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Hollander already knows, is the thing.
There’s no possible way that he doesn’t know. They’ve been fucking for going on six years—and Hollander has been allowing Ilya to fake his secondary gender while fucking for just as long.
But even if Hollander lets him play at alpha while they’re in bed, even if Hollander has some kind of fetish for alphas who can’t knot him, even if Hollander just finds it safer to have sex with someone who has more to lose than he does, even if all that, Hollander absolutely knows.
Ilya fucking hates that. Hates that Hollander knows this vulnerability of his. Hates that his livelihood rests in the hands of Hollander’s secret keeping.
Hollander will keep this secret, because he has his own life to ruin, but still. It leaves Ilya at his mercy, in more ways than one. He might be the one fucking Hollander, alpha or not, but Hollander has always been the one with the power, bottoming or not.
Still: Ilya dug this grave on his own, and so he’ll bury himself in it now. He started this, that day in the showers, risking everything he had on the vague chance of Hollander wanting him enough to risk everything he had too. He was the one who started this long, long walk to the gallows, and so when he finally hangs, he’ll do it without protest.
And this is it, he figures, as he finally, foolishly, belatedly recognizes the symptoms of his heat starting. This is the moment in which he hangs.
Because Hollander knows: he knows Ilya’s secret, the one worse than being bisexual; he knows the feeling of Ilya’s dripping slick even if Ilya hasn’t specifically let Hollander touch him there; he knows the omega scent of Ilya’s desire; he knows the consistency of Ilya’s cum; he knows Ilya has never been able to knot him. Yes, he knows, he must, but he also has never had to deal with it.
They’ve never actually had to deal with this. Face it. Talk about it.
Talk about how Ilya presented as an omega at age twelve, early enough that one doctor suggested it might just be a hysterical presentation and not his actual designation. Talk about how Ilya went into heat again three months later, and then three months after that, simple as clockwork.
Talk about how, with that, it became fucking undeniable. Talk about how the evidence became absolutely irrefutable that Ilya Rozanov is just innately, biologically, an omega.
They’ve never had to face the reality of it together: the heats and all of the ways he disgusts himself; the side effects of the suppressants that exactly two doctors, both bound to secrecy, know he takes; the forged identification documents that Ilya’s father acquired through means Ilya refuses to acknowledge; the lies that would unravel his entire life if he were to get exposed.
Hollander has just been so, so good to him, in ways he doesn’t deserve. He’s allowed Ilya to keep his secret. He’s allowed Ilya to pretend. He’s allowed Ilya the role in the bedroom that he feels most comfortable with, that he feels the most himself in. So they’ve never had to even try to acknowledge the lived experience of Ilya being an omega.
No, they’ve never had to deal with how much that word makes Ilya want to crawl out of his fucking bones. They’ve never had to deal with how wrong it feels and has always felt.
They’ve never had to deal with how being in heat makes Ilya want to tear his skin off with his own teeth, so hot and feverish and angry and in pain. They’ve never had to deal with how, when he’s in heat, Ilya considers killing himself to make the feeling stop more heavily than he considers getting fucked by an alpha.
But here they are now, because Ilya was fucking stupid, and he timed this all wrong, and Hollander is in his apartment eating a tuna melt obliviously even as the fever starts to warm Ilya’s cheeks and every piece of fabric touching his skin becomes too scratchy and the scent of Shane—Hollander—next to him floods his every sense and there’s a cramping in his gut that will only go away when he has sex and Ilya feels sick.
It takes about ten minutes after Ilya has realized what’s happening for Hollander to recognize that something is wrong. Ilya has gone tense and silent next to him, and it feels like they’re pressed so close that Ilya is inhaling his scent more than he is breathing air, even if there’s a good several inches between them.
He’s possibly going to throw up, and it’s nothing to do with the sweetness of Hollander’s scent, sweeter than any other alpha that Ilya’s ever met, so fitting for who he is; it’s nothing to do with the elderflower and ginger and lemon of him. No, it’s everything to do with the churning in Ilya’s chest, the uncontrolled urge to be owned.
It’s entirely unsettling, this feeling that burrows under his skin and turns him into something he isn’t and doesn’t want to be. He doesn’t recognize himself when he’s in heat, not really, because the primal urges his traitor body wants to give into are not urges he recognizes as his.
This body is not his own. This body is not him. This body is what the world has made of it. This body is what the world thinks he should represent, one way or another.
The world looked at him, at his omega status, and made him into a liar. The world looked at his strength, at his exceeding-all-expectations physical ability, and made him into a celebrity. When the world finds out they’ve been fooled, a mockery will be made of his name and his body will be shaped into an omega’s again.
But what would it even mean, for this to define him and who he can be; what would it even mean, for this primal, feral desire to be the only thing that he’s capable of desiring at all; what would it even mean, for some goddamned biologically determined sexual urge to be the final thing Ilya fucking Rozanov gets boiled down into, bare bones and soul and all; and what would it even mean—
Fuck. He’s definitely panicking. His breaths are starting to come heavy and he’s not sure if that’s the feverish wanting beginning to overtake his breathing patterns or if it’s the panic his heat always brings coming early, before caving in to sexual desire rather than after it.
Usually, Ilya deals with his heats alone. He can’t exactly go out and find just any willing alpha—though he knows so many would be willing to fuck him tonight and sell the story tomorrow—when his secret is this carefully kept.
Besides that, he fucking hates being seen like this. This: at his most vulnerable; at his weakest; stripped down to bare biology and unable to fight against neither himself nor anyone who wants him.
Svetlana has offered to help him through it, be there for him however he needs. She’s long since established that she can make herself available when he induces heat in the summers—once at the start, once at the end—and that he only has to say the word. He’s rejected the offer every time she’s brought it up, and though he knows that offer still stands, she’s also long since stopped asking.
Once, and only once, Sasha was with him. It was for one of the longest, and amongst the most painful, heats of his life. He couldn’t get it to break, couldn’t get it to end, and he got desperate. It was the summer before entering the NHL, and he went through every trick he knew to get through it before he curled up into himself, sobbing with the pain, and begged Sasha to come to him.
Sasha had been uncharacteristically decent about the whole thing. Fucked him hard and quick and clincal. No emotions. Brought him water and food after the heat broke. Didn’t make fun of the copious slick and didn’t tease him about the sweat or shaking and didn’t take offense at how miserable he was despite the objectively physically pleasurable sex.
Both of them—Svetlana and Sasha—know him, after all. They know him from the shapes of every worst memory and every terrible decision down to the shape of his cock. They know that being an omega, for Ilya, feels less like innate biology and more like divine punishment. Less like a part of his being and more like an inhumanity. Less like simple sexual desire and more like physical urges he didn’t consent to having.
They are possibly the only people in the world who understand that he has never once felt comfortable with being an omega. They are possibly the only people in the world who understand that the forged identification papers calling him an alpha are more affirming than anything calling him an omega ever could be. They’re the only people who have ever even tried to understand that Ilya feels, in all ways but in his DNA, that he is an alpha.
They don’t always get it right. They’re clumsy with their care, sometimes. But they know enough to know that, for all the ways they tease and poke and prod and hurt and mutually corrupt each other, Ilya’s omega status is not something to be made fun of. It is one of the very few subjects between the three of them that are truly off limits.
That time with Sasha, more than six years ago, was the last time Ilya had an alpha with him for his heat. He hasn’t forgotten how that felt, and he hasn’t wanted anyone to be with him in the time since. It had been exposing and raw and terrifying and fucking embarrassing, no matter how attentive an alpha Sasha tried to be with him.
He doesn’t want Shane here for this. He doesn’t want Shane—Hollander—to see him like this. Exposed and raw and terrified and embarrassed.
But here Hollander is anyway. Turning, nostrils flaring briefly as he catches what Ilya knows is the suddenly overpowering scent of an omega in heat. He splays his fingers over a scent blocker he wears at the side of his neck, and his hand is trembling.
Fuck. He trusts Hollander—as much as he berates himself for letting that happen, he does trust him—not to do anything Ilya doesn’t ask for. But it’s more of what Ilya might ask for, there in the haze of the moment and under the loss of all inhibitions and without being tethered to any of his actual desires, that scares him.
He trusts Hollander. He does. But he’s not ready for this. He’s never going to be ready for this. If he gets a say in it—which apparently he doesn’t—he never wants anyone to see him like this, or be with him like this, no matter what trust exists between them.
“Hollander,” Ilya manages to choke out, and he hates how fucking hoarse his voice sounds and he hates the tenderness and need poured into the three syllables and he hates that he doesn’t know how to finish the sentence.
This is happening too fast. It’s coming on rapidly, in a way that it hasn’t in a long time. In a way that’s starting to border on painful. There’s a cramping in his lower stomach that makes him want to double over and cry out and beg for Hollander, but he refuses to give in to that urge now.
Ilya induces heat twice a year because he’s a professional athlete and can’t afford to fuck up his body more than he’s already doing with this dosage of suppressants. When he’s in the right headspace, it comes on slowly over a period of twelve hours and usually lasts for two days at the most. Only a day, if he’s lucky.
If he times the hormone injections right, it approaches while he sleeps and then he makes a marathon of fucking himself with various toys once he’s awake and then it’s done. During the hockey season, he staves off his heat with a combination of suppressants and DIY self-helping old wives’ tales. And no one has to know and no one has to see him.
But it’s happening now, where Hollander can’t ignore it and while Hollander is looking at him. Ilya mentally stumbles through the past months. Had he missed any pills? Had he not been having enough sex with omegas, the most reliable method of suppressing any of his own omega instincts? Or had he given in to those instincts at all recently, and encouraged this?
“Rozanov—”
Hollander is putting the pieces together much too slowly. He’s not fucking getting it. He’s looking at Ilya like he’s a particularly baffling math problem. His nose is scrunched up a little and his forehead is crinkled and he looks like he wants to solve Ilya rather than fuck him and oh God Ilya can barely find it in him through the fog of his oncoming heat to panic about that.
“—do you…is there someone else here?”
Ilya stares at him. His neck is hot to the touch where his hand is still pressed against his scent gland, his cheeks are probably flushed red, sweat is beading at his hairline, his heart is pounding so loud he can feel it in his throat, his pheromones are going so haywire that a fucking beta could smell it on him, and Shane fucking Hollander is on his couch asking him if there’s someone else here.
“What?” he croaks out. “Why would—what?”
Hollander swallows. “I just—thought I smelled an ome—”
“Fuck you,” Ilya snarls, all his anger and his frustration and his shame suddenly rearing up to guard him. A wolf baring its teeth at a predator. “Fuck you, Hollander, you know exactly what you’re smelling, fuck you—“
“Hey—” Hollander raises his arms in a clear surrender and it does nothing to calm the scent of omega in distress— “Rozanov, I don’t actually—I can’t read your mind, asshole, and—Jesus, you look like you’re about to pass out.”
Ilya stares at him. He can’t do this. He can’t. “You’re not fucking stupid, Hollander. Think for two seconds.”
Hollander stares at him. He straightens up a little, no longer hunched over his knees, their meal forgotten. Fuck, Ilya is so fucking stupid. Planning this day—sharing a bed, buying him ginger ale, making him lunch—as if it’s not homemaking. As if it’s not caretaking. Caretaking, during the time his heat naturally comes without the suppressants, like a fucking idiot.
And even as Ilya continues his spiral, Hollander is still staring, in that way he does, where he doesn’t meet Ilya’s eyes but his gaze trains itself on some vague point below there, fully focused and studying him even without truly meeting his gaze. Everything about him is so endearing and Ilya wants him so terribly and it hurts, deep in his heart.
