like. Slipping out quietly to tell the person at the door that they need to shoot Shane with the gun they use to tranquillize escaped zoo animals when he wakes up because otherwise he’s going to lose his entire goddamn mind when he realizes Ilya’s gone quietly into custody and the guy is like. What? No. Shane Hollander’s parents called. They saw the game and are trying to talk to their kid after he almost died in a terrible passion on live TV. Take the phone already.

And Ilya is like. Oh. Fuck. Okay.

Shane would not talk to his parents when they called after he was outed. He couldn’t be honest with them on these lines and he didn’t want the last thing he ever said to them to be a lie. He also knew that they’d ask him to do whatever it took to come home and at that point America had zero involvement in the situation and 100% of Shane’s plan was “threaten my own life to the point that the homophobic prime minister of Canada saves my gay situationship from mortal peril because it’s coming up on an election year and he’s scared of what his constituents will think if Shane Hollander died seemingly because he hates gay people” which uh. Didn’t think he could handle the talk with his parents with that plan in mind.

Shane’s parents tried again after the semi-final match and got Ilya instead. Ilya. Does not think anyone wanted that to be conversation that happened.

He tells them Shane’s sleeping. Ilya can try to wake him up. He was—out of it, after, after the game. But he’s okay. Doctor promised no permanent damage. Just—stitches. He got stitches. They said it would scar.

Look, Ilya’s going to do whatever he has to in order to get Shane on a plane.

He’s—Shane’s so crazy and stubborn sometimes. But. Ilya’s not going to let him stay here with him. He’s going to get him out. He swears to god he’s going to get him out.

Yuna asks him if it was the CCM photoshoot.

She keeps going over it all in her head. When this could have happened. Shane never said anything. But she saw Ilya in the elevator that night. He was going up. The elevator stopped on Shane’s floor. She remembers thinking it was a funny coincidence that his room was on Shane’s floor. And then the next day, Shane was acting… she doesn’t know. Different. Not bad. Happy. Jittery. Like he was nervous, but also like something good had happened.

Ilya was going to Shane’s room that night, wasn’t he? That was when their relationship started.

And Ilya’s pretty sure Shane would not be thrilled if he low key confirmed the night that they first slept together to his parents. He side-steps most of their questions about their relationship by insisting that Shane wants to tell them himself and rambles about how Shane loves them and how he’s so sorry he’s so so sorry but he’s going to get Shane out he swears he’s going to get Shane out.

Yuna and David tell him to not wake Shane up. They want him to sleep and they don’t know if he’ll agree to talk to them anyway. They just needed to know that he was okay, and Ilya’s given them that.

They’re happy that he and Ilya found each other. They want Ilya to know that. He must be someone very special for their son to love him so much. They can’t wait to get to know him properly.

Ilya feels like absolute shit when they hang up the phone.

He wants to call his dad. He hasn’t spoken to him since before he was outed. The last thing his father told him was that he was an embarrassment to his country and that was before he made fuckin. #throatgoatputin an internationally trending twitter tag.

He wants his dad to be worried about him. He wants his dad to be desperate for someone to tell him that Ilya’s okay. He wants to tell him that there’s a insane and stupid boy who’s decided to terrorize multiple world governments to get Ilya out of this country alive and if someone promised Ilya that Shane Hollander could leave this country safely and never face a single consequence for any of this mess if Ilya sacrificed himself then Ilya would take that deal in a second. Ilya would rot in a fucking hole until the heat death of the universe if it got him a guarantee that Shane would escape this mess unscathed because he likes Shane Hollander in a way that terrifies him in a way that’s eating him alive. And he wants his dad to say things like this Shane Hollander must be someone very special if you love him so much because then that means his dad thinks it’s important if Ilya loves someone it means that he thinks Ilya’s love is something to be valued. He wants him to ask Ilya how he and Shane got together and if it was that dumb fucking CCM photoshoot because Ilya sounded so happy after that day and his dad is suddenly the kind of dad who notices things like if his son is happy.

He doesn’t call.

His dad wouldn’t want him to.

And he knows what he would say to Ilya if he did.

He goes back to his shitty tiny windowless room and almost gets body slammed into the ground by Shane.

Shane woke up and thought to himself that son of a bitch turned himself over to the Russian police while I was too asleep to punch cops and his soul left his goddamn body with the sudden flash of terror. He woke up and thought that he’d just lost every chance of getting Ilya out alive. Ilya is such a dumb fucking asshole sometimes and Shane swears to God he swears to fucking god that if he ever tries to turn himself in when Shane’s not there to stop him Shane will do something so medically crazy that Canada will just up and leave Shane to die in Russian detention. Shane isn’t leaving this fucking country without Ilya so if Ilya ever fucking—if he ever tries to—

Like Shane is doubled over trying to catch his breath. He just had the worlds quickest panic attack followed by a very sudden crash of relief when he realized that Ilya was still here. And Ilya’s like. Hollander Hollander Hollander it’s fine they’re fine Ilya wasn’t going anywhere without him he wasn’t turning himself in while Shane was asleep even though he totally thought that’s what was about to happen and he was absolutely going to do that. They’re going back to bed and see, Ilya will even sleep on the inside. It’s fine they’re fine they’re so so fine right now no need for Shane to do any crazy person escalations that has globally felt ramifications

Except Shane is his mother’s son.

And Yuna walks away from her conversation with Ilya like “I need to escalate this even fucking harder.”

Again, Yuna and David’s strategy is to remind their home nation that they have been nursed an unhealthy attachment to their son since he was fucking twelve years old. Shane Hollander is the unofficial prince of Canada and they need absolutely every registered voter in the country to remember that and be on standby with the goddamn riot if it looks like he’s not getting out of Russia alive. They’re doing tearful interviews how when you’re raising a kid as special as Shane you realize that, in a way, he’s Canada’s son except for how no he’s not he’s their fucking son. They’re leaking his baby photos and old home movies because remember how small he was when you first saw him remember how you fell in love with the idea of him when he was 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 remember how you watched him grow up. He needs you now love him enough to save him love him enough to save him love him enough to save him.

But Yuna realizes that she needs to lean into the Hollanov of it all. She needs the world to love both of them.

She takes a shot in the dark and bullies some poor fucking admin into giving her the raw footage from the CCM photoshoot from before Shane’s rookie year and ends up with tons of the worlds most unusable footage because her son apparently spent that entire photoshoot flirting with Ilya Rozanov.

You can’t make out what they’re saying. They weren’t mic’d. But there’s almost an hour of them making each other smile and laugh. They look and act utterly smitten with each other. They make each other laugh so hard that they fall over.

It hurts Yuna and David to watch. They can’t remember the last time they saw their son smile or laugh the way he did when he was looking at Ilya Rozanov. They feel like they’ve missed so much of his happiness.

They leak it. They’ve got it on every major news network on the planet within hours.

And the public eats it up.

Like. Most of the people following this story have no investment whatsoever in the rivalry. The rivalry matters to a select population in North America and the current audience is the entire fucking world. Most people’s introduction to Hollanov was the relationship, not the rivalry. It’s kind of like when a bunch of new fans show up in a fandom with no idea of most of the lore and the OG fans are like “wait.” There’s all these confused and distressed Hollander or Rozanov fans who have spent days insisting “guys we swear to god those two hate each other” and the rest of the world has been like “YOU MEAN OUR GAY KINGS WHO INVENTED LOVE”

The world loves it. Like. A fuck ton of homophobes hate it, but their supporters love it.

They’ve gotten only a few glimpses of Ilya and Shane’s love. They saw how Shane looked when he ran to find Ilya, and they saw them in front of the car, and that’s pretty much it. They saw the tragedy but they want to see the love that birthed it. The CCM photoshoot gives them this glimpse into their lives before Russia. It lets them see how the love’s been there for years under everyone’s nose.

There are protests. Calls for global sanctions if Shane and Ilya are not allowed to leave Russia. It escalates.

