needs more pining

sochi being really the only time it could work tho.. maybe a few years later when shanes slightly more experienced (if we go with book canon), an au ilya rejects shane in 2017 and sasha/shane meet at a contrived brand party or modeling gig in Paris. [more plot contrivance sveta at this point has gotten sick of ilya's depressed ass in a hell of his own making and has been complaining to sasha about ilya's 'jane' in a very unsubtle manner so sasha sends a lil flirty text to ilya all 'guess who i hooked up with last night' to piss him off]

alskskjd ok let's try to make this work

in 2017 grigori dies earlier & ilya skips all-stars to go to russia & is absolutely fucking miserable, which is exactly the wrong time for shane to text, tentative and soft, hey, i heard, are you okay. ILYA STILL THINKS SHANE IS DATING ROSE LANDRY. ilya texts back sorry, i cannot do this staring sightlessly into a city he's never going to fucking escape. he buries his father. he blocks hollander's number.

shane leaves a voicemail. he leaves another voicemail. he gets very drunk and calls rose and spills out the stupid scraps of a story. says, "i think i love him and he doesn't want me." "oh, babe," rose says, "you deserve better."

i think we also have to move up shane's concussion? it's before the next boston game, it takes shane out for the season. ilya unblocks shane's number to draft one million texts but his eyes keep drifting up to the last thing they said to each other. hey, are you okay. it's better this way, he tells himself. a clean break.

so the metros don't make the playoffs and shane's at his parents' staring at the truth of i'm gay and i'm in love with rozanov, and he can't stop being the first but surely he can get over the second. he hasn't tried. he hasn't tried because he hadn't known.

the men like... scott doesn't really care about either shane or ilya lol. no other main male character has a relationship to both boys. maybe in unrivaled there will be some good crumbs to work off of... (i know shane/ilya/luca has some shooters but luca's a child to me and not in a sexy rookie/captain way lol.)

YEAH EXACTLY. like if shane weren't kinsey 6 the svetlana/shane could genuinely hit so hard but as it is it just gets too miserable.

i do think sasha has sort of the most potential here. a while back hockeyfinches & i were kicking around a concept where sasha's loitering around the olympic village in sochi & finds shane still smarting from "no i did not answer your boring texts" & well. sasha's never seen a wound he didn't want to dig a claw into. the shane side is obviously harder to make work but like there's something:

sasha: you play hockey? mm, i know hockey. or at least hockey players. [pause] my father, he trains the best of the best. not that it helped ilyusha this year.

shane [sharply]: your father was ilya rozanov's coach?

imagine ilya breaking records at 11, thinking the mhl is a possibility, really getting known in moscow so young that even the minister of sport (svetlana's dad!) reached out, he just had to keep it up a few years and he could bring his mom over to north america when he got drafted...

HEY WHY WOULD YOU SAY THIS

ok here's what i'm imagining:

------

alexei waits for him after the game, even though ilya knows the way home. ilya's hair is still wet and curling onto his forehead, so he shoves his hat in his pocket along with his hands. alexei's quiet, which suits ilya fine; when he blinks there's still motion burned into his eyelids, lanes closing and opening up, the straight shot into the net.

"you broke the record," alexei says after a while. "bure's. most goals in a season."

ilya's known for a month he was going to do it. his coach had squeezed his shoulder when he got back on the bench, nearly too hard. "so?"

alexei kicks a rock down the road. his fingers are twitching in his pockets; maybe he's stolen one of mama's cigarettes again.

"they said you could be the next larionov," alexei says. "can you believe that?"

"who said that?"

"some old guys at the game. how the fuck should i know?"

there are more old guys watching ilya every time he plays. "i don't want to be the next larionov," ilya says. "who cares? i'm gonna be the first me."

alexei scoffs. "you think you're better?"

"why not? i beat bure."

"what about fedorov?"

this gives ilya pause. "i don't know," he says cautiously. "i'm going to try, anyway."

"that's ridiculous," alexei says, which ilya doesn't bother responding to, so there's just wind and quiet for a while.

describe environment only when the pov character has an emotion that is reflected by it. don't describe the emotion itself.

try not to describe thoughts or feelings. if you must, come at them sideways. leave them incomplete as much as possible.

scaffold scenes around dialogue & actions. if a character is not talking or acting, move toward the next time they can be doing one of those things as fast as possible.

in cmd news i need him to suffer under his new coach, that is all i can say

at what age do they start saying, there's this kid in russia who's fucking good. gets under your skin, plays hard, the softest hands you've ever seen. could be a match for hollander. could be better.

at what age does shane start looking at videos of ilya rozanov tearing up russian juniors. it's just tape. it's blurry and pixelated and shane keeps his eyes on 81, marks when he slams a boy straight into the boards and then skates off with the puck, watches the buttery smooth deke around the d, backhand snipe, top shelf, fist up in a celly. you're an awesome player to watch. it's the most beautiful thing he's seen.