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Chapter Text

April 2022—Ottawa

“All I Do Is Win” blared through the arena’s speakers, practically shaking the ground with its vibrations as a sea of crimson roared around Shane. With how the Centaurs were playing this season, those words might actually ring true, he thought, as he watched a towering man with “Rozanov” stamped on his back strut down the tunnel with his arm draped over their teammate Haas's shoulders.

That man, his husband Ilya Rozanov, looked about as smooth as one could look while walking in skates on dry land. Ilya whispered something to Luca and the boy smiled. Ilya bonked the sides of their helmets together as he tightly side-hugged him.

Haas had just had a career-defining game. Shane had recently moved up to right wing on the first line, since he was the only one who could really keep up with Ilya's speed. That had left room for Luca to shift to second line center and let his talents properly shine. And shine they had. 

It wasn’t necessarily the number of goals, though a hat trick was never something to complain about. It was what Luca had pulled off to score, a level of hard-scrabbling offensive play that resulted in three last minute impossible shots somehow sinking into the net.

They were nearing the end of Shane’s first season on the team and, while the Centaurs hadn’t exactly begun to relax around their new high-profile teammate, every game felt better than the last. It was probably not a bad thing that Shane and Ilya were now each other’s problems—and poor Barrett’s, Shane thought—with the two of them working together on one line.

That one was still being figured out. Shane missed playing center a lot. He had never said that to Ilya in so many words, but he had finally started admitting it to himself.

Shane Hollander wasn’t meant to play wing. The problem was Ilya Rozanov wasn’t either. They couldn’t exactly both get what they wanted could they?

On top of that, Shane had held some sort of leadership role on every team he had been on since he was twelve. 

He was born to lead, he sometimes thought in his grumpiest moments. But Ilya had sacrificed a lot to be with him, too much, including at least one Stanley Cup and his mental health. Shane could be quiet and do as he was told, at least he hoped he could.

Shane waited for their starting goalie, Wyatt, to peel off his knee pads and the two of them followed the rest of the team down the tunnel, into the belly of the arena, and towards their locker room.

Shane and Ilya were still figuring out their rhythm as teammates and husbands, and how those two things fit together in moments like this. One of them almost always got tapped for press, leaving the other to take the showers. When Shane was up first he would always sprint in and out before his teammates had even taken off their gear so as to avoid a potential run in with Ilya.

But this time it would be Haas handling the press, and neither had been tapped. 

This had happened occasionally over the season and in those moments Ilya always went before Shane. Shane had gotten good at finding something plausible to do to delay himself, like changing his blades or retaping his stick at his stall. Wyatt was his companion in moments like these because he had so much gear to manage.

Shane sometimes wondered if Wyatt loitered with him on purpose, but would then admonish himself for being so self-centered. Wyatt just had a process of his own. And there was no way he was that perceptive, right?

Tonight, he could hear Ilya’s booming voice echoing from the showers. And then Bood, or Dykstra, or maybe it was Chouinard, yelled something loudly back. With their thick hockey accents those three all sounded a little similar, if Shane was being honest.

Ilya had been in there for what felt like ten minutes at least. Shane tapped his foot impatiently. He had run out of believable distractions and so had Hayes. They looked at each other and Wyatt shrugged.

He didn’t say anything but Shane had a sneaking suspicious he was reading between the lines. 

“Is it that big a deal?” Wyatt finally asked.

Ok, so maybe their starting goalie was that perceptive. 

“I don’t know,” Shane said, twisting his hands together. “It feels weird, right?”

He went on. “We bunk together on trips. I don’t know why this feels..worse, but it does.”

“Worse?”

“Not worse," Shane corrected. "Just more,”—he was looking for the word—“exposed?”

“Yeah, well, it’s a room full of naked men. I get that.”

Shane laughed. He liked Wyatt a lot. For one, he was by far their most responsible player in a leadership role on this team, what with Bood as Assistant Captain and Rozanov leading the pack.

“This may sound stupid, so bear with me, Hollander, but I think you’re missing something by doing whatever this is,” he said, waving his hands at Shane slumped in the stall.

“What do you mean?”

“How many times have you showered with your teammates in your career?”

“I don’t know,” Shane said, thinking out loud, “thousands?”

“As silly as it is that NHL teams can’t seem to afford dividers, I’ve always thought it sort of served a purpose.”

“What’s that?”

Wyatt shrugged. “Bonding, I guess. It’s sort of the great equalizer. We all go out and wreck on the ice, and then we go back to the locker room and have to confront that we are all just people, or something, with bodies.”

“Look, I’m not saying that can’t devolve into a lot of tomfoolery..” 

Shane smiled. Wyatt did talk a little bit like he was born in the 1950s. 

“But there’s a purpose, you know?”

“Maybe it’s always been harder for me to see that,” Shane said. As a gay man.

“I get that,” Wyatt said charitably. “I just think it’s something to think about is all.”

“We like you, Hollander. Doesn’t hurt that you make our captain the happiest we’ve ever seen him.”

“But if you want people to relax, they are going to need to get to know you a bit first.”

That was fair, Shane thought. Maybe he was being a little bit ridiculous. Who cared if he and Ilya were fully naked in the same room together?

They could all be adults about that. This was their job and they were professional athletes. 

Shane did try to block out the part of his brain that reminded him that Shane and Ilya had first acknowledged their mutual attraction to one another in one such shower a decade ago.

He nodded at Wyatt and began to take off his CCM undershirt. “You’re right.”

Wyatt grinned. “I usually am, Hollander, the sooner you figure that out the better.”

Once he was completely naked, Shane grabbed his favorite shampoo from his stall and headed towards the showers. As he approached, he could feel the oppressively thick steam of twenty-something shower heads collectively going at once.

He turned the corner and there was Bood, butt-naked and mid-story as he worked suds through his thick mane.

Shane could feel many sets of eyes lock on him as he entered. If any of the men were surprised at Shane’s appearance, they did not comment, though he could feel a few sets of eyes linger curiously on him a beat longer than was necessary.

Shane was grateful for this team, his team. When it came to him and Ilya they always took the most relaxed, congenial route.

Ilya’s back was turned to Shane but he recognized his husband immediately. Well, he recognized his ass immediately. 

As Ilya turned around his eyes widened in surprise as he spotted Shane.

Fuck, Shane thought. Had he made a mistake in doing this? Maybe they should have talked about it first?

Thankfully Bood immediately barked, “Hollander, get over here and hear this.”

“What’s up, Bood?” Shane asked with as much feigned casualness as possible as he stepped under a neighboring shower head. 

“He is telling another one of his stupid stories,” Ilya said, shaking his soaked curls like a dog and letting loose a sheet of water with the motion. 

“Not stupid, Roz,” Bood admonished, gripping Ilya's shoulder. “Your husband is such an asshole, Hollander.”

Shane was surprised that Bood would not only comfortably shower naked next to them, but in the same breath acknowledge they were married. Which, to Shane's anxious brain, was essentially the same as publicly acknowledging they had tons of sex.

Maybe he needed to chill out and stop underestimating this team.

“Dude, Hollzy, you’re shredded,” Bood exclaimed, pointing at his abs. 

Shane’s cheeks immediately went bright red.

Dykstra jumped in. “Not gonna lie, I’ve been waiting ages to see you naked, Hollander.”

Ilya looked at Evan with a piercing glare. 

“What, Roz? We’ve all wanted to know if he is, like, hiding infinity stones under his jersey or something.

“Nice reference,” Wyatt nodded as he entered the showers and joined the guys. Evan slapped his back in thanks. 

“No infinity stones,” Bood said, as he openly inspected Shane’s naked body. “He’s just built like a god.”

“Typical, Hollander,” he said, shaking his head. “Leave something for the rest of us, yeah?”

“This is almost as bad as when we realized Roz wasn’t just an insane player, he was also hung like a horse.”

Shane’s brain almost short-circuited. So now they were apparently talking about his husband’s penis in a room full of twenty naked teammates?

“I did not know that hurt your feelings so much, Bood,” Ilya said with a cat-like grin.

“My feelings? It’s annoying as fuck, Roz. Actually scratch that, you are annoying as fuck.”

Ilya laughed and shrugged, running a handful of body wash down his wide pecs.

“Whatever, Hollander does not seem to mind.”

“Mind what?” Dykstra asked, “your horrible personality or your incredibly large dick?

The entire team howled with laughter. Shane found himself grinning ear to ear as the hot water continued to run down his naked body.

“Ok, boys, I am done,” Ilya said, throwing up a peace sign and slapping Dykstra’s ass as he left. Evan probably deserved that, Shane thought, as he tried to suppress a bizarre pang of jealousy.

Shane remained with the rest of the team under the steaming shower heads. He joined in the ribbing here and there, teasing Barrett for a particularly rough haircut Harris had recently given him. Troy looked at Shane sourly as if to say I thought you were better than this.

And Shane was, he thought. But man was that mullet rough. 

It wasn’t until Shane and Ilya were in their Jeep and speeding towards home that they finally had a moment to debrief showergate.

“You could not wait to see me naked, huh?” Ilya asked with a wolfish grin.

“Oh, shut up. You were taking forever.”

Shane paused. “That was ok, right?”

“Yes,” Ilya said. “More than ok. Is good you did that, I think.”

“How come?”

“These men, they are very good people. But you are.. how do you say, like scary?”

“Scary?”

“Not scary, no..”

Shane tried to decode what Ilya meant, but couldn’t. "Say it in Russian?”

“Pugayushchiy.”

“Intimidating?”

“Da, that. Your Russian is getting very good, Hollander!”

Shane preened. He loved any and all compliments, especially from his husband.

“You are intimidating, Shane. Not to me, of course. To me, you are my boring husband.”

Shane sent him a withering look.

“But you win a lot. You are a very serious boy.”

“Ilya, we are thirty.”

“See! So serious, my serious man.”

Shane rolled his eyes. “And you think me getting naked with our team somehow solved that?”

“In a way, maybe,” Ilya said with a shrug. “You are just a man, after all.”

“That so?” Shane said pointedly.

“And the love of my life, lyubimyy.”

“Mhm.”

“Plus it is good they know my cock is bigger than yours.”

Shane wacked the back of Ilya’s head. “Are you fucking serious?”

“What? Is true, Hollander.”

“And why do they need to know that exactly?”

Ilya paused and grinned before replying, “you would be too perfect otherwise.”

“How dare you—”

“Hollander, you are perfect.”

“Perfect for me,” Ilya added. "Calm down.”

“Plus, I think Dykstra has a crush on you. Maybe Barrett too.”

“Maybe we can all have sex in that fucking shower,” Shane said blandly, more than a little over his husband.

“A great idea,” Ilya said, as if what Shane was saying was somehow a perfectly legitimate proposal.

“Group bonding,” he intoned in his thick Russian accent.

“You are insane,” Shane said, shaking his head. “How are you so gay in a way that doesn’t flip men out?” 

It was one of Ilya’s superpowers, Shane thought. He made homoerotic comments all of the time that were somehow like water off a duck’s back. He had frankly done stuff like that his entire career, like when he had kissed Shane’s cheek on live television during that particularly fated All Stars game. 

“I am very charming, Hollander,” Ilya replied. “Maybe you should try it.”

Shane huffed. He was charming. Ok, not really. But he was the best hockey player in the NHL, besides maybe the man sitting next to him. Wasn’t that enough?

Ilya replied as if he could hear Shane’s thoughts. “They love you as you are, sweetheart. I can tell.”

“You are like step-father. Who is this man? Why is he in our home now?”

Shane laughed out loud.

Ilya continued, “but then he buys you nice ice cream cone and you say, ok, I like this man. Maybe he can love my mother.”

“In this scenario, you are the mother?” Shane asked.

“Da,” Ilya grinned. “And these are my babies. They may be scared of you, Hollander. But not for so long. Not forever.”

“So what you’re saying is I should get naked more often?”

“Yes,” Ilya said, squeezing Shane’s knee with one of his impossibly large hands. “Good boy.”

Shane felt a little lightheaded at that. He’d like to get home and get naked now, thank you very much.

Ilya grinned with his eyes remaining on the road. “Soon enough.”

Chapter Text

October 2021—Montreal

Even deep in the belly of Bell Centre, Shane could hear their screams, and they were screaming for his blood.

He had only been playing for the Ottawa Centaurs for a few weeks, after more than a decade spent calling this arena his home.

Here, Shane had first stepped onto the ice as a teenager, baby-faced and shy, unaware that he was about to become the Voyageur’s most favored weapon of choice. He had been a kid. One with a healthy dose of confidence in his own abilities, not that he would ever have admitted that out loud, but a kid nonetheless.

If he was being honest, the only adult thing about Shane at that age had been him occasionally getting on his knees and sucking Ilya Rozanov’s cock.

He didn’t do drugs and he barely drank. He didn’t blow his multi-million dollar contract on sports cars, or hookers, or five star hotels. All Shane did was play hockey, and play it so very well. And let Rozanov fuck him, sometimes. 

As a teenager, playing for the Voyageurs had been a dream come true. Montreal was one of the Original Six. They were the most decorated team in the NHL, though granted some of those Cups had been back when the league was smaller. And it was common knowledge that they had the loudest fans.

Every night, those fans balanced on the razor’s edge of obsession and insanity. Shane absolutely loved it, mostly because he was their preferred object of worship. 

Montreal loved Hollander. They loved him when he was teenager and bashfully commanding the center, putting up points that made men practically twice his age shiver in terror. They loved him as he matured, as he became a cool-headed, fearless captain. As he brought them a Stanley Cup, then one, then another.

And then the fantasy had come crashing down. The fantasy of Shane, that is. That he was some perfect soldier, that he worshiped one religion and that religion was hockey.

He had never thought they would discover the second site of his worship, Ilya.

The blow out with Shane’s team had been such an insulting and deep betrayal of all that he had given the Voyageurs that Shane had frankly not paid attention to the fans’ reactions. He had stayed off social media and had all but gotten in his car and disappeared from Montreal over night.

Then, he had held his breath waiting to see if there was a place for him in this league (there had been, obviously, “you are Shane fucking Hollander,” Ilya had said).

But would it be possible to have hockey and Ilya?

The answer had been Ottawa, the answer had been yes. Thank god. There had never really been another option but Ottawa. 

Shane had barely interacted with the Centaurs over the summer, still reeling from he and Ilya’s outing and his expulsion from the Voyageurs. He had only just started admitting that a small but loud part of him thought that he was too good to ever properly field the consequences of his love for Ilya. That Shane was somehow exceptional in a way that meant the Voyageurs’ potent cocktail of homophobia and hatred for Rozanov would somehow get overridden by the simple, brilliant fact of Shane’s excellence.

But that hadn’t been the case. The Voyageurs had cast him out all the same, and quickly.

The Centaurs had been far better. They were a different breed, one raised by Ilya, and had been accepting off the bat. Shane had even gotten cautious, respectful outreach from Wyatt Hayes and Zane Boodram, Ilya’s assistant captains, in those early days.

Nevertheless, he had needed time off from scrutiny, even if well-meaning. He had waited until the end of the summer before showing up to a Centaurs event.

Shane had appreciated that his new team had given him space and had played a long game of sorts, courting him carefully and from afar at first. 

He could tell they adored Ilya and were in awe of Shane. He would be lying if he said he wasn’t used to that reaction from people, even other players in the league. Actually, especially other players in the league.

He would figure that piece out eventually, he thought. How to step off his pedestal and properly be a part of this team. But right now he wasn’t focused on that. Right now he was in Montreal, in the heart of Bell Centre, and he was focused on winning.

It was inevitable that this match up would happen early in the season, what with The Voyageurs and Centaurs in the same division and a mere two hours apart.

Shane had hoped it would land in Ottawa, but of course here they were in Montreal. When it came to him and Ilya nothing ever came easy.

Now that he was in Montreal, Shane didn’t know what he expected. But nothing good, that was for sure. As the Centaurs made their way towards the tunnel, the energy of the arena was shocking, like Shane was clutching a live wire with his bare hands. 

Beside him in the tunnel, Ilya was suited up with his “C” proudly displayed on his chest. He eyed the light at the tunnel’s end. He almost looked.. nervous? Or at least ill at ease.

Shane knew Ilya never really got nervous. Getting nervous required you to be worse at hockey than Ilya was, or care about it in the way that Shane did, which was to say pathologically. 

Shane knew Ilya loved hockey. But over the years his husband had admitted that he also loved what it had given him (a Porsche 918 Spyder, freedom from Russia, Shane Hollander, in ascending order). And it didn't hurt that Ilya loved winning. Recently, he had learned how much he loved winning with Shane.

