no evidence to back this up but shane strikes me as the type of guy who holds a comical amount of stuff in one hand. very give me that ilya. big hands. he is The Holder.
there's a famous mid-action candid of them walking and shane’s unintentionally mean-mugging while in one hand holding his phone, ilya's phone, some sort of paper that's been folded up a million times - there's chapstick clutched between his pointer and middle fingers, a water bottle hanging by the ring from his pinky, hoodie in the crook of his elbow, hockey bag slung over his shoulder. meanwhile his other side is completely free. (eagled eyed viewers will understand that this is the hand he opens doors for ilya with)
i know we probably all know this but to be clear ilya is walking through the door shane is holding open for him carrying absolutely nothing and talking dramatically with his hands in an aggressively slavic manner while shane also carries his bags, his hopes, his dreams, and his entire life
A compilation of inherently BOY things I think Ilya does during his first time at the cottage that fundamentally ruin his cool-guy image for Shane in the most endearing way possible:
- Ilya’s first sunburn, which is Very Bad. His are all cheeks all flushed and he’s walking funny and hissing through his teeth as he pushes on the reddened skin as it turns yellow. He yelps any time Shane tries to touch it, which is all the time because it’s funny and also because he likes touching Ilya.
- Shane catches a little sunfish off the end of the dock and puts it in a bucket full of water and Ilya sits in a Slavic squat in front of that bucket for hours on the dock watching the fish swim around. He’s sticking his hand in there to try and touch it and making embarrassing noises and jerking his hand away when he does manage to brush a finger along the scales. Until Shane tells him it needs to be released at some point and then Ilya is insisting on being the one to do it.
- Utterly failing at water skiing, with Shane trying to give tips while David drives the boat. Full on face of water, sputtering eating-shit so many times but insisting on going again, because Shane can do it so Ilya will do it too.
- Not tying up his shorts tight enough the first time David takes them tubing (despite his calm demeanour, once David has a tube behind his boat he drives like a maniac) and Ilya almost loses his shorts, white booty out. Shane can’t help but smack his ass and cackle as Ilya tries desperately to hold onto the tube handle with one hand and his shorts (that are around his knees) with the other while they continue to fly across the water.
- Ilya trying to dive off the dock in a life jacket because Shane told him it was impossible and now of course he has to try.
- Ilya in a life jacket in general.
- Ilya with a mosquito bite. Itching itching itching while Shane slaps at his hands and tells him to stop. It’s gets all red and raised bump, and Ilya’s kind of self conscious but he still can’t stop scratching and cursing mosquitos as he does. But then Shane’s pressing a careful thumbnail into an X over the bite and Ilya’s fascinated by another way he can be close to Shane.
- Ilya on the dock, on his stomach watching a spider eat a bug in its web for an undetermined amount of time. He’s narrating for Shane with a slightly disgusted but fascinated tinge to his voice who is suntanning beside him, sunglasses on.
- Ilya in the marsh trying to catch a frog after David explains how Shane used to do it all the time. He’s finally got one, calling Shane’s name with so much excitement and a frog cupped between his hands. Of course it’s the largest fugliest frog in the marsh so then they’re both crouched down, staring into Ilya cupped palms arguing about whether or not the frog is cute (Ilya says it is, Shane says it’s ugly)
- Ilya with a leech from the marsh stuck onto his ankle. He’s actually Losing His Shit about this one. freaky, disgusting, Canadian blood sucker. Why the fuck would they even have these things in the lake. Shane has to pull it off. Obviously he lets Ilya chase him around the property throwing his ankle towards Shane screaming “get it off, Shane! Get it off!” before he has Ilya sit on a sun chair and performs leech surgery on his ankle while Ilya whimpers (non-sexily).
Sincerely, someone who grew up with a Canadian family cottage.
Ilya does love seeing old photos of Shane. Fat Baby Shane™ in all his forms, toddler Shane in his little hockey gear, Shane in elementary school with a big missing-teeth smile, Shane blowing out the candles on his 10th birthday, Shane holding up his brand new driver's license at 16. The list goes on.
One day Yuna finds an old disposable camera. The expiration date on it says 2009. She tells Shane about it; it might have some old photos from his graduation on it or something. She'd gotten a digital camera around that time so she can't remember what she used this one for. Shane is pretty indifferent about it.
Yuna sends the camera off to some company that still develops old camera film. It's about 15 years old at this point, though, so whatever is on it might not even develop correctly.