“You need to go,” Ilya mutters finally, when Hollander doesn’t say anything. “I don’t—you don’t need to deal with this. Not your problem. I will be fine. But you need to go now. Before it starts.”
Arguably, it’s already started. Every second that they spend sitting here like this is another step towards disaster.
“Before it starts,” Hollander repeats blankly, as if he hadn’t heard the rest of what Ilya said. And then, “But you’re an alpha.”
Something hot and ashamed and angry and hurting curls up in the hollow of Ilya’s chest and starts to climb up his throat. There is something evil inside of him, something wrong about his very being, something fundamentally misaligned about him, and it’s all going to spill out now. Guts and secrets and blood and viscera, all spilled out on the floor at Shane Hollander’s feet.
“Fuck you,” Ilya snarls again, fumbling for the right words, unable to find them. He tries, “You know what I am.”
He can’t say it. Even now, faced with his oncoming heat and the ruination of the best thing in his stupid life, he can’t fucking say what he is. He can’t even say what he wants to be.
Hollander is still studying him, but his pupils are blown wide now, his scent just a little thicker in the air. His eyes find Ilya’s lips and Ilya tenses even more.
“Rozanov,” Hollander says slowly. “Are you actually…”
It takes everything in Ilya not to snarl again, not to brace himself for the end of the world, not to curl his lips back and bare his teeth and bite down into the soft flesh of Hollander’s innocent confusion.
He wants to tackle Hollander back onto the couch and kiss him hard and messy and he wants to be touched everywhere hands can reach and he feels physically empty and emotionally hollowed out, and Hollander is just fucking sitting there and staring. He’s just staring.
“You…didn’t know,” Ilya whispers, horrified. “How the fuck did you not know?”
Hollander swallows visibly. “I…never considered it?”
It’s a weak excuse, and spoken as a question. Ilya kind of wants to kill him, kind of wants to fuck him. He says, instead, “Please leave, Hollander.”
Please leave, Hollander. Half growl and half whimper. Two contradictory sounds, cleaving Ilya apart at the seams; one part of him caving into the basics of being an omega and one part of him desperately trying to keep hold of the natural alpha instincts he feels he should always have.
What he should have, what he often feels, but what doesn’t always have majority control. God, his whole life has been torn between secondary genders, tugged in different directions. His existence is one terrible question about what he first presented as and what he feels he is at his heart and what he legally is and what he would have been if he had inherited no secrets.
Here is another secret, one just as haunting as his secondary gender presentation: Ilya’s body may go into heat, he may lose his mind to the haze of it, and he may induce those heats twice a year just to keep the wolf in him alive, but if he’s being entirely honest, he would rather that part of him fucking kill itself than entirely submit to being an omega.
He’d rather bury these desires—as unnatural and out of character as they feel—than indulge in them. He’d rather swallow a bottle of pills or slit his wrists in the bathtub or both than let this designation define who he is at the core. He can barely even stomach thinking about it all as his designation, his secondary gender, his heat, because it’s not him and it never has been.
Being in heat disgusts him. His own biological inclinations disgust him. In these moments, his very body disgusts him.
If he could carve it out of himself with a knife, he’d have done so already with a serrated blade and not a single whimper of pain. If he had sharp enough teeth to rip this part of his being out of himself, he’d be swallowing blood right now.
But as it stands, he can’t do any of that. The disgust, the embarrassment, the shame, and the discomfort all just boil in his stomach and live there always, churning and hot and curling up past his heartbeat to choke him like fingers wrapped around his throat.
He tries to lean into those feelings, the self-hatred and distaste and hurt, more than he allows himself to succumb to the omega-like desire. He’d rather destroy himself that much than admit to this part of biology. Maybe if he hates himself enough, one day these wants will all fucking go away.
Right now, staring at Hollander and trying to tug himself out of the rapidly consuming haze in his head, unblinking, refusing to submit to the way Hollander is looking at him, Ilya claws at those feelings. Tries to grab onto the discomfort and cling tight to it, because if he lets it go now—ever—he really will be nothing more than a fucking omega.
There’s nothing wrong with being an omega. It’s just not what Ilya is.
It’s not what Ilya is, except for in moments like these. Except for when his heat takes over his body and he’s helpless against it, nevermind his resistance to it and nevermind his discomfort in it and nevermind the dysphoria that wracks his body during it and nevermind the fact that he’s not a fucking omega.
“Please,” Ilya says again, a desperate, whining plea, and he’s not sure what he’s even really asking for anymore because he hates being seen like this but Hollander is, ultimately, a real alpha and Ilya’s traitorous body craves his bite and his dick and his desire, and his traitorous heart craves his love just the same. “Please, Hollander.”
Leave. Fuck me. Take me. Get out. Ignore me. Forget you ever saw this. Kiss me. Turn away from this shameful and most secret part of me. Mark me. Bite down on my neck and swallow me down and trace your fingers through the slick that’s already wet between my legs.
Please, Hollander. Don’t look. Please, don’t look at me.
Hollander’s eyes do not leave Ilya’s lips. His own mouth is parted, like he’s looking for words but all he can find is air. His pupils are dilated, his eyes wide. He smells like want.
Ilya wants to crawl inside of himself and cower. Not from Shane—Hollander—himself, and not from Hollander’s desire, but from the part of his own body that needs to be taken over and consumed by him, the part of his body that craves giving up all control, and the part of his body that wants to hand the wolf of him over to Shane Hollander.
He wants to hide from it. Pretend it isn’t real, isn’t a part of his nature. But the omega in him is overpowering, overwhelming, hot and lustful and gluttonous in his mind. He can’t get out of his fucking body. He can’t get out of his head.
Ilya likes sex, which is part of the problem of it all. He likes having sex; he likes fucking omegas and betas and alphas, and he likes fucking Shane. Hollander.
Sex feels good, and he knows that he’s good at it, and that feels good too. He likes the breathlessness and the rush of energy and the release. He likes the adrenaline and the crash afterwards. He likes giving in to pleasure and he likes having control and he likes getting overwhelmed enough by physical sensation that he forgets all mental tax.
When it’s Hollander, he even likes the careful intimacy of it; the intimacy they haven’t spoken about in words but that Ilya—the goddamn omega that he is—wanted so quietly to bring out in them today.
He likes sex.
He does not like being in heat. He does not like losing all his inhibitions. He does not like giving up control of his decisions regarding his desire. He does not like that something primal and feral takes over his head, and he does not like how wrong it all feels.
This contradiction is not something he has words for. He’s been playing at alpha for so fucking long that sometimes he forgets he isn’t one. He sometimes forgets, until a moment like this comes over him. Until everything in his body is tensed, uncomfortable, begging his mind to submit. Until he feels that tension and that discomfort and that instinct for submission, and he wants to maybe jump off a bridge if it will just make it all stop.
He won’t. Jump off a bridge, that is. He won’t, unless he can’t control himself.
He likes sex. He hates this. The contradiction does not matter though, because the omega part of him that usually lives so latently under the surface of the alpha part of him is currently in control more than it isn’t. His body wants—needs—craves—begs for—something that, if he had any real say, he wouldn’t ever ask anyone for. He hates this wanting—needing—craving—begging—but he also can’t shut up the part of him that’s doing it.
“Hollander,” Ilya says again, weakly, because Hollander still hasn’t fucking moved. “Please. Before it gets worse.”
Hollander stays just frozen there on Ilya’s couch, staring at Ilya’s mouth. Then his hand twitches on his own lap, like he wants to reach out. Ilya doesn’t recoil from the aborted reach, but it takes everything in him. He needs to stand up, needs to not be here, needs to get to his bedroom to ride this out alone.
He needs his friend-with-benefits, who isn’t even really his friend in any way that counts, to leave. He needs Hollander to leave, because he apparently didn’t fucking notice at any point over the six entire years they’ve been fucking that Ilya isn’t—and he can say it now, now that the haze is a fog—a goddamn alpha. He needs Hollander to shake himself out of his shock and he needs Hollander to get out before Ilya starts begging him to fuck him through his heat.
Then something pierces through the heat, through the haze: Hollander didn’t know. He’s finding out Ilya’s secret for the first time. And he still hasn’t actually said anything that matters. This could—no, this has already changed everything.
Hollander is looking at him still but his expression is more unreadable than Ilya has ever seen it. He seems unsure of himself, but there’s also a lust in the way he’s biting down hard on his lip.
There’s worry there too, in the crease of his brow, but Ilya doesn’t have the wherewithal to figure out what the fuck he’s worried about. He’s not the one who’s so goddamn out of control.
No, he’s got Ilya Rozanov right where any alpha would fucking dream of him: dripping wet into his briefs, hot and feverish, horny out of his mind, ready to drop to his knees for the first alpha to ask.
“Rozanov—” Hollander swallows visibly, Adam’s apple bobbing— “you asked me to stay. You said you weren’t done with me.”
Ilya stiffens, the tension in his muscles tight and painful. “Maybe things changed.”
“Okay.” Hollander lifts his gaze to meet Ilya’s eyes, dark and intense. “But I can help. I am an alpha, you know.”
He sounds like he’s trying to convince himself more than Ilya. Still, everything in Ilya is screaming to drop his gaze and bend over and stop resisting this.
He narrows his gaze, unsure if Hollander is trying to rub it in his face or if Hollander actually wants this. “I’m aware, Hollander. We’ve been fucking for six years and I am not the least observant person in the fucking world.”
Hollander winces at that, but he doesn’t look away or back down. “Do you want me to stay?”
“I’m not letting you finger me.” Ilya takes a short breath, because it seems that’s all he’s capable of right now. “And I will kill you if you try to knot me.”
A beat, while Hollander processes that. “Don’t omegas need—”
“I am not an omega.”
The words come out sharp and vicious and angry. He snarls them, so much vitriol and hurt in his voice that it almost makes it feel true. He feels sick with his heat, his fingers itching to reach for Hollander, his heart pounding at double speed, at a tempo that’s trying to align itself with Hollander’s pulse, everything in his being calling out for his alpha, and he’s so embarrassed by it all that he wants to cry, which is almost more embarrassing.
“Rozanov,” Hollander says quietly. “I can smell it. And there’s no one else here. Are you or are you not—not in heat?”
This is possibly one of the worst things that has ever happened to him, Ilya thinks distantly. In a short life of a lot of things that have kind of fucking sucked, this is definitely up there on the list.
“You should leave.” Ilya’s voice is shaking. “Now.”
He feels so fucking weak as he speaks, voice and hands both trembling with shame and self-loathing. There’s a sickening disconnect between mind and heart and body right now: his mind is fogged over with desires to give in that he can’t stomach; his heart is beating rapidly even as it threatens to collapse under a dysphoric weight; his body is two steps ahead of the moment and is already priming itself for Hollander to knot him.
Hollander looks away, his expression folding in on itself, hiding all his thoughts. But he doesn’t manage to mask the confusion, or the fact that he just doesn’t get it. He says, anyway, “I didn’t mean that you—I didn’t—Rozanov, just—you look like you’re in pain. Let me take care of you for once.”
“I am not some puck bunny you can fuck and bond with and call your girl for the night, Hollander, and I am not some goddamn omega that will carry your children. You cannot own me because of this.”
It feels important to make that clear, Ilya thinks vaguely, but Hollander looks almost horrified at his words, almost insulted by them.
“I know that, asshole,” Hollander snaps, not hesitating. “You think I don’t know you by now? This isn’t—this isn’t that. Not to me.”
And Ilya does not at all have it in him to unpack any of that right now. Instead, he just nods sharply.
He clenches his fists in the fabric of his sweatpants, trying to ground himself, trying to take himself out of the fog clouding any rational trains of thought, like, This is such a terrible, terrible idea. But so is everything we’ve ever done together. I want him anyway.
