“is there anything so undoing as a daughter”

June 2015

Shane returns to Montreal in a fugue state, his head a jumbled mess.

He turns off his phone as soon as he gets to the apartment (messages unchecked) and hops in the shower, determined to wash Vegas off of his skin. As he scrubs he practices his breathing techniques, trying and failing to center himself.

Ilya's words won't leave his mind, playing on an endless, echoing loop. It almost feels like a cruel trick Shane's brain is playing on itself, like it couldn't possibly be real.

Ilya couldn't really want him. Certainly not enough to sound as devastated as he did when Shane asked him to leave. That couldn't possibly be how it happened.

Except it is, and now Shane has to decide what to do about it.

If he hasn't already fucked everything up.

He sits down on the living room couch once he's done showering, clean sweats on, and thinks Okay. What's the play here?

Ilya likes him and wants to be with him. It sounds impossible but Shane has to believe it, because it's what Ilya told him straight out. Maybe he'll change his mind - maybe he already has - but for now Shane has to operate like it's true.

Ilya thinks Brian is bad for him. He thinks he makes Shane unhappy and Shane, reflecting on it for more than five seconds in the privacy of his own mind, can admit that he kind of has a point.

Things haven't been good with Brian for... a while. Shane tries to remember the last time he felt uncomplicatedly happy to see or hear from his boyfriend, and finds that he can't. Vegas wasn't anything unique but rather an escalation, the latest iteration of Brian ignoring Shane telling him what he wants and deciding he knows better.

He's always done that, hasn't he?

He also couldn't even be fucking bothered to congratulate Shane on winning MVP. A moment that he ruined with his shitty, attention-seeking behavior.

Shane pauses that train of thought, allowing the anger rising in his chest to ebb and flow away.

Maybe, he thinks charitably, this was all because Brian was feeling threatened. Clearly he had reason to be, even if Shane hadn't realized up until now. It's not just that Ilya likes Shane and wants to be with him, but Shane....

Shane wants...

He wants.

It's choking him, this want. Expanding in his chest, cracking his rib cage open, overwhelming and overflowing. It's as if simply acknowledging it has made it grow tenfold in size. How could this feeling exist inside him without him knowing?

Absurdly, Shane finds he's on the verge of tears. He blinks them away, embarrassed despite the lack of an audience.

He suddenly wishes he was still in Vegas, that he could run and find Ilya. Could tell him that he feels the same way, that he wants more, and then -

Well. Shane should probably break up with his boyfriend before he gets to the next part.

The thought sends a nauseating thrill down his spine.

He can't really be thinking about leaving Brian for another man, can he? Throwing away everything they've had in the past eight years, everything Shane has known since he was sixteen. He isn't even sure who he is without Brian.

But it's Ilya.

Shane picks up his phone. Swipes away the unread messages, heart hammering as he thumbs open his thread with Brian.

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

Edit: Yes, this also works on mobile!

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.

YOURE SO RIGHT THOUGH

In the books, when they’re talking about Ilya switching to a Canadian team, Ilya proposes leaving Boston for a Canadian team himself. It is brought up explicitly because America is bad for Russians at the moment, and he wants non-Russian citizenship. And during the conversation, Ilya has this moment where he can tell Shane wants him to come to Montreal, but Ilya doesn’t want to because Montreal could never afford both of them. Ilya says “Not Montreal,” and Shane immediately understands. He proposes Ottawa as an alternative because it needs a star center and has the cap space for Ilya.

And, critically, I cannot find a single mention of the fact that Ottawa is a bad team in Heated Rivalry itself.

Like. Please correct me if I’m wrong. I can’t remember any mention of the fact that Ottawa is terrible. I pulled up the pdf of the book and searched couldn’t find a single mention of the word “Centaurs” in it. I searched every mention of the word “Ottawa” and couldn’t find a single mention discussing how Ottawa was a bad team. The closest we get is Shane saying that they need a star center, but still needing a star for one position is a very different thing than it being the shittiest team in the whole league. And you’d think that Ilya would maybe bring up the fact that that team is absolute ass and would destroy his career if he went there if that was a legitimate concern. The Long Game rewrites its own canon to victimize Ilya and make Shane the villain in the Ottawa move. Its claims are fundamentally and irrevocably inconsistent with the explicit text of Heated Rivalry.

The entire dialogue around Shane being selfish in the Ottawa move drives me absolutely raving insane because it is fundamentally based in revisionist history. Shane is at no point in the conversation a driving factor in Ilya’s decision to leave Boston. Ilya decides he wants to be on a Canadian team before he even talks to Shane. The fact that he wants to come to Canada specifically is because of Russia, not Shane. And picking Ottawa is for the sake of Ilya’s career.

Signing with Montreal is outright considered and rejected by Ilya so he doesn’t have to take a pay cut. The explicit reason why he doesn’t want to sign with Montreal is the fact that Montreal cannot afford both of them. And that decision is later recast entirely into Ilya picking Shane over hockey. If Ilya wanted to pick Shane, he would have just taken the pay cut in heated rivalry and they would have been playing on the same team since fucking 2018–and it would have been on a team that Ilya himself describes as “the most legendary team in the entire league.” He would have had a great team and been tearing it up winning Stanley Cups but he didn’t want to take the pay cut or hit to his captaincy and his position and Shane fucking understood that and found him an alternative that wouldn’t require him to sacrifice his own position.

They explicitly pick Ottawa so that Ilya’s career doesn’t have to suffer and then the Long Game revises the entire narrative to turn it into how Ilya sacrificed his career for Shane. It is absolutely nonsensical when read in light of their conversation around the move itself. They outright reject playing on the same team so Ilya doesn’t have to sacrifice his own career.

And then!! All of the reasons why Ilya shouldn’t have to sign with Montreal suddenly do not matter at all when it’s Shane who has to suffer them. Shane has to take a pay cut? Laugh it off. Hubby will provide. He loses his entire career as narrative punishment for “making” Ilya sacrifice his career, but signing with Ottawa was explicitly so that Ilya wouldn’t have to sacrifice his career. Ilya actually does what Shane is accused of and villainized for in The Long Game, and Shane never did it to begin with. I feel like I’m being gaslit by an entire fucking fandom. Can anyone hear me hello