"Happy Birthday, Ilya", Shane Hollander & Ilya Rozanov [Hudson Williams & Connor Storrie]
Jun 2026
Summary: A quiet birthday dinner with Shane's family shouldn't feel like much. For Ilya, it feels like everything. Sometimes the best gifts are the people who choose to keep showing up.
Read on AO3
It wasn’t fancy. No private room. No celebrity friends hiding behind menus waiting to yell surprise. No giant cake shaped like a hockey rink. No cameras. No reporters. No carefully curated social media moment designed to make strangers on the internet jealous.
Just dinner.
A small Italian restaurant tucked into a quiet corner of the city, warm light spilling across white tablecloths. The smell of garlic and fresh bread hangs in the air. Soft music plays somewhere in the background, barely loud enough to notice.
At the table sit exactly three people.
Shane. Yuna. David. That’s it.
Shane, meanwhile, looks vaguely panicked.
Not actual panic. Shane never actually panics. Shane does something much worse. He worries himself into a state of polite, silent anxiety while pretending everything is perfectly fine.
Ilya knows the look.
The tiny crease between Shane’s eyebrows. The way he keeps glancing around the restaurant as though he’s personally responsible for the quality of every meal being served. The way he asks if everything is okay every ten minutes.
As if there is any universe where Ilya is going to complain.
Especially when Shane has already spent half the evening smiling at him like that.
At some point Yuna insists on a photograph. Shane immediately sits up straighter, polite and composed as ever. Ilya leans in close enough that their shoulders touch. The resulting picture is painfully them: Shane smiling softly at the camera while Ilya looks delighted by absolutely everything. It will end up as Shane’s phone background within a week. Shane will deny this. The evidence will be overwhelming.
Especially after this morning.
Ilya has already had an excellent birthday.
Maybe the best possible start to a birthday, in fact.
Being woken up before sunrise by his husband had resulted in several minutes where coherent thought had completely abandoned him. There had absolutely been fireworks involved, regardless of what the Canadian government officially classified as fireworks. So really, Shane could have handed him a stale muffin and a coupon for free parking after that and Ilya probably would have called it a perfect day.
Instead, Shane had spent the entire day looking increasingly concerned that he hadn't done enough. It was ridiculous. Completely ridiculous.
Ilya leans back in his chair and watches Shane fret over the menu.
The man has somehow arranged a dinner with the two most important people in his life, booked a restaurant Ilya actually likes, cleared everyone's schedules, and spent the whole day treating him like he hung the moon.
And still Shane looks worried.
"You know," Ilya says finally, reaching for his wine, "most people would be very offended."
Shane immediately looks up. "About what?"
"About how little faith you have in them."
The crease between Shane’s eyebrows deepens.
"I don't know what that means."
"I mean," Ilya says patiently, "you look like you think I am about to stand up and announce this is worst birthday in history."
Yuna snorts into her drink. David outright laughs.
Shane sighs. "I just wanted it to be nice."
"It is nice."
"I know, but—"
"No." Ilya points at him with his wine glass. "Listen carefully. I am going to explain something important."
Shane immediately adopts the expression of a man being forced into a lecture.
"I woke up this morning very happy. Then I spent the day with my husband. Now I am eating pasta with people I like. This is already successful birthday."
Yuna nods. "That's actually a pretty good summary."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome."
Shane's shoulders finally loosen a little.
And that, more than the restaurant or the food or the occasion itself, makes warmth settle comfortably in Ilya's chest. Because Shane still doesn't understand.
He still thinks effort is measured in grand gestures. He still worries that simple isn't enough.
But across the table is Yuna, smiling into her wine. Beside her is David, telling some story that keeps getting interrupted by laughter. And next to Ilya is Shane, who woke up early just to make sure his birthday started right and has spent the entire day trying to make him happy.
What Shane never seems to realize is that none of this is simple. Not for Ilya.
Not when, for most of his life, birthdays had been phone calls across oceans, teammates in hotel rooms, hurried celebrations squeezed between games and flights and obligations.
This is family.
And for a moment, watching Shane finally stop worrying long enough to smile, Ilya thinks that maybe that's the real gift.
