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There were a million reasons why Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander could not fall in love with each other.
They were professional hockey players, after all, and hockey was a deeply homophobic sport. Not only that, but they were both really, really, ridiculously good at hockey. Ilya was like, a brute-strength, super-fast, all-charisma-and-cocky-swagger kind of player, but with the talent to back it all up. Shane was maybe even more talented, but in a more cerebral, disciplined type of way - a real good boy and rule-follower, but it worked for him, y’know? Their contrasting styles and the fact that they went one and two in the 2009 draft to historically rival teams meant that they were ruthlessly pitted against each other and portrayed in the media as bitter enemies, so that made things tricky.
Actually, correction - they had grown up together, best family friends (no hockey, forget about that), maybe starting to inch toward experimenting with each other in their teen years. It was very innocent and cute and sweet, how much they adored each other, and all they wanted was to make each other happy. But one of them did something that the other one misunderstood and the other one cut off all communication and/or stubbornly chose to believe the worst intentions, which was really not fair considering they’d been friends forever. They didn’t talk to each other for years, but they did definitely want to.
No, actually, they met when they were in their early 20s, on a construction job. Ilya was the foreman and Shane was the new guy. They had their shirts off around each other, like, all the time (this was the exact kind of workplace where that kind of thing was acceptable) so there were a lot of long looks at each other’s back muscles and trying not to drool on each other. But, they didn’t want to lose their union benefits by getting in trouble with Human Resources over fraternizing, so they displayed an insane amount of restraint and did not ever tell each other that they were completely in lust.
You know what? Shane was a New York City cab driver and Ilya kept ending up in his taxi to take girls to his place. Shane drove him home while Ilya macked on honeys in the backseat and Shane had to listen to them moaning. (Also in this version it was like 1991 so “macked on honeys” was totally ok to say.) Shane was going crazy and he shouldn’t feel this way because Ilya was obviously 150% straight, even though Ilya flirted with him, like, all the time, between honeys.
No, actually, Shane owned a private island in Belize (right next door to Leonardo DiCaprio’s) and Ilya was a castaway who washed up on shore with amnesia. Shane was trying to help him recover his memories, but while that was going on Ilya did remember to antagonize Shane at every available opportunity, because being a little shit is hard-wired. Once the memories started coming back, Ilya realized that he had justification to hate Shane for one reason or another (maybe just because Shane was a billionaire, and Ilya was a moral person who fundamentally believed we should eat the rich). So all that made getting to the hook up stage especially challenging.
Hold on. Ilya was a trivia host and Shane was a sports trivia savant. It was 2026, they were both out and they weren’t famous at all, so there really shouldn’t have been anything standing in their way, except Ilya was playing a stupid game with himself where he couldn’t ask Shane on a date until he stumped him on a sports trivia question. I guess it was meant to be a commentary on competitiveness, but it was a really dumb idea, and ended up taking a really long time, but also Shane was too shy to ask Ilya out also so maybe it was both their faults.
Shane was a matador and Ilya was the bull. That made things very difficult for them to fall in love, but maybe it was more about vibes with this one. Like, Shane had a very academic approach to waving his cape and the other ritual aspects of the traditional Spanish bullfight but the Ilya-bull represented something wild and vital. Don’t think Shane didn’t notice what the Ilya-bull had hanging between his back legs there, but it was less about wanting to get his mouth on it (ew) and way more about being inspired by raw nature and struggling with the morality of something very culturally important to him.
Ilya was Chappell Roan and Shane was Celine Dion. That makes sense, right? Because Ilya is way more sexy-out-loud and Shane is Canadian. Also Ilya/Chappell was 25 and hated media attention, and Shane/Celine was nearly 60 and totally more experienced at dealing with fame. The May/December of it all was the real sticking point; their agents thought it was a bad idea for them to date.
Ilya was, or possibly became, a dog and Shane was a cat, duh. For mostly biological reasons they were aiming to be very good friends rather than lovers, but their friends (Doberman Svetlana and fat tabby Hayden) were not supportive of their relationship, like, at all.
Scratch all that. Ilya was Harry Potter and Shane was Hermione, y’know, because he’s all nerdy? Actually, no, Shane was an uptight version of Harry and Ilya was the Golden Snitch, because of his blonde hair, and Harry Shane wanted to grab him. Wait, is this too close to the SNL skit?
Ilya was Aurora from Sleeping Beauty and Shane was Snow White, but not the cartoon versions - they worked at Disneyland Paris together. They were both really good at being princesses, and they flirted relentlessly in French over character breakfasts. Oh, and Marleau was Gaston and this time he was Shane’s best friend! But both Shane and Ilya really, really wanted to get promoted to Tinkerbell, so rivalry was a problem here, also Human Resources again.