I think the fact that escalation is only in Ilya’s best interests is so important for this fic. Shane would be safer if he didn’t escalate. J.J., Carter, and Scott would all be safer if they didn’t escalate. They would all be able to safely make it out if they just keep their heads down and stayed with their delegations. The escalation only happens to save Ilya.

Ilya is someone who grew up with very very conditional love. His family only loved him as far as he was useful to them. He was the golden goose, and he has finally stopped shitting gold. He knows how this ends. When he runs, it isn’t even to save himself. He knows it’s too late for him. He goes to be with his mama.

He doesn’t think he can be saved. He doesn’t think anyone will even try.

And then Sveta and Shane say that actually, no. They will risk their lives to save him. They will grind nations to a goddamn halt to save Ilya Rozanov. And then J.J., Scott, and Carter all decide to do the same.

They love Shane so so SO much. He is their gay hockey prince and they will burn the entire fucking city to the ground if anyone touches a single hair on his beautiful hockey playing head.

In the Sochi outing au, Shane and Ilya really pull a gay hockey Romeo & Juliet, only they don’t have to die for the Capulets and the Montagues to lay down their arms. They are low key killing the Boston v. Montreal rivalry through the power of gay love.

Like. The fans still want the other team to lose just as badly, don’t get me wrong. But they gotta keep it impersonal. I think after Sochi, there’s a period of infighting as internal fan etiquette resets itself. There’s definitely the voices that take the tone of “THEYRE TRAITORS SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY” but as time goes on and Shane and Ilya continue to be batshit insane on the ice against each other, more and more people are looking at this relationship like “okay, we’ll allow it.”

There’s no more burning jerseys outside the stadium before a game. Like, if you try, the other fans will get mad.

Shane and Ilya are outed not long after they sign extension contracts with their teams. They’ve both got years committed to their respective teams, and Shane and Ilya have both insisted that they have no interest in trying to force a trade—and their teams have absolutely no interest in trading them.

But what happens when they hit free agency?

For me, this fic ends with the summer after Shane wins his first Stanley Cup, so we wouldn’t actually see that. If you want to imagine that they end up on the same team, go for it. But in my mind, they stick with their own teams, work really really hard to make long distance work, and then spend the first year of their retirement crawling into each other’s skin because they finally get to be with their favorite person year round. The paparazzi coverage of them that first year of retirement is just endless shots of them in beautiful and exotic travel destinations trying to swallow each other’s tongues. They explore the world and each other’s bodies. They’ve been together for 20+ years at that point and they’re as sickeningly in love as ever.

But the fans don’t know that. They think “one of these men is probably going to sign with the other’s team when they hit free agency and we want it to be us.”

A lot of fans start aggressively policing the other fans to be less hostile to the other’s partner so they’re more likely to one day sign with the Raiders/Metros. Beyond that, they don’t want to drive off their own star captain because they’re so impossibly hostile to their partner that the city becomes unlivable. Boston and Montreal are reluctantly calling a slow truce where they leave the rivalry in the stadium. It becomes a minor Internet meme for Boston/Montreal fans to go out for drinks with fans from the visiting team after a game to help put the hostility to bed like “I’m doing my part.”

Before round 2 of the 2015 playoffs, a reporter asks Shane if he’s at all worried about Ilya staying with him in Montreal since he’s the captain of a rival team and Shane side steps it with one (1) comment about how he hopes there’s no issues because it’s really important to him that Ilya doesn’t feel like Shane’s home is hostile to him and Montreal is like King We Have Got You.

And they REALLY have him after the Metros sweep the next round in four.

A lot of their cities’ acceptance of them is driven by the unfortunately accurate meme about how they fuck each other so good that it gives them hockey super powers. And. The fact that they play discernibly better whenever they’ve recently seen each other does not help dampen that meme. And, again, to me it’s more that they make each other really really happy and they both play better when they’re happy, but to the rest of the world, they’ve got magic hockey dicks.

The Wooing Structure of the 2015 playoffs is different. Shane and Ilya face each other in round 1. Shane’s not using the time before the first round to Wine And Dine His Man because they talked about it and agreed to just sort of become hermits in the time leading up to this playoffs. This is the first time they’re facing each other in the playoffs as an out couple, and it’s kicked up the controversy around whether they’re too conflicted to play each other again. They’re trying to just stay out of the news as much as possible, and every Hollanov Date Night has ended up in the tabloids since they were outed.

Then they each fight so goddamn hard that they go to game seven in round 1, so there’s not much of a break before round 2. Shane’s going straight into it again. No time for wining or dining.

But then they sweep round 2 in four.

Montreal is ecstatic. Ilya fucked his man so so good that the Metros goddamn CONQUERED. He has been elevated to Divine Consort status. He’s Gonna Keep His Man Happy All The Way To The Stanley Cup.

The meme about how they fuck each other so good it gives them hockey super powers causes them so much psychic damage. Like, again, this fic is set in the early to mid 2010s. The shit the press pulled in the early to mid 2010s should have been considered violations of the goddamn Geneva Convention. The press is cruel about it.

Shane and Ilya get brutalized in the media every single playoffs run for the first few years. They have to be so, so, so offline. They are sexualized endlessly in the tabloids. You cannot get through a gossip rag article about them without at least three innuendos.

I think they just hate the endless speculation around their sex life. They can’t really escape it. They absolutely get chirped on the ice constantly about it. The jokes are all over social media. It’s in press and in interviews. The fact that they’re attracted to each other and like having sex with each other is so so funny to everyone else on the planet. It’s so frustrating to them.

In private, they’re comfortable enough with each other to joke about it, especially as more time passes. Ilya’s climbing into bed after the Raiders wash out of the playoffs like “*heavy sigh* time to perform my Duties” while Shane’s like “oh my god.” I don’t think Shane would be joking about it the first year, but after they’re a couple of years deep into this, I think he’d be comfortable enough to do shit like joke about how he’s gotta do his part to make sure the Raiders survive this round before he blows Ilya.

They’re very comfortable with each other, especially as time goes on. They can joke about their sex life with each other. Everyone else on the planet does not have that right.

But they also can’t really stop them from it. After the Metros sweep the second round, Metros fans are going into that third round with big signs reading “THANK YOU #81.” Ilya’s arriving to the game with Marley and Shane’s parents and people are trying to toss him flowers and hand-made crowns. Ilya is not touching his wallet the entire time he’s in that city. He is Taking Care Of Their King and so Montreal shall Take Care Of Him. The fan’s enthusiasm can be very uncomfortable at times but it’s mostly well-meaning.

The Ilya and Shane that live in my head are very protective of each other, especially in the Sochi Outing AU. They do not fuck around about each other in the slightest. Like. Out of all of my AUs, they are suffering through the highest level of fame. They are on multiple government watch lists because they’re graded as such high risks for Russian assassination attempts. They are getting death threats from hate groups and on the radar of a very angry world leader. When it comes to the other, they do not put up with any shit.

I think the fans pick up on that. Shane and Ilya get a lot of questions about each other and they have to shut down a lot of bullshit. If something happens to one of them, the other will drop everything and fly to be with them. I think people start to realize that they prioritized each other over their own fucking survival in Sochi and they’ll prioritize each other over every single other part of their lives. Fans start aggressively policing each other about going after one or the other because they don’t want to drive away their superstar player. And that really shows during the playoffs, when one invariably ends up following around the other’s team.

Both Shane and Ilya aggressively plan for the playoffs like, over a month out. The playoffs are too busy with like. Their real jobs to be planning dates. But, especially for the first few years, they really really want to make the other feel at home in their city so they just plan how to Woo Their Man well in advance.

Shane has contingency plan after contingency plan about how he’s going to Wine And Dine His Man because he doesn’t have the benefit of knowing when exactly he’ll be able to do it. He and Ilya agreed to just stay in before round 1 and he doesn’t know how many games they’ll go through in the remaining rounds. But then they sweep round 2 and have this little oasis of time before round 3 and Shane is like “IT’S TIME”

The fans of the teams that may have to face the metros in round 3 are like “FUCK” because they’re fighting it out to game 7 so their team is going to be exhausted and meanwhile the tabloids are FILLED with Shane Hollander in his most fire fit Taking His Man Out to Montreal’s finest dining locales with Ilya Rozanov grinning like he won life. Like POV your team has its first shot in two decades at breathing in the presence of the Stanley Cup but before they can they have to get past this asshole who’s using hockey as foreplay with his boyfriend whose dick apparently grants him hockey superpowers.

