i knowwwwww in my heart ilya would love taking shanes last name and after they have kids referring to their family unit as hollanders. ilya turning around to the backseat like okey hollanders here is plan. we are going to be in and out of costco in thirty minutes. you may choose ONE item each. if we get separated we meet at optometrist. we will get ice creams on way out as long as everyone is cool and nobody tells dad. hollanders on three.
I think while trying to settle on what to call the daughter they're expecting, Ilya would get such a kick out of suggesting all the ridiculous white people baby names he finds online to a Shane who's taking this as seriously as he used to take his playoffs strategies.
Ilya looks over to where Shane is scrolling on his phone, wearing his glasses and that little frown he gets when he's concentrating. Ilya's grin gets a little wider.
"Oh here's one, My Shane. Blazeleigh. Maybe she'll grow up to be hot like you."
"Ew no, that sounds like something Sarah would make me wear to an awards show."
"Okay then, how about Kashtynn?"
"Absolutely fucking not."
"Snow, spelled like S-N-E-A-U-G-H?"
"Baby, be serious." Shane takes off his glasses to properly look at Ilya. "This name has to take our daughter all the way to being an old lady. We can't be one of those celebrity couples who give their kid a crazy name."
And Ilya makes a big show of rolling his eyes and sighing dramatically.
"Fine. Then how about Britney?"
And Shane shrugs but doesn't immediately scrunch up his face this time.
"I mean, not my favourite, but it's definitely better than the other names on whatever cursed list you've found."
"Would you like it more if I told you it was spelled B-R-Y-T-T-K-N-E-I-G-H?"
"Oh fuck off, Rozanov!"
And his husband tackles him to the sofa, pinning him down and kissing him in all his ticklish spots, until they're both laughing so hard their sides hurt.
"No more crazy names, okay?"
And Ilya nods, giving Shane one more kiss and putting his glasses back on for him, before dutifully finding a proper baby name list. But as Shane adjusts his glasses and starts looking at his own list again, Ilya can't help himself.
"... It's Brittkneigh, bitch."
He gleefully accepts the pillow that flies at his head.
“I am a greedy man. You know this. Just one more, I promise.”
Shane sighed and rolled onto his back. “Fine, one more, but this is seriously the last one. I’m exhausted, Ilya.”
Ilya leaned down, pressing a kiss to Shane’s forehead. “Спасибо, Любовь моя.” (thank you, my love)
“Let me see.”
With a pleased grin, Ilya held his phone in front of Shane’s face. He waited patiently as Shane pulled his glasses down from the top of his head and squinted at the screen.
Shane’s eyes trailed across the screen for a quiet minute, before he lifted his finger to point. “You can play squeeze with this e. There’s a double word tile too.”
Ilya’s eyes lit up, stealing a kiss from Shane before he started to place the tiles. “You are genius. I love you. I am finally beating Yuna!”
“I love you, too. Now, please shut off your damn phone. Words with Friends will be there in the morning.”
A continuation of this post, because I want to see Shane and Ilya happy, giggly, and cute.
Harris schedules filming for a second Ottawa Centaurs Try Not to Laugh video after practice. The rules are simple:
1. You laugh, you’re out.
2. Shane and Ilya CANNOT sit next to or on each other.
He probably should’ve added a third to prevent what’s happening, but it’s far too late to stop it now. The team seems to have agreed that eliminating Shane and Ilya is the goal, and every joke told thus far has been tailored to them. Is it fair? No. Will the engagement be amazing?
Fucking hell, it’ll be off the charts. This is too good.
Shane is holding his nose, lips trembling and face red as he tries to hold in laughter.
“Please,” he gasps desperately. His chest spasms with trapped giggles and he’s this close to breaking. “I can’t. This has to be against the rules.”
“This is torture,” Ilya grits out. His teeth are clenched almost as hard as his fists are at his sides. “Bag skates for everyone tomorrow.”