Hollander nods too, looking back up at Ilya’s face. He makes eye contact, and then shifts on the couch so that he can come closer to Ilya. They’ve been slowly gravitating towards each other all morning, but this is closing the distance for good. Ilya sucks in a breath, heartbeat stuttering, as Hollander puts his hand on the back of Ilya’s neck, dragging him forward into a messy kiss.
Kissing is safe. Kissing is normal. Kissing is okay. Kissing is something that’s always come so naturally to them. Kissing is also not nearly enough. The curl of arousal that’s been burning him up from inside out is rearing upwards now, making itself known and unignorable. Ilya kisses him back hard, teasing his teeth against Hollander’s lips, drawing out a moan from him.
The sound pushes Ilya further into that heady, desperate fog in his mind. He wants Hollander to consume him, to take him to pieces, to learn his body in a way that Ilya has never allowed before and that Hollander has never asked for.
He’s never seemed to want to try switching. Does he want it now? Now that he knows Ilya is what he is, will he want to take charge instead? Will he want Ilya to play the role that biology says he should? Will he now always want Ilya on his hands and knees and begging for his knot?
Hollander moans as Ilya tilts his head to deepen the angle of their kiss, and his moan vibrates through Ilya’s body right down to his dick. All the little sounds that Hollander makes have always been some of the most arousing parts of fucking him. Ilya dreams of cataloguing all of them, memorizing the sound and feel of them on his tongue. Right now, he just wants more.
“Please,” Ilya whispers, and it’s a whimper that makes him want to shrivel up with how pathetic it sounds.
But Hollander takes the word in stride, not saying anything about how different he is when he’s in heat versus when they’re having sex at any other time of year. While Ilya is grateful for the lack of teasing, it also only makes him feel more pathetic. Is this something Shane—Hollander—his alpha—has wanted the whole time? Is this what Ilya should have been giving him from the start? Is he going to want it again? Want Ilya as he is now—in heat, submissive, pliant, small, trembling?
“What do you want?” Hollander asks. His voice is low. “What do you need, Rozanov?”
Ilya groans, tilting his head back and baring his neck for Hollander to kiss at. He doesn’t bite, doesn’t even scrape his teeth against the skin below his jaw in the way he surely knows Ilya likes.
He’s so careful with his kisses that Ilya hates him for it. He needs it rough and hard and quick right now; he needs to be treated not like he’s fragile but like Hollander wants to ruin him.
He can tell, already, that this heat is going to hurt. It already does, in so many ways.
“Shit.” Ilya’s voice is hoarse as Hollander noses against his scent gland, as if he fucking cares. As if he wants to scent Ilya or even mate him, as if he wants to take care of him. Warmth tugs at his lungs and pools in the low of his stomach. “Fuck, Hollander, stop, fuck—”
Shane—Hollander—pulls off immediately, his eyes searching Ilya’s face for an answer as to what he did wrong. He hadn’t done anything he hasn’t done before, not really. But everything is infinitely more sensitive right now, everything is infinitely louder and more overwhelming, and every touch goes right to the precum beading at Ilya’s dick and the slick that’s wetting his underwear.
“Did I hurt you?” he asks, and Ilya isn’t sure if he wants to laugh or cry.
“No,” Ilya mutters, his breaths coming heavy and uncontrolled, his English failing him. He can’t find the strength to look Hollander in the eye. “You’re fine. Just—sensitive.”
When Ilya looks up at him, Hollander blinks at him, eyes dilated and curious. He looks like he has more questions that he wants Ilya to answer, that he wants Ilya to answer right now. Ilya hates him. He reaches for Hollander’s jaw, pulling him forward into a bruising kiss. He doesn’t want to leave space for things like talking and questioning.
Hollander hums into the kiss, a breathy, musical kind of sound. Ilya wants to devour it. His hand curls around the nape of Hollander’s neck, holding him in place. Hollander is perfectly capable of tearing himself away from Ilya’s touch if he wants to—for one thing, Ilya would always let him go without protest if he wanted; for another, being in heat makes Ilya’s grip weak—but he doesn’t.
“How do you want this?” Hollander asks again, barely pulled away from Ilya’s lips. His breath is hot against Ilya’s mouth and Ilya makes that horrible whimpering sound again.
Ilya takes a ragged breath. “Just—need you to touch me. Fuck. I don’t care how, just—”
One of Hollander’s hands curls around the side of Ilya’s neck, the other one goes to his chest to push him down against the backrest. Ilya lets him, going willingly at his touch. Soft in Shane Hollander’s hands.
When he first presented, years and years ago, and the third doctor said it might be a hysterical presentation, Ilya’s father accepted that answer. His brother did not.
Alexei spent the next three months—until it was real, until it was no longer a hysterical trauma response to his mother’s death but his actual truth, his very being, until it couldn’t be spoken of anymore—making cruel jokes that weren’t really jokes targeted at Ilya’s secondary gender.
Weak like an omega. Gonna let someone knock you up one day, if anyone can stand to fuck a male omega. That’s all you’re good for. Never gonna be a real man. Fucking pathetic.
And it’s not that Ilya believes these things to be true about all male omegas. It’s not even really that he believes them to be true about himself.
He’s not weak; he’s one of the strongest players in the highest North American tier of a contact sport where being weak gets you a concussion and broken ribs. There are absolutely people who can stand fucking male omegas; it’s a whole goddamn porn category. Despite the perceived emasculation of being an omega, Ilya has never really debated whether or not he’s a “real” man or not; whatever Alexei’s jokes about male omegas being basically women hiding dicks, Ilya is perfectly comfortable calling himself a man.
He knows all that. He’s perfectly aware of all that. But still: he’s never identified with being an omega, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever settle into it in the way Sasha once suggested he would. He knows he’s never going to settle into it. It just isn’t who he is.
Being an alpha at his core while being an omega in every way that physically matters is a dissonance that no one wants to talk about. That no one wants to validate. Having sex with Ilya with the understanding of what he feels he is, and accepting it as both attractive and honest, is too high of an ask. Having sex with Ilya as he wants to be, letting the pretenses stand until they don’t, is a part of fetish play; it’s not about love or care.
But Shane—Shane Hollander pushes Ilya down and then he slides off the couch in order to drop to his own knees as if it’s worship and not just fucking an omega through his heat. Mouthing at the bulge in his sweatpants, Shane moans as if it’s him that’s being touched. Unable to hold back anymore, Ilya unceremoniously pushes down his pants, leaving him only in the stained briefs.
Shane doesn’t seem to be bothered by the precum that’s wetted the cotton, doesn’t seem interested in teasing him for his eagerness at all; instead, he laps at the wet spot with his tongue, eager and desperate. Ilya drops his head back, his breath stuttering at the pressure of Shane’s tongue against his dick. With the fabric between them, it’s all too much and not enough.
“You always taste so good,” Shane mumbles, and Ilya looks back down at him.
His hand is between his own legs, palm pressing against his own hard-on but not truly giving himself any friction. Like he’s waiting for permission. A rush of confidence pulses through the haze, and it’s the first time Ilya has felt truly comfortable in his skin in hours. Shane is an alpha—a fact that Ilya is very, very aware of—but he’s letting Ilya take the reins here. He’s letting Ilya take back some of the control that he’s lost just by virtue of being in heat.
“Fuck,” Ilya hisses, as Shane reaches his free hand up to fumble at his briefs, brushing lightly against his cock in the process. It’s not enough, nothing is enough, nothing is ever going to be enough to make this feeling stop. “Fuck.”
Shane pulls his underwear down and the two of them manage to maneuver themselves in such a way to allow for Ilya to undress fully and to tear Shane’s shirt over his head and off. They’re both breathing hard, and Ilya thinks maybe he’s going to implode if he doesn’t get to come in the next five minutes. Being in heat always makes him a walking livewire. He’s sweating and overwhelmed and his hands are trembling until he grips the edges of the couch cushions tightly.
Left kneeling in front of him and holding Ilya’s ruined underwear, Shane’s lips part with silent breath. Ilya follows his gaze to the spot on the fabric that’s wet with slick, that’s fucking soaked and dripping with it. Shame courses through him at the sight.
Not just the sight—he can feel it, too, everywhere that it touches his own skin. He can feel it between his legs, is keenly aware of the part of him that’s wet and clenching and unclenching and begging to be touched, and the slide of it between his thighs as he shifts his weight makes him cringe. He’s not an omega, except for in all the ways that matter.
Then Shane touches a finger to the soaked underwear with an undeserved reverence, and then slides three fingers through the slick that’s staining the fabric. It gathers on the tips of his hand and drips down over his knuckles. Ilya shudders at the sight, unsure if the embarrassment still has a place in his chest when Shane is reacting like this.
It takes only another moment for him to decide that no, embarrassment has no place here in this sanctuary with Shane. Shane puts his fingers to his lips, just the lightest touch for the briefest of moments, and then he pushes those three fingers into his own mouth and swallows around them. He sucks every drop of the slick off of his own fingers, his eyelids fluttering shut and open and shut and open again. His gaze burns against Ilya’s flushed cheeks.
Ilya swears in Russian, and then in English, and then Russian again. Low under his breath, barely audible. Shane seems to catch it anyway, and he offers the smallest of smiles when he drops his fingers from his mouth. His hand goes to Ilya’s outer thigh, his damp grip tight enough that Ilya hopes it bruises in the shape of his fingerprints. He wants Shane to mark him up, wants to be owned.
With no other warning than that smile curling upwards just the slightest bit more, Shane drops forward and takes Ilya into his mouth. He swallows around Ilya’s hard dick, easing himself onto it. Ilya’s back arches with a strangled moan, hips rutting up into Shane’s mouth. Shane makes a surprised, aborted noise, and then takes him deeper in. He sucks Ilya off like his life depends on making Ilya come as soon as possible, tight and fast and desperate to please.
It’s too much, it’s not enough, it’s hot and messy with spit and desire; it’s overwhelming every one of Ilya’s senses but it’s not calming them. A guttural groan from Ilya makes Shane nearly choke, and then double down to take almost all of Ilya in. What he can’t reach with his mouth, his hand twists around in a way that makes Ilya cry out again.
Shane is always so enthusiastic about sucking cock, is always so eager to satisfy. He wants Ilya to feel good, to give him what he needs. He’s so good to and for Ilya, in a way that Ilya usually appreciates but that right now leaves a strange taste on his tongue.
Still, it doesn’t take much—normally, he can last longer, but while he’s in this hazy state, every touch puts further pressure on a hairpin trigger—before Ilya is groaning, before he’s crying out Shane’s last name.
He pushes Shane off of him and takes his own dick in hand, needing barely the smallest of upstrokes before he’s coming all over his stomach. Shane is breathing hard, eyes hot on Ilya’s cock. He’s fully hard at this point, Ilya can see, but he’s not doing anything about it.
Ilya drops his head back against the couch, closing his eyes and taking heavy breaths. His heartbeat isn’t slowing down at all, and the fever that’s overtaken his body hasn’t broken even a little. He still feels that tightly coiled sensation in his body, a livewire running through his taut muscles and threatening to spark. Shane is good at giving head, but it’s not enough to break his heat, however much Ilya wants this to be over.
“Good?” Shane asks. He sounds wrecked, hoarse and breathless. Like this, and always, he is so beautiful.
Ilya nods, lifting his head to look at Shane. His next words are mumbled more than anything, still trying—and failing—to control his breathing. “Need to fuck you. Please, Hollander—”
“You just came,” Shane says incredulously.
He’s already straightening up though, moving to straddle Ilya’s thighs and put his hands on either side of Ilya’s face. He leans down to kiss Ilya deeply, fingers cradling his cheeks, settled comfortably in his lap.
