Chapter Text
If anyone had told Ilya ten years ago that he would retire from the NHL at twenty-nine and decide to stay in Canada of all places, he would have laughed.
Not that it was a bad country by any means – far from it – but there was a certain irony in leaving Russia for Canada of all places. If he had been forced to guess back then, he would probably have said he’d retire closer to forty and settle somewhere warm and sunny, perhaps near the sea.
But when had anything in his life ever gone according to plan?
He met Shane the summer he won his second Cup. It wasn’t love at first sight, but Ilya would be lying if he said his gaze hadn’t lingered on the young man’s pretty face and athletic frame, neatly concealed beneath a classic black suit. It was some kind of charity dinner in Montreal, one the organization insisted Ilya attend, despite his hesitation. And there he was, feeling like a fish out of water, hyper-aware of his halting English and thick accent, mostly just trying not to draw the attention of the city’s cultural and charitable elite.
He was fiddling with his cuffs and calculating when exactly it would be acceptable to disappear without drawing the ire of the Canadiens’ brass when a young man approached him. He offered a few customary compliments about that summer’s Cup run and then slipped in a remark about Ilya’s playoff discipline issues – a comment that might have passed for critique if he weren’t also undressing Ilya with his eyes at the same moment. Shane wasn’t very good at flirting back then – and hadn’t become much better since, if Ilya was being honest – but there was something almost endearing about it.
As it later turned out, Shane was indeed very knowledgeable about the game, having plenty of opinions on Ilya’s playing style, his team, and the league in general. As Ilya would later learn, Shane had played hockey until he quit at sixteen, after winning gold at the Youth Olympic Games.
It took Ilya years to coax the reason why out of him.
But back then, Ilya was a two-time Stanley Cup champion, amused by the way Shane tried and failed to hide his crush. He was, admittedly, a bit more drunk than he’d planned to be that evening; he’d tried to soothe his nerves the only way he knew how. So when he kissed Shane in a private alcove on the second floor, he wasn’t really thinking about anything except the way Shane clung to him, the sweet, lustful sounds he made when Ilya kissed along his jaw and down his neck. Thankfully, Ilya came to his senses before someone walked in on them and gently pushed him away. Shane’s slow, drugged blink and the faint curve of a smile that followed almost made Ilya say fuck it and drag him to the nearest empty room.
But he couldn’t. He was on a work visa and going back to Moscow that summer. A single photo, even a rumor would probably tank, if not destroy, his career. So Ilya pressed a quick kiss to Shane’s mouth and left before he could do something even more stupid.
He assumed that would be the last time he saw him. He didn’t even know who Shane was, really – Shane steered the conversation away from himself, and Ilya had been too amused by his brutally honest analysis of the Voyageurs’ playoff performance to notice.
It was only two days later, lazily scrolling through his timeline at the airport, that Ilya saw a photo of Shane from that dinner – posed beside were presumably his parents: a dark-haired woman in an elegant black dress and a man in a dark gray suit, seated at a table with the Voyageurs’ General Manager.
It took only a few minutes to find out that their names were Yuna and David Hollander, and that they were indeed suspiciously chummy with the aforementioned brass.
It felt like a slap in the face – to realize he’d been played, drunk and horny and stupid, too insignificant to even be clued in on who exactly he was kissing. It gnawed at Ilya for a few days, but then he was back in Moscow, and there were more pressing concerns than pretty boys with lustful eyes and barbed jabs about his playoff discipline.
Ilya assumed he would never see Shane again.
He was mistaken.