Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

(unlock Shane’s phone to see his Google search. Tap the screen, then enter his passcode: 615)

Summer 2017

Shane holds the warrior pose for another thirty seconds. Next, the yoga app will tell him to get into a high lunge, but he waits anyway. This is the closest he’ll get to anyone telling him what to do.

“When you’re ready, step your right foot forward into a high lunge, releasing your breath,” the soothing female voice instructs in his earbuds.

He moves through the lunge, folds forward, lets the app walk him into one last slow sun salutation, and then it’s time for savasana, the corpse pose. Shane lies down on the wooden deck off the back of the cottage, popping the earbuds out and into their case.

5:45 a.m. is the perfect time to do it. The sun has risen, but it isn’t summer-hot yet, which means no bugs swarming around and wrecking his concentration and his prana. No, around this time, he gets to soak in pleasant noises only: the breeze, the lake lapping at the rocks, morning sparrows whistling, even a loon every so often, way out over the water.

There’s a new sound, though. With his eyes still closed, Shane tracks it coming from the dark stand of pines along the road, the opposite direction from the lake, a deeper, but low rumbling. Still, infinitely more peaceful than a packed hockey arena.

Now, done with his breakfast and the full day ahead of him, Shane proceeds to pick a broom and a mop.

During his stay at the cottage, he’s he’s taken a genuine liking to chores. Mondays are for the kitchen, Tuesdays the bathrooms, Wednesdays laundry, Thursdays get a full gym clean up, and today is floors: sweep, then mop, then the vacuum for the rugs. There’s enough to do that keeps his body and, most importantly, his mind busy (especially after Hayden and the kids left, and every time Shane comes across a toy or crumbs of Oreo Cakesters, it’s like the prize at the end of a scavenger hunt).

But don’t be fooled—Shane makes sure his routine isn’t 100% boring. At 4:30 pm, he proceeds to his designated time for jerking off.

At first, he tried using his TV room for that purpose, but porn—proper gay porn, not the straight shit he once forced himself to watch—on a seventy-inch screen wasn’t doing it for him. Out in the open is out of the question because of the bugs, and the shower could be an option, if eight out of ten times he didn’t need something up his ass to actually finish. So he does it in his bedroom, legs spread, curtains open to the lush view in greens and blues, not exactly sexy but relaxing enough, and an optimal location to slip into the shower right after, staying on schedule to have dinner by 6 pm.

Fridays are for grilled salmon and vegetables, because on Saturdays he drives the half hour to the landfill—no curb collection this far from town—so the scraps won’t sit and stink in his compost bin for long. One episode and a half of Game of Thrones covers the digestion time—if all go as planned, which absolutely will, he’ll be all caught up in time for the seventh season. Dishes, done. Leftovers, done. Counters, done.

He catches the last of the light to carry the trash out to the garage. There’s no door from the house into the garage—thank God he doesn’t travel up here during winter—so he has to go out the front, around the side, and thumb the fob to lift the door. He brings the kitchen scissors to break down the cardboard, too. Done. There’s a sparkling thrill to it, having the final task completed, on time, no disruptions.

And then he hears it: a dragged thumping from the woods across the road, branches shuffling. It’s different from the deer that sometimes pick their way through at dusk, and certainly not raccoons. Can’t be the wind, either. It’s… slow. Heavy, even.

He holds out the scissors in front of him. Could it be a person? A stalker? An animal wouldn’t be so smart as to go silent and hide.

Shane never had these kinds of fans, nothing close to the disturbing stories Rose told him about, like the man who’d figured out which trailer was hers and started leaving photographs of her sleeping, the woman who turned up at her parents’ door in Michigan certain the two of them were secretly married. And besides, even the people Shane actually invited needed the address and a whole page of directions, only to still call him because they got lost. No, it’s virtually impossible that anyone could’ve found the place on their own.

A high-pitched whine at the edge of his ear snaps him out of the paralyzing fear, and he slaps the mosquito against a trickle of sweat running down the back of his neck.

Shane finds himself panting once he’s inside, leaning against the door—closed and locked, he checked thrice—behind him. The second half of the episode goes by without him paying attention, but skipping it to go to bed would mess with his sleep cycle and he’d rather drown in the lake before falling behind his self-imposed schedule of episodes.

