#irina rozanova

[wingsseni]

irina and ilyusha 🤍

[stabthroughme]

Ilya can't go back to visit his mother's grave, but sometimes higher ups from the Treasury Board in Canada do go on diplomatic missions.

David who's assigned to go on a trip to Russia after Hollanov's been outed, because he's been picking up Russian and it would be a good temperature read on the Russian counterparts.

David who visits Irina's grave and spends time cleaning it up, lights a candle and sits until long after it's burned out.

David who tells Irina about Shane as a child, who tells her about all the ways Shane and Ilya fit together, who tells her about the puzzle nights and the cookies and cream ice cream and the blanket they keep specifically for Ilya on their couch.

David who reassures Irina that he helped Ilya with his cuff links on his wedding day, tells her not to worry about her boy.

David who tells Irina that her son is so loved and cherished.

David who plants a little maple tree as a "sign of friendship" in a park across from the cemetery Irina is buried in. He got to pick the place, and he made sure she would be able to see it.

Edit may 3: Hey if you're here from threads :) Love getting jump-scared with my own tumblr post getting screenshotted (this is fine i promise, they credited me properly) but jfc. Right in front of my salad???

Yes I kissed the brick :D

[parcai]

i think quite often about the implications of shane growing up in nowhere ottawa, a cottage at the edge of the woods, and ilya hailing from the cold, salt-stained streets of moscow. the way those two childhoods never stopped existing inside them. the way they surface in quiet, domestic moments.

shane kills the bugs in their house without thinking. he doesn’t even hesitate. just a folded paper towel, quick and clean. ilya, who flinches at the sound of loons on the lake, watches from a safe distance, faintly horrified. he has never been an exterminator. he has never needed to be.

ilya offers to hire someone to change a lightbulb. to replace a lock. to fix something small and ordinary. shane just blinks at him, slow and confused, because it costs ten dollars at home depot and then you do it yourself, ilya... that’s the whole point. that’s how it’s always been done.

but ilya knows how to endear himself to the local bakery. he leans on the counter, soft voice, easy smile, and every time they leave there is something extra tucked into the brown paper bag. being a millionaire means nothing here. every grandmother pinches his cheek anyway. every owner insists he take more.

he doesn’t need google maps when they drive through the city. he knows instinctively how streets bend, how neighborhoods breathe. he has every app for taxis, deliveries, reservations, tailoring. he knows how to argue, too -- sharp and precise -- when someone tries to take advantage of shane. no, you are not ripping off my husband. no, you will not get away with it (shane's no idiot, but yuna famously handles all his business, simply taking his interests in mind).

(by the same vein) shane, who barely knows how to negotiate a contract because someone else always did it for him (yuna, an agent, etc), knows the sky instead. he knows the constellations. he learned them standing beside his father, neck bent back, the dark stretching endless above them. (he was a boy scout for exactly 1 year before quitting bc it cut into hockey time). sometimes they lie on the patio furniture now, deep in thought, and shane points them out one by one, voice soft with certainty, and ilya listens like he’s being told a story (it reminds him, at first with a shock, of his mother, of bedtime folk stories told once by the first russian mother to the first russian child. of cannabilism and children being stolen by devils in the middle of the night, but it was still funny & sweet anyway, bc irina swore to always protect him before tucking his little toes in)

ilya fills their kitchen with beautiful, lavish, complicated things. heavy clay pots. expensive japanese knives. a coffee machine that hisses and gleams like something alive. the tv room with state of the art speakers & a remote system that takes shane 3 days to figure out how to use. shane brings the deck pillows inside before the first snowfall. he checks the seals on the windows. he knows which mornings the frost will come early.

they are both, in quiet ways, teaching each other how to live.

(and, more quietly still, carrying small, invisible pieces across that shared space between them. ilya learns to rotate his own tires. shane cooks his first stir fry. and what a beautiful thing that is -- for someone to look inside you and, somewhere in the shape of who you’ve become, recognize the person you love most).

it is strange, sometimes, to see the ghosts of who they were before this. the boy in the woods & the boy in the city. all those instincts, all those small private competencies, surviving into this shared space

and maybe that’s what love is. not becoming the same thing, but making room for the person shaped by somewhere completely different. letting their world fold into yours until neither of you is ever alone inside it again.

[warren-keplers-funk-band]

it doesn't count as crying if you don't let the tears fall~

a chance encounter between shane hollander and irina rozanova, inspired by a couple fics i read a while back with a similar premise (small serendipity by the_hemlocked and soulmates by justaromanticfool)

[livijoyann]

Ilya and his Mommas 💙💜

Threw the brick so hard, it came back and hit me in the face 😭 All "fake insta" posts here: anotherhraccount

[1doesnotsimplyhavejust1fandam]

Thinking there needs to be even more utter confusion in-fic about Shane and Ilya starting the Irina Foundation together as friends. Especially from their respective friends, and not because they think it’s a PR stunt.

They hear the press conference, Ilya talking about his mother’s death, and there are sirens going off in everybody’s heads about how in the world Ilya was ever vulnerable enough to tell Shane about his mom when most people he’s known for nearly a decade probably didn’t even know Irina was dead. Cliff is screaming crying throwing up because he had no idea, Svetlana is staring in shock at her screen because at least she had an inkling about Shane but not to this extent, and the rest of his Bears/Centaurs teammates are going “did you know???” in all the chats without him in them. Bood is ready to call Hollander up and beg for advice on how to get this crazy Russian man to open up to their team.

And on Shane’s side of things, his people have zero concept of how Shane makes friends because Hayden and Jackie claimed him from pretty much the moment they respectively met him, Rose best friend-zoned him, and J.J. is basically the final girl extrovert to end all extroverts. But Shane didn’t start off hating any of them like they think he hated Rozanov, and he’s also never had a vulnerable conversation with any of them that didn’t need to be clawed out (gently) from inside him.

Going off of all their prior knowledge of these two, their friends absolutely would conclude that Hollanov are somehow insanely close, platonic soulmates if you will. I think knowing Irina’s story should do a lot of heavy-lifting with their friends when it comes to their closeness, because what could make being friends more believable than telling someone that story? This also means there is potential for their friends calling them soulmates (platonic, to them though), and Shane fumbling over his words in horror and confusion because how did they know, while Ilya’s just like “yes” about it.

[swagsmeister]

irina and 11 year old ilya. mother's day 2/3

[unlikecharlie]

As someone whose dad often criticised me by comparing me to my mother - "stupid like your mother" was an often heard phrase aimed at me every time I messed up during my childhood - it breaks my heart to think of Ilya growing up after Irina died and only ever hearing mentions of his mother when his father berates him. And I'm thinking about how he tried to speak up in defense of her only once, before quickly learning the lesson that you don't talk back to Grigori Rozanov. The red handprint on his face was reminder enough.

-

But then he and Shane become boyfriends. Ilya tells Shane about Irina. Eventually, he shows him a photo, the only one he managed to find and hold on to after Grigori got rid of every other trace of her after she died. And Shane holds the physical copy in his hands delicately - the photo yellowed and creased at the edges, very obviously handled with love and reverence every time it gets taken out - before he looks back at Ilya with a sweet smile and says, "You have her hair. And you smile like her." And it's the first time in so long since someone compared Ilya to his mother with love and affection in their voice instead of scorn and disappointment. He clings to Shane as he holds his tears at bay for a long time before he finally doesn't feel fragile enough to shatter into pieces anymore.