Work Text:
Shane had never been so wrecked in his entire life. The most brutal training camp, the most violent bouts of sickness, even the one time he’d been hospitalised with concussion and a broken collarbone, didn’t even come close. Shane was a professional athlete; his body had been built to endure since he was a little kid. But his body had never endured this kind of prolonged, impossible strain. Through his exhaustion he was almost indignant at the fact he had not slept for more than two hours together for almost two weeks, and hadn’t died, or at least failed to function in some obvious, irrevocable way. It was unreasonable.
“You know,” he murmured, his voice roughened with weariness, hefting the small, snuffling weight of his new daughter against his shoulder, leaning back with a sigh against the padded back of the rocking chair, “this is unacceptable behaviour. Completely.” Eri gave a quiet, almost contemptuous burp, apparently unmoved.
Shane was a creature of habit and routine. He was also a man who prepared religiously for any challenge he took up. For this particular challenge, his preparations had given him to believe that his affinity for habit would be a positive strength. According to every baby book and parenting manual, the important thing with a newborn was to establish a routine. Feeding, Sleeping, even toileting, could all be optimised with enough determination. By the time Shane and Ilya were summoned late one sticky night in August to the hospital, to the bedside of the teenage girl who had, after a number of meetings and discussions with her and her parents, and Shane’s parents, agreed to let them adopt her baby, Shane had been entirely convinced he was ready. He had bought every essential and accessory. He had a colour-coded timetable stuck to the fridge. He had a plan.
The moment Shane had seen Eri in Ilya’s arms, the plan had scattered like leaves in the breeze. His busy brain had suddenly emptied of everything except an aching love that he had been afraid, until that moment, either wouldn’t come, or that the peculiarities of his brain would take time to process into something recognisable, legible to the world and to the baby. But when Ilya looked up from her tiny, furiously screaming face and smiled at Shane, his eyes shining with tears and terror and joy, Shane had felt the new love knit itself into the familiar fabric of his love for Ilya, a feedback loop of love for Ilya for loving her and her for giving Ilya that love, shot through with his love for them both, separately and together. And a family was born.
Ilya had taken his shirt off to hold her - skin-to-skin contact straight after birth had been one of his non-negotiables. His own research had been more haphazard than Shane’s, but had mostly centred around the challenges adoptees faced with bonding, and the psychological impact of motherlessness - an emotional bruise that he had pressed again and again, determinedly, in his resolve to do right by the daughter they didn’t even have yet.
Ilya’s concern on that score had shaped and almost derailed their journey to fatherhood. He and Shane had talked about kids, in the abstract, for years. But of course, for them, there were logistics to be considered. They had danced around the various possibilities cautiously, feeling their way. Shane’s preference had been surrogacy. He wanted to see Ilya’s eyes in his child’s face; more pragmatically, the transactional nature of the process, the degree of control one could exert over conception and gestation, made him feel safe. But he could feel Ilya’s instinctive reluctance to pursue this. It took a while for him to articulate it, but when he did it came out all at once.
“I don’t want to be bio-dad, Shane. My background, my parents - the Alzheimers on my father’s side, and my mother - and me..” he trailed off. “Is too risky for me. I wouldn’t want to do any of that to our kids.”
Shane had opened his mouth to protest, to point out that genetics weren’t necessarily destiny, to say that any child would be blessed to be just like Ilya, that every part of him was precious and irreplaceable to Shane. But he didn’t. He knew better by now than to attempt to overrule Ilya’s feelings about his family and his mental health with logic; although they shared so much, the edges of their lives blurring more with every year that passed, some places in Ilya were impermeable to him. He was allowed to witness them, which is more than Ilya gave to anyone else outside of therapy; but he had to observe the boundary line.
“Okay,” he’d said, putting a hand on Ilya’s knee, relieved when he covered it immediately with his own. “Okay, I get it. So you want that I should-?” Ilya cut off his almost question with a shake of his head, a pat on his hand.
“No. No. Not that I wouldn’t love our kids to look just like you; frowns and freckles,” he teased. “But no. It’s not just about if it’s me or you. I don’t like this thing, this surrogacy. I know that it is right for some people, is necessary, but not for me. I can’t-” he bit his lip and fumbled for the words. “I don’t want to make someone on purpose to take them away from their mother. Babies need their mothers.”
