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Shane’s parents had very pointedly and explicitly promised to see them on Monday and not under any circumstances except the most dire come to the cottage before then. It was nice of them, except it was also one of the most mortifying conversations Shane’s ever had in his life, to stand out by his car with his boyfriend—boyfriend—already in the passenger seat and his mother averting her eyes tastefully as his dad tells him that they’ll text—they’ll text, alright—before setting foot on the cottage grounds this time.

He thinks that maybe other people his age are used to that sort of thing, the My parents are totally aware that I’m having sex right now and now we all have to deal with it thing. But it’s new territory for Shane. Beautiful, freeing, amazing territory that makes his heart sing just to think about it, about the fact that he doesn’t have to pretend or lie to the people he loves and trusts more than anyone else in the world anymore. Because they know about Ilya, about Shane.

Awkward as shit though.

Anyway, Shane’s parents have promised to leave them alone for the weekend, bar sudden death of a family member or hockey trade, and so Shane has absolutely zero protests to Ilya lifting him up on the kitchen island and tearing his shirt off with his teeth. He has zero protests to Ilya’s hands running up and down his sides before gripping at his waist and yanking him closer into his chest with that snarling smirk Shane loves. Is allowed to love. Has loved for ages. He has zero protests to Ilya’s hand running up the length of his spine and then into his hair, tugging his head down, exactly where he wants it so he can kiss him rough and beautiful and right and—

“Holy shit, oh my god!”

The voice is high-pitched. Achingly familiar. 

Incredibly, totally, completely unwelcome.

Ilya rips their mouths apart probably mostly on instinct, and Shane’s quick to grab at his head and keep his face turned away from the intruder, pressing it into his shoulder instead. It’s a pretty damning tableau they make anyway, face or no face: Shane’s legs spread and wrapped around Ilya’s bare, muscular back, Ilya’s athletic shorts probably riding down the way he likes to wear them when they’re alone and planning to do nothing more than fuck, Shane’s shirt’s who knows where. Hanging discarded off the basket of bananas next to them, apparently.

“Fuck,” he mutters, giving himself one second to tip his head back towards the ceiling and curse whatever higher power or hockey god has it out for him, specifically. 

There’s a nip of teeth against his neck. Ilya, pissed off. Shane would be too to be fair. Or, Shane would probably be having another panic attack. At least Ilya’s still here, staying dutifully at least partially concealed by Shane’s hands. 

At least the intruder didn’t pop in a few minutes later. There’s that to be grateful for. At least.

“Oh my god,” the intruder says again, voice coming faster and higher-pitched. “Shane, what the fuck? Oh my god.”

Shane takes a very deep breath and lets it go in increments.

“Eeleeyah, come to my cottage,” Ilya mocks, voice muffled by Shane’s skin. “Don’t go to Russia. Come to my house instead. Is so private. No one will know…we will be completely alone together.” 

“Oh my god, is that Ilya Rozanov?” the intruder yelps like he's about to start hyperventilating. “Why is Ilya Rozanov half-naked in our kitchen?”

“Okay,” Shane says, mostly for himself. He tugs at Ilya’s curls, pulls his face up so he can see his eyes. This is very important. Shane has no idea what to say, had never spent as much time as he apparently should have, thinking about explaining this to Ilya. But there’s a flash of genuine worry in Ilya’s eyes, a concern for himself and Shane and this thing that they share together, that’s just been given the green light to grow into something strong and beautiful and lasting. Thoughtlessly, he cups Ilya’s face and then when that doesn’t feel like enough, he leans forward and presses a kiss to his forehead, then to his cheek. The intruder can wait. It’s his fault for barging in on this moment anyway. 

“You are not panicking,” Ilya says when Shane pulls back. His eyebrows are furrowed, eyes flicking across Shane’s face like the answers are hidden somewhere on him and he’ll be able to find them if he only looks long enough.

“Okay, I know how this looks,” Shane settles on saying, “But I mean, technically, we are still alone. Together.”

Ilya’s face scrunches up in confusion. Shane gets it. Gets how it looks. Gets that there’s not really any good explanation that stands on its own without visual evidence, so he unwraps his legs from Ilya’s back and nudges him around.

Shane Hollander, aged eighteen, is staring at them from the fireplace, slack-jawed with shock. 

“Holy shit, it is,” Hollander says, wide onyx eyes flying from Ilya to Shane and then back to Ilya. They get stuck there on Ilya’s face—or, probably, knowing eighteen year old Shane Hollander, they get stuck lower, on the muscles and moles that make up Ilya’s objectively perfect torso.

“Kakogo cherta,” Ilya swears and then doesn’t stop swearing for what feels like hours. 

“Okay, okay,” Shane interrupts, grabbing his shirt from the banana basket and tugging it over his head. “You,” he points at Hollander, who hasn’t quite managed to tear his eyes away from Ilya. He snaps his fingers and shrugs on his Captain voice. “Hey, Hollander, come on. You. Go sit down on the couch. You look like you’re gonna have a stroke.”

Hollander does, to be fair. His face has flushed a bright red that looks like it’d be hot to the touch. It makes every one of his freckles stand out in grotesque high definition. 

“You look like you need to sit down too,” Shane says to Ilya, lowering his voice and softening his tone. He presses his hand against Ilya’s back, rubs soothingly along his shoulders. Ilya turns to look at him, wide-eyed. His hand has come to wrap around his necklace. He opens and closes his mouth without any sound escaping. 

Shane supposes it’s probably better than cursing. “You’re scaring him, c’mon,” he murmurs, pushing at him until Ilya walks down the few steps into the living room.

“I am scaring him?” Ilya finally manages to get out, sounding offended down to his bones. “There are two of you! Did I get concussion instead of you, Hollander? I am seeing double!”

“We get a concussion?” Hollander cries, jumping up from the seat and looking even more upset. Right, of course. Hollander’s at the age where the only thing that could distract him from a big gay freakout is a hockey freakout. “I’ve already had one concussion, how many more have you gotten, Shane?”