Alright, it was 1973. Santiago, Chile. Shane was then-current president Salvador Allende and Ilya was General Pinochet, planning a military takeover (don’t worry, he still had the Russian accent somehow). Scott Hunter was Richard Nixon in this one, which of course meant Kip was Spiro Agnew. As unlikely as it seems, they all had several explicit encounters with one another, but eventually history put a damper on all the yearning, and Shane Allende died in the coup.
Final answer: Shane was Good Will Hunting and Ilya was Chuckie. No, no, wait, this is way better: Shane was Lambeau and Ilya was the Robin Williams character, Sean the therapist. ‘Cause they had a rivalry from way back, right? “Yeah, you were smarter than me then and you're smarter than me now, so don't blame me for how your life turned out,” Shane said. “I don’t blame you! It's not about you, you mathematical dick!” Ilya screamed back at him.
So, alright, it’s all forbidden, you get it. And beyond the circumstances they found themselves in, they were so different, and they had so many quirks and defenses and hurdles and assumptions about each other. And, oh god, were they terrible at communicating. Like, deeply, chronically unable to say what they were feeling at each other.
Regardless of the set-up, okay, Ilya was Russian. His name was Ilya Rozanov, for God’s sake. A lot of the time this, unfortunately, resulted in him saying important things in Russian instead of English. Sometimes it was by necessity, right? Like, he was really new to Canada or the US and he barely had time for his ESL classes, so he couldn’t help it. But, like, ok, in the construction scenario, he’d lived in the US for more than a decade and had a great grasp of English. At one point he and Shane were at a bar after work and they were both thinking about how they’d seen each other’s nipples earlier in the day. And Ilya was like, “Я знаю, ты любишь Canada Dry — милый кролик.” That means, I know you like ginger ale, you adorable little bunny, and if he’d said it in English, which he was completely capable of, then Shane would have been able to respond and say, “Aw, you think I’m cute like a bunny? And you have also noticed my nearly pathological obsession, however unlikely it is, for full-sugar soda? We must be in love.” But Ilya the construction worker said it in Russian - god, with the Cyrillic spelling, even - so it was definitely gonna be at least another chapter before they ended up in bed.
Speaking of full-sugar soda, in all these scenarios, Shane had some food issues, with the severity ranging from picky to full-on undiagnosed eating disorder. For the most part, though, it was a cute little quirk he had - whether for athletic performance or due to his particular flavor of neurodivergence, he always had some sort of sensitivity or particularity about food. Mostly Ilya was charmed by the less harmful iterations, but when it was a more unhealthy, damaging thing it occasionally caused problems. In the Disneyland Paris scenario, Aurora Ilya tried to get Snow Shane to eat steak frites at Bistrot Chez Rémy and it caused a huge blow-up that set back their making out for the first time by like three years.
Ilya smoked cigarettes, and Shane didn’t like it. As a dog or a bull, okay, probably not because that wouldn’t make sense. But when they were human - yeah, Ilya was either fully smoking, or listlessly trying to quit, or just having one under stress. The weird thing was, Ilya never tried vaping, which would have been a good solution, but in many cases it was the early 2010s, and at that time vaping wasn’t really a big thing, but even then I think he could have tried e-cigs. In the Chappell/Celine world, they were both too protective of their vocal chords to be into that kind of thing, so no worries there, but trivia host Roz definitely took a smoke break at one point and Shane had something to say about it. You know what, though, this never seemed to be a huge deal-breaker; more like an annoyance, so maybe don’t worry about this one as much.
OK, this one was a hurdle, though - Ilya came from a tough family background in every instance and there was some chafing there, because Shane almost always had a loving and supportive family. When Shane drove the cab he was always talking on the phone to his dad, David, about the day’s New York Times games, specifically Wordle and Connections. Even though Ilya was very often smooching in the backseat, he overheard Shane being all lovey dovey with his dad and it gave Ilya some complicated feelings of inadequacy that delayed their inevitable backseat hook up by three whole rides.
In almost all these scenarios, what they called each other was very important. Like, when it was hockey, they always called each other by their last names, but then one time one or the other of them was inspired to say Shane or Ilya (or both) in a particularly intimate moment and it sent one of them running for the hills because either they weren’t sure what it meant or they were exactly sure what it meant and either way it was bad. But, ok with the matador thing, Shane always thought of Ilya-bull as El gran toro, but then one time when he was bull-whispering him, he called him Velikiy Byk (because Ilya-bull was of course, a Russian bull) and after that they seemed to come to some sort of understanding. It was kind of beautiful, actually, and a nice departure from the tuna meltdown of it all.