Shane had felt that in his heart. They never really got to forget that, to some people, they would never be a proper couple, have a proper marriage, start a proper family - that the very fact of their love wasn’t valid in the eyes of a lot of people, even some of the people they had played hockey with most of their careers. Certainly in the eyes of Ilya’s brother, his ex-teammates on the Russian national side. But this was speaking to something deeper than bigotry - a basic biological imperative that stood between them and fatherhood. Babies need mothers. And with all the love in the wide world, neither of them would ever be able to fill that role.
Shane had lowered his head. “So - do you mean you don’t want us to have a kid?”
He had tried to keep his voice neutral, to give Ilya the space to answer yes if that was his truth.
But inside, he felt a little part of him go dark. Ilya was great with kids. It was one of the things about him that lit Shane up inside, watching him with the Pike kids or the kids at the foundation camps or even young fans who would stop them shyly on the street. Ilya always knew exactly how to meet children where they were, playful and noisy with the confident ones, easy and careful with the ones who could barely open their mouths to speak to him, taking such obvious pleasure in them that they bloomed in a dozen different ways under his warm, bespoke attention. Shane knew that the term ‘broody’ wasn’t one he could legitimately claim; but as the years had passed, seeing Ilya with children had begun to ache inside him, a longing that deepened with each interaction like a crack in a wall.
He had begun putting feelers out about children with Ilya, and he had seemed to be responding, casually at first but following Shane’s lead as he went from theoretical to practical, from general to specific. Shane had thought that they were on the same page, wanted the same thing.
Ilya had seemed to know what he was thinking as plainly as if it were running on tickertape out of his ears. He had put his hands on Shane’s cheeks and turned his face up so he could look into his eyes.
“Nyet, lyubimiiy, that’s not what I mean. I do want it. But I don’t want to get what I want by taking something away from someone, you understand? I want to give someone something when they would have nothing. And it won’t be maybe best thing, or easiest thing, but it will be good. We will make it good, like we are good. Is okay? You understand why?”
Shane did understand. And so they had abandoned the safe, orderly path of surrogacy, and stepped instead into the more complicated, contingent world of adoption. There had been false starts and disappointments. And then there had been Mika - a smart, sweet, rather naive 16-year-old schoolgirl who had made one mistake with a boy at school, and then compounded it by being too afraid to tell her loving but rather conservative Japanese immigrant parents until she was too far gone to erase it.
Mika had agreed to meet them. Her parents had been highly sceptical, both because they were a gay couple and because of their fame - they hadn’t wanted Mika to be exposed to any kind of scrutiny, wanted to shepherd her safely and discreetly through this diversion back to the path of excellence and achievement they had mapped out for her. By the end of their first meeting with the family, they were still not convinced but were at least open enough to the idea to allow a second meeting, then a third. Mika had been charmed almost instantly, not by Ilya as Shane had expected, but by himself. At the end of the third meeting, she had put her hand in his and said “I like you, Shane. You’ve got ‘good dad’ written all over you. I know you’ll do everything right, the best that you can do.” Shane had gone red, but met her gaze seriously and promised that he would, if she gave him the chance.
Then there were practicalities, and the waiting, and the terrifying understanding that until the baby was born and legally adopted, Mika or her parents could change their minds. This was the absolute hardest part for Shane. Although he knew that technically surrogacy carried the same risk, somehow the existence of a contract, however notional, would have given him a sense of safety. So he spent the pregnancy in a sort of suspension. He couldn’t let himself really expect something so important that he couldn’t control. But he also couldn’t think about anything else.
He let Ilya set the tone of their relationship with Mika; he knew that he would have wanted to be in touch far more than would be appropriate, or withdraw so far as to have been unkind just to protect his own anxiety. Ilya hit a far better balance. He checked in with Mika regularly, but not intrusively. He shared the shape of their day to day life with her without bombarding her with details. He sent her cards and very small presents. And he insisted on an open adoption.
“Our child will have a mother, if they want each other one day,” he insisted. “She will not always be sixteen and scared. We will be fathers - best fathers in the world - but we take nothing away from them. Either of them.”
And Mika hadn’t wavered. She had kept them informed, and it seemed that knowing them made her more confident she was making the right choice. She said they could both be at the birth, which her parents had protested about at first but eventually relented when they saw how much it meant to Shane and Ilya. And she had approved, with tears in her eyes, when they had told her the name they planned to give the baby.
