Chapter Text
Today was moving day.
Ilya was vacating his luxury Ottawa condo and moving into the house Shane had purchased, several years prior, first as an investment, which turned into a passion-project renovation, and would now become their forever home.
Shane had been planning for this particular day for over two months, since before the ink was dry on his new contract with the Ottawa Centaurs.
He’d been planning for this change, as a whole, since before he even knew he was planning for it.
It was another step forward in his relationship with Ilya Rozanov. He’d taken a pay cut of just over a million dollars a year, which he’d justified, on a spreadsheet, naturally, by the reduced commute expenditures, automotive wear-and-tear and combined living expenses.
Shane had been ruminating on the reality of this day, and the subsequent settling into a new life together since they’d made the decision, before the contract was signed. He’d moved into full obsession, shortly after a single conversation, on the dock at the cottage, three weeks before the move, when they were still in the midst of off-season, but pre-season was approaching quicker than they’d like to admit.
"Ilya." Shane started, as if he was testing the ice on a lake. "If you're moving in with me, actually moving in, and you’re here, who's packing your stuff?"
"Is handled," Ilya said, not opening his eyes, still laid out on the dock.
"Handled how, Ilya, that's not an answer, that's…"
"Is handled," Ilya said again, cutting Shane off, calmly.
"You still have a house in Boston, right? The one that you never fully vacated. Still full of things, I presume. And the penthouse here, the one you've actually been living in the whole time you've played for Ottawa. Also full of shit, and god knows what and not… I don't know, nothing. Someone has to pack all of that. Someone has to decide what comes to the new Ottawa house and what doesn't. And if it doesn’t go to the house, where does it go?"
"Shanushka. Will figure out."
"How do we even know what fits? There's two full closets, Ilya, his-and-his, I had it built that way on purpose… but I built it guessing, I didn't have an actual inventory to work from, and you own…" Shane gestured, broadly, the measurement of Ilya’s belongings, being more of a concept than anything else.
"Will fit," Ilya said, completely confidently, even though Shane was pretty sure he’d never actually looked at any of the specs Shane had sent him.
"That's not a plan. That is the absence of a plan. The opposite of a plan."
Ilya cracked one eye open, found Shane's face, and smiled. "Shane. Trust me. I have moved before. Is not first time for me. Okay?"
"You moved from the Boston house into a furnished rental, Ilya, a bachelor pad that came with half the furniture already in it. This is different. This is combining an entire life with mine, and I would like, at minimum, to have some idea of what's coming, what to expect."
"Fine," Ilya said, sitting up properly for the first time, pulling out his phone. "I will tell you what I know. There are movers. Trucks?” Which was phrased halfway between a question and a statement. “I sent a voice memo about it, to the person who handles these things, last week."
"You sent a voice memo about our move. To the person who handles these things. Who handles these things?" Shane cocked his head, trying to wrap his mind around the fact that there was now a third party involved.
"Is not important right now," Ilya said, waving his hand, and then continued scrolling. "Two voice memos, actually. Should be fine." He frowned slightly at his phone, like he was secretly doubting himself. "Also sent a photo of the house. From Zillow. Front of it. So movers know which door."
"You sent someone a photo of the front of the house so movers would know which door. From Zillow. From… when I purchased it four years ago?"
"Was helpful context, no?" He kept scrolling. "Some other things come separate. Different companies, for different… you know. I told her whenever works for everyone, she knows better than me about scheduling all of it."
"What other things?"
"Things, Shanushka," Ilya said again, in the exact same tone as before, and Shane understood that that would be the extent of the answer. "Also I think I said yes twice to something about the closet, maybe three times, was a long email, did not fully read all of it, seemed easier to just agree."
"You agreed to something about the closet without reading it."
"Was a long email," Ilya said, like the thought of the email exhausted him. "Had many attachments." He set the phone down as if he had given Shane all of the information and context he’d requested. "See? Is handled. Just, is handled by somebody else, mostly, and a little bit by whatever I remembered to say, in between other things."
Shane stared at him. This had, if anything, made things considerably worse. He had started this conversation hoping for a plan, a meeting of the minds, and a general idea of what to expect in the next few weeks, and instead received something that felt less like a plan and more like the raw, unsorted thoughts of a man who most certainly did not understand what a move like this entailed, and the new knowledge of the involvement of a possible third party whose role he still didn’t quite understand.
"Ilya, this is not a plan to move, this is a series of voice memos you sent to some woman while distracted, and now she’s going to have to figure all of this out without your help."
"Yes," Ilya agreed, like this was self-evident. "That is the job. She is very good at it. Will be fine," Ilya said, closing his eyes again, entirely unbothered, reaching over without looking to find Shane's ankle and squeezed it, affectionately, an unspoken gesture, hinting: conversation over, I love you, stop worrying. "Trust me."
Shane did not, in fact, trust him, not about this, not with the specifics required to create functioning plan for combining two entire households into one, and certainly not after learning that the plan, such as it was, had been assembled out of scattered voice memos and a photograph of a door from four years ago, by someone whose name he apparently wasn't even going to be told yet. He tried again twice more over the following weeks, once with an actual spreadsheet pulled up on his laptop, tabs for logistics and timeline, and once, three days before the move, half-joking, half-desperate, asking if there was anything at all he needed to prepare for, and got, both times, some variation of the same dock-side serenity, until he gave up trying to extract a plan and simply built his own mental model instead, out of the only data available to him: two years of watching Ilya operate with the general organizational instincts of a golden retriever let loose in a room full of tennis balls, and roughly six voice memos.
He could picture it now. Ilya would arrive with maybe six boxes and a few garment bags, organized and labeled. The rest would be complete chaos, not sorted by room, more than a few items broken in the course of moving them from Boston or the condo to the house. Mountains of boxes and no system.
After that, there would be those chaotic first weeks where Shane found protein bar wrappers under the couch cushions, Coke cans on the end table and would have to explain, gently, patiently, that the recycling and the garbage were two different bins with two different purposes.
There would be skates in the hallway, sweaty practice clothes on the floor, Ilya running out of his favorite cereal, and a road trip bag that would comically be missing something vital like a toothbrush or underwear.
There would be a moment, the vision was so clear to Shane; he had looked forward to it, where he'd come home to find Ilya attempting to do laundry and inadvertently ruining one of his prized cashmere sweaters, and Shane would sigh, roll up his sleeves, and take over. A bit. A running joke. Something they'd tell people at dinner parties in six years: remember when you tried to wash the Loro Piana.
This was not, as it turned out, going to be how it went, and Shane figured this out approximately ninety seconds into ‘moving day.’