Chapter Text
“Ilya?”
A disheveled but cozy Shane stood in the morning light of their cottage kitchen, hair mused from sleep and wearing just boxers and one of Ilya’s old Boston shirts. Ilya couldn’t believe that he got to spend the rest of his life with this man. Shane stood there chewing on his bottom lip and looking at his phone.
“Yes Text with Creator's Style turned off?"
Ilya sleepily saundered up to where Shane stood.
“What’s this Dykstra put in the group chat about a canoe trip?”
Ilya sighed “It started out as a ‘team bonding’ thing, but now it’s just an excuse for the guys who don’t have responsibilities in the summer to get drunk in the woods.”
Shane’s brow furrowed. “How come you’ve never gone?”
“Why would I have spent any of my summers away from you?” Ilya murmured, sliding his arms around Shane’s waist and kissing his cheek. Shane frowned.
“We could have gone last summer?”
“Shanya, after the year we had, I think we needed to just be at home alone.”
Shane nodded, letting Ilya envelop him for a moment until he perked up. “Okay, well, we are going this year!”
“Shane, you do not want to go,” Ilya whined. “You don’t like going to these long group things.”
“I’ve been going to more this year, and I think I would enjoy it since it sounds like it’s a smaller group. Right now, it just looks like Dykstra, Wyatt, Troy, and some of the kids.”
“Okay, well, you will not like being outside for so long. No showers, sticky humidity, lots of bugs.”
“I was a scout until I was 12, Ilya. I loved it. I only stopped for hockey.”
“You are so picky about your sleep, You would be so cranky after one night!”
“Ilya, we spend half the year sleeping in different bad hotel rooms every night.” Shane turned in his arms to face him. “I can sleep anywhere with you.”
Ilya resists the urge to melt at that, avoiding Shane's big doe eyes staring up at him. He was quickly losing this argument. He huffed as a response, calculating his next retort. Shane beat him to it.
“Ilya, are you deflecting because YOU don’t want to go?” The brown eyes Ilya folded for every time narrowed, flashing from pleading to suspicious in an instant. “C’mon, it would be so nice to just be in real nature for a bit.”
Okay, fine. Ilya did not want to go. As much as he loved their team, he did not want to share his precious summertime with Shane paddling around a lake like some kind of 1800s fur trader. And frankly, he did not want to find out what constituted “real” nature in Shane’s mind. Their cottage, albeit a luxury compound, still was far more wild and remote than anything else he had ever experienced.
“Why do we need to drive five hours for nature? We have nature right here!” He motioned out the window. “Besides” he dropped his voice and worked his hands up Shane’s hips, pulling out his last ditch effort. “I cannot fuck you day in and day out on stupid canoe trip.”
“I’m sure you can get innovative,” Shane said flatly, unamused by Ilya’s distraction tactic, and typing a response back.
Fuck. Ilya was going on a four night canoe trip.
Ilya knows this routine. Shane will get a wisp of an idea in his head and minute by minute it takes root, growing rapidly until it takes over their lives. In the weeks that follow, Shane becomes all consumed. Ilya wakes to him scrolling Reddit threads, comparing and contrasting sleeping mats. As they work out, Shane watches YouTube video after YouTube video of people talking to cameras for 45 minutes about water filters. And then the packages start arriving. Ilya truly could not comprehend how many packages they seemed to need for a five day trip. Once the last package came, Shane was practically skipping with excitement as he laid all of their gear out across the back deck so he could see it.
”Shane, why do we need aloe gel, Benadryl gel, AND calamine lotion? Is neosporin not enough? And what is this?” Ilya picked up a small bright orange walkie-talkie.
Shane huffed. “One is for sunburns, one is for rashes, and one is for bug bites. And that’s an SOS device since we won’t have reliable cell service. It pairs with my watch, see?”
Ilya had no idea what he was looking at on the tiny screen of Shane’s fitness tracker, but was wary of learning there was a chance they would need to send out an SOS signal.
“Okay, but this is one week, we are not climbing Everest!”
“It’s an investment, Ilya. If this is an annual trip, we might as well have high quality stuff that will last. Besides, since we started cutting back on sponsorships, I want to backpack more.”
Ilya fought back the protest that would reveal just how horrified he was at the idea of more than one week a year being spent surviving off of the strange inflatable pads and eating out of the contraptions that slowly piled up in the guest room.