“Eri,” she had murmured. “Precious gift.” Shane had nodded, trying not to look too earnest and failing miserably.
“We like for that, but also because sounds like Irina - my mother’s name,” Ilya added. “I did not have her for long, but she is always with me. If you don’t mind it, we would like to call her ‘Eri Mika’ - so you are always with her too.” Mika had nodded, tears leaking out of her eyes as she squeezed both their hands.
And now the wait was over. Mika had been delivered, quickly and safely, of a seven-pound six-ounce ball of fury who had screamed against Ilya’s bare chest as if it personally affronted her, and then mouthed hungrily at his skin until he passed her to Mika, who had decided to breastfeed until they both left the hospital. Shane was happy about it; he had done his research, knew all about benefits of colostrum for the brain, gut and immune system, not to mention the health benefits for the mother. Ilya had been oddly nervous about it - although he had said nothing, Shane could tell but the minute clench of his jaw muscles when the plan was discussed. Perhaps he expected that the experience would prove too bonding, and that at the last minute Mika would choose to be a mother after all.
But no; Eri had fed lustily and well, but between feeds Mika had been more than happy to hand her off to Ilya or to Shane, to get her well-earned rest while they burped and walked Eri round and round the room, took her to post-natal hearing and physical checks, the heel-prick test and vaccination shots that made her scream a high, indignant cry which caused Ilya to wince as if he was the one being stabbed with a needle. Shane was already getting the feeling that he would be the one to do the dirty work of doctors’ appointments, haircuts and homework in this family - Ilya didn’t seem to have the stomach for making Eri do a single thing she didn’t want to do, gathering her up and away from the clinicians who were simply doing their jobs as if they were the enemy, walking her round and round patting her tiny back and muttering consolingly to her in Russian as if they were plotting their escape from these outrages together.
Finally, both Mika and Eri were ready to be discharged home. The paperwork would follow, but Mika had said she didn’t plan to see Eri again once they parted. “I don’t want it to be confusing for her,” she said. “Or you. She’s yours now. And I know you’ll do a much better job than I can.” She took Eri in her arms for one final feed - she had pumped a few bottles worth of breastmilk to help them adapt her to formula feeds, and the frozen yellow bricks were in one of about a dozen bags Shane and Ilya were juggling between them, full of baby paraphernalia. Then she kissed her on the forehead in a brisk sort of way, patted her fat cheek, and handed her to Ilya, whose face was carefully blank, holding away some great emotion Shane couldn’t interpret but could read in the twitch of a muscle in his jaw, under his eye.
“Goodbye baby,” she said softly. “And goodbye, dads. Look after each other.” They all stood in silence for a moment, and then had an awkward, three-way (well-four-way, if you counted Eri in the crook of Ilya’s arm) embrace. Shane and Ilya had shook hands with Mika’s parents, and had walked out of the hospital and into their new life.
As soon as the structure and rhythm of the hospital had fallen away from them, Shane had felt himself beginning to spiral into panic. He didn’t quite know how to compute the fact that the two of them had been allowed to simply walk out of the hospital with a baby. He felt like someone ought to be supervising, monitoring, making sure they were doing things properly. But when he confided this to his mother, his phone clamped between his ear and his shoulder as he made up the formula bottle from a fresh kettle as per the instructions while Eri screamed furiously in the background, she had laughed.
“Welcome to being a parent. It’s a 24/7 exam you never get a grade for. Forever. Enjoy! And by the way ignore the damn formula instructions. Nobody has time to be making up fresh bottles every feed, least of all a hungry baby. Make ahead and warm them up as needed, it’s what I did with you and you survived.”
Advice. There was no shortage of it to be had, from his parents, from his friends and teammates and coaches with kids, from podcasts and Instagram posts he found himself scrolling obsessively in the long watches of his broken nights, and most of it seemed to conflict with official guidelines. It drove Shane crazy. Here he was, in charge of an actual human being, a tiny, helpless, impossibly vulnerable human being, and there seemed to be no consensus on how he should be the best at it beyond “don’t drop her.”