“You know head injuries don’t work like that,” Shane snaps at him, holding up his hand to forestall any more unhelpful outbursts. “There’s no limit, it just depends on how they heal, and I’m fine now, alright? This is the summer of 2017. We’re playing next season, we’re fine. Now just—give me a moment. This is more important.”

Hollander sinks back into his seat with a weird look twisting across his face. Shane remembers that feeling. Remembers being eighteen, a day before playing in the International Prospect Cup for the Canadian team and hearing an older version of himself say that there are more important things than hockey.

He’d thought then: who the fuck are you. What do I become?

He’s thinking much the same thing now as he glances between his younger self and Ilya Rozanov, who’s looking at Shane like his entire worldview has just been thrown off its axis and Shane alone can help him through it.

Of course there are more important things than hockey. Ilya Rozanov trusts him enough to sit where he tells him, to not run away from something that’s objectively a mind fuck. Ilya Rozanov loves him, Shane.

And somehow, eventually, they get through this. Shane thinks. Knows. Probably.

“Here,” Shane murmurs, grabbing a throw from the back of the couch and wrapping it over Ilya’s bare shoulders. He sinks down next to him, carefully keeping his body between Ilya and Hollander. 

“What is this, is this shock blanket?” Ilya asks, and it would sound like a joke except for the way his voice is high and thready and hysterical.

“Ilya, you’re not—seeing things, alright? You’re not going insane. I promise. I see him too, he’s me. He’s me when I was eighteen. It’s, uh, he’s me from right before we meet actually. He’s supposed to be at a hotel in Saskatchewan in 2008 right now. The International Prospect Cup is tomorrow.”

“Then why isn’t he there?” Ilya snaps, harried, hand gripping the crucifix around his neck hard enough that Shane’s slightly concerned about it cutting into his skin. “Shane?”

There’s a small, tiny note in Ilya’s voice. Something lost and adrift.  Something he’s never heard before, or maybe just something he’s never been allowed to see. Unwelcomed, like someone coming into a dimly lit room and turning on the overhead light, Shane thinks about Ilya’s mother. About depression-induced psychotic breaks resulting in seeing things sometimes, hearing things. About the genetic links between mother and son and everything that gets passed on from one generation to the next. About how Ilya knew that word in English already, genetic, had asked Shane about his parents, about which side has given him what. Like this is something that weighs on him, often. Enough that he already has the words for it in English even though he doesn't have anyone to speak them to.

Shane doesn’t know. Doesn't know if that's the root of his current distress, worrying about his mental health, thinking about his mother's death. Shane has no idea. Ilya, in so many ways is still so unknown to him, still so full of surprises and secrets and uncharted ground. Shane is too, of course. As much as Ilya knows him, there’s still so many things Ilya had no idea about. 

Demonstrably. 

Shane doesn't know, but he isn't taking any chances. So he slips off the couch and sinks down between Ilya’s knees, reaching up to wrap his hand around Ilya’s fingers still clutching his necklace. “Hey,” Shane says. He gentles his voice. In a day, maybe even tonight, he’ll have his own freakout about this because he knew it was coming but he’d never realized it was so fucking soon after they get together. He’d never been told that.

But that’s for later. Right now Ilya and Hollander need him to keep it together, need him to be the expert—or at least pretend to be.

“Okay, so, um. This is real, I promise. He's really here, and he can, like. Feel pain and touch and stuff. It's not an image or anything, it's really me. When I was eighteen. It's just--um, sometimes, when I get really stressed or in my head—and sometimes just whenever, um, I don’t know why or what triggers it exactly, but—anyway, I just…travel? In time. I’ve always done it, since I was a kid. There are a bunch of rules about it, that I have with my past and, uh, future selves to sort of, you know. Protect the timeline? Like things I don’t tell myself and things I’m not supposed to ask. Mainly about, like. Hockey stuff and lottery numbers. And, uh. You, actually.”

Ilya’s eyes, if it’s possible, get wider. So do Hollander’s.

“But it doesn’t happen that often!” Shane rushes to say. He has no idea what he’s saying. Memories of this already happening in his head are faded except for the very important parts that his eighteen year old self had held onto and played over and over in his mind. And those parts are mostly memories of Ilya, not Shane’s stuttering, blushing conversation about his weird genetic time traveling quirk. 

In hindsight, it’d have been way more helpful to commit this minute of fumbling explanation to memory over the way a twenty-six year old Ilya Rozanov’s chest moved up and down with his panicked inhales and exhales, but well. C'est la fucking vie.

He throws a completely ineffective, dirty look over his shoulder at Hollander, who isn’t paying him any attention at all. 

“It’s just a thing, alright, that happens. Sometimes," he finishes lamely.

“Thing that happens sometimes,” Ilya repeats, finally dropping the crucifix to run his hands through his hair as he stares down at Shane in dumbfounded amazement. He shakes his head like he can’t believe it. “Thing that happens sometimes is for running stop sign or puck turnover during third period or sending picture of dick to wrong person, Hollander! Thing that happens sometimes is not for time traveling!” 

Shane glances over at Hollander for support. The kid shrugs back at him. “He’s right,” Hollander says, flicking his eyes at the fireplace, apparently having decided that the best game plan is to just not look at Ilya Rozanov for the time being.

“Not helpful,” Shane informs him, cupping Ilya’s knees and stroking over the bone there. “Ilya, hey, look at me, baby.”

This at least gets him Ilya’s attention, even if his brow is heavy-set and his face is still drained of color and his eyes keep darting between him and the younger version of him on the seat across from them.

“You asked me if I get my boring from my dad, remember?” he says, and Ilya blinks. It’s probably the closest thing to agreement he’s going to get, so he continues with a bit of a smile. “Well, I don’t, that’s all me. But I do get this from my dad’s side. It’s genetic.”

“Genetic,” Ilya repeats. He grabs blindly for Shane’s hand and then cups it against his heart. “Wow.”

“Wow,” Shane agrees, letting out a breath at the same time Ilya does.

Ilya’s eyes dart in between Shane’s, then back up, away, to Hollander. Then back to Shane. “Wow,” he says again. “Wow, okay.”