That had been a beautiful discovery. They had had a version of that at the 2017 All Stars game, but that had been a goofy exhibition match.

This was different. This was playing on the same team. Shane and Ilya could not get enough of each other.

They were assassins on the power play. Shane sometimes found himself wishing they could play on the same line. He knew that didn’t really make sense. They were both centers and neither entirely willing to change that critical piece for the other. 

This wasn’t like sex, where Shane had always felt so deeply compatible with Ilya and willing to bend in whichever way he wanted.

There was an odd sort of incompatibility here that had always made them brilliant rivals, but poor linemates, or so Shane often thought.

Even in the safety of the tunnel, the sound was deafening. Shane had played so many seasons in this arena. He knew what an unusually rowdy night sounded like, and this was the rowdiest he had ever heard by far. He frowned and met Ilya’s unflappable visor-covered gaze. Shane had no clue what to expect on the other side of that opening. 

Then the ominous chords of “Enter Sandman” began to play, which was the Centaurs sign to start filing out one at a time onto the ice. Ilya and Shane patiently waited at the back of the line.

Usually Shane went in alphabetically since he held no leadership position on this team (though he often found himself thinking about it a little bitterly). This time was different. His captain had told him they would enter together. 

As the heavy metal chords started to reach their crescendo, the two of them made their way towards the bright light and unending roar.

For a moment, Shane felt like a newborn baby about to be spit out into a world in which he had little clue how to navigate.

What if they booed? What if they threw things onto the ice?

Should he be worried about his safety?

With his and Ilya’s outing, Shane was arguably the most decorated out gay athlete competing across any sport.

And Ilya had even worse problems of his own. His country of origin, that country’s president, publicly mocking and denouncing him.

Shane would never show any of this to Ilya, but there had been countless Russian headlines and horrible talk shows bits about Ilya Rozanov. Shane’s Russian had been improving rapidly with consistent dedicated study and he almost wished in those moments it was worse.

Suddenly Shane wondered if they should be worried for their safety. He felt a wave of nausea ripple through him.

Ilya’s eyes found his and for the briefest second his hard, game ready glare softened. He nodded.

Shoulder-to-shoulder, they stepped out.

Whatever they had heard in the tunnel was nothing in comparison to the sound of the fans from the ice.

The roar was so violent in its intensity that Shane felt like he had stuck his head straight into a jet engine. Voyageur blue and red covered the arena in one uninterrupted wall of jerseys. 

This wasn’t necessarily booing, though he certainly could hear that too. Instead, this felt closer to tapping into some frequency of unbridled rage. 

Shane glanced at Ilya and his husband, his captain, looked at him as if he were waiting for directions. These were Shane’s fans, or at least had been for over a decade. Maybe he would know what to do.

Shane took a look at ocean of red and blue, and then it hit him. What these fans, his fans, wanted.

They wanted a battle for the ages. They wanted a show. 

But their golden boy had become a little less golden. He had been spending time training alongside Ilya Rozanov, and he’d give these fans what they wanted in a way quiet, well-mannered Hollander never had.

It didn’t hurt that Ilya had fucked Shane in their combined trophy room before they had gotten on the bus for Montreal that morning.

Ilya’s message had been clear. Everything the Voyageurs had was because of Shane. They had spent a decade with Shane as their leader and scorer, now they would know what it was like to be at the other end of a Hollander face off. 

Shane had had enough. He skated towards center ice and raised his arms to receive the roar, like he was being welcomed home. 

The arena somehow got even louder with the display. Shane gave his best Rozanov smirk.

They loved him. They fucking loved him.

No team could vanish away that love overnight. Here was Shane on the ice at Bell Centre and thousands of Voyageurs fans couldn't help but fall to their knees for him.

Shane began to skate a lazy, unhurried circle around center ice, meeting the screaming crowd from every vantage point. He held his head tall. He did not smile or frown, but met their combination of rage and adoration head on.

When he skated by the bench of Voyageurs, he ignored them all, not even making eye contact with Hayden or JJ. He and Hayden were still close friends and JJ was a work in progress. It was nothing personal, but he wouldn’t give that team a single inch tonight. 

He had given so much to them already. Now, he would remind them who they had given up, and for what. For a thing as stupid as Hollander loving Rozanov. 

Was that worth a Stanley Cup? They'd find out.

He looked at Ilya, who was still loitering near the tunnel’s entrance warily watching. Shane beckoned to him with a gloved hand.

Ilya skated onto the ice, and the crowd began to boo, loud and long. It was maybe the loudest booing Shane had heard in this entire professional career, and he had beaten the Admirals in the Cup finals in Toronto. 

Ilya was no stranger to being booed in this arena. In fact, it often fed him in a way that Shane had come to respect. But tonight Ilya did not look fed.

Ilya pulled up alongside Shane, and Shane reached for Ilya’s gloved hand and raised it with his. They could boo all they wanted. They were just delaying their own demise. 

He looked at the Voyageurs bench, and let his eyes rove down it. Some of his former teammates had the decency to drop their gaze. Then he and Ilya stopped beside the Centaurs bench.

Ilya had already delivered his locker room speech and the men looked intense and in their own world all at once, watching their captain and new star player’s display and as they ran through whatever pre-game rituals got them ready for sixty minutes of agony.

After a few minutes, a whistle abruptly shrieked, signaling that the starting line should climb over the boards and onto the ice.

Ilya, Barrett, and Boodram got into their offensive positions on the ice. Behind them, hulking Dykstra and Chouinard circled like starved vultures.

Over the last few years, Shane had seen Ilya build a team that wasn’t ruled by fear, but by fun. Winning was fun, especially when they did it together. That was probably a good sentiment, albeit a foreign one to Shane. But he could tell that sentiment was nowhere to be found tonight. Ilya could care less about having fun.

Ilya wanted to eat the Voyageurs alive. When Shane looked at Barrett and Boodram he knew they would happily feast with their captain and spit out the bones. 

Ilya got in a face off stance against Montreal’s new starting center, Lane Garrity. The Voyageurs had gotten him from Colorado when they had lost Shane and gained millions of dollars worth of contract to spend on a shiny new toy.

Shane knew that Ilya had no personal ill will against this man. But, unfortunately, whether Garrity knew it or not, his move to Montreal had been a grave mistake. He might as well have stepped right into oncoming traffic.

The whistle below, and the puck was Ilya’s. Immediately Montreal’s offensive line was blocking his channels, and Ilya checked one of the wingers with a brutal crunch, creating room for Barrett to get out into the open. 

Then Ilya got the puck to Troy and barreled through a defender. Not even because he really needed to, if he was being honest. He just wanted them to hurt. 

Ilya was dictating how this would go and the answer was fast and aggressive with little room for precious technique. If the Voyageurs seemed surprised by this, they didn’t show it, but even ten minutes in they hadn’t taken a single shot on goal.

Shane and his line were at center by that point, and had picked up where Ilya had left of. While Rozanov was relatively fluent in this sort of rage-fueled play, this was something new for Shane.

It turned out it hadn’t been as hard to embrace as he had thought. He reached into himself to locate that anger, and found he was surprised by how deep the well went and far down he could go.

It wasn’t just Shane’s pain, his resentment towards his former team. It was his resentment towards the league, towards these fans, all of whom had made him feel like their love of him was conditional. 

He would be ten percent less perfect tonight if it meant he could destroy this team on their own turf. It was Montreal’s hubris, having foolishly angered some ancient god, and they would pay the consequences.

Shane scored after less than a minute on the ice. He had checked a winger right up against the board, allowing himself to squeeze through an opening and catch a breakaway heading right towards the net.

Slamming the puck in without an ounce of finesse, he threw a fist in the air and roared.

The tell-tale thump of THUN-DER boomed over the sound system as Shane skated around the ice throwing his arms up as his goalscoring song played. 

He hadn’t publicly taken this much pleasure in scoring, well, ever. THUN-DER. 

Shane looked over at Ilya who was grinning from the bench. Ilya stood up, turned to the crowd, and raised his arms.

By the end of the first period he and Ilya had both scored a goal. That was good, but it wasn’t enough. Shane had become so, so greedy. He wanted more than a victory, he wanted an extermination.

The second period had been a wrestle for the puck. The Voyageurs were trying to match Ilya and Shane’s physicality to the best of their abilities.  One of the Voyageur’s defenseman had even tried to kick Shane with a skate while he was sprawled on the ice after a particularly brutal check.

When Ilya’s line had returned to the ice he hadn’t even waited for the face off. He had taken his gloves off and punched that man in the face then and there.

Usually these parts of the game were more a performance than an actual fight. But Ilya wasn’t looking to entertain, he wanted to punish this team for the thousand things they had done to hurt Shane Hollander, and the new injuries they were inflicting now.  The defender looked shocked as Ilya launched at him and brought him down.

There had naturally been a penalty, a considerable one. But even a man down, the Centaurs and Wyatt Hayes had held the line.

The game ended four to zero and, when the buzzer finally went, Shane had looked at Ilya with such shock and joy.

Before they had been outed, Shane had been ready to walk away from his team for Ilya. Anything to make the man he loved happy. Then they had been outed and Shane hadn’t had a choice. It hadn’t felt good to walk away then, but he had still done it gladly.

Even with all of that, a secret part of Shane had wondered if he would ever play a game of hockey as good as the thousands he had played with Montreal.

Ilya had made the Centaurs good, so good. But they weren’t great.

This game had been great, and it had been so because of Shane and Ilya. Their team too, who had shown so much promise, commitment, and discipline.

But there was an alchemy happening on the ice that Shane could tell the arena was more than a little in awe of. They were watching two people who had been circling each other for over a decade finally reach out and link arms.

Shane pulled off a glove and ran a hand through the sweaty hair stuck to his forehead. He and Ilya stood at the back as their team worked its way down the line of frowning, dazed Voyageurs. 

Shane debated not shaking their hands. It was something Ilya would do, he thought. Ilya didn’t give a shit about sportsmanship. Everything was personal or worse some sort of demented psychological game. 

Shane had never played an angrier game of hockey than just now, but he was still Shane Hollander, and Shane Hollander looked people in the eyes when he beat them. He took hand after hand and nodded politely. He could feel his heart rate dropping in real time, like he was coming down from some sort of competitive psychosis. 

As Ilya and the Centaurs began to head towards their tunnel, Shane paused and took one last look at the arena. The fans were still so loud, even hours later. How, Shane did not know.

And then he heard it. Starting from far off, practically in the rafters where his three Stanley Cup banners hung, and then spreading towards the ice, taking row after row with it. 

His name.

They were chanting his name. Hollan-der.

And again, Hollan-der. 

As if it were Thun-der.

Hollan-der

And again.

Hollan-der

And again, and again.

Hollan-der.

He bowed his head. He couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh or burst into tears.

Raising his gaze, he smiled and saluted.

Shane made one last long orbit around center ice before sailing towards the comforting darkness of the tunnel, and Ilya’s shadow within it.

Chapter Text

January 2023—Edmonton 

The Centaurs were in Alberta and it was fucking freezing. Thankfully, they had destroyed the Oilers, so the whole thing hadn’t been completely without a purpose, Bood thought to himself. But damnit central Canada felt almost as cold as Siberia.

Maybe that explained why Rozanov was the only one who wasn’t huddled with his fellow teammates, who were all pressed together like a group of towering Emperor penguins as they waited for the bus.

Even Hollander had left his husband alone and was in the center of the group, surrounded on all sides by bulky warm bodies.

It was pitch dark, which wasn’t hard in Canada at this time of year. The sun practically felt like it set at noon.

It didn’t help that it was snowing and clearly the beginning of a blizzard. Bood could always tell because the snowflakes were thick and dropped like lead. Rozanov seemed utterly unaffected by the temperature and was sticking his tongue out, as if he were trying to catch one in his mouth.

As soon as their bus pulled up in front of the loading area, the guys started throwing equipment bags into its cavernous bays and one by one rushed up the stairs into the warm interior.

“Hurry up, Haasy,” Bood barked, as he fumbled to get his bag in. “My nuts are going to freeze off.”

“Maybe better for us all, no?” Roz said with a wicked grin. 

“Shut it, Roz. Could be you too if you aren’t careful.”

“My nuts are fine, I think,” Rozanov said with a laugh. Then he looked for Hollander, who was waiting to load his bag.

“Shane, I take that, you go,” he said with concern.

Shane looked confused but cold enough that he wasn’t about to argue.

Good to know Roz was worried about someone’s nuts, Bood thought with a silent laugh. Hollander and his priceless fucking nuts, and his utterly whipped husband.

Bood thought about Hollander spawn. That man could probably sell his sperm for a million dollars a pump, what with the sheer amount of first round draft picks it would produce.

Bood was probably a sick fuck for going there, and he was aware of that. But Hollander and his pack of little hockey gods, now there was a thought. 

These two. They were fucking ridiculous. He loved them.

He really loved Hollzy, which hadn’t been a surprise necessarily, but had been a beautiful realization. Not just that he loved him, but by how much and in what ways.

It had taken Hollander about his entire first season on the Centaurs to properly thaw out. To be fair, he had gone through a betrayal of epic proportions. Bood still felt sick when he thought about it.

Bood had never played on another team but the Centaurs, and he struggled to even imagine what something like that might feel like.

Hollander had stayed hidden the summer before his first season on the Cens.

Then, when he had shown up, he had been a little ghost-like, Roz’s quiet, polite shadow. Who also happened to be the greatest hockey player Bood had ever seen, not that he was about to tell Rozanov that.

Look, Bood wasn’t complaining. They had started winning.. a lot. Not in a way that got them a Stanley Cup last go round. But in a way that had gotten them close. Had gotten them to the point where it felt like that Cup was a possibility, maybe even an inevitability, and definitely not some pipe dream.

Hollander moving to Roz's line at the start of this season had helped fortify their offense. Mostly because it had unlocked the full freight of Rozanov’s potential, giving him the gift of someone who could actually keep up.

But in Bood’s opinion, and granted he was no coach, Shane wasn’t meant for wing long term.

He was most definitely a center. So was Roz.

They needed to figure that whole thing out.

It wasn't hurting their game play, that new configuration, but Bood had a gut feeling it was holding them back from their very best.

Once the guys were all on the bus and the doors were finally shut, Bood moaned a “thank god” of relief.

“Canada, man,” he bellowed. “You gotta fucking love it. Ain’t that right, Young?”

Young was from California and looked like some amalgamation of a surfer and skateboarder with his bleach blond hair and prominent chipped tooth.

“She’s a cruel mistress,” Young nodded wisely. 

Bood could hear Rozanov’s laughter from the front of the bus.

“You are all so.. what is the word, Shane?” Roz asked Hollander, who was naturally sitting next to him with his head leaning against the window.

“Huh?”

“You know! What you call me, when we play Mario Kart and—“

“Oh, dramatic.”

“Dramatic, that is right,” Rozanov said, his eyes lighting up with recollection. “You are all very dramatic.”

“Please, Roz,” Bood shot back. “Don’t tell me this isn’t brutal.”

“In Russia—"

“Don’t get him started,” Hollander mumbled, as he put on his noise-cancelling headphones and leaned against the pane of glass with his eyes closed.

Bood loved when Hollzy did shit like this. No one managed Roz quite like him.

In his more intrusive moments, Bood sort of wondered how that dynamic played out in other aspects of their relationship.

As in, he wondered how they had sex.

Was that gay of him? He honestly didn’t know or really care.

It was less that the idea was hot, though they were obviously hot. You didn't need to be gay to realize that.

No, more than anything he wondered how the pieces fit together. About the doing, and who was being done exactly.

If you watched their dynamic in public, Roz took up most of the oxygen in the room, but Hollander clearly called the shots.

Nowhere more so than on the ice. This is why Bood had given up at the start of the season and handed over his assistant captain title, only to have Roz surprise them all and ask his husband to co-captain instead (this was not a thing in the league, but these two were crazy, crazy for each other, and didn’t seem to fucking care).

While Hollander was bossy and stubborn, he was also a little delicate and girlish, if Bood was being honest.

He was sort of pretty, for a guy.. if that made sense. Just generally a smooth, leanly muscled sort of dude with dark almond-shaped eyes covered by thick eyelashes and a smattering of freckles over the bridge of his nose that made it hard to look him in the eyes and live to tell the tale.