Ilya seemed to take the whole thing in his stride far better than Shane did at first. He listened with as much patience as he could muster to Shane’s monologues about the latest book or podcast or whatever for a while, but ultimately he took the phone out of Shane’s hand and tossed it into the Moses basket, which had quickly become a storage container for anything they didn’t have a place for after Eri had made it abundantly clear that she would not be sleeping in it.
“Shane. Stop it. Your head will explode. She is just person, you know? Very small, but just very small person. We don’t come with manual. We will figure it out, OK? Will be fine.” He was leaning in for a kiss when Eri (who he had held against his shoulder) spat up luxuriantly down his back. He mumbled some very non-child-safe words in Russian and went off to change them both.
However, as those first crazy weeks wore on, Shane began to notice that something was wrong with Ilya. At first he had put it down to exhaustion - both of them were running on fumes due to Eri’s total refusal to sleep more than an hour at a time unless it was on one of their shoulders. But Ilya’s mental health, although much better than it had been for a long time, made him more vulnerable to lack of sleep than Shane. Shane didn’t mention it, but did his best to take more of the nighttime shift, catching up on sleep in the daytime when Ilya took Eri out of the house with him in the sling when he walked Anya, to show her things in the park even though Shane had told him that at this age she probably couldn’t make out much more than a foot in front of her. Ilya did seem better rested, but something was still up - something Shane couldn’t catch hold of, but nonetheless couldn’t stop feeling, an undercurrent in the air around Ilya.
Shane's brain was a little mangled with the lack of sleep, but it still attempted to decode this systematically. Obviously their lives had changed enormously. Was Ilya unhappy about the reality of becoming parents? No. Shane could answer that immediately and unequivocally. Whatever was bugging Ilya, it certainly wasn't their daughter. He showed almost superhuman patience with all the newborn chaos, and the strange thing was it didn't even seem like patience. The way they had both approached being dads was reminiscent of the way they approached hockey - Shane with a single-minded diligence and quiet determination to be the best; Ilya with a sort of wild, joyful passion that made magic in their home in exactly the same way that it did on the ice. He couldn't take his eyes off Eri, couldn't stop touching her, talking to her. When he was with her he gave her the full focus of his singular attention, and Shane, who knew just what it was to be the centre of that spotlight, could only wonder at what it must be like to grow up never knowing anything but that adoration, to take it as your birthright, unremarkable as milk in the fridge. He wondered what kind of soul might grow in those conditions.
So not Eri then. But also yes, Eri, because the atmosphere thickened around their daughter. Not all the time; the sound heard most inside their home now, besides Eri's demanding cries, was Ilya's laughter - everything their daughter did seemed to fill him with gleeful wonder. But sometimes, usually when she was falling asleep or sleeping on Ilya's chest, Shane would catch his face set in an expression so serious he couldn't chalk it up to love, or even awe. It wasn't an expression Shane had ever seen on Ilya's face before, and he had thought that he had seen him in every variation after all these years. It was an almost perplexed, almost angry look, like someone trying very hard to work something out. But then Ilya would see him looking and the expression would be shut away, or slip into an easy, charming smile, old walls Shane had thought they were done with.
Shane didn't press. He knew Ilya well enough by now to know that was rarely the answer. And he trusted him enough, trusted the progress he'd made towards becoming the man he wanted to be, that if he needed help with this, he would know how to ask. But when he saw the cloud come over Ilya, he would reach out, take his hand or slip his arm over his shoulder or just lean against his shin (depending on what part of Ilya had not been commandeered by their daughter). He didn't ask, and Ilya didn't comment. But his hand would squeeze Shane somewhere gratefully and his face would lighten into something true.
Eventually, Ilya said he had made an appointment with Galina. “Good,” was all Shane said. “Can you pick up diapers on your way home?” Ilya grinned.
“Shane, we have diapers coming - how do you say it? - out of our ears. We don't need more yet.”
Shane smiled, shook his head. “We've got room in the cupboard. It doesn't hurt to be prepared.”
Ilya kissed him on his way out the door. “Okay, Mr Ready For Anything. I see you later.” Then he swept Eri up from the mat on the floor where she was resentfully undertaking tummy time, swirled her round in the air, snuggled his face into the soft folds of her neck. “Proshchay, moya malen'kaya sosiska. Papa uviditsya s toboy pozzhe, i my snova pochitayem knizhku pro trokh medvedey, khorosho? Do svidaniya. Do svidaniya.”