Ilya was so dedicated to treating Shane like his princess (gender neutral) during his playoffs run and then when he realized what Shane was doing the next year he was like “oh my god I am princess (gender neutral).” He is SMITTEN. At this point they’ve semi-recently talked about how they both want the relationship to be real so this is their first time living together for an extended period as Definitively The Real Boyfriend and Shane wants Ilya to be happy with him so badly.

For the first time since they were outed, Shane feels like they can really survive Sochi. Getting out of Sochi just cost them so much. Ilya lost his country, his family, his reputation, and would have to live the rest of his life in a fake relationship and under threat of assassination. Shane returned and felt like he’d fucked any chance he’d ever have at having a real relationship with Ilya because he fucking trapped him with him, he felt like losing the Metros was becoming more inevitable by the day, he felt like his reputation would never recover and that he’d spend the rest of his life living under guard because Russia wants to shoot him only a little bit less than they want to shoot Ilya.

But now he’s got this goddamn electric team with the Metros now and he’s never been happier professionally and he was so fucking worried it’d cost him Ilya with how badly they fought over him staying with the Metros but no Ilya loves him and he’s happy that Shane didn’t lose the metros and suddenly the relationship is real it’s real.

Shane wants to make Ilya happy so badly. He wants there to be a light at the end of the tunnel for them. He wants Ilya to feel like he’s not trapped with Shane and like Shane wants him to be here and cares if he feels happy and welcome in Montreal. Everyone be fucking nice to his boyfriend.

Shane and Ilya are again very restricted in how much they can go out during the playoffs. People are fucking angry about the fact that the Metros dream team rebuild may actually take home the Stanley Cup. Just like the year before, Shane and Ilya have to spend a lot of time indoors to try to minimize the security risk during their playoffs run.

But Shane has to take Ilya out on a nice date. Thompson he will pay any price in security precautions. Thompson they have to make this happen. Ilya went to so much effort to make Shane feel welcome in Boston and Shane needs him to know that he’s worth Shane putting in the same effort. Thompson he’s trying to woo his own (real!!!) boyfriend here.

Shane is wining Ilya and he is dining Ilya. Hayden and Jackie went on their finest date night streak in the history of their marriage helping Shane with dry runs. Shane is the gay hockey prince of this city and when Shane and Ilya walk into a restaurant together they are getting the ROYAL treatment.

That being said, Ilya is not even the one who receives the true princess treatment in Montreal during the 2015 playoffs. This is not from lack of trying on Shane’s part.

No, the true princess of the 2015 playoffs is Cliff Marleau.

This is purely because Cliff can like, go outside with much more ease than Ilya. Ilya has to spend most of the playoffs stuck in Shane’s house or his hotel room for the same reasons that Shane had to spend most of the 2014 playoffs in Ilya’s house or his hotel room. Ilya is not complaining. Okay like he is complaining because it’s bullshit that they have to live under threat of assassination but he and Shane are finding ways to keep each other very entertained which. He is not complaining about.

Cliff spends the playoffs as the loyal steward to the Divine Consort of Montreal. Like. Once the Raiders got knocked out of the playoffs, he stopped being Of The Enemy and became The Guy Who Supported The Guy Who Was Fucking Their Guy All The Way To The Stanley Cup. Cliff is having a fantastic time.

Cliff is not the only Raider who comes to support Ilya through the playoffs—he’s just the only one who stays through the whole time. The rest have to pop in and out so they can see their families, go on vacations, etc. But Cliff has carved out the entire time to be with His Boy as he supports His Man. So Cliff gets to bask in the full experience.

Hollander sends a fancy fucking car to take him, Connors, Hammersmith, and Pricey (still a Raider #tothem) to be wined and dined at some five star restaurant on his dime and it really sets the tone of the whole trip. Cliff is also not touching his wallet in that city. People recognize him as the Guy Who Keeps Happy The Guy Who Keeps Their Guy Happy and suddenly it’s no sir that drink is on me.

He’s going out every night as an unofficial fourth Landry brother. Those guys know how to fuckin’ party and so does Cliff. He’s texting photos of all the rainbow flags to his lesbian sister. He’s made plans to come back for their Pride (which is apparently in August in Montreal) and to fly his sister out to join him in it. He’s such an enthusiastic if sometimes clumsy ally that there’s talk of putting him in the parade. Cliff is living his best life.

And, as a note, the spirit of bacchanalia is WELL alive in Montreal that year at Pride. Their profoundly gay team just ended the Canada Cup Drought and brought home the Stanley Cup. It is ECSTASY.

During the playoffs, whenever one of the raiders pops up to join Cliff & Ilya for a leg of the Metros’ run, they get to Montreal and see how Cliff’s living right now and they’re like “oh my god” and he’s like “RIGHT??? I’m telling you man I feel like a fuckin’ princess.” And then whenever they see Ilya, Hollander’s always bringing him a Coke or a coffee or insisting on carrying his bag for him and they’re like “oh my god cap’s the princess.”

I just really like the idea that the romance stays alive for them. They don’t take each other for granted. They thought they’d never get to take each other out for dates or even be together as a real couple and now that they have that opportunity they’re taking it every single chance they get. They like making each other feel special and appreciated and cherished. They are the most sickeningly in love couple on the planet. It’ll be ten years down the line and they’ll still be gearing themselves up to flirt with their own husband.

When it’s the admirals’ turn to win the Stanley Cup, Shane and Ilya are traveling with the team to support Carter and Scott, as they are members of the Ally Squad and, of course, besties with Hollanov for life. Shane and Ilya are very dedicated to the admirals’ winning the cup. They want the streak of gay people winning the Stanley cup to remain unbroken. They are helming a war counsel to analyze game tapes for weaknesses and then when they’re not doing that they are dating the absolute shit out of each other.

They have more freedom to go out during that playoffs run. For one, they now have no chance of winning the Stanley cup, so slightly less people want to kill them. For another, they’re spending a lot of that run in NYC.

NYC is the land of billionaires and celebrities and extremely high profile and often contentious individuals. Hollanov is so far from the biggest security risk that city has ever seen. They have way more dining and entertainment options equipped to handle them.

Like. You have to think about the logistics. When they go to restaurants, the main concern is someone slipping poison into their meal. Russia has legitimately assassinated people in real life by poisoning their meal in a restaurant.

How do you make eating out for someone under that kind of risk safe?

First, you have to try and keep it a secret that they’re going out to begin with. It is easier to plan an assassination if you know the exact future location of the target and the date and time that they’ll be there. Which means you need them to not be going out for a date at a business where the hostess is vagueing on social media about how there’s going to be some VERY special guests at the restaurant this Friday #hockeyprinces. You need a restaurant that understands the important of secrecy in advance of the date.

You need to know the name of every single person who touches those plates. You need as few people as possible touching those plates and you need background checks on the ones that do. How long have they worked at the restaurant? Where did they work before that? Where are they from? Russia likely did not plant a chef in a high class Montreal restaurant in hopes of catching Hollanov on a date before Shane and Ilya were outed, but if they were hired after? Be more careful about that person.

Maybe the person who’s handling their plates has debts that can be exploited. Maybe they have family members who have been involved with shady people in the past and suddenly got in over their heads. But hey, you can help save them, if you just add this one little ingredient to just two dishes at your restaurant.

Those plates can never be left unattended. You need to make sure the kitchen area is fucking secure so no one can slip in to taint the food and then pretend to be a lost delivery man here with their restock on truffles.

