of course!

also, general PSA to all HR fic writers, if i could gently suggest that you take some time to really listen to ilya's dialogue from the show. It still kills me every time when we have show!ilya saying stuff like "i have always wondered what it would be like to be a metro" (present perfect+adverb construction, relative pronoun, second conditional construction) we still get fic!ilyas left and right barely conjugating verbs even after years in the US. With full appreciation that this shit is not easy and parsing grammar is not a thing most native english speakers have been taught, you really can get a decent sense of ilya's abilities just by listening carefully to what he says.

June 2010. Ilya Rozanov is delayed after the CCM shoot. By the time he gets to the locker room, Shane Hollander is out of the showers and Ilya’s entire plan is ruined. Only not quite fully ruined. Hollander invites him to dinner with his parents as a thank you for arranging the shoot and Ilya, in a burst of insanity, agrees. He hits it off with Yuna and David. They all exchange numbers. He and Hollander become friends. At no point does Ilya stop wanting more from him.

June 2016. Ilya Rozanov is a superstar. A Cup winner. An MVP. Women want him, men want to be him. He’s fucking miserable. He’s in love with his best friend. He can’t deny it anymore. Only now Shane is dating a movie star and happier than Ilya’s ever seen him. Ilya can’t ruin that for him, can’t ruin their friendship by asking for what he knows Shane can’t give. No matter how much it kills him.

A charity event in San Francisco. A catastrophic computer failure. A fateful decision to drive, not fly. Two days in a car, just the two of them. Alone. Together. Ilya’s sick with excitement and with dread, because how can he keep his secrets with Shane so close for so long?

What he doesn’t know is that Shane has secrets too.

4 chapters, 34k words, rated E for the final chapter

LINK

June 2016, Palm Springs 

Ilya wakes up in the particular silence of just-before-dawn. It takes him a bit of time to realise why. 

He’s in Palm Springs, he recalls. In a nice hotel there. In bed. With Shane. 

Shane, who fell asleep on his shoulder, tucked into his side. Who is now almost fully on top of him, soft lips on his collarbone, one thickly muscled thigh between Ilya’s legs.  

Ilya is hard in an instant. He was hard already but the full understanding of what is actually happening here sends every millilitre of blood his body doesn’t immediately require to keep him alive, straight to his dick. It makes him dizzy and weak, so weak he tightens the arm that’s slung around Shane’s waist and pulls him closer, lets his eyes fall shut, breathes in the scent of Shane’s hair and his skin then presses his lips to that hair, just for the space of a heartbeat. 

Then he gets a fucking grip on himself. He’s got to detangle them, now, before Shane wakes up. Above all else, Shane cannot ever know the way he cuddled Ilya when he was wine-drunk. He’d be so embarrassed and guilty he’d probably  get on the phone to tell Rose fucking Landry immediately, and then where would they be? Someplace Ilya decidedly does not want to go. 

Slowly, carefully, he lifts his arm and starts to ease out from beneath Shane’s body. He achieves possibly ten millimetres or so of movement before Shane shifts, makes a small sound of protest, and snuggles closer. His hold on Ilya tightens. 

And then—fuck—his eyes flutter open. 

He blinks sleepily. “Wha—” he begins, and Ilya scrambles to come up with something, anything to say to defuse this situation, to brush it off with a joke or a chirp. He cannot. He speaks two languages fluently and both of them fail him. 

He watches helplessly as Shane blinks again and the grogginess vanishes from his eyes. Watches as he realises, as Ilya did, what is happening here. Where he is and who he’s with and what they are doing together. Waits, for the rejection. For Shane to push him away and say what the fuck, Rozanov? What do you think you’re doing? I have a girlfriend/fiancée/whatever the fuck. Someone in my life I want. I don’t want you. 

But Shane does none of those things. He just looks at Ilya with those devastating eyes, a faint flush beneath the freckles on his cheeks. He licks his lips and Ilya swallows a moan as his dick leaps up, trying to reach Shane at any cost. 