When he came back, he was unusually quiet, and his eyes were red. But he seemed lighter somehow. After Shane had given Eri what they notionally called her bedtime bottle and carefully laid her down next to him on the bed for what was likely to be her longest stretch of sleep that night (around about 4 hours), Ilya came into the room and looked at them, Eri spread-eagled on the mattress and Shane curled around her body in the shape of a letter C. Something in his face broke open, and he came and laid carefully behind Shane, slotting into the same shape, reached his arm around Shane's to delicately run strands of Eri’s soft black hair between his fingers. Shane curled his hand up to stroke Ilya's forearm.
“Are you okay?” he asked at last. Nothing too specific. Nothing Ilya couldn't evade if he wasn't ready to open up. But an offer, if one was needed. Ilya gave a deep sigh, and pushed his nose into the hair at the nape of Shane's neck.
“No, not really. But better now.”
“Do you wanna talk about it?”
“Yes. Galina said I should. And I want to. But is difficult for me.”
“Take your time. I'm not going anywhere.”
Ilya squeezed Shane's flank with his other arm, the fingers of his left hand still toying with Eri’s hair.
“She is so beautiful,” he said wonderingly. “I know she isn't yours, but she does look like you. Her hair, her eyes. I wonder if she'll have freckles when she's older. I hope so.”
Shane waited. Ilya was circling something, but Shane was in no hurry. He could wait.
“I… I love her so much Shane. I hoped I would. I thought I would. But I didn't know if… I worried. You know. We both did.”
They had talked about it, before the birth, the fear that they wouldn't feel that rush of instant love that birth parents talked about. They had agreed that there were many kinds of love, and love was no less worthy for being built of want and care and daily proof, instead of arriving unearned and undeniable inside one's chest at first sight. But they had been worried. Shane had talked to Hayden at last, who had laughed.
“Man, that's nothing to do with adopting. Jackie talked about the thunderbolt with the twins, that instant love. But me? They fucking terrified me, dude! These two little angry needy potatoes… took me a good few months before it hit. But when it did… wow. Don't worry, Shane. You'll love your kid. And Ilya? Jeez. That guy's a fucking sap, for all he tries to hide it. He'll be head over heels before the placenta is even out, you'll see.”
Shane had told Ilya about this conversation, and while he had some scathing comments about Hayden, he had seemed heartened. As it so happened, both of them had fallen in love with Eri as soon as they saw her.
“I know we did. But yeah. I love her too. So much.”
Ilya shifted, blew air between his lips.
“Is making me think a lot about my mother. A lot.”
Shane stilled. He knew how delicate this moment was. Even after all their years together, and everything they shared, Ilya found it extremely difficult to talk about his mother. Over the years, Ilya had spoken about her a handful of times - stories, memories, never anything as sharp and tender as that low-voiced confession by the fire their first time at the cottage. Shane had learned that this wasn’t a door to push against - it opened and then closed, and any effort to prolong or deepen the discussion met with instant resistance. Irina was the lodestar of Ilya's life, her love and then her absence shaping everything. Talking about her opened up a fragile place inside him he didn't want to acknowledge, even to Shane.
“You miss her?” he guessed. Ilya nodded.
“Always. But also… also I am feeling confused. And… angry.”
Shane hadn't been expecting that.
“Angry?”
“Yes. Yes. It feels bad, but I am. I am angry with her.”
Shane wrapped his hand around Ilya's elbow. He could hear the tightening of Ilya's throat in his voice.
“Can you tell me why?”
There was a long silence. Then Ilya began to speak, fast and low.
“I know she loved me. I know she did. Like I love Eri. But I don't know…. I don't know how she could do it. Leave me. I would never. Never. I could never do that to her.” His hand stilled on Eri's head, the fingers trembling as he ghosted a thumb over her round cheek.
Shane felt a sharp, tugging pain under his sternum. He carefully rolled over until he was facing Ilya, his head cushioned on Ilya's bicep. Ilya wouldn't meet his eye; his throat was working, his lips were tight.
