The Thoughts From My Brain

they/them ADHD gremlin

[fivebrokenboundaries]

Me clicking on a fic after reading the summary: Alright, this sounds mildly angsty

Me reading the third chapter: When will the tears stop. I literally can't stop crying what the fuck-

[wingsseni]

irina and ilyusha 🤍

[mutinsfromthemoon]

i know all about the troy barrett slander that happened few weeks ago and still do sometimes, but i believe that troy and shane would be such good friends. they have too much in common to not bond. those two are like siblings from another womb. and i think ilya would joke like always that they’re very bad at liking things that aren’t hockey and they need to find a new hobby. then those two taking it seriously cus they want to prove that they can like things other than hockey and each other. and there’s shane and troy trying every single thing they have time to do for a year until they find something that they genuinely enjoy doing either alone or together. and the rest of centaurs would definitely join them sometimes cus they’re watching this closely hoping they get to be friends and find a hobby. and after shane and troy get close, the centaurs start to call them “the twins” and joke “what the twins are going to do this week?”

[lavenderprose]

Ilya finds an odd picture of Shane in a photo album at one point. He's maybe three, he's sitting on the massive purple sofa that Ilya has discovered the Hollanders owned when Shane was born. He's frowning, red-cheeked and he's got a strange plastic case on his thumb.

"Yuna," he says, shifting his elbows on the table to point at it. "What is this on his hand? Was broken?"

Shane's head snaps up from across the table, where he's pretending that Photo Album Time is very boring to him and not worth paying attention to. He hasn't scrolled on the article he's pretending to read for over five minutes.

"I never broke a bone as a kid," he says, brows furrowed. "Not until U13, when that fucking kid from Guelph--"

Yuna and Shane both inhale quickly through their noses in what Ilya has learned to recognize as a moderative measure, lest they start yelling about something that everyone else on Earth has forgotten about.

"No," Yuna says, once her face looks a little less intense. "No, it wasn't broken. It was this...contraption that the dentist gave us to correct his thumb-sucking. He was so mad about it, we only put it on him a few times."

"Oh, Jesus," Shane mutters, eyes going back to his phone.

"Aw," Ilya says. "Poor baby Shane." He taps his finger against one little red cheek and laughs. "You really do look so mad, sweetheart. How did you make him stop?"

"Hmm...you know, I don't remember," Yuna sighs, tilting her head. "I guess he just stopped by himself eventually. Do you remember, Shane?"

"No," Shane says, shortly.

"Of course, that didn't get rid of the oral fixation," Yuna sighs, adjusting her reading glasses as she flips the page. "The things you used to chew on, Shane. Pens and straws and--"

"Mom," Shane snaps, while Ilya vibrates beside him. "Can we not?"

"I was afraid to give him popsicles because I thought he would gnaw on the sticks until he got a splinter in his stomach."

"Mom!"

"Well, honey, it's true! And you did outgrow it eventually, so it's not as if you have to be embarrassed."

"Oh, you did?" Ilya says, shoulders shaking. "You outgrew the, uh, oral fixation?"

"Stop," Shane hisses.

"Mm. Excuse me." Ilya stands from the table and sweeps out onto the back porch, though the sliding door does nothing to prevent the sound of his guffaws from floating back into the kitchen.

"You know," Yuna says, "I'm just going to assume that this is some kind of language barrier thing--"

"Please stop."

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

fanfic writers deserve better

if we post too fast, we get accused of using ai (no, you don't know how fast someone can write. you don't even know if the "too-frequent-to-be-human updates" you see are something that have long been finished and sitting in an author's drafts for god knows how long. just because it's recently posted, doesn't necessarily always mean it's recently written too. a lot of writers finish the whole thing first before they start posting it chapter by chapter).

if we take "too long to update", we get people pressuring us to "update faster" even though fanfics are our hobbies and we write for ourselves first and foremost.

if our works are grammatically correct, we get accused of using ai (some of us just love correct grammars).

if our works are not grammatically correct, we get insulted/criticized (mind you, not everybody writes in their native language. kudos to writers who write in their second, or third, or fourth language — I'm willing to bet a lot of people who criticize fanfics because of poor grammar can't even speak other languages besides english).

if our paragraphs are "too long and too detailed", we get accused of using ai.

if our paragraphs are "too short", we also get accused of using ai.

if we are autistic and we write in ways some deem "too robotic", we get accused of using ai.

some people just don't use their brains to think "ai was trained on human-made works, it was trained to look human-made. ai writes this way because the way it writes is the way real humans write — real humans whose works it was trained to mimic". instead they somehow disregard this logic and think "hmmm this work looks ai-generated. I will engage in witch hunt, be a bully and harass writers whose works I don't vibe with".