Shane feels it. There’s no way he can’t with the way they’re pressed together, but the leap makes him realise. Ilya can see in his eyes that moment of realisation. 

Those eyes go wide and Shane shifts again, pressing his thigh harder against Ilya’s poor, suffering cock. His eyes search Ilya’s face. “Ilya?” he says. “Are you—?” 

I’m sorry, Ilya wants to say. I’m sorry I’m so fucking sorry I tried to keep this from you but my body just won’t obey when you’re near it won’t happen again I promise please don’t hate me please don’t go don’t leave—

“I—” he croaks, but he gets no further than that single, ragged syllable because Shane kisses him. 

For a brief, shocked beat, Ilya freezes. Then his mind goes white. 

He rolls Shane over onto the bed and kisses him back. Kisses him with fierce intensity and a desperation he can barely control. All his years of loving and longing and holding back, beating himself up because he wants Shane so deeply and he can’t fucking stop—all of it distils into this single, fiery moment of Shane’s lips on his.  

And the miracle of it, the absolute transcendent fucking glory of it is that Shane is kissing him too. In exactly the same way. 

Ilya devours him with his lips and his tongue, nips his lower lip and swallows his moan. Shane’s dick is hard, flush against Ilya’s own, Shane’s fingers are fisted in Ilya’s hair. 

“Shane,” Ilya gasps, then kisses him again. “Shane, what the fuck?” 

Shane laughs, a choked, manic sound. “I was going to ask you that.” 

Ilya kisses him some more before he can, deep kisses edging into filthy. Shane arches into him, moans when Ilya’s lips move to his neck. 

“Fuck,” he gasps, “I can’t think.” 

Ilya can’t either but there’s nothing to think about here, surely. Surely there’s nothing they need to think of or talk about or—

a commenter asked me when i thought shane and ilya fell in love in the world of there is no heart for me like yours; in response i unleashed the following wall of text. Why am i posting it here? why not.

when did they fall in love? is a really great question!

so i don't believe in love at first sight. i believe in attraction at first sight and maybe more importantly in recognition at first sight. i do think it's possible to meet someone and know right away that they could be your person. The potential is there. This for real happened to me, i knew within 24 hours of meeting my husband that he could be the one. But that is just potential.

when emily said that marriage isn't work but it is effort, that was my opinion, word for word. Relationships shouldn't feel like work but they do take effort. It also takes effort to get into a relationship in the first place. The potential isn't enough, you have to actively decide you want to pursue the potential. Also, a lot of things have to fall into place. You can feel potential with someone then have it not work out, because your lives don't align in some way or because you aren't quite ready. Right person wrong time, as they say.

since this fic diverges from after their first meeting, basically we've established the potential and the spark of attraction they felt in the hotel gym. From there, they choose to build a relationship far earlier than in canon and even though that relationship isn't supposed to be "real" the fact of its existence forces them to choose each other repeatedly, which is ultimately what brings them closer sooner than in canon.

which is a lot of words to still not answer the question of when they fell in love. i don't think it was on their wedding night. As the author maybe i should say that it definitely wasn't then, i deliberately wrote it not to be then, but i do respect differences of opinion and different interpretations so i'm not going to tell you what to think. Their wedding night shows that they have strong compatibility, both sexually and just hanging out together. The fact that they spent so much time together and did so harmoniously and had a lot of sex but not only sex is very important, but at that point they still barely knew each other.

my intent was for it to be clear that ilya was in love by the end of their first summer. His crisis of standing up to his father and choosing shane over him, choosing canada over russia made their marriage real to him in a way it hadn't quite been up to that point. Spending the summer with shane and just getting to be with him, learning to live together, that's what made it More for ilya. When he calls svetlana to say his secret is too much for him, the secret has grown too big because he loves shane and is struggling to hide it. He still manages to hide it from himself, of course, but he wouldn't be ilya if he didn't.