There’s a host of security protocols you need to keep that food safe, and most restaurants are just not going to be equipped with those in advance. You have to create those security protocols just for the Hollanov date, and even then, you have to account for human error. People who are following security protocols for the very first time are more likely to break them—either by accident or because they do not yet appreciate why these protocols exist. Like. They are worried about the 19 year old busboy who left the back door unlocked for just a few minutes while he was on a smoke break. And yeah, they said to make sure the back door was always locked, but he works for his Nona, who has the only key and doesn’t know he smokes. It’s just for a few minutes. They’re worried about the Nona who looked away from the dish just for a few minutes even though she wasn’t supposed to, but a pot was boiling over on the other side of the kitchen and she’s sure it’s fine, she knows and trusts her staff and the back door was, of course, locked.

NYC has restaurants that regularly seat billionaires and politicians and a-list celebrities and fuckin’ saudi princes. I guarantee you that there are restaurants that have religious protocols in place to accommodate for sensitive clientele. Shane and Ilya still have to be very very careful, but it doesn’t require nearly as much planning and security screening to accommodate their date nights because they’re not having to create the security protocols themselves. They suddenly have access to dozens and dozens of options that already have pre-existing security protocols in place to keep people like them safe.

Ilya gets a much rockier start with Yuna and David in the Sochi outing au. He does not get to come out the gate fully evolved into his ultimate loverboy form who is there to talk their son down from a panic attack with such ease and skill that David is willing to try and black out the memory of how he watched Ilya grope his little boys ass like an hour ago. No, Ilya has to open this relationship as “their little boy’s fuck buddy who has no romantic feelings for him and vice versa but who their son must now pretend to be in world-changing gay love with, possibly for the rest of his life, robbing him of any chance of one day having a real relationship.”

Yuna and David do not want Ilya to have died in fucking Russia. They understand, on a level, how this happened. On that same level, they do not blame Ilya for what happened. They understand he was also a victim here.

But on a different level, Shane is their baby boy who is now going to spend the rest of his life living under the threat of assassination and pretending to be in love with someone he apparently doesn’t love.

They just didn’t want this life for Shane. They wanted him to be happy. They wanted him to be able to fall in love and get married. And then suddenly he went to fucking Russia for the Olympics and they thought he’d be fine but then they woke up one morning and Shane was gay and too scared to tell them (ouch) and he may never come home because he’s risking it all to save the love of his life that he never once mentioned having.

When he got out, David and Yuna were all geared up to make sure Ilya knew they were so, so happy he and Shane had found each other and they were excited for him to be a member of their family.

And then Shane and Ilya fess up to the fact that they aren’t even dating. The entire relationship was a desperate ploy to get Ilya out of Russia alive. And now he’s going to be held to it, possibly forever.

Yuna and David cannot protect their son from this. They cannot fix this. They’re parents who already feel like they failed Shane in a lot of ways and then they get hit with the sledgehammer of “your son will never get a real relationship; he will have to perform at being in love to the entire world for what may be the rest of his life and if he doesn’t he may be legitimately killed for it.”

They don’t wish that Ilya had died in Russia. But they do wish this had never happened. And they are really trying hard to make sure that this doesn’t come off as resentment towards Ilya, at least where he can see, but it’s awkward sometimes. Ilya can tell that they don’t really know what to do with him. He can tell that they don’t like his relationship with Shane.

Ilya’s family did him a lot of damage. He knows their relationship was fucked but a part of him has been Pavlov’d into feeling like other people’s love is something he has to constantly, constantly, constantly earn—and like he can never do enough to earn it. The 2014 playoffs is his play to earn love. He’s trying to prove to the world that he was worth saving in Sochi. He’s trying to prove to Shane that he was worth saving in Sochi. Which Shane would be bewildered by if he knew, because Ilya was always worth saving in Sochi to him.

Ilya wants Shane’s parents to like him. He doesn’t want them to spend the rest of their lives thinking of him as the guy their son is forced to be with. He wants Shane to love him and for the relationship to be real and for Shane’s parents to not be disappointed by that fact. He doesn’t want to be the son-in-law they put up with for the rest of their lives because they have to—he wants to be good for Shane and he wants them to think he’s good for Shane.

Yuna and David are not there for every single game of the playoffs. Only Shane and J.J. are doing that. Carter and Scott get knocked out during round one of the playoffs, so they miss the games during round one at least. Hayden’s there for a lot of it but he also has like. A family. He’s trying to be there as much as he can but he’s flying back to Montreal a lot. Jackie and the kids are flying down to Boston to be with Hayden for part of it, but it’s hard for very young kids to spend several months away from their home and their routine and to be constantly flying for home v. away games so they’re not doing the full playoffs run. Yuna and David are flying down for a lot of it, but like. David has a job that’s not hockey. They’re using his time off strategically. He’s making appearances during weekend games and taking time off for important games—the first game of the playoffs, the finals, etc—but he just can’t be there in person the whole time. Yuna could, her job is to be Shane’s momager, but she’d have to be away from David and from home for several months and Shane does not want her to be spending months in the same fucking pressure cooker of public attention as him. Everything he’s doing right now is getting dissected and if Yuna were sitting next to him through all of that, the public would turn their attention to her. He doesn’t want her here the entire time. He wants to try to insulate her from the feeding frenzy the playoffs is turning into.

Shane flies in before everyone. J.J. at least could afford to take a few days for himself to visit his family before the playoffs started, but Shane is one half of star-crossed lovers who only get to see each other a few months out of the year. People expect Hollanov to be so deliriously in love that they’re rushing into each other’s muscular embrace at the earliest possible opportunity. Shane’s on a plane to Boston as soon as his season ends. He’s got a little oasis of time where it’s just him and Ilya and he figured it’d be kinda awkward, Ilya had the playoffs to worry about and Shane would be underfoot and it’s not like they’ve ever really lived together before so maybe they wouldn’t be compatible there, and also it’s felt like the only thing that’s been hammered into him pretty much every single day since Sochi is how inconvenient he is and how no one wants him around but they have to put up with him for appearances’ sake. Shane walks into the 2014 playoffs very exhausted and defeated. He spent months trying to fix things with his team and he failed.

Shane has not spent the last few months with the worlds biggest Hollanov shipper insisting to him that he was a goddamn catch and he didn’t need to win his man’s heart because he already HAD it #trust. No, he has spent the last few months in a downward spiral with J.J. as they desperately tried to convince the other that there was not something about them that made it fundamentally impossible for others to love them without ever once being able to verbalize their fear that there was something about them that made it fundamentally impossible for others to love them.

Shane’s just so tired and defeated and rejected by the time he hits the playoffs. He tried so hard to convince the teammates that turned on him that he was still their brother and got it hammered into him that all he’d ever be to them was the traitor faggot they didn’t want to share a locker room with.

Shane’s already spent his entire life feeling like he was wrong. He was too Asian, too autistic, too gay for the spaces he was operating in. But he was good enough at hockey that people deigned to put up with him anyway.

But their acceptance of him had a limit, and he wasn’t allowed to know what it was. He felt like he had to stumble around blindfolded in this world of conditional acceptance and he didn’t get to know what the conditions were. But he always eventually crossed a line that he couldn’t see and when that happened he invariably became too much for everyone to keep putting up with. He was always eventually dropped. And it hurt every time.

Shane wants his relationship with Ilya to be real. But he doesn’t have it in him to actively pursue it going into the 2014 playoffs. He had a much closer relationship with his teammates before Sochi than he did with Ilya and when he asked them to still love him the answer was “absolutely not.”

Now he’s spending months with Ilya. And he wants it to be real so badly. He already had feelings for Ilya going into this and because of this mess he’s gotten so much more access to him. Ilya is funny and charming and hard-working and brilliant and good, and Shane likes him so, so much. And suddenly Ilya’s holding his hand and sometimes sharing his bed but only when they have to and staying with him during games and Shane keeps getting these little stolen moments where it almost feels real and he wants it to be actually real so fucking badly.