[agent-odessa-over]

Yuna invites Ilya over for lunch. He is tempted to decline, believing it to be motivated by pity, but Shane is in Montreal and the loneliness of rambling around his too-big Ottowa house starts to feel like living in a mausoleum, so he accepts. It is this afternoon that he learns Shane's darkest secret. Darkest in name only, because it turns out to be quite the opposite in appearance.

After lunch they are seated in the den, fondly flipping through old photograph albums, when Ilya spies one that makes him lean over and squint. In the way of disposable camera film from the early aughts, it is grainy and overexposed, but there are no mistaking the warm brown eyes and pouty lips of Shane Hollander, looking blank faced at the camera. What comes as a surprise are the bleached blond ends of his dark hair, styled into crunchy looking spikes with obscene amounts of product.

Ilya emits a noise that can only be described as a squawk. Hand clapped to his mouth, because he barely trusts himself to speak, he chokes out, "What is...this?"

Yuna glances over nonchalantly. "Oh, that. Shane begged me to let him get frosted tips when he was 12."

Ilya will die. He will die right here, gagging on suppressed laughter, and Yuna will be forced to clean the mess of his remains off the berber carpet.

"I think he was trying to emulate some boy band he was obsessed with then. NSYNC maybe? I thought it was a bad idea, but David convinced me to let him try it out. Shane was going through a moody period, and he thought it might help."

"And-" Ilya squeaks in way too high a pitch, then clears his throat. "Ahem. And did it?"

Yuna thinks. "Hard to say. God, he was a bit of a bitchy preteen." She chuckles. "He had a poster of Lance Bass taped to his closet door. In hindsight, I should have guessed the gay thing much earlier."

Ilya can no longer contain his laughter. He doubles over with it, waving his hand and wheezing, "Sorry, sorry." He wipes tears from his eyes. "I can have this picture?"

Yuna shrugs. "Sure. The poster is probably still upstairs in his closet, if you want that, too. I've been meaning to clear it out-"

Ilya just stares at Yuna in wide eyed wonder. "Yes. I want." He dashes up the stairs so fast he nearly trips.

[cl3ms-fruitfandomsalad]

──────────────ᯓ★

‘Made-Up Marvel Tweets,’

Getting back into Marvel. I’m switching through fandoms too fast

Warnings: Suggestive and possibly offensive content!!!!!!!!!!

⚠︎︎Warning! Suggestive and Possibly Offensive Content Ahead!⚠︎︎

──────────────ᯓ★

[lazylittledragon]

Are jinx and Ekko both straight or is one of them like bi?

oh they’re definitely ‘straight, but in an unmistakably bisexual way’

i absolutely refuse to believe either of them are cishet, there’s no way those two artsy punks don’t have some pronouns going on

[tinylilhollander]

If Ilya does ever figure out that Shane's autistic it'll be through something so stupid. Like he's scrolling through TikTok one night because he can't sleep and he comes across this video that's like 'Dear autism community: rate this spoon'. And there's this whole reveal where they unwrap it from a cloth so he's expecting the fanciest spoon he's ever seen and then they reveal it and he's so disappointed to find it's just... a normal fucking spoon.

He thinks this must be a joke so he goes to the comments, and sure enough it's absolutely full of people who not only seem to think this spoon is worthy of rating in the first place, but who seem to have very strong opinions on what makes it a good or bad spoon. To Ilya a spoon is a spoon is a spoon. It's absolutely baffling to him that people seem to think the handle looks like it's not weighty enough, or that the shape of the bowl is wrong, or that it's too flat or too square. He opens the playlist of cutlery rating videos because surely this can't be the norm, and sure enough every single one has a comment section full of very strong opinions about how good or bad this normal fucking fork or knife is.

And then a memory returns to him, as he looks over at his peacefully sleeping husband, of Shane moving in and having to get rid of all his cutlery to replace it with his.

"Sorry, I know it's stupid, but yours are really bad to hold, baby. It's literally all I can think about every time I eat here."