shane is a little harder to pin down. He is a Committer, in that once he chooses a path he gives it everything he has. He was all-in on the Agreement from day one, so much so that he couldn't allow himself to deviate from it, even when he began to develop feelings for ilya. Because the feelings weren't part of the Agreement, shane basically dismissed them as irrelevant. Shane buying coffeemakers for ilya, designing the cottage to include things he likes, those acts aren't because he's in love as such, they're because he is Committed. At some point that commitment becomes something he's devoted to not for the Agreement but because he wants ilya to be happy. When exactly does that happen is a very good question.

shane is definitely in love by the time of ilya's citizenship ceremony, fully in love to the point he could be aware of it if he allowed himself to think that way. i'd say he was falling slowly for a long time and probably landed somewhere just before sochi, or maybe the summer of their third anniversary. Somewhere in between those points. It's not for nothing that shane gets the elizabeth bennet "the hour the spot the look the words" quote, it genuinely is very difficult to say precisely when he fell in love.

so, tl;dr: ilya falls hard after their first summer, shane drifts down slowly and lands somewhere around their third.

June 2010. Ilya Rozanov is delayed after the CCM shoot. By the time he gets to the locker room, Shane Hollander is out of the showers and Ilya’s entire plan is ruined. Only not quite fully ruined. Hollander invites him to dinner with his parents as a thank you for arranging the shoot and Ilya, in a burst of insanity, agrees. He hits it off with Yuna and David. They all exchange numbers. He and Hollander become friends. At no point does Ilya stop wanting more from him.

June 2016. Ilya Rozanov is a superstar. A Cup winner. An MVP. Women want him, men want to be him. He’s fucking miserable. He’s in love with his best friend. He can’t deny it anymore. Only now Shane is dating a movie star and happier than Ilya’s ever seen him. Ilya can’t ruin that for him, can’t ruin their friendship by asking for what he knows Shane can’t give. No matter how much it kills him.

A charity event in San Francisco. A catastrophic computer failure. A fateful decision to drive, not fly. Two days in a car, just the two of them. Alone. Together. Ilya’s sick with excitement and with dread, because how can he keep his secrets with Shane so close for so long?

What he doesn’t know is that Shane has secrets too.

LINK

Hannah tucks her pad back into her apron pocket then hesitates. The intent look is back on her face. She glances over at the middle-aged couple across the room, who are still talking quietly together. Then she sits in the chair opposite Ilya. 

“Tell him,” she says, in a voice that matches the look on her face. “I know it’s none of my business—” 

“You are right about that,” Ilya retorts.  

“But you should tell him.” 

Ilya doesn’t bother to play dumb. He knows his feelings for Shane must be written all over his face, plain to see for anyone who knows how to look. “I can’t,” he says. “He has a girlfriend.” 

“Does he?” 

“Yes. Hot one. Perfect for him. Makes him happy.” He takes a gulp of coffee. “I think they might be engaged.” 

“Well, if that’s the case then you’ve really got to tell him. That boy cannot marry a woman. It’d be a huge mistake.” 

“Maybe,” Ilya says. 

Hannah eyes him shrewdly. “I’m bisexual myself,” she tells him, “I get it. But if he”—she gestures out at the beach where Shane presumably is—“is not fully gay then I will give up sex entirely. And I really like sex.” 

Ilya shrugs. “Maybe,” he says again. 

There was a time when he'd believed the same. That Shane was, if not gay per se at least into men enough that he’d entertain something with Ilya. But in those first few encounters of theirs, Ilya had not been subtle. Short of actually stripping down and jerking off right at him there’s not much more he thinks he could have done to let Shane know that he was interested. If Shane likes men then that means it’s Ilya he doesn’t want and Ilya gets that, he does. He just can’t face it. It hurts too much. 

Hannah sighs. “It’s scary,” she says. “Feelings suck. I still think you should tell him.” 

“Maybe,” Ilya says, for the third time. 

the wonderful and talented @kowabungadoodles designed these jerseys for the owls and i am blown away. The heart-shaped owl logo! 😭

perfection.

