Archive of Our Own

My honey's heart is blue and a second offbeat,

Always tugging at me like he’s running out of daylight.

Yeah, my baby acts cool, but they all know something ain’t right

Only acting this cool when he's walking with me.

(…) But then the morning comes.

You were there looking for me

But I was gone, turned my back for a moment

And you had fallen apart.

How much of a cruel year can you call my fault?

Not even the memories are immortal.

Terrified on this side of a conversation,

A conversation we'll never come back from.

(…) I loved you when it hurt inside to

But in the low light, you know I'd do anything for you.

(…) Yeah, you've changed, but did I ever know you?

Or did I hold you, facing away from me?

(…) I never meant to hurt you, but somehow, I knew I would.

Will it be like this forever?

I'd reach into your body and fix you if I could.

Will I feel like this forever?

Are you angry?

Do you hate me?

And, darling, time may forgive me

But I won’t.

You know I'd do anything for you,

You know it's true, ‘cause I've said it to you.

Held in my arms, I swore I'd be good to you,

Then sat and watched as you walked away from me.

So, I bled till I cried, till I felt I might die.

To be known the way you should

Is to put yourself through hell.

Still, I waited and tried

Till it killed me, ‘cause you're right:

I can wait if I want,

But it'll never be good enough,

Like I want to believe it is.

Waco, Texas

Ethel Cain

Greatness is made of beginnings, Grigori Rozanov had once told him.

It wasn’t said kindly, or to encourage. It was delivered the way most things were in that house: as a statement of fact, as instruction, as something that didn't require comfort to be true. Voice flat and declarative, like it were law rather than thought. His father believed in beginnings like other men believed in God—as something rigid, hierarchical, already written. You began correctly, or you failed early, and everything that followed was merely consequence.

Ilya learned young how to stand still under that gaze. Grigori Rozanov was a man built of angles and restraint, a statesman’s spine, a voice that never rose because it never needed to. Affection was not withheld so much as deemed unnecessary; praise existed only as an absence of criticism, and even that was rare enough to feel accidental. Love, when it appeared, came disguised as expectation.

Be better. Be sharper. Be worthy.

And still, Ilya had loved him. That was the cruelty of it—he’d loved him with the desperate, unquestioned devotion of a child who wanted to be seen, who wanted to matter, who wanted to one day be pointed at and claimed.

This is my son, the father in his dreams would say as he beamed, warm hand on Ilya’s shoulder.

He wanted to make his father proud like other boys wanted toys or tenderness. Pride became his native language, achievement his first dialect. Russia itself began to blur with his father’s approval: homeland, legacy and expectation all collapsing into the same heavy shape he carried in his chest.

Greatness is made of beginnings. The phrase stayed with him, lodged somewhere deep and stubborn, and Ilya carried it with him longer than he carried anything else. Carried it through cold Moscow winters that bit at exposed skin and taught him endurance by force. Through teenage years spent measuring himself against impossible silhouettes. Through the quiet unraveling of his mother’s psyche and, eventually, her suicide, which arrived like a fault line splitting the house open and was never spoken of again, grief sealed off behind the same closed doors as everything else. Carried it through hockey: the ice, the discipline, the clarity of a world where effort translated cleanly into result. Through becoming great, unmistakably great, the greatest hockey player of his generation, second only to a player even greater. Through the rise that was supposed to explain everything. Through his father’s slow disappearance into dementia, the cruel inversion of roles, the man who'd once been immovable, now reduced to fragments, to repetition, to forgetting the very greatness he'd demanded. Carried it through Shane Hollander, who somehow arrived too late and too early, all at once.

Greatness is made of beginnings.

Years later, and the words still hit him wrong, still unsettled something deep inside him. Because what happens when the beginning never ends? When it stretches and stretches, shapeless and unresolved, until it starts to feel like stalling instead of starting? When stillness hardens into habit, and effort into endurance, and endurance into something that looks a lot like paralysis if Ilya stares at it long enough?

Melancholy never announced its arrival. It didn't knock, or even reveal itself. It festered, and polluted, and followed him like how a climate follows a country, influencing everything, determining what could grow and what could survive. It grew with him as he grew: boy into man, ambition into reputation, strength into spectacle, until one day he noticed that something had quietly reversed, that while his body kept moving forward, some inner part of him had begun to contract instead, folding back in on itself and becoming smaller, more cautious, more afraid. Until, without ceremony, he’d gone from man back to boy.

There was no moment he could point to and say here. Just the slow realization that he’d lost range, lost reach, lost the ability to imagine himself beyond the narrow corridor of what he already was.

He learned how to live around it, though. How to step without shifting the arrows buried in him, dyed and dipped in self-loathing, lodged so deep he’d stopped thinking of them as foreign objects at all. Russia’s Achilles, he thought sometimes, wearing himself out slowly, decade by decade, bleeding internally under the guise of resilience, until he could learn to map the pain and memorize where it lay buried, until he could adjust his steps so he wouldn’t press too hard against the places that burned.

A formal crisis of purpose. An existential numbness that followed him like a shadow. Ilya chased an enemy that didn't exist, or rather existed only inside him, and the harder he ran, the faster it seemed to move; the older he grew, the less he recognized himself, until dissociation felt less like a symptom and more like a solution.

There were things crystallized inside him by the time he came of age—old fear, old voices, sunk deep enough that removing them felt more dangerous than leaving them altogether, stacked neatly where they were. So he adapted, built a life that avoided emotional pressure.

Ilya functioned. Ilya excelled. Ilya became very good at not making things worse.

Time passed that way. Tides rose and fell, cold gave way to heat, weeds withered, and later, flowers bloomed. A year, then another, then enough that counting them as years began to feel arbitrary, so he turned to counting hockey seasons instead, as a reminder of what truly demanded his focus. The world rearranged itself around him, yet through it all, Ilya remained suspended in that strange in-between, refusing to be small, or ordinary, or to let this be all there was, and yet unable to move toward anything else. Resistance becoming paralysis, rebellion hollowing itself out.

Greatness, he would think, whenever doubt surfaced. Think of hockey. Think of legacy. Think of Moscow. Think of making it all worth something. But it all slipped through him anyway, and even began to feel small against the loneliness that settled in his bones.

Ilya could be surrounded—locker rooms loud with laughter, dinners crowded with familiar faces, bodies close enough to brush against—and still feel untouched, sealed off behind something invisible and unyielding. But he learned how to smile in the right places, how to nod convincingly enough, how to participate in a way that passed as present, how to keep his worst thoughts folded inward, compressed into something manageable that wouldn’t spill. Vulnerability felt indulgent, something humiliating and vaguely shameful, like a failure of discipline, until it felt as if Ilya’s restraint had fully calcified into his whole identity. Meaning thinning out like sand between trembling, calloused fingers, never quite leaving a trail, and so his only response was to intellectualize his every waking thought. Aestheticize it. Minimize it. He learned to swallow everything sharp, to smile without believing it, to laugh without humor, to bury the tired so deep he couldn't find it again, all as he wandered without direction. Odysseus without Ithaca, shipwrecked across the Aegean, rising and falling according to winds he could never command. Drifting north, south, east, west, everywhere but where he intended, rowing blind toward an abstract of home that only receded the closer he believed he was to reaching it.

Anything to avoid the phantom weight of his father’s gaze, he supposed—stern and evaluative and never entirely gone, not even when it eventually became his own.

At night, when the noise fell away, his mind refused to follow. Sleep came and went unpredictably, and Ilya would lay awake, counting his absences, reminiscing over all the different versions of himself he might've been had things tilted even just slightly differently. The boy, the man, the athlete, the lover, the son, the person. They all hovered just out of reach, not painful enough to grieve properly, not real enough to let go.

And quietly… stubbornly… he dreamed.

He dreamed of intensity without decay. Of joy that didn’t come with warning labels, and the Floating Gardens of Babylon, and miracles that made a mockery of restraint. Of greatness, real and tangible and malleable and held in his hands.

He dreamed of being remade, fundamentally altered and stripped down to something truer. Imagined transformation arriving from somewhere outside him, dramatic and undeniable: a moment, a force, a hand reaching down to lift him out of himself. Divine intervention, catastrophe, anything powerful enough to override the inertia he couldn’t seem to escape. Gods and their outstretched hands, either from above or below, ready to tear him apart and remake him into something unrecognizable, someone invincible. Ilya dreamed of eradication and replacement, of becoming someone else entirely.

He dreamed, too, of simpler things.

Two pairs of feet on a sofa. A favorite film half-watched. A dog barking in the background. His head resting against someone else’s, just to feel the weight of it. Sentences left unfinished, because someone else already knew how they ended. Notes spread through a home, missing signatures, because those went without saying. Shared grocery lists, lost under the fridge.

He dreamed of smiling—of looking up at the face of the person he loved and his lips twitching of their own accord. Of smiling so big and wide and free, from pure instinct alone, his cheeks would hurt and his heart would burst.

For a long time, he mistook closeness for contact, mistook being wanted for being known. Bodies were easy, and they asked nothing of him beyond presence and performance, and so he'd find relief in that—the basic predictability, how raw physicality could drown out thought, if only for a moment. Touch without tenderness, intimacy reduced to mechanics: belts unbuckling; mouths meeting without hunger; words spoken out of habit rather than desire. He let it happen because it felt easier than refusing, because it felt like proof he still existed, even when it left him emptier every time. But it never lasted. The warmth would fade, replaced by that old, familiar hollowing: the sense that he'd missed something essential, that he’d once again violated his body in a shortsighted attempt to reclaim something he didn’t know he’d lost. So, he learned how to leave without ceremony, how to detach without cruelty, how to walk away carrying the same unanswered ache he’d arrived with.

Ilya learned to like contradictions. Wood made of cotton: hard at a distance, but gentle to the touch; that split under the faintest pressure and turned itself into seas, then searched for harbors made of wreckage and grey skies beneath which to anchor.

For years, he refused to look directly at it. To ask who he was, or what he’d become. Clean lines are boring, he told himself often. He preferred extremes: peaks and valleys; the storm after the calm; the vessel that sank under safe harbor; the flower that died at the first touch of dusk rather than hold out until dawn.

What was there to say, really? If what was already felt redundant, what could possibly be gained by revisiting what had been? He searched endlessly for the single explanation that would unlock everything; spent whole nights staring at ceilings. A life composed of would’ve, could’ve, should’ve, looping endlessly. He dissected, catalogued, deconstructed, broke things apart and rearranged them, yet never moved past the thinking: all those lives he hadn’t lived; all that love he hadn’t allowed himself; all the chosen families he might've found if he’d lingered here or hurried there. Other paths, other homes, other versions of himself walking somewhere else if he'd just chosen differently.

Days repeated themselves with the dull insistence of waves against ice, each morning bringing the same hope of rebirth and the same disappointment when everything remained the same. He would dream of change, wake up, and immediately know better.

Greatness, he’d remember, then, as a mantra. Hockey. Legacy. Moscow. Pride.

Sometimes he wondered if this was simply what he was built for; if he was just configured differently for the kind of life other people seemed to fall into without effort. Some flowers aren't made to bloom, he told himself, and found a strange comfort in the fatalism of it. Some things are born to wither, and to ache, and to someday die.

Time continued its work. He grew older in ways that surprised him, laugh lines appearing without memory of laughter, milestones passing without ceremony, watching others settle into lives that seemed to seamlessly click into place. Relationships smoothing into routines, futures taking on shape and direction. He felt like an observer to his own adolescence and then adulthood: present, but unanchored; participating, but never fully arrived.

Still, something in him refused to go quiet, and Ilya continued to chase intensity like how others chased stability, mistaking extremes for meaning, novelty for direction. Anything to feel the edges again. Anything to break the numbness wide open, even if only temporarily. Anything that would make the waiting end.

And then, somewhere along the way, Shane Hollander appeared.