“You, Shane Hollander-Rozanov, want to start backpacking?”
Shane nodded eagerly. “I used to go all the time with my dad. I really miss it.” He looked off longingly, as if David was long lost and not just 10 minutes up the road. Ilya ignored the twinge in the chest of a childhood he did not have, and admitted to himself that a boys trip with David could be fun. He didn’t know why they had to backpack for it though.
Ilya has lost track of how many times he’s heard Shane use the word “ultralight” in the last month. Therefore, he almost pulled a muscle when he reached down casually to test the bag Shane packed for him four days before they left.
“Shane, did you put our entire house in here? What were all those packages for?”
Shane was unamused. “You can pick me up without breaking a sweat, Rozanov. You absolutely can carry that backpack.”
“It‘s all your doomsday prepping,” Ilya muttered. “I bet we only use a third of the things in here.”
Shane ignored him, and instead started lecturing him on the wonders of proper strap tension.
Ilya woke slowly and painfully the morning of the trip. Actually, woke is generous, he thought to himself, watching Shane bounce around their room upon returning from his morning routine. Were they up late because Ilya was determined to make sure they did everyyyything they couldn’t do for the next four days? Maybe. Were they up an extra half an hour because Ilya tried to tell Shane everything else he could do to him if they stayed home? Probably. Was his sleep interrupted no less than four times by Shane practically vibrating all night, tossing and turning, suddenly sitting up to grab his phone, just for Ilya to roll over and see him googling things like “Quebeque July wet bulb 2020-2023” and “Témiscamingue Regional County Municipality Moose calves”? Most definitely.
”Maybe no phone will be good for you,” Ilya groans, as he’s jolted awake at 3 am by Shane accidentally clicking on a video narrating 5 knots I used on my sea kayak traverse of the Saint Laurence Seaway—a new interest Shane had recently stumbled upon that Ilya feared would bloom into an additional hobby by the time next season started.
”Sorry, baby,” Shane whispered, setting his phone down and scratching Ilya’s matted curls. Ilya almost slipped back to sleep at the soothing gesture, until Shane left the bed.
”Hollander, where the hell are you going?”
“I can’t sleep and we were going to be up in two hours, so I might as well get my run in,” Shane whispers. “I’ll leave you alone now so you can sleep.”
Ilya’s brain was far too foggy to object that the only thing that would make his last night in his own bed worse was the lack of his husband-sized body pillow, but the exhaustion in his brain could only force out a pathetic whine into the mattress as Shane slipped out of the room. With Anya already delivered to her grandparents the night before, Ilya was entirely alone.
Although the last two hours of false sleep stretched long, the chime of Ilya’s alarm still came too soon. It was only after hearing the whir of Shane’s blender that he forced himself up, telling himself that if he made them late, his current pitch to stop at McDonald’s would be overruled by whatever concoction Shane was stirring up.
Ilya’s respectable rising of 10 minutes before they were scheduled to leave, combined with the convincing way he draped himself over Shane like a sloth as Shane finished his own breakfast, seemed to be enough, and he felt marginally better as he pulled the last of his caramel macchiato from the straw as they parked in the arena parking lot.
“Morning, Ilya!” A cheerful Harris called, already helping Shane load their bags from their trunk into a sprinter van.
Ilya returned the greeting with a grunt. Harris, needing to be wary of his heart, was not able to commit to four days of an intensive upper body workout in the July sun. Instead, he had happily offered to chauffeur them up to their launch spot, wait on standby at his cousin’s cottage in the area, and be prepared to collect them in case of bad weather.
”Woah, Hollzy,” Wyatt Hayes said, walking up to them with a single neatly-packed backpack. “Are these the new Windrider 2.0 Hyperlight Mountains? These aren’t supposed to be in stores yet, how did you get your hands on two of them?” Wyatt admired the seemingly-flimsy bags Shane was pulling from the car.
Ilya’s annoyance at the previous chipperness softened when he watched his husband grow embarrassed.
“Um…”
”It’s because he’s an influencer,” Harris called. “He was telling me about how bad he wanted them for this trip, and I told them I’d reach out to the brand to see if they’d let him and Ilya get samples.”
“I tried to pay them,” Shane protested. “I even offered more for the inconvenience!”