“Worth it,” Bood cheers as he grabs the mic for his turn. “Alright, buckle up. What do you call a drink made with tuna juice, maple syrup, and rose petals if you leave it alone for a while?”
Wyatt snorts and covers his face with his hands. Luca looks like he’s about to combust. Bood bites his bottom lip to maintain control before the punchline.
“Depends on the year. If it’s 2016? A sad Russian.”
Ilya’s eyes about bug out of his head as a team-wide “holy shit” echoes in the room. He reaches out wildly for a hand, an elbow, anything to steady himself, but it’s no use. He pitches forward in his seat, falling out on the floor in a fit of uncontrollable laughter.
Shane makes a sound like a dying animal. His jaw’s clenched so hard that he thinks he can hear teeth cracking.
“Please,” he wheezes. A tear rolls down his beet-red cheek. “Mercy.”
Wyatt snatches the mic. “Okay, this has to do the trick. I’m calling it.”
He clears his throat, looks Shane in the eye, grins like an absolute lunatic, and jumps right in.
“Do you know,” he starts, voice high pitched and ridiculous, “the Muffin Man?”
“Ah, yes,” Ilya cuts in, words garbled in between chuckles. “The Muffin Man. Who lives on Drury Lane?”
“I hate you,” Shane chokes out. “You asshole. I fucking hate you, oh my God.”
Wyatt makes a strangled noise, but keeps going. “Well…she’s married to the Muffin Man.”
Shane slaps a hand over his mouth. He’s not going out like this. He won’t!
Unfortunately for him, Harris decides to join the fun. “The Muffin Man?”
And before Shane can shoot Harris a look of utter betrayal, the entire team joins Wyatt for the killing blow.
“THE MUFFIN MAN!”
The final cut of the video shows Shane Hollander, three-time Stanley Cup winner, People Magazine’s Hottest Man Alive 2022 and 2024 (and in the top 5 since 2021, right along with his husband), and man known for his unwavering professionalism, completely losing his shit. Mouth open so wide that at least a few viewers will comment on a filling in his bottom left molar. Tears streaming down his cheeks. Laughing so hard that he doesn’t even make sound at first—just shakes silently as the full force of repressed giggles builds up before he gasps and explodes into impossibly loud joy.
Just imagined Ilya retiring from hockey (before Shane does of course), and then Troy suddenly having a career-ending injury not long after that, which is a huge adjustment for everyone involved.
Ilya, faux-casually: "I was thinking of starting a hockey podcast. Shane refuses to retire and join me though."
Troy: "... Are you asking me to be your cohost?"
Ilya: "What a great idea you just had all by yourself! Now, we will also need someone to produce and edit the podcast and run our social media..."
cackling about the idea of shane and ilya getting separated on the bench from time to time and the public thinks "oooh, trouble in paradise? the rivalry rearing its head again?? hollander getting fed up with rozanov??"
and the truth is that the team was playing against someone ilya and/or shane ESPECIALLY hates, which means shane was dropping the most vicious, lethal reads known to man and making ilya crack tf up to the point that they were attracting attention and the coach was just afraid of someone reading lips and getting them all in trouble
and signficantly, the three person buffer between them just keeps shane from SAYING his comments
he and ilya are still leaning forward and backward to look at each other and exchange "mhm" "mhm" looks that still make it clear they're still communicating their thoughts perfectly fine
But I feel like this is the point of connection that gets Shane to actually accept Troy as a guy he can vibe with. They make the mistake of putting Troy as one of the guys in between Shane and Ilya only for Shane to keep muttering things and Troy to pick right up where Ilya left off on dragging people. Troy may have been a homophobic menace for a while but not he’s a homosexual menace and Shane can very much so get down with that. Ilya has almost as much fun listening to them banter as joining in.
Shane and Troy are downright catty when it comes to bad hockey and shitty men. “Do you think he’s tried passing to a player instead of empty ice before?” “No, I don’t think he knows how to find someone who will accept a pass from him. If he had, maybe he wouldn’t be harassing women in every major city in North America.”