At first, Ilya didn’t recognize what was happening.

Shane was just there, in the periphery of his days, in the unremarkable spaces between obligation and routine and the early days of hockey. Not really someone Ilya noticed, but he knew the name, the face, just vague enough to be in the corner of his mind, like a whisper he couldn’t quite catch. But the league had them marked, tied together in some unspoken script, and so they were going to keep crossing paths, circling each other like two planets pulled by the same gravity. There was an inevitability to it, like a slow current dragging them closer, whether they wanted it or not.

And then Shane showed up that first day in Saskatchewan, awkward and earnest and polite and so very Canadian, and introduced himself, and that’s how it started. In a voice Ilya came to expect and who didn’t demand anything. In someone, well, frankly, quite boring, and who asked him equally boring questions, but then actually waited for Ilya to answer them every time instead of filling in the silence for him. In a boy, meeting a boy; in unexpected pleasantries; in polite remarks; in Ilya Rozanov? Shane Hollander, I wanted to introduce myself and You’re an awesome player to watch and Good luck in the tournament tomorrow.

So simply, so casually, like the fabric of their lives wasn’t forever changing. No thunder, no ceremony, no divine hand reaching down, no fire splitting open the sky. Just a man, ordinary in all the ways one could be, stepping into Ilya’s orbit and refusing to ever leave it again.

And so, what was he supposed to do but give in to it? Ilya had no choice but to surrender to the pull of him, lodged somewhere under his ribs before he’d known to call it for what it was. Shane Hollander, Prince of Hockey, all awkward edges and earnest pauses, polite to a fault, freckles scattered across his face like something incidental, unremarkable, and somehow impossible to look away from.

Attraction followed, sudden and exact, immediate and volatile, less a feeling than a current that flared the moment they shared space and snapped into place like a law of nature. It lived in proximity, in how the air seemed to tighten when he looked at Shane, in the certainty that something had already leapt the distance between them and was now humming, alive and waiting. Ilya had spent a lifetime disciplining himself against impulses like this, and still his body betrayed him, responding long before his mind could intervene.

Over time, of years of washing it down and pretending it wasn’t real, genuine tenderness and affection would end up festering and taking root in his chest. And then, before he’d even realized it, before he knew he was ready, before he could’ve given time permission to move forward, it had moved anyway, and ten years had passed, and—love.

The love of his life. The reason he breathed, and woke up every morning, and put right foot in front of left.

There was no sudden clarity, no theatrical shift in the air. If anything, the change was almost irritating in its subtlety and how it refused to announce itself. Ilya had learned to brace for intensity, for upheaval, for things that burned bright and burned out just as fast, and Shane did neither.

Staying wasn't something people did lightly. Staying implied patience, attention, a willingness to see what unfolded rather than what dazzled, and so Ilya kept expecting the moment where Shane would grow bored—Mister Boring himself growing bored, he thought, warmly—or disappointed, or quietly distant. The moment where the effort of knowing him would outweigh the reward. He waited for the withdrawal like one waits for pain after impact: already flinching, already rehearsing the detachment that would follow.

Except it didn’t come. Shane tried, sure, but he also learned Ilya instead, and the pauses in his speech, and how his eyes drifted when he was overwhelmed, and the particular kind of silence that meant he was thinking too hard and the other kind that meant he’d stopped thinking altogether. He noticed when Ilya ate less, slept worse, or withdrew without explanation. And Shane never interrogated him, either—just placed a hand lightly over his own when they were alone, or tried an earnest attempt at a straight-face joke that fell flat but humored Ilya all the same, and mostly he kept the routine of their hook-ups alive and unbending, for years on end. A constant in Ilya's life, for once.

He didn’t know what to do with that kind of care. The stability of it.

It felt undeserved, first of all. Suspicious, second. Tenderness, in his experience, had always come tethered to expectation—do better, be stronger, do not falter, do not embarrass me, do not make this harder than it already is—and Shane’s affection arrived without instruction, without a rubric to follow, which made it terrifying in a way cruelty never had. Cruelty, at least, was legible.

So he found himself holding back instinctively, rationing the parts he revealed, as though vulnerability might deplete some finite internal reserve inside him. He gave Shane humor before honesty, charm before truth, kept the darker corners cordoned off, convinced that if he saw too much—the doubt, the exhaustion, the despair that sometimes arrived without warning and overstayed its welcome—something would break.

But Shane didn’t push. He didn’t pry the doors open. He sat outside them, patient, unoffended, so much so that retreat felt like an increasingly distant concept. And slowly, so slowly Ilya almost missed it, his body began to respond before his mind did. He slept better when Shane was in his bed, ate without thinking about it, laughed and didn’t immediately feel the need to justify it. There were moments, brief and disorienting, where the static in his head softened enough for him to feel something like ease, like he could set something down for a minute without fear it'd be stolen.

He tried to tell himself this was temporary, that everything meaningful eventually was, rehearsing the exit even as he settled in and keeping one foot angled toward disappearance out of habit. But the longer he and Shane kept their arrangement alive—as years passed, and they pushed each other harder, harder, harder, until it was just the two of them standing together at the top, no one to challenge them, no one to match them, no one to understand them quite like each other—the harder it became to imagine leaving without consequence.

And for the first time, the idea of absence hurt in advance, rather than just in his imagination. Between fear and wanting, instinct and possibility, Ilya began to understand the true danger of love: that it would ask him to live, rather than destroy him outright; force him to choose presence over paralysis and stay awake in a life he'd spent years half-asleep inside.

He'd never understood what living in a constant state of pain was until Shane, not really. He’d known suffering, of course—deep, gargantuan suffering, had lived inside a tectonic aching that rearranged the ground beneath him for so long it felt structural—but this was different. This was the pain of attachment, of anticipation, of having something to lose. With Shane, he learned what it meant to love fully, with the whole of himself, every fracture exposed, with no real plan for survival if it went wrong. Love that didn’t ask permission, and didn’t wait for him to be ready, and didn’t care about the defenses he’d spent a lifetime perfecting. Love that hurt, because he kept waiting for it to be taken away from him.

He didn’t know then, couldn’t know, that his whole life up until Shane had been the darkness before dawn. That the waiting, the confusion, the fear, the constant sense of standing on the edge of something vast and unstable, were signs of motion, not failure. That joy, when it would finally come, wouldn't come cleanly or all at once, but would instead arrive in pieces, in moments so small they were easy to miss if he wasn’t paying attention.

He thought of his father’s mantra. How lonely he'd felt all those years, twisting the words in his mouth, convinced no one else would understand their weight. But if there was anyone who understood greatness quite like Ilya Rozanov, it was Shane Hollander.The greatest hockey player of his generation.

Greatness is made of beginnings, the voice whispered, sharp and insistent, reminding him.

But Shane never asked him to be great. He only asked him to be there.

The words echoed, and for the first time, they didn’t feel like accusation, didn’t demand proof in trophies or legacy or national pride. He thought of Shane, and the life they’d built together, married and in bliss, and for the first time, Ilya could almost nod along, uncertain but sincere. Greatness. Yes. Finally.

The love he’d always dreamed of. The career he’d once barely dared imagine. The home of his dreams; the cottage tucked away from the rest of the world, their own hidden corner of paradise. Shane—God, Shane. Yuna. David. Svetlana. The Centaurs. The dog he’d always wanted and never let himself get until now—Anya asleep under the table, her fur forever being cleaned off the couch, curled up against Shane in their bed despite all his rules, the smallest smile on Shane's mouth whenever he thought Ilya wasn’t looking. Grocery lists, house keys, vet appointments, towels in the drier. Even Hayden fucking Pike. Even Hayden and Jackie sending them home with leftovers after Sunday lunch. Even Shane’s pissy little moods after a loss, sulking through the house for days while Ilya found him endlessly amusing. The whole impossible, domestic little picture.

Was this the life he'd chosen, or had this life chosen him? Sometimes it felt like he'd drifted his entire existence from purgatory all the way to hell and then back again, never quite landing anywhere long enough to build something solid. And then Shane appeared, and the drifting didn’t stop, necessarily, but it changed shape. Suddenly, there was direction, however faint. Suddenly, the ascent toward something livable, if that’s what it was, felt possible.

The pain didn’t leave. It persists and remains to this day, but now he carries it differently. He tolerates it, uses it as a kind of talisman that protects him and reminds him not to fear love or connection, not to flinch away from companionship, but to let them in, tend to them, nurture them, watch them grow.

He was living life on his own terms now, and it hadn’t been fate that’d got him to that point. No God had reached down, no prophecy had unfolded. Ilya had been the one responsible for all the hard work, him who’d crawled on his knees out of the pit of complacency over the shards of his broken past.

It wasn’t easy, but he’d done it. Not for Shane, not really, and not for anyone else, either. He did it for himself. And he did it because pain is fleeting, and love is endless, and his heart, fractured though it may be, was still beating.

Right?

Ilya wasn't fine.

That much was certain. Loving Shane hadn't cured him, hadn't sanded down the sharpest edges of his depression—that bitter word Galina loves to use so much, he thinks, ruefully—hadn't rendered it manageable like how people imagine love can.

The pain didn’t lift. The loneliness didn’t evaporate. The old ghosts didn’t pack up their things and go.

Shane knew this without needing to be told, of course. Galina knew it too, more precisely than anyone else, in the way she watched him enter her office, the way his shoulders sat in their sockets, the way his hands either clenched or lay uselessly open in his lap.

Ilya loved Shane with the kind of depth that made recklessness feel inevitable, the kind of devotion where, if he were drowning, Ilya would already be underwater, lungs burning, arms outstretched, unconcerned with tides or currents or how some rescues were never meant to succeed.

It didn't matter that waves that row against the sea are folded into wind and dissolved into air. Instinct doesn't negotiate. Who was Ilya, really, if not the somber filling poured over burning moonlight? The night sky could fracture itself into a thousand stars and, still, Shane would outshine them all, as if refracted through a kaleidoscope, brilliant and disorienting.

So, Shane would drown, Ilya would dive after him, and somewhere beneath the surface, he'd understand he’d been the one drowning all along. That was the way of it.

But their life together felt impossible to look at for too long without him fearing he’d lose something in the process, so Ilya had no alternative but to enter self-preservation mode. The past had corroded him too thoroughly, the future remained too abstract to trust.

He wouldn't let the one good thing in his hands slip away.

For years, he’d swallowed his pain whole, learning to move with it lodged in his throat and to read the dismissal before it ever reached a mouth. His father. His brother. His old coach back in Moscow. He could already taste it on their tongues—the thinning patience, the tightening jaw—if he was to ever give his suffering a name. Now, at least, he knew the truth.

The pain was real. Profound, undeniable, validated. Clinically recognized. Clinically named.

And still. Still, there were moments when doubt slipped in sideways; when he wondered whether anyone was really looking; whether Galina was truly peeling back the infinite onion layers of his ill mind or just re-mapping the same terrain from different angles. Every time he opened his hand, it felt like something seemed to fall through it, and in the hollow of his grip, only the echo of what might’ve been remained. Images that time refused to preserve, smeared and half-remembered, like photographs left too long in the sun.

His father surfaced again in these moments. The harsh gaze. The tight frown. The barked orders that never softened.

Greatness is made of beginnings, Grigori’s voice sounded in his head.

And mine are too small to reach it, Ilya answered back.

Years later, the sentence still had weight. His father was dead now, and there was no one left to ask what he’d make of Ilya’s greatness, of his beginnings, no one left to decide whether any of it counted. But when he looked at his life, even now, Ilya—greedy, selfish Ilya—couldn’t find the grandeur he’d been promised. If greatness meant standing at the top and basking in the glow and warmth of the sun, thoughts uninterrupted, finally at peace, steady in who he was, then—well, he felt like anything but the Great Ilya Rozanov. He felt the furthest thing from great, actually.

