i just watched eugene levy's tribute to catherine o'hara and the way my ears perked up when he mentioned how much she loved being at her cottage on an island in muskoka............y'all. y'all.
shane has his own cottage in muskoka. he has a beautiful, private view. he has his own well. he also has a neighbor: moira rose.
god can you imagine? shane doesn't mention her the first two times ilya visits, and by some miracle, neither do yuna or david. i mean, among themselves they try to avoid talking about her too, but it's also kind of impossible not to. she's moira. so it's a complete surprise when ilya answers shane's phone while he's in the shower one afternoon (they always answer their phones now), and whoever Moira (with a bird emoji) is, she hits him with a quick, "shane darling i'm on the boat but the boat stopped, please come find me. use the other boat," and then hangs up. ilya barely got a chance to say hello before the call disconnected, and before he gets a chance to form another thought, another call comes in. he swipes immediately.
"shane darling you sound sick, are you sick? don't take the boat, i'll call yuna—"
"not sick, allergies. i'll get boat. wait." it was ilya's best impression of shane, even furrowing his brow because he'd just been misunderstood. he hangs up on her then calls yuna, to make sure she hasn't been harassed by the bird woman. she's in town with david though, and didn't get any weird calls. ilya chalks it up to a blackhawk playing some sort of long-running prank, and carries the phone to the bathroom.
"you should block this moira person," ilya declares as he shoves his arm into the shower. "bad joke."
"moira?" ilya wonders if his pronunciation was off, so he caws like a crow to clarify it for shane.
shane lunges for the shower knob to shut off the water. "you talked to moira?!"
"no, just a prank call. said she's on a boat." he shakes the phone at shane. but shane ignores his phone, shouldering past ilya to escape, getting half of his shirt wet. "what the fuck?"
but shane's already out of the bathroom, a towel barely wrapped around a hip. "put your suit on," he calls from the bedroom. "we're taking out the boat."
well anyway i'm not going to actually write a fic, but clearly ilya and moira need to meet, and between ilya's russian and moira's...moira, they simply click. once ilya meets her (a handshake over the starboard side, moments before she simply launches her neon orange self into his arms, abandoning her boat completely), then she makes perfect sense. he answers every call from her and makes shane marathon the entire "the crows have eyes" franchise, which was infinitely better than yet another evening watching the fire pit. he bodyguards yuna from her, and replaces david as her go-to call any time she needs muscle, like when she simply can't finish the puzzle on her coffee table but it has to be done (and also when the boat has to be steered onto the cradle). she declines most of his invitations to their cottage, which just makes ilya try harder to see her, and shane huffy in bed when ilya returns late. it's a fucking beautiful relationship and a divine insult to the english language. the cherry of course, is that ilya realizes, about three years into it, that he's found his hayden.
