#irina rozanova

David who's assigned to go on a trip to Russia after Hollanov's been outed, because he's been picking up Russian and it would be a good temperature read on the Russian counterparts.

David who visits Irina's grave and spends time cleaning it up, lights a candle and sits until long after it's burned out.

David who tells Irina about Shane as a child, who tells her about all the ways Shane and Ilya fit together, who tells her about the puzzle nights and the cookies and cream ice cream and the blanket they keep specifically for Ilya on their couch.

David who reassures Irina that he helped Ilya with his cuff links on his wedding day, tells her not to worry about her boy.

David who tells Irina that her son is so loved and cherished.

David who plants a little maple tree as a "sign of friendship" in a park across from the cemetery Irina is buried in. He got to pick the place, and he made sure she would be able to see it.

Edit may 3: Hey if you're here from threads :) Love getting jump-scared with my own tumblr post getting screenshotted (this is fine i promise, they credited me properly) but jfc. Right in front of my salad???

shane kills the bugs in their house without thinking. he doesn’t even hesitate. just a folded paper towel, quick and clean. ilya, who flinches at the sound of loons on the lake, watches from a safe distance, faintly horrified. he has never been an exterminator. he has never needed to be.

ilya offers to hire someone to change a lightbulb. to replace a lock. to fix something small and ordinary. shane just blinks at him, slow and confused, because it costs ten dollars at home depot and then you do it yourself, ilya... that’s the whole point. that’s how it’s always been done.

but ilya knows how to endear himself to the local bakery. he leans on the counter, soft voice, easy smile, and every time they leave there is something extra tucked into the brown paper bag. being a millionaire means nothing here. every grandmother pinches his cheek anyway. every owner insists he take more.

he doesn’t need google maps when they drive through the city. he knows instinctively how streets bend, how neighborhoods breathe. he has every app for taxis, deliveries, reservations, tailoring. he knows how to argue, too -- sharp and precise -- when someone tries to take advantage of shane. no, you are not ripping off my husband. no, you will not get away with it (shane's no idiot, but yuna famously handles all his business, simply taking his interests in mind).

(by the same vein) shane, who barely knows how to negotiate a contract because someone else always did it for him (yuna, an agent, etc), knows the sky instead. he knows the constellations. he learned them standing beside his father, neck bent back, the dark stretching endless above them. (he was a boy scout for exactly 1 year before quitting bc it cut into hockey time). sometimes they lie on the patio furniture now, deep in thought, and shane points them out one by one, voice soft with certainty, and ilya listens like he’s being told a story (it reminds him, at first with a shock, of his mother, of bedtime folk stories told once by the first russian mother to the first russian child. of cannabilism and children being stolen by devils in the middle of the night, but it was still funny & sweet anyway, bc irina swore to always protect him before tucking his little toes in)

ilya fills their kitchen with beautiful, lavish, complicated things. heavy clay pots. expensive japanese knives. a coffee machine that hisses and gleams like something alive. the tv room with state of the art speakers & a remote system that takes shane 3 days to figure out how to use. shane brings the deck pillows inside before the first snowfall. he checks the seals on the windows. he knows which mornings the frost will come early.

they are both, in quiet ways, teaching each other how to live.

(and, more quietly still, carrying small, invisible pieces across that shared space between them. ilya learns to rotate his own tires. shane cooks his first stir fry. and what a beautiful thing that is -- for someone to look inside you and, somewhere in the shape of who you’ve become, recognize the person you love most).

it is strange, sometimes, to see the ghosts of who they were before this. the boy in the woods & the boy in the city. all those instincts, all those small private competencies, surviving into this shared space

I feel like everyone makes her out to be this perfect angel bathed in golden light who never said one bad thing about anyone and who wouldn’t hurt a fly

But the first thing Ilya said about his mum was that she was funny

Irina Rozanova was a funny gal, she cracked jokes, she was quick witted and let’s not forget she raised Ilya little shit supreme Rozanov

it doesn't count as crying if you don't let the tears fall~

They hear the press conference, Ilya talking about his mother’s death, and there are sirens going off in everybody’s heads about how in the world Ilya was ever vulnerable enough to tell Shane about his mom when most people he’s known for nearly a decade probably didn’t even know Irina was dead. Cliff is screaming crying throwing up because he had no idea, Svetlana is staring in shock at her screen because at least she had an inkling about Shane but not to this extent, and the rest of his Bears/Centaurs teammates are going “did you know???” in all the chats without him in them. Bood is ready to call Hollander up and beg for advice on how to get this crazy Russian man to open up to their team.

And on Shane’s side of things, his people have zero concept of how Shane makes friends because Hayden and Jackie claimed him from pretty much the moment they respectively met him, Rose best friend-zoned him, and J.J. is basically the final girl extrovert to end all extroverts. But Shane didn’t start off hating any of them like they think he hated Rozanov, and he’s also never had a vulnerable conversation with any of them that didn’t need to be clawed out (gently) from inside him.

Ilya and his Mommas 💙💜