“Okay?” Shane murmurs. His knees are starting to hurt a bit from the press of the floor against them. Usually when he’s kneeling for Ilya, there’s a wealth of other physical sensations to distract him from the pain, but not this time. He shifts, eases his weight back onto his ass.

“Yes, okay,” Ilya says. He raises their hands to his mouth, presses a kiss to the back of Shane’s knuckles like he can see in Shane’s eyes how worried he is about being rejected. About this being the line, this being too much for him to handle. “Is crazy,” he adds very seriously. “Is fucking mental and I do not understand it. But is you. It’s two yous.”

“Whatever you’re thinking right now, stop it,” Shane warns, rising up onto his feet and putting his hands on his hips. “He’s eighteen.”

“I am not thinking anything,” Ilya defends. He tilts his head, bites his lip. This is his considering expression. “Why? What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that this is insane,” Hollander pipes up, and Shane and Ilya both look at him. The boy’s on his feet again too, stance mirroring Shane’s. “Ilya Rozanov? Shane, you’re fucking—I mean, you’re…we’re…”

“Boyfriends,” Ilya says proudly. Shane squeezes his eyes shut and groans, even though he remembers this. Knew it was coming. He’d still hoped maybe it wouldn’t. “What?” Ilya says, looking between the two of them. “I cannot tell anyone else, but I can say it to small, baby you, yes?” 

“I’m not a baby,” Hollander protests at the same time that Shane says, “Actually, you can’t, okay, there are rules.” 

“I cannot call you Shane because my Shane will get confused,” Ilya says reasonably, gesturing between the two. “I cannot call you Hollander because my Hollander will also get confused."

“Careful,” Shane mutters, because Hollander’s eyes narrow in consideration. That’s one of the things he remembers clearly about today. Wondering what sort of relationship he and Ilya Rozanov strike up, where apparently even years and years later, when they’re clearly intimately familiar with each other, he’d still respond to Ilya calling him by his last name.

Ilya tosses up his hands at the warning. “Okay, explain me the rules, please,” he snaps, Russian accent almost stronger than the English words. He gets like that sometimes, when he’s worked up and horny or worked up and angry. Apparently also when he is worked up and frazzled and learning about time travel for the first time in his life.

He glances between Shane and Hollander. “We do this outside though,” he decides, standing. “I need a smoke.”

Hollander makes a scandalized sound. “That’s so bad for you.”

“Oh, yay,” Ilya sneers. “There are two of you.” The words—the tone—are really only made bearable by the way that he squeezes Shane’s shoulder as he passes him. The way the touch lingers, a drag of his thumb across the flexing muscle of his shoulder until he’s gone.

“He’s right though,” Shane calls at his retreating back. Ilya gives him a rude hand gesture as he stomps into the bedroom, blanket still wrapped around his shoulders like a shawl. “Alright, come on,” he tells Hollander. “Fire pit. Pretty sure you’ll be here for a bit longer, so we can set a fire.” 

Hollander nods, game face carefully secured, before he hesitates on the lip of the siding glass door. “Um…”

“I’ll grab one of the protein shakes from the fridge,” Shane reassures him because he remembers being eighteen. The pressure of being close to making it but not there just yet—knowing it’ll happen but worrying at the same time that somehow it won’t and that life you’ve dreamed about, seen slivers of, will dissolve into nothing. There’s no certainty with this sort of time travel, not for Shane. Just more doubt.

Hollander has the biggest game of his life tomorrow, and even if he’s been tossed nine years into the future, that game’s still going to be tomorrow for him. He’s worried about getting a good night’s sleep and getting all his macros. 

Shane can’t help him with the sleep part, remembers how he tossed and turned that night before Prospects, but he can give him this. 

“Thanks,” Hollander says, politely but almost reluctantly, and Shane grunts in acknowledgement. He’s thought a few times now, when Hollander has appeared in his Montreal apartment as a kid of varying ages, that this is the universe’s way of making him be somehow both an only child and a big brother. To himself. Which is weird.

“Go sit,” he tells Hollander. “Ilya’s gonna be out in a second.”

“Ilya Rozanov,” Hollander says. Gobsmacked all over again. “What the fuck.”

Shane shrugs. He’s way past defending his choices in partners to himself. And he knows there’s nothing he can say that will make this easier for Hollander to wrap his head around. He sees himself kissing another man when he’s eighteen and it still takes him eight more years to admit to himself that he really, really isn’t into girls at all. “You’ve seen tape of him playing hockey,” he says under his breath. The kid goes scarlet. 

They both remember what they used to do while watching Ilya Rozanov play hockey on shitty recordings from even shittier cameras. There’s a reason he waited until Ilya was out of the room and digging through his stuff to find his pack of cigarettes to remind Hollander of that.

“Now go.”

Hollander goes.

“Okay, Shane, kotik,” Ilya says, after stubbing out his second cigarette on one of Shane’s dinner plates. “Explain to me these rules.”

“Um,” Hollander says. His eyes dart between them. “I’m kotik?”

“Oh, yes,” Ilya replies, lips curling up into a smirk as his eyes dance with the flames. “You are.”

Shane rubs a hand over his face and sighs. Kotik. It’s the first Russian word he ever learned, took it from the future back to his shitty hotel room in Saskatchewan and looked it up as soon as he had a moment to himself so he could understand what exactly Ilya Rozanov had been calling him the whole time they talked.

Kitten.

He can feel his face flush. It’s different, being on this side of the evening. It’s weird: somehow brand new and already well-trodden. The things he knows, the things he can’t remember, the things he feels now that he hadn’t felt then…it’s hard to wrap his head around.

“He never stays long,” Shane says when Hollander only looks between them, eyes lingering constantly on the way their hands are knotted together on top of Shane’s knee, the way that Shane’s head is resting on Ilya’s shoulder. He hadn’t necessarily meant to get tangled up in his boyfriend in front of his barely legal teenage self, but then Ilya had tugged him into his orbit the moment he’d sat down, and that was that.

“Long like a day or long like a week?” Ilya asks, pressing another cigarette between his teeth and fumbling for the lighter. Shane wants to give him shit for it, but it’s been a stressful day. Anything that doesn’t end with Ilya running and screaming into the hills is good in his books right now.