“Y’know, Shane, for all the trouble you go through for being in the public eye, you never reap the benefits of it,” Harris laughed. “They would have sent you their entire warehouse if you let them. I think if you asked they’d pay YOU to use their stuff as long as you just posted about it.”
”I know how brand ambassadorships work, Harris, I’ve had them my whole career,” Shane huffed. “I just don’t think a hiking backpack company is looking to break into the hockey market.”
“No, but an outdoor-appreciative athlete with a huge queer following? A backpacking company couldn’t ask for a better person!”
Shane furrowed his brow. “What does being gay have to do with backpacking?”
Wyatt laughed “Have you ever been inside an REI? It’s like a U-Haul frequent flyer club in there.”
“Wyatt, are you allowed to make lesbian jokes?” Young asked, the first of the kids to roll out of Holmberg’s tricked out minivan he carted them around in for the sake of “intentional community.” How they were hurting for community when they worked together and lived together, despite all of them being millionaires, Ilya was unsure. With Luca Haas in Switzerland for the month, it seemed the intentional community this morning was just the trio of roommates’ coffee run.
Wyatt shrugged. “My sister’s a lesbian and said my jokes are funny, so unless any of the queer council here would like to object, I think so.”
They all turned expectantly to Harris, Ilya, and Shane. Shane still seemed like he was trying to puzzle out how they went from REI to lesbians, while Ilya shrugged. “No problem with me, but U-haul is low-hanging fruit.”
“I think it’s funny!” Harris giggles. “Troy’s already in the van but I doubt he will be the sole objection.”
Young fist bumps the air. “Lesbian jokes it is then!” He proceeded to pull a very, very worn school backpack from Holmberg’s car and began to stuff an empty duffle bag with three grocery bags full of supplies. Ilya watched Shane eye the situation, and decided he didn’t need to be there for another lesson in proper weight distribution and optimized carrying materials.
Ilya pulled himself into the van, settling down behind where Troy sat shotgun.
“Oh no.” Troy groaned. “Absolutely not”
Ilya dramatically looked around the van, confirming they were the only two in there.
“Good morning, Ilya, captain that leads my team to victory, closest confidant, and orchestrator of my beautiful relationship,” Ilya started. “How are you this morning? Why thank you for asking Troy, my brother from another mother. I am sleepy because my husband is insane but I am okay. How are you?”
“Sorry, man,” Troy said sheepishly. “It’s just if you sit there, Shane will sit next to you, and if Shane sits next to you he will be right by Harris, and if he sits by Harris those two morning people will yap the whole way there and then that will be the last time I have with my boyfriend for the next five days.”
Ilya smiled to himself in understanding, suddenly more than happy to climb back a few rows. Never did he think he’d see the day that someone would preventively plan around his wallflower of a husband talking too much, but he was so proud of the way Shane had integrated into the Centaurs. The first year was hard for sure, coming off of the trauma of their outing, Shane coming into a new room of people who all knew each other better, and said room trying to adjust to the idea of Shane fucking Hollander there with them suddenly. After a lot of bonding, and frankly a lot of therapy, Ilya had started learning an entirely new side of Shane that he previously only caught glimpses of.
As the van filled up, Shane settled himself next to Ilya. Ilya immediately curled up on his shoulder, losing the battle with his lack of sleep. At some point an indeterminate amount of time later, he momentarily drifted awake to find Shane passed out on top of him, also apparently not immune to the night his excitement caused. Ilya fully awoke hours later to see they had left civilization, bouncing along a two track road that he was frankly shocked the van could handle. The road was walled on either side by soaring trees, and Harris frequently had to yield to turkey and deer crossings. At one point, they stopped at a shack that looked like it would blow over at a moment’s notice for a whitefish lunch, but otherwise made good time to the canoe outfitter.
Everybody buzzed with anticipation as the shop attendant walked them through proper safety procedures and explained how to portage. Ilya was indignant to learn that apparently "canoeing" included walking their boats over dry land multiple times throughout the trip. Everyone else looked at him as if it was obvious what he was signing up for. Ilya pouted for the rest of the explanation, but found himself secretly grateful for Shane’s backpack weight obsession.
“Harris, are you sure you do not want company?” Ilya asked. “We could have our own bonding time.”
Harris frowned. “Ilya, you are more than welcome with me if you want, but are you sure?” Harris shot a glance at Shane.