A few weeks later Shane and Ilya are over for dinner. Yuna tells them she got the photos back and they actually turned out ok. She hands over the stack of 10 photos. Shane rolls his eyes, but Ilya grabs the photos and starts flipping through them. The first two look like they are from some school event; there's Shane surrounded by similarly aged kids in an auditorium. There's one of the three of them on Thanksgiving that year and another of the three of them with Yuna's parents at the same dinner. Two of David asleep on the couch with the family dog clearly taken on different days. One of a Christmas tree in the Hollander's living room. The next two are Shane on the ice in a rink that Ilya recognizes as the one in Regina. The one from their first World Juniors Tournament.
And Ilya freezes. The last photo in the stack is a close-up of Shane. He's in a white hoodie with a black coat over it. He has on a dark green beanie and he's standing next to the door to the rink. He's smiling for the camera and his freckles are crinkled near his eyes. It's the Shane that so awkwardly and so confidently introduced himself to Ilya the first time they met. The Shane that had tried so hard to talk to Ilya then. The Shane that Ilya could admit to himself now that he'd had a bit of a crush on already. His Shane.
His Shane was getting blurry as tears filled his eyes.
i think if hollanov decide to have more than one kid at least one of them will be a goalie. and you know that kid is going first in whichever draft they end up in because they practiced on shane fucking hollander and ilya fucking rozanov (because if your dads were casually the two best centres in the nhl and two of the most successful hockey players on the planet, then you defend that net like your life depends on it)
everyone else in that years draft thinks this hollander-rozanov child got picked first out of nepotism (because who the fuck is that desperate to pick a goalie first overall in the draft?) until one day that team’s starting goalie is injured and all of a sudden your scoring chances have gone to hell because you’re trying to get the puck past cerberus, the three headed dog that guards the gates of hell
One side of the argument says hollanov fucked rough and nasty in the tampa hotel, the other side says it was slow and tender but we don’t have to fight. We can have both. They can fuck twice. I’m so serious. I don’t think they talk much, the first time. Let alone first names. It’s a physical reunion made potent by the unsaid things, fast with just hands and mouths searching for the other. Then they talk, sprawled in bed. Just small talk, catching up. They’ve missed each other so fucking much, and something is different now, a wall torn down. The second time is slower, Ilya putting Shane on his hands and knees like Shane likes but going slow, taking their time. And then they do it a forbidden third time after they’ve showered, both shaking and oversensitive when Shane pulls Ilya back inside him, face to face, and Ilya says something in Shane’s ear so soft and whispery enough that Shane pretends he doesn’t hear it, to spare himself and also to spare Ilya, because it’s enough that Ilya says it at all: Fine, you’re right, Hollander, you win Shane, you fucking win, Shane…
#MyShane is the type of person who has a time he is leaving by and will threaten to leave you behind if youre not ready to leave at that time. #MyShane is also the type of person to actually follow through on that threat and thats why him and Ilya show up to the rink in seperate cars multiple times a week.
“Shane fuck Shane help we fucked up, we lost Ilya, I swear he was here one second ago and now-“
“Haas, where are you right now?”
“The club by the hotel.”
“And he’s not in the bathroom?”
“No.”
“Not on the roof?”
“No.”
“Not trying to access any of the dancers poles?”
“What? Why would- Oh, Troy says no.”
“Is he hanging out with drunk girls in the women’s bathroom?”
“Umm, one sec. Harris, can you ask her if Ilya is in there? … Harris says no.”
“Ok. What were you talking about before he disappeared?”
“We were trying to figure out where to eat.”
“Did anyone bring up sushi?”
“He didn’t say he wanted-“
“Just answer the question.”
“Uh yeah, someone suggested it, but he said he wanted-“
“He’s at the pier.”
“What?”
“He got bored, sushi put fish on his brain, which made him think about water, and he likes going to piers, and the hotel is walking distance from a boardwalk by the water. He’s there, most likely trying to look at fish going under the dock.”
“… How do you know that?”
“Do you have any ideas how many times I have gotten this exact phone call? He’s easier to catch if you bait him with mozzarella sticks but make sure he knows he only gets them if he comes quietly. If you let him negotiate he will take the sticks and run. Cliff always fell for that.”
The polar opposite of corporate accounts trying to come across as hip and super friendly are the ones for libraries, aquariums, parks systems and the like, that are basically just trying to get people excited about learning and the wonder of history/science by posting things like this:
And with the thud of the closing car door, they were done. Ilya and Shane had been driving— well, Shane had been driving for the past couple of hours to their daughter’s house, and the drive felt like it would never end. Iris had begged her fathers to make it, because, as she put it, a “Hollanov” family dinner was long overdue. Shane agreed.
They were the last to arrive, no thanks to the constant breaks in driving Shane had to take, thanks to his tremendous headaches. The slower-than-average driving didn’t help either, but that was simply thanks to Shane forgetting to get a new prescription for his glasses. Ilya was always the one to remind him of those things when he’d get so preoccupied with life that he’d forget the smaller details to care for. Now it was Shane who had to remember.