Across the fire, Hollander scowls. 

“Long like a few hours at most,” Shane corrects, rubbing his thumb over the back of Ilya’s hand. “I’ve never flashed forward longer than, I don’t know. Three hours?”

“So you still…go into the future?” Ilya asks, breathing out a puff of smoke. “It happens for you, too?”

“Yeah, I don’t know if…I don’t think it’s something I grow out of,” he says. “I haven’t for a while though. I mean, last time was…uh. Fall of 2016. Just after…you know. Boston.”

“Boston?” Hollander is quick to ask, even as Ilya’s shoulder flexes beneath Shane’s cheek as he straightens. He knows what he’s talking about, at least. 

“Ah, ah, Is against your rules, isn’t it, kotik?” Ilya says, because he’s always been so fucking clever. He untangles their fingers to stroke along Shane’s hair and Shane turns his cheek further into the line of Ilya’s shoulder. He remembers how strange it’d been, to see his older self like this. Like someone in love. He can’t bring himself to separate them though, almost wants to crawl further into Ilya’s lap if that’ll make Hollander realize and understand that this is something he can have. That this is real, this is his future.

“Whatever,” Hollander huffs, all of eighteen years old, dropping back into his seat with a pout. He grabs the protein shake bottle next to him and takes a petulant sip.

“The rules?” Ilya prompts, tugging carefully at the roots of Shane’s hair.

“There’s only so much we can really keep separate or secret,” Shane tells him, eyes on the fire. “We don’t know what knowing will do, so…I mean obviously we try our best, and anything we see we don’t repeat to anyone else, ever. Ever. But we don’t, like…disclose information about the future to the younger versions either. No politics, no lotto numbers. No cup wins or season stats.”

“I always wondered why your house does not have all your hockey trophies in the living room,” Ilya hums. “I thought, Shane Hollander, very respectable. Very humble boy. But not even one picture?” 

“It’s all in a trophy room that I keep locked,” Shane admits. “A few team pictures in my bedroom, but no—can’t exactly do a shrine or anything. Prying eyes, you know.”

“Yes,” Ilya waves his hand and then squeezes the back of Shane’s neck. His tone turns sly, “I thought, maybe Hollander is ashamed of being drafted eleventh overall, I do not know if this—”

“Eleventh overall?” Hollander cries, sounding heartbroken.

“Ilya,” Shane admonishes. “Not helpful.”

He can hear the smile in Ilya’s voice when he turns to look at Hollander. “Oh, you did not know?” he says, because he is an asshole.

Shane glances across the fire at Hollander, ready to shake his head in assurance if Hollander really is stressed. The last thing they need is Hollander getting into his head about his future with the MLH and fumbling the puck during the International Prospect Cup games.

But then Ilya seems to melt underneath Hollander’s distressed eyes and he’s quick to course correct, voice going all soft and fond. “Oh kotik, you know you are better than eleventh draft overall,” he murmurs, body flexing slightly beneath Shane, like he’s fighting the instinct to get up and go over to the younger Hollander and hold him.

God, what a soft touch.

Shane clears his throat and bats at Ilya’s thigh in sharp reprimand. “And we also don’t make jokes about the future, alright?”

Ilya huffs but sags back into his seat. “I cannot believe it, Hollander,” he says, taking another drag of his cigarette. “All these rules. You have somehow managed to make time travel boring.”

“It’s a talent,” Shane agrees, deadpan. “There are some things we—sort of grow up knowing, I guess. Like that we do get drafted, probably. And we play for Montreal for—a bit. And we win a cup.”

“A cup,” Ilya repeats, like the words are difficult for him. Shane can practically hear him choking back the correction. The two cups, actually, and an Olympic gold medal.

“I was eleven when I flashed forward and interrupted my own Cup Day,” Shane says shortly. “Thank God it was just my parents and me at the time, but. There was no hiding it after that."

“But they’re not sure things,” Hollander interrupts, crossing his arms and curling his feet up beneath him. “Nothing’s really, actually set in stone.”

“What do you mean, kotik?” Ilya asks, voice a gentle rumble like he’s talking to an actual baby. It toes the line between sweet and offensive, if Shane’s being honest. Especially since that tone isn’t, technically, being directed towards him. 

Alright, well. Technically it is. But still. 

“I promise, kotik, you win cup,” Ilya adds. “I watch. You have trouble lifting it around for victory lap. Is funny.”

“I don’t,” Shane snaps, hitting Ilya’s thigh again. “It’s lighter than it looks,” he tells Hollander. “It’s fine.”

“It’s like…” Hollander shakes his head, hands flying up to tug at the sleeves of his borrowed jacket. It’s Ilya’s, but there’s probably no way for Hollander to know that. He looks too comfortable in it to have noticed, at least. “Like, it’s all in your past now, so it’s set in stone because it’s already happened. But your past is my future. And that could still change. It’s not guaranteed. If I—if I fall and break my ankle on the ice tomorrow, maybe the MLH decides not to draft me at all and I never win any cups.”

“Or maybe you break your ankle and it heals fine and you go first in the draft,” Shane says dryly, because he’s had this conversation before a million times—in his head and out loud, with different versions of himself both older and younger.

Hollander wrinkles his nose automatically. “Boston has the first pick,” he says, disdain dripping off the words like Shane knew it would. 

Ilya stiffens beneath him, defensive and automatic. “There is nothing wrong with Boston,” he says. “Is good team, good place to live." He hesitates, adds, "I have heard this, at least.”

Shane can’t help it; he turns his face into Ilya’s shoulder to hide his grin. 

“Whatever,” Hollander says. But Shane knows he remembers this. Remembers thinking, okay. Rozanov probably goes to Boston. Gets first pick. That’s fine. I didn’t want to play for Boston anyway.

“I mean, we just don’t know,” Shane says, picking up the thread. “It’s better to be safe than sorry, right? I’ve seen—some stuff, some good stuff, but they’re like…just one possibility. It’s not something I can depend on to happen. And it’s not like the older me is sitting down and spilling his guts about everything that’s happened over the years between him and me. There are rules for a reason.”