It wasn’t that Hollander wasn’t masculine, because he definitely was. Though maybe it depended on how you defined that. Hollzy was a fucking legend. He was so unbelievably cool under fire. He was the guy you called if your basement was flooding.

Rozanov was more like the guy you called if you woke up in jail.

Bood shook his head. He loved these two. Loved playing with them, sure, but he also just loved them. They were stupidly perfect for each other and every day the Centaurs had to live through their disgustingly beautiful love story.

When the bus finally pulled up to their hotel, the penguins—his teammates—shuffled out and into the lobby. Rozanov handed out keys and rattled off room assignments from a list on his phone.

“Bar in thirty?” Bood asked the group. Most of the men nodded. There was literally nothing else to do. It felt hazardous to step a single foot outside of this Sheraton.

Hollander looked at Rozanov sheepishly.

“I need sleep,” Roz suddenly said, yawning and laying it on more than a little thick. “I will see you tomorrow, I think.”

Bood squinted and took one look at Roz and then Hollzy.

Hollander looked sort of bashful and dropped his gaze to the floor.

“Whatever,” Bood said dismissively.

If they wanted to be lame, that was their god-given right. He sometimes missed the version of Roz that actually partied, though he couldn’t say he missed the one that was clinically depressed.

“Go get your beauty sleep, boys.”

Rozanov and Hollander did not need to be told twice and were out of there in the blink of an eye.

An hour or so later Bood, Barrett, Chouinard, Dykstra, Haas, Hayes, and Young had commandeered the hotel bar and were doing tequila shots.

“We are very far from Mexico,” Haas said with a giggle as he looked at his empty shot glass and the bitten lime wedge in it.

Where oh where did one get fresh limes in Alberta? Bood couldn’t help but wonder.

He took a sip of his drink. “We are very far from anything, Haas.”

“Not the Arctic Circle,” Hayes added, as if he were sharing an exciting new fact with the classroom. God, he really was such a nerd, Bood thought with a shake of his head.

“And Russia,” Haas added with a slight slur. Tequila never seemed to end well for this boy.

“Speaking of Russia, where’s Roz?” Chouinard asked, slamming back another shot.

“Asleep,” Bood replied with a wave of his hand.

“Right.. asleep.”

“What?”

“What do you mean 'what'?”

“No actually, dude, what are you talking about?”

“Come on, don’t tell me you haven’t been subjected to it,” Chouinard muttered.

“To what?”

“To, ya know..” Chouinard waved his hand around in a way that was incredibly useless and indicated nothing at all.

“Huh?”

“Don’t make me say it, dude.”

“What on earth are you even—“

“He’s talking about the noises,” Hayes interjected calmly.

Bood knew he could always count on Wyatt to be the one with a basic grasp of the English language.

“..noises?”

“Uh huh,” Chouinard said. “Noises.”

Bood looked to Wyatt for help, but his goalie just shrugged.

“I see,” Bood said. Noises. He had never heard these noises, but oh could he guess.

Oh did he want to know, a tiny part of him in some remote tundra of his brain hollered.

Haas’s cheeks were painted with a deep and frankly concerning-looking blush. Was he having an allergic reaction to the tequila?

Bood then locked eyes with Barrett, who had been doing everything to avoid his gaze throughout this back and forth.

“Just because I’m ga—“

“Oh calm down, Barrett,” Bood interrupted. Like it was that.

This had nothing to do with that.

It had everything to do with him being a nosey fucking teammate.

“Who has heard these..noises?”

He looked around the circle and suddenly every hand was raised but his.

“All of you?” he said, a little aghast.

Why did he suddenly feel so left out?

“Damn,” he muttered.

“Bood, you sleep like a rock,” Dykstra explained. “A rock that definitely has sleep apnea.”

The man would know, since they had shared a room practically the entire time Bood had played for the Cens.

“So,” Bood went on.

“So,” Chouinard replied.

All the guys looked silently at each other.

“Ask the question you wanna ask,” Chouinard said, wearily sipping his drink.

“Hollander..”

“Yep?”

Chouinard was going to make him say it out loud, wasn’t he.

“Well..”

Maybe Chouinard would take pity on him? Please, for the love of god.

“Look,” his teammate said with a sigh, “he’s not exactly a goal scorer, ok?”

“Ah," Bood said as his brain short-circuited for a second. 

Hollander was famously a goal scorer. The best goal scorer. 

He guessed even the best goal scorer needed to take a break from.. goal scoring? 

“..and Rozanov?”

“Definitely the high scorer on that team. Seems to be scoring a lot. Of goals.”

“Alotta slap shots into the net,” Dykstra muttered, shaking his head. Barrett sent him a withering look.

“Right.”

Chouinard’s gaze met Bood's. Bood then looked at Hayes, who was shaking his head in his hands. Young looked like he was about to burst out laughing at his teammates' reactions.

Bood finally got his wits about him.

“Good for Hollander,” he said a little foggily. “He works hard. Dude deserves a break.”

Haas cackled. Ok, that kid was drunk.

“Uh, see that’s the thing,” Chouinard continued, looking pained.

“Hollander might not be scoring any goals but he’s still.. captain?”

Bood barked.

“That right?”

“Well,” Barrett said and took a long pull of his beer.

"Maybe not captain. More like.. coach?"

Now that made sense. Hollander had to be one of the quietly bossiest people he had ever met. Was Bood really surprised? 

It wasn’t like Hollander was wrong much, though. He had earned that. Realistically, Bood would do whatever Shane Hollander told him to.

“Huh, I see.”

These guys had given him a lot to think about. Way, way too much to think about.

“I wanna be clear,” Bood said, and his words slurred together in a way that had him realizing he was drunk.

“This isn’t about them both being dudes.”

“I have never once had a problem with that,” he went on.

“You know, men who don’t have a problem with that typically don’t need to say that,” Barrett said a bit bitchily.

Bood looked at him. “Fair enough, Barrett. But I don’t, to be clear.”

He went on. “I mean, Roz and Hollzy are hot as hell. Who hasn’t thought about which one they’d, uh.. pass a puck with?”

Wait, what?

It was like the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. The group of men were practically not breathing, let alone moving a muscle. 

Except for Haas, who looked like he was vibrating and about to explode.

“Oh, come one. Who hasn’t?” Bood asked again, a slight plead in his voice. Suddenly the dim lights of the bar felt very bright.

“Barrett, not even you?”

“Don’t you dare single me out here,” he shot back. “You’re on your own, Bood.”

“Not you, Hazey?”

Wyatt shrugged. He was always the most reasonable and evolved one, really.

He could count on him to bail Bood out of about an hundred foot well’s worth of shit. Right?

“Sure, Shane’s always been more my type.”

“What?” Bood and a few of the others asked without even thinking.

“He’s more my type,” Wyatt said as if he explaining a complicated math equation to a group of gorillas.

“He’s sort of.. you know, pretty?”

Bood nodded enthusiastically before he could catch himself. Oh, he knew.

The freckles and the eyelashes. Yep.

“I don’t know, man,” Chouinard jumped in. “I think if I slept with a man I’d want to fully commit to the experience.”

“What on earth does that mean?” Barrett asked in an increasingly high-pitched voice.

“You know,” Chouinard said, again waving his hands around in utterly useless ways.

“Roz, he’s like..” he trailed off. He tried again. “He’s..”

“You’re going to need to help us here, man,” Wyatt interrupted.

Chouinard looked like he was passing a kidney stone.

“He has a huge dick.”

“Right,” Wyatt said, a little contemplatively.

“That he does,” Bood conceded. Roz was unfortunately impossibly hung. It sort of explained everything, really. The ungodly amount of swagger and his generally insufferable confidence.

“All I’m saying is that if I were to do that, I’d want to fully commit.”

“I get that, actually,” Young said. “I’m Roz too. He feels like he’d be an attentive lover.”

“An attentive.. what?” Bood practically found himself gasping.

“An attentive lover,” Young said, his chipped tooth flashing as he grinned.

“Who else thinks Roz would be ‘an attentive lover’?” Bood asked, looking around wildly.

No one else jumped in, until Barrett.

“Haas, you have something you wanna add?”

“Troy..” Haas begged, looking at him with desperate, pitiful eyes.

Haas worshiped Rozanov so openly it almost wasn’t even fun to make fun of him for it. To Haas, Roz transcended attentive lover.

He was more like dad, hero, and sex god all wrapped up in one.

“Shut up, Barrett,” Haas mumbled. “Everyone knows you had a crush on Shane before you knew he and Ilya were together.”

Barrett looked murderous. “What did you just say?”

“When he played for Montreal,” Haas added by way of explanation. “We were not blind.”

Troy looked like he was about to commit murder and probably get extradited to Switzerland as a result. 

“Dykstra, what about you?” Bood asked warily. He was the last one left.

Dykstra looked thoughtful.

“Why do I have to choose?” Evan responded after a moment, rolling back his massive defenseman’s shoulders.

“What?” Bood asked. “Dude, you have to choose.. it’s not like you can have both—“

He stopped himself. Oh. Oh.

Had that been an option all along?

Bood had the intrusive thought that he definitely needed to change his answer, like, now.

Oh, he was drunk. He needed to get out of here.

Wyatt took the reins. “Ok, boys, I think we’ve given each other a lot to, uh, think about.”

“Cens cell. Ok?”

The rest of the men nodded emphatically. 

This was where they kept all of the things that simply could not under any circumstance be repeated outside of the confines of their locker room or a hotel bar post-game.

Cens cell it was.

“Well, guys, I’m out,” Bood muttered, slapping Hayes on the back. “See you in a bit, yeah, Dykstra?”

His roomie nodded. “I need another drink.”

Bood wandered towards their room, doing his best to walk in a relatively straight line. Straight.

Why’d the line need to be straight, anyway?

Bood didn’t even turn on the lights. He peeled off all of his clothing and climbed right into bed. He’d deal with teeth-brushing and peeing at a later date.

It was about thirty seconds into getting comfortable with his eyes shut when he heard it.

Someone was in pain.

He heard the sound again. Pain, someone was in it.

Whoever that was was not well.

It sounded like it was right next door. Wasn’t that one of their rooms?

Should he knock and make sure this person was ok?

Then he heard it.

“Ah, fuck.”

Oh.

Then the thump of a bed frame hitting again, and again, against the wall that separated his bed from.. whatever was happening on the other side of it.

Then, “that’s the best you can do, Rozanov?”

Oh my god.

Bood could hear something low and angry sounding in Russian.

Then the pace picked up and his wall was practically rattling.

Bood couldn’t even say he was having a fight or flight response. He was frozen solid. Was he breathing?

He could now hear the slap of skin against skin. Thick and harsh, and raw sounding.

Maybe it was the conversation they had all just had, but it felt like he was on the other side of the wall.

He could see them.

In his mind’s eye, he could see Rozanov fucking Hollander from behind, his hand twisted in the other man’s dark hair as Hollander clutched the head board and practically coached him.

“Harder, baby, fuck.” And then a groan in response. More thick, harsh slapping.

“Don’t you dare fucking come yet,” Shane’s voice commanded, though muffled through the wall, and for a moment Bood thought the man was talking to him, because he suddenly realized his hand was on his dick.

Not overly so, just on it and checking out what was going on down there.

Then there was a scoff that sounded like pure Ilya, and the sound of an ass being loudly smacked, Shane’s ass. Bood felt like he was going to pass out.

The other man let out a high, frustrated sounding moan.

“Like it is ever me,” Ilya's accented voice spat back. “You come like you were made for my cock.”

“Shut the fuck up and fuck me.”

And then the sound of bodies slapping against each other intensified again.

Ok, that definitely sounded like Shane Hollander. But Bood refused to believe that was him.

Who was this man and where was his goody two shoes of a teammate? Bood wondered, as he stroked himself harder.

“On top, on top,” he could hear Ilya mutter.

And then suddenly it was like Shane's voice was practically in Bood’s ear. He couldn’t be more than a few inches away from him, really.

“That feels so fucking good,” Shane moaned. “You feel so good, ah fuck, yes.”

He sounded completely out of it, like he was on the verge of babbling nonsensical words.

“Who owns this ass?”

“You do, fuck, Ilya,” Shane declared.

“This ass is mine.” Yep, that was definitely llya.

Then Bood could hear the sound of a hand repeatedly smacking an ass to within an inch of its life.

He was so, so hard. Was he going to come?

He couldn’t think about that right now.

“I’m yours, baby,” Shane moaned.

And then, “fill me with your come.”

Jesus christ.

Bood ripped has hand off of himself, gasping. 

That had seemed to do something to Shane too, because he was practically speaking in tongues. Though Bood was able to catch, “fuck, I’m coming,” being repeated at least a dozen times. 

And then “I love you” again and again like it was a mantra.

A hand slammed against the wall and Bood heard a low growl, a distinct sound he really only associated with Rozanov making a particularly impressive goal. Then a loose string of Russian.

There was a long, drawn out pause where all Bood could catch was muffled panting.

Bood looked at his hand, which was back on his rock hard dick and moving rapidly up and down it of its own free will.

He stumbled out of bed and into the shower and got himself off faster than he had since he was a teenager.

He was never, ever going to think about this again. This was not going into the Cens cell. This was going into the equivalent of a military-grade safe in Antarctica.. in his brain.

He dove back into bed and pulled the covers up tight.

He couldn’t hear his, uh, teammates on the other side of the wall. They must have fallen asleep. He hoped they had fallen asleep.

Soon after, Bood desperately embraced sleep, and everything finally went truly dark.

He woke up blearily the following morning. He felt hungover. Pretty dangerously so.

By the time he had made it to breakfast, some of the guys were already there. He plopped down next to Wyatt and made his way through his row of five hard-boiled eggs.

Just as he grabbing a cup of coffee for a swig, Rozanov and Hollander turned the corner.

They both looked very well rested.

Hollzy threw Roz a long, lingering look as the man draped an arm over his shoulder.

“What is up, guys?” Rozanov asked, sitting down right next to Bood and patting the seat next to him for Hollander.

Bood and Wyatt let out noncommittal noises.

“How was Shane?”

“I’m sorry, what?” Bood practically sputtered.

“I said, how was sleep?” Rozanov asked, like he was speaking English to a toddler.

“Oh, it was fine,” Bood said, shrugging.

Truthfully, after the thing that shall not be named or thought of ever again it had been one of the deepest sleeps of his life.

Hollander sat down next to Rozanov and yawned.

“Yeah? That’s nice.” He added, “I slept like a baby.”

“That so?” Bood asked, and he couldn’t hide the skeptical tone that had slipped into his voice.

“…yes?” Shane responded, looking at him with confusion.

“That’s nice,” he recovered.

“Shane loves Edmonton,” Roz said with a wicked grin. “So cold, but he has me to keep him warm.”

“You make it sound like this hotel doesn’t have centralized heating,” Hollander said, rolling his eyes.

“Who cares if it does or does not?” Roz grinned. “You have me.”

“Don’t remind me,” Hollzy retorted, trying to sound annoyed and failing as he looked into Rozanov’s piercing gaze and blushed deeply.

Bood watched whatever this was, this version of flirting that was half on ice chirping, half full blown declaration of love, and one hundred percent them.

He loved these guys. They had given him a lot to think about.

But man did he love them.

Chapter Text

May 2023—Washington DC

Ilya pressed his face against the wrought iron fence that protected the White House lawn and peered in.

It was a big house, no question. Though it had nothing on the Kremlin.

He wanted little to do with Russia, but even he could admit his country of origin knew a thing or two about imposing state architecture.

America—Ilya was surprised how little he missed it. He had loved this place when he had first moved to Boston at the age of eighteen after becoming a multimillionaire over night.

But the novelty had worn off quickly. For one, the longer he had lived in the United States the more he had realized how much freedom was a promise instead of a reality.

Granted, you could talk about things here, which was nice.

The first decade of his career had lined up with a relatively progressive American President. If you had asked Ilya what that president stood for, though, he would have had no clue. Something about health care? Human rights?

Russia’s health care was sponsored by the state so he had never really understood that debate. The human rights piece had felt personal, however.

Coming from Russia, it had shocked him how much gay marriage had been the topic of discussion during his ten years here.

Though he hadn’t been paying that much attention for most of it, if he was being honest. Which was sort of funny when you took into account the fact that during that decade he had slowly, steadily been falling in love with another man.

But maybe that was a reflection of his own specific brand of delusion. That he never stopped and thought that this national debate had anything to do with him. He played hockey and he fucked Shane Hollander. Everything else was white noise.