They had barely taken two steps from the car before Iris burst through the front door, ready and willing to help as always. She took her Papa’s hand as his faded blue-jean eyes crawled up the house, squinting suspiciously at the building. Shane could just barely hear him murmur in Russian to her, “Where is this?”
“Papa, it’s my house. Remember, it was your wedding gift for Jeremy and me.”
Jeremy took his father-in-law’s hand and helped Shane up the front steps. Shane stopped at the door, turning and waiting for his husband to slowly make his way up as well. Hockey had always blessed them with strong arms and legs, and the diets Shane kept them on did their best to do them good, but time always robbed you of something. Forty years of retirement guaranteed that.
When they finally made it through the front door, Shane braced for impact. Literally. His hands reached out to the frame of the door, and he planted his feet as firmly as he could.
“Grandpa!” A chorus of voices from below chest-level cried out from the living room, hurling themselves against his legs as short arms wrapped around his waist and legs. He couldn’t help but laugh, even if the room spun with the impact. “Alright, alright, hello. Gentle on grandpa’s knees, please.”
“Kids, careful with— Riki, handle the grunts!”
Iris, warm-hearted and iron-fisted Iris, called out into the main room for her brother as Ilya slid his shoes off, an old habit he’d kept after years of Shane rubbing off on him. When the grandchildren caught sight of Ilya, it was over. Every hand detached and reached instead for Deda, and their dedushka leaned down with open arms to catch them all. “Oh, my babies. Look at all my babies. Shane, look at them. They are so tall.”
Ilya’s head tilted up to his husbands and something in his expression changed as he looked at him. Shane knew the expression well, the “you don’t look like how you’re supposed to” look. Like every time he turned his head, he expected to see Shane Hollander: Captain of the Montreal Metros… not Shane Hollander: “Dad” to some, “Grandpa” to many. He turned his head back down, picking out Iris’ youngest. “You, uh,” he snapped around until he could conjure a name, and Shane supplied discreetly. “Oliver, yes, you have gotten so big. Last time I saw you, you were, what? This big?” he reached down to his knee, his hand a measure of height. He did this every time he saw the kids, and every time it got a rise out of them.
Shane took in the display of love as another headache hit him. If it was like the others, it was only going to get worse.
By the time dinner was over, and all five grandchildren tried their hardest not to fall asleep on Iris’ couch, the adults stayed at the table.
Riki, the youngest of Ilya and Shane’s two, was telling a story about the day he found out he was adopted after he learned where babies came from. “I remember I asked Dad who gave birth to me, and how he was freaking out.”
“And then you asked him if he gave birth to you—” Iris supplied, smirking over her glass of red wine that Jeremy topped off for her.
“And Papa started howling, so bad I thought he was mad until he fell off the couch and I realized he was laughing.”
Shane chuckled silently at his seat, his hand over Ilya’s as he gave it a light squeeze. He knew he was trying to keep up, trying to place timelines and stories. It was only when Iris joked that she “never had to second-guess if I was adopted” that Ilya sat up.
“Yes, yes, I remember! Little Irochka in the back seat when we drove home with you. Shane was so scared I would crash, but you know your papa would never hurt you. He was crying, I remember now.”
“I was not crying.” Of course, Shane knew he was crying, but how could he not? That was the day they took their baby home for the first time after an endless adoption process. “It was just a dusty car.”
“Not even a real car.”
“It was European.”
“I am European, I know what a real European car is, and that is not a real car.”
For a second, it felt exactly how it should have. Ilya and Shane were bantering, teasing each other as they have been since the summer before rookie season. It was so good he could ignore how his husband’s face blurred and doubled for a moment, because Ilya was back. Even if just for now. Riki stood, kissing the tops of both of his father’s heads as he passed by to grab another bottle from the kitchen, and in that moment, Shane thought he could stay at that table forever.
The house Ilya had bought for Iris and Jeremy had too many bedrooms for a four-person family, but it meant that even with Riki and his three kids, Shane and Ilya still had their own room when staying over.
Ilya sat at the edge of the bed, staring at his feet as Shane washed his face in the en-suite bathroom. He tried to wash away the excruciating pain from his head, the pain that had him scream into a pillow some nights as lightning struck in his skull for minutes on end. It had gotten worse throughout the day, and Shane did his best to hide it with trips to the bathroom, substituting a pillow for a pile of folded towels. He tried to ignore the burn of lights in all the rooms by focusing on his children, or on the sleeping pile of grandkids by the TV. At night… all he had was the promise of sleep to save him. Shane had no clue what he needed saving from; he just knew it was fucking up his time with his family.