“Yes, I noticed,” Ilya says, rolling his eyes as they break apart. Then he adds in a mutter, “I’m also in heat, Hollander, and insatiable.”
Shane blinks at him, like he still hasn’t completely reconciled together as one the ideas of Ilya Rozanov and being in heat. Ilya braces himself for the interrogation that’s surely about to come.
But instead, the corner of Shane’s lips quirks up, teasing rather than questioning. “Insatiable, huh? Big word.”
“Big feeling.” Ilya’s hands tighten on Shane’s waist. He tilts his head up for another kiss, murmuring into his mouth again how badly he needs to fuck Shane right now.
Shane laughs a little into the kiss, low and breathy. Ilya can feel his hard cock through the fabric of the sweatpants. He wants this too. He’s an alpha, after all.
“You don’t want, um, me to be on top?”
Yes, Ilya thinks sourly, he’s an alpha, after all.
Shane seems to catch the way that Ilya recoils. His expression shutters off, studying Ilya without giving anything away. Shane is so easy to read, except for when he’s not. He wears his heart on his sleeve and his every feeling in his eyes, except for when he doesn’t.
“Have I ever wanted that?” Ilya asks stiffly. “Have you ever wanted that?”
At that, Shane hesitates. “I…I’ve been…curious.”
Ilya blinks at him. Something deep and feral and instinctual wants to give in to Shane’s curiosity. His own curiosity blooms in the deep of his chest. What would it be like for Shane to touch him like that? Drag his fingers through the slick between Ilya’s legs? Finger him open slowly, working him to pieces with those hands? Enter him from behind, slow or fast or hard or tender or—
“No,” Ilya says, voice hoarse. He doesn’t sound confident but God, he needs Shane to take him at his word without question. Right now, he doesn’t have the strength to argue, to self-advocate. But he can’t do what Shane is asking for. “Not now. Maybe—another time. Maybe. But not now.”
It’s instant, the way that Shane’s scent goes bitter and hurt. His expression doesn’t change, but something in his eyes shifts. Ilya can see it, can sense it, so naturally—the way that Shane is offended by Ilya’s refusal, the way that he’s taken the rejection so personally. The realization comes as easily as breathing in Shane’s familiar scent.
Here’s the thing: there is this perception almost everyone has about sex, and a part of it is the idea that omegas always, always want it.
The desire to be fucked and dominated is a biological instinct that omegas naturally hold in them. The ability to get pregnant means that’s what omegas are meant for. When it comes to sex with an omega, it’s not about consent, because omegas always, always want it—especially an omega in heat.
So Ilya—in heat, desperate, trembling naked under Shane—trying to refuse to let Shane fuck him is…unnatural. It’s not what should be happening, and they’re both well aware of that. Shane is looking at him like, for the first time, he isn’t seeing Ilya fucking Rozanov but rather is seeing an omega playing at being an alpha.
An omega who can’t physically keep up the facade anymore. An omega who is rejecting him despite the feverish sweat beading at his brow. An omega who’s carrying a wanting that can only really be fulfilled by an alpha—and he isn’t letting Shane be that alpha for him.
“Please,” Ilya murmurs again, “not now.”
Shane takes a slow, steadying breath. The air is thick and tense with their mutual distress. Ilya can’t breathe quite right, can’t focus on anything other than primal need. He hates how out of control he feels right now, hates how his mind feels vacant from his body.
He trusts that Shane isn’t going to take advantage of it. He knows Shane, and he knows that look on his face is nothing more than contemplative. Alpha or not, he’s never seen Shane look threatening anywhere but on the ice.
Still, being reduced to begging and not being able to control the tremor in his heartbeat is humiliating. It’s vulnerable in a way that Ilya wasn’t ready to show anyone, not even Shane.
“Okay,” Shane says quietly. He still sounds small, and a little worried. But he’s not going to force the topic either. He’s always been so much more than Ilya deserves. Instead, though, he presses a kiss to Ilya’s throat, scraping teeth against skin and pulling out a gasp. “How do you want me then?”
His voice is lowered, vibrating warm against Ilya’s skin, and it’s a miracle that Ilya manages to get them to the bedroom before he’s tackling Shane down and kissing him hard. Shane follows his touch easily, giving in to Ilya’s unspoken direction without protest.
Shane is an alpha—something Ilya is very aware of right now—but he also never seems to comply with the standards that anyone else would want him to.
He puts up an image on the ice and for the media, but when he’s with Ilya in the secrecy of hotel rooms and the dark of the Montreal apartment, being an alpha seems to be the last thing on his mind. He doesn’t battle Ilya for control in the way Ilya, at first, had somewhat expected him to; and when he’s fully in the throes of passion, when he’s fully lost in sensation, any alpha inclinations seem to evaporate.
Right now, with Ilya in heat and fucking into him desperately, being an alpha seems inconsequential.
His body wasn’t made for the shape of Ilya’s fingers nor his dick, not really, but he takes Ilya in as if it’s natural anyway. He doesn’t produce any slick, but the copious amount of lube is enough for Ilya. His knot swells at the base of his dick when he comes humping the mattress with Ilya nine inches deep, but he’s so breathless that he doesn’t seem to notice.
When it all finally ends, too many rounds and too many different positions to count later, it happens with the breaking of both his fever and his heart.
Shane is pressed tight against Ilya’s chest, long since starting to feel overstimulated and fragile, his fingernails scraping over Ilya’s back in a way that has Ilya’s hips stuttering where he ruts into the tight space between Shane’s thighs. The slide of his painfully hard dick against skin is helped along by the smear of cum and slick and sweat, and Shane is groaning into the crook of his neck, kissing at his scent glands, overwhelming Ilya with sweet elderflower and lemonade.
“You gonna come for me, Rozanov?”
Ilya is breathless, gasping into Shane’s bare shoulder. He pulls back—“Fucking make me”—only to lift his head and kiss him hard. He can feel the heat beginning to wane, just a little; just enough for him to feel awake, even if still hazy and dissociated. Shane clenches his thighs tighter around Ilya’s dick and Ilya loses all sense of reality again. He comes with a cry that’s somewhat whimper and somewhat sob and somewhat relieved exhale.
Here, when it all finally ends, it goes like this: Ilya says Shane’s name.
“Ilya,” Shane breathes back, the name brushing warmly against Ilya’s neck.
With that, Ilya can feel the fervor and desperation and insatiable desire all subside. Like a receding wave on the shore, his heat pulls away. The omega in him finds itself satisfied, fulfilled, just with hearing his given name on Shane’s lips, the sound like a prayer and a miracle all at once.
Ilya comes back to himself, just fast enough to realize that he’s tilting his head up to kiss Shane again and that Shane is moving away. Shane turns his head away from Ilya’s lips, and his scent has gone from its usual sweetness to tasting of terror. An alpha that’s been cornered.
In the heat of the moment, out of his mind with the wanting, Shane.
And, in a thoughtless reply, Ilya.
And, “I should—I should, uh—”
The fog is receding so fucking fast that it leaves Ilya’s head spinning. He doesn’t understand what’s happening, doesn’t understand what he’s done, doesn’t understand what Shane—Shane. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“I should go.” Shane—Hollander—is pulling away, sitting up, tugging at his hair, looking uncomfortably around the room for the clothes Ilya had torn off and hadn’t given him time to fold. He grabs at the stained and unkempt sheets, turning them over to find a shirt. “I should—”
“Go?” Ilya asks blankly, and his heart is lodged in his throat like a secret. A secret that’s already gotten out, one that can’t be put back and locked away again.
Hollander stands, stumbling in his hurry to get off of the bed; and Ilya is still lying there, naked and vulnerable, covered in a sheen of feverish sweat, feeling raw and torn open and spilling apart at every fracture.
“Stay—I can’t—” Hollander is fumbling over his words in a way that he so rarely does, not giving himself time to think over his excuses before he’s trying to get them out, and the omega in Ilya is whimpering, and the alpha in Ilya wants to cower just the same— “Team meeting in the morning. I forgot. So.”
Ilya sits up and stares at him, eyes raking over his bare body and his heaving breath and his panicked expression, and Hollander can’t meet his eyes as he starts pulling on clothes. “Okay. You forgot team meeting.”
Hollander averts his gaze even more, says, “Thank you, for the tuna melt,” and Ilya stares at him, not fully processing the words right. The fucking tuna melt? That’s what Hollander is thinking about? All his secrets laid bare between them, this moment of uncontrolled vulnerability given to Shane, the only person Ilya would ever allow to see him like this, and Hollander is thanking him for making him lunch like a good omega would.
A shaky breath, an inhale that doesn’t fill lungs. Hollander continues, “I’m sorry—this—I can’t.”
Ilya’s hand twitches to reach out to him, to pull him back to bed, but he aborts the motion before it can get far. This is already fucking awful enough without begging him to stay. All he can manage to say is not enough to undo what’s already happened: “Hollander.”
“I—just—I can’t, uh, I can’t do this.”
“Hollander,” Ilya says, and it’s not desperate, it isn’t, but it’s also not completely composed. It’s terrified and wrecked and humiliated and Hollander is just fucking standing there, staring at him and the ruin he made of Ilya’s body and heart.
“I’m sorry,” Hollander manages to say, and then he’s getting the fuck out of Ilya’s bedroom.
Ilya is left there, staring at the space Hollander had just been standing, still sticky and breathing unevenly and flayed open at every muscle. The air around him burns with the scent of his embarrassment. He knows exactly where it all went wrong, knows exactly at which point his biology betrayed him and ruined this, and knows exactly the moment his soul betrayed him just the same. He also knows that this was all kind of just a matter of time.
That doesn’t make it hurt any less. If anything, knowing that this was probably inevitable just hurts more.
Other things that are inevitable: life going on. Ilya allows himself five minutes of self-pity before cleaning up both the couch and the bedroom in the methodical, emotionless, disconnected way that he cleans up after every heat; he showers in scalding hot water until his skin is bright red and hot to the touch; and he pulls his shit together because to let himself grieve is to admit that there was something to grieve in the first place.
There wasn’t. There wasn’t anything to grieve. He and Hollander were—are—nothing, and they will never be anything more than nothing.
They play against Montreal the next afternoon, and Ilya cannot bring himself to look at Hollander. Looking at him would be like asking for something, would be like admitting to wanting something. And Ilya has already done enough damage.
He plays like a man possessed, because he doesn’t know what else there is left to do. Boston loses anyway, and he tries not to think about it as a metaphor. Then he spends the next week angry and tense and wound up, withdrawn from anyone who talks to him and lashing out at anyone who looks at him funny, because he’s just waiting for the moment that the news story breaks.
Logically, it doesn’t make sense for Hollander to spill this secret to anyone. He has everything to lose just by admitting that he saw Ilya off the ice at all, much less that he had helped Ilya through being in heat. But logic doesn’t settle in his chest and rot there in the same way that fear does.
The facts are that Hollander—somehow, shockingly—didn’t know before this, and now he knows, and immediately after he had taken care of Ilya enough to keep his conscience clear, he left. Ilya hasn’t heard from him since. There is plenty to be afraid of, given all that. Logic cannot convince him otherwise.
Ilya has spent so long hiding this secret—out of shame and disappointment inherited from his father; out of dysphoria and disconnect between his head and body; out of ambition to win and out of fear of losing—that hiding it is a bigger part of him than being an omega is. Some days, it’s also even a bigger part of him than being an alpha. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when the world finds out that he’s always been a fraud. He doesn’t know what will be left of him when this secret isn’t a secret.
Barely a week passes before a different story is breaking news, though. This is not the first time that Ilya has heard Rose Landry’s name, but it is the first time that hearing it hurts like this.
