Chapter Text
2019
Mid February
It was a rare weekend where neither of them were on a road swing of games and Shane had driven to Ottawa after his Friday afternoon game in Montreal. Ilya had a late dinner ready for the two of them and after finishing they were relaxing on the couch of Ilya’s large living room talking about their last few games and their teams. Well, Ilya was talking about his team, Shane didn’t have a lot to share beyond what was going on with Hayden’s family. Ilya was talking about how Bood had hosted a party a couple of weeks ago that he hadn’t gone to because he was in Montreal with Shane, but he wanted to go to the next one, because he hated missing out on team bonding, even if it was for a good cause.
“He has them all the time, he loves hosting. Maybe next year we can be friends to more people and you could come to one with me! Would be so fun to see your boring interact with my fun team.” Ilya mused.
“I don’t know if we will be able to be that close in public in less than a year. We have years of rivalry to counter at this point. We haven’t even announced the Foundation yet.” Shane countered. They had hoped to announce it closer to All-Stars, but the league leaned back into the rivalry aggressively after last year and they weren’t sure how to make it work. Now the plan was to announce it before playoffs started, at the last regular season Ottawa/Montreal game.
“But we could start with our teams, and just be friends. We could try smaller groups over the summer. Plus your family lives here, so simple excuse for you, nothing else to do in this boring city but hang out with Yuna and David. I am much more appealing choice of company.” Despite the wink accompanying this statement Shane could hear a bit of mulishness creeping into Ilya’s voice.
“You love spending time with my mom and dad, maybe more than you like spending time with me,” Shane tried to deflect, hoping Ilya would take the bait, to either tease or defend him. Either would be fine, and both probably would lead to less talking and more kissing.
“We have to show people we are friends somehow.” Ilya stubbornly didn’t bite the lure of the joke. “How else will we start to change the narrative?” Narrative rolling off his tongue in an exaggeration of his accent.
“Right, but that is going to take time. And we have to be careful about how we do it.” Shane reasoned.
“I guess…” Shane could hear the pout in Ilya’s voice. It pissed him off.
“You guess?” Shane interrupted sarcastically. “Well, excuse me for wanting to be a bit more sure about something that could out both of us if we aren’t careful.” He waited for Ilya to respond.
They had had versions of this conversation over the last year and a half since they had officially gotten together, and increasingly, and especially since Ilya had moved to Ottawa, it seemed like they were less and less on the same page. Ilya seemed to want to push the boundaries of the plan, despite them both agreeing that they were not going to come out as a couple until they retired. This shift in Ilya’s attitude worried him. There was no way to only sort of come out. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. And if both of them were out and friendly in public people would start to put the pieces together.
“Ilya – I thought we agreed that we would wait.” Shane tried to reason.
“Wait to come out publicly, yes. Not wait to live our lives.”
“What do you mean?” Shane spluttered.
Ilya didn’t respond right away. Shane rushed to fill the silence. “Our lives are hockey. If we come out we could lose that.”
“Your life is Hockey, Shane,” Ilya accused. “I want more than just Hockey.”
“I do too, that’s not what I meant,” Shane defended, “I just meant–”
“Yes I know what you meant,” Ilya interrupted, “Hockey is more important than our relationship.”
“That’s not what I said!”
“Is same.” Ilya muttered petulantly.
“No it's not,” Shane rushed to explain “you know what I meant. Our relationship will still be there when we retire, but we are building our legacies now.”
“But…” Ilya tried to interject.
“We don’t want to be those queer hockey players that are accused of throwing games for each other, that every question we get asked is about being gay and what your losses and wins and everything means to the LGBTQ community, I’ve seen how it has changed things for Hunter.”
“That dinosaur is not as good at hockey as us.” Ilya tried to steer the conversation back to less combative ground. “Being friends around our teams doesn’t mean we would be out, just would mean we get to spend more time together.”
“But people would figure it out!” Shane cried. “There’s no way you could keep your flirting under control and keep your hands to yourself. We would be found out so fast.”
“But we could keep it to people we trust, so if that happened we would be safe.” Ilya reasoned.
“It’s almost as if you want to come out.” Shane threw out. There was a pause. This time Shane didn’t rush to fill the silence. He was completely thrown off. He thought they were on the same page. It was too dangerous. Especially for Ilya, he still was a Russian citizen. But for both of them. This wasn’t the plan.
“I guess,” the words left Ilya’s mouth slowly, deliberately. Different from when he was trying to translate, more like he was weighing each word on some invisible set of scales. “I can think of worse things.” Another pause. “I just want to have our future sooner. Or at least parts of it.”
This shocked Shane. Since he had admitted to himself, and subsequently to Ilya, that he was gay, he had settled into thinking about his life in two phases. During Hockey and After Hockey. He was a Hockey player now, he could be The Gay Hockey Player later. He thought Ilya did too. Shane tried to assimilate this discordancy into his understanding of the world. It wasn’t fitting, it was sharp and dangerous and destabilizing.
Ilya kept speaking, Shane hearing him as if through a closed door, muffled by the chaos of his brain going into overdrive. “I just – miss you. All the time.” Ilya confessed quietly. “I thought last year was bad, being with you, but so far away. I thought being here would fix.” He continued quickly at the look of confusion that Shane couldn’t keep off his face. “Is better. Much better. But…”
“But what?”
“Is not enough.”
“What?” Shane choked out. “What do you mean?” His mind was racing, trying to figure out how to make the pain of hearing that Ilya wasn’t happy with their relationship go away. “What’s not enough?” His voice thick with unshed tears.
“Not you, дорогой (dorogoy)[sweetheart],” Ilya rushed to reassure, “Never you. Just want more time. And want to share how much I love you more. Second best hockey player is mine.”