Shane, trying very hard not to look crestfallen, was tying and untying the same shoe an absurd amount of times. Ilya felt his heart tug. He knew that if he asked at this moment, Shane would not force him to go through with anything Ilya did not want to. He wouldn’t even if it was something he spent all month preparing and planning and telling Ilya how excited he was to do it with him. Ilya knew that even as he was actively finding more reasons not to go and was already being eaten alive by bugs, he couldn’t do that to Shane.
“Ah I just worry you will miss me too much, Harris, but no,” Ilya said. “I worry Моя любовь will miss me more.”
Shane, finally satisfied with his shoelace, brought his eyes up to meet Ilya’s and gave him the softest smile. If Ilya died here, consumed down to the bone by horseflies but with Shane smiling at him like that, so be it.
Other than minor bickering amongst the kids about who got to pair up together (Holmberg, ever marginally more mature than the others, agreed to join Wyatt so Young could pair with LaPointe), they pushed off without fanfare in the mid afternoon. Ilya took the rear bench of his and Shane’s boat for the departure, and enjoyed the view of his husband’s muscular back flexing as he steadily paddled them through the calm water. Everybody was in good spirits, and Ilya did his best to shelve his apprehension as he watched how happy and in his element Shane instantly seemed. They paddled for a short few hours for their first day, going just far enough to get them out of the path of cottages and motorboats and into some of the smaller waterways.
They shored at a nice clearing as the sun was setting, and everyone began preparing for dinner. Ilya watched in fascination as some of the guys assembled contraptions that lit flames out of fuel canisters. Some held traditional pots over them, but Shane was screwing a thermos directly onto his contraption.
“Do we not cook over a campfire?” Ilya asked. He was starting to realize just how little of the prep he comprehended.
“No, firewatch is too high in the summer, and this is an old-growth forest,” Shane said. “There’s a fire ban for anything besides these camp stoves.”
Ilya thought “stove’ was quite the stretch for what he was seeing, but Shane had already gotten the water he was boiling to a steady roll. He produced four big pouches reading “pad thai,” and, much to Ilya's horror, just poured the boiling water directly into the freeze dried contents and then let them sit.
“Text with Creator's Style turned off…are you feeding me astronaut food?”
“They are camp meals, Ilya,” Shane said, completely focused on stirring the contents of the bag. “They are the easiest way to have a lot of food, and we can make sure we are getting enough protein and calories for all-day exertion.”
Ilya felt the last of his forced optimism of the week drain out of him as he considered a whole trip of rehydrated vegetables.
“Shane, light of my life, please tell me this is not the only food we have for the next four days.”
“No Ilya, we have all sorts of ones. There is a mac ‘n’ cheese one, chicken chorizo and rice, bolognese, and a few more. Oh! There is a pizza pepperoni bowl one, you’ll like that. And I have instant oatmeal for breakfast.”
Ilya stared at him.
“We have snacks too! Protein bars, dried fruit, trail mix, apples, all sorts of stuff.”
Ilya looked longingly at the kids, who had somehow rigged their stove to shoot the flame straight up, and were pulling hotdogs out of a costco 50-pack and roasting them, much to Ilya’s amusement. They seemed to have enough to go around; maybe he could convince them to share.
“Guys, why do you have so many hot dogs,” Wyatt asked, surveying the scene.
“They have so many preservatives in them that they should probably be fine for the few days after the ice in Pointy’s cooler melts, and it felt like the best investment,” said Young, as if the answer was a no-brainer.
Shane froze his stirring, and Ilya watched him decide whether to tell the kids off or puke.
“Right, so an investment is, like, property or stocks” Wyatt started. “Hollzy could probably help you but recently I’ve been investing in collectable figurines from this 1960’s series–”
“Have you considered that we are just investing in our love of hotdogs?” LaPoint said proudly, cutting him off.
“I would love if you all would invest in not getting food poisoning when we are so far from civilization,” said Wyatt, walking away from them towards Shane and Ilya.
Shane shot him a weathered look. “I have more than enough of these for them,” he said motioning at the pouches, “but I think we let them live with this for the first day or two.”
When Ilya eventually dug into his instant pad thai with a ridiculously long double-ended spork Shane handed him, he was pleasantly surprised by it, though he was still suspicious of the concept of a freeze dried and bagged pepperoni pizza bowl. As they finished dinner, Shane started packing all of their food and utensils into a dry bag from his seemingly endless supplies. Ilya didn’t think much of it until he saw the rest of the group performing the same ritual. He watched in fascination as they all stood at the same time, wordlessly handing them off when Shane motioned for them.