In Russia, there had been no debate to begin with, and that had been part of what had always felt so scary and suffocating. A sort of surveillance that Ilya chafed against as someone who had never acted that rationally or wisely.

He had always had this haunting suspicious that if he stayed it would only be a matter of time before he would be found out. For liking men in the way he liked women, which was to say, far too much.

America had hardly been on some long, marvelous march towards equality, though.

If he had to diagnose this country’s problem it would probably be that Americans loved to talk. He often felt their hearts were in the right place (well—some of them, that recent President who loved Russia was an idiot). But Americans struggled to do, and in there lay the problem.

Ilya had always liked his job because of the doing, since playing hockey was ninety nine percent doing. The only wheels he spun were the ones on his sports cars.

And now there was more doing to be done. Ilya was staring down the latest task at hand. Beating the Capitals in the Eastern Conference, for which the Centaurs had made their way to Washington DC .

Ilya still couldn’t entirely wrap his head around the fact that they were here, that they were once again a playoff team.

While they had made the playoffs the last two years, it had been as wild card qualifiers. Last year that had been thanks to a Herculean point-scoring effort from Shane, even as their defense struggled.

This playoffs, they had cruised through a shut out against Buffalo and found themselves in DC in what felt like the blink of any eye.

Shane was already deep in playoff mode, a mode Ilya hadn’t seen much of up close and personal.

Historically at this time of year they were either focused on beating each other, or one of them was smarting after a defeat at the hands of the other.

It had never been the most relaxed time of year for rivals turned lovers.

But for husbands turned teammates? Not so bad, Ilya thought.

Shane was clearly stressed, but he did a decent job of hiding it under the unflappable mask of his co-captaincy.

It had been cute to watch their team, the Centaurs, start to open up to his husband and fall in love with him in their own way over the last two seasons. It was hard not to fall in love with Shane when you were up close.

He was a once in a generation player, but beyond that, there was something about Shane’s humble sort of leadership, one that was always by example and from behind.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t be bossy, because he most definitely was. There was no use arguing with Shane when he thought he was right.

But his temperament was unique for someone at that level of play. The league bred larger-than-life characters who longed for the spotlight, people like Ilya.

Shane was a gift, something rare and wholly unique.

He was such a genius at hockey that it was almost hard for him to relay strategy to his teammates. It was like he was explaining Calculus to them and they had never made it past Algebra.

But with time, he had gotten better at captaining, and, in a sense, coaching. Ilya thought he was actually quite good at that second thing. Ilya was too, but the difference was it didn’t bring him joy, not in the way it did his husband.

Whenever Ilya was willing to expose his soft underbelly, he could admit he loved making his teammates feel safe and taken care of. Nurtured, even.

For Shane, it was less about that. Shane loved helping people win, and Ilya was realizing in real time how good he was at doing that.

Maybe even good enough do it professionally one day.

Ilya shook his head to get himself away from that thought. They had a lot of Stanley Cups to win first, and maybe even a few children to have he thought with a grin.

By now, the rest of his teammates were taking selfies with the White House looming behind them.

It wasn’t like they hadn’t all been to America’s capital countless times before, but it was a perfect spring day and the cherry blossoms had recently exploded, leaving the city a sweet-smelling wonderland.

So far, the Capitals had won two games in a row for the Eastern Conference title. The Centaurs were all still so shocked to be here—well, except for Ilya and Shane, who were old hands when it came to the playoffs. The rest of the team had been so shocked that the increasingly tenuous nature of the Centaurs’ position had only just begun to sink in.

They needed to win this next game or they were going to be in serious trouble. Though the Capitals had seen better days, they were a pretty good team.

When Ilya had been young, young enough that he was still in Russia, he had loved their star center, Artem Bukharin, who, like Ilya, had showed up in this country speaking little to no English and with a license to kill.

Bukharin was a phenomenal, flashy goalscorer, having recently hit a cool nine hundred throughout his illustrious career. Ilya had always loved how bucolic and Russian he looked, with his shaggy beard, no shits given attitude, and toothless smile.

Over the years, he and Bukharin had become friends. Ilya wouldn’t call it a mentorship, because they were competitors and also Russian, and, to Russians, mentorship was one of those words that often felt like it exclusively existed in English.

But over the years he and Bukharin had been pretty good at finding a way to get a drink when they were in the same city and usually saw each other every year or so.

After a few more hours wandering and frolicking in the cherry blossoms with a gaggle of two-hundred and-something pound grown men, Ilya made his exit and grabbed a cab to meet up with his fellow countryman.

He met Bukharin in the most Russian looking bar he had ever seen outside of the Eastern Bloc. He was shocked something like this was even allowed to exist in the heart of America’s capital, but somehow it did, and the older man was sitting at a booth grinning his signature toothless grin as he locked eyes with Ilya.

Ilya smiled. He took such pleasure in knowing he wouldn’t speak a word of English for at least the next hour.

“Look who it is,” Bukharin bellowed in Russian, his accent hinting at a childhood spent far away from the streets of Moscow.

“You look well for someone who’s been on their heels most of the playoffs,” he said with a teasing grin.

“Well, it didn’t feel appropriate to beat you out right, old man,” Ilya said with a pat on his shoulder as he plopped down on the other side of the booth. “Plus where’s the fun in that, really?”

“You’re right, not very fun at all,” Bukharin agreed.

Like Ilya, he had a similar philosophy that this sport they were paid millions to play should actually somehow be fun. Shane could stand time with Bukharin, Ilya thought a little ruefully.

“So,” Bukharin said, pushing a full glass of vodka Ilya’s way, “how are we doing in boring Ottawa?”

“Good,” Ilya said with a smile. He realized he hadn’t seen Bukharin since a few months into the beginning of his and Shane’s first season playing together. So much had happened since then.

“Really good, actually.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Bukharin said, sipping slowly from his glass as his light blue eyes met Ilya’s.

Bukharin and Ilya had never really spoken about Shane. Vaguely sure, as a sort of implied context for Ilya’s life choices and current state of being. But never outright.

It wasn’t like all Russians were homophobes and all North Americans saints. Americans, in particular, were some of the most ignorant people he had ever met. But a sort of pervasive hatred of queerness in all its forms—of gay men, in particular—permeated Russian culture, and so Ilya had always been a little scared by what he might find out should he let that conversation unfold.

Sometimes ignorance was bliss.

“Yep,” Ilya agreed with Bukharin, as he thought of what it was like to play alongside Shane.

“How is your husband?”

Ilya almost jumped. This was new, he thought nervously. Not bad, just new.

He would proceed with caution.

“Good, I think,” Ilya said, meeting Bukharin’s curious gaze. 

“You think? Do you not know?” Bukharin asked, raising an eyebrow. 

He went on. “I’ve learned it’s best to know my wife’s moods every minute of the day, or else.”

“He’s good,” Ilya said more confidently. “We’re very happy.”

“I am glad to hear it. Cheers to that, Ilyusha.”

“Happy wife, happy life,” Bukharin added in English, before reverting back to Russian.

“Though.. my English is not good enough to know what the fuck rhymes with husband, sorry.”

A smile broke out on Ilya’s face. This man was so rough around the edges and he loved him for it.

Bukharin went on. “You know, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you seduced Shane Hollander to get the Centaurs a shot at the Cup.”

Ilya laughed out loud. “That would be one hell of a commitment to winning.”

“I guess it would be,” Bukharin said with a twinkle in his eyes. “Though it’s not like your husband is so bad to look at.”

Ilya threw up his best smirk to cover the genuine surprise that had flashed on his face for a brief moment.

When had he ever been around a full-blooded heterosexual Russian man who felt comfortable casually acknowledging that a man was handsome?

Shane was like that though. He was an exception to a lot of peoples’ rules.

“No, not bad at all,” Ilya said, sipping from his glass.

“In the years I’ve played against Hollander I haven’t found a single thing wrong with him,” Bukharin said. 

“Good luck with your hunt,” Ilya retorted.

“Surely there’s something,” Bukharin teased. “Does he forget to do the dishes?”

“Nope,” Ilya said. Shane was about as fastidious at home as he was on the ice.

“He could stand to be less good at center though,” Ilya joked with a shrug. It was a joke, but it also hit a little close to home.

Bukharin was no idiot. He looked at Ilya for a moment, and then took another sip from his ice cold glass.

“Ah. So there is trouble in paradise.”

“Trouble? Hardly,” Ilya scoffed. “And don’t go around using that against me, old man. You asked, so I answered.”

“Call down, umnik,” Bukharin hushed him.

“I don’t need to know about your marital problems to beat you two,” he added with a grin.

“Please,” Ilya shot back. “Last game you looked like you were about to pass out. Have you run a single mile in the last year?”

Bukharin did have the world’s most marvelous dad bod for an elite athlete. It was almost impressive how good he was given how little of a shit he appeared to give.

Ilya sort of hoped he might look like that one day. Though maybe running around in the backyard with his kids, instead of still playing game after game of hockey into oblivion.

Bukharin ignored his jab. “So what is the problem exactly? I’m all ears.”

“You go to therapy now, or something?”

“Please, every Russian in this country has a therapist,” Bukharin scolded him. “Why else come here?”

Ilya laughed at that and met the older man’s gaze, which looked both playful and a little serious.

“Ilya..”

“Fine. It’s not a problem, really, and maybe that’s what makes it worse.”

“How so?”

“We play best when together, on the same line.”

Bukharin nodded. He knew. He had seen the difference first hand.

Ilya went on. “We also play best at center.”

“Both of these things can't be true at the same time,” Ilya said, running his hand through his curls.

“Have you thought about letting him play it?”

“Of course I have,” Ilya shot back. Around the time of their marriage Ilya had started admitting that Shane was potentially the greatest hockey player of all time. It hadn’t stung as much as he thought it would to say those words out loud. 

“And?”

“I just can’t seem to do it. I love him so much. I love this team,” he said, pausing. “But I don’t know if I will love this game at wing.”

“And Shane wants you to love this game.”

“Shane needs me to love this game. We’ve gone through so much to get here. We deserve to finally win together.”

Bukharin nodded and scratched his thick gray beard in thought.

It was a little surreal to discuss this with the one person who stood in the way of him and Shane making it to the Stanley Cup finals.

But that was Bukharin for you. He was so very good at hockey, but he had always understood that other things mattered too.

“I think there are solutions you haven’t thought of,” he said after a moment.

“Like what?”

“It’s probably not my place to tell you,” Bukharin said.

“Why?” Ilya asked. Because we are two men in love?

It was almost like Bukharin could read his thoughts. “Because I am playing you in under twenty four hours, Rozanov.”

Right.

“What I will say is this,” Bukharin went on. “You have never played by the rules. It’s why I like you so much, Ilya. Why start playing by them now?”

Ilya thought about Bukharin’s question. He wasn’t really sure what the older man meant, but the sentiment was appreciated. That he and Shane would figure out how to navigate this in their own way.

He knocked back the rest of his vodka and they moved on to other topics, like Bukharin’s brood of rambunctious children and impossibly hot Russian model of a wife.

By the time Ilya was suited up on center ice staring Bukharin down in a face off, he had still not recounted his conversation with the older man to Shane.

Bukharin grinned and there was something more than a little patronizing in his eyes, like Ilya was some toddler holding a hockey stick. The Capitals won that face off.

The game progressed in the same way the last one had, which was to say, not well. They had made it through two periods without a single Centaurs goal. Bukharin and his men had posted up three.

It was not a pretty place to sit and Ilya was trying to not accept their seemingly inevitable defeat and end of their season.

Shane, on the other hand, had not accepted either of those things. He was playing like a man possessed until the bitter end.

Then Ilya had made a truly atrocious error, the sort that was a Junior league move, hardly one that anyone would associate with the NHL, let alone one of its star players.

Coach Wiebe indicated a line swap and Ilya, Shane, and Troy skated towards the bench.

As he sat down, Ilya braced himself for Shane’s words. Sure enough.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

Shane wasn’t necessarily a yeller, but his words could cut like ice. He had such high expectations of himself, and by extension Ilya, and nothing was worse than being confronted by those expectations on a losing day.

Ilya was tired. They had already played three playoff games against the Capitals. He wasn’t a twenty-two year old anymore.

Before he could think of a single good retort, “fine, you do it then,” slipped out angrily and unbidden.

Shane’s glare dropped, and he looked at Ilya with surprise.

Ilya hadn’t been serious, right? It was a fucking joke.

Obviously they were not going to switch positions mid-way through a game. That was only done in a power play or when a dire injury made a team reconfigure a line last minute.

A team didn’t do that just because their star center was a little tired.

Then he thought of Bukharin, and what he said. They had never once played by the rules. They were both world class centers, who so clearly were meant to play shoulder-to-shoulder.

He had mulled over this complex riddle for two years. It had felt unsolvable, until now.

“I said, you do it then, Hollander,” Ilya repeated louder.

That got Shane’s attention and Coach Wiebe’s. Their Coach, so focused on the battle on the ice, took one look at the two of them and Ilya could see him make a split second decision.

He shrugged, as if to say, why not? What did they really have to lose right now?

When Ilya and Shane got back onto the ice, Ilya took his new position at wing.

Bukharin took one look at Shane across from him and laughed.

“Just my luck that you’d figure it out in time, Rozanov,” he barked in Russian. Shane was fluent enough at Russian to get that one and looked at Ilya like this old man had truly gone off the deep end.

Shane won that face off and then proceeded to play the most beautiful five minutes of hockey Ilya had ever seen.

It was like Shane had been holding his breath in for the past year since being made wing, no, for the past two years since he had been exiled from the Voyageurs.

This single move had unlocked something in Shane’s play. And not just Shane’s, Ilya’s too.

A minute in to Shane at center, Ilya made his most elegant assist in recent memory. Through the legs of one of Capitals wingers, and then a quick backhand to Shane upon being reunited with puck.

In Shane’s capable hands, the puck had rocketed into the net and the crowd was on their feet. Even the thousands of Capitals fans in the arena could admit that they had missed watching Ilya and Shane make a move like that.

A few minutes later, before Coach Wiebe could retire their line for some much needed rest, Ilya got ahold of the puck on a breakaway and felt Shane at his side before he could even think to ask.

He shot the puck towards Shane, and then Shane shot it right back as if to say, this one is all you, babe.

Ilya grinned through his mouth guard. Oh, please. He was nothing if not generous.

He shot the puck back right before he entered the crease and Shane slammed it in at full speed.

The arena roared.

Shane practically climbed onto Ilya with joy and his rosy cheeks and wide grin were enough to make Ilya want to let Shane play center for the rest of their lives, maybe.

They got some much needed rest after that and when they climbed back onto the ice Ilya wordlessly took center.

Bukharin laughed with glee.

“Atta boy, Rozanov.”

Ilya thought he sounded a little bit like a proud parent.

The Capitals looked at their aged captain like he had lost his marbles.

Ilya scored quickly at center, bringing the game to a clean tie with two minutes left on the clock.

Ilya loved a game like this, where overtime and sudden death loomed in his periphery. Shane was less enthused. He liked a clean, decisive win.

Sure enough, with a few seconds left on the clock his husband was on a mission, careening down the ice with the puck in his grasp.

Ilya tailed him closely, which wasn’t so hard when you had been the fastest player in the league for more than a decade.

Just as he thought Shane was going to take one final Hail Mary on goal before taking this to overtime, Shane swerved out of the way, leading Ilya to race into the puck and tap it part accidentally and part instinctually into the net.

The Capitals goalie was so confused by Shane’s little magic trick that it took him more than a few seconds to realize they had just lost the game.

But Ilya knew it immediately and he let out a yell that permeated the ice.

“Hollander, you fucking nut job!”

Shane grinned and sped back towards him to wrap him in his arms. Then their team was on them.

They had won that game against the Capitals, though ultimately not the series.

Ilya had had the worst sort of luck with a puck to the kneecap in game seven. This knee had always been trouble, and that had taken him out when the Centaurs had needed him most.

Shane had done an expert job holding the line, but the shake up had rattled the team, who were not used to a game without Ilya’s leadership, and Shane alone had seemingly not been enough.

While that loss had been brutal, the lesson they had learned along way was worth a hundred losses. Ilya and Shane had unlocked how to win, together. 

Ilya thought about that with a smile. Next year, the Cup would be theirs. And then again, and again, and again.

The way they had played in the fourth game was unlike anything the league had ever seen. He knew it. Shane knew it. The world knew it.

Ilya and Shane had returned home and ran off to their cottage for a blissful month’s escape from the world of hockey and from the world, period. There, by the front door on that first day, they had found a massive freshly delivered bouquet of flowers in red, white, and blue.

