#hidden psa

Properly Sourced

AAB38

Summary:

Married and home after The Long Game, Ilya melts down Shane, comforts him, then offers a locally sourced replacement. Comedy, filth, and finding comfort with their person follows

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

Past midnight, and Ilya Rozanov was grieving at the kitchen island.

Shane came down to find him hunched over his phone, the jar of Nutella open in front of him with a spoon abandoned in it, the screen lighting his face from underneath so the misery had weight.

“You coming up?”

“In a minute.” Ilya did not look up. “Shane. Do you know what is in this?”

“Bad choices in a bottle, a leg up to being pre-diabetic. The tears of your enemies.” Shane stayed in the doorway in Ilya’s old shirt and waited to find out what they were grieving tonight.

“Palm oil.” It was, apparently, a tragedy. “Almost the first ingredient. They burn the rainforest to plant it, and the orangutan loses his whole house, his whole forest, his whole everything, and here I am at a sink at two in the morning eating it out of the jar like an animal, an animal who still has somewhere to live.”

“That’s a strong open. What’s the second act.”

“It is not okay, and that is the good part. The hazelnuts are the bad part.” He turned the phone face down as if it had said something unforgivable, stood, and started to pace, the spoon brandished at no one. “Turkey grows almost all of them. The whole planet’s hazelnuts, off hills so steep a goat would file a complaint, every one picked by hand, and there are reports, Shane. Reports of children in the fields. Ten years old, doing grown mens entire season for almost nothing, so that I can have a nice feeling with toast. And the company that makes this exact jar buys more hazelnuts than anyone alive on the earth. They could fix it tomorrow. They have the money to simply fix it.” He stopped pacing, and all the theatre went out of him at once. “Some kid’s whole summer. For my breakfast. And in thirty years I never once thought about him.” He looked at the jar like it had been writing him letters the whole time. “I loved this more than I have loved most people.”

He ran out of sentence and stood there holding nothing.

Shane felt his own chest go tight and decided not to look at why. He was not bothered that his husband could open up like a window for a chocolate spread and stay shut as a vault for everything else. That would be a deranged thing to be bothered by. He crossed the kitchen, took the spoon out of Ilya’s hand, and set it down a little harder than he meant to.

“Hey. Look at me.” Ilya looked. “You’re standing in our kitchen at midnight wrecked about kids you’ll never meet and animals you’ll never see. That is not a rotten man. That’s the best person I know having a hard feeling at a bad hour.”

“Why do I feel like this,” Ilya said, quieter, “over chocolate.”

He did not know the answer. Shane did not know it either, but he recognized the question, because eleven years had taught him which nights wanted the chirp and which wanted the hand. This one wanted the hand. He gave it a minute. He was good at the minute, the one part of feelings he had ever had a talent for, and he was not about to waste it.

“Because it was never about the chocolate and because that made it get big,” Shane said. “It does that to you. I know and you know I’m here for the big version. I signed up for the whole thing.” He waited until he watched Ilya surface, until the worst of it slid back under the waterline. Then, because the man could not be left alone in a feeling for long or he would start spiraling again, this time in Russian, Shane let his mouth tilt. “Right. Front office is handling this from here.”

“Front office.”

“You’re a free agent as of tonight. The jar’s been informed.” He set a hand on the counter to either side of Ilya, fencing him in, all business. “Here’s the structure. We waive the incumbent. Bad locker room presence, off-ice issues, the orangutan thing. We move on a replacement with no palm oil, no deforestation, no children at any point in the supply chain. Locally made. Single supplier.” His mouth found the edge of Ilya’s jaw. “Hands on. Term and dollars to be discussed. And I’ll tell you up front, going off the tape, you will not find better numbers on the open market.”

“You are scouting yourself.”

“I’m a generational talent. You’ve been settling for a spread.” He caught Ilya’s bottom lip between his teeth, slow, and felt the whole of him answer. “Eleven years and you still taste like sugar. The cap hit alone is embarrassing.”

“Big words for a man in my shirt.”

“It’s mine now. Acquired it in the deal.”

Ilya got two fists in the shirt and pulled, and Shane went, the way he always went, a thing about their marriage they had never once held up to the light. The jar tipped off the counter and rolled across the floor. Neither of them looked at it.