Ilya followed as Shane carried the bags away from the campsite. After wandering for a bit, Shane studied a tree, and then proceeded to pull paracord from his pocket. He knotted a carabiner to one end, and then took a few attempts to toss it up over a high branch. After hooking all the bags to the carabiner, he created a makeshift pulley, hoisting the bags far up off the ground. As Shane busied himself tying the rest of the cord around the trunk of the tree, Ilya let curiosity get the better of him.
”Are you afraid our oatmeal will run away?” He asks, making Shane jump.
“No, Ilya” Shane rolled his eyes. “It’s for bears”
Ilya’s blood ran cold. “Bears?”
”Yeah, we have to put the food away from camp and out of reach so bears and other critters can’t get into it. I wanted a bear vault but the guys said they just bag it since there are only black bears out here.”
Ilya swallows a dry lump, deciding he didn’t need to learn what a “bear vault” is tonight. “There are bears here?”
“Just black bears,” Shane repeated, as if that was enough information to smooth all of Ilya’s quickly-mounting worries before walking back to camp.
Ilya spent the walk back with Shane telling himself that if his clinically neurotic husband wasn’t worried, then there was no need for him to be. They returned to all the older guys unfurling their tents, as the kids wrestled with hammocks and bug nets.
“No, I’m telling you, man, we should triple stack them. It would be epic!” LaPointe said, pleading with his partners in crime.
“No way, Pointy,” Young argues. “You pee like four times every night—which you should probably get looked at by the way—and I’m not dealing with you falling on me in the dark. Just put your hammock way high and pretend we are under you.”
“I won’t feel your presence, man,” LaPointe whines. “Bergy? What about you?”
“Absolutley not, man, I’m not gonna let you crop dust me all night.” LaPointe pouts for all of five seconds, before attempting to ratchet his hammock straps as impossibly high as they could go.
“Pointy, if you fall and break your leg on the first night, I’m leaving you out here for the windigo,” Dykstra called. LaPointe looked to genuinely evaluate the likelihood of falling, and seemingly decided not to risk it as he shimmied his straps down the tree.
Ilya turned his attention to Shane, who was quickly assembling a tent.
“Can I do anything?” Ilya asked, attempting to pick up a pole before Shane swiped it from him.
“No, I got it, I’ve watched a lot of videos about the assembly. You can blow up our mat though,” Shane said, reaching into his backpack to hand Ilya a roll of something that was smaller than some water bottles Ilya owned. Ilya grimaced before unfurling it, finding the valve and beginning to inflate it.
“Oh my god, of course you have a two-person mat,” Dykstra chirped. “I swear if I hear you two have tent sex, I’ll kill you.”
”It is the sounds of the natural world, Dykskie,” Ilya said proudly. “It’s what we are in the woods for.”
Shane momentarily paused his setup, reddened, and Ilya forced a wicked grin into the mat he continued to inflate. One of his favorite parts of married life was prodding at the exhibition kink he long-suspected Shane had, and Ilya knew for a fact that challenging Shane to not get caught would make the next few days more exciting for him personally.
Exhausted from their first day though, they collapsed into their bedding as soon as it was set up without any extracurriculars. Ilya pulled Shane into a little spoon the second they were horizontal. As the forest settled around them, quiet save for an occasional familiar loon call, Ilya let comfort wash over him.
The first night Ilya had spent with Shane at the cottage, Shane had left the windows open for a pleasant cross breeze. Ilya had no hope of sleeping that night either, unable to believe he had Shane asleep and wrapped around him. Ilya in Shane’s bed. Ilya in Shane’s home. He listened to the little puffs of Shane’s breathing, intermixing with the loons, the lapping lake, and the soft rustle of the leaves. He spent that night thinking of everything and nothing, of his conversation with Shane about his mother, of all the things he didn’t tell Shane. Of how close he came to not even sitting with Shane around the fire that night.
“This is nice, it’s like our back deck,” a sleepy Shane murmured, reading Ilya’s mind. Ilya pressed a kiss into Shane’s hair, too tired to move his face back the minute he made contact. He fell asleep thinking about how that wide-awake version of Ilya didn’t know it at the time, but that night was the first day of the rest of his life.