America? Russia? The colors were ultimately the same.

Ilya smiled, picking up the card.

In Cyrillic, “всегда лучше вместе.”

Bukharin.

“Always better together,” Shane translated over his shoulder without really thinking.

Ilya grinned.

“Yes, I think so,” he said, turning around to kiss Shane on the mouth.

“Who are these even from?” Shane asked suspiciously.

“From a friend who thinks we should not play by the rules,” Ilya said with a smile.

“I like this friend, then,” Shane said, half distracted as he pulled Ilya into the house. “Now let’s see how many times you can make me come."

They would deal with the flowers later.

Chapter Text

February 2024—Ottawa

Every so often Troy looked around and wondered how exactly he had gotten here.

Here was Ottawa, in the literal sense. And it was the Centaurs, the NHL team Troy had played on since 2021.

But more specifically, here was a gay bar. A gay bar where a glammed up drag queen in a Centaurs-inspired look was giving his captain, Shane Hollander, a lap dance.

Shane was blushing so deeply that if Troy didn’t know better he would have thought he needed to be extracted then and there.

Except Troy did know better. Shane Hollander loved drag queens.

He couldn’t get enough of them. At some point over the last few years Shane had started to love them with a rare adoration that he reserved for only a few things, namely hockey and Ilya Rozanov.

The way to get Shane to respect anything was through the language of sports.

To Shane, Drag Race was “like the Olympics” and the queens were “utility players,” who had to master every skill under the sun to compete, including but not limited to celebrity impersonations, death-defying dancing, and sewing their own looks from scratch.

“Ok, so they had to make these ball gowns out of wrapping paper,” Shane would exclaim to Wyatt in the locker room as he recapped last night’s episode, adding in awe, “can you imagine if we had to, like, make our skates?”

By the third time Troy had overheard Shane telling a rookie that Alyssa Edwards was the PK Subban of drag he had felt obligated to pull the kids aside and say that if they had no clue what their captain was talking about that was, in fact, ok.

Ilya would watch these exchanges and just laugh and laugh. In the years that Troy had watched his married linemates interact he had learned that Ilya’s agenda was almost always encouraging Shane to be as openly gay as possible.

Troy appreciated the instinct. Shane was somehow even worse at being gay than Troy, which was saying something since Troy needed all of the help he could get.

Ilya, on the other hand, slipped easily into queer culture. If he wasn’t fluent in the language, he was at least a natural study. It had been harder for Troy, and no doubt hardest for Shane.

Being gay in the NHL was not easy. It was possibly more challenging than being gay in any other professional sports league in North America. Not that Troy wanted to dwell on that fact that much, or, like, get an award for it.

Over the years he had come to realize that no one was making him play hockey at gun point. Troy played hockey because he wanted to and because he loved it. It didn’t hurt he was paid millions of dollars to do it.

So being closeted had been less about survival and more a strategic trade off. Troy, and Shane, didn’t want to lose what they had, and they had been angry and resentful that they even had to think that way in the first place.

Troy knew many gay people were not staring down the barrel of a decision like that. Not just because it was so rare to be an NHL player, but because not every gay person could seamlessly pass in such an unrelentingly heteronormative (see, Harris was teaching him) world.

In fact, many didn’t have the ability to pass at all—no, they had no choice but to live openly and so had built a culture that fortified them from that reality, one that had helped them survive.

A culture that hockey boys who looked and sounded an awful lot like Troy and Shane often belittled.

Certainly not here and now though, Troy thought, as Ilya let out a whoop from his front row seat and threw a wad of dollar bills at the queen in question, who was now fully straddling his bright-red husband as she danced to a blaring pop song.

Troy loved this culture, his culture.

He didn’t need to know whatever pop song gay people had ironically anointed that year. He didn’t need to know the slang, or dress fashionably.

He just needed to appreciate this thing that had been built. To love it and defend it, and to celebrate it at midnight with his teammates after a particularly decisive shutout of the Voyageurs earlier that evening.

This sort of evening had become a tradition. Whenever the Centaurs beat Montreal in Ottawa, which they did frequently, the Cens first line ended the night at their favorite local gay bar, often with their straight teammates in tow.

These games had essentially become pride nights. Except out of pocket and decidedly not league-approved, full of traditions that could have only come from the brain of someone as deranged as Rozanov.

Whenever the Voyageurs were in town, the warm up songs were the who’s who of gay anthems. 

Someone had even changed Shane’s goalscoring number to “Dancing Queen” and that tradition had stuck. Shane pretended to hate it when Ilya tried to get him to dance whenever he scored, but Troy knew his stoic captain well enough to clock a performance when he saw one.

Then there was the roving fan cam that would scan the crowd for the straightest looking Centaurs fans only to have them hold up signs that said things like “Gay for Shane Hollander” or “Mr. Ilya fucking Rozanov.” If Troy hadn’t found the whole thing so fucking funny, he might have actually shed a tear of joy at how commonplace these bits had become.

The Centaurs office and NHL had little to add to the conversation. It wasn’t like they could say much when these games had become such big-ticket items.

Why else would Elton John ever fly to Ottawa to watch a hockey game? Let alone twice.

Troy knew Shane was incredibly serious about this sport. It was his job and his calling. He had no interest in making a mockery of all he had accomplished.

But sometimes it felt like Shane hadn’t realized that mentality and having a little bit of fun weren’t mutually exclusive. That had been Ilya’s contribution to his husband’s world view, and it had been much needed.

This was the man who had barely touched Ilya on the ice their entire first season playing together. Who had even debated not sharing a room with him on road trips like that somehow proved how seriously he took the game of hockey. Who had spent a majority of that season refusing to shower with Ilya in front of their teammates (as if Troy hadn’t noticed that one, please).

This was the man who unironically called his husband “Rozanov” in post-game press conferences. And not in the way that Ilya called him “Hollander”, which was sort of flirty and cute. Troy thought about calling Harris “Drover” in any unironic capacity and felt like having an aneurysm.

But that was Shane, unchill and so, so serious.

Except for during these games against the Voyageurs. These games had become some sort of bizarre ritual for Hollander, where the many intricate rules that governed his life went out the window for three glorious gay hours.

The fans loved it because it was a side of their hometown hero that they rarely got to see. Ilya loved it because in his eyes the gayer Shane was the better. Troy loved it because it made him proud to be on this team and to feel so publicly celebrated alongside his linemen.

And the Centaurs loved it because they loved their first line, and they loved it in the way that they loved the annual gay pride parade. After all, the only thing more boring than being gay and in Ottawa was being straight and in Ottawa.

Back in the bar, Bood had taken Shane’s place in the chair and looked like he was having the time of his life.

Bood had a girlfriend he loved very much, but Troy had always felt like there was a queer bone in that man’s body. Next to all the straights one, but there nonetheless.

Ilya was sitting in the front with his injured foot on a chair and Shane somehow in his lap.

Troy’s other captain had been out navigating surgeries all season. The inciting incident had been a particularly rough puck to the knee during their playoffs series in Washington DC last spring.

Troy knew Ilya was pissed about it, but he was doing what he could to cover that up. Luckily they had Shane.

Troy had expected Shane to be an awkward figure of authority, until he had been on the receiving end of a critical Hollander pep talk and remembered that the man had lead his previous team to three Stanley Cups all before he had turned thirty.

Shane had swagger, just never in the ways one expected.

Ilya’s speeches were aggressive and brash, and typically had bits where he accidentally mined movies for inspiring quotes and someone had to break it to him that he had just quoted The Lion King to twenty grown men.

Shane’s speeches were ice cold and exhilarating. There was no option but winning when you were in Shane Hollander’s orbit. It was fucking intense.

For the first time in his life Troy felt like he was on a Stanley Cup-winning team, or at least one that could be.

Troy wanted to win more than anything. He wanted it so badly he could practically feel the Cup in his arms, its weight and heft. Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night with fantasies of holding it or nightmares of watching it slip away in the final minutes of overtime.

He had never had those dreams before Shane Hollander entered his life and now it was all he could think of.

That was Shane’s power. He gave the gift of visualization. It wasn’t enough to want a thing, you had to believe you could actually win it. You had to taste it.

Troy knew he wasn’t alone in feeling this change. The tenor of the team was different, especially as Shane became their only on ice captain. Shane was no longer a guest in someone else’s house. This house was his and Rozanov’s and they had built it brick by brick.

The transition from Ilya’s leadership to something more akin to joint custody had not always been easy. There had been some pretty nasty spats along the way.

Ilya always chose the fun way out. Why stick someone’s face in the mud of their loss when you could cheer them up for the next victory?

Shane chose the mud pretty much every time.

During one practice early in the season, the rookies had been goofing off hard and Shane had made them do suicides on the ice until two had thrown up.

It had been a painful, unpleasant punishment that had only ended when Ilya made an appearance from one of his physical therapy sessions and saw what was unfolding in his absence.

He had barked something in Russian to Shane, and Shane had hit back. That had set off an argument in a stream of consonants. 

Troy had no clue what they were saying, which made the whole thing far more disconcerting.

Bood had finally gotten in there and yelled, “if you can say it out loud, you can say it in English.”

That had seemed to pull Shane out of whatever instinct had taken hold of him. He looked at the team and his gaze dropped to the ice. He skated off and into the locker room with a huff.

Shane hadn’t exactly apologized to those rookies, but he had been a little gentler moving forward, or at least tried to be. Troy could see him battling his own instincts for victory at any cost, and it was almost as impressive to see someone who cared that much as it was terrifying.

Certain people had really benefited from Shane’s style of leadership. One was Haas, who was quickly becoming a force in his own right. He was a perfectionist who responded well to Shane’s form of captaining and coaching, where every problem had a clear solution with the only obstacle being how badly one wanted it.

It wasn’t like Shane was always bad cop. Getting a one-on-one with him was heady stuff. Plenty of the guys hung back after practice for that sort of personalized coaching. Sometimes Troy wondered if it was for the results or because there was nothing more intoxicating than being pinned by Hollander’s undivided attention.

Attention that was now squarely on Ilya, where it was always most at home.

As the drag queen continued her performance and Bood lapped it up, Ilya leaned into Shane’s ear and whispered something.

Shane grinned and pressed a kiss to his cheek. Troy had no clue what they were saying but had a feeling it was foul.

He had seen the jokes online. Everyone thought Troy was their third, because in a literal sense.. he was. He would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about that, and lord knows Harris loved the idea.

But whatever alchemy the three of them had was special. So special that it wasn’t something Troy was willing to compromise for a thing as stupid and potentially catastrophic as that.

It was the sort of alchemy that Troy, in his cockiest moments, thought could win them not one Cup but two, three, and maybe even four.

Shane was now making out with Ilya and Troy looked at Harris with a raised eyebrow. Shane never, ever did stuff like that outside of these four walls. Blink and you could miss that he and Ilya were even married.

But here, it was like some veil had dropped and a freer, wilder version of Shane would come out to play. Ilya was hardly complaining. His large hand wrapped around Shane’s head and he pulled him closer.

If Troy didn’t find the whole thing so ridiculous, he might have even found it hot. Shane and Ilya were hot, obviously, and in love, and perfect at playing hockey.

Troy had always been a rain cloud and so he sometimes found the whole thing to be a bit much. But of course he adored them. He would lay down his life for them, and practically did every game.

He was proud of the fact that he could withstand their gravitational pull and live to tell the tale. Maybe now that Ilya was out, and Shane and Troy had a new line mate in Bood, he had a better appreciation of the task that was keeping up with his two captains.

Playing with Shane and Ilya was like playing with fire, or staring straight at the sun. It was like sitting at the bottom of the ocean and withstanding however many tons of pressure, or climbing a mountain without a lick of oxygen.

No one really talked about how hard it was. No one could even do it but him. It wasn’t like he expected a medal for that accomplishment, but it had to count for something.

Behind every legend was the guy who somehow found a way to keep up.

Harris wordlessly got it, the Herculean, thankless task his boyfriend had been assigned.

Some nights Troy would come home desperately needing to let off steam, and Harris would let Troy fuck him roughly into oblivion.

Troy loved Harris for this and the countless other ways his boyfriend took care of him and made him feel like the most valuable, special person on earth.

He didn’t mean to sound ungrateful for his lot in life, because he wasn’t. He loved Shane and Ilya. They were his best friends, in a way, and frankly more than that. They were his brothers.

It was an honor to play alongside them. Every game was even more of a pinch me moment than watching a drag queen tease Shane in a gay bar.

How on earth had he gotten here?

Troy had no clue, but he would ride this karmic wave as long as it would have him.

Chapter Text

November 2021—Detroit

Brandon sat in the conference room he and the coaching staff had commandeered for the team’s breakfast and sipped his coffee as he reviewed the schedule.

The Centaurs had begun trickling in and were giving versions of their standard greetings to Brandon, or Coach Wiebe as he was known to them, as they sat down and dug into breakfast.

They were in Detroit for their first away game of the season. This was already shaping up to be a season unlike any Brandon had ever witnessed, let alone coached.

It was Hollander, really. Brandon had woken up one day and found himself responsible for coaching Shane fucking Hollander.

He would lying if he didn’t admit he felt a little inadequate for that. Hollander could probably coach the Centaurs on his own and do just fine, what with his impeccable hockey education and disciplined way of doing things.

It wasn’t that Rozanov couldn’t do the same, because he very much could and oftentimes had in his role as captain. It was more that Rozanov’s type of genius still felt somewhat tethered to the earth. Hollander’s was a whole other thing.

Brandon continued to make his way through the schedule. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Rozanov steal a bite of toast from Hollander’s plate. The other man scowled and swatted at his husband.

Brandon had not seen that one coming whatsoever.

It had been so implausible, so insane that his first reaction upon seeing that video however many months ago had been to play it again and again as if somehow the images might change.

In shocked silence, he had started to process what had been laid bear for the world to see.

It wasn’t necessarily that Rozanov and Hollander were kissing, or that they were two men. It was that they clearly had done this before, together.

Brandon knew he was a relatively undeveloped bisexual person. Not that he had much issue with that. He was so lucky to have found his wife, Em, when he had.

But that meant that he had very few experiences with men. What he had, had been brief, brilliant, and terrifying.

Even with that, he knew enough to know when two men were genuinely, eagerly making out with each other. 

The kiss had been passionate, declaratively so. Rozanov and Hollander obviously were in love and had been, if Brandon could guess, for a long, long time.

It hadn’t been hard for him to support his captain through the fallout. Brandon’s protectiveness had been instinctual. It had perhaps even healed a part of him that was still so raw from his own destructive entanglement once upon a time.

It had felt good to finally tell that story to someone who wasn’t his wife. Brandon hadn’t even realized it was a thing he needed until he had looked into Rozanov’s surprised but receptive eyes.

He had gone home later that day and cried in his wife’s arms. She had held him and stroked his greying hair. She had kissed his temple and murmured that she loved him and she was so sorry he had gone through that, especially as a kid in a league full of adults who were so ill-equipped to support him.

Brandon had talked about this whole thing so little that it was often hard for him to even recount the story to himself.

It was easier to say to Rozanov “I’m bisexual” than it was to admit “I fell in love with my best friend and teammate when I was nineteen and he didn’t love me back.”

Brandon Wiebe and Trevor MacNeil had been drafted to Detroit the same year. They had both been bright-eyed and so naive to the juggernaut they were entering. The league loved precocious talent like them, the sort that didn’t quite grasp its own disruptive potential. Quickly MacNeil and Wiebe became a duo.

Luckily he and Trevor experienced something akin to love at first sight, or whatever the equivalent was for teammates. Over night, they became best friends.

The fast alliance made sense. Brandon and Trevor were the youngsters. They often had more in common with the children of their teammates than they did with their teammates themselves. Everyone welcomed them with open arms, but it could still feel so isolating.

Brandon was comfortable admitting to himself that Trevor was the real star. It wasn’t like Brandon wasn’t good, because he was, but he was the sort of dependable winger that helped set a team up for success in a playoff season. He was a natural strategist but didn’t lead a team there himself, at least not on the ice.

That was Trevor, who played center and who had quickly become one of the highest scorers in their age group that year.

Trevor had grown up in Nova Scotia and had a sort of homespun farm boy quality to him, like he could be milking cows but had somehow been dropped on a rink, handed a stick, and told to win.

Brandon had been drawn to Trevor from their earliest interactions. He had been so polite and unaware of how great he already was and would be.