I do still cling to my belief that Ilya has an irrational fear of witches because of the tales of Baba Yaga from his childhood.
Like he knows it’s not real. He’s not stupid.
But he also can’t watch any witch related horror movies without getting bad dreams. Outside of trauma nightmares, the Baba Yaga nightmares are the most frequent. He also sometimes talks in his sleep (in a weird mix of Russian and English) and Shane can just about get ‘chicken feet’ from it before he smiles and gently wakes Ilya fitful form and pulls him closer.
‘Want me to fight her for you? I’ll fuck her up if that’s what you want’
‘You would?’ Ilya smiles sleepily and softly in that childlike way that he’s allowed to, in this space.
‘’Course I would. I love you. Go back to sleep.’
‘Oke. ya tebya lyublyu’ Ilya mutters groggily, eyes already closed, and promptly begins snoring like a foghorn a minute or so later.
Everyone has their corny fic trope they will never not love, and for me it’s mafia/organized crime AUs. So, consider.
A summer night in Manitoba. Shane fighting sleep from the driver’s seat of his patrol car, four hours left on his shift.
Nights like this are dangerous because they allow his mind to wander back to a time when he wasn’t always a small-town cop, writing parking tickets and getting the short end of the stick with his patrol times. In another lifetime he was one of the youngest members of the RCMP, back before the lifetime blacklist and demotion down to the lowest possible rung of police work with no hope of ever rising up again.
A car zips by, the first in hours. Barely anyone drives on this back-end, one-way road this late, not even teenagers looking for trouble. Shane ignores half the cars that pass through, but this one has a trifecta of infractions: no plates, double the speed limit, dead right tail light.
Shane sighs and turns on the flashing lights, pulling away from his patrol spot on the shoulder. The car pulls over immediately, obediently. Shane is relieved; the last thing he wants to do at 3 in the morning is start a pursuit.
He gets out of his car, flashlight in one hand, wanders over to the driver’s side door prepared to see a stoned teenager or a night shift construction worker woozy from lack of sleep.
Instead, Shane freezes, his fingers going so limp he nearly drops his flashlight.
The man sitting in the driver’s seat should not be here. He should be miles away, at his home base in Montreal, not driving a piece of shit beater in the middle of nowhere.
And Shane should not be here with him, because as far as Ilya Rozanov knows, Shane Hollander’s body burned up in a car fire four years ago.
Ilya blinks at Shane, narrowing his eyes. It’s dark, even with the flashing light spilling behind them and the tiny light in Shane’s hand. If he gets through this quickly, maybe Ilya won’t even get a good look at his face.
“Can I help you, Officer?” Ilya asks, tapping the steering wheel once, twice, with his pointer finger. Hearing his voice sends twin lines of heat and ice down Shane’s spine.
“Sorry, ah,” Shane clears his throat. “You have…you were going a little fast.”
“I am not from around here.”
“Right, well, just don’t do it again,” Shane says. “Um, and get that tail light fixed. Have a good night.”
He turns on his heel, forcing his legs to move fast despite the fact they feel wobbly. He just needs to get to his car and it’ll be fine.
He hears the door of the other car open behind him, heavy boots settling on the ground.
“Officer,” Ilya calls behind him.
He keeps walking, but the feet behind him are walking, too, faster.
Shane makes it to the squad car, grabs the door handle like a lifeline, but before he can get it open, a heavy body is pinning him down.
“Too slow,” Ilya says behind him, pulling his hand away from the door handle so he could hold Shane’s arms behind his back.
“Sir,” Shane whispers. Tears prick at his eyes, the animal fear rising in his body. “Please just…go back to your car.”
“But I wanted to tell you something, Officer,” Ilya says. “It’s very funny. Do you want to hear it?”