The goddess of time would laugh, then, cosmic indifference in her tone. She’d whisper incapacity into his ear, convince him that this was simply what he was: emotionally amputated, resigned to spend the rest of his life in her icy company. Forever tired, forever stagnant, forever waiting for that inevitable last breath. Her opaque finger would curve in his direction and assure him that he must already be in debit to life, and nothing else explained the deficit.

Ilya tried to calculate it like he’d learned to calculate everything else: how much he owed, how much he had already paid, how much remained in him to give before the balance tipped against him.

When the thoughts became unbearable, he’d conjure Shane’s face, and the pressure in his chest would ease and soften, just enough to breathe around.

Shane, his harbor. The world could end at their feet and the intertwining of their souls would still feel sufficient, self-contained, complete.

Shane. Anya. Yuna. David. The family he'd found. The family the universe had handed him, belatedly, like karmic cashback for all the years spent wandering without a map, searching without knowing what he’d been meant to search for all along.

He’d think of therapy then. Of Galina, and the armchair in her office, and her notebook, and the crossing and uncrossing of her legs as she shifted in her seat in front of him, watching him, studying him, listening to him. Of how giving words to the weight he carried had made it tangible and measurable, capable of being set down, even if only for a moment.

On the good days, the people he loved and the life he’d built with them and the support system he’d ensured was in place were enough to quiet the noise. And yet, he knew how fragile and temporary it all was. Like dye in water, first dissipating, and only then coloring—because the nights always returned.

Late hours when Shane slept beside him, unknowing, while tears soaked into Ilya’s pillow over futures he'd never get to live; entire lives he constructed with meticulous care, ingenious in their detail, before watching them collapse every time. A loving brother. A proud father. A living mother. Walking hand-in-hand with Shane through his neighborhood for his birthday. Showing him to the bakery down his street he’d spent half his childhood in. Walking in and finding his family already inside, grinning and smiling and hugging and laughing and loving him. These lives would vanish at the first taste of moonlight, dissolving in lazy smoke, gently and mercilessly all at once. A mild flame of arson fire that would burn as it ached, turn to ashes as it bit, but never killed him, not even when it died.

Ilya would spend whole nights tangled in these thoughts, restless and awake, carried along on the currents of memory that refused to let him rest. And in the quiet, she always came back. The goddess of time, tireless in her collection, charging her tax, meditating over the poetry of a life so well considered, so thoroughly dissected—'but frankly, so poorly lived.'

At night, she'd stand by his bed, shadows pooling beneath his eyes, and ask him what he was searching for. And as he’d answer, laughter would fill the room: deaf, sardonic, ancient.

The goddess of time had always known irony.

Late one night, the cassette of Ilya’s life plays, rewinds, and plays again, the same track on loop in the dark. It spills over and skips, all at once, like the static in an old tape that just won’t quit and he can’t find the stop button.

Shane snores lightly at his side, and Ilya thinks of older, simpler times. He hears the wild, messy clapping of children echoing through a sunlit Moscow schoolyard, sees their clasping hands like reckless promises, remembers the careless laughter trying to fill even the coldest spaces with light breaking through the cracks. Memories of children’s laughter before the weight of years settled in. Unashamed glances and stolen moments, not yet buried by time or burned into scars long after the light had gone, tangled up in blood and bone and the brittle hope of what might've been.

The hands hover, not quite real, not quite memory, ghosting the edges of his mind like opaque echoes of another life that's both far away and crawling just beneath his skin.

Ilya thinks of the singsong games he and his classmates would play, guessing the futures stretched before them. Who would be Blonde or Brunette, Bald or Thick-haired, Short or Tall, Fierce or Forgotten? Who would be King or Thief, Policeman or Captain? Lives sketched in minutes, futures mapped like stars—all full of promise and glittering light and terrible, impossible hope.

The world was their oyster, wide and wild and waiting, full of everything and nothing. Voices jangling in the distance, before the world got heavy enough to crush. Ilya had a lifetime ahead of him then, endless and sprawling; days so vast they could stretch forever and swallow him whole without notice. Decades unwritten like blank pages begging for stories to be carved into them.

How large were those days? How long the years in front of him?

The river bends, the current pulls, and time steals it all away.

He thinks of the boy he once was—little Ilyusha, small and tiny, a messed heap of tangled, blonde curls, tugging at his mother’s headscarf, soft hands fumbling with threads, unaware, unknowing, unafraid, unbroken.

What would he say if he could reach back through time and speak to that child? Would he laugh with that reckless hope he never quite lost? Or would he cry? Or scream? Or maybe he’d just hold that boy—hold him tight and close enough to stop him from ever slipping away; cradle him in silence, soothe him with words that could never fully heal the both of them.

Maybe I'd just rip the band-aid off, he thinks, because sometimes love means breaking open the heart before it breaks in silence; telling the truth, tired and blunt, honest and harsh, sharp enough to cut clean and deep enough so you can finally see what’s waiting just beyond the horizon. Because existence is a cold weight that presses down, and maybe it’s kinder to know early, to be braced for that cold weight and the unkindness that always comes and never lets go, rather than shattered by the surprise.

The world is unkind, Ilyusha. Unfair. A ruthless master with hands cold as stone. He would shake him hard and say: Do not believe the lies. Do not let your heart get caught in the cracks.

That little boy, small and bright and trembling—Ilya would tell him about the silence after the noise, about the mother who was there and then wasn’t, about the hollow pit that opened in the room where she lay still. And about how time keeps moving while you freeze in place, that indifferent bastard, watching the world march on without you.

He spends the night tangled in this thought, restless and raw. Little Ilyusha—combed blonde curls; mother’s headscarf caught in fingers that don’t quite know how to hold on.

That child staring back at him late at night, seemingly trembling on the precipice of catastrophe. Not much time left before life comes crashing into him, Ilya would think. Barreling down, rushing toward him and sweeping over him, reminding him of fate’s true master and how it lives in the bottom of a bottle of pills, and the silent room at the end of the hall, and the frozen stillness of his mother’s body sprawled over the bed, and the pit in his stomach as he finds her, forever imprinted. A tidal wave that would crash without mercy, and little Ilyusha would be swept with it, utterly helpless beneath it. Colossal and holy and terrible, that unflinching, unstoppable titan of a force, meeting an object it couldn't move, and thus would forever be unmovable as a result.

And then, time and space would fold in on themselves, crashing and colliding until little Ilyusha would sit in his stead some twenty-five odd years later, lying in the same bed and listening to the same rise and fall of Shane’s chest beside him. Growing and growing and growing just to become little old Ilya—no Gods or religions to catch him, no holy book to latch onto, devoid of any purpose but to hold the fragile semblance of his life and clutch it in his shaking hands. Days pitifully passing by him, dripping and slipping and ticking away like mold growing on stale, forgotten bread. Life perpetually suspended, wasting away, pressing down with the weight of a reckoning that never quite comes.

Patiently waiting for a cosmological, Big Bang-like explosion that would justify all that came before, and then realizing that Shane; Shane, who's his home; Shane, who tears through the darkness and shatters the silence and burns steady and bright like a lighthouse and demands Ilya keep living was that cosmological explosion, and if loving him hadn’t yet fixed what was wrong with him, he didn’t know what would. But maybe it didn’t need to.

Little Ilyusha, he'd tell him, time is the cruelest villain, slipping and sneaking through cracks, stealing your footprints as you walk above them. It will leave you with nothing but necromantic ghosts to haunt the corners of your brittle life. It will give you something back, just to take it away from you again.

A thousand and one dichotomies will live within you, swirl inside you, he would say, and you'll but watch.

Rationally, he knows the river of life flows only once, straight and relentless, linearly and streamlined, and he’ll never actually see his old self again. But if the child he once was is to live, it’s inside him. Ilyusha’s dreams are Ilya’s, though his fears even more so. That boy with curls tangled in his mother’s scarf, small enough to disappear but big enough to dream impossible things—he’s still here, inside, carrying a fragile light that flickers beneath everything, even now. The boy he was, the man he is, and the love he holds all fold into each other inside him like tangled roots, wrapped tight around the stubborn heart of the man lying beside him.

So, what else is left, if not to hope?

Not the wild, reckless hope of youth. No, something raw and aching, a small pocket of light that won’t be snuffed out. Hope that maybe there’s still a chance to rewrite the story, that maybe he’s not just trauma and scars and all the dark diagnoses Galina throws at him. That maybe he’s someone who can grow beyond the wreckage, who can choose to hold onto Shane, and through Shane, hold onto life itself. That beneath all the ruins, all the ghosts, all the pain that never quite fades, there’s that glimmer, that stubborn little flicker that refuses to be crushed.

What else is there, really, if not to clutch that fragile spark, that stubborn thread? A tiny, trembling pocket of it, yes, but real nonetheless—that maybe he’s still young, and therefore foolish; that an eternity of days stretches ahead of him, still unwritten; that maybe he’s just scarred and traumatized, but not resigned to his circumstances, not yet, not quite. That maybe there’s solace to be found in what is to come, not only in what was. That maybe the question is no longer who he is, but who he might still become. That maybe he remains master of his own fate, and his future waits for him to sketch it, fragile and new and pregnant and waiting.

Hope, that maybe he’s still growing, still becoming, and he can still build a life from the dust, still choose the shape of the days to come, still fight for something more than survival, something that feels more like living.

Even the slowest river moves forward and carves a path, no matter how many stones lie in its way. This inertia, this slow decay, this weight—it doesn’t have to be his story, it doesn’t have to define him. Not if he doesn’t want it to. Not if he doesn’t let it.

Life can still be good, he tells himself, as if it’s even a choice he can actively make. It can. It must.

He smiles then, soft and small, and the weight eases just enough to let a breath come all the way in, just enough for his heart to stutter and then steady. Something adjacent to relief, a fraction of space carved out of the pressure that’s lived in his chest for so long it started to feel structural.

He turns his head and catches Shane’s sleeping smile—the soft curve of his mouth caught mid-breath, content with the simple fact of being there. Shane's chest rises and falls beside him, steady and stubborn, indifferent to Ilya's spirals and time’s cruelties and the long arithmetic of survival, and Ilya knows, with a certainty that doesn’t demand anything of him, that for now—just for now—he can keep going a little longer.

A few more days. A few more nights like this.

He curls closer, turning into Shane's warmth, pressing his ear to the incessant drum beneath skin, the heart inside the heart, and the sound anchors him, tethers him to something solid and living and real. A promise he doesn’t have to articulate, something to hold onto when everything else fractures and threatens to scatter into dust.

The goddess of time laughs, that old familiar sound, somewhere distant, but it doesn’t cut as deep this time. It echoes once, duller now, and passes. The world, impossibly, holds still for a moment, and for a quiet moment in the night, only the hope remains.

For now, I can keep going.

He just has to let Shane in.

He doesn't let Shane in.

Ilya tries, really—earnestly, desperately—and still the words refuse him, turning to sand the moment he reaches for them, slipping away before they can ever be shaped into something usable.

He knows it. He feels it every time he opens his mouth with the intention of telling the truth and finds nothing there that will obey: his throat tightens; his jaw locks; his eyes slide away on instinct; walls rise faster than he can think to stop them, old and automatic, already in place by the time he realizes what he’s doing.

It’s almost funny, he thinks. My soul and Shane’s are as intertwined as two souls can ever be. And yet.

They sit on opposite ends of the sofa, their feet still touching—a small, accidental mercy—and Shane's speaking. Ilya hears the sound of his voice before the words themselves catch up.

“Ilya, what’s going on?" A beat. "Why did you sleep in the guest bedroom last night?”

And still, despite it all, he tries.

Shane, I can't sleep. Shane, I hate myself. Shane, I don't know why, but I loathe every single fiber of my being. Shane, hockey no longer means anything to me, not like it does to you.

