the more you look the more you find (it's all around you all the time)

by PredictingShitLineByLine

Summary:

Ilya Rozanov moves in next door to Shane Hollander when they're five years old. Ilya doesn't speak English and Shane doesn't speak at all. They become best friends, and eventually, the two best hockey players in the world. The world is constantly baffled by their friendship and their private life. To understand it, you have to start their story from the beginning.

Notes:

Tagged explicit because the boys do eventually grow up and get dirty, but they are still children for the first about twenty or so chapters.
There are some notes on characterisation, because I feel like people will get spooked by the Autistic Ilya tag, but you don't have to read them if you don't want to. (They're long.)

Notes on the autism of it all

Autism is, primarily, a developmental disorder - so the disorder would be more apparent as a child is developing. I am autistic, but I don’t have difficulty speaking the way Shane does, so I spent a lot of time carefully considering how this stuff would affect him as he grows up, in order to make it as realistic as possible.

Ilya is a whole different story. Ilya is undiagnosed and unaware of his autism for the first half of this story. I know that autistic!Ilya is a very uncommon interpretation of him, but I see so much of myself in his character as it is in canon, that I wanted to explore it. Because of his genetic depression, Ilya is canonically neurodivergent anyway and I think he'd think a lot about his “different” brain, regardless. Ilya is sooo alexithymic in this. He cries so much and never knows why. I tried not to stray too far from canon with Ilya’s character, because I feel like that would defeat the entire point. Having said that, I haven’t changed a lot of Shane’s adult character either, because there’s some unexplored layers we need to explore with him too.

It's so important to me that this Ilya is very similar to how he is in canon and he's autistic. Just like how we (rightly so) praised Hudson's portrayal (and Jacob's writing) of Shane for well representing an autistic person who strays from the stereotypical presentation of it, Ilya also reads to me as a high-masking autistic person with less-stereotypical traits. It's so cool that so many autistic people are able to see themselves in Shane, but as an autistic person, I see myself more in Ilya, which is partly what inspired this. (So much. I see myself so much in Ilya)

Essentially, this is a childhood friends AU and it's also an autistic love story.

Chapter 1: Prologue

All Yuna Hollander wanted was for her son to find his place in the world. The moment he was born, she looked into his big brown eyes and promised she'd do whatever she could to get him there. As he grew, it became clear to Yuna that that wouldn’t be as easy as she’d initially projected.

Shane reached the age of 2 and he didn’t speak. But that was okay, Yuna thought. It was only a slight delay. There was still time.

But then he still wasn’t speaking at age 3. And then at age 4, when it was time for him to start kindergarten, Yuna worried. Her son was perfect, she insisted to herself. There wasn’t anything wrong with him. She didn’t think others would see it that way. So, at age 4, when Shane started kindergarten and still didn’t speak to any of the kids his age, Yuna caved. Shane was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. For the first time, Yuna faced the possibility that Shane may never speak. Ever.

When Shane was 5, Irina Rozanova and her boys moved into the empty house next door. Shane still didn’t speak to the little boy his age, but that little boy didn’t ignore him like the other kids did. Though, Yuna still worried. She worried that Irina would want her son, Ilya, to spend time with a child he could learn English from. Irina didn’t seem to mind, as long as Ilya had friends. And she seemed to have a lot of other things on her mind.

Shane didn't need words to ask to start hockey and large part of Yuna was relieved. Here was something normal that Shane actually wanted to do himself. The very thing that had made Yuna feel truly Canadian, no less. So when hockey became Shane's whole life — his career — it was a no brainer that she'd become his manager. And Ilya's manager too, she supposed, since that boy had never stopped following her son everywhere. She was not so secretly grateful for that.

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Irina Rozanova only wanted the best for boys. That was hard to focus on when she married a man who seemed to want the opposite, and her brain seemed to be constantly working against her.

Irina grieved when she realised she was pregnant with her second. She hid the pregnancy from her husband for as long as she could, hoping she would miscarry. She didn’t want to bring another child into this home. But Ilya was a fighter and he was born screaming, with a halo of golden curls, the same as hers. But it soon became clear to her that Ilya had a sensitive soul, much like her own. Russia was not the place for him. Irina spent the next five years planning her escape.

Irina almost thought the sadness would be left behind in Russia. She was wrong, of course. With the constant fear of her husband gone, she was able to be more present for her boys, but not as much as she'd have liked to be. Her boys noticed and they became resentful. They particularly noticed how Yuna Hollander managed to pick up all the slack.

The curse of Irina’s sadness was that she was perfectly aware of how terrrible a mother she was being, while simultaneously being unable to do anything about it. It was perfectly clear that her eldest needed help making friends and her youngest needed help with his English. Instead, Ilya spent all his time in the Hollander household and Alexei, alone, grew angry. Irina began to realise that her boys had inherited her sadness, and that was worst of all.

But, even if she could not save either of her boys, Irina was glad that Ilya, at least, had Shane Hollander. Quiet, intelligent and careful with Ilya’s sensitive soul. Irina had needed a Shane when she was young, and she was incredibly grateful that Ilya had his. His Shane.