And Ilya didn't mind at the time. So Shane likes his own cutlery better? That's a small compromise when Ilya doesn't have strong feelings about silverware in the first place. But now things are beginning to click, and he's beginning to draw a line between the opinionated spoon people and the day he had to drive his cutlery to the nearest goodwill.

Ilya spends the rest of the night reading about autism and suddenly there's so much more that's beginning to make sense. He doesn't know how he'll bring it up with Shane – if he'll ever bring it up with Shane – but for how it's good to know.

[drabbles-and-rambles]

I saw a post about Shane and Ilya being sad that they can't thank each other in their acceptance speeches like other can with their spouses and it got me thinking:

Ilya wins his first awards and hes got nobody he really wants to thank after his team and coach cause he he hates his family but he knows his speech is too short so on impulse he goes "And I want to thank Shane Hollander for being slightly worse than me this season". Everyone knows it was going to one of those two, so everyone thinks hes an asshole to say that but whats new so it works for him. But from then on it then becomes a bit for both of them to thank each other in their speeches in a snide way as a reason they won.

Shane winning the Art Ross Trophy (Awarded to the player who leads the league in total points at the end of the regular season). and going "special thanks to Rozanov for missing at least 5 shots this season, he was a huge help"

Ilya winning the Conn Smythe Trophy (Awarded to the most valuable player for his team in the playoffs.) "Just want to give a quick shout out to Hollander for getting knocked out in the second round this season. Must hate to see me up here."

They find a way to mention the other in their speeches every time all the time.

[shanehollandered]

and every time, they sit in their seats like

[fivebrokenboundaries]

My brother was watching the NBA Western Conference Finals last night and I had the unfortunate realization that I'm read so much Heated Rivalry fics that I just Know How Sports Work now.

I explained the whole bracket and how getting to the NBA finals works because I assumed it was the same as the Stanley Cup bracket. And now, whenever I'm in the car and hear sports commentators discussing draft picks for American football or basketball, I understand a lot more than I would've 6 months ago.

What is happening.

[ivviannaa]

thinking about the centaurs playing never have i ever...

everyone finds out something new and unexpected about someone else, like for example luca haas is not immune to tumblr's horniness and is in fact just as much of a freak as everyone else who runs a hollanov blog. shane didn't even realize half of the things he and ilya have done were kinky until everyone was absolutely SHOCKED that hockey's golden boy has driven two hours with a plug in. nobody wants to accept that sweet sunshine harris is actually capable of having sex. wyatt hayes gets pegged weekly. nobody is sober

[parcai]

i just know in my heart of hearts years after ilya's been in america & canada, he purposefully turns up his russian accent to put the fear of god into his rookies' partners. luca meets a guy, & ilya goes straight into russian mafia dad mode. he googles all their boyfriends, looks into background checks. his name is ilya nosy rozanov for gods sake there is no other way 💀💀

[joondemiel]

You are Yuna Hollander. Your son is in primary school and tells you he wants to be a hockey player because he loves the ice. He’s talented and he has drive, even if he can be a little awkward and reserved. He is your only child, he is your world. You are committed to making this happen for him.

You are Yuna Hollander. Your son’s brand new boss should be talking about how skilled he is at his job, instead he talks about your son’s race. The way he looks like you. Your son tenses up by your shoulder. You cover the discomfort coming from the both of you, because this is the price for his dream and it is your fault.

You are Yuna Hollander. You know Shane has to work twice as hard to be half as visible as the white players even though he’s better than all of them (except maybe that Russian in Boston). You’re grateful that he has his father’s last name, it’s easier to market. You spend your lunch breaks making calls, answering emails, securing brand deals. You get home from work and clock into your second shift, building your son’s retirement plan. The body you made for him will only last him so long. You’re determined that he will live beyond it.

You are Yuna Hollander. Your son is at lunch and he’s not acting like himself. He’s tense like you’ve never seen him. He’s under so much pressure and you know you’ve contributed to that and it kills you. Maybe he needs to break from this regimen. You suggest he has a glass of wine with yourself and David. You’ve forgotten how important routines and rules are to your autistic son. You don’t know how to express that you think Shane is maybe in too deep with his hockey bubble, and that he perhaps should meet more normal people. Or at least, ones that aren’t hockey people. You don’t know how to say this because you’ve pushed him into this, now you’re changing the game and he hates that. You make a joke about a Swedish princess. Really? says David.