Shane never noticed his bedroom door has a lock. He uses it for the first time tonight.

***

(unlock Shane’s phone to see his group chat. Tap the screen, then enter his passcode: 615. Scroll to see all messages)

Shane forgets to reply anything. He clicked the link, read through the article twice, and is now staring blankly at the photo at the top. They picked an older but good one this time, from when they won the Stanley Cup in 2014, Rozanov with his mouth open in a shout, looking insufferable and beautiful and stupidly alive.

He scrolls through his chats and finds it buried under months of other numbers. Lily. A humiliating cascade of one-sided messages in green, delivered, never read, and a whole bunch of missed calls dating back to January, when Rozanov didn’t show up for the All-Stars in Tampa.

They hadn’t talked since that time at the nightclub, each showing off the girls they were with. Shane thought he got the message: Ilya didn’t want to talk to him. And why would he? What was there to say, after that? Silence, even when, in the middle of some night in February, he sent the biggest text of all, reporting he and Rose broke up.

It wasn’t until March that the rest of the world caught up to what Shane had already been living with. Star of the Boston Bears, Ilya Rozanov, gone MIA. Teammates, friends, neighbours, no one had anything to report.

A small, sick and selfish and needy part of Shane believes this is all his fault, that Ilya bolted because Shane spent the winter parading a girlfriend around. But a bigger part, the mature part of Shane, knows the truth is simpler and worse: that he was never important enough to make a man like Ilya Rozanov run.

The app chirps with a soft chime of Tibetan singing bowls. Corpse time is over, spent on everything except an empty mind.

Fridays are his second-favourite day of the week: it’s gardening time. Shane does the backyard before lunch then the sides first, leaving the front of the house for last. Changing the order already has him all fucked up, basically disoriented, because the mowing was calibrated—without him quite meaning to calibrate it—to finish exactly before lunch when the front got done second, and now the whole sequence runs long and overlaps with the hour he’s supposed to be eating, and the rest of the day tilts a few degrees off its axis and won’t sit right again no matter what he does. All because Shane Hollander, a twenty-six-year-old professional athlete, is scared.

He manages to finish the front strip, after all. He’s more tired than he should be at two in the afternoon, his lunch sitting wrong, the grass scalped and uneven where he rushed it, but he’s done it, and he’s still alive.

Last night must’ve been a product of his imagination. The Shining isn’t his favorite movie, and maybe he didn’t fully get whatever it was supposed to mean about the guy and the hotel, but the message was clear enough: spend too long alone in a big empty place and your own brain starts seeing things that aren’t there.

So when he kills the mower and hears the crack of branches from across the road, he takes a deep breath and ignores it at first. He thinks about Jack Nicholson’s deranged face through a door crack, and Shane absolutely refuses to end up like that.

Another crack. Then another, then another.

Shane knows that, if he looks over his shoulder, he won’t see anything, and as a bonus, it will confirm to himself that he’s officially gone mad.

A louder crack, this time, closer. Then a low, rumbling huff.

In the span of a few seconds, Shane makes a deal with himself: either he’s going to turn around, see nothing, and therefore force himself to find a psychiatrist for yesterday, or...

No, it’s the second option. Turning slowly, he confirms he isn’t crazy, but he’s about to die: past the trees, one heavy paw planted on the cracked pavement of the road, a bear stares back at him.

When he was ten or eleven, a conservation officer came to school for an assembly and explained what to do if you ever met one. Shane had learned that Ontario, mostly, only has black bears (skittish, more scared of humans than the other way around) and that the polar bears live way up north on the Hudson Bay coast where nobody he knew would ever go, and that the big brown grizzlies from the movies don’t live in Ontario at all. He’d learned to make himself big, make noise, never run, never play dead. Ten-year-old Shane had thought seeing a bear would be pretty cool. Ten-year-old Shane was stupid.

Adult Shane is petrified. A forward player could fire a puck right into Shane’s chest and it would just ricochet off of him, like he’s the very goal post. Is he even supposed to be looking the beast in the eyes? Would holding the stare establish dominance, or just piss it off? Shane has never been good at dominance. His sexual personality, it turns out, says a lot more about him than he ever thought.