Rose Landry is famous, and a woman, and publicly adoring. She goes to Hollander’s games and wears his jersey. She holds his hand in the street. She kisses him in front of coffee shops on morning dates. Her love for Hollander is known to anyone who knows her name and visible to anyone who looks at her looking at him.
She is also an omega. A real omega. She’s spoken about it in interviews before: the discrimination that she’s faced in the industry, the difficulties she’s had managing her career and her gender, the biases casting directors and audiences alike have against omegas. She’s an omega, and she’s perfectly proud of it. She doesn’t hide anything.
Ilya, on the other hand, is a living secret. A living secret that Hollander had once kept like an oath, had once embraced. Had once even been attracted to.
Now, Ilya looks at the paparazzi photos of Hollander and Landry and wants to cry. Scream. Kick something. Punch a wall, maybe. He bared his awful self to Hollander and Hollander ran. He ran, and he decided that Ilya’s awful self isn’t satisfactory enough.
Ilya had been playing at alpha with Hollander for so long that he actually believed Hollander liked it. Liked it, and believed it.
Now—now that Hollander has seen and experienced and felt the truth of him—it’s undeniable that Ilya cannot be what he wants or needs. He’s not an alpha and he’s not an omega, not in any cohesive, singular way, and Hollander can never again look past that.
He’ll never again see Ilya at his heart. Instead, he’ll fall in love and fuck and bite and publicly adore Rose Landry. He’ll choose a real omega, something that Ilya can never compromise to give him. He’ll choose the path of least resistance—a female omega, a relationship no one will question—over the hard way through—a male omega who dreams he’s an alpha, a fuckbuddy who breaks the rules.
Really, he’s already made his choice. And Ilya is trying to pretend it didn’t break his heart, isn’t currently actively splicing the muscle open with a scalpel, but the rejection fucking hurts.
It hurts, and it’s humiliating, and it’s terrifying, and no one can ever know that he’s feeling any of this. Hollander is the only one who could ever even guess, but fuck knows that he probably doesn’t care. Not given how caught up he is in Landry, not given how he hasn’t reached out to Ilya once since that heat, not given how he’s at the top of his game in every match except against Boston, when he’d clearly rather be anywhere else than near Ilya.
There are days when it doesn’t hurt so bad. When Ilya fucks some omega woman and feels like he’s himself. When he drinks himself numb. When he stands in bitter Boston cold and smokes and daydreams of blackened lungs. There are days when he can cope.
Today, after a brutal, exhausting game in Montreal, is not one of those days. He’s snapping at his teammates, practically growling at them when they ask if he’s alright. He nearly punches Marleau for asking if he’ll be meeting up with his Jane.
No one around him deserves this, but he can’t seem to subdue his most volatile emotions right now. There’s something in him that’s been pulled taut and he’s just waiting for it to snap. It’s like he’s running barefoot on a knife’s edge, adrenaline constantly surging through his veins, trying desperately to keep his balance.
He also constantly feels as if he’s falling. Plummeting to the ground and cracking open against concrete. Again and again and again, all to the soundtrack of Hollander’s I can’t do this.
There is a part of him that has shattered, and Hollander took all the shards into the calloused palms of his hands, and Ilya will never get any of them back. Ilya gave him the most vulnerable piece of his body and heart, and Hollander fucking ran into the arms of safety as soon as he could. There’s no taking any of that back, for either of them.
In the rush of that moment, his body betrayed him. But the truth is that his heart betrayed him first.
“I need to get laid.” Ilya’s voice is stone, dark, frustrated; moments later, Connors stumbles out of the hotel bed in his rush to gather the team for a night of clubbing.
He doesn’t mean to sound so threatening. He doesn’t mean for his claws to always dig so deep. But how else is he supposed to exist in this world? Without sharpened teeth, he has no method of protection. All his secrets come spilling out, and they ruin everything.
The club that the Raiders team finds that night is crowded and dark and illuminated only every few seconds with strobing lights. Ilya doesn’t know the name of the club and he doesn’t know what Marleau asked the bartender for, but it’s bitter and alcoholic and he downs two glasses of it quickly.
He’s not drunk—a little hazy, a little unbalanced, but not drunk. Despite his relative sobriety, the flashing lights are overstimulating and the press of so many bodies against bodies makes him want to flinch away.
And then there’s the man who nods at him from across the bar and Ilya knows that face, because fucking everyone knows that face, because he’s seen him in every X-Squad movie with Rose fucking Landry, and Ilya actually does flinch. He turns, searching the crowd for who he knows is there.
It’s not hard to find her. She stands out in the crowd, glittering under the colorful lights. She has her hands on Shane Hollander, one on his waist and one on the low of his back and underneath his shirt. She’s pressed so close against him that surely she must feel his heartbeat, a heartbeat that Ilya’s heart once aligned with in the heat of the moment—
He can’t turn his eyes away. It’s masochistic and painful and he can’t look away. He thinks he can smell Hollander across the crowd of the dance floor, even though he’s surely wearing scent blockers and the club is overwhelming with sweat and alcohol. They’re kissing, and something in Ilya snaps as he watches.
He and Hollander have been fucking since before their rookie season. They’ve been each other’s secret keeper for just as long. Still, they’ve never meant anything. Not in the way Ilya dares—dared—to want.
Now, he’s being confronted with strobing lights and pounding club music and the fact that he can never have what he wants. So he swallows down his drink as if it will fix this feeling in him, and he goes to dance.
There’s a woman willing to be with him on the dance floor. She’s blonde and tall and dances on time with the beat and she presses herself against him hard and insistent. He doesn’t know her name and doesn’t care, doesn’t bother asking. She lets him kiss her anyway.
She has her back against his chest and she’s swaying, hands going back to tangle in his hair, tugging slightly. He’s half-hard and getting just enough but also not nearly enough stimulation from the press of her body.
Looking up from where he’s got her earlobe between his teeth, his eyes catch on Hollander. Just staring at him. Frozen there in the crowd, unmoving. His face is unreadable, except for the way that Ilya recognizes the twist of his expression so obviously—he sees the same look in the mirror every day.
His eyes latch onto Hollander, and Hollander meets his gaze. Or, at least, Ilya wants to think he does. He runs his lips over the woman’s jaw, over her neck, and it’s not enough. It’s not what he actually wants.
This feeling—wanting someone so badly and knowing that wanting them so much is not enough to keep them—might be the scariest thing he’s ever felt. He craves Hollander’s touch, and his comfort, and his trust, and his love. He wants to be good enough for Hollander, alpha or omega enough, brave enough, gentle enough.
He will never be any of those things. That much is clear now, because Ilya let him stay through his heat and said his given name as honestly as he could and now Hollander is dating the perfect, beautiful, true omega Rose Landry.
Hollander’s lips part, soundless across the club. All Ilya can hear is his own heartbeat pounding in his ears.
He should have known from the start. He should have known that he would never be enough for Hollander, and he should have known that he himself would always want more than he could rightfully take.
He should have known from that first night, when Hollander looked down at him and didn’t see the swell of a knot and he said nothing. Yes, Ilya should have known from the start that this could only last as long as Hollander was choosing to say nothing.
Still, Ilya’s body caved in to its heat, and he asked Hollander to speak. He asked for caring words and tender touches and sex that meant something and he asked for Hollander’s given name. He asked for these things because to not have them leaves a gaping hole in his chest the size of a fist, and because what they were sharing was not going to be enough until it was real.
He ruined it, by wanting all this. He moved too fast, moved in a direction that Hollander didn’t ask him to. He exposed the bare beating muscle of his heart and Hollander didn’t want it.
Ilya presses a wet kiss to the woman’s shoulder and thinks of Hollander, and of I am an alpha, you know, and of Don’t omegas need, and of I never considered it. He thinks of all he wants and cannot have. He thinks of all he is and is not, and all that Hollander is and is not, and the things that they are both too scared to be.
He hopes that this hurts. He hopes that Hollander is watching him right now, and that looking at Ilya like this hurts. He hopes that Hollander can’t tear his gaze away either, and that he hates Ilya for it, because Ilya hates him right now.
Closing his eyes, Ilya tries to school his own expression into something controlled, something that isn’t falling apart at the seams. He kisses the woman pressed against him. He can still feel Hollander’s gaze burning over his body. He wants that gaze to stay on him forever. The impossibility of his own desire disgusts him.
When he pulls away from the woman and opens his eyes, Hollander is gone. Like he had never been there at all. Like Ilya had made it all up.
After leaving the club alone, only sending a short, curt text to Marleau about leaving without the rest of them, letting him assume he’d be going back with that woman, the exhaustion begins to set in. It’s a bone-deep kind of tired, one that takes over his body and mind and makes the world around him feel sluggish and fogged over.
The scalding hot shower does not fix him. Angrily jerking himself off to the memory of Hollander’s mouth around him does not fix him either. Coming with Hollander’s name half-gasped on his tongue maybe just makes it all worse.
In the morning, new photos of Rose Landry and Shane Hollander surface in the gossip magazines. Ilya nearly throws his phone across the room when he sees it. Instead of doing that, though, he manages to find some semblance of self-control, and he scrolls through the articles and photos.
Here’s the thing: Hollander doesn’t actually look happy.
Ilya knows what Hollander looks like when he gets out of his head and he laughs with abandon and he stops overthinking everything so goddamn much. He knows what Hollander looks like when he’s letting go of himself and giving in to simple sensation and feeling. He knows what Hollander looks like when he’s relaxed.
The Shane Hollander here in these photos is not any of those things. He so rarely is, but Ilya would have thought that at least he would be with his stupid girlfriend. But he’s not.
No one else seems to be picking up on it, but it’s so obvious to him. The more photos that drop and the more time that passes, the more clear it is to Ilya that Hollander isn’t relaxed and hasn’t stopped overthinking and is still carrying that tight, scared tension in all of his muscles.
But knowing that doesn’t change the fact that Hollander saw him for the first time, in the worst way, and now he doesn’t want Ilya anymore.
Now, he wants Rose Landry and the most public relationship in the fucking world, even though he’s stressed and stiff and uncomfortable with all the paparazzi and all her kisses to his cheek and even though his gameplay kind of sucks now and even though Ilya wants him so badly anyway that it physically hurts.
Ilya tries to move on. What they had meant nothing, not to Hollander and not to himself. It was just sex. Ilya’s heat and Shane’s first name made it more than that, without Hollander’s permission, and so now it’s over and Ilya needs to pull himself the fuck together.
He feels a little sorry for every member of the Raiders team during these past few months. He feels like a walking pile of shattered glass, and every single one of them has sliced open their bare hands on his jagged, sharp edges. Every look and every touch and every laugh feels like it’s going to break him all over again.
Marleau tries to get him to open up. Tries to get him to talk about it, because the way he’s bottled it all up isn’t sustainable. All his secrets are pounding at the cages of his chest, begging to be let out, punching at the bars and trying to break free. He needs to tell someone, because he can’t live like this. Like the blowing up of the universe, the Big Bang or a nuclear bomb, has gone off in his fragile, soft heart, and now his carcass of a body is just going through the motions of living.
It’s not sustainable.
Not sustainable is kind of a running theme in Ilya’s life, though, so he keeps on going with it anyway. He doesn’t tell Marleau shit. They’ll all find out about his omega status one day, probably, even if it isn’t ever going to be his choice, and he’s going to put that moment off as long as he’s capable. This lying can only last so long before his body betrays him again, so he’s going to squeeze every bit out of the alpha life for as long as he can.
He takes his heat suppressants religiously, not that that fixed anything a few months ago. He’s on a higher dosage now, after a drawn out, frustrating argument with his doctor.