You are Yuna Hollander and your son has a girlfriend. This has never happened before. For a while you thought he might’ve been gay, but clearly you were wrong. He’s a hockey player. He’s the best in the world. He’s handsome, he’s talented, and he’s rich. Now there’s a movie star girlfriend. He tells you a day before the media frenzy begins. It feels so short. You used to feel closer to him. Something feels distant, and you hope that this can bring you back into his orbit again. You ask him to extend an invite for the summer to his girlfriend. You hope that this Rose Landry sees your son, past the jersey to the quirky, funny, honest man beneath.

You are Yuna Hollander and your son is bleeding on the ice.

You are Yuna Hollander and you visit your son in the hospital. He’s babbling away like he used to as a small child, before the other kids told him that the way he spoke and thought and acted was strange. It’s unashamed and giddy and you wish it wasn’t from the morphine. You haven’t seen him this unguarded in— you can’t remember. He keeps a tight hold on your hand even when he falls asleep. The nurse says the visit earlier from Ilya Rozanov tired him out.

You are Yuna Hollander and you’ve just witnessed hockey history. Scott Hunter has just come out in the most public way possible. No one will remember this cup for anything else. Your son has been texting his friend throughout the whole game. His phone starts ringing and he practically sprints out of the room to answer it. You look to your husband in shock. I can’t believe someone did it, you say. I can’t believe it was Scott Hunter, he says. You don’t know what Shane thinks. He stays on the phone for a long, long time.

You are Yuna Hollander and your husband has just told you. Why didn’t your son tell you? Why didn’t he tell you years ago? What have you done or said that he felt he couldn’t tell you? How did you not notice your son was living a lie? Did he love his girlfriend? Did you not notice that he didn’t love his girlfriend? You are a terrible mother. You are a terrible person. Your son is your world. Your son has not let you know who he is. Your heart is breaking.

You are Yuna Hollander and Ilya Rozanov is in your home, eating your food and drinking your husband’s vodka. He’s also been fucking your son for a decade and—

You are Yuna Hollander. Your son is gay. Your son has been in some kind of relationship for a decade. Your son has been afraid of the world, of the media, of the reaction. Your son has been afraid of you.

You are Yuna Hollander and your son is telling you that he tried so hard. You are going to throw up. You have never wanted him to be something that he isn’t. You have never wanted to stand in his way. All you have ever wanted is the best for him. All you have ever wanted is to help him achieve his dreams. You take him into your arms and you feel his heart beating against yours and you remember his heart used to be inside of you. You haven’t known him. But now you do. You feel like the luckiest woman on the planet.

You are Yuna Hollander and you will meet your son and his boyfriend for dinner at 5PM. And you will be texting first.

[bridferchglyn]

“Yuna Hollander POV” this, “Imagine you’re Yuna Hollander” that… Valid, valid. But let’s shine a glorious light on DAVID Hollander for a minute.

Imagine you’ve spent most of your son’s teen and adult life supporting the hell out of him and your wife as they jointly steer his career into the astral plane of international hockey stardom. You’re so proud of him, but you also worry that the focus of his life may be too narrow. You gently encourage him to smell the roses - go down Youtube rabbit holes (whatever those are), take a holiday to London, maybe even date? After years of only surface-level relationships, he develops a true friend in Hayden Pike, and you breathe a sigh of relief. He shows an interest in real estate and design, and you’re delighted to encourage him.

You’re thrilled when he gets a girlfriend after so many years alone. When they seem to break up but remain on good terms, this fuels your growing suspicion that he might be gay. Then Scott Hunter kisses his boyfriend on the ice. Shane immediately takes a call and comes back with a giddy smile on his face. That’s really all the confirmation you need.

You gently break this to Yuna (I love how the show changes that “we know you pretty well, Shane” line from her to him, because it matches characterisation they’ve added to David as an insightful father and husband). Yuna immediately wants to talk to Shane about it & make contingency plans for how it might affect his life & career if true, because she loves her kid & wants to cover all bases ASAP, but you talk her down. “Let him come to us,” you say.

Shane tells you he’s doing a silent retreat for his time off this year, but you need to charge your phone, and it’ll be good to check in on him (you always worry about him being too isolated, too lonely). So you head over only to be… well, astonished to see him kissing his arch-rival with an easy familiarity. Shit, shit, you should NOT be here. You panic & leave - let him come to you (Shane’s flight response is also inherited).