Shane reached for the bedroom key, knowing he had to lock the door in case Ilya woke up in the middle of the night, but just as his fingers grazed the cool metal on the dresser, he heard Ilya cry.
There was a time when seeing Ilya cry was rare— something mythical and believed to be impossible. He turned around, taking slow steps to his husband. When Ilya cried, it was mostly silent, a deeply ingrained habit of hiding any and all emotion that he and Shane had worked so hard over their lifetimes to overcome. The only tell was his hiccups. Ilya hiccuped when he cried too much, too hard.
“Where is this? Where am I? I don’t know where I am.”
“Ilya, you’re in your bedroom. You’re alright.” This was a relatively new voice for Shane. A soft, artificial voice that was meant to exude trust and comfort. Familiarity. He felt like he sounded robotic. “You’re with me, Shane.”
“Shane?” His Russian dipped back to English briefly before returning to what was familiar. “No, I… I was with my mom. Where is she? Did she go off with father on a trip? She told me I could come with on the next one.”
Understanding was one thing for Shane, but he could only do so much speaking after forty-five years of trying to learn. It didn’t come to him like French did growing up, as hard as he tried. He attempted to stick to English, hoping Ilya would listen. “Ilya, look at me. We are at our daughter’s house, remember? Iris, baby Irushka. Riki is here too. You’re at home with your family, Ilya. You just don’t remember.”
“Where is Hollander?” The thickly accented English cut through Shane’s words like a knife as Ilya pushed himself back against the bed, as far away as he could manage in his state. Angry, frightened, and distrusting of the man he trusted everything with. “Tell him I am here and to come get me. I do not like this.”
Shane sighed, tears of his own sliding down his cheeks that he wiped as quickly as they came. He stepped forward until he reached the bed, a wave of nausea hitting him that he swallowed down. “I’m Hollander. I’m right here, Rozanov, I’m right here. I just got old.”
Ilya’s chin quivered as he took in the stranger’s face again. He saw the brown eyes that darted away in the showers, the lips that curved into a smile under a helmet around a mouth guard, the freckles that set his soul on fire that he would count as they deepened under the summer sun.
“You got old.” Ilya realized then who he was talking to.
Shane Hollander nodded, climbing into the bed to settle next to a slightly calmer, but still scared, Ilya Rozanov. “Yeah. We both did.”
There’s a thud that comes from outside Iris’ bedroom door. She ignores it at first, too tired to care or investigate. Two minutes later, there’s another. The clock at the bedside reads 4 in the morning.
When the door opens, she finds her papa standing before the top of the stairs, looking down, then around. Lost. Scared. When he finds her, brows knit in confusion by her presence, he simply says “there’s a man in my bed.”
She finds the source of the noise— Ilya had knocked down pictures from the walls as he stumbled across it from his room, trying to find something to balance him in his tired confusion. She picks them up as she leads him back to his room, turning them over in her hands. One is of her and her dads at her college graduation. The other is them holding their grandchild for the first time in Iris’ hospital room. She sets them on a dresser for the moment, explaining in hushed whispers where he is and who she is.
Then Iris reaches their bedroom door. It’s dark. She remembers growing up and how sensitive to light Shane was when he slept; he always needed blackout curtains. It doesn’t feel familiar now, though. It feels… like a stranger that occupies her parents' bedroom from corner to corner. Swallowed up in silence and shadow, only the outline of the bed visible from where she stands. Ilya lets go of her hand, wandering to his side of the bed and sitting at its edge. He looks behind himself at the unmoving man who has slept next to him for over fifty years, and Iris can’t make out his expression. She only hears him whisper in Russian.
#myshane loves the pwhl and the pwhl loves him back. in montreal, he would go to every victoire (triomphe?) game that he could given his schedule. he has jerseys and gets wedding invites and the entire roster's numbers in his phone. they adore him and he loves being around people who share his love of hockey without being boisterous dickbags
this leads to a full fledged uprising when shane gets run out of montreal though. they're so pissed off because really?? you got rid of your best player because he's GAY? the victoire no longer even associates with their nhl equivalent. it doesn't exist in their minds. meanwhile ottawa's pwhl team is already best friends with the centaurs and is just excited to have another addition that happens to be shane thee hollander
Loads of Hollanov fics have them getting walked in on while making out etc which is great
But I’d love a fic where one or both of Shane’s parents drop by the cottage for phone charger/laundry pod reasons and find Shane snuggled on the couch fast asleep on Ilya’s chest and that’s how they find out
They’re dressed in soft casual clothes, sleeping like the dead and wrapped around each other like vines and Ilya’s hand is in Shane’s hair and Shane looks so so comfortable and relaxed
Meanwhile his parents are staring slack-jawed at the sight of their son using his archenemy the Russian Rage Machine as a teddybear/pillow
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