First, I am fascinated by the tin roof rusted au and I am sat for further installments (especially the alluded to Sochi situation).
I did have some questions tho if you'd be open to answering any?
Would Shane ever seek a trade / free agency signing to a Canadian MOHL team (Montreal, Ottawa, etc.)? Or is he committed to Boston (for any combination of reasons)?
Does Shane have a cottage in this au? If so, is it built on a different timeline / scale due to pay discrepancies between the sibling leagues?
(and this may be spoiler territory) What's the Svetlana of it all in this au? Is Shane jealous, do they interact a lot? Is Ilya being more pressured to settle down with her / someone like her in this au because his family's aware of his ~thing~ with Shane?
Oooh fun questions!! Thank you for the praise, Tin Roof Rusted truly is my favorite child and once I'm finished with this monster of a fic that's been fighting me for the last few months, I'm gonna jump right back into TRR.
- Shane goes Ride or Die with the Bayonets really quickly. Part of this is how load-bearing Patty and Orlando are to the team combined with the season that Shane spends living with them, but it's more than that too. Shane is an integral part of the Bayonets rebuild, to the point where he helps them win the O'Brien Cup his rookie season. The team (who I'm hoping you'll meet in the next installment) is a relatively young team and they're ambitious. Orlando is a very respected figure within the greater landscape of Boston Hockey (He's a Texas boy who was initially drafted by Florida, but he's been in Boston for four years by the time TRR kicks off and he is shaping the team in his own glorious image) not only because he's a damn good player but because he runs his locker room the right way. He keeps his guys safe. Shane is low-key terrified of disappointing Orlando, lmao. Hockey teams can very easily dissolve into cults of personality and so it's nice, for Shane especially, that more level heads prevail on the Bayonets. He also learns a lot about, like...not hating himself? From these guys? So that forms a certain kind of loyalty.
All of that and also: Boston Hockey basically forms their entire brand around Shane and Ilya at a certain point. Ilya gets his C in 2013, a young and unvetted captain of a team with a history of balking mid-season. At that point, Shane is has an A and is very clearly the heir apparent, but Orlando has good hockey left in him and the MOHL style of hockey opens players up to being able to play for much longer than their NHL counterparts. So when Shane finally gets the C after Orlando retires in 2018, it's like a fucking coronation. Boston Hockey airs a local ad spot to drum up excitement for their upcoming season and the entire thing is Ilya standing there in his Raiders uniform visibly waiting for something and then you hear the shwick of skates on ice and it's spotlight on Shane next to him, resplendent in Bayonets Blue, C prominent on his sweater. Then they grin at each other and the footage clips to them doing almost the exact same thing in their rookie promo.
So yeah, Shane stays in Boston.
- The Cottage gets built! It's in its canonical location of Lanaudiere and Shane spends his first summer there in 2014. Initially, Shane was just going to purchase a prefab cottage out there to spend his (extremely long and uncomfortable because he only has them ONCE a year against literally all medical advice) heats in, but then he realized that it might actually be nice to, like, build a home out there that he could land back at once hockey was over or if, y'know, something happened. The trauma of his presentation is something that Shane will never forget or quite manage to work past. He is painfully aware of how quickly things can be ripped away; how fallible his dreams are. And maybe he thinks of Ilya as one of those fallible dreams too, which is why he doesn't mention that he is building the cottage until it's done and he oh so casually mentions that he's going to take his heats there from now on, and if Ilya can make it out to the cottage they could use Shane's pheramones to trigger his rut so that Ilya doesn't have to worry about it randomly going off during the season...like, it's sooo practical...
Then Ilya gets to the cottage and finds out that Shane has had a banya built on the property and plausible deniability kind of flies out the window. 2014 is a big year for them.
- OKAY so Svetlana is still very much Svetlana in his AU. She's a beta and even within conservative Russian culture, it's well within normal variation for an alpha man to marry a beta woman, so things do sometimes get said, yes. Especially when they were kids and spending their summers wrapped around each other's fingers. However--and this is where the mind games start--because Shane is an omega, and because there are so many rumors about him and Ilya even by the time their rookie seasons end, all is not quiet on the home front with regards to Ilya's American ("why do they keep calling me American") Omega. In the traditionalist eyes of his father and his cohort, Ilya knows that Shane would only be an acceptable partner if he was the Most Omega to Ever Omega. Male alpha/Male Omega relationships are only acceptable if the alpha in question is the platonic ideal of an alpha, masculine and proprietary and THE provider, and the Omega is obedient to a fault. So people are aware of Shane but don't really think of him as proper. They think of him as yet another one of Ilya's American indulgences. This does not stop Grigori Rozanov from souring when Ilya refuses to bring Shane to the party in Sochi--because it still isn't entirely proper, that Shane doesn't feel any sense of duty to Ilya and is eschewing the appropriate amount of Omega Obedience by traipsing around Sochi with a group of Alpha and beta hockey players instead of meeting Ilya's Very Important Father. And that Ilya is just letting him do that without any kind of concern.
(Ilya is concerned. Ilya hates that Shane is in this fucking country. Ilya has St-Simon and Connors, who are both on the Canadian team with Shane, texting him multiple times a day to update him on whether Shane has tried to leave the Olympic Village and how they're going to STOP him from doing so. It's the most alpha he's ever been about anything ever and the stress is disregulating his hormones to the point where he is actually afraid he's going to pop a rut.)
Also. I'll be a little cheeky and give some insight into the Sochi situation because I'm excited for it and it's been awhile since I talked about TRR: Shane is in heat the entire time he's in Sochi :)
Anyway! Sorry to derail from Svetlana. She's precious to me, so rest assured that she will be around. Obviously, because the Shane and Ilya of it all accelerates much faster in this AU, Svetlana comes into her role of Hollanov confidant much earlier as well. And since she's attending college in Boston cocurrently with Shane and Ilya's initial seasons with Boston Hockey, she's privy to a lot of drama. There will BE Sveta in the narrative, rest assured.