Brandon had had a different sort of childhood in Toronto. He had always been an intense kid who wanted to go pro, but had lived in a city that had given him perspective and taught him how to be street-smart and world-weary.

For about a year, Trevor’s charming, gullible nature had made him to want to squeeze his best friend and shake him silly. Then, one day, it had made him want to kiss him instead.

The two rookies shared a hotel room every road trip. Brandon and Trevor wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. They had spent countless late nights watching god knows what on the television and raiding the minibar for M&Ms.

They were professional athletes on million-dollar contracts. They were also teenagers, and their idea of a good time was getting fucked up off a stolen handle while watching cartoons.

Sometimes they would drunkenly talk about the girls they were seeing, or the famous ones who had started showing interest. Thank god Brandon had Trevor, he so often found himself thinking. They were both clearly in over their heads, though no one more so than Trevor with his soft, polite smile.

It was obvious in retrospect how much the first year of their friendship had them careening towards some inevitable sort of car crash.

They were inseparable. If the world had been closer to where it was now it might have called them what they were, which was soulmates. A bonded pair.

Then the lid had finally been blown off their desire, and there had been no going back.

That fateful night, Trevor had gotten a hat trick. His third of their second season playing for Detroit, and they were little more than a month in. All three of those assists had been by Brandon, and the third had been a MacNeil goal in overtime, making Trevor the youngest rookie at the time to secure that honor in the league.

There had been a lot to celebrate, but the victory had been in Winnipeg and they were not even legally allowed to drink, so inevitably that had meant retiring to their hotel room sooner rather than later.

Brandon sat in Trevor’s bed as they made their way through a handle in the dark, their faces illuminated by the glow of reruns on the television.

Brandon could tell how drunk his best friend was because he always got a little cuddly and docile when like this. He was in nothing but a pair of sweatpants and was curled up on his side with his blond-brown head pressed into Brandon’s shoulder.

The weight of him and the feel of him breathing—it was enough to make Brandon go permanently insane, not that he had any clue why.

He remembered having no grasp on what he was feeling or what to make of the urgency of it. He was drunk and had just played his best game of hockey ever, and now he got to celebrate that with his best friend and teammate.

“I’m fucked up,” Trevor whispered into Brandon’s shoulder as he shook his head and giggled.

Brandon laughed. He had said something like, “I know, dude. Winnipeg’s such a shit hole.”

We should be out celebrating.

But they weren’t. They were together in a dark hotel room drunk out of their minds.

Trevor had raised his head and his blue eyes had met Brandon’s.

Brandon’s stomach had swooped. Was he going to be sick?

“God, wish Sarah was here,” Trevor slurred, patting his best friend on the stomach.

They did this a lot, talking about the girls they wished were there with them, the ones with which they loved to celebrate victories.

Sarah had been Trevor’s high school sweetheart and they had stayed in touch even after he had been drafted. She had visited Detroit a few times and whenever she arrived Brandon inevitably did not see Trevor for days at a time.

Brandon would have almost found Trevor’s devotion to Sarah sweet, if he didn’t find himself so envious. Of what, he wasn’t even sure.

Of having a high school sweetheart? Of having someone you liked enough that you wished they were in a Winnipeg hotel room with you this very moment?

“I know, man,” Brandon agreed. “You deserve that tonight.”

The that was sex, of course. Trevor deserved to celebrate what he had just done with a girl’s lips wrapped around his him, or her naked body presented to him like a gift. That was how hockey players celebrated performances like this, or so their older teammates were teaching them.

Trevor deserved to be taken care of, Brandon found himself thinking. He was doing so much for this team. Hell, Brandon was too. And they were teenagers.

Who was taking care of them as they took care of everyone else?

Brandon could feel Trevor’s eyes on him as he pretended to watch whatever was playing on the screen.

“What happened with whatshername?”

Whatsername was the girl Brandon was sort of seeing, who he had met at a party in Detroit when she was home for the holiday before she had returned to New York City and her burgeoning career as an actress.

“She’s.. I don’t know, Trev. We text sometimes.”

“You make a pretty couple,” Trevor said.

Trevor tried that again. “She’s fucking hot, ya know.”

Brandon nodded. “Yeah, she’s way outta my league.”

“No,” Trevor interjected. “She’s not, dude. You’re obviously, like, hot too.”

That had made Brandon pause, though he did his best to hide the reaction.

Trevor complimented how he dressed or his fresh haircut, but he never said something like that so plainly.

“You think so?” Brandon had asked back. He couldn’t help it. He needed to hear it again.

Trevor had nodded in the glow of the television, and he had gulped.

Gulped.

Thanks to the half-finished handle, Brandon found himself speaking before the words had even cleared his brain.

“Who’s hotter?”

“Wha?” Trevor stumbled out.

“Me, or her.”

“Shut up, dude,” Trevor said, wacking Brandon’s head.

But his fingers had slowed on contact. They lingered on his hair.

Why did that feel so good? Brandon wondered. He was so drunk.

“So, what’s the verdict?”

Their faces were close now. Brandon wasn’t going to let this go, he couldn’t. He felt like someone had held his head underwater for a minute and he needed to come up for air.

“You know you’re..” Trevor trailed off before finishing, “hot, or whatever. You know what girls say.”

Brandon frowned. He did, sure.

“Why’d you need me to say it then?”

“I don’t,” Brandon replied, running a hand over his face. The room was spinning a little. “It’s just nice to hear, I guess.”

“Nice to hear?” Trevor questioned carefully. "Or hear from me?”

Brandon looked at Trevor and his best friend’s eyes were wide and questioning, like he wanted to make Brandon happy but didn’t quite know how.

Brandon nodded. Well, it was more like he let his head drop, like he let gravity do the work and finally stopped fighting it.

Trevor was frozen an inch from his face. He could smell the alcohol on his best friend’s breath and the powdery scent of his deodorant.

Then Trevor licked his lips. It was quick, a blink and you miss it sort of a thing.

Brandon felt the gap closing between them. He wasn’t even sure who was leading the charge, just that it was happening and neither of them were turning away.

When Trevor’s lips grazed Brandon’s it was like there was a flood in his ears. His mouth was warm and Brandon felt himself leaning in and rolling on top of him without even thinking.

He ran his hands through Trevor’s hair and held him still so he could kiss him. Trevor moaned into his mouth.

“Fuck, this isn’t—“ he said between kisses.

“Shut up, this doesn’t mean an—“

“Nothing, ok?” Trevor said with a whine before leaning in again.

“Yeah, you’re like a brother,” Brandon supplied against his lips, like that somehow explained everything.

Trevor nodded and pressed forward. He ran his hands along his back and Brandon felt like he could scream. He hadn’t realized how much he had wanted this and what it would feel like to finally get it.

They had made out for hours, until they were genuinely fatigued by it. Then they had gotten each other off over their sweatpants and passed out.

The next morning they hadn’t talked about it. Their was nothing that suggested at what had happened beyond the fact that Brandon woke up blearily in come-soaked sweatpants in his best friend’s bed.

The next few months had gone like this whenever the team was on a road trip. Brandon had never been so excited for an away game in his life. They did not talk about what they did, but inevitably when they found themselves in a hotel room, Brandon climbed into Trevor’s bed and spent the night.

It had escalated from kissing and unconfident touching, to sucking each other off, to Brandon laying Trevor on his back and slowly pressing himself into him as he watched his friend’s eyes grow wide with a look of awe that made Brandon want to permanently claim him then and there.

It had really only taken that first night together for Brandon to admit that he loved Trevor, loved him in a way that wasn’t “hey man, I love you” but more “I think I could spend the rest of my life with you.”

One day he had accidentally said a version of that as he came. He had tried to pass that off as a joke, sort of, but the words had hit their mark.

He was nineteen and a boy. He knew he sounded insane, that he had no business loving Trevor.

What to make of these things?

In the end, he had never gotten the time to sort through it all. As their season approached spring, something had changed. There was some unchartable distance between them, even as Brandon was on his knees with his mouth wrapped around Trevor and his eyes trained on him.

Then came the only words that could have destroyed Brandon: “I don’t think we should do this anymore.”

Calling it off had been all Trevor. If Brandon had had it his way he would have done it forever. By then, he knew that.

Trevor had said he didn’t even like dudes in that way. Sure he loved Brandon, his best friend, but he had to think about girls to even get hard during their hook ups. The whole thing wasn’t worth it to him. It was convenient, and even then not that much.

Brandon knew he was lying. He knew it. There was nothing about their nights together that suggested this was a task or chore gone wrong. It was as easy as breathing.

That had killed him. There was no arguing. What could he really say to that. It wasn’t like he could beg his friend to let him love him, let alone fuck him.

Without Brandon at his side, at least in that way, Trevor’s star still continued to rise. Brandon’s, on the other hand, suffered. He was so depressed he worried he might not survive this.

He was barely able to show up to practice, and when he did his performance was so poor that he started getting pulled into frequent meetings with their head coach. It wasn’t like he could explain what was happening and so he made vague excuses, excuses that ultimately got him sent down to the AHL and permanently out of the league.

Until he found himself coaching an NHL team, that is.

He had told Rozanov this story that morning in Ilya’s home after the video had leaked. He had told the most removed and need-to-know version of the story, sure, but one nonetheless.

His wife, Em, knew the details. She understood why he needed her daily affirmations of love. It was a flood wall against the memories of having been so brutally discarded all those years ago.

So, safe to say, Brandon knew what it looked like for two men love each other. Watching that video, he had quickly realized what he had on his hands and how much of a mess it might be.

Except he and Trevor had been a childish exploration, even if deeply felt.

This thing between Rozanov and Hollander, it clearly had been going on for a long time. They had been rivals for a decade.

How much of that had been spent loving one another?

He had almost asked Ilya that day at his captain’s house. It hadn’t been right to do that, he knew, and so he hadn’t. But he had still wondered all the same.

He had been so busy supporting Ilya that he hadn’t thought of the only real possible outcome of this, which was Hollander being traded to the Centaurs.

The coach in him was thrilled. Shane Hollander was one of the greatest players the NHL had ever seen. The Centaurs had absolutely no business getting him and Rozanov.

It was ultimately Shane’s love for Ilya, his willingness to be with him at all costs, that had led him to Ottawa and accepting a contract far below his value.

But a part of Brandon—the piece that was a man who had at one point loved another man—was heartbroken. By the circumstances and by how little had actually changed since his fumbling, failed affair.

Then there had been the completely new territory of watching two of your star players navigate being married and on one team.

Brandon had never sat them down and gone through the rules of play. They were both grown men who had captained Stanley Cup-winning teams and had four sets of hardware between them. It hadn’t felt appropriate to play coach in that moment.

But he had quietly watched them navigate the dynamic in real time.

He had a lot of respect for Hollander from afar. What Coach didn’t? He was the equivalent of a star student, the most coachable and gifted player the league had seen in decades.

But he was also intense, a little withdrawn, and hard to read.

Since Hollander’s arrival, Rozanov had been on one long bender of a high. It was like nothing could dampen his smile.

Hollander had been more complicated. What had happened with the Voyageurs, at the end, had not been pretty.

On top of that, Brandon could tell that for whatever reason Hollander had more baggage around being out than Rozanov seemed to have.

He had found that sort of interesting given Rozanov’s country of origin, but he knew how complicated and unpredictable shame could be.

The first point of contention had been around hotel rooms, of all things.

It had felt a little like a sick joke to Brandon, whose heart had been broken in one so many years ago. It had been made worse by the fact that they were in Detroit of all places.

The issue, naturally, had been if Rozanov and Hollander should share one. During their first trip of the season, Brandon had overheard them arguing ahead of Ilya reading out the room assignments.

“We are married, Shane,” Ilya had said with exasperation.

“I’m not..” Shane sounded a little at a loss. “That’s not it, Ilya.”

He went on. “It just feels.. unprofessional, ok? This is our job.”

“We are the most decorated players on this team. You are my husband. Why would we not share a room?”

“It doesn’t feel right. I don’t know.”

“They know we have sex.”

“Jesus, Ilya.”

“What? They do?” Ilya exclaimed. “They know you are gay. Why are you trying to hide that from them?”

“I’m not,” Shane muttered.

“I am not so sure about that.”

“Ilya..”

“I love you, Shane. I am proud to be your husband.”

Ilya went on. “These guys, they do not care. Stop making them the problem. The rest of the world might be, but they are not.”

Brandon could hear Shane let out an exhale.

“Fine,” Shane said. “But don’t you dare make jokes about us, like, having sex or something.”

“Sex?” Ilya asked with a grin. “You are much too focused on winning right now for that, I think.”

Shane laughed at that and Brandon could hear them kiss. It sounded intimate and tender, and so he quickly slipped away.

Later in his hotel room, Brandon had looked around and found himself missing Em, which inevitably happened during these trips.

He felt a bit suffocated by the beige walls pressing in from all sides. He wondered what Trevor was up to now, having retired years ago after a particularly brutal injury.

He sent that thought down the river. He didn’t need to think about that man right now.

He could think about Rozanov and Hollander instead. He didn’t mean that weirdly. He just meant he could appreciate that here, in this hotel, two of the most dominant NHL players were sharing a hotel room, and maybe even fucking in it.

As was their god-given right as two married men. As long as it didn’t mess with their performance on the ice, it wasn’t any business of Brandon’s as far as he was concerned.

And if their handful of games so far had been any clue, Brandon had a feeling Rozanov and Hollander’s proximity and teamwork would only be a winning strategy for this team.

He smiled to himself as he sat on the perfectly made bed and looked out the window facing the parking lot.

The universe had a proper, developed sense of humor, he thought.

Decades ago, a shared hotel room had been the source of his downfall in the NHL, or at least that was how it had felt at the time.

Now a shared hotel room, and the two men in love with each other within it, might be the solution to all of his, and this team’s, problems.

He laughed. Never in a million years.

Chapter Text

November 2022—Ottawa

There goes Shane Hollander having another record-breaking game, Ilya thought with a helping of pride and slight annoyance as he watched his husband slot the puck into the net for what felt like the thousandth time.

Tampa's goalie looked horrified, though Ilya would be too if he was staring down a score like that. Shane, on the other hand, stoically careened behind the net and out the other side into Troy’s arms.

Shane met his gaze and shrugged. What, like it’s hard?

Oh please Ilya thought, shaking his head. That goal was perfect and you know it.

Shane cracked a grin. It was, wasn’t it.

They were barely a month into their second season playing together and Shane had already hit his stride at wing. Right wing, in Hollander’s hands, felt a little like watching an astrophysicist recite their multiplications.

Shane had officially assumed that position at the end of last season after it became clear that keeping him and Ilya on separate lines was squandering this once in a lifetime gift the Centaurs had been given.

Ilya knew Shane could play any position he put his mind to (except for goalie, no Hollander would ever play that). His husband’s raw coachability had always been one of the more frustratingly special things about him. You'd have to squint to notice he was even breaking a sweat.

Shane was a fabulous winger. He always wrangled back possession of the puck with his relatively small frame somehow slipping out from the tightest of pins against the boards. He had this unnatural ability to locate gaps on the ice and capitalize on them, and—and Ilya was only just starting to admit this to himself—Shane probably had the most accurate shot in the league. Ilya no question had the fastest, though.

The force of their partnership had first been revealed on the power play. Their stats had been through the roof to the point that it had become a critical part of the team’s strategy to draw penalties wherever possible. If a member of the opposing team went into the box it wasn’t a question of if the Centaurs scored, but when.

When Coach Wiebe had finally moved Shane up last spring that had meant Bood migrating down, which he had handled like a good little soldier. Bood was the sort of person every team needed, Ilya reasoned, since he always prioritized what was best for the group and seemed to do so with ease. 

The change had been the right one. That much was obvious tonight as Ilya watched Shane wipe the ice with Tampa. 

Ilya loved watching him be so dominant and in control. That had never been the dynamic in other aspects of their relationship, but he had always reveled in it here. If Ilya wasn’t careful, he would find himself, even if momentarily, slipping into the sort of slack-jawed worship with which so many fans gazed at Hollander.

Ilya had his acolytes too. His jersey was hands down the best-selling. It had helped that he had built this team into what it was becoming, a team that would win Ottawa a Stanley Cup. Everyone knew it, even if it felt superstitious to acknowledge that.

It was certainly something Ilya and Shane never openly spoke about, at least not out loud. Thankfully they had reached the stage of their relationship where a lot could be communicated with a well-timed look.

While Ilya reveled in watching this man lead their team to victory at right wing, he wrestled with how both he and Shane could ultimately get what they wanted.

