Izuku shrugged. "I could sleep through the night. I wouldn't have to think and think about what next. It'll be a routine. It'll come with insurance and other benefits and it's just... very safe. Lots of money too, I'll buy you all the guitars in the world."
"Could you?"
"What?"
"Could you sleep through the night?" Katsuki turns to face him. "Sitting behind a desk. Wearing a tie. Pushing papers while the world burns outside your window. Could you close your eyes and not see everything you're not doing?"
Izuku's breath catches.
"I've seen you in a suit," Katsuki continues. "You look like a bird in a cage. Don't you know what a tie is Izuku? It's a noose around your neck they give you to tie yourself! The illusion you have some control over your death because death it is! A slow and certain and painfully boring death stuck in a nine to five, answering to men who've never had a single fire in their chests their entire lives — we are dreamers 'Zuku!"
He looks like he wants to stand up on the branch right then.
"There's stars in your throat Deku. I love what you write, don't you get it? I— you need to write. You were made for it. I won't let you put a tie on. You can call me reckless. You can call me stupid, irresponsible, you can say I don't understand the real world — " a sharp breath, almost a dare— "but don't you dare tell me you don't know. Don't you dare stand there in that suit and pretend you don't feel the stars trying to get out."
He kissed him furiously, and it hurt. A little. "Don't make me watch you go dark," he says. "I'm asking you. I don't ask for things. You know I don't ask. But I am asking."
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Summary:
How does the saying go?
First you love them. Then you love the loving. Then the loving loves itself and you're just the body it lives in.
From childhood best friends to best friends who fucked, Katsuki and Izuku were inseparable. But then the Todoroki family pulled the rug out from under them and they go from strangers to strangers who fuck.
Katsuki is running from the press and Izuku is running from his past, can they ever break out of this cycle?
Ohhh an update on Tumblr would be great! But no stress 🙏 whatever is easiest for you! But again, really love your fics and how write Izuku and Katsuki 🥹🥹❤️
"Do you think it's better to love something that's not quite right for you, or to not love anything at all."
"That's a stupid question," he says, not unkindly. "There's an obvious answer."
"You could protect yourself."
"You could. And then one day you'd be old and safe and you'd have protected yourself from everything that would have made you someone." He pushes back from the table slightly, leans in his chair. "People who've never been broken are not whole. They're just... unfinished."
Gosh sorry I hit send too soon. I really enjoy your fics!! I'm more asking about the updates bc I don't want to miss out on anything BC I really like your fics 😅❤️
will it help if i update on my tumblr everytime i actually write a new work or chapter? i usually do that but not immediately.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
summary:
The game, as Momo has explained in the group chat three separate times and in person twice, works as follows:
Around fifty questions, some directed at Katsuki first and then Izuku second, some the reverse, some answered simultaneously. After each question and answer, the respondents hold up a shoe — their own to indicate themselves, their spouse's to indicate the other person. Points are awarded for matching answers. The game, nominally, has a winner, but everyone present already understands that the real game is watching two of the most intensely competitive people in the known universe be forced to cooperate in order to score points, which means the real prize is the spectacle of what happens when they don't match.
The thing about being secretly in love with your lifelong rival was that it required you to maintain the exact same external behavior while internally reorganizing every memory of the past ten years into a new and somewhat horrifying chronological order. Shane was managing this with moderate success, or at least with the appearance of moderate success, which for him had always been sufficient.
They texted now. Not a lot — Ilya was not a heavy texter, which Shane had actually remembered carefully enough to know that Ilya's texting patterns fell into three categories: brief functional communications (Got home. See you. Game at 7.), inexplicable single-word responses delivered hours after the conversation had logically concluded (Fine.), and, rarely, the longer messages that came late at night when Ilya was apparently in some other mode entirely, messages that were still not long by any reasonable standard but were long for Ilya, messages that said things like There was a dog on the street today that looked exactly like a very disappointed professor. Reminded me of you for obvious reasons.
Shane had stared at that message for eleven minutes before responding: Extremely rude. Also what kind of dog.
Ilya: Big. Brown. Very judgmental face.
Shane: Sounds like a Chesapeake Bay Retriever. They do have naturally serious faces. It's not judgmental, it's just how the face is shaped.
There had been a pause and then: I will tell the dog you said so.