The dosage is, apparently, enough to completely tranquilize a wolf. That’s the whole fucking point, Ilya had argued. The dosage may also have permanent effects on his hormone regulation, on his birthing ability, on the success rate of impregnation, on the length of his heat. Again, Ilya had said, yes, that’s the fucking point, so please raise the fucking dosage.
He won the argument, in the end. He hasn’t had a heat, or even the usual heat-related symptoms that overpower the suppressants, since. The medication has had no life-altering side effects. He can still play hockey. He’s fine. He’s doing fine.
If he starts looking into surgeries and physical or neurological alterations that would solve the horror of his body, no one else needs to know that. There are options for people like him, he finds. He knew this, on a conceptual level, but he’s never actually met anyone else who didn’t align with their secondary gender in the way he doesn’t. It’s just not a thing that people talk openly about.
The fact that there are enough people like him for there to be options to deal with it is validating, in some ways. He lives in a country in which there might be a way to cope with this misalignment in him. He lives in a world in which someone out there might one day even accept the fact that he’s like this.
But if he were to go through with these things—a medical procedure to remove the uterus that he doesn’t like admitting is there; hormone treatments to increase and reduce specific hormones; injections to permanently change pheromones; the alteration of scent glands; a mostly experimental surgery that could give him the capability of a knot—he would lose hockey.
He can’t play while on drugs to significantly change hormone balances—heat and rut suppressants, inhibitors, and scent patches are all one thing; actual alpha-affirming hormone therapy would be unacceptable. It would be considered doping, and Ilya’s already unfairly watched for that more than enough by media and opponents alike just because of being Russian.
Besides that, anyone knowing that he’s doing this—that he’s even thought about wanting to—would ruin his career before he could even ask if it was game-legal. Without a game to play, without a role on the Raiders, Ilya goes back to Russia in shame.
So, that’s the end of that. There are options. He will not be taking any of them. He cannot afford to.
Ilya copes with the reality of that in his own way. He goes out to clubs and fucks people in the dark of hotel rooms or bar bathrooms, and pulls on dark-colored underwear or covers himself with sheets as soon as he finishes so that no one can see him. He kisses women only and he doesn’t think about Shane Hollander. He kisses omegas only and he doesn’t think about Rose Landry.
And then it’s All-Stars in Tampa, and everything changes again.
Everything is different, because Hollander says he and Landry weren’t compatible and Ilya takes to the ice next to him and it’s like they’re both alive again. They’re playing next to each other and it’s like coming awake after months and months of sleep; they’re finding each other in the sinking dark of sunset where their fingers brush and it’s like feeling human for the first time in his life.
After the vibrant activities of the weekend have finished, in the calm of it, Ilya sits in a hotel room and Hollander is in his lap. They’re not kissing. They’re not fucking.
Instead, Hollander is just holding him. Like he’s safe in Hollander’s arms, like he belongs there. Something warm blooms in Ilya’s body and it isn’t the usual arousal so much as it is adoration. Something bigger than that, maybe. Something infinitely less fragile.
He doesn’t want to say the word like. He doesn’t want to say love either.
But he wants to stay in Hollander’s arms. He wants to stay like this for as long as the world will let him have it. He buries his face in Hollander’s shoulder and he’s so overwhelmed by it all that he allows himself to cry, just a little, because Hollander will keep him safe here in the privacy of their secret.
When Hollander finally kisses him, Ilya sighs, sinks, slips away into the kiss with all the abandon of someone who has already fallen in too deep. Hollander has the decency not to say anything about that, about Ilya’s pliancy in his hands, but he does ask, quietly, “Before, um—are we going to talk about last time?”
Ilya stiffens in his arms. He pulls away, eyes narrowed on the hollow of Hollander’s throat, unable to meet his gaze. “There’s nothing to talk about. It won’t happen again.”
“Why not?” Hollander asks, and he still has his arms around Ilya’s neck, loose and unrestrictive but heavy in their comfort. He’s looking at Ilya in that intent way he does, like he wants to unravel him, take him apart, name his every shattered piece.
Swallowing hard, Ilya tries to hide his face, then tries to kiss Hollander enough to distract him, but it doesn’t work. Hollander leans back just enough that Ilya can’t reach him comfortably like this, and it’s so reminiscent of that last time that Ilya kind of wants to scream.
Ilya sighs heavily, the exhale not doing anything to relax the tension in his posture nor the tight discomfort in the back of his mind. “Higher dosage of the suppressants. If I have to, I’ll induce it when I’m in Moscow this summer. You don’t have to think about it again. Okay? Good?”
Hollander is frowning. Ilya can just tell that Hollander is frowning. He amends quietly, trying to sound nonchalant, trying to sound as if his heart isn’t shattering, “If it’s—if you’re reconsidering. I would—understand.”
This does nothing to make Hollander stop frowning at him. “Why the fuck would I reconsider this just because you’re an omega?”
Ilya flinches, so viciously that he almost yanks himself out of Hollander’s arms. “Because I’m not an omega, because I have always been an alpha, because this heat I go through is just—just biology, and I don’t want it, and it makes me stop feeling like me, because it’s not me and never has been.”
He spits the words out more than says them. He spits them out because they burn to say but they hurt more to keep in.
Hollander continues staring at him, his frown working into something scrunched up and confused. Thinking. Trying to unravel Ilya’s words. “You’re an alpha.”
“Yes.”
“You go through heats. And make slick. And purr when I scratch the back of your neck.”
“I do not purr—” Ilya cuts himself off, glaring at him until Hollander gives him a look and Ilya relents— “Fine. Fuck. Yes. To most of that. Most.”
Hollander snorts. He presses a small kiss to Ilya’s neck, just the lightest brush of his lips. Ilya definitely does not purr, though he does tilt his head to the side to give Hollander more room. But Hollander pulls away again and gives Ilya a more serious look.
“You’re an alpha anyway,” Hollander says, sounding out the words like he’s trying to decide what they mean. “Because you want to be?”
Ilya shrugs uncomfortably. “Do you want to be gay?”
Hollander’s jaw tightens, and Ilya briefly wonders if that’s still too sensitive a subject to reference in this conversation. Then he decides that Hollander is the one who climbed on his lap and lured him in with a hug and then cornered him in with this question, so he’s not going to take it back now.
“It’s a choice like that is a choice,” Ilya says quietly. “I don’t just want to be. It is—something in me. It just is. I just am.”
There’s a kind of uncertainty in Hollander’s expression when Ilya finally dares to look at him. “And that’s…allowed?”
Ilya thinks of the shame, and of the fear. Thinks of the secret keeping, how he lives in a constant state of hiding. Thinks of how his father forged his paperwork not to support his son’s identity but because a male omega for a son is worse than a fraud for a son. How his brother would laugh in his face if he knew that Ilya feels that his forged identity is his real one.
He recalls the research he dared to do in the dark safety of his bedroom, alone on his phone under the covers. The studies and the forums and the discourse in the news. He recalls all the visceral hatred online, and the misinformation spread with the intention of furthering that hatred.
It’s simple biology. How can you fight against that? Why would you want to? Omegas were made to submit. An omega playing at being an alpha should have his dick cut off for that weak imitation. Someone better show that kind of omega what a real alpha can do. They’ll give in. They’re made for it.
Then he looks at Hollander a little closer. There’s something shining in his eyes. A tear, maybe, or just a mirror of Ilya’s reflection.
There is shame and fear, but—there’s also the euphoria in being the way he is. The confidence and security in knowing his own body in such an honest, intimate way. The bravery he knows he has, because he chooses it every day.
There’s the strength and confidence he gets in fulfilling the role he feels most at ease with. There’s the heady rush of fucking someone with his own hand wrapped around the base of his dick like a knot. There’s the trust and vulnerability he gets to share with Hollander as they have sex even when allowing no strings to be attached.
That’s allowed? Shane Hollander asks, and Ilya thinks maybe he understands what he means. What he’s asking. What he’s thinking but isn’t ready to say.
“Yes,” Ilya says. “It’s allowed.”
Hollander nods sharply. He averts his eyes, looking down at their laps. Ilya’s hands have dropped away from his waist and now tighten on his thighs.
“It’s not…easy,” Ilya amends, trying to keep his words steady and diplomatic. “Some people don’t like it. And almost no one knows, about me. I have…I’ve kept it secret for a long time now. To be safe.”
“The league would be…”
Ilya shrugs stiffly. “I do not want to find out. And my family would not be good either.”
“They don’t know?” Hollander sounds almost offended on his behalf, like he can’t conceptualize at all how Ilya’s family wouldn’t understand. “They’ve never noticed?”
Ilya gives him a pointed look. “You didn’t notice. And I’ve been fucking you for years.”
Hollander flushes a little. “Okay, fair enough.”
“They know,” Ilya says, sighing. He rubs his thumbs in small circles against Hollander’s hipbone. Thinks of his father’s endless shame and his brother’s cruel twists of laughter. “My brother knows, anyway. We don’t speak of it, because he can’t admit to knowing without admitting to my father falsifying documents. And my father is sick enough that he has forgotten he did that in the first place.”
“Why did he?”
Resisting the urge to sigh again, Ilya explains, scoffing a little, “It wasn’t out of support. He needed me to play hockey, and bring pride and money and respect to the family. To his name. And lazy, male, bisexual omegas are not allowed in the KHL.”
They’re only allowed in the NHL on a technicality, and none have ever been successful, but neither of them say that. It will have to remain a conversation for another day.
Instead, Hollander looks him in the eye, his pupils dark and an intense earnestness burning there. “You aren’t lazy. But I’m glad you went to the NHL anyway. It would be boring without you.”
Ilya cracks a small smile. “Even though it means you are the second best player?”
“Fuck you,” Hollander says, but he’s smiling. Real and genuine, not a hint of the tension or stiffness that’s been there in all his press photos recently.
Ilya wants to, so he leans in to kiss him. It’s softer and sweeter and more tender than it’s ever been before, and Hollander lets it happen. Ilya fucking relishes in it.
Laughing a little into the kiss just before nipping at his bottom lip, Hollander murmurs lightly, “You should fuck me now, Ilya.”
Ilya sucks in a sharp breath. He never thought he’d hear Hollander—Shane, Shane, Shane—say his name again.
“I can do that.” Ilya moves forward, hesitates just before his lips, breathes out, “Shane,” and then kisses him hard enough to bruise. It feels like being human.
Kissing Shane has always felt like a revelation. Like coming up for air after drowning. Ilya likes the sex they have, but he likes simply kissing him without expectation just as much.
Ilya maneuvers them further back on the bed and flipping them around so that Shane is on his back with Ilya hovering over him, leaning on his forearms. Shane laughs breathily as Ilya manhandles him, this beautiful, strong, handsome, brilliant man who is happily allowing Ilya to take his fill of him. And Ilya wants everything.
He’s so greedy for it all: the sounds of Shane going breathless; tracing the way down his neck to his chest with wet kisses; running the flat of his tongue over a nipple and sucking just enough to make Shane whine high in his throat. He wants all this and more.
He wants Shane in bed like this, moaning and writhing underneath the hot press of Ilya’s own body. He wants Shane in hotel rooms and on club dance floors and in the intimacy of his own bedroom. He wants Shane in the mornings and in the afternoons and in the evenings and for all the time in between. He wants the sunrise runs together and the making Shane a protein shake afterwards and the lazy afternoons and the laughter and the going to bed in the same place at the same time.
Maybe, with time, these things can come. Maybe, with change, these things could happen.
Maybe, Ilya thinks, terrified and already dreaming all at once. Maybe.
Reality comes crashing back in when his father dies, and then reality buries him even further underground when Marleau slams into Shane and Shane goes down motionless. Reality breaks over them both like a harsh wave over an eroded cliffside, and Ilya is ready to crumble underneath it just at the sheer sight of Shane in the hospital bed.