The captaincy. First line center. Some puzzles didn’t have solutions, Ilya figured.

He thought back to Galina and the many sessions they had had dissecting his marriage. Maybe that’s what this was, one example on a much longer list of the compromises one was supposed to make for their life partner. 

Ilya was no stranger to compromise. He had done it early and quickly when he and Shane had confessed their love for one another. It wasn’t for some noble reason. He just wanted Shane so badly he thought he might go crazy if he didn’t have him, so much so he was willing to give up pretty much anything. 

Shane had been a more challenging story. Compromise hadn’t been quite as easy for him. Ilya tried not to begrudge him for it since those choices were now squarely in the past. And, it felt like resenting Shane for that might be like resenting him for a fundamental part of who he was.

Shane could be self-centered, in a sense.

No, that wasn’t the right word. He was self-focused.

He was playing an internal game of tug of war with himself at all times. So much so that he often forgot to look around and realize others were playing versions of the same game all around him. 

In others that looked like narcissism, Ilya supposed. But with Shane it was more like a compulsion or fixation. It wasn’t about bragging, or even being the best. It was a game of one versus one that was really man versus self 

Even with all of that internal competition, Shane had never once brought up their line and what it might mean for him to take center. In fact, he barely brought up the captaincy, and if he did it was more often than not some teasing joke about Ilya watching his back and not something that ever felt like it had teeth in it.

Here was Shane quietly playing wing to the best of his abilities, which were significant. Maybe compromise was no longer such a foreign language to Ilya’s husband.

Shane skated over to him and knocked his helmeted head against his affectionately. Ilya could see his husband’s eyes glittering with satisfaction at the goal he had just scored. It had been beautiful and completely out of left field. A Hollander special. 

“Not bad,” Ilya said with a smirk.

“Thanks, captain."

“Think you can go again?”

Shane blushed. The phrasing was intentional, obviously. Usually Ilya reigned in his flirtiest quips when they were on the ice. But they were winning this game no question and he couldn’t help himself.

“Depends on if my husband helps me,” Shane said, cocking an eyebrow.

This was why these sorts of exchanges were a bad idea in the workplace. Ilya could feel himself getting hard through however many layers of sweaty gear. 

Ilya grinned. Minutes later Shane scored once more off a well-placed Rozanov assist and the game was over.

In the locker room the Centaurs were happily blowing off steam after their decisive victory. Coach Wiebe had tapped Shane for press and he was about to head out to chat with reporters before Bood whistled loudly.

Quiet fell over the pack of ruddy, half-naked men. They all looked at their Assistant Captain from their seats in their stalls.

“Boys..” Bood began. “What a game. What. A. Game.”

“Hollander, goddammit,” he went on. “You fucking god, you idiot.”

Shane looked more than a little overwhelmed and his face bent towards the ground. Ilya laughed. His husband was ridiculous.

Was it that hard to take a compliment? Ilya had never seemed to have that problem. 

The team was crowing their support for Shane and some were tapping sticks against the ground. All were looking at him with some mixture of awe, envy, and pride. 

Ilya grinned. Yeah, he was married to that. He was married to Shane fucking Hollander.

“Look,” Bood said. “I know when my time's up.”

Then he stripped off his jersey. He handed it in a damp ball to Hollander, who took it with confusion and a little disgust. 

“Take the A, man. You don’t play a game like that without it.” 

Ah, so that’s what this was about, Ilya realized. He hadn’t thought of the scenario where Bood might just go and do this.

Ilya knew Bood was doing this from the right place, from one of respect for who Shane Hollander was. Nevertheless, Ilya felt a pang of discomfort ripple through him.

Shane looked at the jersey in his hands, and then at Bood, and then at him.

Ilya could see a questioning look in his eyes. Were you behind this?

In Ilya’s head, it had sort of always felt like Shane either had the captaincy or nothing at all. Shane being Assistant Captain felt.. unnatural?

Ilya thought about letting Shane have it, of standing up and congratulating his husband with open arms and a wide smile. For some reason he couldn’t get himself to move his mouth.

What was wrong with him? Was this actually about what Shane deserved?

Or was this some old reserve of competitiveness between the two of them that Ilya had never quite let go? Why couldn’t he let him have this thing?

He got up abruptly. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, and clearly this team had no clue either. They were all looking at him with wary stares. 

Then he was in front of Shane, who was still clutching Bood’s balled up jersey. 

Ilya dropped to a knee.

Shane looked anxious, his eyes roving over the circle of men behind Ilya who were all reflecting his confusion back at him.

“Shane..” Ilya began. He had no clue what the end of this sentence was going to be. “You were the worst to play."

Ok, that. 

“The best, too," he corrected. "Too good at winning.”

“So fucking perfect,” he went on. “You know that. These guys have not realized that you know that.”

“You never make us feel bad for it,” he said, grinning. “But I am sick of my husband being so polite.” 

Shane looked surprised. They very rarely said that word out loud while in the locker room or on the ice. Here they were colleagues, sort of. To Shane it had felt like a critical separation of church and state.

“You are captain, Shane. It is silly to pretend otherwise.”

Thank God, it had clicked. Ilya had finally realized what he was asking for. 

Shane looked at Ilya with panic in his eyes, like whatever this proposal was he was going to say no.

He started to shake his head. “Ilya..”

“Let me finish, Shane”

The rest of the team was dead silent. They knew they were being granted some vantage point to watch the vastness and depth of intimacy between these two men.

Ilya had to imagine confronting the immenseness of what he and Shane had was a little like how he had felt the first time he had seen the ocean up close after a childhood spent landlocked in Moscow.

“Ok,” Shane said. He was listening intently.

Ilya readjusted on his knee (the good one, thankfully). Shane almost looked like he thought Ilya was going to pull out a ring or something, as if they weren't already married.

“Will you captain this team with me?"

“What?”

“Will you captain this team with me, Hollander?” Ilya repeated. “For as long as we both are playing on it?”

“What are you—”

“Say yes, Shane.”

“Ilya, that’s not poss—”

“When have we cared about the league?”

Shane stopped. That seemed to have shut him up, even if briefly.

“Say yes, Hollander,” Bood interrupted. 

And Wyatt. “Say yes.”

And Troy. “Shane.. say yes."

A chorus of say yes’s echoed through the locker room. Shane looked at Ilya.

“Skazat da?” Ilya asked.

Shane took a deep breath and looked at the fearsome hockey player on his knee in front of him. At the impossibly handsome man, his husband, at his feet.

“Yes.”

Shane went on. “Until you’re old and gray and I’m nursing your injuries. Now get up.”

Ilya beamed. “Only Hollander gets to see me on my knees,” he said with a wink. 

He stood up, pulling Shane up with him by his jersey. It almost seemed aggressive, like he was about to slam his husband against the boards.

He brought him towards him and kissed him on the mouth, his hands on either side of Shane’s face.

It was a deep, long kiss and Ilya could hear their teammates chanting and cheering, cheering something.

Hollanov?

What the fuck was Hollanov? Ilya found himself thinking, before Shane deepened the kiss further and he had other things to think about.

They finally pulled apart from each other, panting. Ilya could see that Shane was shocked at what had just happened and what he had let himself do. 

“Ya tebya lyublyu,” Ilya said, kissing him once more. 

“Ya tak sil'no tebya lyublyu, Ilya.”

“Already co-captains and they’re speaking in secret code,” Bood said with indignation.

“It’s Russian, you idiot,” Troy responded.

“Well, I’m already feeling left out.” Bood seemed just fine.

At home later that night, Ilya felt like it was their honeymoon all over again. They were on each other before the door had even closed.

Shane’s movements were quick and urgent. His hand in Ilya’s hair, the other running under his shirt and along his abs. Up and then down, down under his waist band.

Ilya was already hard, obviously, and the feeling of his husband taking him in his hand made him let out a low moan.

Shane stopped and looked at him. “This is ok, right?”

“What?”

This was more than ok. The only thing that could make this better was Shane’s mouth on his cock.

“Not this,” Shane said, squeezing his erection lightly with a smile. “The other stuff.”

Ilya racked his lust-addled brain.

Oh, that.

“Shane, I would not have asked if it was not.”

“I know, I just want to make sure. I don’t need it, ok?”

Ilya smiled. “Is not about needing it. Is about deserving it.”

Shane looked at him quietly, his dark eyes boring into him. He pulled Ilya’s head toward him and kissed him.

“Thank you,” Shane said, kissing him again. “Thank you, Ilya.” Another kiss. “I just want you to know.. I don’t need anything but this.”

“Was silly for you to not have it. You are very.. captainly, yes?”

“That so?”

“So bossy. Always in control.”

Shane raised an eyebrow and looked around their empty living room and the bottle of lube they had accidentally left on the coffee table from earlier this week.

He laughed. “I don’t know about that.”

“Is exhausting for me to be in charge all of the time,” Ilya added, eyeing the bottle of lube. “Will be nice taking turns bossing around the kids, I think.” 

“Exhausting?” Shane smirked. “Does my captain need a day off?”

Ilya could feel himself somehow harden even more. “I love it when you call me that, Hollander.”

“My captain,” Shane said as he dropped to his knees.

“No, not tonight,” Ilya said without thinking.

What did he want here? Once again, he had no clue.

Shane slowly stood up again, looking at him. “No? What then?”

Ilya slid to his knees and pulled down Shane’s pants and underwear. His cock was in his mouth in an instant.

Ilya could feel the vibration of Shane’s moan through his mouth. It was enough to make him feel like he would burst.

He bobbed his head, confidently taking his husband deep within him. After a few minutes of this, he pulled back and sucked his head sloppily in a way that reminded Ilya more than a little bit of what it had been like to eat out a woman so many years ago.

Then, once again, deep, letting Shane feel his length hit the back of Ilya’s throat. It was a combination that drove him crazy, especially if the sounds he was making right now were any indication.

“Fuck, Ilya, stop,” Shane muttered after a few more minutes, pushing him away from his erection.

He was practically gasping for air. “Not yet. I want to try something.”

“Mhm?” Ilya asked, trying to suppress his curiosity. It wasn’t every day Shane built up the courage to try something new.

“Only if you want,” Shane added feebly.

“Well, obviously,” Ilya responded from his view on his knees.

Shane pulled him up so that he was standing. “I want you make you feel good.”

“You do not have that problem, lyubimyy,” Ilya replied. “Trust me.”

“I know, in a new way though.”

Ilya looked at him appraisingly. Then it hit him and a wide, cocky grin spread on his face.

“You want to fuck me.”

Shane huffed. “Why do you have to put it like that?”

“Are you embarrassed or something?”

Shane shook his head. “I want to make you feel how I feel.”

“I do not know if it works that way,” Ilya said. “I think I already feel it when I am inside you.”

Ilya watched Shane blush at how bluntly this was being discussed.

“I know, I just want to.. try?”

Anything that required Shane to build up this amount of courage Ilya would give him in a heart beat, but he did love watching him squirm.

“Ok, captain.”

Shane snorted. “You’re such an asshole.”

Then his eyes somehow went even darker than usual. “Bedroom.”

By the time Ilya was fully naked on their bed with Shane’s perfectly sculpted body above him he wondered what he had done in a past life to earn this. Whatever it was, he could cry with gratitude. 

They had tried this a few times before to varying degrees of success. Ilya could get himself to relax well enough, but Shane had struggled with what was required of him. To have someone laid bare in front of you like that and to have to take such complete control was no small thing.

It wasn’t about dominance, Ilya reasoned. It wasn’t like Shane didn’t know how to lead or Ilya always needed to be in control.

Topping just took work. He sometimes wondered if Shane was so busy giving every reserve of his energy to hockey that by the time they got to this he practically wanted to lease his body and brain to someone else.

Shane sunk between his open legs. He didn’t touch Ilya’s cock, which was patiently waiting for him, and instead went further still.

Ilya could feel his warm breath in places he hadn’t thought about in a long, long time. Then Shane dove in and the sensation of his tongue against his hole made Ilya feel dizzy.

It was wet and hot, and Shane was taking him apart with such attention that Ilya could do nothing but lace his hand’s through his hair and watch the show unfold.

It felt fucking incredible. He wanted more, more of whatever this was.

“Shane..”

Shane stopped, his lips remaining there but his dark eyes peaking up at him from behind Ilya’s erection.

“This,” Ilya said, lightly pushing him off as he rolled over onto his stomach and presented his ass to his husband. “Ok?”

“Yeah, ok,” Shane grinned widely. Something about the smile took Ilya back to watching Shane score a goal as a goofy teenager.

He dove back in, grasping Ilya’s ass in his palms as he ate him out from behind.

“Fuck, Shane,” Ilya moaned.

Shane swiped his hole and he began to fuck his tongue into him. The feeling of a part of Shane, one so intimate and unbidden, inside of him felt incredible.

It felt like he was being cracked open wide. It was vulnerable and intense to be taken care of in this way. He didn’t quite know how Shane was able to do it with such frequency.

By the time Shane had multiple fingers inside him, Ilya had no interest in patience. He would take whatever Shane would give him.

“I want you inside me,” he muttered, his face planted in the bed and his ass still in the air.

“I already am,” Shane said, curling a finger in him in a way that definitely grazed his prostate.

“Not like that,” Ilya yelped.

“So impatient,” Shane said, clucking his tongue. “What do you always say in practice?”

Ilya turned to look at him with a glare. “Process. But this is not practice, Hollander.”

“It isn’t?” Shane said cooly.

“Well, when I led Montreal to three Cups”—why did Shane saying that make Ilya feel like he was going to come?—"it was never about process.”

“No?” Ilya said with genuine surprise. They had never compared captaining styles, though the differences were evident.

“No,” Shane said and Ilya could practically feel his husband’s grin even from his position facedown with a finger curled inside him.

“It was about discipline and results.”

Fuck.

He thought about stony-faced Hollander barking at his team as they ran through drill after drill on the ice. Ilya’s cock twitched at the thought.

“What do you need from me?”

It was the question Ilya had taught his players to ask. What did their line need from them, their team need from them, to win.

Shane leaned forward, his erection pressing against Ilya’s ass as his lips breathed in his ear.

“I need you to be the best.”

Something about how Shane said that made Ilya feel like he would drive off a cliff for him. Whatever he needed, he would give it to him.

He knew this side of Shane, the one that was like a general leading troops into battle. But he had only ever seen it on the ice, never here.

“How do I do that?” Captain.

“I need you take every inch of me,” Shane whispered. “Can you do that?”

Ilya nodded helpless with lust, his cheek still pressed against the bed. “Whatever you want.” 

“And do you want it?”

“Yes, I fucking want it.” 

The first few inches hadn’t been hard for Ilya. He had had toys and fingers up there over the years. But as Shane pressed further Ilya had to stop him and slowly exhale, trying to get his body to catch up with whatever fantasies were already racing through his brain.

This had never come as easily to him as it had to Shane. As he let out a particularly deep breath he could feel himself open up and Shane slide in to the hilt.

Shane remained still. He had been on the receiving end of this enough to know what his husband probably needed in this moment. Ilya took another breath and let his body adjust. The sensation was intense, overwhelming, not necessarily good yet, but he knew it could be.

“There is nothing you can’t do, is there?” Shane ran a hand along his back. “You’re so fucking perfect, Ilya.”

Usually it was Ilya lavishing Shane with this sort of praise. Ilya knew he was perfect, in a way. He was handsome and imposing. He controlled the energy of any room he walked into and practically had since childhood for reasons that were still a mystery to him.

He was also a once in a generation talent on the ice. Maybe in a way that was different to Shane, but equally as impressive depending on who you asked.

He hadn’t necessarily craved Shane’s praise in moments like this, but he was realizing he could get used to this.

“Yeah?”

“I can’t believe I get you all to myself,” Shane moaned as he slowly fucked into him.

“You were made for me.” Again, the feel of him thrusting deeply in and out. “Once I saw you no one else was good enough.”

Ilya gasped. God, something about Shane’s words and the feel of him hitting his deepest parts.

“What did you see?”

“Someone who could keep up.”

That admission rolled off Shane’s tongue. Did Shane have any idea what that made Ilya feel? To have found his equal, somehow, miraculously. To have Shane acknowledge that equality so plainly. 

There was no one else like Shane alive, Ilya knew that. They had been built for each other, like counterweights in some larger cosmic balance.

Ilya shot a hand back and stopped Shane’s movements. He slowly turned over onto his back, feeling Shane adjust within him.