Shane took a shaky breath. “Ok, so…” Shane didn’t know what to say. Ilya had brought him back from the brink of a panic attack, but he knew that they still weren’t on the same page. “What do you want to do?”
“Can we think about ways to spend time together around friends?” Ilya asked. “Maybe telling specific people we trust, like Sveta and Rose, that we are together?”
“Maybe…?” Shane reluctantly said. He wasn’t sure how this solved things. It's not like he had that many people to tell. And Ilya was new to his team, who would he want to tell, who would be safe to tell this soon?
“It doesn’t have to be right now, or even soon,” Ilya rushed to say. “Maybe we just talk about it and figure out plan.”
“Ok,” Shane was relieved, he could work with making a plan. Plans to keep them safe. “Just to be clear though, we aren’t talking about coming out publicly, either separately or as a couple right?”
Another pause. “Right.” Ilya said quietly and deliberately. Shane wasn’t sure if Ilya had more to say, but before he could push, Ilya tugged him between his legs and hugged him tightly. “We can talk about this later, I only have you for 18 more hours, we must make the most of them”.
Shane allowed himself to be distracted, but a seed of unease settled in his mind that he knew wouldn’t go away even after a round of wonderful sex and a night of sleep.
Two Weeks Later
Shane had been stewing over the conversation about coming out for weeks now. He had been vacillating between trying to figure out plans that would work for them to be a little bit more open, anxious spirals over the inevitability of their secret getting out, even in the best case scenario, and lingering frustration that Ilya had seemingly changed his mind about the plan. The original plan wasn’t perfect. But it was something they had agreed to and had the least risk to either of them.
“How are you and Ilya doing?” He was brought back into his body by his mom’s question.
“What do you mean?” He stalled.
“Oh, just asking how you all are doing with everything. We saw Ilya last weekend and he seemed a little quiet. We were just wondering if all the travel is piling up and making things hard as playoffs get closer.”
“It was worse last year.” He said shortly.
“Of course, honey” Yuna had a placating tone that bothered him. He was just hoping to have a nice meal with his parents and then enjoy watching Ilya’s game against Colorado. Ilya had one more game on this west coast roadie and then he would be back. They would have a day before Shane had to go to Florida, South Carolina, and Washington. They had been pretty lucky up until this point with their road trips, but the in the lead up to playoffs their home stretches barely overlapped.
“Shane? Do you want to talk about anything?” David asked. “Are you ok?”
“Yeah, of course,” He replied reflexively.
His parents eyed him and said nothing.
As the weight of their gazes bore down on him he caved. “It’s just, Ilya and I had an argument a couple of weeks ago about our plan to keep everything quiet.” He admitted while staring at his half eaten dinner. “It seems like Ilya has changed his mind about the whole waiting for retirement to come out plan, which is insane especially since he doesn’t even have Canadian citizenship. I don’t know where the fuck this is coming from. We can’t fucking come out. It would ruin everything. I don't understand it. I thought we had agreed this was the best plan.” The words rushed out in a wave. Uncontrolled, rapid, and fierce.
His parents looked at each other for a moment, and seemed to have a wordless conversation before looking back at him.
“What?!” He snapped.
“Shane, honey, we understand that you don’t want to come out right now,” Yuna started.
“Of course I don’t! I would be the poster boy for diversity in hockey! More than I already am!” He interrupted.
“Listen.” Yuna said firmly. “We understand your worries. We do. And I’m pretty sure Ilya does as well. We just think that maybe you aren’t thinking about what waiting till retirement to come out really means.”
“How so?” Shane was sure they were wrong. He had done nothing but turn this over in his head since the moment he finally accepted his sexuality.
“Well for one thing, how long are you planning on playing?” Yuna asked.
“As long as possible, obviously.” This answer was said quickly as if there was only one answer to even consider. Nearly defensive in its speed. Both his mom and dad smiled wryly, but there was a hint of something else in their looks that he couldn’t quite interpret, sadness, fear, or maybe even pity?
“That’s what I thought,” Yuna responded, “so that means, unless you get hurt, you could easily play into your late thirties.”
“Yeah? I mean that’s the plan.” Shane was confused where she was going with this.
“So that is at least 10 more years, probably more, of hiding yourself from the world. Keeping yours and Ilya’s relationship in the shadows.”
“It’s not ideal, I know.” Shane conceded.
“I’m not even talking about ideal, Shane,” Yuna continued, “is it sustainable, can you survive it?”
Her words hit him like a dirty check into the boards, knocking the wind out of him. He didn’t want to admit it, but she was right. Ilya had put words to how he had been feeling during their argument. It wasn’t enough. He thought that being two hours away from each other would make a world of difference, would soothe the ache that persisted in his chest all of last season while Ilya was still in Boston. It was better, it was. But that’s like saying being hungry is better than being starving. Technically true, but ultimately unsatisfying.
“I don’t know.” He finally admitted. “But I don’t know what to do instead.”
“Kiddo, that’s ok,” David said soothingly, “we can figure it out.”
“I guess…” Shane was unconvinced. “I just don’t know how to partially come out. There’s no way somebody wouldn’t let something slip, or see something, or put the pieces together if they had some of the story.”
“What is it about coming out that scares you the most?”
Shane couldn’t answer Yuna’s question in any sort of satisfying way. “I don’t know, there’s so much that scares me.”
“Then I think you need to think about that, and figure it out. I think the only way to solve this problem is to know exactly what we are facing.” Yuna said matter-of-factly.
“And don’t just bottle this up,” David added, “talk to us. We are happy to help you sort things out.”
“Yeah, I know Dad.”
“And bud? You need to talk to Ilya about this. About what you are scared of and what you want from a life with him now, not just later. And you need to ask him to share his fears and what he wants.”
“I will Dad,” Shane agreed.
“Soon” David pushed.