(there is more owls lore on the way it is all in my head. It just needs to go on the page) (thank you to everyone who loves this fic and this team. i love you.)

I am fucking SPEECHLESS

This has been better than most books I’ve read

This work has checked all my boxes: timeline fix, friends from the start and confident Shane

The writing is phenomenal. The characters, emotions, dialogue, storyline - all ✨chef’s kiss✨

I laughed, cried, snorted, giggled, got nervous when Ilya went to Russia for Olympics and had to put my iPad down and walk around for a bit before I could come back to it. I never quite knew where the story was gonna go and this did NOT disappoint!!!

You need more than kudos

😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍

i have taken too long to reply to this, i’m sorry. i had to sit with it for a little while. Thank you ❤️. i am so so glad you enjoyed it so much that makes me insanely happy to hear.

June 2010. Ilya Rozanov is delayed after the CCM shoot. By the time he gets to the locker room, Shane Hollander is out of the showers and Ilya’s entire plan is ruined. Only not quite fully ruined. Hollander invites him to dinner with his parents as a thank you for arranging the shoot and Ilya, in a burst of insanity, agrees. He hits it off with Yuna and David. They all exchange numbers. He and Hollander become friends. At no point does Ilya stop wanting more from him.

June 2016. Ilya Rozanov is a superstar. A Cup winner. An MVP. Women want him, men want to be him. He’s fucking miserable. He’s in love with his best friend. He can’t deny it anymore. Only now Shane is dating a movie star and happier than Ilya’s ever seen him. Ilya can’t ruin that for him, can’t ruin their friendship by asking for what he knows Shane can’t give. No matter how much it kills him.

A charity event in San Francisco. A catastrophic computer failure. A fateful decision to drive, not fly. Two days in a car, just the two of them. Alone. Together. Ilya’s sick with excitement and with dread, because how can he keep his secrets with Shane so close for so long?

What he doesn’t know is that Shane has secrets too.

LINK

“Thanks,” Shane says, and Ilya nods. He heads back out of the gas station and down the road and sure enough, a sprawling clapboard house painted in shades of blue and cream with a sign reading Beachside Inn soon comes into view. Ilya pulls into a vacant space in the small parking area in front of it and they go inside. 

There’s a reception desk in the foyer but no one is behind it, so Shane dings the little bell next to a sign that reads Ring For Service! and a moment later a little woman appears, smiling a big smile. 

“Hello!” she greets them brightly. She’s compact and wiry with skin that’s the sort of tan that makes her ageless, in the sense that she could be anywhere from twenty-five to seventy. Her hair is dirty blonde and styled in two braids wound around her head. Ilya’s queerdar dings like mad. He likes her immediately. “Looking for a room?” she asks them. 

“Yeah.” Shane doesn’t seem to notice the singular noun. “We were just at the gas station and Jamie sent us here. Are you Hannah?” 

“I am. Are you stranded with no gas?” 

“Sort of. Though I think we were ready to take a break anyway. We drove down from San Francisco.” 

“Where you headed?” Hannah taps on her computer keyboard as she speaks. 

“Vegas, eventually. We’re taking the scenic route.” 

“I’ll say.” She looks up from her monitor with another warm smile. “Well, you’re in luck, gents. We’ve got one room left, top floor with a sea view. How does that sound?” 

Ilya waits for Shane to protest that they need separate rooms, that they’re not together in the way Hannah seems to have assumed, that he has a girlfriend. A beautiful, famous, hot girlfriend who loves hockey and may be a fiancée now. But Shane says none of those things. He just smiles his best Canadian good-boy smile and says, “Sounds perfect. Thank you, Hannah.” 

Hannah flushes slightly beneath the sexuality-defying force of Shane Hollander’s beauty—Ilya sympathises—and taps a bit more on her keyboard. A printer whirrs to life then spits out a sheet of paper Shane won’t let Ilya near. 

“You took care of the car,” he says firmly. “This is on me.” 