Ilya reached up to hold his cheek in the palm of his hand.

Shane understood what he wanted. He wasn’t even thrusting now, just sitting in Ilya.

“It can be lonely, no?” Being the best. 

“I haven’t been lonely for years.”

“Me too,” Ilya smiled, pulling his husband down on top of him. “Moy podarok.” My gift.

Shane nodded in comprehension and thrust into him again, holding a muscled arm against the bed to improve the angle.

Ilya let out a sound before he could stop himself. He needed Shane to finish what he had started.

Ilya placed a hand on his ass and forced Shane to keep the pace up. “Like that, fuck.”

“Yeah, you like that?”

“Ah, fuck.” Ilya gasped as Shane’s cock directly hit his prostate. “Ahhhh, fuck.”

His moan was impossibly loud and uninhibited. God, he loved not living in an apartment. He loved living with this man.

Now Shane’s skin was slapping against his and the mix of sweat and lube had practically made it feel like they were on a slip and slide. Ilya wrapped his long legs around Shane’s ass and something about that unlocked an angle he didn’t even know was possible.

“Ilya,” Shane whined. “I don’t know if—”

“Come for me,” Ilya demanded.

“I'm coming, oh fuck,” Shane stuttered and Ilya could feel his warm release coating his insides.

Ilya placed a hand on his cock and pulled a few times before he came all over himself.

“God, I love you so much,” Shane said afterwards, after they had returned somewhat to earth. 

Ilya felt a rush of love—appreciation, really—for this man. He placed a finger on his lips.

“My half," Shane added, and Ilya could feel his mouth curve into a wide smile. 

Chapter Text

March 2023—Seattle

Wyatt loved Seattle. Probably because it reminded him of Vancouver, a place he associated with family, at least the part of his family he actually liked—his sister, her wife, and their kid.

There was something about this city and its countless overcast, drizzly days that felt fundamentally compatible with Wyatt. He had never been the sunniest, flashiest person. Goalies rarely were. It was a thankless job. No one noticed when you were doing well, only when you weren’t.

Wyatt had always been a deep well, to quote his sister. With him, one might see the surface but rarely, if ever, the sea floor. He liked to listen and to observe, and he was good at it. It was nice to have found a job that rewarded him for something he so naturally came by.

The Centaurs had arrived that morning in preparation for an evening game. Most of the guys were lounging about the hotel, doing whatever pre-game rituals best suited their needs.

Ilya and Shane had promptly left to have lunch with Seattle’s star PWHL players, Halla and Morton, who led that team and who also happened to be married.

His captains had struck up a friendship with them over the past two years. There weren’t exactly many hockey couples on the ice, at least who were out. Certainly not couples in the NHL, where it remained a club of one.

The PWHL was a world apart. Wyatt knew that league had phenomenal athletes, and frankly they had to make sacrifices NHL players didn’t have to contend with. Namely accepting the pay, the lack of financial backing, and the limited reach of the league.

But their sister league had something the NHL didn’t. Their world was so, so much gayer.

Wyatt’s sister had played hockey as a teenager, and she probably had the sport to thank for rocket launching her into coming out. He had seen what women’s sports had given her first hand, a place to be rewarded for all of the tougher, fiercer parts of herself that had felt like a liability anywhere else.

As far as Wyatt was concerned, the NHL and PWLH were two entirely separate nation states built with customs and codes that could not have felt more foreign from one another. No, they were more like two alien races, Wyatt reasoned, struggling—and often failing—to make contact.

One had been built on the bedrock of a culture so cripplingly toxic that it had taken three of its star players coming out, and two marrying each other, for a modicum of change to occur.

The other was a world so inherently queer that its players were often gay until proven otherwise. It was frequent for teammates to date each other and for partners to play on opposing teams.

Wyatt thought it was safe to say the two leagues had pretty much nothing in common beyond the sport they played.

Shane and Ilya had become ambassadors of sorts, emissaries between these two planets.

The PWLH players loved them, especially Ilya, who openly adored and celebrated their league. Wyatt reasoned it somehow came from the part of Ilya that had once been so good at unproblematically worshipping women, at least before he had started openly worshipping Shane.

Just as Rozanov and Hollander reigned over the NHL, the PWHL had its own royalty, and Halla and Morton ruled with an iron fist, no question.

Sami Halla was the greatest hockey player Finland had produced in a long, long time. Halla cut an imposing figure. They were probably closer to Ilya’s height than Wyatt’s, muscled, and impossibly blond.

They were masculine in the sort of way that Wyatt had grown accustomed to over years spent with his sister’s wife, a butch woman who radiated a sort of unflappable capableness of which Wyatt found himself envious.

Halla was the quiet type, until they weren’t, which was typically after scoring off one of their deadly breakaways. Wyatt shivered even thinking about it. Their trick shots were legendary among all goalies regardless of league.

Wyatt had never heard Halla brag or showboat. They knew what they were capable of, and they wanted to be left alone to dominate in peace. In some ways, it was all a little Shane-like.

Halla was also nonbinary, which wasn’t necessarily so complicated in a league where most people understood what that meant, though it hardly meant it was easy.

Watching Halla interact with the NHL was a real treat. It was bizarre, albeit fascinating, to watch his league contend with a person who was potentially more effortlessly masculine—whatever that meant, exactly—than any of them.

There went towering Halla wandering around a sea of NHL players as all of their wives snuck curious, vaguely horny glances their way. Halla was typically too busy staring at their wife, Katie Morton, whose petite frame hide one of the most diabolical slap shots in the league.

Halla and Morton had coached at camp this past summer, and Hollander and Halla had grown close over the weeks. Wyatt wasn’t sure what two people as subdued as them could possibly talk about, but clearly something.

It probably didn’t hurt that Halla looked the way they did, Wyatt would sometimes catch himself thinking with a grin as he watched the two humble hockey stars interact. 

Wyatt was pretty sure Hollander was gay, at least far gayer than Rozanov. But all of those labels started to feel a little irrelevant when you were staring down a six-foot something green-eyed Finnish hockey player who looked like an androgynous Norse god.

During their weeks at camp, Wyatt had caught Hollander’s eyes wandering more than once. One time he had even caught Rozanov watching Hollander watching Halla, and Ilya had the audacity to turn to Wyatt and wink.

Shane's sexuality was clearly reserved exclusively for the best hockey players on earth, Wyatt concluded. Classic Hollander. 

With Shane and Ilya off to lunch with those two, Wyatt found himself with a nice chunk of time to himself, which he spent wandering downtown in the rain with his headphones in. He found this sort of alone time critical to his performance on the ice as he ran through his approach against Seattle.

Luckily the game that evening was a breeze. The Centaurs had been playing very well with Rozanov and Hollander finally on one line. Wyatt didn’t think that configuration could last forever, at least the one where Shane played at wing, but for now it did the trick.

Afterwards, the guys hit a bar and were letting loose ahead of a few days of downtime before their next game. Rozanov and Hollander were perched at a table in the center of the pack.

Their bodies were close together, but barely touching. If you didn’t know they were married, you weren’t about to find out now.

Wyatt often found himself watching them and cataloguing the small displays of intimacy he could catch. He didn’t mean to scrutinize them, but he was a goalie.. it was sort of his thing.

Tonight, Shane’s cheeks were flushed and he was clearly tipsy. Hollander did drunk pretty poorly. He was good at so many things that he had to leave something for the rest of them, Wyatt reasoned.

Bood, Hollander, and Rozanov had been talking about this year’s upcoming NHL Awards and who they anticipated would win MVP. 

Ilya had turned to Shane and slyly asked, “remember that year?”

“Worst night of my life,” Shane muttered.

“You got what you needed in the end.”

Bood raised an eyebrow and looked at the two of them. “And what was that exactly?”

Shane flushed a deep red and shook his head. Ilya just grinned silently.

Wyatt knew that a drunk Bood was a dangerous Bood, especially in situations like this. He was an agent of chaos, and his fascination with his co-captains was borderline obsessive and sort of gay, if Wyatt was being honest.

“Do tell,” Bood said, crossing his arms. He was clearly not going to budge.

“What is there to tell?” Ilya said yawning. “I won, obviously.”

“And Hollander?”

“He was grumpy,” Ilya replied, shrugging. “But we made a bet—“

“Ilya,” Shane interrupted.

“What? Is a funny story. Can we not tell it?”

Shane looked at him for a second before exhaling. Wyatt knew how hard it was for Shane to rewire the part of his brain that had come to view his and Rozanov’s relationship as some carefully guarded state secret.

“Fine,” Shane relented.

Ilya patted him on the knee. “Whoever won got what they wanted. That was the bet.”

“What they wanted?” Bood asked dumbly. Wyatt internally rolled his eyes. This guy.

“Ah, yeah,” Shane responded.

Wyatt could see the wheels turning. “Oh, ohhh. Got it.”

“Were you guys, like.. even then?” Bood asked.

Dykstra had caught on to the topic of conversation and was now leaning in to listen, poorly disguising his interest.

“Yep,” Shane said. “I mean, not together. But yeah, we were.”

“Right, right,” Bood said, though he seemed a little flustered by that piece of information.

“That’s sort of crazy,” Dykstra butted in.

Wyatt, Bood, and Dykstra were old enough to have seen the early days of the Hollander-Rozanov rivalry up close. The younger generation on the Centaurs didn’t get it like they did.

“You guys really hated each other,” Dykstra continued. “That was what, 2014?”

Rozanov nodded and took a sip from his beer.

“So you’re telling me even then you were..” Dykstra paused, clearly looking for the right word.

“You were fucking each other in 2014?” Yep, he had found it.

“Jesus,” Shane said.

“What? Were you?"

Shane rolled his eyes. “Yeah, we were hooking up. But it was, like, three times a year if we were lucky.”

Ilya laughed. “Shane had a lot of pent up energy.”

Bood raised an eyebrow. “Were you not.. with other people?”

Shane shrugged. “Not really. It was hard to be.”

He went on. “I wasn’t exactly into women, and finding a guy who could keep a secret was not.. easy.”

“Rozanov had no choice but to keep the secret,” Wyatt interrupted, saying what he was thinking out loud before he could stop himself.

The four guys looked at him, as if they had forgotten their goalie was there.

“Yeah,” Shane nodded at Wyatt. “Pretty much.”

“I would have kept it anyway,” Ilya said pointedly at Shane, and then at Wyatt. “I do not kiss and tell.”

Wyatt thought about that. That was true, actually.

Everyone knew Rozanov had been a ladies’ man, but it was not like Wyatt had ever caught wind of any of those details when he had been playing for Toronto.

The same had been true of Ilya and Shane’s marriage. He was fiercely protective of Hollander. While he might tease his husband for being a prude, he never revealed much of anything.

Shane looked at Ilya. “Mutually assured destruction, so it worked.”

“I have no idea what that means but it does not sound very romantic, Hollander,” Ilya said flatly.

“What?” Shane said. “It was safe, I guess, in a weird, fucked up way.”

“For you, maybe,” Ilya shrugged. “For me, I am not so sure.”

The guys remained silent, all trying to process this exchange.

“What was it then? For you?” Dykstra asked, breaking the silence.

Ilya didn’t hesitate. “Sex. And I was in love with him. Maybe from the beginning."

Shane shook his head. “Not this again.”

“Is true, Shane,” Ilya retorted. “I was there too, you know.”

Shane didn’t seem to have a good response to that one.

“So, uh, when was the beginning exactly?” Dykstra asked carefully, as if he could just slip that question in there.

This was the question they had all been working up to since Rozanov and Hollander's relationship had been made public and Hollander had suddenly showed up one day in Ottawa. 

“Their rookie year,” Wyatt mused, again without thinking. 

Shane looked at Wyatt with surprise and then at Ilya with a little annoyance. “You told him?”

Ilya raised his hands. “Shane, you know I would not do that.”

“Then wha—“

“Call it an educated guess,” Wyatt supplied. Rozanov smiled at him and mouthed perceptive.

“Your rookie year?” Dykstra stuttered.

“Before it, technically."

“How?” Bood said. “Did Hollander take a field trip to Russia or something?”

Ilya shivered. “Absolutely not. We had this thing. The night of the draft.”

“A spark,” Shane supplied.

“Then the CCM commercial shoot,” Ilya said, shaking his head fondly. “And that fucking shower.”

“The shower?” At this point Wyatt was starting to wonder how many times Bood had been concussed.

“Hard to hide in the shower,” Ilya said with a smirk. Shane hung his head to avoid his teammates’ eyes.

Bood’s looked back and forth between the two of them.

“Fuck. So you were, like, properly in love. Like, each other’s first loves.”

“I mean, I would hardly call the shower —“ Shane began

“—yes,” Ilya interrupted. “He is the only person I have loved.”

“Man?” Bood asked.

“Person,” Ilya corrected with a frown.

“Same here, for what it’s worth,” Shane added, eyeing the three men.

Bood and Dykstra nodded, taking that in.

“Wow,” Dykstra finally muttered. “That is fucking nuts. Do people know this?”

“My parents,” Shane supplied. “Hayden Pike. Rose and Svetlana. And now you three, I guess.”

“My therapist,” Ilya added. “Galina knows all.”

Bood and Dykstra remained silent as they processed the new information. Wyatt couldn’t say he was surprised by any of this. It was obvious that the intimacy between Rozanov and Hollander had been building for far longer than their relationship had been public.

If the rest of the Centaurs hadn’t pick up on that, god help them, Wyatt thought with more than a little exasperation. These men.

“That is.. intense,” Bood finally said, letting out a whistle.

“It’s beautiful, actually,” Dykstra said. “Very romantic.”

Shane squirmed as Ilya grabbed his hand and agreed.

“Hollander, no offense man, but why’d it take you so long?” Dykstra asked. “Roz is a fucking catch.”

“The story is a little different from my point of view,” Shane said, frowning at Ilya. “We spent many, many years barely talking. That was a two way street.”

“It was lonely,” Shane said matter-of-factly. Wyatt was surprised to hear Hollander say those words so plainly, to frankly admit anything at all about what he had felt during those years.

“Lonely to be with someone you are supposed to hate. Three times a year if that, and not really saying much, at least nothing that really mattered.”

He looked at Ilya and they had some wordless exchange. “Look, I’m not debating Ilya, just that it was really fucking hard too.”

Shane went on. “I took me a long time to forgive myself for all of that hiding. I was so angry at the league”—at you all, Wyatt could catch—“for making us feel like we had to do it in the first place. I still am, sometimes.”

“I’m sorry,” Dykstra said plainly.

“It’s not like you are the Commissioner, Evan,” Shane said. “We’re good.”

“Still, I’m sorry,” Dykstra said. “None of us probably ever said anything that was so bad, but I know we were around guys who did, and we probably said nothing.”

He exhaled. “I know we said nothing, actually, and I’m sorry about that.”

“Me too,” Bood agreed. “I said dumb shit. I still do sometimes, and I’m trying to be better, to, like, unlearn it all.  I just need you guys to know I’d do anything for you and I’m trying.”

It was the closest thing to a sincere I love you that one male professional hockey player could give another.

Wyatt was surprised by his teammates’ sincerity. Bood and Dykstra had always been goofy in a fearless sort of way, but this softness was new. Maybe it was courtesy of this thing Rozanov and Hollander had built.

“Is ok, Evan,” Rozanov said, patting him on the shoulder. “Here we are,” he added, beckoning to the team around them.

“And I get to play hockey with the love of my life,” he said with a grin. Shane’s eyes immediately took a glassy turn.

“Ok, Roz, wrap it up,” Bood laughed. “God, that’s sappy. Gross.”

“And not because you’re gay,” he added, “or whatever you are,” he said, shaking a hand at Ilya. “This has literally nothing to do with that.”

Wyatt laughed. “Bood’s a homophobe.”

Bood’s face paled. “What? No, I’m not—“

“Guys,” Dykstra bellowed, getting the larger group’s attention. “Did you know Bood’s a homophobe? You wouldn’t believe what he just—”

Young immediately stood up. “—are you fucking serious? What did he—“

“—I don’t say anyth—“

“—Bood, whatever you said—” Chouinard began, taking his teammate’s collar in one large hand. 

“We are good, guys,” Ilya said with a laugh, waving a hand. “Just teasing him.”

“Plus, Bood is about as gay as I am,” he added with a smirk.

Bood looked like he was about to take serious issue with that. Then he paused, looking thoughtful, and shrugged.

Wyatt cackled. This team. Had a team like this ever existed in NHL history?

Not a chance, he thought. Not a fucking chance.