“Ilya,” Shane said, hoping so hard that he would find the right words - not to take this pain away, he knew he had no right to that - this was Ilya's pain, he had earned it. But Shane wanted so much to be with him in it, to find a way to hold Ilya's heart as it broke and rebuilt itself around this new perspective. “Ilya. She was very sick. It wasn't about you. It should have been; of course it should have been. But it wasn't. Not then.”
He pressed his lips to Ilya's Adam's apple, the side of his neck, his ear. Ilya gave a sharp sniff.
“I know. I know that. Galina said it too and I know she is right. She said that I have to forgive my mother, for myself. But she said first I have to let myself be angry, because I never have before. So I am letting myself be angry. And is fucking terrible.”
His voice broke on the last word, and Shane wrapped his arms around him, felt his hand leave Eri's head and knot in the back of his shirt. He held Ilya hard, as if he could squeeze the pain out of him. Ilya held him back, just as tight. The pain became a hard, sharp thing in the impossibly small space between their bodies.
Ilya dropped his face towards Shane and kissed him, his mouth open, his breathing hitched and wet. Shane kissed him back, trying to put into it all the fierce tenderness he felt but knew that Ilya couldn't take from him in words. Ilya sighed into his mouth, such a sigh, the ache of a lifetime of denial.
“Tell me.” Shane pleaded. “Tell me what's going on in your head. Let me hold it for you.” He had been learning Russian for almost 5 years now, and like everything Shane applied himself to, he was good at it. “A russkom, yesli tak proshche.”
Ilya gave another heavy sigh, tucked his chin on top of Shane's head. Then slowly he began to speak, in Russian, so faster and more fluid than his English, but carefully. He didn't just want to vent. He wanted Shane to understand, to be with him in this.
“It's so hard, Shane. I love her so much. I hate feeling like I hate her. I don't hate her. But I want to ask her. Before I always just somehow felt like it made sense. Her life was horrible and hard and so she left it. But now, with Eri… it doesn't make sense any more Shane. She left me in the horrible hard life she couldn't bear. How could she do that?”
Shane tightened his grip on Ilya, trying to hold him together. He cobbled together what Russian he had, forgot about grammar and pronunciation, just focused on vocabulary and the soft emphasis of empathy.
“She shouldn't have left you, Ilya. It wasn't right and it wasn't fair. You shouldn't have had to go through all of that alone.”
Ilya collapsed, quietly and completely, He pressed his face into Shane’s neck and sobbed harshly.
“I’m so angry that I can’t ask her, Shane, Can’t tell her how angry I am with her. Can’t ever know what happened, why she did what she did, I’m so fucking angry.”
Shane held him, stroked circles on his shoulders, his face clenched with the effort of not crying himself. This wasn't about him.
“You're allowed to be, sweetheart. You're allowed to be.”
“She did love me,” Ilya insisted suddenly, the determination undercut with an aching vulnerability. He sounded so young. Shane gulped and nodded hard.
“She did. So much. You know she did. And she left, and she shouldn't have. Both things can be true.”
Ilya began to cry. He didn't fight it like he would have done even a year ago. He had learned the hard way that the quickest way out of his pain was through, to let his feelings have him and then let him go. Shane held him through it.
“Ilya,” he murmured, as the sobbing settled into jagged breathing against the damp spot on Shane's shoulder. “Ilya? I'll never, never leave, ok? Know that. I love you, and I'm going to stay. Forever. And I'm going to help you stay if it ever feels like you can't. Forever.” He wrapped his hand round Ilya's where it was knotted in the front of his shirt. “This, us, Eri? It's solid. It's real. It's permanent. It's never going to let you go.”
Ilya drew in a deep, shuddering breath, then let it go. His whole body went boneless against Shane's.
“I know,” he said at last. “I know it.”
Shane sighed and closed his eyes, let his grip on Ilya relax just a fraction, combed his fingers though his curls. He felt the responsibility, the massive privilege, of being allowed to love a man like Ilya, of being given access to his broken edges, his courageous fragility, his bottomless capacity for love, resting on him like a weighted blanket - heavy and warm and grounding. He opened his mouth to try and put that into words, then realised that Ilya was asleep. He gave a soft snore into Shane's collarbone, and as if in response, Eri shifted and sighed out a little whistling snore of her own. Shane looked back over his shoulder at her, then down at Ilya, and felt his heart swell up into his throat.
This was his. He had built it, on his own, against the odds. And he would protect it with everything he had.