This could be a good thing, though. Dying young, especially in this tragic a form, only means he’ll be immortalized at his peak. His money would go to his parents, to a couple of charities they’d pick in his memory, something for Asian kids in sports. He’d never have to think about staying at the top of his game, or about pleasing sponsors, or about Ilya Rozanov’s lips on his neck ever again.

Maybe one hundred minutes while Shane plays his entire funeral out in his head, wondering whether the headlines would run one of the Cup photos, or the old rookie-of-the-year shot. Maybe actual full five minutes pass, and the bear does… nothing.

Shane takes one step back, then another, and still nothing, just big brown eyes following his movements. Imagining things isn’t off the table yet, because Shane has the distinct impression that the bear gives him a once-over—a slow, almost judgmental but slightly hungry look—as he reaches the last few steps to the door.

***

If changing the order of his chores made Shane feel unmoored, three days without getting off makes him feel genuinely deranged.

It’s not the lack of trying; it’s already 4:55 pm of the Monday, his bed sheets are cool under his bare skin, and he even splurged on the lube, two fingers gliding in and out of his hole with ease, and still, his dick won’t get past half-hard. All because he can’t fucking concentrate on the task with the curtains closed.

He didn’t tell anyone about the bear sighting (his mom would’ve flipped) but the new hyperfixation has fully replaced his assigned TV time, and he’s learned that, while bears are not seen often in the region, they aren’t dangerous. Shane should have no problem enjoying the—he glances at the nightstand clock, it’s now 4:58 p.m.—remaining 18 minutes with himself, if it weren’t for the fact that he kept spotting the bear for days in a row now: from the kitchen window while he’s cooking, from the couch after turning off all the lights for the night; on Sunday, it was even just sitting out in the road like it was waiting for a bus. Like, what the fuck.

Which is why the curtains stay closed now. Which is why he’s lying here at half-mast like a teenager.

But in all seriousness now. Shane needs to come. Not even for the orgasm-induced release of endorphins or dopamine or whatever, but because he cannot survive one more day where the missing fifteen minutes throws off the shower that throws off dinner that throws off the whole back half of the evening, which ends, every single night now, with him facedown in his phone catching up on the news. Hockey news. Hockey news about hockey players and their whereabouts. Eight months since Shane last saw him.

Shane’s dick throbs. He’s finally hard.

Fuck that. He jolts off the bed, crosses to the window, hauls the curtains open, and doesn’t even lie back down—one hand braced flat against the floor-to-ceiling window, the other working himself frantically, hopelessly even, until he paints the glass in ropes of come. The world snaps back onto its axis.

The relief passes instantly, though. When Shane opens his eyes, legs still trembling, he sees the bear between the trees across the road, looking up, watching him.

***

It should’ve been obvious from all the research: an animal, any animal, that hangs around a house, that noses through the trash and all, does it because it’s hungry. Primal instincts: find food, find shelter, don’t die. (Well, there’s no research on why an animal would be watching a man through his own windows like he’s daytime television. Or like porn, in Shane’s case. But anyway.)

Shane understands it, though. He’s nothing but a human with a house, planted right in the middle of the woods where the bear is supposed to live. He’s invading the bear’s space, not the other way around. He feels guilty, even.

On the same evening of his little voyeuristic moment, Shane digs the biggest thing he can find out of the freezer: a slab of beef ribs he’d meant to grill when Hayden’s family was up. Then he leaves it out at the edge of the yard.

Wouldn’t that just teach the bear there’s a guy at this house who hands out free meat, you may ask? Sure. Which is exactly why Shane has concocted A Plan: each day, he’ll set the food a little farther from the house, drawing the beast off the front lawn and back toward the bigger expanse of the woods maybe, until the bear stops coming anywhere near him at all.

Shane hasn’t felt that smart in years. Who’s boring now?

***

Shane feels fucking stupid.

In the morning, in his yoga attire, he finds the beef ribs covered in flies, and upon a closer look, gnawed at the edges by what must have been a small mouth—raccoons, maybe, definitely not a bear. A bear who, right now, is lying down on the other side of the road, front paws stretched out ahead of it like a dog settling in for a nap, blinking slow and serene at Shane.

“Not a fan of beef, are you?” Shane asks, rhetorically of course, and politely, obviously. The last thing he wants is a quarter-ton animal coming at him because he called it “picky” and it somehow understands him, like Shane is Snow White or Cinderella or something.