“Rules,” Ilya repeats, shaking his head like he can’t believe the word. “For time travel. The only rule for time travel is that there is no such thing as time travel, da?”

“I mean, obviously not,” Shane replies, gesturing across the fire pit, and Ilya makes a disgusted noise. He stubs out the rest of his cigarette; this time, he doesn’t reach for another. 

Instead, he presses Shane’s head down into his lap, one hand falling to his shoulders while the other resumes petting along the top of his head. “Maybe you are most boring but best person for magic time travel powers,” he says. “You would never take advantage of knowing the future.”

“It’s not really knowing—” both Hollander and Shane start to say at the same time, and Ilya barks out a laugh.

“Only Shane Hollander would see bits of future and then say, hm, no, maybe this is not going to happen, let me stress about it more,” he says, and his hand is a solid weight on Shane’s back, keeping him grounded.

Shane bites his lip. He wants to tell Ilya that seeing bits of the future has never given him certainty. It’s just given him a better view of everything he has to lose. Things he didn’t even know he had yet. Things like Stanley cups and hockey teams and a forty-year old Ilya Rozanov, lounging in a ratty t-shirt and joggers with a dog at his feet and reading glasses tangled in his hair.

If the future isn’t set in stone, it’s just dreams you can lose once you wake up. If it’s not your life and you’re just looking at it through someone else’s window, then you’ve got nothing to hold onto except how badly you want to make it true.

But he can’t say that. Hollander is here, across the fire. Watching them like he can’t believe Shane’s found the courage to fuck another man, let alone fall in love with him. Too much more would break him. Could hurt his chances with his Ilya, their Ilya, and Shane would never risk that. Being in love the way he is with Ilya is a thin line between calculation, risk assessment on one side, freefall and skydiving on the other.

So he says the next best thing. 

He says, “I need to go to the bathroom, I’ll be right back.”

He takes the long way to the bathroom, doesn’t even bother closing the door as he washes his face. In his memory, this conversation takes hours, each word slow and careful and impactful the way a cannonball is impactful. 

But logically, it can’t have taken more than ten minutes, so Shane washes his hands, pats his face dry, washes his hands again when he notices they’re trembling slightly. 

He takes the long way back to the fire pit, leans against the wooden trim of the living room wall next to the open door for a moment, hidden.

“And—um, I mean, how do you and me….” Hollander trails off. His voice cracks, which is embarrassing enough to make both Hollanders wince.

“Shane says there are rules, kotik,” Ilya chides, but his voice is soft enough that it’s a useless sort of refusal. Hollander knows what Shane already does: Ilya is incapable of refusing him anything. A soft fucking touch. No wonder all the older versions of Shane kept him from meeting Ilya all the way up until last autumn. They must have known exactly how quickly Ilya would cave and tell him whatever he wanted to know.

“No, I know, and um. I don’t want to know anything, like…big. I just….I mean. You love him? It’s not—it’s not just sex? We love each other?”

“That is very big thing, kotik,” Ilya murmurs in disagreement, and Shane leans his head back against the wood paneling of the wall. “But yes. I love him, and he loves me.”

“And it’s okay?” Hollander blurts, sounding young, sounding like a child. “We get to be in love and play hockey and it’s okay?”

Shane’s chest hurts. He rubs at it with his palm, trying to dispel the ache, but it lingers. It lingers, all these years later. Maybe that’s something he should ask his older self, the next time he jumps forward. If it ever goes away.

There’s a rustle of fabric, the outside patio furniture creaking as Ilya abandons his seat to cross around the fire, sit next to Hollander. He holds his hand. He remembers that, Shane does. He remembers Ilya reaching out for his hand and taking it in between both of his own. 

No one had ever done that before. 

Or—that’s not true. Jessica had, his girlfriend when he was in high school. They’d held hands. Done more than that. 

But it’d never, never once in his life, felt like it did when Ilya Rozanov held his hand. Like he was something precious. Like he was something to be treated with care. Tenderly and gently.

“It is okay,” Ilya tells the younger version of Shane, fierce and protective and so, so wonderful that Shane has to press the back of his hand against his mouth just to keep a wounded sound in. “Shane, kotik, listen to me, it is important. Even if everything else changes and you break your ankle tomorrow—”

“Oh my god, what if—”

“No, listen, solnyshka. It will not, I promise. I know. But even if it did, it is okay. Who you are and who you love, whoever you love—you are perfect, you are just exactly okay.”

Hollander makes a broken little noise, like he’s about to cry, and Shane shuts his eyes. “But we’re—we’re not out, or anything, right? I can’t be out, I can’t—no one can know. I don’t want—anyone to know—”

“No one else knows,” Ilya rumbles, and Shane can hear shifting on the cushions. Can remember how it felt, being folded into Ilya Rozanov’s arms for the very first time. How he already, immediately started thinking about ways to get this again. “But they will, later. Maybe. Probably. When we are ready for them to.”

There’s a sniffle. Hollander’s, probably. Shane can’t remember Ilya crying outright, but now that he knows the way Ilya sounds when he’s emotional, when he’s teetering on the edge and one fucking word will break him, he knows exactly how close Ilya is to losing it too.

It’s strange. Well-worn memory that’s still somehow brand new, like this is the first time this has ever happened and like it's a script he knows every stage direction for. He feels it in his chest, his ribs expanding around something so impossibly light and buoyant.

“So how do we, um…do we meet tomorrow? At the Prospect Cup games?” Hollander asks very quietly. Shane thunks his head back against the wood. Grins at nothing and feels the edges of his smile with his fingertips.

Ilya’s getting taken advantage of, swindled and conned. And Shane knows what this means to Hollander—he wouldn’t change a thing.

At least Ilya seems to realize it too, because he lets out a huff of laughter. Shane closes his eyes, can almost feel the way Ilya’s hockey-rough fingers had felt dragging through his hair for the first time. “Clever kotik,” Ilya says, but that’s all the protest he has left to give. They are, after all, not his rules. That’s what the older Ilya had said when Shane had met him last autumn. This is important, kotik, he’d said with a wave of his hand. Shane and I share many things in this relationship, in this life, but sometimes magic time traveling rules are made to be broken.