And hope comes to him not much longer after that. With it, the cottage.
But first—before getting on a plane to Ottawa, to Shane, and before the two weeks that will make or break whatever their relationship is becoming—Ilya goes to the NHL awards ceremony. It’s boring, for the most part. Scott Hunter gives a speech, and that’s just the slightest bit more interesting. Mostly, he wishes Shane was with him.
Ilya goes to the Scott Hunter night at some bar afterwards, and he doesn’t intend to stay long; he wants to talk to Hunter and then he wants to leave. He has plans tonight to call Shane and finalize travel plans. That is something much more important than anything else. They’ve been calling every now and then, which is a recent development that still makes Ilya’s heart skip a beat every time Shane actually picks up.
At the club, Hunter is easy to spot. Ilya gets himself a drink first—the courage he needs for this conversation is not a kind of courage he has without one—and tracks Hunter across the room while he sips at it. He’s making the rounds, talking to anyone who approaches him, shaking hands and clapping backs and trading the smiles of acquaintances.
If he’s being honest—which he will not be, at least until this drink is gone—Ilya has to give him credit for how well he’s handled everything. The choice that Hunter made on the ice after winning the Cup changed everything, for the league as a corporation and for all of the players in it and for Ilya himself, on a much more personal level. Hunter’s choice made everything else seem possible.
Here’s the thing about bravery: someone has to be the first. Someone has to be the first person to step up, and to take on the weight, and to be strong while carrying it. Someone has to be the first person to say that they’re willing, and they’re able, and they’ll wait patiently and patiently and patiently until the rest of the world is ready to catch up.
But there’s no way to know how long it will take until then. There’s no way to know how heavy the weight will be, or how hard everyone else will try to bury you under it. There’s no way to know if you will fail, or if you will be the last, or if you will be the last because you fail.
What you have is a leap of faith, and trust, and hope, and courage. Maybe a little bit of recklessness, maybe a little bit of idealism. Maybe some love, if you’re a romantic. What you have, really, is a dream. Ilya knows this as well as Hunter does, as well as Shane does. The difference is that Hunter found it in him to be that first person. The one to try to bring the dream into the daylight.
So, a drink and a half in, Ilya can find it in him to be as honest as he can, right now, afford to be. He is not Scott Hunter, not yet. There will be no kissing Shane at center ice, and there will be no revealing his omega status.
But right now, he can have this—just a night at a gay bar, drinking some sweet cocktail, telling Hunter, “I have two secrets.”
Hunter stares at him, clearly not sure what to do with that statement. Ilya takes a slow sip of his second drink, carefully analyzing Hunter out of the corner of his eye but not quite looking at him. They’re sitting at the bar, Hunter having approached him tentatively, as if approaching a wild animal, to ask what he was doing there.
“Okay,” Hunter says slowly.
“I am not going to tell you either of them,” Ilya continues, “because you’re so exhausted from playing a sport you’re not good at that you’ll forget to remember that they’re secrets, and you’ll accidentally tell the whole world. And then they will no longer be secrets, and I will be in trouble.”
Hunter rolls his eyes. “This may shock you, but I’m kind of practiced in keeping secrets.”
Shrugging, Ilya takes another sip of his drink. He’s quiet for a long moment, gathering his words; until it’s been long enough that he’s starting to think that Hunter is going to walk away. But he doesn’t. He stays, for some reason.
“What you did, after winning the Cup,” Ilya starts, and then stops as he catches Hunter visibly tensing next to him. He looks down at the glass he’s cupped both hands around. He says dryly, “Relax, Hunter. I’m not going to do whatever it is you’re so worried about.”
“Sure.” Hunter doesn’t relax. He looks away from Ilya, though, somewhat giving up his guard. His eyes go across the bar to where a man is sitting with some men Ilya recognizes as Admirals players.
“Your boyfriend?” Ilya asks, nodding in that direction.
Hunter turns back to Ilya. There’s something defiant in his gaze. “Yeah.”
“He’s handsome.”
“Yeah,” Hunter says again, but now he sounds confused more than assertive. “He is. I’m lucky.”
Humming, Ilya nods. “You are. He can do much better than a hockey player with terrible puck handling on the verge of retirement.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Hunter says, rolling his eyes again. “I do not have—”
“Hollander and I have both broken your record in the shot accuracy competition at All-Stars a hundred times over now,” Ilya points out. “Which is almost as many years as you’ve been playing. Your boyfriend can do better.”
Hunter mutters something under his breath that Ilya doesn’t catch, but he doesn’t want to ask either. His knee is bouncing up and down anxiously, and he downs the rest of his drink in the hopes that it will stop the nervous tick. The human embodiment of tension that is sitting next to him certainly isn’t helping.
“Why’d you come here tonight?” Hunter asks, finally speaking loud enough for Ilya to hear.
Ilya shrugs. “I wanted a drink. Thought this would be a respectable place with good, relevant themed nights and nice, plain vodka, but I can’t have everything. At least whatever I’m drinking is cheap.”
“If you’re going to be a dick, I’m going to walk away,” Hunter threatens, not making any move to walk away.
Ilya sighs, tightening his grip around the now empty glass. “Okay, okay.”
“So?”
“I wanted to talk to you,” Ilya says, exhaling the words more than saying them. “I wanted to congratulate you. On the Cup, and the handsome boyfriend.”
Hunter stares at him again, his brow furrowed, like Ilya’s words make no sense coming from him. That’s kind of fair, Ilya supposes. He doesn’t think he’s ever handed Hunter a genuinely, and not at all backhanded, nice or supportive word once in his career.
“And I wanted to ask a question.” Ilya’s volume has dropped, his words barely audible over the bar’s chatter, even to his own ears.
Hunter nods a little, still searching Ilya’s face for some kind of sign as to where this is going. “Thanks, I think. What’s the question?”
Ilya takes a short breath, glaring at the bottom of his glass. “You’re happy, yes?”
“What?” The bafflement in the high pitch of Hunter’s voice is obvious, and Ilya flinches a little at it. “What was that?”
“I’m not asking twice.”
Something in the stiff refusal to ask twice must trigger something in Hunter’s head, because something clicks for him then. He softens a little, and his eyes drift to his boyfriend again. This time, his boyfriend is looking back, and he gives Hunter a wave. Hunter’s ensuing smile could rival the sun with its brightness. Yes, Scott Hunter is happy.
When Hunter turns back to Ilya, his smile shifts a little. No less bright, but a little more contemplative. He says, “Yeah. It was a hard way here, but…but I’m happy.”
Ilya swallows. He looks over to meet Hunter’s eyes. He wants to ask something else—Did you ever feel like I feel now? Do you still get so fucking scared that you think you’ve lost your mind? Does loving him hurt this much for you too, and will it always hurt this much for both of us? Does the fear go away when the secret does? Does the pain go away when the love comes?—but his lips part and then close soundlessly.
“Are you?” Hunter asks, voice low.
Ilya blinks hard. He looks away. Maybe. Yes. No. Sometimes. He could be, one day. Maybe even one day soon. There are so many answers, and he wants to give none of them. He just shrugs wordlessly.
Hunter nods, studying him. He seems to see much more than Ilya is ready for him to, and Ilya needs to get the fuck out of there before he starts asking questions. He exhales heavily, dramatically, and sets his glass down, sliding it a few inches forward towards the bartender.
Already out of his seat and one foot out of the door, Ilya says as confidently as he can, “I should go—”
Hunter grabs his wrist, and Ilya freezes. He doesn’t turn around when Hunter says curtly, “It’s worth it. Loving someone. It’s worth all of it, Rozanov.”
Then Ilya feels the grip on his wrist loosen, and Ilya tears himself away. He doesn’t look back as he makes his way out of the bar and back to his hotel, his heart pounding in his throat and his whole body trembling.
But hope comes to him again: on the plane to Ottawa to see Shane; in the car on the road with Shane; laughing in bed with Shane; in the lake with Shane; all of it, with him, again and again and again. Yes, it’s worth it, loving someone.
The first time that Shane moans the words alpha and Ilya in the span of three breaths, Ilya nearly climaxes on the spot. The second time, he’s no more prepared than the first. The third time, Shane adds the word my to alpha and Ilya actually does come at the sound, barely touched and still in his sleep clothes. Shane doesn’t laugh at him for it, doesn’t even tease him, just breathes out the words again, like a promise to keep saying them.
“That really does it for you, huh?” Shane asks, later. Ilya knows exactly what he’s talking about, but he doesn’t acknowledge it beyond the embarrassed reddening of his cheeks. “Calling you my alpha, I mean.”
“Can you blame me?” Ilya mutters, shoulders hunched up.
There’s very little about sex that actually embarrasses him, but he really doesn’t want to have this particular conversation. It’s one thing for a nameless omega woman to call him alpha while they fuck. It’s another thing for Shane specifically to do it, because he loves Shane, for one thing, and for another, because Shane knows the truth about him. So yes, Hollander, hearing that really does it for him. It doesn’t have to be a thing.
“No, it’s—I’m not judging.” They’re lying in bed, tangled amongst the sheets, and Shane rolls onto his side to look at Ilya closer. “Really. I’m not. I, uh. I like it too.”
Ilya turns to look at him, a crease deepening at his forehead. “Oh.”
“If you wanted to—” Shane cuts himself off before he can say whatever he was actually thinking, finishing lamely instead with— “you know. Whatever. If you wanted.”
Ilya stares, a little lost. “What?”
Shane waves a hand vaguely. “If you wanted to—you know. The opposite. That…that could also be…okay.”
“If I wanted the opposite,” Ilya repeats slowly, trying to parse out what the fuck Shane is talking about right now. A hurt feeling starts to twist in his chest; he can feel his scent go bitter. “You mean calling me omega. Hollander—”
“No!” Shane says it fast, before Ilya can go on the defensive, and then takes a slow breath. “No, that’s not—I know you don’t want that. And that’s fine. I want you as you are. I meant, um. If you wanted to call me…”
Shane trails off, waiting for Ilya to get it. When it clicks, that bitter feeling turns into arousal like the flip of a coin.
“Oh,” Ilya breathes out. “Okay. Yes. Okay. Yes, I can do that.”
They don’t try it that day, though, because just before Ilya can take the opportunity to say the words, his eye catches on the presence of someone else in the house. Shane’s father watches them with an unreadable expression on his face and Ilya takes a full step back from where he had been pressing Shane against the glass wall.
Shane turns to look at where Ilya’s attention has gone, and the panic that ensues will not leave Ilya for a long time, he thinks. They’ve been foregoing scent blockers since Ilya arrived, so it’s more than clear when Shane’s pleased and easy confidence in their situation shifts into something anxious, terrified. The quiet comfort and euphoria they’ve been sharing turns into a horror movie before Shane’s father is even out of the house.
Even without the guide of pheromones, though, Ilya can tell. He recognizes every expression on Shane’s face that comes next, and the pacing and shaking hands all make it entirely obvious.
“But you are brave,” Ilya says quietly, and he knows this to be absolutely, unquestionably truer than anything else he could say in this moment about it going to be okay.
Shane nods, and he still looks terrified, but he’s also got the slightest ghosting of a smile on his lips and he seems a little less shaky now. His panic has dulled into fear—Ilya knows well that those are two different emotions—and he’s going to be okay, because he is brave. Ilya knows this too.
Accompanying Shane to confront his parents is going on his top ten list of most unnerving car rides of his life. But this car ride isn’t about him or his anxiety; this is about supporting Shane. Shane, who asked to be called Ilya’s omega, who asked this while knowing the kind of alpha that Ilya is. Shane, who Ilya both likes and loves so much that the two feelings have burrowed into his bones, into his muscles, into his very heartbeat. Shane, who both likes and loves him too.