Shane, I love Yuna and I love David and they've done nothing wrong and they've opened their home to me without hesitation and made room for me like it's easy and made me feel like I belong, but every time I'm with them, I feel like an impostor, because my family is broken and yours is not.

Shane, I love you more than anything. Shane, you're everything to me. Shane, I miss Moscow. Shane, I think I resent you for being the reason why I can’t go back home. Shane, I don't think I would be a good father. Shane, I think only you would miss me if I was gone.

Shane, I'm not getting better.

Shane, you're the only thing keeping me here.

Shane, Shane, Shane. I really am not getting any better.

Shane, I hate my mother, sometimes. Hate her so deeply for leaving me behind and all alone.

Shane, I miss my mother. I miss my mother so much I think of following her into death, sometimes.

“You snore too loud,” he jokes, instead.

And still, despite it all, he fails.

Summer comes to them quietly, and then all at once.

One day, the cottage smells of damp wood and lake water and sunscreen rubbed in too fast, and the next it feels like the world has rearranged itself around them. The air stays warm well into the evenings; the light lingers, stretching hours thin, refusing to let go. Time loosens, rules soften. It becomes possible, suddenly, to think that nothing is waiting on the other side of this.

Out here, it always feels like the summer belongs to them personally, like they’ve been singled out by it. Like the season has taken a look at the two of them and decided, yes, you can have this. Yes, you can keep it. Yes, everything else falls like sand through your fingers, so yes, this is yours.

The lake is glassy in the mornings and restless by the afternoon, sun breaking against it. Shane moves through the space like he belongs to it, like the house has been waiting for him specifically, and the dock creaks easily under him, old and familiar and unbothered by his weight.

Ilya watches him without trying to stop himself, because out here there's no reason to pretend he doesn’t want to, no need to ration affection or attention like it might run out.

In the cottage, they spend hours doing nothing at all. Sitting, shoulders brushing and fingers tracing idle patterns. Lying back and letting their limbs drape over one another. Cooking, stirring sauces and tasting sizzled garlic on melted butter and grinning at minor mishaps; the browning bread turning crisp as they lose their grip on time. Kicking a football back and forth across the garden, wind in their hair under the overhead sun, grass warm beneath their feet and easy jokes tracking in the air like birdsong at each missed kick. Making love, soft and slow and without urgency, hands re-learning each curve, letting time dissolve between sighs and laughter. Reading aloud to each other and sharing their favorite music through the home speaker, chuckling and teasing and growing somber when the notes call for it. Playing footsie under the dining table, toes brushing and retreating. Washing dishes side by side, hands occasionally colliding under the warm water. Walking barefoot across the floor, letting sun streak across their skin. Smiling at each other across the table, across the bed, across the quiet hum of a summer that refuses to hurry.

Watching light slide through the cottage, catching on dust motes like tiny drifting stars. Letting the days rot pleasantly around them, golden and sticky and unimportant. Just existing in the same orbit, without expectation, without need. Letting themselves heal, setting into the shape of each other’s souls, without the world pressing in.

Just them, and the soft, tender pulse of being.

On the dock, Shane sits with one leg dangling over the edge, toes skimming the water every now and then, the other leg bent, knee pulled in, his chin resting against it in that thoughtless collapsed posture that still feels like a small miracle to witness. One hand props his face, and the other rests between his legs, idle and unguarded.

The thought comes then, uninvited and complete: This is where my life makes sense.

Sitting beside you, Ilya thinks, the lake wide and blue behind our shoulders, the world reduced to water and sky and heat. I hope I’m buried here.

He looks to the side and smiles, finding Shane’s mouth caught halfway between a smile and a comment he’s probably still thinking through, like he’s on the verge of saying something or nothing at all. It hits him just how complete Shane looks like this—unposed, unrehearsed, entirely himself, loose-limbed and relaxed—and Ilya thinks: maybe loving Shane was never much of a choice at all.

Surely, Ilya must’ve loved him before he ever knew him. Surely, some part of him had been waiting for Shane all along. Surely, this was all some grand design, woven and spun by the goddesses of fate into the threads of inevitability. Surely, he simply happened to discover it that one unremarkable morning in 2008, but it had been set in stone long before he ever knew it.

He can’t make sense of how this happened, how he ended up here. How, out of all the possible configurations of his life, this is the one that stuck. Ilya thinks he would’ve ruined himself trying to earn this if he’d known it was coming; would’ve sharpened himself down to nothing, cut away every softness and every indulgence if that’s what it took. Instead, it was given to him freely. How?

But if he lets himself think about how much he loves Shane, he might just start crying. So, instead, and because the words insist on being said, because not saying them feels like lying, he just says—

“You’re beautiful, любимый.”

Shane laughs, soft and embarrassed, shaking his head like he’s trying to brush the compliment off his skin.

“Ah… so modest,” Ilya says, smiling, because teasing Shane is half the pleasure, and because watching him fail to deflect affection will never stop being funny to him. “But it’s true."

One hand under his cheek, the other between his legs, the slight pucker in his lips…

“I would've been a fool not to fall in love with you,” he tells him, simply. “So, I did.”

Out here, with the days stretching endlessly ahead of them, love feels vast enough to hold an entire life inside it. Vast and unreasonable and terrifying in its permanence, worth carrying quietly, stubbornly, for years, even when everything else starts to fail.

Summer wraps itself around them, bright and unrepeatable, and Ilya, well—he was never much of a fighter, really—he lets summer have him, ripe and flushed and easy, so easy, easy like breathing.

There’s a particular hour of the day Ilya’s always hated.

It’s an hour that asks questions without asking them outright, arriving just as the day technically ends but the night hasn't declared itself yet. When the light outside starts to go flat and gray and the world seems to pause, like it's waiting to see what he’ll do with himself now that there are no more obligations left for him to hide behind. An hour that assumes he has somewhere to return to, someone to sit with, a way to occupy space without needing a reason to, and he’s spent most of his life learning how to endure it by treating it like bad weather, like something to be waited out.

Shane's with him. It feels like he's always with him now, threaded into the very architecture of Ilya's days. And it should feel like relief, like proof that something has finally gone right. It shouldn’t feel like a problem, and it’s not, not really, except that it kind of is. Not because he’s doing anything wrong, necessarily, but because Ilya can already feel himself tightening around his presence like how bodies tighten around cold water—instinctive and involuntary, an unconscious recalibration he can’t quite stop.

The season’s grueling schedule has stolen Shane in pieces, entire days and weeks parceled out to travel and practices and games that leave Ilya alone in their home more often than not, and he's adjusted to that absence with surprising ease, slipping back into old, alarming rhythms: meals eaten standing up; television left on without sound; thoughts allowed to spool uninterrupted for entire days at a time; no one asking him where he’s going or whether he’s hungry or if he wants company.

He's always been good at being alone. Too good. Like muscle memory—something learned so early that it no longer feels learned at all. After all, you don’t question the shape of your own spine until it starts to hurt.

Shane moves between the fridge and the counter, humming while he prepares dinner. It's a low, melodic sound, emblematic of casual domesticity, and it should be comforting, but the knife hits the cutting board in an easy, unthinking rhythm, and each sound lands behind Ilya’s eyes like a pulse he can't tune out, like noise his body can't metabolize.

“This might take a while. You want anything?" Shane asks him, not looking up. "I can make you a sandwich, if you’re hungry."

“Uh, no,” Ilya says from the couch, where his fingers are curled around an hour-old mug of coffee that’s gone cold without him noticing, his phone balanced uselessly in his other hand, article open on the screen that his eyes keep skimming without absorbing, text sliding off his brain.

Immediately, Ilya thinks the words come out too fast and too sharp, and he winces. His grip tightens on the mug, and he’s already reaching for the reflexive apology, but Shane doesn’t react, doesn’t stiffen or pull away, just keeps moving. And talking.

“You haven’t eaten since lunch, Ilya.”

Irritation flickers. It comes less from what Shane says than from the fact he keeps needing him to answer altogether, the sound of his voice layering itself over the quiet Ilya's been craving for hours.

“I’m, uh, not hungry,” he says, calmer this time, purposely trying to soften the edges of his voice, but the effort makes his throat feel dry and scraped raw, like something's being dragged across it.

He’s spent so many years alone—in empty apartments and hotel rooms and the echo chamber of his own mind—that having another person track his appetite, his energy, his needs, feels less like care and more like a demand he doesn't know how to meet.

“You okay?” Shane asks, still not looking at him, just checking in the way people do when they assume the answer will be yes.

So, when Ilya answers, it's—

“Yes,” and he again hears how wrong it sounds, clipped and too tight. This time, Shane glances over.

Immediately, Ilya feels the familiar prickle of being perceived. He wants, irrationally, to apologize—for the tone of his voice, for the tension he hadn’t meant to reveal, for the fact of it existing at all—but the apology gets stuck somewhere between intention and execution, caught in an old instinct not to explain unless asked, not to be vulnerable unprompted.

“I didn’t mean—” Shane starts, then stops, recalibrating in real time. “You just seem far away.”

Ilya presses his tongue to the back of his teeth, like he always does when he’s trying to hold something in place. He shakes his head, attempting to hide how he’s gritting his teeth. “I'm here.”

Which is true, technically, but not complete, and the incompleteness of it settles between them like yet another piece of furniture neither of them knows quite where to put.

Shane eventually joins him on the couch. Ilya can feel the heat coming off his arm, the easy sprawl of him, the settled comfort with which he takes up space, and alongside the love that wells up reflexively, there’s something else too. Something thinner and sharper, a sound just below the threshold of hearing.

Shane talks, idly at first, about practice, about a teammate who can’t stop overthinking his shots, about how the season feels like it’s speeding up and slowing down at the same time. Really, he just talks and talks and talks, never stopping, and Ilya listens, and nods in the right places, but he's tracking the steady rhythm of Shane’s voice more so than the actual content, and he's waiting rather impatiently for him to finish, because, really, when will he run out of things to talk about?

He loves him—with a depth that still startles him when he stops to think about it, with affection so intense it almost feels retroactive, like Shane's been rewriting Ilya’s past just by existing in his present—but that love, for all it encompasses, doesn’t translate cleanly into ease. Being alone taught Ilya how to make himself small very efficiently, how to fold himself into shapes he can manage, how to disappear without anyone noticing; but being with Shane requires the opposite, requires expansion and noise and presence, and some days that feels like relief, like proof of life, and others it just feels like labor he hasn’t trained for. It presses down as much as it lifts, heavy and demanding and tiring, because why is Shane talking so much, and now Ilya feels an itch crawling through his body and he can hear the refrigerator humming and the clock ticking and he’s tense all over and when will he stop talking and oh my fucking God, please, please stop talking and—

“—I’m not boring you, am I?” Shane asks suddenly, half-teasing.

This is one of those moments Ilya's usually expected to fill, a quiet gap he'd bridge with a joke or a comment or a smile, but he’s out of currency. All he can feel is that low hum of the refrigerator, and that ticking of the clock, and that never-ending drone of Shane's voice, now replaced by his attentive gaze, and the awful, tender reality of being seen by someone who loves him.

He doesn't answer.

“Ilya?” Shane presses.

“No,” he replies, and again it comes out wrong, too fast, too tight. He hears it again, hears himself doing that thing he hates.

Shane’s eyes widen just slightly, cheeks flushing, and he sits up straighter, a little embarrassed, letting out a high-pitched incredulous laugh. “Wait—am I fucking annoying you?”

Ilya stammers. “No, no, of course not, I just—” The sentence falters. “Fuck." A beat. "I'm sorry.”

Shane blinks, surprised. “Uh. O-kay,” he says carefully, and then turns his body fully toward him, attention sharpening instead of retreating.

It would be easier, Ilya thinks, if he didn't always do this.

With Shane, confession is always interpreted as invitation, and most days Ilya just wants okay to really mean okay, I understand and we're done, and not okay, now tell me more and let's talk.