Shane feels the brown eyes on him as he picks the rotting piece off the ground with a garbage bag and carries it to the garage. Shane keeps his eyes down until he gets back inside the house.

At 4:31 pm, Shane busts a heavy load in the shower.

The 44 minutes he’s earned are spent scavenging his pantry. There are granola bars, ground coffee, and… jackpot: six tins of canned tuna, shoved to the back of the second shelf.

Before coming to the cottage, roaming the aisles at Costco, Shane thought he’d crave tuna melts during his stay. He hasn’t managed to bring himself to make them once without feeling fucking miserable.

There’s a whole loaf of almost-stale Dempster’s white bread that Hayden brought for the kids, two days from its expiry date, that Shane is never going to eat anyway.

“Do… bears… eat… bread,” he searches, and finds that, yeah, bears are supposed to happily eat everything and anything. Well, it isn’t the case of his bear—not his his, but the one that’s, like, his neighbour—so he might as well put out as many options of food as possible and see what actually bites.

After dinner and just three-quarters of an episode of Game of Thrones (not even the shirtless Dothraki men are holding his attention), Shane sets a baking tray on the front lawn, a pile of tuna and the entire loaf torn up beside it, with a frost-welded block of broccoli. Then he checks four times that his bedroom door is locked before going to bed.

In the morning, Shane finds the tray licked clean at his doorstep. Sleepy eyes stare from between the trees.

***

(unlock Shane’s phone to see his messages. Tap the screen, then enter his passcode: 615. Scroll to see all messages)

Chewing on the drawstring of his hoodie, Shane closes the chat and promises himself he'll never open it again. Just like he promised the last five hundred times.

On days like today, cloudy and windy, the mist sits so low on the water you can’t see the far side of the lake. He’s done three days’ worth of chores after his indoor yoga session (then he’ll absolutely freak out about all the empty slots in his schedule for the rest of the week, but that’s a problem for Future Shane) but at least, for now, he feels a little less guilty about rotting on the couch and doom-scrolling.

In the background, he’s got YouTube on all afternoon. He’s watched something like nine hours of bear content in two days, and his algorithm keeps delivering more. He didn’t know black bears can run thirty miles an hour, or climb a tree faster than a squirrel. He didn’t know the white Kermode bear out in British Columbia is born that colour and isn’t a polar bear at all. If anything, all this knowledge makes him like Canada a little more.

Though, he’s yet to find a single thing explanation for the one detail that keeps nagging on him: bear sizes. An adult male should be two-eighty, maybe three hundred pounds, black mostly, sometimes cinnamon. And yet, he’s pretty sure that his friendly, famished visitor isn’t the right size for the only bear that’s supposed to be out here, much less the right colour. On a sunny day, he got a glimpse and the beast’s fur looked almost like a shade of dark blond.

A rumbling roar echoes outside, and then, it comes down at once.

First, the lights and the TV flicker and die out. Then the hail banging against the glass gets louder and louder, and the height of the ceiling and the open concept don’t help, either, the echo more annoying and claustrophobic by the second. Having more glass than solid wood for a house seems like the single worst architecture idea ever had by mankind. Shane likes Canada a little bit less now.

Shane knows he shouldn’t think about it, that there’s nothing to worry about, that evolution or some shit has nature functioning even in conditions a lot harsher than this. He. Shouldn’t. Think. About. It.

And yet, before it even occurs to him to check whether the generator’s kicked in, whether the modem or the fridge are coming back up, Shane darts across the room to the front door and hauls it open. A gust of wind nearly knocks him off balance, and the heavy rain soaks him from head to socks in a matter of seconds.

It’s exactly the worst he expected: across the road, the bear is hunched at the base of a big tree, flinching under the hail, now surely almost looking dark brown, almost black with his coat wet. The tree above it is bent way over in the wind, splitting up the trunk. Crack. Crack. Crack.

It’s official: Shane has gone completely mad. He knows that. He’s aware of it happening in real time, and… he does not care. He’ll never be able to explain to anyone, ever, least of all himself, why he steps back, holds the door wide, and waves one arm out like he’s trying to get a cab.

“Come on,” he shouts over the storm. “Come on! Here! Pst pst!”

Now Shane has a fucking wild bear all soaked and dripping in the middle of his living room.

And the bear is bleeding.