~
Here is what Shane knew about Ilya Rozanov: he was left-handed, he cooked eggs with exactly the right amount of butter and without asking how you liked them because he had apparently already determined through observation how you liked them, he drank black tea from a specific tin that he brought with him when he traveled, he had opinions about Italian greyhounds, he ranked musical keys by personality, he dreamed in Russian, he sat on floors, he called home on Tuesdays, he cried at one particular movie and would absolutely deny this if asked, he kept a stone from the Black Sea on his nightstand that he would say was just a stone if you asked about it and which was very clearly not just a stone, and he had been in love with Shane for approximately as long as Shane had been in love with him, which was long enough that the love had grown old enough to be trusted, deep-rooted enough to be structural, the kind of thing that was less a feeling than a fact of architecture.
Shane knew all of this. He had been knowing it in pieces for months, each piece added to the structure with the methodical care he brought to building anything important. The structure was complete now, or complete enough — there was always more to know about Ilya, there would always be more, that was one of the things about Ilya, that he was not a fixed quantity, that he continued revealing himself in the specific and surprising way of things that are truly alive — but the core of it was there, solid and warm.
None of this changed the fact that when they were on the ice together, Shane wanted to win.
He had worried about this. He had worried that the shift in their relationship would soften something in him that was not supposed to be soft, that the affection and the rival would cancel each other out, that he would be incapable of playing hard against someone he loved. He had worried about this in the specific way he worried about things — systematically, in the dark, making mental lists of the failure modes, trying to construct solutions in advance.
The first period answered the question definitively.
Ilya bodychecked him into the boards at the three-minute mark, hard enough that Shane saw stars, and Shane's response was instinctive and total — a surge of adrenaline, a sharpening of focus, the competitive fire flaring up with such immediacy that all his worrying about softness seemed, retrospectively, very stupid. He scrambled back into position and on the very next shift stole the puck from Ilya's stick with the kind of clean theft that was a skill and also, honestly, a flex, and he heard Ilya make a sound — an irritated, undeniable sound — and something in Shane lit up like a lamp.
This. This was also them. This had always been them.
After the second period, in the hallway that ran between the visitor's locker room and the home locker room, they nearly collided — which had happened before, over ten years, the geography of arenas throwing them into each other's paths at inconvenient moments. Ilya pulled up short. Shane pulled up short. They were close enough that Shane could see the sweat on Ilya's jaw, the flush of exertion on his cheekbones, the dark attention in his eyes that was the same attention he brought to everything, the attention that was one of the things Shane had catalogued and filed away under things he was allowed to notice now.
"Good steal," Ilya said.
"Good check," Shane said.
They looked at each other for a moment in the flickering fluorescent light of the arena hallway, both of them breathing hard, both of them ridiculous, and Ilya said: "I am going to score on you in the third."
"You can try," Shane said.
Ilya smiled, and it was the sharp competitive smile, the one Shane had hated for years, except that now he knew it was also the fond smile in disguise, the warmth underneath it just barely visible if you knew to look, and looking was something Shane was very good at.
Ilya did score in the third. It was an excellent goal, a top-shelf rocket off a wrist shot that beat their goalie clean, and the arena made the sound arenas make when someone does something undeniably great, and Shane stood at his blue line and watched Ilya celebrate with his teammates and felt two things simultaneously that ten years ago would have seemed impossible to feel at the same time: pure, uncomplicated competitive fury, and pure, uncomplicated pride.
Both things. At once. The rivalry and the love, not canceling each other out but existing together, occupying the same space in him the way two notes occupy the same chord — separate, distinct, and together more than either was alone.
The Canadiens won anyway, 4-3, on a Shane goal in overtime that he would describe to Ilya later, over the phone, with the detail and precision he brought to things he cared about, and Ilya would listen to the whole thing and say: "You are insufferable," and then, quietly: "It was a good goal."
And Shane would say: "I know." And mean two things by it, as he was increasingly learning to do.
There was a saying his father had used, when Ilya was young and prone to emotion in the unguarded way of children who have not yet learned to manage what they feel — медведи не плачут, bears don't cry — and Ilya had taken this in the way boys take the things their fathers tell them, as a directive, as a definition of what he was supposed to become. Bears don't cry, so he became the kind of man who didn't cry, who controlled what he showed, who built the public version of himself with such thoroughness that even in private it was sometimes difficult to find the seams.