“I just—” He tries again. He thinks of deflecting, but the space Shane creates for him is so gentle that he owes it to him to try. “You know I spent a long time being alone, and I got very used to it, and now you’re here, and you are—” He shakes his head, already regretting the direction this is going. “It's not you,” he adds quickly, because that's what you say when you’re afraid of causing damage. “It's not,” he repeats, noticing Shane’s raised brow. “It's just…”

Ilya pauses, exhaling hard. “Look, I’m just really used to silence,” he says finally, and then, because honesty has momentum once it starts, “and it's just all a bit much sometimes. The talking, and the questions, and the—блядь, I'm not explaining this well.”

Frustration twists in his chest. This is so fucking humiliating, he thinks. He takes a breath, covering his face with his hands. “It's just really loud sometimes,” Ilya adds, quieter, sound muffled by his fingers. “I'm sorry.”

The words aren’t pretty. He knows that. Shane would be justified in taking offense, in hearing complaint where Ilya means confession, in scoffing at him and standing up and leaving him to his demons, because what do you mean he's gone most of the week and the short time we get together I'm already bristling at the sound of his voice and—

“—Hey,” Shane says gently, nudging him. “Hey. Look at me.”

Ilya does, and whatever he expects to see there—hurt, or irritation, or withdrawal—isn’t present. Shane’s expression has softened instead, recognition settling into place.

“I get it,” Shane says quietly. “Really, I do. You know I do.” He pauses, steady and solid in front of him. “You don’t have to entertain me, Ilya. It’s okay. We can just sit.”

Ilya nods once, slow and careful. Shane reaches out, his hand settling at the back of his neck, thumb brushing over the short hairs there in an absentminded gesture, and Ilya leans into it before he can stop himself, resting there for a second like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

He thinks of all the hours he spent convincing himself that being alone was preference rather than the only thing he could do; that all that distance was a choice, when in truth it was something he was forced to learn. He thinks of how easy it would be to retreat even now, how familiar the shape of withdrawal feels, how safe.

Instead, he exhales. “Okay,” he says.

They sit together in the quiet, the house humming softly around them. Ilya feels the itch to reach for his phone, to anchor himself to something that can distract him, to fracture the vulnerability of the moment before it can gain even more significance. He resists it.

Outside, the hour finally gives way, night settling in at last, and Ilya, who spent so long mistaking solitude for safety, lets his phone stay off for a few hours, pulls the shades up, and risks letting himself get a little known.

It starts with the light, and how it catches on every windshield and every leaf and how it turns the whole street into a series of white-hot needles pressing into the backs of Ilya’s eyes.

He hadn’t meant to stay out this long, but Shane is still at the rink, or maybe he’s already on a plane back, or maybe he’s just fucking away, and the house had felt too small and too full, like it was shrinking and collapsing on itself, and Ilya had figured he could outrun the claustrophobia if he just kept moving, if he just felt like a person who does normal things, if he just walked his dog without falling apart.

The walk starts out like any other, or at least that’s what he tries to tell himself, but the air feels immediately too sharp against his face when he steps out and the sunlight is hitting the pavement in these aggressive little shards that make his head throb. The world's too open, the wind's humming in his ears like a broken radio, and already he can feel the sweat slicking his palms against Anya’s leash. And the street—it’s too loud, and there’s the distant hum of tires and the screech of a bird and the rattling of dry leaves on concrete somewhere, and it all feels like it’s scraping against his raw fucking nerves.

He’s trying to walk straight, trying to pretend his legs don't feel like they're made of wax, but every sound is landing on him like a physical blow. A car door slamming three blocks away, the rattle of a plastic bag in the gutter, Anya's wet, rhythmic panting at his side. It’s all too much, it’s all too loud, and he’s now also sharply aware of the fabric of his own shirt rubbing against his skin, grating like sandpaper, until his jaw is locked so tight his teeth ache.

Ilya just needs the sound to stop. He just needs five seconds of actual, vacuum-sealed silence so he can figure out how to draw a full fucking breath.

Anya’s usually calm, but today it's like she’s sensing the static in the air, the vibration of his shaking hands, and she’s feeding off it, pacing and whining, her paws clicking against the sidewalk like a countdown. He's thinking about how much his lungs feel like they’re full of glass, and then Anya suddenly stops, ears twitching and body tensing into pure vibration—a squirrel, another dog, a shadow, he doesn’t know what the fuck she even sees—but before he can even tighten his grip, she's already letting out the first bark, a sharp explosion of noise that immediately feels like it’s happening inside his own skull. Fuck.

She starts pulling at her leash, wild and electric, thrashing like a live wire. 

“Anya, enough—” He tries to tell her, but her barking remains relentless and seems to never fucking end. “блядь, enough—”

Each new sound strikes the edges of his patience and grates him further and further until his breaths are coming short and ragged. He clenches his jaw, shuts his eyes, but she won’t stop; she just barks, and barks, and barks, and barks—

Before he can stop himself, Ilya snaps, and a raw yell tears free, ripping through the air, his voice cracking. His hands twitch and clamp down hard on the leash, jerking it back with a desperate force that surprises even him—the force he reserves for the ice; for throwing players against the boards; for when he’s looking to hurt.

Anya yelps painfully as her neck's pulled and jerked sideways, startled into obedience. It’s a sharp, sudden thing, a crack in the tension, and her cries immediately die down, recoiling just a step.

For a moment, there’s nothing but quiet. Finally, Ilya thinks. Silence. His chest heaves in relief, and he looks down.

But Anya’s still there, and she’s watching him now, ears pinned flat against her skull, eyes wide and uncertain, cautious and hesitant—and the sight of it nearly sends him to the floor. Hesitant with him. Hesitant because of him.

It cuts deeper than anything, and a cold pit opens in his stomach, swallowing him whole, his grip slackening immediately on the leash.

What the fuck just happened? His chest heaves, heart hammering. What the fuck did I just do?

He looks back at Anya as a tight knot of panic and shame starts twisting in his gut, and the heavy silence stretches between them.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

The words tumble out, breathless and tangled with ragged gasps, and Ilya drops to his knees, reaching for her fur with shaking hands.

“My girl,” he whimpers. “My sweet, sweet girl—”

"I'm so sorry. I am so, so sorry." Tears slip freely down his cheeks now, and he’s sure he must look crazy to anyone who happens to walk by, but he couldn't care less, not when Anya's looking at him like that. "Please—please forgive me, I—”

Slowly, her tongue gently starts to graze his fingers, tentative still, hesitating between each lick.

“Anyusha,” he cries, “Anya, fuck. I'm sorry.” He feels her start to lick his fingers more enthusiastically, and the weight in his chest both loosens and tightens. “I am so sorry, I—” She settles at last, normal once more, and he buries his nose in her neck, eyes closed and still reeling. “So, so sorry.”

The restless energy drains away eventually, but the ache inside Ilya stays. It swells and lingers long after they return home together, long after he knows the memory of his outburst fades for her and only love for him remains.

He hangs her leash by the door as he normally would, fills her water bowl as he normally would, even leaves a few extra bone-shaped treats by the rug in silent apology. Then he drags himself up the stairs, crawls into bed, and cries the rest of his day away.

“What are some new things you learned this week?”

Galina’s voice echoes in his mind. She asks him the same question at the start of every session, and it irritates him, sometimes—the labor of inventory; the demand to scroll back through his life and label what was new, what was old, what could be discarded. Resents how needlessly clinical it made his interactions feel, how it inevitably forced him to re-contextualize them every time.

“Nothing,” he'd reply, more often than not, jaw tight and exhausted. “I learned absolutely nothing.”

Galina would lean back, nodding, already knowing the answer before he’d spoken, based on how he’d entered the room, how he’d sat in the chair, how tightly his body was holding itself together, and she’d open her notebook. Because they both knew he was always learning things.

Like how Yuna had kissed his cheek after he'd handed her a birthday gift, hugged him tightly, refused to let go for a solid minute until he couldn’t help but collapse against her, heart impossibly tender. Then thanked him, and called him son, and kissed his cheek again, and how his chest had throbbed so sharply he’d excused himself under the pretense of the bathroom because being loved like that still overwhelmed him, because having a family that loved him back was still new enough to hurt, because being called someone else’s son made him ache every time for a mother who he desperately loved but couldn’t grapple with the fact she’d left him behind and all alone.

Or how Shane had looked at him when he returned to the table, eyes warm and kind and completely knowing, and how the sensation had landed like sunlight as his hand found Ilya’s thigh under the table and he traced a heart on the denim of his jeans, using his index finger.

Or how Ilya'd caught him one morning, head hunched over at the kitchen table, making annotations in a book where he could faintly make out the words “Russian” and “Language” and “Course” from over Shane's shoulder; how he'd approached him then, and Shane had looked up, and smiled, and said wait, listen to this and tell me if it doesn't sound right, and carefully sounded out Y-a te-by-a ly-u-bly-u and smiled that shy, embarrassed smile of his, and Ilya's heart contracted in real time at the sound of the splintered syllables and the broken Russian that had somehow never sounded so loving as it did coming out of his husband's lips.

How he learned every day, slowly and against his own disbelief, that love is elastic, against all odds and physics; that every time he thought his heart had reached its limit, that he couldn’t fit more love into it, it expanded anyway, made room, restructured itself without tearing. That when he would think, no, I can't possibly love Shane any more, his heart would tell him it beat and vibrated and pulsated and ruptured and somehow stitched itself back together again for him.

Galina’s exercise matters, even when he resists it. It anchors him to forward motion, reminds him that days are passing, that time hasn't stalled completely, that he's changing even when it doesn’t feel like progress. That if nothing else moves, he's still accumulating something: knowledge, awareness, proof of continuity.

But that's on the good days.

Today, he feels inert. Today, he feels like he lives a half-life. Like he’s paralyzed, like he can’t move forward, like he only knows how to stop moving altogether. Today, he feels like he’s been existing, but never truly living, like he’s immobilized in some ancient grief, like this sadness is a second skin. Like he can’t help but to weigh and measure his worth in the empty footprints left behind him. Like he lives a life that, if not screamed, will vanish unmarked and unremembered.

Today, he feels like he’s a subordinate to that stubborn, old parasite of depression, who’d long learned to pull the strings of his puppet from how early it had festered within him. Like there are old shadows burrowed deep inside his chest, choreographing a dance that's been playing long before he knew what to call the music, before he ever understood what love or hope even meant.

Today, he feels hopeless.

Today, it feels like a bad day. A really bad day.

And so, when he grabs his computer while Shane's away grocery shopping, opens an Incognito Window and anonymously starts to type in an online forum for writers, I'm writing a book where the main character is a doctor and I'm trying to write a scene where he finds his friend who tries to kill himself with pills and I need it to be serious enough that a hospital would have to intervene but not serious enough to be fatal; how many would they have to take for the scene to feel realistic—then pretends not to wait hours until he hears the ping of a notification, and when someone finally replies with a number, neat and practical, like it’s a problem with a solution and not a person at all, he leans back in the chair.

A number, free of any qualifiers, like a dosage chart. Like a simple recipe he can follow.

There, he thinks. There's something new I learned this week.

Ilya holds the knowledge close to his chest.

He doesn’t act on it, doesn’t do anything stupid. Just keeps it locked away in his mind, far from view, just out of reach. Like a bridge he’s memorized the height of, counting the steps to the railing every time he crosses but never actually stopping, never actually looking down, just keeping the geometry of the fall tucked in his pocket for future reference.

He doesn’t do anything with it, even though months have passed, and the seasons have bled into one another, and the sky’s turned grey again, and maybe he should, maybe he really should, because the temptation is heavy and everything feels bad and he pretty much knows Shane has finally run out of energy to continue pretending things are fine just for Ilya’s sake. That this is just a phase, or that it’s just a rough patch, or that it can all be excused away with a joke they can both laugh at, the same joke Ilya keeps throwing at him like a blunt stone until the edges have worn smooth.