“Yes,” Ilya is saying. “We meet tomorrow. You are very pretty. All these freckles. And I am very defenseless Russian boy.”

“I’m not,” Hollander denies, “I’m just…I’m just some guy.”

“Very pretty guy,” Ilya disagrees. “With beautiful freckles and big doe eyes that make me give rival competition handshake. Two handshakes. I forget to shit-talk you until you are already leaving, you are so pretty.”

“Now you’re just teasing me,” Hollander says. He sounds pleased though, and shy. God, Shane hopes to hell and back he’s gotten better at hiding his emotions over the years. It’s embarrassing, is what it is. 

“I am telling the truth,” Ilya promises. More shifting.

“And…it works out?” Hollander asks in the tone of voice of someone who knows he’s toeing the line but can’t quite bring himself stop. “I, um, find you? After? Or you find me? And we…get together then?”

Ilya is quiet, for a beat. Two. There’s more shifting on the cushions. He clears his throat. 

Shane shuts his eyes and mouths along.

“I wish I could say it is so simple,” Ilya murmurs. “But it is not. We make it very…complicated. But is beautiful. Beautiful and complicated. I will not be…there are things, in my mind. Maybe it is difficult. For both of us. But I think about you many, many times. Very often. I do stupid things to get your attention. For…many years. And there is good hockey, in between. And bad hockey. And when I see you, it is hard to look away for many years. Until I realize I don’t ever want to stop looking at you, not ever. And then…”

He trails off. Material shifts, cloth against nylon. A shrug. 

“And then it works out?” Hollander asks, voice a ghost of a whisper.

“Kotik,” Ilya says incredulously and Shane says quieter, “Look around you. Do you think it works out?”

Hollander doesn’t respond.

But Shane knows he recites those words in his head over and over again, over eight years of agonizing over Ilya Rozanov and loving him more than he thought possible. He keeps those words closer to his chest than he keeps his pride over the cups, the medals, the trophies, until he grows from the boy Rozanov spoke those words to into the man who listened to them from inside the house.

But Hollander doesn’t respond because he disappears in between one second and the next. 

“Kotik?” Ilya’s voice is sudden and loud, a complete one-eighty turn from just a few seconds before. “Shane?” His feet hit the patio cement. Panic bleeds into his voice. “Shane, kotik?” 

This part is new for Shane. He’d hadn’t thought about it much before either: how Ilya reacted to him disappearing so suddenly.

He rubs at his face quickly, trying to dry the tear tracks on his cheeks, as he steps out from behind the wood panel and through the glass doorway.

Ilya whips his head to look at him, expression frantic. “Shane, I think I broke it,” he says, rushing around the fire until he can grasp at Shane’s shoulders. Tight, like he thinks maybe Shane will disappear on him too. “I broke rule, did he go away because I broke the rules?” His English is patchwork again, unstable and built on the faultline of his panic.

“No, no, Ilya, come here, baby, c’mere” Shane says, tugging him into his arms and pulling them down onto the patio couch again. His hand winds through Ilya’s hair while the other rucks up his shirt and wraps around his side. “They’re not rules like that, it’s alright, you didn’t do anything. He just had to go back.”

“He just disappeared,” Ilya mutters, eyebrows low on his face like he’s irritated at the world for taking the younger version of Shane from him before he was finished. Like he's scared.

“He does that,” Shane murmurs, soft agreement. He fits his hands over Ilya’s face, tilts it up so he can see him better in the fading light. There’s no reason to resist the urge to give him a kiss on the forehead, so he doesn’t. Then he kisses his cheek, the bridge of his nose, his other cheek, his chin, his jawline.

“You are not mad I broke the rules?” Ilya asks, even as he leans up into Shane’s lips, eyes fluttering shut under the delicate treatment. 

Shane shakes his head, rubs his thumb over the line of Ilya’s cupid’s bow and then shakes his head again. He loves him so much he can’t stand it sometimes. It’s even harder to bear, now that it doesn’t hurt anymore. It feels like he’s swallowed a miniature sun. He doesn’t know how he’s just supposed to keep it inside him without letting anyone else see, not when it feels like he’s burning up on the inside. Not when it feels like he could play on a hundred hockey rinks wearing just a shirt and shorts and never be cold again.

“Not this time,” he mutters, kissing the curve of Ilya’s cheekbones, twisting them on the couch so he can climb on top of him, nestle as close as he can get without crawling into Ilya’s skin. Which is the sort of gross thing he’s never thought of before, but now it’s something he wishes could happen. “Don’t do it again, obviously, but—no, this was good. We needed this.”

“What do you mean?” Ilya asks, tilting his head up and looking at Shane through half-lidded eyes. His hands have yet to let go of their tight grip on his shoulders. Maybe—yeah, okay. Maybe Shane should have been more explicit about what happens when Hollanders go back to their correct timeline. He sees that now. “I forget to compost banana peel, you get angry and call me oil-country tree murderer, but I tell younger self that we are in love and get together, and hm, this is fine?”

Shane leans back, as far as Ilya’s hands will let him. He blinks down at his boyfriend. He feels...shocked. He feels sort of shocked. He can’t believe Ilya doesn’t know, doesn’t get it. But then—Ilya has had maybe five minutes of living in a world with those words. Shane’s had eight years of clutching them close to him like they’re rosary beads.

“I wish I could say it is so simple,” he says. Recites. His thumb rubs along Ilya’s jaw, up to carefully move an errant curl back into place. “But it is not. We make it very complicated, but is beautiful. Beautiful and complicated.”

“Shane?”

“I will not be…there are things, in my mind. Maybe it is difficult for both of us. But I think about you many, many times. Very often. I do stupid things to get your attention. For many years. And there is good hockey, in between. And bad hockey.” 

“Shane,” Ilya says, like a prayer. His eyes are wide, wet. He gets it now, maybe. A part of it, at least.

“And when I see you, it is hard to look away for many years,” Shane murmurs, bending down so he can ghost his lips across Ilya’s mouth. “Until I realize I don’t ever want to stop looking at you, not ever.”