Just as you and Yuna are discussing whether you should go back to the cottage, he does come over. With Rozanov. You’re a bit shellshocked, and the whole thing is awkward as hell at first, but also… Rozanov looks at your son like he hung the moon, talks him down from a panic attack, and it turns out they’ve been doing this for almost ten years. The same ten years that you spent encouraging Shane to pursue happiness and live a full life. Of course it breaks your heart that he felt like he had to do it in secret, but he still did it.

That’s your boy.

[scaredycatshane]

Has anyone considered diagnosed Shane, but Yuna and David just never told him?

The thing about being diagnosed as autistic as a kid is that no one tells you why you're there. You get shoved into a room to play blocks with a random stranger for a couple hours, and then you never see them again. He's like 8 when this happens, so he's already in school and he's already in hockey. He's really good at it and it seems to be making him some friends. Yuna and David don't want to hurt his friendships or his hockey standing by telling the world that he has Weird Kid Disease, so they just don't.

They don't tell his coaches that they know why he breaks sticks when he has a bad practice. They don't tell him why he has a hard time telling when people are laughing with him and when people are laughing at him. They just silently cut tags out of his clothes and teach him how to find quiet places when everything gets too loud.

They try their best to treat the symptoms without ever telling him the cause, and it pretty much works. At least on the surface.

He's learned to keep everything in until he's made it home and into his room. He's learned to cry silently when the lights have been bothering him all day and he just can't take it anymore. He's learned to plan for every possible contingency so changes of plans don't make him want to throw up.

When he's like 25, Hayden is the one to finally bring it up. He truly didn't think he was telling Shane anything he didn't already know. Shane had been overstimulated all day, and Hayden just wanted to give him a break and do the post-game presser for him.

"You're autistic and you just listened to 40,000 people scream at you for 3 hours. Go rest, dude," was not supposed to have nuclear consequences. He spends the hour and a half before Hayden gets back to their room researching and taking and retaking the RAADs.

Hayden feels like shit, because Shane should be hunched over a Ron Francis biography with nothing but a reading light on without making a peep until the next morning, but instead they talk for the next 4 hours about what Hayden meant when he said that.

Finding out his parents knew what was wrong with him the entire time brings their relationship crashing down. He's always known them as the 2 people he could trust over anyone, and they were silent when he came home crying because nobody wanted to be his friend. They said nothing when his peers thought it was funny to make him so mad he cried when he was 15. They said nothing when he almost failed classes because he couldn't make his brain focus on anything but hockey.

They let him believe he was broken, and that he had to do everything he could to hide that fact. The worst part is that he agrees with them. He knows he wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as far in his career if people had been treating him as the fragile autistic kid that just can't control himself. He knows he wouldn't have learned to mask well enough to get that C on his jersey if his parents told him he couldn't help it. There's a part of him that understands exactly why they did what they did, and another part that can't ever look at them the same way again.

[beehivedemocracy]

I like the idea that Ilya actually finds Shane's stimming to be comforting. Like if he's doing it because he's content or just regulating himself, Ilya finds it as attractive as the rest of Shane and just as a part of the package that is being Shane Hollander'a bf/husband.

And after a while together Shane gets much more comfortable unmasking specifically around Ilya (I don't know that he ever learns to fully unmask in public or around people he's not close with) and he sees many more sides of what that looks like

Like Shane copying half of the words and short sentences he says because Shane likes the way it feels to use Ilya's accent. Or Shane rocking in place when their standing in the kitchen together and he doesn't know what to do with his body. A big one is that Shane likes to make humming or grunting noises for all kinds of reasons, good and bad. But vocal stims are very common for Shane.

And Ilya just lives with all of this and more constantly and has grown so deeply used to the consistent stream of noise or movement and comes subconsciously from Shane, and when they're apart, Ilya can almost physically feel the space where all that used to be.

Ilya hates any insinuation that he finds Shane or his antics annoying or tiresome. The few people who Ilya has spoken to about it over the years might say shit to him like "god that sounds so exhausting I could never live with someone like that" and he's immediately like well this conversation is over because every part of Shane fuels my reason to go on and see the good in the world and I will not take slander on his innocent, self regulating behavior that is hurting no one.

I can even see Ilya playing a game with someone over his headset and Shane is happily beside him, completely doing his own thing but also making his typical stream of noises and Ilya's gotten to the point where he doesn't even notice them, let alone do they interrupt his game for him, but whoever gets playing with just has to say something about how loud and annoying Shane is being because they can hear him over the microphone and Ilya would just log off without saying anything.