And it’s not just the guest bedroom thing anymore, either, or how Ilya will slip away from their bed in the middle of the night without saying anything. It’s how the air feels like lead every time they’re in the same room and how his heart does this violent, sickening stutter when he hears Shane’s footsteps getting closer because he knows that questions are coming, he knows that Shane’s tired of being the only one reaching across the gap, and Ilya wants to say something, he really does, he wants to scream all those things he thought about on the sofa months ago and continues to think every night, but he just stands there quietly and watches the hope die out of Shane’s eyes a little bit more every single day, until there’s nothing left but this fragile exhaustion that makes him look decades older than he is.

So, when Shane follows him into their bedroom one night, when he doesn't let the door close behind Ilya, when he stands there in the dim light of a house that was never meant to be Ilya’s permanent home but has sort of become his tomb anyway, it feels like the end of a very long, very quiet war of silence.

“You just need to let me in,” Shane whispers while lying beside him, voice low and urgent, cracking with something close to hope. “Just let me in. Talk to me. Please, Ilya.”

Ilya's breath catches, trembling in his throat. He doesn’t meet Shane's eyes, not letting himself look, just slowly turns away and curls onto his side. He bites his tongue hard enough to taste metal, red-rimmed eyes staring past the room.

You deserve so much better, he thinks.

“I don't know how,” Ilya breathes out, voice barely higher than a ghost's.

A pause stretches, and Shane holds his breath. His gaze lingers on Ilya, waiting, pleading, desperate for a crack that won’t come. His fingers twitch, reaching out, but stop just short of touching his skin.

And then Ilya's hand abruptly slides out from under the covers and, with a soft click, turns off the light. The switch cuts through the silence, and darkness floods the room.

He can feel Shane's eyes on the curve of his back for hours afterward. Neither man sleeps.

The thing about that night is—at first, it actually feels kind of nice.

Not before Shane arrives, of course. It's not like anything dramatic or catastrophic happened, but until Ilya hears Shane's key turning in the lock, he feels restless. He's moved through different rooms all afternoon like he was being stalked, drifted from kitchen to living room to bedroom and back again without ever settling in any of them, and spent the whole day feeling anxious—the anxiety that comes from having nowhere urgent to be and nowhere safe to land, least of all his own head. He’s touched objects as if they might anchor him, scrolled through his phone without paying much attention, made coffee he never really drank so much as mindlessly sipped, and stood at the window and watched the weather like he was waiting for it to change, before reprimanding himself for wasting his day away.

Tomorrow, he'd thought. There's always tomorrow.

The day passed like how most days pass lately: unremarkable, exhausting even though he'd done nothing particularly taxing, full of motion but no direction. He ate; he drank; he showered; he stood; he answered messages; he took calls; he performed being fine with meticulous care—because convincing other people is much easier than convincing himself—and the house has carried the residue of it all. A half-finished glass of water left on the coffee table. A lamp turned on even though the light outside was still good.

You're fine, he'd told himself earlier, standing by the kitchen counter with his hands braced against it. You're resting. You deserve rest. This is what normal days are like.

By the time Shane’s key turns in the lock, Ilya has already constructed and dismantled three versions of the night in his head. In one, they're loving and easy. In another, they're distant and civil. In another, they're careful and trying. None of them involve raised voices, because he doesn’t plan for a fight. He doesn’t wake up thinking, tonight, I will ruin us. The narrative that he's volatile by default is one he resents precisely because it's so easy to believe. Because, really, it doesn’t even start as a fight, but something affectionate and light, like nothing at all, the kind of nothing that comes from the familiarity and domesticity of two people who have been together for a long time.

Because, again—between Shane arriving and their night taking a turn, the energy feels, for once, nice.

Shane comes in later than planned, jacket slung over one shoulder, hair slightly damp, looking especially tired—which probably only Ilya notices, because he's learned to read his husband like it's a second language. Ilya knows what tired looks like on Shane—the quiet depletion of being needed by too many people for too many hours, of having spent the entire day performing on command.

He looks good like this, a little undone, softened at the edges, and Ilya, sprawled on the couch with his phone in his hands and a bag of chips abandoned near his thigh, feels the familiar warmth run through him.

“There he is,” Ilya calls, already smiling—because the smile is real, the relief is real, because loving Shane is the only reflex he's never had to practice. He feels something finally unclench in his chest. “Are you alive?”

Shane pushes the door closed with his heel, then exhales, rubbing the back of his neck like he has to return to himself.  “Hi,” he says, and then he smiles back, small and genuine, the kind of smile that costs very little because it’s reserved for just one person. “Barely.”

He starts taking his shoes off, dropping his bag by the door and placing his keys in the bowl, before padding across the house in his socks.

“You know, people usually sleep here," Ilya teases him. "Are you coming back to live with me again, or…?”

Shane snorts, and Ilya's already crossing the room without thinking and angling to press a kiss to his lips, breathing him in as though his proximity alone is medicine. He runs his hands through Shane’s chest, and he feels solid under Ilya’s fingertips, a fixed point around which he's learned to orbit. There's a solidity to Shane that Ilya has built parts of himself around, like scaffolding raised against collapse, and today, it feels like removing it would alter the very architecture of his entire body.

“You're late,” Ilya whines, his voice fond.

Shane grimaces. “I know, I know, I’m sorry. Practice ran long, and it was—”

“—It’s okay,” Ilya cuts off the explanation before it can become an apology. “Well, it always runs long, but it’s okay. I know how Theriault is.”

Shane laughs, moving into the kitchen, and the night starts to settle into something almost sacred in how ordinary it is. Shane rinsing his hands beneath the tap. Filling a glass with water. Stealing a banana from the fruit bowl, starting to peel it. Ilya opening the cupboard under the sink, nudging the trash can with his foot. Shane dropping the peel inside, lifting the banana for the first bite, but Ilya already leaning in and stealing half with his mouth, as if by instinct. The soft choreography of two people who have memorized each other’s movements without ever needing to say so out loud.

“You know…" llya starts to say, mid-chewing. "Your career keeps ruining my romantic plans."

“Oh?” Shane pauses to take another bite, amused. "And what plans are those?”

“Well, you know. Me all alone... very sad... My husband out in the city while I wait for him at home, missing him...” Ilya grins, teasing. “Oscar-worthy, yes?”

Shane’s smile widens, and everything feels easy. Everything feels true, and light, and uncomplicated, and Ilya’s world feels as if it’s finally narrowed into something manageable again and snapped back into alignment now that Shane's here.

“I thought you already missed me all the time, dickhead,” Shane laughs. "But I missed you too," he adds, back now turned to Ilya as he opens the fridge and scans it absently. “So much. Spent all day itching to come home, actually. Hayden kept ribbing me about it, the asshole. Like he doesn’t act the same way with Jackie and the kids.”

This is how evenings are supposed to go, Ilya thinks, so in love it's almost stupid. No harsh angles, no sudden turns. Just—easy.

“Have you eaten yet?” Shane asks, glancing over his shoulder and trying to be casual.

Ilya presses his lips, a little annoyed already, but he eventually nods. Immediately, he notices Shane's raised eyebrow, and he rolls his eyes, leaning against the counter. “I ate, relax. No, I did not starve to death without you. Tragic, I know."

And then, because Shane still has a slightly disbelieving expression on his face, Ilya moves past him to stand in front of the fridge. "See?" He points at the container sitting in the second row. "I made dinner. Or, well, I ordered dinner. Same thing. There's still some leftovers for you, if you want. Not that you will, because it’s not your usual bird food, but I try.”

Shane laughs, and Ilya pretends not to notice how his shoulders loosen beneath it. “Just checking!” He sing-songs.

“Yes, yes, I know. You worry,” Ilya watches him, leaning against the counter. “Very cute.”

There’s a version of this night where everything stays light. A night where no edges sharpen, no voices rise, and the hours slip by gently in the home they share together. Where it’s just another quiet, unremarkable end to the day, the weight of the long week settling between them while they hold each other on the sofa and watch some bad TV. Where the light thins out, and time slows just enough to let them breathe, and heal, and love, and rest, and be.

But that's the moment—Shane smiling and humming and turning back to the fridge—where it starts to shift, even though he doesn't know it yet. Because beneath the teasing, there's an observation, and beneath the observation, there's an old, unarticulated tension that's been accumulating quietly over months, perhaps years.

Worry can feel like devotion, but it can also feel like surveillance. And for Ilya, the line between being cherished and being monitored is much thinner than he likes to admit. Because Shane always checks, always calibrates, always asks if he's eaten, always asks how he slept, always asks what his mood is like in these subtle, badly-disguised ways, and always fucking doubts him when he answers. And sure, it's loving, yes, but it's also careful and, worse—it’s constant.

He watches Shane move through the kitchen, registers the small efficiencies—the assuredness, the steadiness—and something in him, already restless, stirs at the sight of it. Ilya has learned, over time, that quiet moments are where his thoughts grow teeth. Quiet moments are dangerous and invite thought, and thought invites inventory, and inventory invites questions, and questions, well. Questions are rarely kind; questions don’t usually have answers he can live with.

So, he nudges.

“You know,” Ilya says lightly, still joking, still smiling, because he can't leave the silence alone, “normal people would maybe take a day off. See their husband in daylight. Check if the sun still exists.”

Shane looks at him, eyebrow raised, smiling.

“Just once,” Ilya continues. “For science, you know?”

Shane chuckles. “For science?”

“Да, yes. Just to see if the world would end.”

It’s teasing, and affectionate, and they’re even laughing, and it’s nothing, really. But teasing is rarely just teasing—more a blade wrapped in velvet, more affection with a question embedded inside it. And Ilya knows this about himself. He knows that he picks, that he can’t resist pressing on places that might bruise, not because he wants them broken, but because he needs to know how strong they are.

“Well, I think it definitely would survive,” Shane laughs.

Ilya tilts his head, a forced smile playing on his lips. “You know. One day, I’ll start thinking you just don't want to see me that often.”

Shane’s smile falters, and it admittedly sparks a faint pleasure inside Ilya. It’s not like he means for the words to cut, or for his voice to sound sharp, or for the conversation to shift from teasing to accounting, from play to pattern, from playful exchange to ledger-keeping. It just does, like boats that get caught in steady currents can’t help but pull away from the dock.

“Relax, Hollander,” he waves his hand away, tone dismissive. “I'm just joking with you.”

But Shane’s not really smiling anymore, and his fingers are wearily rubbing the back of his neck once again, and Ilya knows the tell of that gesture all too well.

The body always betrays first.

Shane looks down, guilt quietly settling in his eyes. “You’re right, though,” he admits, softer now. “I know I’ve been gone a lot.”

“Ah,” Ilya says, his smile thinning just a fraction. “Would you look at that? Admission. I would say it's progress, but you already say this every time.”

“And every time it’s true.”

“Mhm,” Ilya hums. “How convenient.”

Shane forces a laughs, a trace of apology woven through it, and his gaze eventually steadies on Ilya.

He feels it—that small internal checklist Shane always runs when conversations change temperature. Don’t, he thinks, but he doesn’t know what he’s asking for, exactly.

“I just—” Shane starts, then exhales, eventually settling for something simpler. “This week’s been a lot.”

Ilya presses his lips. “For you,” he immediately replies, sharper now.

The words are small, almost nothing, but he hears the unnecessary edge as he says them, feels the shift in the air like a pressure change, notices how they introduce measurement like a third presence into the room. He doesn’t know why he says it like that, really—except he kind of does, because somewhere inside him, there’s that ledger he can’t stop updating.

When he’d announced to Farah and his team he was planning to take the year off, framing it in the clinical language of a leave of absence and we can say it was the advice of the MLHPA behavioral health program, as if that made it sound intentional instead of desperate, it had felt like the smartest decision available to him at the time.