But Ilya wouldn’t have chosen to give him any of this. He’s just another person who’s only spending time with Shane because he’s stuck with him. And Shane thinks it’d destroy him if he tried to have more with Ilya and Ilya had to be the one to tell him “no, you’re too much for me too, I’m only putting up with you this much because I absolutely have to and I thought you knew that. C’mon. You didn’t really think I would ever pick to be with you?”

Shane’s going into the 2014 playoffs telling himself that he’s just going to stay out of Ilya’s way. He’ll play his part for the cameras and when they’re alone he’ll just keep to himself. He and Ilya can just get each other off when one of them is horny and Shane will ignore how the idea of it kind of makes him feel like a live in whore because this is the first time that he’s staying with Ilya while not also being a player so it’s not that he’s here for a game and the sex is just a nice bonus he’s just here for Ilya and if this were real he’d be here as Ilya’s partner who Ilya actually liked spending time with but it’s not real and so it feels like all he can offer Ilya is a quick fuck and it’s his own fucking fault because he’s the one who trapped Ilya with him and beyond that they can just be… fucking roommates or something. Ilya obviously doesn’t want more with Shane and Shane’s so tired of being told he’s not worth more.

But then Ilya starts pursuing him.

Shane tries to get out of Ilya’s way and slink back to his own room and Ilya says no no stay with me sleep with me I want you here. Shane offers to get out from underfoot if Ilya wants to have his teammates over without Shane in the way and mucking up the dynamic with them and Ilya insists no no I want to spend this time with you. He wants to take Shane on a date and he wants to spend all day with him and he wants to talk about what Shane’s reading right now uh. wwi was a hell of a war. and he wants to watch a movie with him and eat with him and to have sex with him on every single available surface of his house and he wants Shane he wants Shane he wants Shane. And it feels so good.

Shane’s not questioning this. He’s not asking Ilya why he’s suddenly acting like this relationship is real because if he does maybe it stops. Maybe he asks “hey so uh i can’t help but notice you’re acting like you like me as more than a colleague who you have to pretend to be in love with and occasionally fuck” and maybe Ilya says “no that’s all you are to me you read way too much into the tender reverence I use when I kiss your freckles in the golden light of the morn and now you’ve made it fucking weird by acting like you want more god you’re so fucking impossible to put up with Shane” and then maybe Shane just walks right into the ocean maybe THAT happens. Shane feels a little pathetic for it but for the first time in months he feels like someone actually wants him around and he just wants to bask in it without doing anything to risk it.

Ilya thinks it’s going fantastic. He is advancing like goddamn Napoleon and Shane is letting him do it. He’s letting Ilya pull him into his arms on the couch and he’s letting Ilya keep him in his bed and he’s letting Ilya kiss his beautiful beautiful freckles in the golden light of the morn. He’s taking the time before the playoffs to settle Shane into living with him and then in an ideal world Shane will already be deliriously happy having Ilya as his Real Boyfriend by the time Ilya has to segue into Wooing His Future In Laws.

In Ilya’s ideal world, Yuna and David would arrive in Boston to their son happy and comfortable and in love please love him back Ilya wants Shane to love him back so so badly with Ilya and Ilya could Woo Them Too But In Like A Son In Law Way.

They’re not staying in his house with him and Shane. He is planning on having way too much sex with their son to ever be able to share a roof with them. The sex of it all is both a part of his Wooing Plan and also just like. An aspiration. Shane Hollander is the most attractive man to ever live to Ilya and Sochi happened very early in their relationship. He had swapped a few blow jobs with Shane and had penetrative sex with Shane one (1) time before suddenly they were Destined To Be Wed In A Ceremony Officiated By Obama Himself. They haven’t had much time together since Sochi. They had the Gratitude Tour and then they had like, two games maximum left in their season together and they spent some of that time celibate and having to re-determine whether the other still wanted to have sex with them. He just hasn’t had that much sex with Shane in the time they had before the playoffs.

And now he’s looking at potentially months of uninterrupted time with Shane where they have to spend long stretches of time together alone in his house where he has multiple beds or in a hotel room where there is always a bed that they have to share and limited sources of entertainment outside of each other. Ilya wants a real relationship with Shane and he wants to be able to talk to him and comfort him and unburden himself to him but he also very much wants to do things to that man’s body that has not been invented yet. Like he’s front-loading his advances with sex because he wants to approach this from a place of familiarity and then change his dynamic with Shane but also he very very much wants to have sex with Shane on every available surface of his house for the sake of the sex itself. Like Jesus Christ Shane brought his glasses to Boston how the fuck is Ilya supposed to be normal about that

He cannot put David and Yuna in his guest bedroom. He ravaged their little boy who they have loved since the womb in that room on the second day of having Shane alone in his house. He is cataloguing every single sound he can get out of Shane in bed and Shane’s not going to want to make those sounds if his fucking parents are sharing the wall. No, Ilya is a problem solver and he is solving this problem before anyone realizes it’s a problem to solve. He’s reserved them the penthouse suite of one of Boston’s finest hotels before anyone thinks to float the question of where Shane’s parents will be staying during the playoffs. Excellent security, world class concierge, and his credit card is on file with the front desk if they want anything. He got them reservations for dinner at one of the best restaurants in Boston and opened their tab on his credit card in advance, please go enjoy a romantic date night on him and do NOT think about what Ilya is doing to their little boy’s body while they’re doing that. He is instructing the hotel to make sure their room is stocked with fresh flowers and chilled champagne and hiring a car to drive them around and a security team to make sure the press doesn’t harass them and Russia/any of the fucking hate groups sending them constant death threats don’t try any shit against Shane’s parents since they can’t get to Shane himself.

Ilya planned it so thoroughly. He was going to dazzle them with the nice hotel room and fine dining experience and chilled champagne and then when they came to spend time with Shane they’d find him happy and comfortable and safe with Ilya and not at all like he was only in this relationship at fucking gunpoint. They’d see Shane could be happy with Ilya and they could stop viewing this relationship like it was a tragedy that befell their son and they would never ever get any kind of indication that Ilya was fucking their son in ways not found in the Kama Sutra. Ilya did not want his fucking future in laws to have any knowledge of their sex life and Shane sure as hell did not want want his parents to have any knowledge of their sex life and Ilya would take reasonable precautions to ensure that that knowledge was avoided. Shane had approved Ilya giving him hickeys since the season was over and he wouldn’t be in a locker room for a while—he would NOT be giving Ilya any until he hit the offseason too, his fucking teammates ALREADY TOLD the entire fucking planet that Shane Hollander was their favorite thing to discuss in the locker room when they were trying to I Am Spartacus Ilya’s sexuality and if they do anything that risks what Shane does in bed coming up in the locker room then Shane is killing them both—and Ilya was 1) abusing that power and 2) strategically abusing that power so that any marks would be covered by Shane’s clothes and his parents would never ever ever see them. He was setting Yuna and David up in a hotel for home games and when they traveled with them for away games he was giving the strictest possible instructions that not only could David and Yuna not be in the adjoining room, their room could not even be within 2 floors of them. Hollanov + the Ally Squad are already sort of apart from the rest of the team for security reasons during the away games—Shane and Ilya’s room specifically is flanked by Boris’s room on one side and Thompson’s on the other and they’ve given up having dignity with either of those men so they’re not super worried about one of Ilya’s teammates hearing them—but Ilya is taking no fucking chances. Yuna described their relationship as “fuckbuddies” one (1) time when they were trying to break the news of “heyyyy so Obama himself is now invested in our relationship which is in fact fake” and Shane almost flung himself out of the White House window. David and Yuna will never again get further confirmation of the fact that they have sex if Ilya has anything to say about it.

And then some fucker

Paps him in his own fucking backyard

Kissing h i s b o y f r i e n d

And then giddily following him inside to very obviously have extremely athletic gay sex with him

And he has to talk about that fact WITH HIS BOYFRIEND’S FUCKING MOM

R U I N I N G his plans to convince them that he was a charming and respectful young man who would cherish their son into his twilight years and they definitely do not need to ever think about or remember the fact that this entire mess started because Ilya dedicated several years of his life to the pursuit of fucking their son and was extremely willing to dedicate the rest of his life to that same pursuit. Just don’t even think about that part.