June 2010. Ilya Rozanov is delayed after the CCM shoot. By the time he gets to the locker room, Shane Hollander is out of the showers and Ilya’s entire plan is ruined. Only not quite fully ruined. Hollander invites him to dinner with his parents as a thank you for arranging the shoot and Ilya, in a burst of insanity, agrees. He hits it off with Yuna and David. They all exchange numbers. He and Hollander become friends. At no point does Ilya stop wanting more from him.

June 2016. Ilya Rozanov is a superstar. A Cup winner. An MVP. Women want him, men want to be him. He’s fucking miserable. He’s in love with his best friend. He can’t deny it anymore. Only now Shane is dating a movie star and happier than Ilya’s ever seen him. Ilya can’t ruin that for him, can’t ruin their friendship by asking for what he knows Shane can’t give. No matter how much it kills him.

A charity event in San Francisco. A catastrophic computer failure. A fateful decision to drive, not fly. Two days in a car, just the two of them. Alone. Together. Ilya’s sick with excitement and with dread, because how can he keep his secrets with Shane so close for so long?

What he doesn’t know is that Shane has secrets too.

LINK

San Francisco, June 2016

“I’m sorry, Mr Hollander, but we have no booking in your name.” 

The woman at the check-in desk is the politest shade of rude Ilya has ever seen. A quality many airline employees seem to share, in his experience. He wonders vaguely if they train for it or if the profession just attracts people with the knack. 

To be fair, it is late on a Sunday night and Ilya himself isn’t in the best of moods. He and Shane have just come from a charity gala where they shook many hands and smiled with visible teeth and answered tiresome questions about how they could be such fierce competitors on the ice while remaining friends off it. No one ever seems to understand that the competitiveness is what they like best about each other. 

Well. Competitiveness is one of the things he likes about Shane. There are others. 

The airport is busy despite the late hour, churning with loud and tired people. The lights are stark and glaring and there’s a headache brewing behind Ilya’s eyes. 

Beside him, Shane seethes in Canadian. Ilya can see the strain beneath his politeness, the sort that usually only comes out when reporters ask him ham-fisted questions about representation. There’s none of that here, though. Shane’s just pissed. 

“I booked the seats three weeks ago,” he says, tightly. You incompetent fucking moron, he does not say, though his tone heavily implies it. Ilya is impressed. “I have the booking confirmation number. I have a boarding pass. What is the problem? 

“The problem, sir, is that neither your name nor Mr Rozanov’s are listed on the manifest for this flight. In fact, I have—” She pauses, frowning. “I have… oh. Um. One moment, please.” She picks up a telephone from next to her monitor and begins to mutter into it. Ilya stops listening. He leans on the check-in desk and looks at Shane. 

He looks like shit. For him, that is. Which means that he looks fucking devastating, beautiful in the way that still lights Ilya up inside, even now, more than seven years after they first met. Still ignites that itch beneath his skin and in his fingers that long to touch, especially when Shane is this tense and this tired. Ilya wants to soothe him. His shoulders are high and tight, his eyes red-rimmed; they’re here in the San Francisco airport to catch a red-eye to Vegas but—

“Hey,” Ilya says. He gives in to the urges of his itchy fingers and swipes a gentle thumb across Shane’s cheekbone, over the freckles that can still, if he lets them, take him back to a frigid Saskatchewan parking lot and a pretty Canadian boy who turned his world on its head just by shaking his hand. “Flight is called red-eye but you are not supposed to take this literally, yes?” 

“Fuck off,” Shane mutters, but there’s no heat behind it. “I’m fucking tired is all. Tonight was exhausting. I’ll sleep on the plane.” 