His father had not been a cruel man. He had been a hockey man, which was not the same thing as cruel but was sometimes adjacent to it, and he had loved Ilya in the way hockey men loved their sons: through insistence, through standards, through the particular tenderness that expresses itself as expectation. Ilya understood this now, at thirty-three, understood it with the retrospective clarity of a man who had spent enough years in therapy — quietly, privately, with a therapist he had found through a referral and paid for himself and told no one about — to have developed some compassion for the boy he had been and some complicated peace with the father he had had.
The summer was when things became real.
The summer was when they existed outside the frame of the season, without the structure of games and travel and the opposing-team narrative that had organized their relationship for ten years, and when Shane came to Boston for a week in July and they were just — there, together, in the apartment that Ilya had slowly, over the preceding months, begun making less designed and more lived-in: a throw blanket from a market that he had bought because it was the right weight, books stacked on the coffee table, the red tin of tea visible on the counter — Shane had walked in and looked around and said, "You changed some things." Ilya knows it's supposed to be a coompliment.
"Yes," Ilya said.
"It's better," Shane said, and went to put his bag in the bedroom as if this were already a normal thing, as if he already knew where things went, and Ilya stood in his own apartment and felt something structural shift.
The hard part came on the fourth day.
It came, as hard parts often do, from a small thing — they were arguing about dinner, which they did with the particular relish of two people who are competitive and have strong opinions, and Ilya had said something dismissive, some careless sarcasm that had come out sharper than he meant it, and Shane had gone quiet in the specific way he went quiet when something had landed wrong, the stillness that was not sulking but was rather the careful management of a reaction that felt too large for the room.
Ilya knew this quiet. He had remembered it. He knew it meant Shane was recalibrating, determining the rational response, probably listing the relevant facts of the situation in the internal spreadsheet he maintained for interpersonal friction. And Ilya, who had spent thirty-three years being a man who didn't show things, felt something rise in him — a panic that was not really about the dinner argument at all but was about something older and more fundamental, the fear of being the person who hurts the specific person they cannot afford to hurt.
He said: "I didn't mean it the way it sounded."
Shane looked at him. "I know."
"I was being — " Ilya stopped. The English word he wanted was dismissive but that felt insufficient. In Russian he might have said я был груб, I was rude, I was rough, with the particular shade of roughness that implies carelessness rather than malice, but in English — "I was not thinking about how it would feel. I do this. I know I do this."
Shane was quiet for a moment. Then: "Yes. You do."
"I am sorry."
Another pause. Shane had the quality, Ilya had noticed, of sitting with apologies rather than immediately dismissing them, which was unusual and somewhat uncomfortable if you were accustomed to people saying it's fine, don't worry before you'd finished the sentence. Shane let the apology exist in the room. He considered it.
"I know you do it when you feel cornered," Shane said finally. "I'm not — I'm not cornering you. I'm just here."
And Ilya looked at him — at Shane sitting on the couch, in his socks, with his precise posture and his careful face, this man who had seen the world and found Ilya worth including in the sights, who had driven four hours from a cottage with cold coffee and a love he didn't know how to say yet, who had arrived in Boston and looked around and said it's better as if he had already decided that wherever Ilya was was somewhere he was going to be — and something broke open in Ilya in a way that felt like relief.
"I know," he said. "I know you are just here." His voice came out different than he intended, rougher, the control insufficient for once. "I am not used to that. I am — I am learning it."
Shane looked at him for a long moment and then got up from the couch and crossed the room and put his arms around Ilya, which was startling because Shane was not a man who touched people easily, who reached first, who offered physical comfort without being certain it was wanted — and the fact that he was certain, that he reached without hesitation, was the thing that broke the rest of it open, and Ilya, who had been a bear for thirty years and had not cried, put his face against Shane's hair and held on and felt the long-held tension of being a man who does not show things begin, slowly and irrevocably, to ease.
Bears, it turned out, were allowed to.
Shane held on and didn't say anything, which was correct, which was the right thing, and Ilya thought about his grandmother's kitchen and the horizontal light and being in a place where you were entirely allowed to exist, and understood that he had found it again, finally, after a very long time, in the least likely and most inevitable place in the world.