Before The Soccer Photos, David and Yuna sort of knew that Shane and Ilya were still having sex? They weren’t asking their fucking baby boy about the state of his sex life but they had one (1) excruciating conversation with them about how their could be absolutely no Arrangements On The Side because Russia would actively be trying to honey trap them or have their homes watched for evidence of an affair so they could ruin the hollanov love story which means they have academic knowledge of the fact that their son is trapped in a dating pool consisting exclusively of himself and Russia’s greatest love machine so they sort of figured they’d end up in some sort of quid pro quo agreement about it.

They didn’t like thinking about that part. They hated the fact that Shane was trapped in a relationship and his only options were 1) treat sex like it was purely transactional and he was just scratching an itch with some guy he apparently didn’t want to be in a relationship with 2) never have sex again or 3) risk it all for an affair that, if discovered, would destroy him in his professional and personal life. Like. They’re just not thinking about it. Yuna at one point said at 1:37 in the morning “David do you think they’re still—” and David said “GOODNIGHT YUNA” because don’t make him Contemplate or Consider. There’s a new circle of hell entitled “the fact that our little boy who we knew in the cradle had sex yesterday makes international headlines” and they’re living in it.

That being said they clock the fact that Ilya’s trying to woo their son like. 0.37 seconds after they arrive in Boston.

Like. Either Ilya is flirting with their son or he’s flirting with THEM. David’s googling the champagne he bought them like “yeah you don’t buy that label for a work colleague’s parents.” Shane’s going through the playoffs like “maybe he tenderly kisses my freckles every single morning as part of a playoffs ritual” but absolutely everyone else can tell that Ilya’s embarking on the hockey player version of a peacock’s mating dance. And, in fairness to Shane, it’s easier to make an objective assessment of what’s going on if there’s no risk to you. Shane’s hindered by the anxiety that comes with knowing you have literally one good thing in your life right now and it goes away if you misread these signals. But David and Yuna are on the outside looking in like “yeah he imported our sons favorite brand of ginger ale and stockpiled his favorite type of shampoo like a doomsday prepper who believes that soap will be the currency of the apocalypse and also sometimes we catch him caressing Shane’s face with tender reverence so not only does he want this relationship to be real he’s DESPERATE about it”

I think they were already kind of hoping that there were feelings going into this? Like. Shane and Ilya went so hard trying to save each other in Sochi that it was sort of hard to believe that there weren’t any feelings involved. And they didn’t want their son to just never get to be in love.

At the same time, they’re a little hesitant about Ilya actively pursuing Shane. It’s less about Ilya and more about the fact that there’s no easy way out of this relationship for either of them. They want Shane to have love but if he and Ilya try for the real thing and fail and the entire relationship sours because of it then it’s not as simple as “break up with each other.” They have to consider all the exterior pressures and potential fallout of a break up.

I think they feel more comfortable with the idea of Ilya making overtures quickly though. Like Yuna comes to Ilya’s house to meet with Shane and decide if they need to issue a public statement about the soccer photos and she’s opening the fridge door to find the entire nation’s supply of her son’s favorite brand of ginger ale. She goes to the bathroom and it’s not even the main en suite bathroom it’s just the random downstairs half bath and there’s her son’s preferred soap with the scent that doesn’t linger on his skin and drive him crazy. Ilya isn’t there at first because it’s the day before the first game of the playoffs and he had to go in for a team meeting and Shane is stressed. The metros had times where they’d almost act like how they used to be and then something would remind them that Shane was gay and they’d just become fucking nightmares again. It was like they could sometimes forget about his sexuality but ohhh boy when something reminded them there was hell to pay. He dreaded the last metros/raiders game of the season because he knew from the previous game that the locker room would be absolute fucking hell after for at least the next week.

He doesn’t know if it’s the same for Ilya. Maybe Ilya wouldn’t tell him if it was. He sure as hell didn’t tell Ilya just how bad it went for him whenever they played Boston. And the Raiders just got a photographic reminder of the fact that Cap’s Bi And Fucking Shane Hollander. Ilya has to go into his team and Shane is so fucking stressed about whether he’s going to be okay with them. The Metros just had to like, be reminded that Ilya existed to retaliate against Shane and the Raiders just got an unfortunately clear photograph of Shane shoving his tongue down Ilya’s throat. Ilya will have Boris with him but he doesn’t know if Ilya lets Boris in the locker room or even has him sitting in with him when he’s with the team—Shane always sent Thompson away, the idea that he needed a bodyguard with them who was intruding in on the team dynamic seemed to upset them and Shane was trying to fix things and so he always had Thompson wait with Ralph in the stands until Thompson and Ralph sat him and J.J. down and told them in no uncertain terms that they didn’t believe that was a safe option anymore.

I think he’s so stressed out that he asks Ilya to let Boris respond if Shane texts him to see if Ilya’s okay. Ilya’s going to be with his team, he can’t reply, and Boris and Thompson are so aggressively dedicated to their individual clients that they will share absolutely no information about them without advance approval. It doesn’t matter who’s asking. They Are Vaults. And yeah, Shane knows these are Ilya’s Boys and he’s fine with them of course he’s fine with them who wouldn’t be fine with their own team. He just wanted to. Check in, he guesses. It’s fine. It’s stupid. He shouldn’t have asked.

Ilya says Shane can text Boris and Boris can reply and starts getting increasingly stressed about whatever the fuck happened with the metros. Fucking J.J. is texting Ilya trying to casually probe into whether Ilya’s going to be physically safe with his own teammates after the photo was released and Ilya was definitely not in the loop on whatever was going on behind the scenes to make both J.J. and Shane act like they were worried Ilya would be jumped at work. Ilya’s biggest problem going into that locker room is having to dodge all the high fives and slaps on his back because the raiders think allyship means saying “hell YEAH brother looks someone got LAID. hope Hollander finally removed that stick from your ass… or… that… that you put one in his…?”

Ilya gets home hours later and Shane’s texted Boris four times to make sure Ilya was still okay and Ilya’s not about to ambush him with questions about what exactly happened to make Shane so nervous because 1) Shane always clammed up when he tried to probe about the metros before and he wants to be careful about how he probes this time and 2) his fucking future mother in law is here to talk about how Ilya fucking her son is once again an international headline. Heyyyy yunaaaaa

They still have like. A moment together at the door. Ilya kisses him like they’ve ever been the kind of couple to kiss at the door when one of them gets home from work and squeezes his hand and tells him “all good” and they leave it all that and Yuna doesn’t even think she was supposed to see it but she does and it makes her feel better about the idea of Ilya Wooing Her Son?

I think she and David like the fact that Ilya never acts like there’s something wrong or inconvenient about Shane—at least where they can see. They’ve raised him with this kind of necessary evil mentality centered around the fact that he had to be clean and perfect and convenient all the time because he had so much attention and pressure on him. He was a Japanese-Canadian boy in an aggressively white space with the entire country breathing down his neck and a lot of people were excited for him to fail. They went to his fucking midget games and watched Real Life Adults shout abuse and slurs at him. They knew he was in a space that was hostile to him. But he loved hockey and it was the only way he could play. They thought they were protecting him by raising him to keep his image clean and himself safe and they didn’t realize that he was maintaining an image with them too until suddenly he was in Russia about to fucking die for the gay love they didn’t know he had.

They’re worried they made Shane feel like he had to hide himself from them. They’re worried they made him think that he was somehow wrong or that they wouldn’t love all of him. And so they like the ways that Ilya emphasizes that he loves every part of Shane, down to the tiny little details.

They really like that Ilya obviously went out of his way to make sure that Shane would be comfortable while staying with him. Like. Shit like buying his favorite drink or soap brand is all relatively minor but they’re all these tiny signs that he doesn’t just expect Shane to just go along with what Ilya already has—he’s trying to make Shane comfortable and they’ve seen so many people over the years not give a single shit about whether Shane was comfortable or okay that even the little things mean a lot. He didn’t get frustrated or act like Shane was being stupid to worry when Shane got stressed even though it turned into nothing, he just reassured him and moved on.