Ilya isn’t so sure about that. If the frantic nature of the check-in woman’s whispering is anything to go by, nobody will be getting on any planes anytime soon. He lets his fingers trail down Shane’s cheek as he moves his hand away, a small touch to ease the ever-present hunger within him. 

i've been working on this one for a while, hoping the first chapter will be ready by friday. So to light a fire under some asses (mine) and ideally intrigue you please accept this snippet. In which ilya rozanov pines like he's sprouting evergreen needles (this is basically the entire fic)

in summary:

June 2010. Ilya Rozanov is delayed after the CCM shoot. By the time he gets to the locker room, Shane Hollander is out of the showers and Ilya’s entire plan is ruined. 

Only not quite fully ruined. Hollander invites him to dinner with his parents as a thank you for arranging the shoot and Ilya, in a burst of insanity, agrees. He hits it off with Yuna and David. They all exchange numbers. He and Hollander become friends. 

At no point does Ilya stop wanting more from him. 

June 2016. Ilya Rozanov is a superstar. A Cup winner. An MVP. Women want him, men want to be him. He’s fucking miserable. 

He’s in love with his best friend. He can’t deny it anymore. Only now Shane is dating a movie star and happier than Ilya’s ever seen him. Ilya can’t ruin that for him, can’t ruin their friendship by asking for what he knows Shane can’t give. No matter how much it kills him. 

A charity event in San Francisco. A catastrophic computer failure. A fateful decision to drive, not fly. Two days in a car, just the two of them. Alone. Together. 

Ilya’s sick with excitement and with dread, because how can he keep his secrets with Shane so close for so long?

What he doesn’t know is that Shane has secrets too. 

-

Once they’re on the state highway and out of the heavy San Francisco traffic, Shane relaxes. Ilya can almost see the tension drain from him, the tiredness and frustration still clinging to him from the night before dissolve away. He stops tapping on his thigh and sinks deeper into his seat, face tilted up to the sun. Soft golden rays highlight the sharp lines of his nose and jaw and cheekbones and Ilya just yearns. 

Shane is so fucking beautiful. He always has been, even as a tightly-wound teenager in a frosty parking lot. Ilya remembers that day well, or parts of it at least. Remembers Shane’s smile and his freckles, the warmth of his hand, the delight in his eyes when Ilya chirped him. He’s only grown more beautiful since and never more so than when he’s relaxed like he is now. An evil voice in Ilya’s mind whispers that he would look much like this in bed, after he came. More flushed, probably. Sweaty, breathing hard. Soft—his eyes, his smile. His voice as he moaned Ilya’s name. 

“Fuck.” 

Ilya drags his mind away from thoughts of soft and sated Shane and back to the car, which helps only a little. Shane turns his head and looks over with a little smile. 

“What?” he says. 

“Nothing,” Ilya replies. “Mind was wandering.” 

“Don’t get in a crash and kill us.” 

“I am a good driver.” 

“You’re reckless.” 

Sometimes, Ilya concedes. Sometimes he gets urges, to drive as fast as his fast cars will go, see how much speed he can handle before he loses control. He’d never actually push it too far—he wouldn’t, it’s not like that—but the urge is there. 

It’s not there now, though. Not with Shane in the car. Ilya is sometimes careless with himself but never, never with Shane. 

“Look, I am below speed limit.” He gestures at the speedometer. “Boring driving to keep boring passenger off my fucking back.” 

Shane just shakes his head. The wind catches in his hair as he does and blows it across his face. It’s longer now than it used to be—before her—long enough to brush past the collar of his shirt and sweep across his forehead, thick and dark and so fucking soft. Ilya has rested his cheek against it when Shane fell asleep on his shoulder. He knows the touch of that hair. 

Shane runs his fingers through it now to brush it back, tucks it behind his ear. Ilya grips the steering wheel hard, to numb the itch in his own fingers. His fingers always want to touch Shane, to sink into his hair and stroke down his cheekbone, trace the contours of his muscles as they clench beneath his skin. 

Ilya bites back the curse word this time, swallows it down deep into the place where he locks away all his feelings for Shane, the best he can. His best it seems is not very good today. It’s rare that they have more than a few hours together and almost never completely alone; already Ilya feels strung out and threadbare and their road trip has barely begun.