They cooked dinner together, which was its own comedy — Ilya with strong and vocally expressed opinions about how to properly handle a shallot, Shane with the defensive certainty of someone who had been cooking his own dinner for fifteen years and had a system that worked even if the system did not involve shallots and was perhaps, fine, maybe, open to revision in the shallot department — and they ate at the cottage table with the water visible through the window, dark and wind-ruffled, and drank wine that Ilya had brought because Ilya always brought good wine and Shane always brought good olive oil and together this made their combined household considerably more expensive in two specific areas than any rational budget would justify.
"This is where it started," Ilya said, at some point in the evening, looking at the cottage around them with the slightly distant expression he wore when he was thinking about the shape of things.
"Technically it started in 2015," Shane said. "At the Bruins-Canadiens game. You called me a —"
"I know what I called you."
"A pompous — "
"Shane."
"— automaton. Which was rude."
"You had been elbowing me for thirty minutes."
"I was playing hockey."
"With your elbows."
"It's a contact sport."
"Shane," Ilya said, setting down his wine glass, and the way he said the name had the specific weight it had acquired over the past year, full and deliberate and warm, a name used as a declaration. "I know it started in 2015. I am saying this cottage is where it changed. Where I allowed it to change."
Ilya had a memory that came back to him on the drive from the airport, unbidden, the way memories come when you are tired and your guard has dropped and the city is filling itself in around you through the car window — the memory was of his grandmother's kitchen in Chelyabinsk, which he had not thought about in years, not the kitchen itself but the specific quality of light that existed in that kitchen in winter, a light that was pale and horizontal and that turned everything it touched the colour of old paper, and his grandmother would be at the stove, her broad back to him, and the whole kitchen would smell of борщ and something sharper underneath, something medicinal that he later understood was the smell of the particular hand cream she used, which came in a green tin that had a picture of a woman with a braid on it, and the memory held no narrative, no event, just the light and the smell and the knowledge of being in a place where he was entirely allowed to exist.
He had not thought about that kitchen in eight years. He was thinking about it now because of Shane Hollander, which was deranged, which was the kind of thing that happened when you spent three days with someone you had been trying not to love for a decade and you failed, spectacularly and irrevocably, at not loving them.
His apartment was large and clean and expensively appointed and entirely wrong in the way apartments are wrong when you have been somewhere that was right.
He stood in the entrance hall with his bag and looked at the open-plan living space — the leather couch, the view of the city, the kitchen island in white marble that he never used, never, because he cooked at the stove and the island was just expensive negative space — and felt, not for the first time, the specific loneliness of a place that has been designed rather than lived in.
Funny, he had designed it himself, huh? He had paid a great deal of money for it too. He had once found it perfectly acceptable too.
Damn you, Shane Hollander.
He made tea — not the tea bags he kept for guests, but his own tea, the black tea that came in a red tin from a shop in the neighbourhood with the grocery, the tea that tasted like his grandmother's kitchen, like Chelyabinsk in winter, like the particular lost country of his childhood which was not Russia exactly but was the version of Russia that existed only in that kitchen in that horizontal light — and he stood at the kitchen window with the mug between his palms and looked at Boston's nighttime skyline and thought about Shane Hollander.
The thing about Shane, the thing that had always been the thing about Shane, was that he was not what you expected when you looked at him. You looked at him and you saw the jaw and the statistics and the particular arrogance of someone who had been told he was exceptional before he was old enough to know what exceptional meant, and you thought: here is a man who will be easy to hate. And Ilya had hated him, genuinely and usefully, for years, had organized his career around the opposing point of Shane's career, had measured every trophy and every headline against the equal-and-opposite trophy and headline on the other side, because that was what Shane had been — the opposite, the rival, the negative space that defined his own shape.
But the thing you found out, if you ever got close enough to find out anything, was that underneath all of that — underneath the jaw and the statistics and the practiced cool of a man who had learned to use his own unlikeability as a weapon — Shane Hollander was someone who counted things. Who noticed the temperature of rooms. Who ate the same pasta every Tuesday because the texture was correct. Who rolled his shirts with the precision of someone who understood that the world became less frightening when small things were controlled. Who stood in cottage doorways in his socks, watching you leave, with his face arranged into blankness that was not emptiness but rather the opposite of emptiness — everything held carefully in, the way you hold water in cupped hands.
But if you've ever held water in cupped hands, you already know of the droplets that slip between your fingers.
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