It did not stay polite. Ilya hauled him up onto the island and shoved the shirt up and off, mouth open and hot on his throat, his chest, lower, and Shane let his head fall back and let him have it, which he did for no one else on earth. He let him until Ilya got smug. Then he hooked a heel behind his husband’s knee, flipped the whole thing, pinned both of Ilya’s hands flat to the cold granite, and grinned down at him.

“Still better than you.”

“You are dreaming.” Ilya’s voice had dropped to a wreck, his hips lifting. “Let go and prove it.”

“This is the physical. Standard before any signing.” And he proved it, taking his time, because the only thing sweeter than beating Ilya Rozanov was making him beg for it, working down the length of him with his mouth while Ilya swore at the ceiling in two languages and fisted one hand in his hair, not pushing, just holding on like the floor had tipped. When Shane took him in properly the sound Ilya made was not a word in either of his languages. His hips chased up; Shane pinned them with a forearm and made him take it slow, watching the whole time so he would not miss a second of it.

“You are enjoying this far too much,” Ilya gasped.

“It’s a thorough medical.” Shane lifted off just long enough to say it, and went back down.

They got upstairs eventually. Not gracefully. There was a wall. There was a doorframe his back would not forgive by morning. There was Ilya finally working his hands free and getting Shane under him on the bed and taking him apart, slow and filthy and sure, one palm splayed flat over Shane’s heart the whole time like he was keeping count of it, driving them both up to the edge and holding them there, generous and merciless at once. They did not say the true thing. They said the only honest words they had, harder and there and still you, after all of it, and let the sentences fall apart.

Somewhere in it Ilya stopped, looked down at him, flushed and bright and altogether gone, and said, “You. You are my.” One ear went red, a tell he had never managed to train out of himself, and then he grinned, the grin only he could do, half asshole and half imp and somehow all charm. “My Nut-ella fella.”

Shane stared up at him, breathless and betrayed and ruinously in love. “Say it again and I trade you.”

“No-trade clause.” Ilya kissed him slow. “You signed it in a church.”

A long time after, sprawled and grinning at the dark, Ilya sighed the sigh of a redeemed man.

“You know what is best.”

“Terrified.”

“No guilt after.” He rolled in close, smug, throwing an arm across Shane’s chest. “The only post-nut in the world with a clean conscience. Empty jar.”

“Eleven years,” Shane said, “ fucking the only man on the planet who can turn an orgasm into a press conference about hazelnuts.”

Ilya opened his mouth and, for once, found nothing to put in it. Shane pocketed the silence with the rest of the small wins he was not allowed to gloat about.

Then Ilya turned his face into Shane’s neck, going heavy and slow. “In the morning I write them the email. Cc the orangutan. Bcc the children. Very professional.” A pause, most of the way to sleep, every guard down. “I do not want to want anything that is not.”

He stopped.

Shane held very still.

“That is not properly sourced,” Ilya finished, four seconds too late, and pretended to be asleep.

The true thing sat there between them, the size of a country, and Shane did not say it. He never did. He pulled the heavy arm a little closer, holding it down and not holding on, and lay there listening to his husband breathe.

“Goodnight, Ilya,” he told the ceiling. “You asshole. Crying about apes and then ruining the good counter.”

No answer. Ilya was already gone, dead weight and furnace-warm, out cold the second he decided he was safe.

Somewhere downstairs the jar lay on the floor where it had rolled, waiting to be a problem in the morning. It could wait. Shane closed his eyes and let himself, just this once, stop keeping score.

Notes:

Author’s note

A note, since this started as a joke and the joke is half true.

Two real things live in that jar. The orangutan part (palm oil) is, awkwardly for Ilya, the bit Ferrero actually does well now: certified, satellite-watched, the works. The hazelnuts are the thornier one. Turkey grows most of the world’s supply, Ferrero buys more than anyone, and the harvest has a long-documented child-labour problem that still isn’t fixed. Everyone working in the fields says the same thing: pay a fair price and the kids go back to school. Ferrero’s on it, says the press release.

No verdicts here, just a nudge. If a jar of chocolate can wreck a grown man at midnight, it can probably get the rest of us to read a label.