Chapter Text
It started, as many things in Ilya's life have, with a chirp.
"Tell me, was getting Hollander's dick in your ass worth blowing up your whole career?" Peterson sneered quietly at Ilya during the tension of the face off. Ilya was not even sure why he kept it quiet, many of the referees did not care enough about homophobic chirps to police them. They hadn't cared when Ilya was closeted, why would they care when the comments were true?
Except, it wasn't true. Or at least, he did not actually know how Shane would fuck him. How he would look, or how it would feel.
Ilya was forced to swallow down a chirp, something he hated with a passion. But lying and responding with the first thing that came to mind, a "He fucks like a Stanley Cup champion, something I am sure your wife wishes she could say," felt wrong. If felt off in a way that Ilya did not have time to examine at the face-off line.
He instead had to chirp back, "Why do you ask? You are jealous, yes? Or just considering options for your career?"
The puck dropped before Peterson could get over his sputtering. Ilya won the face-off, but the thought simmered in the back of his mind through the rest of the period, then the locker room, the post-game interviews, and into the drive home afterwards.
----
Shane drove, unsurprisingly, like it was a test he needed to pass. Once they were living together in Ottawa on the same team, and driving to the same places together regularly, it quickly became obvious to Ilya that it was not worth dealing with the backseat driving comments about speed limits, turn signals, and the proper length of time to stop at a stop sign so that Ilya could be the one behind the wheel. He still drove his cars on nice days outside, or his boring car when they went places separately, but at this point in their relationship he tended to go without much complaint to the passenger seat. It was much easier, and saved many arguments, to simply let Shane be the one to drive them when the two of them were going somewhere together.
Even if the other Centaurs now liked to joke that marriage had turned Ilya into a "passenger princess." Ilya pretended to protest, and certainly had protested quite a bit in the beginning, but in all honesty, there was something about the setup that made him feel a flicker of warmth in his chest. The dedication to keeping both of them safe, and the natural way they now slid into their respective seats, it all was a visible sign of their marriage. It made Ilya feel cared for, which gave him a squirming, soft feeling that he did not examine too closely.
This is all to say, that Shane was driving when Ilya, after hours of turning the idea over in his head stated, "I would like for you to fuck me. In the ass."
The car swerved.
In complete defiance of his firm rule of "eyes on the road at all times, Ilya, there are deer," Shane turned his head to look at Ilya with wide eyes.
"Uh... ok? Yes, if you want, but, what brought this on?" Shane swallowed, returned his eyes to the road with some effort. "I mean, we kind of have a.. thing... at this point, one that you seem really happy with. And there's nothing wrong with that! Or with trying it the other way! I like our, uh, arrangement but if you want to, like, switch things up, if you are bored-"
Ah, his sweet, overthinking husband. Ilya gently took one of Shane’s hands off the wheel and held it between his. "Of course I am not bored, I could fuck you for a 100 years and not get bored. I could quit hockey to take up fucking you full time and I would still be grateful everyday to do it. I was just... thinking."
Shane blinked, "Thinking? About bottoming?"
"Yes, during the game."
"During the game?!"
Ilya smirked, "And the interview afterward."
Shane flushed for a moment, pink drowning out the stark contrast of his freckles on his skin momentarily. "The game made you think about bottoming?"
"Da, well, really Peterson did."
The look that crossed Shane's face was complex, starting somewhere around shock and ending firmly in the land of disgust.
Ilya hastened to clarify, "Something he said at the face-off. Very unoriginal chirp, quite lazy actually. But it got me thinking. He spoke about you fucking me, and my first thought was to tell him how good it was, but we have never actually done that. I don’t know how it would feel for us to do that. And I hate to not be able to shut up assholes, but it felt wrong, I think? To lie and pretend."
Shane paused. Then, with deliberate slowness, he said, "Let me get this straight. You want to bottom... so you can chirp better?"
"Well it is not very straight, that is kind of point, yes?"
Shane took a deep, long-suffering breath.
Ilya took a moment to order his thoughts more. The truth was, there was a part of him that squirmed in discomfort at the thought of changing their dynamic. A voice that sounded suspiciously like his father, going, "Russians do not do this."
Ilya had not cared what Russians do or do not do for some time now. He had in fact done many things Russians do not do, with the most prominent example being Shane Hollander. And he was at the point in what Galina liked to call, "his healing journey" that when he thought of what his father would have said about something, he now tried to do the opposite.
Another thing he was trying to improve through his "healing journey" was communication so he picked his next words carefully.
"It is stupid, yes? Whole world knows I love beautiful man now, I love beautiful man's cock in my mouth and I want it there everyday. They assume I put it other places already. But..."
"But...?"
Ilya opened his mouth. Closed it. The words were not there for him, just out of reach. For all that he was the one suggesting it, he was not actually sure how he felt about this. Or at the very least, he had an idea of what he felt, and he did not like it. He was obviously not straight, a fact the world at large knew very well at this point and which he felt no shame over. Yet, this felt like a step, one that he had never had the confidence, or the trust in someone, to examine before now. He would never think any less of Shane, or any other man for bottoming, but to imagine himself in that position...
It felt like carving himself open. Like stepping on a ledge and hoping a gust of wind wouldn't push him over. He didn't have the words, but he knew the feeling after a decade of hiding.
Fear had always made Ilya want to be defiant. To push. Even when what he was pushing against was himself.
"I want to do everything with you. To try everything. I do not want anything to hold me back from embracing you."
Shane risked another glance over, let out a breath, slightly shaky. It matched the small, borderline imperceptible shake in Ilya's hands to anyone who had not spent a decade attuning themself to his body, his heart.
"And also, you would be my first, yes?"
The car swerved again.
----
Shane put his foot down after that and demanded any other conversation about fucking Ilya happened when they were home and not driving at 80 kilometers per hour through woods filled with suicidal deer.
After they walked through the door, and gave a happy Anya all the requisite pats and scritches to show they really were home and had not left forever, Shane spoke again.
"Ok. Let's do this."
Ilya raised an eyebrow and lifted a hand to the hem of his shirt.
Shane threw his hands up quickly, as if to defend himself from the sight of his husband getting naked. "Not now! I need time to prepare. To get ready."
"Prepare? You need to study for this? What, have we not fucked enough in the past decade for you to understand how it works?"
Shane flushed again, "Yes, but that was from the other side. And I was a bit distracted at the time. And it's not like I haven't topped before, but those times were always with women, and they were uh, not great?"
Ilya smiled smugly. Did he like to think about his husband having bad sex with other people? No, not particularly. But he did like the reminder that Shane was his. That he was different from anyone else Shane had been with before. Better.
Shane breathed for a moment, gathered his courage, then stepped close to Ilya. With a confidence he did not feel, he placed his hands on Ilya's hips.
"I want to make sure I am good at this. I want to make it good for you."
Ilya's breath caught. For a moment, with the weight of Shane's hands on his hips, and his head dipped slightly to stare into Ilya's eyes with a heat unlike he had seen before, Ilya felt... different. Not quite small, he was taller and Ilya had not felt small in a long, long time. But he felt held, like Shane was cupping his heart between his palms. This was not an unfamiliar feeling to Ilya, but it had never felt quite like this before. Like all he had to do was let himself be held in Shane’s gaze and in his hands.
For the first time, the slightly detached musings he had been pondering since the face-off took a different shape. They transformed, became slightly more real. A flame of desire touched a paper thin urge in him that he did not realize he had, and that urge started to burn.