Shane hears Ilya unclip something from his belt, feels cool metal press into his side. Ilya leans in so close he can feel his breath along the shell of his ear.
“You look just like my dead husband.”
Shane’s body goes limp, the memories rushing back to him at once.
He used to be very, very good at his job. So good he was once entrusted to lead an undercover sting of one of the country’s most deeply rooted bratva families. He was meant to find all he could on the family’s young and newly minted pakhan, find a weakness in the newly shaken power structure. He had succeeded more than anyone could imagine, including himself.
But he was not meant to get attached. And in that aspect he had failed horribly.
Ilya’s lips press to his neck, over his jumping pulse point.
“Did you think I would not find you, Зайчик?”
Shane has not heard that name in four years, and it undoes him.
“Ilya,” he whispers, the less scrap of self preservation leaving his body. “Please.”
He doesn’t know what he’s even asking for. To not die? To die quickly and painlessly?
Ilya tugs on his arm. It’s pathetic, really, the way Shane peels away easily from the car and collapses into Ilya’s waiting body. The barrel of the gun is still stuck between his ribs, but he knows he would move even without it.
“Come on,” Ilya says, nodding towards the beater. Shane can see now how obvious this whole thing was, a series of petty traffic infractions laid out of him like he’s a rat in a trap. A bunny hopping blindly to the wolves.
“At least tell me where you’re taking me,” Shane says. He doesn’t know where he finds the strength to say it, to make any request at all. Ilya looks at him like Shane has asked the color of the sky.
“You do not know?” he asks. “I am taking you home.”
with how deeply physical their bond is, i don't think that hollanov ever bothered to develop a safeword. i do think, though, that they developed-- by accident!-- a physical system to tell each other how they are feeling. and it definitely bleeds into their life outside the bedroom, and it's definitely subconscious at this point, and it definitely makes it into the locker room and onto the ice by the time they're both in ottawa.
which means maybe the centaurs have picked up on the fact that hey, sometimes when shane wants ilya to stop doing something, he taps his arm twice. or if ilya wants shane to move one way, he taps him three times. or if he just wants his attention, its a squeeze. which is all relatively normal, and they probably think its cute that they have an unspoken language for communicating with one another.
and then maybe-- by accident!-- it starts taking root as a thing, and then mindlessly troy or wyatt or bood accidentally double pats shane's arm to get him to stop talking to ilya for a moment, and shane thinks for a moment, that was a weird coincidence, and moves on. but then it happens again, and then maybe luca squeezes his arm to get his attention and then bood taps him three times to get him to move aside so he can walk past and shane feels himself flush to the ears and catches ilya's eyes across the room and ilya definitely noticed that too. so now what? they can't full well ask them to stop without saying, hey, so this was a sex thing. but it'd be weird to let it continue... right?
They move in together full time and Ilya notices that Anya acts differently with Shane than she does with him, more quiet and less playful, and he worries that means she doesn’t like Shane or is jealous, so he hires a dog trainer to come over and see if there’s anything they need to do to help
After a while of talking about how Anya acts the trainer says there’s nothing to worry about, Anya likes Shane just fine, it’s just that she sees him as the boss and is acting accordingly
And Ilya is like. But. I’m the one who adopted her? And raised her before Shane got here?? And the trainer is just like yeah well she sees you more like an equal. And Ilya is like WAIT she thinks Shane is in charge of both of us?? And the trainer is just like well do you interact in a way that would make her think that?
Ilya’s life flashes before his eyes as he thinks of all the times Shane has come over with a snack for Ilya and a treat for Anya, or all the times Shane has announced they’re all going for an after dinner walk, or pets Ilya’s hair and tells him he did a good job at practice, or the fact that he uses the same warning tone with Anya when she misbehaves as he does with Ilya when he’s causing problems on purpose
Shane comes home to Ilya with his face in his hands going oh god I’m not Anya’s dad I’m her brother and she thinks we’re both your pets. And Shane just goes. What.