Work Text:
When Shane was eleven, he’d decided, independent of his parents, that he was finally old enough to verify the thickness of the ice on the pond behind his home by himself. At ten, he reasoned, he’d still needed his parent’s expertise to guide him, but he was eleven, now, and he had all the tools he needed to make the decision on his own.
He’d come to the conclusion that yes, absolutely, he could definitely skate on the ice that had started forming three weeks earlier and had been through two above-freezing warm-ups since.
When he’d plunged in the knee – deep water, so incredibly lucky he’d just been lapping the outer edges, he’d felt a thousand tiny needles, digging into every square inch of his skin – losing a glove to the silt at the bottom, furiously kicking his skates to break up any ice that might impede his way up the bank, his legs and his ribs and his lungs screaming, screaming, screaming from the cold, his voice shaken right from him even as he desperately called out for his parents, who were too far away, tucked in the nice warm house away from the storm Shane had calculated made the ice an absolute sure thing.
It’d taken him an excruciating minute of shaking feeling back into his limbs, and a gallows walk that was equal parts mortification and ‘if I get frostbite and can’t play hockey my whole life has been a waste of time’, for his parents to notice he’d been even more quiet than usual and freak out just in time for him to stumble through the mud room, icicles dripping off the sleeves of his jacket where he’d shoved himself up and out of the murky, half-frozen pond water.
His mom had never been more angry at him, not in his entire life.
His dad had toweled him off while Yuna Hollander lectured Shane for half an hour. And then they’d drawn him a bubble bath that went from lukewarm to steaming over the course of an hour and a half.
The worst part, really, was how sure he’d been. How he’d asked his father a million questions about the ice - how it formed, what time of year you could start checking it, what key weather factors led to Good Ice, what, exactly, was good enough to skate on - and his father had indulged him because Shane had never had a focus that wasn’t at least indirectly related to hockey and it hadn’t seemed remotely out of the norm for Shane to be asking.
He’d pulled up an internet search to triple check, and he’d been positive – absolutely positive – the ice could withstand at least twice his weight.
He’d miscalculated, somewhere.
Shane fucking hates miscalculations.
Scott Hunter says “You’re starting to sound like him,” and Shane plunges feet first into that pond, again.
—
“It was a shot in the fucking dark, man,” Scott says, three beers too deep with one eye on Kip, who is currently taking body shots off of Ilya Fucking Rosanov. He can’t remember, right now, who had invited them to this particular cup party; the Cens, misfit toys that they were only a few years ago, have so many friends across the league that it’s approaching wedding-levels of intermingling teams, here in – Hayes’, he thinks it’s Hayes’ – backyard.
Hollander’s gaze lingers in a way that has Scott squinting, trying to remember what they’d been talking about, what shot in the dark he’d been –
Scott snaps a finger in Hollander’s face. “That, though – I mean, you hid it but the only reason you hid it for so long is because this league is so homophobic, man. They couldn’t conceive of it. And – listen, okay, number one and number two hooking up for the entirety of their careers? You’d have to be crazy to come up with something like that.”
Shane’s gaze darts to meet his, brows squishing together, a look sort of like panic flashing over his face before he remembers that people know, now. “Who said anything about our entire career?”
Scott huffs a laugh. Chances another glance at Kip, who seems to be arm wrestling Vaughny, now, with an audience of cheerleaders led by Rosanov, again. Fuck. Kip’s going to leave tonight liking Rosanov, and Scott’s gonna have to break his fucking heart by reminding him that Rosanov is a huge fucking dick.
“Oh, are we pretending I didn’t hear you two arranging a hook-up on the bench at your first All-Stars?”
Shane grimaces, flushing a bright, bright red, and Scott can kind of see what makes Rosanov so fucking feral about him.
“So then it wasn’t a shot in the dark,” Hollander accuses, and Scott struggles, again, to follow the thread of this conversation.
He feels like an ass. Hollander is a good guy. Decent man, excellent skater, maybe one of the best to ever play this game. And Scott is, ostensibly, here to celebrate him winning another fucking Cup. It’s just – there are so many goddamn things happening right now, and Hollander cornering him to talk about a near-fight they’d had seasons ago over a chirp Scott can barely remember –
“Was that baby’s first chirp, or something?” Scott asks, because Hollander seems to respond better (more like a normal human) when you’re being at least a bit of a dick to him. “You seem super focused on it.”
“I called you an old man,” Shane intones, a little huffily, and – yeah, he can see it. What gets Rosanov so hot and bothered about the most laced up man in the league.
“Hollander, it’s not like I actually clocked you, and had a fucking timeline of your affair. Did I have suspicions? Yeah, sure. The only reason I knew anything for sure is because of how you responded to that dumb, nonsense chirp.”
“I almost texted you about glass houses, after you won,” Shane admits, and Scott thinks back to the, in retrospect, grateful note he’d received instead. That, paired with Rosanov just randomly showing up for Scott Hunter night, had really, honestly, made Scott want to root for them.
Scott hadn’t sent him shit, after they’d been outed, because the way it had happened was like every nightmare Scott had ever had, and even then – even with Kip on his arm for team events and grocery runs and galas for over a year – he’d had himself a few quiet, private panic attacks and only scrounged up the nerve to congratulate them on their wedding a month later.
“Scott Hunter, you are making my boring husband more boring. Is time for more shots.”
Scott can never quite tell how much of Ilya Rosanov’s accent is a mask. He has regained his shirt, though the linen monstrosity still hangs open from throat to navel, at least now he has something hanging off his shoulders.
He marvels, a bit, at the ease with which the word husband rolls off his tongue.
He did that, he thinks. A bit. It’s at least a tiny bit down to Scott that Ilya Rosanov is sliding sideways into Shane Hollander’s lap, shit-eating grin on his face and a finger outstretched to – yeah, boop his husband's nose.
Hollander looks charmed – and then annoyed, when he remembers exactly how many witnesses they have.
“Hey,” Scott says, and watches the both of them flinch a bit, like they’d forgotten he was there. Ten fucking years they’d been a thing without anyone ever realizing. He wonders how they’d managed to keep it a fucking secret for a week, if they’d always been this lovestruck. They’re too far past the honeymoon stage for this to be abnormal behavior, for them. “Rosanov, did he ever tell you what started the argument the only time he ever got a game misconduct?”
Ilya’s gaze meets his, a sparkle in them that could mean anything, really, except for the way his grin shifts into something a little victorious as he shoots a look at Hollander.
Hollander groans dramatically, and Rosanov cackles before Scott has even begun to tell his tale.