Ultimately, they just want Shane to be happy. And the fact that they can tell that Ilya’s taking a bunch of tiny little steps to try to make him happy puts them at ease.

And honestly the fact that they can kind of tell he’s nervous and trying hard to impress Shane and his parents also helps. Like. It’s not that they want him to be nervous. But the fact that he is nervous means he’s not taking Shane for granted and just assuming he doesn’t need to really try considering Shane’s about as locked down as they come.

Like the Sochi outing au delights me. There’s so much fun in its internet. You get Peter Landry living his goddamn dream as a professional hockey player on a team with Thee Shane Hollander and the two other landry brothers sobbing tears of pride and joy every single game and they are Viral Goddamn Sensations. Their fucking sister is Rose Landry and she has inexplicably decided that she shares a soul with Shane Hollander, who agrees with her about the soul sharing bit. There’s a lesbian on the first line of a top NHL team and she lifts the Stanley cup two years in a row and she’ll lift it AGAIN later because gay people stay winning in this world. The NHL got looney tunes’d into being the most progressive major professional sports league on the goddamn planet and it was through the power of gay love and also fucking Obama.

I feel so bad for Shane and Ilya in this au because their relationship is very much happening at gunpoint but beyond that there is so much genuine joy in their relationship. Like. From an outside perspective looking in, Shane and Ilya are finally a gay love story that didn’t end in tragedy. They loved each other to the point of destruction, but they weren’t destroyed. They were saved and they get to live and love and be together. People love them so much.

I tend to focus on the negative aspects of fame. The parasociality and the discourse and the lack of privacy. But I do think there is a certain beauty in what Shane and Ilya’s relationship means to people in this world.

To so many people, Shane and Ilya’s relationship is proof that queer love does not have to end in tragedy. It can beat the goddamn odds.

The reason why the world becomes so attached to Shane and Ilya in the Sochi outing au is because they are a sincerely beautiful love story. They are two people who never should have fallen in love. They stood to lose everything. But they loved each other anyway, and they tried to save each other anyway, and just this fucking once, love actually won. World fucking powers couldn’t keep them apart.

There is a world of queer people out there who were so fucking scared of their own identities and relationships because they stood to lose their family and friends and jobs and communities because of who they were and who they loved. And Shane and Ilya became this promise that sometimes you beat the odds. Sometimes the entire world comes together to save you. Sometimes you come out the other side okay.

Shane and Ilya give people so much fucking hope in this universe. People think of them and think how impossibly hopeless it all must have seemed to them. When they fell in love, they were 18 years old. They were the two most talked about prospects in the most homophobic sport around. They were on rival teams that absolutely hated each other. The NHL itself was pushing their rivalry. Their professional success was suddenly tied to hating each other and millions of people were invested in it. And Ilya was fucking Putin’s favorite hockey player.

They could never be seen outside together. They thought they’d never be able to get married. They’d never be able to go on dates. They’d never be able to tell their friends or families that they’d fallen in love. They had to pretend to hate each other. They couldn’t even save each other’s contacts under their real names. They were sneaking around hiding in hotel rooms and apartments together because that was the only way they could be together. Their love represented a serious threat to their physical safety but they loved each other too much to let the other go.

Like. If we’re talking about hopeless scenarios, the public thought Hollanov fell in love under the most hopeless circumstances imaginable. When people imagine them, they imagine a star-crossed love for the goddamn ages. They imagine two scared teenagers who fell in love with the wrong person and then spent years stealing whatever moments they could because they had no other options.

And then the worst case scenario happens. They are outed in Russia. They have no hope of making it out of this. Ilya is going to be killed or imprisoned and Shane has no choice but to stand by and watch it happen.

But he doesn’t.

He runs to save him.

He has no hope of saving him.

But he runs anyway.

And it ends with them in front of that car with the entire world watching, with each desperately trying to sacrifice themselves to save the other. They seemed so desperate and afraid and sincere in that moment. Shane was refusing to go to safety if it meant leaving Ilya and Ilya was begging him to please please please leave him behind and in that moment it seemed so, so certain that this story would have a tragic ending.

But it didn’t.

They made it out alive.

They made it out together.

Their love saved them.

People think of Shane and Ilya and think to themselves “if they survived that, then I can survive this.” They are so starving for glimpses of them happy and in love together because it makes them feel like maybe one day that will be them. People are so attached to Shane and Ilya because the idea of what they survived gives people hope that one day, it will be okay for them too. Even when it seems like all hope is lost, sometimes you still get the happy ending. The relationship is so goddamn electric to people.

They don’t go until the 2014-2015 season, but that’s not because of security—the NHL does not hold the all stars game in the years that it has players participating in the Olympics. The all stars game happens as part of the mid-season break. The Olympics replaces that mid-season break. So during the 2013-2014 season, there just isn’t an all stars for Shane and Ilya to attend. They went to the Olympics and had the absolute fucking worst time of their lives.

But they absolutely attend the 2014-2015 All Stars Game. Hollanov + the Ally Squad are the main event.

Ice hockey is one of the relatively less popular candidates of the North American sports. They’re in the top five but like. As number five. For reference, the NFL pulled ~$13 billon in 2014 with teams that operate only in the USA. That same year, the NHL pulled ~$3.7 billion from markets across the USA and Canada. There are specific regions where ice hockey is extremely popular, but overall, the NHL enjoys a relatively smaller audience than the other major North American sports.

But Hollanov + the Ally Squad has the potential to take the NHL global.

For one, the Olympics puts them in front of a massive audience just by merit of it being the goddamn Olympics. In 2014, the real Olympics had an audience of 2.1 billion viewers worldwide. In comparison, the 2014 Stanley cup finals averaged at just shy of 5 million viewers. The NHL simply cannot attract anywhere close to the size of the audience the Olympics sees.

In the Sochi outing au, the audience watching the Olympics is much higher than it was in real life. Because absolutely everyone who is not already watching the Olympics is tuning the fuck in to see what the fuck is up with those two gay hockey players trapped in Russia. In the Sochi outing AU, the Olympics probably cracked over 4 billion viewers.

People who have been following me here for a while know that I am obsessed with Baby Jessica scale events. Baby Jessica scale events are usually rescue operations that for whatever reason capture global attention. It happened when baby Jessica got stuck in a well, it happened when the Titan submersible disappeared, and it happened with the Tham Lung caving rescue. For whatever reason, there are some rescue efforts that the entire world stops and pays attention to. Everyone stops, everyone holds their breath, and for a few days, the entire world hopes that someone will be saved.

The sochi outing au has the potential to be larger than any Baby Jessica scale event we’ve ever seen. Because Sochi presents this perfect storm of factors that would bring this event to an unprecedented level of global notoriety. The audience is already watching. 2 billion eyes are already turned their way before anyone is in danger. And then, suddenly, Shane and Ilya get outed. They play out the opening act of their love story in front of 2 billion eyes. All of those people are going to go and tell their friends, family, coworkers, the random people they meet in bars and on the street. The audience would grow exponentially. And for a few days, the entire world would be thinking about and talking about and getting emotionally attached to Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. 

We like to check back in on our Baby Jessicas. If something happens to them, the world likes to know about it. The real life baby Jessica ended up in the news again recently, years after she had done anything of global importance, because she was arrested. Even though it had been years since her rescue, there was still public interest in what was going on with her life.

Shane and Ilya are famous athletes. The world can follow their lives much easier. If the world wants to see what’s going on with them, they can just watch one of their games.