Ilya’s arms wrap around his back and crush him into his chest, like he’s afraid someone will come and take him away. Like he’d rather die than let that happen. “You…all of it?”

“I remember it,” Shane agrees. “All of it, of course I do. It was—God, I thought about this all the fucking time. I couldn’t believe it when I got drafted, when I won the cup,  when we first...but I knew this was going to happen.” He kisses him, because there’s no good reason not to, and Ilya’s face is wet like one of them is crying a little bit. Maybe both of them are. “It was fucking awful, some parts,” he mutters, and Ilya’s hands tighten then loosen like he knows and agrees.

Shane shakes his head, rushing to get ahead of Ilya thinking any of it was his fault alone. “I wasn’t…I wasn’t ready to face it all, anyway,” he says. “Like the—the being gay stuff. And the being in love with a guy part. But I knew it was going to happen. That it would work out. Because you told me. Fuck, you were the first person to tell me that it was okay. Of course I didn’t forget that.”

Shane could travel to a thousand different moments of his life, relive the whole thing, however many years he ends up getting, and he’d never forget that. Never forget being eighteen years old and holding out his darkest, most shameful secret in his hands and someone cupping his palms with all the love in the world in their eyes and saying, This? Oh, sweetheart, this is nothing. 

“I love you,” Ilya mumbles, tangling their fingers together and pressing Shane’s knuckles to his mouth clumsily. “Ya tebya lyublu, ya tebya lyublu, ya tebya lyublu.”

“I love you too,” Shane says, burying his face in his neck. “Fuck, I couldn’t sleep the night before the Prospect Cup because I knew I was going to meet you.”

“Yes, I thought you looked like shit,” Ilya lies, and Shane lets him because he knows it’s a lie. Has already heard the truth eighteen years ago. Ten minutes ago.

“I was so worried it’d fuck up my hockey, but I was more worried that I’d fuck up meeting you,” he says, a confession. “That I would fuck it up and I wouldn’t get to keep you, even if—at the same time, I knew. That you were mine.”

“Moy,” Ilya agrees, running his hands up and down Shane’s back. “Moy, Shane Hollander.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Shane agrees. “Always, yeah.”

Ilya grips at the edge of his shirt and tugs it up and off Shane’s shoulders. It’s difficult work, the patio couch just wide enough for one of them to lie flat against its cushions. “Careful, careful,” Shane says automatically as Ilya lets the shirt drop onto the ground.

“You think I am going to throw your shirt in the fire, Hollander?” Ilya scoffs, grasping Shane’s hips and dragging him into a better angle on his lap. “You think I am in the mood to hear your bitching about your shirt being on fire?”

Shane makes himself scowl down at his boyfriend, but he knows his grin is already shining through. “What are you in the mood for then?” he teases, rocking himself down against the obvious bulge in Ilya’s athletic shorts.

“I don’t know,” Ilya says. His smile turns sly, eyebrows raised in challenge. “Maybe you pretend to be eighteen again?”

“No, Ilya, that’s gross,” Shane says, immediate and visceral, even as a fire sparks to life in his gut at just the thought.

Ilya smirks up at him like he knows it. “You’re blushing, kotik,” he says, and that does it.

Later, wrapped up more in each other than in the sheets of the bed, Ilya prods at Shane’s side suddenly. It’s the middle of the night—or it feels like it, at least.

“What, what’s wrong?” Shane asks groggily, shifting up onto his elbows. 

“You said you still travel,” Ilya says, sounding wide awake.

Shane blinks at him, mind feeling fuzzy and limbs aching with exhaustion. “Yeah?” He says. “I mean, I’m meeting the team in Mexico in a few weeks before training camp. I told you that.”

Ilya makes a disgusted noise. “I do not care about your boring Mexico trip,” he says. “You said you still travel.” In the dark, his eyebrows go up and then down, a strange wriggling motion that Shane’s almost grateful he can’t see. “Through time, da?”

Oh. Yeah. “Oh, right. Yeah. Sometimes.”

“How far have you gone?” Ilya asks intently, slipping closer.

“I don’t know any lottery numbers,” Shane warns, sitting up and rubbing a hand over his eyes to get the sleep out of them.

Ilya sits up too with a scoff. “We are millionaires, Hollander, I do not care about lottery numbers. I own many sports cars and houses already. Let the peasants play with their magic tickets.”

“Then what do you want to know?” Shane asks, eyes narrowing. “I can’t—I really can’t say anything, Ilya, you know that. It’s a rule.”

“Magic time traveling rules are made to be broken,” Ilya says, waving his hand in a way that pulls Shane back—or, rather, forward in time. To an older Ilya. One who waved his hand through the air to dismiss Shane’s worries. One who waved his hand through the air in the dim living room light at just the right angle to show off the gleam of his wedding band.

He’d winked at him afterwards, smug smirk still the same on his face after all those years.

Shane lets out a gust of breath. “Fine. What is it?”

In the face of the naked question, Ilya goes quiet. Goes careful. “Only…” he reaches out, picks up Shane’s hand, pulls him into his body. “Are we…in the future, your most away future…are we together?”

Shane closes his eyes. Before Ilya, a question like that would be a firm No, I can’t say, I’m sorry. 

But this is After Ilya. This is Ilya, and Shane loves him.

“Nothing is set in stone,” he murmurs, tilting his head until he can feel Ilya’s curls beneath his lips. “Remember that, okay?”

Ilya goes stiff beside him, a small noise escaping his lips like he’s been wounded. He withdraws his hand as if Shane’s touch suddenly burns. “So we are not,” he says, to himself. “I see. I understand.”

But he doesn’t, is the thing. The heart of the problem. Ilya can’t understand. Shane doesn’t know how to explain it to him, how to tell him the truth in a way that lets him appreciate its weight.

There’s a difference, he wants to say, between seeing and believing. And blind faith has led more ships into rocky coastlines than lighthouses ever could prevent. You can sketch a plan on paper, a building design, but it’s only graphite. There are no cracks in graphite. No flaws. You have to build it first, get your hands dirty with it. Identify the weak points and the fault lines and strengthen them as you go. 