So Ilya takes his hand in between the front seats of the car, and holds him tight. Physical touch has always been the best way they’ve communicated—and the biggest way they’ve avoided communication—and Ilya hopes this says everything he wants to right now.
I’m here. I’ve got you. However this goes now, I’ve got you in my hands, and you’ll be safe there. I love you, and I’m not leaving. I’m holding onto this for as long as you’ll let me.
Ilya doesn’t really know what he was expecting from Shane’s parents. He’s only ever known them through brief comments that Shane’s made in interviews, through interviews that they’ve done for TV specials about Shane, or through the things Ilya’s just picked up about Shane’s upbringing. He’s given thought to them—more thought than he wants to admit to—but he doesn’t actually know anything about who they are as individual, real people.
But the longer that they sit together, the longer that the discomfort lingers between them all and the longer that Yuna and David Hollander stay for Shane despite that, Ilya believes with more and more certainty that this is going to be okay. This won’t end in a nightmare, even if Shane still looks so uncomfortable that he might bolt at any moment.
Yuna and David are the kind of parents who are going to try. Even if they don’t understand right now—“There were no nice omegas in Montreal?” David asks first, and this quietly cuts much deeper than intended—they’re still going to try. They’re going to try, because they love Shane that much.
And Ilya, too, loves Shane so much that he’ll stay too. He’ll try at this, this relationship thing that he’s never really done before. He’ll do it, with no stipulations and no conditions, because loving someone like this—it’s worth it all. It’s worth everything, and Ilya knows that he is capable of being brave. He knows they both are.
So when Yuna asks, “You would leave Boston for Shane?”
Ilya thinks, in the barest split of a second, of all the things he loves in and about Boston. All the things that have been the closest thing to the definition of home for so long.
He thinks of his team; he thinks of the men who had embraced him for almost a decade, who will not understand why he is going to Ottawa to ruin himself without explanation. He thinks of Marleau, who has been a brother to him: picking him up when he’s too drunk to drive, bringing him water when he’s hungover, allowing Ilya to rant and yell and do everything but cry when he’s hurting with feelings too big for the closed boxes he shoves everything into.
He thinks of the sounds of the city; the cars hitting potholes and the T scraping along its tracks and the bustling chatter of Faneuil Hall. He thinks of the parks, of the trees. He thinks of the roar of ever loyal Raiders fans; their chants and jeers and replica jerseys. He even thinks about the traffic on his commute to practice.
Then he shrugs a little. Shane Hollander comes back to the forefront of his mind, as he so often does. He thinks of the unadulterated love and trust and acceptance that Shane has gifted him, something that no one else has given him in this way.
He thinks of comfort and ease and vulnerability and confidence. Such great, conceptual, inexplicable things; such important ones. He thinks of all that they have gone through to get this chance. He thinks of how he would do anything to keep taking this leap of faith, to keep falling.
Yuna asks about his loyalty to Boston. And Ilya thinks of the kind of worship and devotion he treats Shane with.
You would leave Boston? Yuna is talking about hockey, maybe. About team loyalty and the significance of a team taking a chance on some kid from Russia and the need to repay them for that. Ilya gets the sense that she is much like Shane, with this question.
But David looks at him with something else in the slight raise of his eyebrows. He looks passive on the question, neutral to Ilya’s answer, but he also leans forward just a little in interest. Will you break his heart one day, or is my son worth this much to you? Say he is. Oh, be real enough to say he is.
Ilya says, without hesitation, “Yes.”
Yuna makes a disapproving noise, and Shane groans a little, chastising her with an ease that Ilya never would have dared to have with his own parents.
“Loyalty is important,” Yuna protests.
“He’s trying to be loyal to me, not Boston,” Shane argues, not giving her an inch of room to disapprove of Ilya.
Ilya can’t help but smile just a little. Shane defending him to his parents is sweet. It’s more than he’s earned, really. But his parents are taking it infinitely better than feared, and not much more defending is actually needed in the end.
When Shane leans forward, resting his forehead on the table to hide his face away, Ilya isn’t afraid to touch him. He’s not afraid to show this kind of affection, because Yuna and David are watching them with sympathy and love rather than disgust or hatred. They maybe don’t totally get it, not yet; but they’re trying. They’re opening their arms to Ilya anyway.
When Shane exhales slowly at Ilya’s touch, he gets a little bolder than the light brush against his shoulders that he had originally gone for. He rubs small circles against his back, watching Shane carefully for any sign that his touch is making this worse.
He knows Shane well by now, knows how to get him out of his spiraling thoughts, knows how to hold him carefully enough that he doesn’t shatter but firm enough that Shane knows he’s there. There are more clothes this time, and more daylight, and more eyes, but Shane himself has been familiar from the start.
“We’re good here,” Ilya tells him. His voice is gentle, reassuring. He can feel Shane’s breath even out a little as Ilya pours every ounce of comfort he can into his touch and his voice. “Your family is here. Your boyfriend is here. You’re good here, okay?”
Shane lifts his head slightly. Meets his gaze and makes eye contact. Ilya’s heart stutters. “My boyfriend?”
“I mean, yes,” Ilya tells him, searching his eyes for some sign of rejection. He doesn’t find it. He finds only a mirror of his own tentative, hopeful love. “I think so, probably.”
Shane nods sharply, the smallest of movements. Ilya kisses him, because he’s allowed that, because he chooses that, and because he can’t help it. Right now, kissing him doesn’t feel like giving in, doesn’t feel like a release, doesn’t feel like letting go. No, it feels like holding on to something important.
When they get home, they’ve barely gotten two feet in the door and their shoes off before Shane has his hands all over Ilya. Ilya presses him up against the closed front door, kissing him with all the passion and joy and excitement of the day. The car ride back had been so different from the one there—relieved laughter, gentle ribbing, holding hands, love and comfort and contentment and—and Ilya has been aching to kiss him since the moment they left.
“I love you,” Shane breathes out, and Ilya swallows the words down with a kiss. He trails his mouth down Shane’s neck, nosing over his scent gland, lips pressed to his collarbone, pulling soft gasps out of Shane. “Fuck, Ilya, Ilya—alpha—”
Ilya trembles at his words, overwhelmed with want and so turned on that he’s dripping with it. “Bedroom,” he says, nipping at Shane’s earlobe. “Now.”
Grabbing his hand, Shane practically drags Ilya there. Ilya goes entirely willingly. He tackles Shane onto the bed in a rush of breathy laughter and a tangle of limbs when he goes down with him.
Shane moans high in his throat as Ilya scrambles to get his pants off and his hand around Shane. It’s all rather uncoordinated and fumbling when Shane reaches back for his shorts, and, still, Ilya thinks he’s never been as attracted to someone as he is to Shane at this moment. Then again, he thinks he reaches a new high every time, when it comes to Shane Hollander.
This sex feels different from every other time though. They’ve kissed before, they’ve fucked before, they’ve confessed their feelings before. But this moment is charged with a love and passion beyond physical desire.
They’ve done it all before, but Ilya wants it again and again and again. Again, until the end of time. He’ll never get tired of it.
Here, now, Ilya fucks Shane like a devotee, like he’s worshipping him. He has the greatest hockey player in the world, the greatest man in this life, in his hands here, and somehow Ilya gets the privilege of loving him. The privilege of keeping him in his heart forever.
Underneath him, pressed hard against the mattress, Shane gives himself over to Ilya like he’s answering a prayer. Like Ilya is asking a question only Shane can hear—Is this enough? Am I worth this? Will you let me prove to you that I am?—and like Shane is answering—I hear your worry. I see who you are. I want you still and always.
The privilege of loving Shane Hollander as he is does not go unrecognized by Ilya. The impossibility, and the reality, of Shane loving Ilya Rozanov in return, just as much and just as truthfully, does not go unrecognized either.
“Fuck, I love you.” It’s more of a moan from Ilya than not. Then, raggedly, like it’s been pulled out of his throat by the sensation of Shane clenching around him, he chokes out, “My omega. So fucking good for me.”
Shane practically whines at that, his back arching as Ilya thrusts into him. Shane’s eyes are shut tight, his mouth open and panting, head tilted back to expose his neck to Ilya. He had ripped the scent blocker patches off at some point, and Ilya feels that maybe he’s breathing all of him in, sweet like an omega.
So he likes that more than Ilya thought he would, Ilya thinks distantly. Shane was the one to ask for it, but part of Ilya wondered if he would actually enjoy it when the moment came. He wondered if the part of Shane that is an alpha would protest, get offended, rage against it.
But here they are, and Ilya says it again, and Shane’s dick twitches against his stomach, leaking enough that Ilya desperately wants to get his mouth on him right this instant. He looks blissed out and entirely lost in the sensation of Ilya everywhere he can feel.
Ilya thinks, Something to talk about later, maybe, and then focuses on making Shane come. Priorities.
It doesn’t last much longer for either of them. Shane finishes against his own stomach, Ilya’s hand wrapped around his dick, upwards and down, upwards and down, matching that rhythm with thrusts of his hips. Shane’s cry out sounds a little like Rozanov and a little like Ilya and a little like alpha and a little like I love you.
Only a moment later, Ilya’s hips stutter and he pulls out as fast as he can without hurting Shane. He jerks himself off hard and fast and groaning, his cum painting over Shane’s own cock.
Shane gives a weak moan at the sight, then shifts and reaches up to clasp the back of Ilya’s neck. He drags Ilya down into a messy kiss, pressing their two bodies together with their cum wet between them. He’ll wrinkle his nose and make them clean up momentarily, Ilya is sure, but right now, they just bask in the sounds of each other’s steadily calming breath.
When Shane scratches gently at the nape of Ilya’s neck, Ilya doesn’t bother to muffle the resulting hum that’s admittedly somewhat of a purr. But it’s okay. He’s safe here, and Shane loves him as he is.
Kissing the crown of his head, Shane murmurs it again into the curls of his hair. Yours, all yours. My alpha.
Ilya closes his eyes, breathing out his own affirmations—my omega—and his own prayers of devotion—sweetheart and mine, all mine and Shane—and his own honest love confessions. His words vibrate against the warmth of Shane’s bare chest. His love is there in the echo of his beating heart.
This is not something he ever thought he’d have. He’s never going to take it for granted. He’s going to hold onto it, hold onto it tight. Hold onto Shane, who is still figuring himself out probably and who Ilya will love with whatever conclusions he comes to, if any.
He will hold onto who he himself is, too; the person that loves his favorite people so deeply it digs into bone and the one whose body betrays him sometimes and the one who is brave enough to live through it. He will hold onto who he wants to be, and he will honor what he doesn’t want to be even as he lets go of it.
“I love you,” Ilya murmurs again, because as vulnerable as it feels to say, it feels powerful too. Meaningful. Even these words are not enough to encapsulate this feeling, but they’re close enough for now. “I love this. We should stay like this forever.”
Shane hums. “We have to clean up. Shower.”
Ilya snorts. He doesn’t open his eyes. “Ten more minutes.”
A soft sigh. Not an annoyed one, though. A content one, if anything. “Five. Deal?”
“Deal,” Ilya says, pressing a kiss right over Shane’s heart.
In this low of his chest, he can hear Shane give a soft hum, something like a purr. It’s brief, stuttered, like Shane is still figuring out how to make the sound. Ilya doesn’t call attention to it, doesn’t want to make a big deal out of something Shane is experimenting with. So he just buries his smile against Shane’s heartbeat, and hopes that it’s enough to make Shane understand everything he does not have the words for.
Shane makes that sound again, the low, contented vibration of a purr, and Ilya is sure he knows.