His moods had been worsening in ways he could no longer dismiss as just fatigue, his temper flashing hot and fast over things that shouldn't have irked him, and he knew, in the bone-deep, humiliating way you know your limitations, that another season of airports and hotel rooms and locker rooms and media interviews full of expectations would split him open. The travel, the constant relocation, the performance night after night, the weight of the “C” stitched to his chest… He didn’t trust himself to carry it without cracking. Captain Ilya Rozanov couldn’t stand in front of a room of grown men and ask them to be composed and disciplined, when the words rang untrue even to him.

He hadn’t been entirely happy about stepping back, and the relief had been immediately followed by embarassment. And Shane, for all his gentleness about it, hadn’t been entirely convinced either. The idea that one of them would radically scale back while the other kept moving at full speed sat between them like an unanswered question: Ilya home alone for stretches at a time, too much quiet and not enough stimulation, while Shane chased another season, another Stanley Cup, gone for days that blurred into weeks, only being able to come home in the narrow cracks the schedule allowed.

It didn’t look like balance. Didn’t feel like it, either.

Still, when Ilya admitted one night, low and ashamed and unable to quite meet Shane’s eyes, that he wasn’t coping well with the pressure, and that something about this year felt different in a way he didn't trust, Shane had relented without making him fight for it.

Your peace of mind, Shane said, matters more than anything. More than your pride or… optics, or any of that shit. That's all bullshit. If you feel you need to step back, then step back. You know I’ll be here for you every step of the way.

A few months into the season, though, and the clean certainty of that choice had begun to erode. The games kept happening without him, Shane kept traveling, the quiet at home kept stretching, and both of them, in different ways and rarely out loud, had started circling the same uneasy question. How much good had it actually done?

This week’s been a lot.

For you.

Shane glances at Ilya, studies his face for a second longer than usual. “Yeah,” he says carefully. “For me.”

Something in Ilya resents the care in that tone. The deliberateness. Why are you already managing this? We’re not even fighting yet. But he shrugs instead, like it’s meaningless. Like the truth isn’t that he no longer knows what to do with Shane’s forward faith anymore—the belief that effort pays off, that patience is rewarded, that the things you love can be protected if you flag the risks. Like it doesn’t all cave in his chest and land as a whimper and a thud.

Like it doesn’t irk him, deep down, to watch his husband travel the country, and play the sport he loves, and have a father and a mother to return to, and be so composed through it all, and succeed, and just have this whole life bursting around him, throbbing and moving and alive, while Ilya, by contrast… doesn’t. Like it’s not bittersweet jealousy that spikes in his chest when he thinks of how greatness—all that greatness Grigori Rozanov once expected of him—feels like a middle name for Shane, settling so naturally on his shoulders it seems it was always meant to be there.

Shane’s voice breaks his thoughts. “Hey,” he says, gently. “I was thinking… since I’ve barely been home, maybe we could just have a really good weekend.”

“We always have good weekends," Ilya smiles by instinct. "You going soft on me, Hollander?”

“No, I know,” Shane says, voice light. “I just mean, easy. No stupid stuff. You know? Just us.”

Easy. The word echoes unpleasantly, and Ilya listens for the crack, leaning forward on instinct. Easy.

Easy. Easy. Easy.

It feels like implication, for one. That something about them is not, well, easy, or that they're predictable in the wrong ways, or that the weekend requires preemptive management, like bad weather you can forecast if you study the sky long enough or if you watch the clouds closely enough. Like Ilya’s the bad weather: rain and storm and tide and tempest.

“Stupid stuff?” He repeats, still smiling, because he hasn’t yet decided whether this is a wound. “What stupid stuff?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Shane says quickly. “Nothing specific. Hockey, for example, let’s not talk about hockey, or Theriault, or the Voyageurs.” A pause. “Or the Centaurs. Any of it.”

Ilya tenses. “Okay…?”

“I just—sometimes things get more than they need to be, right?” Shane continues. “So, let’s just have a good weekend. Nothing heavy, just you and me. We can do whatever you want. Well, I have some ideas, of course, but, bottom line, I just want us to spend some time together and enjoy it,” he smiles, and Ilya thinks Shane almost looks proud of himself, like he’s not speaking the words he’s actually speaking.

“Wait, what?” Ilya laughs, surprised despite himself, despite the fact he's catching onto the hidden meaning. “You think we fight?” There's still some remnants of laughter in it, but weaker now, because his brain is a half-second behind his body.

“Uh, no, not really.” Shane replies, frowning. “I mean, I’m just saying I don’t want us to.”

“But we're not,” Ilya insists, smile thinner. “You're the one talking about it.”

Shane blinks. “I just thought—”

“—You come home,” Ilya interrupts, and now the words are speeding up and his English is starting to fray at the edges, “you ask if I eat, if I'm okay, and now you ask if we can not fight. Is… strange.”

“Oh. I'm sorry,” Shane says softly, and now he looks almost confused at how this is tilting. “I guess I just thought… Since we’ve been under a lot of pressure lately, both of us… I just thought to bring it up, but you're right. Maybe I’m overthinking it. It doesn’t matter.”

The softness does it. The care, the immediate willingness to concede, the belief that this can be managed if handled with pincers. To Ilya, it doesn't feel like overthinking—rather that Shane's already accounting for volatility that hasn't even happened yet.

“Well,” Ilya says, shrugging, but his pulse has quickened without his consent, “if you’re already afraid of an argument, maybe that's why they happen.”

Shane opens his mouth, then closes it again, frowning. “I’m not afraid.”

Ilya laughs, drily. “It sounds like you are, Share."

He feels the familiar urge to press harder, because part of him needs to know where the breaking point is, needs proof that their love isn't as fragile as Shane seems to think, or maybe that it is. He isn’t sure which answer would be worse.

“Alright… Okay, yeah, you’re right," Shane exhales, a little tired but still trying. “I don’t want us to fight this weekend, yeah. Look, I’ve barely been home lately, I’m tired, and I just want us to have a good few days together before I have to leave again. That’s all.”

And that's the thesis, whether Shane means it or not.

Can we not fight?

As if fighting is a decision Ilya makes in the morning, like choosing a shirt or a pair of socks. As if volatility is something he chooses to employ, and peace something he chooses to withhold.

The thing Shane doesn’t understand, or can’t, really, is that asking for peace feels, to Ilya, like an accusation dressed up as kindness, because peace implies that something in him needs managing, smoothing down, containing before it spills. It feels like being asked to behave, like being told in advance that there's something that needs to be toned down inside him, and maybe there is. God knows there have been days when he has scorched the earth around him without meaning to. But the way Shane says it now, calm and hopeful and a little too earnest, makes it sound like a choice Ilya's actively failing to make. Like the only thing standing between them and a perfect, uncomplicated weekend is his utter inability to be.

The irritation festers fully now. There's many things Ilya can't stand—and being anticipated ranks pretty damn high. He's Shane's partner, for God's sake. Not a fucking risk assessment that needs to be handled.

“We’re fine,” Ilya says again, purposely slower this time, like Shane simply didn't heard him properly. “Nothing's wrong.”

“Okay. Great!” Shane's smile is tender, which somehow just makes it worse.

“We are okay,” Ilya insists, and he hates how defensive it sounds even as he says it.

Shane shifts his weight, a small movement, but Ilya clocks it instantly. “Hey, you don’t need to convince me. I didn’t mean to imply something was wrong. I just want us to be good,” he replies, smiling, before continuing. “I’m excited for the weekend. It’s going to be great.” A pause. “Okay, so, do you wanna go down to my parents’ tomorrow and grab lunch with them? Mom mentioned she was testing some new recipes and I think she…” 

You don’t need to convince me.

I didn’t mean to imply something was wrong.

It lands wrong. Too close to reassurance, too close to something you say when you think the other person is already catastrophizing, and the word convince lodges itself under Ilya's skin.

Convince implies doubt. Doubt implies instability. Instability implies that somewhere in Shane’s mind, there’s a version of Ilya who can’t be taken at face value.

He thinks I’m spiraling, he realizes. He thinks I’m already fucking spiraling. What the fuck.

“—I'm not convincing you,” Ilya suddenly interrupts.

“Uh… what?”

“Before, when I said we're okay. You told me I was convincing you. I'm not,” he says sharply, then forces himself to soften his voice. “I'm telling you. We are okay. We are good.”

“Oh, yeah. Okay,” Shane says, smiling, even lifts his hands up in surrender. “Great. I think so too.”

That should end it. It’s designed to. An exit ramp, a neat little period at the end of a sentence that’s gone on for way too long already.

And for a moment, Ilya almost lets it, almost laughs it off, almost reaches for Shane and lets the evening reset itself into something salvageable. A healthier version of himself would probably take the offered peace and move on, but something has already started to twist inside him, something that feels older than this conversation, older than their home, older than even Shane. It feels like the echo of every time he was told to calm down back in Moscow, to be reasonable, Ilya, for Christ's sake. So, instead, he hears subtext where there may have been none, and recognizes something else underneath Shane’s words.

Relief. Like he’s glad they’ve dodged something.

The thought needles him. Why is Shane bracing at all?

“Why did you say it like that?” Ilya asks quickly, words rushing now. “Like I am—” He stops, searching for the words, irritation making his fluency in English temporarily slip. “Like I'm a bomb you have to walk around with, or something.”

Shane looks up, surprised. “What? I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to," he laughs, drily. "It was kind of obvious."

Shane frowns, confused. “Ilya, I just meant I’ve missed you. I don’t want to waste the weekend arguing about dumb shit. That’s all. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Dumb shit,” Ilya repeats. “So we’re fighting about dumb shit, now?” Shane goes to protest, but Ilya continues. “That is what you meant, yes? You come home and already you're planning how to avoid me. Well, that's just fucking great.”

“I’m not avoiding you,” Shane scowls. “I’m trying to be with you.”

“By telling me in advance not to fight? Very romantic.”

“Okay, look, Ilya, I don’t want this to turn into—”

He cuts in. “—Into what?” 

Shane hesitates, and that hesitation is gasoline.

"No, no. Finish what you were about to say."

Shane takes a breath, and then another. “Into one of those conversations,” he starts to say, carefully, choosing each word like he’s stepping across thin ice. “where we both get hurt and nothing actually gets resolved.”

Ilya stares at him, feeling hollow. “So, you already know how our conversations end now.”

Shane’s mouth tightens. “Don't be like that, come on. I just mean when we end up having the same argument over and over again and it never ends.” A pause. Then, softer, “I really didn’t mean it in a bad way, Ilya.”

But the phrase lands wrong, again, and Ilya sees how it clicks into place alongside a dozen others he never consented to carrying. Inventory is happening in real time now. He can feel it, the quiet categorization of their dynamic, the subtle implication that their arguments are, what, recurring incidents that need to be fucking mitigated, or addressed with intentionality, or processed constructively, or held with compassion, or whatever other bloodless little phrase Shane’s been underlining in a relationship therapy book instead of talking like a normal person?

Ilya scoffs. “Okay. So now it's a pattern,” he says. “Good to know.”

Something inside him tightens, defensive and mean, and he knows this feeling—how the ground gives a little, then a little more, then a lot more, until stopping feels impossible. He can feel his pulse in his throat and in his fingers, his body already halfway into fight-or-flight. “You know, you talk to me like I am a case study sometimes. It doesn’t feel great, to be honest.” 

Shane frowns. “That’s not—that's not what I’m doing.” He pauses. “I was just… saying something stupid. It’s meaningless, really. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sorry.”

Shane looks tired and worn down, and it makes Ilya’s chest ache even as it enrages him, because still he feels the argument tipping, still he feels it slipping out of the realm of misunderstanding and into something darker, something with teeth, uglier the more he apologizes, the more he makes this blurb of nothing into an actual thing.

Ilya watches it happen in real time, horrified and fascinated, the more Shane gives it name and shape and corporeal form.