Shane got injured, like a lot. “Suffers a career ending injury” level of hurt, the poor thing, but always in the service of Ilya figuring out his true feelings while sexily nursing him back to health. Once, when Ilya was a nurse and Shane was Wally - you know, the Green Monster mascot from the Boston Red Sox? - well, there was this brawl at Fenway and Shane (as Wally) rescued a little girl from getting hurt in the chaos and broke his arm in the process. He was very concerned about being able to return to his duties hugging kids at the Jimmy Fund Clinic, which Ilya found unspeakably hot. But, yeah, professional boundaries were an issue in that scenario. Luckily Rose Landry was the owner of both Ilya’s hospital and the Red Sox, and she helped them figure it out.
The crazy thing was that they were almost always single and technically available to each other. I mean, Ilya was actually kind of slutty 99% of the time, and publicly hooked up with, like, a lot of women. He was always bisexual, but usually not out about it, and Shane was always gay and deep in the closet, at least to start, so there were misunderstandings about whether their particular Kinsey scales aligned. I mean, one time Ilya worked at the Dollar Tree in Norman, Oklahoma and Shane was an obsessive tornado chaser passing through. Ilya left a party they were at with Jackie Pike, who worked on Shane’s tornado team. (Hayden had been killed in a prior tornado so she was single, if mourning.) Shane assumed Ilya was straight, and it took forever for Jackie to ‘fess up that he only took her home because she was drunk and Ilya had very sweetly tucked her into bed while confessing he had a thing for Shane.
But whoever they were, whatever the situation was, there was some sort of pull, and unless they were not of the same species, most of the time they managed to fuck about it sooner or later. Their whole thing, actually, was that from the moment they set eyes on each other, they each found the other one scorchingly hot and hopelessly irresistible, in spite of everything in their way. Not to be too clinical about it, but these dumb dumbs were always stupid for each other, pretty much on sight.
They were both perfect physical specimens, young, strong and at the height of sexual desirability. Or, even if they were a bit older when they ran into each other, the bones were there, you know?
Ilya was a Greek god, chiseled from marble by master sculptors. His body was hard, broad and strong, kissed with a network of marks and moles and just enough body hair to be fucking intoxicatingly masculine. His luscious, curly blonde (or brown) hair was soft and wild, perfect for pulling. Hazel (or occasionally blue) eyes sparkled in a way that reflected his wit and playfulness, but also his barely disguised loneliness and longing.
Shane was softer, and a bit smaller, but solid and thick with muscle. His silky black hair, perfect tanned skin, and naturally hairless physique were enough to knock anyone on their ass, but the adorable freckles splayed across his nose and cheeks (vesnushki, sozvezdiya, puzyr'ki shampanskogo) made him completely irresistible. His deep brown eyes, so often welling with tears of emotion, anxiety or arousal, were windows to the soul existing beneath that yearned for acceptance and love, even when his face was otherwise hard to read.
Also, they both had perfect, gorgeous dicks.
How could either of them resist? I mean, usually they hated each other initially, and their opposite styles caused friction, but boy howdy did it end up making the sex both completely inevitable and desperately hot. Breathing in each other’s mouths, growling orders, sexily whining, the whole thing.
Ilya said, “You are so boring, Hollander.”
Shane said, “Rozanov, you’re such an asshole.”
Ilya said, “You are so pretty.”
Shane said, “Shut up.”
Shane said, “Please…”
Ilya said, “Please what?”
Ilya said, “Tell me what you want.”
Shane didn’t answer.
Shane said, “I don’t know.”
Shane said, “I need…”
Shane said, “You.”
“Solnyshko,” Ilya muttered.
“Baby,“ Shane whispered.
Shane couldn’t find words to speak. Ilya mumbled in Russian. Shane’s thighs shook and his eyes rolled back. Ilya’s hands trembled as he rolled on the condom. Shane begged, Ilya thrusted. Shane whined, Ilya grunted. Shane wouldn’t make eye contact, Ilya stared.
It wasn’t always happily ever after, but I don’t have much to say about the times when it wasn’t, because I’m certainly not reading about that. OK, yes the Allende/Pinochet thing ended badly, but if you don’t read the final chapter, or any history books, you’d never know that. The first 67 chapters were pretty loyal to history aside from the sex stuff, but it’s a WIP that hasn’t been updated since January so I’m choosing to believe there was a twist ending.
They fell in love, over and over again, despite all the reasons it was a bad idea and despite everything standing in their way, despite everything they didn’t have in common. They loved each other so fucking much, and they usually ended up as husbands. They found strength in each other, even when they struggled to be honest, or to be their honest selves to the world. Their love was compelling, heartbreakingly genuine and pure. Sometimes they found the bravery to say it to each other, sometimes they didn’t, but even that was ok. They would get there eventually.