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.”
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“My emperor is fine” your emperor has commissioned over 8000 life-sized terracotta soldiers and buried them facing east, in the direction of his recently conquered enemies in the hopes that they will protect him in the afterlife.
would a “paranoid despot with innocent blood on his hands”construct a bunch of secret underground passageways under his palace to avoid the prying eyes of the living and dead? if anything, it just proves how INTELLIGENT and RATIONAL i am because no one can be sure of where i am at any given time! being in a constant state of heightened vigilance is the best way to avoid the assassins who are 100% real and 100% out to get me!
Okay justice for Ilya Rozanov, a man who notably managed his entire families finances and his dementia-having fathers caretaking since he was literally a teenager, while also essentially raising himself to be an elite, generational athlete by himself.
like what is this ‘Ilya needs the threat of a sex ban to pick up his socks’ slander or this ‘Ilya has terrible financial literacy’ misinformation or this ‘Ilya only eats junk food and needs to be forced to eat his veggies’ tomfoolery
#something very heteronormative is going on here…#<prev. and something very orientalist as well not to be the friend who is too woke.#there’s something to constantly writing the one non-western character as singularly in need of civilising in a way that like.#flies directly in the face of the character the canon has actually given us.#we’re all playing in our sandboxes &c. but the canon isn’t only a suggestion😭 not when the alternatives for it too often rely on bias
Let me be completely clear - I’m not being a sarcastic ass. I’m just realizing all over again, in real time, for myself, that reading a real life published book makes your neurons feel like they’re getting a spa day. Like I can feel my brain getting juicer and wrinklier with every page I turn. This shit is no joke, this is like hard drugs if hard drugs were good for you and made your brain feel revived and alive.
should i eat first or shower first *has phone in couch time for another 3 hours due to choice procrastination, a behavioral phenomenon observed in pigeons and rats as well*
gummygunk
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romaincrisis
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germansingergirl