The NHL is absolutely riding this wave of attention. This is billions of dollars. This is world leaders suddenly caring about the results of their playoffs. The Obamas are suddenly attending the Stanley Cup finals. Lobbyists would kill for that kind of opportunity to rub elbows with world leaders, and suddenly, it’s an opportunity open to anyone who owns an NHL team. This is so much money that not even nuclear waste levels of homophobia can stop the NHL from shipping Hollanov. They just don’t have the option to force Shane and Ilya out. They have an entire world of people who want to see Hollanov + the Ally Squad ride off into the sunset like it’s the end of the goddamn movie. People want to be able to check back in on Shane and Ilya over the years and see them happy and in love and fulfilled and successful. Which means the NHL is looking at an unprecedented global audience every single time one of their teams makes it into the playoffs. The NHL is suddenly brokering broadcasting deals to stream their games into countries that have never once before given a shit about any of their teams. All because the world wants to keep checking back in on Hollanov.

So the NHL is gritting its teeth and shipping fucking Hollanov. If they retaliate against Shane and Ilya, they are looking at investigation from the multiple world leaders who just turned the gears of nations to save those gay boys and also the unbridled ire of a planetful of people who think Shane and Ilya personally invented love. Fujoshis would fly from across the world to pipe bomb the NHL headquarters if the NHL retaliated against Hollanov. On the flip side, if they grit their teeth and make Hollanov + the Ally Squad the stars of every event, then they get billions and billions of dollars from an extremely invested global audience.

The NHL is coordinating with Hollanov + the Ally Squad’s security teams well in advance to make sure the All Stars game is safe enough for them to come. Because they are the ones the world wants to see. The global audience is not tuning in to see some random asshole from the fucking LA Queens who didn’t even compete in the Olympics.

They are tuning in so they can see Shane and Ilya holding hands during a press conference and telling the world how they’re happier and more in love than ever. They’re tuning in so they can see the glimpses of Shane and Ilya chatting with their best buddies J.J., Carter, and Scott, who captured the hearts and minds of the world with their earnest and visibly confused allyship. Like it or not, Shane and Ilya are the All Stars Game now. If they tried to gracefully bow out of the event due to security concerns, they’d find themselves on a group call with their GMs and the NHL commissioner’s office within the hour to find out How We Can Make You Feel Safer, Because We Really Want You Both At The Event :)

If Shane and Ilya are both at an event, that means that the expected audience goes from a few million if they’re lucky to potentially north of a billion. Their jerseys sell out every single time they get papped doing anything more racy than brushing fingertips. They are in a parasocial relationship with the entire planet.

They are the greatest love story of the modern age and people are absolutely obsessed with them for it. Shane and Ilya played out a desperate, passionate story of star-crossed love on the global stage, and the fucking All Stars game is the happily ever after at the end of the book.

In my opinion, navy blue sheets are the official sponsor of fuck boys across America. Every single frat boy goes to college and buys the exact same set of fuckass navy blue sheets. I don’t know why this is. They just do.

Ilya Rozanov canonically owns navy blue sheets and this fact DELIGHTS me

We see his house in one episode and Shane Hollander rides that dick in a bed decked in the coat of arms for fuck boys across America. King did you go sheet shopping with the proud members of fucking sigma alpha chi.

I love it so much. I love that Ilya picked the most fuck boy coded sheets imaginable. I hope his sheets are forever fuckass navy blue.

So the fabulous, incomparable @un-liebling sometimes makes memes for the silly little tales we chat about on here and they proposed via memes that in the Sochi outing au universe Carter Vaughn gets to star in the hockey version of space jam, and then I joked that Shane had been dodging Warner Brothers’ attempts to get him to star in that thing for years (as he is the Michael Jordan of hockey) and so they eventually asked Carter Vaughn who turned out to be the goddamn star and hero the world needed.

And then I joked that everyone figured Shane always said no because he’s too serious and dedicated to hockey to ever act but then the muppets ask him to be the human actor in a muppet movie and Shane immediately said it would be the honor of his goddamn life because it’s the fucking muppets (Shane may or may not have been secretly and extremely emotionally attached to the muppets as a child), inadvertently launching a Warner Brothers/Disney Cold War because Shane Hollander jilted the Looney Tunes but dropped everything the second the muppets blinked his direction.

Which resulted in more memes that I frankly just misread when I first saw them and I thought they were proposing that Shane Hollander starred in The Muppets (2011), originally starring Jason Segel and Amy Adams, and I was like “that would be so goddamn funny because that movie was released pre-Sochi so could you IMAGINE if you turn on your tv one day and have to be like ‘why is Putin trying to kill the guy from the muppets (2011)’ and only then do you find out that starring in the muppets (2011) was just kind of a side quest for him as his true passions are (1) being the greatest hockey player to ever live and (2) sucking off Putin’s favorite hockey player and Putin found out about that second thing and he’s super pissed now so he’s trying to kill the guy from the muppets (2011)”

As it turns out they were NOT proposing that, i had just misread the posts on my first pass, but it still spiraled into a different series of posts where we riffed about a world in which the Sochi outing au still happens but Shane Hollander starred in the goddamn muppet movie pre Sochi (he was trying to get emotional actualization out of it and instead he got this dumb fucking Oscar). Rose Landry was of course his leading lady and they ended up still dating but this was circa 2010 when the muppets (2011) was being filmed and so it was when Ilya was still begging Shane to let him fuck him so now there are a bunch of embarrassing sexts of Ilya begging Shane to let him fuck him pls don’t abandon him for that backwater Michigan bitch and Shane having to reply “please do not sext me when I’m with the muppets.”

And we’re so dedicated to making sure Shane Hollander is always winning on this blog that we gave him a muppet-specific acting career that he achieved unreasonable success with and so he kept winning these dumb fucking acting awards for his acting career which is, again, muppet-specific. Shane does not want any of his acting awards. He is only proud of his hockey awards. His muppet-specific acting career is purely for emotional actualization reasons. Stop giving him these dumb fucking awards he doesn’t know how to act.

This eventually results in him becoming tied with Rose Landry for being the youngest EGOT to ever live (he’s tied with Rose Landry because we are (1) so dedicated to Shandry platonic soulmatism here that we gave them the same birthday and (2) Rose and Shane teamed up to make sure they won their final award for the same project so that they’d achieve EGOT status simultaneously). We are also so dedicated to making sure Rose Landry is always winning on this blog that we gave her an Olympic gold medal in skeet shooting, and so she and Shane are the worlds first EGOOTs (Emmys Grammys Oscars Olympics Tonys). And the muppets are very proud of them for all of this, as Shane and Rose are friends with the muppets after they starred in the muppets (2011) together.

But I cannot emphasize enough that did not actually happen in the Sochi outing au. The Sochi outing au is like a big Olympic sized swimming pool that we are all splashing around in and the au of the Sochi outing au where Shane Hollander starred in the goddamn muppet movie pre Sochi is just like, a little jacuzzi we sometimes vibe in. We all love the muppets here and are somewhat traumatized by them because I went straight from the muppets into the Stepford wife curse au which is an incredibly different energy from the muppets.

In sum: the muppets have no real involvement in the Sochi outing au but we have a different, sillier little sandbox to play in where the events of the Sochi outing au still happened except for the purposes of that world Shane Hollander starred in The Muppets (2011) before he landed himself in international peril as the guy who sucked off Putin’s favorite hockey player

Then for the Stepford wife curse au:

I went straight from riffing about the muppets into the stepford wife curse au which is uh. Incredibly dark. And I got a lot of asks from people who went to sleep to the muppets and woke up to “wouldn’t it be fucked up if the ending of the long game happened because Shane was cursed to be a perfect passive receptacle for everyone else’s desires and be So Happy That His Entire Life Fell Apart :) It’s Happily Ever After :) and the entire time Shane is trapped in his own body suffering while everyone tells him how they like him better like this” that amounted to “where did the muppets go can we please go back to the muppets” (I can’t remember how many I answered tho) and it eventually turned into a minor au of the stepford wife curse au (which. I can’t remember if this au was only ever discussed in the comments of a post or if it got its own post) wherein the muppets are incredibly powerful avatars of magic and Also Shane’s Friends (because he starred in The Muppets (2011)) who free him from his agonizing cursed existence with a gentle embrace from Kermit.

But that’s also not in the actual, main stepford wife curse au. The stepford wife curse au is incredibly fucked up and there shall be no muppet-related relief.