Knowing or not knowing, it doesn’t mean anything. What the future Hollander has, it’s worthless if Shane doesn’t keep building day-by-day now. That’s true for hockey; it’s true for this, him and Rozanov.

But—Rozanov doesn’t understand because he can’t understand, not until Shane can find the words to tell him. And—and maybe fancy magic time traveling rules are made to be broken, only sometimes. When it’s important. And it had been important for the eighteen year old Shane to hear those words from this Ilya. Maybe it’s just as important, for this Ilya to hear these words from twenty-six year old Shane. Maybe Ilya operates more on faith than Shane's ever thought possible.

“Hey, c’mere,” Shane whispers when Ilya turns his face away from him. Ilya’s lips are pinched, nostrils flared. “You’ve got it wrong.”

“Do I,” he says stiffly, and it’d maybe sound mean if Shane doesn’t know what Ilya sounds like when he’s feeling ripped to shreds.

“I can’t—say much,” he says, knowing already he wants to keep that older Ilya to himself for now. That if he lets one hint of him reach this Ilya’s ears, it won’t be long before Ilya drags the whole story from his lips.

Ilya raises both eyebrows, achingly unimpressed. But here, still. Because Shane asked him to stay. 

“But a few years ago, I flashed forward to my Montreal house,” Shane says. He reaches up and cups Ilya’s face. “You weren’t there, but there was a book of Russian verbs on my bedside table. And um, post-it notes. On all the furniture, with the names in Russian. And it wasn’t my handwriting.”

Ilya’s face softens in the dim light, then it cracks open. “And you were old?” he whispers, like he doesn’t even know if he's allowed to begin to hope.

“Ancient,” Shane promises, even though he thinks probably he was about thirty-five or six. Which, to be fair, feels like centuries away. “It’s not much,” he adds, and for a moment all he can think about is that older Ilya’s smirking face. He must have known, then, how much of a liar Shane is now. “But I don’t think I’d learn Russian for anyone else but you. Ya—ya tebya lyublu.”

There are tears in the corners of Ilya’s eyes, and his smile is bright enough to rival the sun in Shane’s chest. “Your accent is horrible,” he says, which Shane knows is a lie. “It will take you ages to learn good Russian, no wonder you are very old and still practicing.”

“Yeah,” Shane agrees, because he thinks he’d agree with anything Ilya says if he’s looking at him like that.

“Don’t worry, I will help you,” Ilya promises, pushing him down onto the bed and curling up on his side behind him. Content, apparently, to go to sleep now that this mystery has been solved. “I will always help you,” he mutters, kissing the words into the nape of Shane’s neck. “Ya tebya lyublu.”

Shane sighs and then slowly lets himself melt back into Ilya’s arms in quiet contentment. He’ll be out in a flash, he knows it. It’s been an exhausting day, but it’s over now —

“Solnyshka,” Ilya whispers, nudging his side again.

It’s been an exhausting day, but it’s over now—

“Shane, solnyshka, you are still awake, you are not snoring yet.”

“I don’t snore!”

“Okay, okay,” Ilya says in deference, kissing his cheek. “We can lie about some things this week, that is okay—”

“I don’t!”

“I just want to check. No more other things, yes?” Ilya’s arm twitches beneath Shane’s head, his other arm snaking down and around his hips to pull him back against his body. “Is nice, accepting but nosy parents and magic time travel powers, that is all of the cottage surprises for the week, yes?”

Shane blinks open his eyes into the darkness of the room. Ilya’s arms are holding him, but his fingers aren’t tapping against his skin like they do when he’s feeling impatient. He’s being an asshole more than genuinely worrying that there's some other huge secret Shane's not telling him. 

“Oh, well,” Shane whispers shyly. “I, um. Now that you ask, there is one more thing. A secret.”

Ilya’s breath pauses against Shane’s neck, and he moves carefully. Away and up, to loom over him. “One more thing?”

“Bigger than time travel kind of secret,” Shane agrees, rolling over onto his back so he can peer up at Ilya’s moonlit face.

“I take it back, Shane Hollander, you can be boring. Please be boring now,” Ilya says, and Shane can hear it in his voice that he’s only partially joking. “What is this last secret, solnyshka. Maybe it is best if I decide if it is bigger or smaller than magic time travel powers. You are too unbothered by magic time travel powers.” 

“Well, it’s just. Um…” Shane bites his lips, drops his eyes and looks away. “I can, you know. On the full moon….I turn into…”

“Turn into,” Ilya’s eyebrows are curved together, expression set and serious, and Shane doesn’t feel guilty at all. 

“A loon,” he says. 

Ilya lets out a sigh and collapses on top of him. It’s enough to knock the breath out of Shane, and what little air he has left flees his chest the moment Ilya’s hands find his tender sides and dig into them. “You smile like it is big joke,” Ilya cries, kneeling up over Shane’s twisting form and tickling him all the harder. “But ten hours ago, magic time travel is big joke!” 

“Okay, okay, okay!” Shane yelps, tears stinging at his eyes from the force of his laughter. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! No more, mercy, Ilya, please!”

Hands clamp down on his wrists, pin him to the bed, and Ilya’s face peers down at him from only a few inches away. There’s still a smile in the corner of his mouth, in the twinkling of his eyes, but his voice is serious when he says, “There can be more. More big secrets. I love you with your big stupid secrets. The ones you tell me, the ones you haven’t yet. Is important that you know. I am not going anywhere.”

“Same,” Shane murmurs, wriggling his arm free from so he can cup Ilya’s face with all the tenderness he feels but doesn’t quite know how to articulate yet. “Same for you, Ilya. Anything. I’m not leaving you. I know that.”

And it’s the truth, unshakable, the bedrock he started building his life on back when he was eighteen and laying awake in a hotel room in Saskatchewan, one night before the International Prospects Cup. Ilya is it for him. He’s everything he could ever want, everything he never thought he’d get to have. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, what lies ahead of them and how it’ll test them, how it’ll seek to break them. But he does know this. He isn’t going to leave Ilya Rozanov, come hell or high water and whatever middling path lies in between.