He keeps apologizing.

The rain outside is louder, or maybe it’s just that Ilya's blood is louder in his ears.

You could stop right now, he tells himself. You could laugh. You could push him to your lap and kiss him and say sorry and tell him you're being stupid and let it die down and go enjoy your weekend together and—

“No, no. You always do this, actually,” Ilya says, voice mild now. “You decide ahead of time what kind of conversations we can and can't have. Why are we setting rules for how I’m allowed to exist in my own home for the next two days? I don't understand it.”

“Huh?” Shane frowns. “Our home, Ilya. And that’s not what’s happening. To me, at least, but…” He stops, and takes a moment, shaking his head.

Our home, Ilya repeats in his head, mocking. Like he's ever fucking here, anyway.

“No?” Ilya tilts his head, mouth curving. “Shane,” he presses. “I say something wrong, you stay calm. I get upset, you stay calm. I say something mean, you stay calm. Makes me think you’re just forcing yourself to not react. It's very impressive, don't get me wrong.”

Shane groans softly. “Oh, come on. Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” Ilya asks sharply. “Say that you like me better when I’m quiet? When I agree? When I don’t make, ah—” he gestures vaguely, “—mess?”

Shane’s looking at him like he’s grown two heads, so Ilya thinks: make him understand, explain further, make him feel it.

“I talk. You talk back. I talk. You talk back again. In the end, neither of us is satisfied." He laughs, drily, pausing for a beat, before continuing. "Like, wow, what a great relationship,” he mocks.

Ilya keeps going, voice tightening. “You want me to… what? Turn myself off so you can relax? Say sorry if I have a shitty feeling at an inconvenient time and it ruins your weekend?”

Shane’s jaw sets. “Of course not. I want to be here with you. If you’re feeling bad, then of course we can talk about it. You’re not—you’re not listening to me.” A pause, and then he sighs deeply. “You know… We can’t keep doing this every time one of us says something slightly wrong, Ilya.”

“And this is what, exactly?” Ilya snaps. “Or are we pretending we didn't have the same conversation last week, and the week before?”

Shane exhales, slow and deliberate. “I’m not attacking you.”

Oh my fucking God, he thinks, vicious and desperate all at once, react, Shane. For once, react. Say something real. Say something ugly. Say something you mean. Don’t just stand there like a fucking mannequin.

“No,” Ilya says, laughter already clawing its way up his throat, “you're dissecting me. Much better, so nice of you. Thank you so much, Shane. Do you want me to suck your dick as a reward?”

Shane’s eyes briefly flicker with something unguarded, before the shutters come down again. “Come on, Ilya, that’s not fair. I'm talking with you, I listen—”

“—You are talking at me,” Ilya replies, heat bleeding through. “And you listen so you can fix. Not so you can actually hear me.”

Say you hate me, Ilya thinks, vicious and pleading all at once. Say it like you mean it. Hate me like you love me. Make me feel something, like I exist here.

Instead, Shane keeps talking, explaining, clarifying, choosing his words like they’re glassware he doesn’t want to break, and something inside Ilya twists on itself, ugly and mean, because he can see the emotion pressed down beneath Shane's restraint, and the knowledge that he can still pull that reaction from someone settles into his chest with a shameful, heady relief.

He still has some power. Still has the capacity to destabilize. Still matters enough to not be indifferent.

Not yet, anyway.

“You treat me like I'm made of glass, Shane,” he continues, and now the wobble in his voice is there, the crack he hates. “You act like I'm about to break. Like I am this close to ruining everything.” Ilya's voice drops to a whisper, eyes wet. “It makes me feel like loving me is work.”

Shane’s composure fractures at the emotion in his voice. “Because I’m scared!" He drags a hand through his hair, breathing harder now. "And—and so are you! You don’t have to pretend you’re not, it’s fine to say it. I’m fucking scared, okay?”

There it is. The soft underbelly. And Ilya sees it—the exposed place, the honesty, the fear—and instead of softening, something in him hardens.

“Scared of me,” he says quietly, already deciding that's what he heard.

“No,” Shane says, immediately, smiling sadly. “No, not of you.” His voice drops to a whisper. “Just scared. Of this whole situation. Of not knowing what to do, or what to say. Of messing up." A beat. "Scared of losing you.”

And it should be sweet, should land as devotion, but it just makes his chest ache, irritation flaring as if he meant it as an accusation. Ilya’s smile twists, bittersweet. “But maybe you're already losing me. Have you thought of that?”

Every day, there's less of me left, he wants to say.

Shane flinches, his face registering the words with pained surprise. “Don’t say that,” he says, instinctively.

“I say what I want,” Ilya snaps, and then he looks to the side and shakes his head, as if to himself. “What the fuck is going on today…” he proclaims under his breath, and his eyes return to Shane’s. “You think you have to manage me! Let’s talk about that! How fucking normal do you think that is, huh?”

He knows he should stop. Knows, distantly, that this is the moment where you choose to de-escalate, to step back, to say okay, I hear you and mean it. But he's on autopilot, and the brakes aren't working, and the foot on the pedal won't lift. From here on out, the slope can only steepen.

“Okay, look, we’re not going anywhere with this, so—”

“—No, no, no, hold on. Hold on, because I’m learning a lot of things about our relationship I didn't know about, so maybe it’s good we’re finally talking. It’s good you’re finally being honest, Shane, for once.”

They stop for a second and stare at each other, flushed, breathing hard.

“Tell me,” Ilya says, more calmly now. “Why do you manage me?”

“Ilya,” Shane says, tightly. “I don’t manage you.”

And the intensity in his voice comes back full force. “Yes, you do! Yes, you fucking do, Shane!” Ilya exclaims. “You check, you double-check, you monitor how I sound, how loud I am, how quiet I am, you walk on, ah, eggshells around me, and you tell me you love me as if any of this makes any fucking sense!”

Shane swallows, defensive but gentle, and the frustration is creeping in now despite his best efforts to keep it contained. “I do love you. I just try to keep things from exploding because I know sometimes you don’t mean what you say when you’re hurt, and these arguments are pointless, anyway. Why are we even fighting about this?”

“So now I hurt you?” Ilya says.

“Sometimes,” Shane admits, because he’s honest to a fault. “Yeah. Yeah, sometimes you do.”

This is a moment where Ilya could absorb that and hear it as pain instead of blame. Instead, he feels the familiar pang of humiliation, which he quickly reshapes into offense. “And you don’t?” He asks. “You don't hurt me? I see how you look at me every day. You think I'm, what, unstable?”

“No,” Shane shakes his head. “No, I don’t think that. I think you’re struggling, yes. In fact, I know you’re struggling, and I try to make things easier for you, because I care. I’m allowed to care, Ilya. I’m allowed to worry.”

“Care,” Ilya repeats, tasting the weight of it on his tongue. “Or control, hm?” The words don’t ring true as he says them—he doesn't feel that with Shane, not really—but he says them anyway, because he needs it to sting.

Shane doesn’t take the bait or rise to it, though—just lets out a sharp, disbelieving scoff. “What? I’ve never controlled you. I try to get you to talk to me, to open up, and you tell me you can't, that you don't know how. So, I back off. I wait for you to come to me. I don't pressure you. I don't corner you. What else can I do?”

“You could be here, to start.”

He hears how it sounds as soon as it leaves him, and Shane’s expression falters instantly.

“No, no, no,” Ilya shakes his head, already bristling. “Do not give me that look, Shane. You said it. You admitted it. Not me.” A beat. “You’re never home anymore! We barely see each other. And then when you're finally here for just one fucking weekend, you tell me not to argue and to be quiet. Like, what?”

The air between them tightens. “But fine,” Ilya adds, the edge turning brittle. “We don't have to go there, since apparently it makes you so uncomfortable.” He exhales through his nose, looks away, then back again. “So, you don't think I’m unstable. I mean, clearly you do, but—okay, Shane. Sure.” He ponders for a moment, and then his voice shifts, lighter on the surface. “What, then? Do I annoy you?”

“What? Ilya, no. Of course you don’t annoy me. What kind of question is that? I spend half our time together wondering if I annoy you.”

“I exhaust you?” Ilya presses.

Shane hesitates, just a second too long, and there it is. Confirmation.

“Ah. So, you're exhausted. Okay, well. Good to know,” Ilya says casually, voice lower now. He tries to make it seem he’s fine with it, but the hurt laces through all the same. “Exhausted because… why? You resent me? Because you resent that I'm not getting better? Help me understand.”

“What the fuck. No, no—of course not,” Shane says, the horror evident in his voice. “I’ve never thought that, I have never resented you. I don't even know... Jesus, Ilya, is this what you’ve been thinking this whole time?”

There he goes again, Ilya thinks, just talking and talking and talking, and never actually saying anything of substance.

Shane’s voice keeps forming polite sentences that slide cleanly into one another and eventually loop back on themselves, carefully choosing his words to be as inoffensive as possible, and Ilya feels his patience disintegrating. His thoughts are splitting, one half listening, while the other is pacing restlessly inside his own skull.

Shane shakes his head to himself. “No, never. I've never resented you," He repeats. "I have wanted you to feel better, yes, but that’s not the same thing.”

“Okay, sure. So, you don’t resent me, but then you keep asking me not to struggle? How does that work?”

Shane doesn’t miss a beat. “I ask that you don’t destroy us while you struggle.”

Ilya’s rendered silent for a moment.

“Destroy us?” He echoes softly, digesting the word.

The surprise and hurt must show in his expression, because Shane’s face falls. “I don’t mean—”

“—But you do,” Ilya cuts in. “You do mean it. You think I ruin things.”

“I think,” Shane says carefully, “that sometimes you push until it hurts the both of us. And I don’t know why.” A pause. “Like today. What are we even fighting about?”

And Ilya doesn’t know the answer to that either, so they just stand there, silent for a moment. What else is there to say?

But then Shane sighs, and his voice comes out soft, wavering under the pressure, trying to wave the white flag. “I’m just trying to help you, Ilya. I really don’t want to fight.” A beat. “We can just let this go and still have a good night.”

Ilya considers the word for a minute, rolls it around in his mouth. “Help,” he repeats, a knife-shaped syllable. “That’s what you call what we’ve been doing these last ten minutes?”

Shane’s lips tighten, eyes frowning, but he stays silent.

“Funny you call it help,” Ilya continues. “because, to me, it feels like a cage, if I’m being honest.”

“Yeah, no," Shane’s patience thins. "We’re not doing this, Ilya. Sorry, but—no. I know sometimes you feel you need to push away the people that love you, but you can’t do that with me, so…”

Ilya’s smile is sharp. “That’s a new one. Push away?”

Shane sighs, exhausted, but eventually nods.

“Aw. And you stay anyway. How noble.” He mocks, and then he’s shaking his head, disbelieving.

What the fuck are they even arguing about?

“Yes. I stay because I love you.”

“Or because you like being the good one,” Ilya says, and now it’s turning, really turning. “You like being the stable and reasonable person in our relationship. You feel superior, yes? It makes you feel better?”

Shane’s eyes flash. “I have never felt superior to you.”

And Ilya knows Shane’s feeling cornered now, because all of his arguments are wrapped around trying to defend himself.

Bite back, he thinks. Lash out. Hurt me.

“Sure,” Ilya says, sharpness in his tone. “but you feel, ah… sane next to me. That's what this is, right?” He gestures vaguely between them, mouth twisting. “You calm. Me chaos. You patient. Me difficult. Is a nice balance for you. Especially now that I'm not on the ice anymore. Must be great being able to go out there and say your husband stayed back home. Not having to split all the attention with me.” A bitter laugh. “I take up so much space, right?”

Shane clenches his jaw, but he stays quiet, which only encourages Ilya to keep going. “Actually,” he adds, like the thought has just occurred to him, though it clearly hasn’t, “you were the one who told me it was better to skip this season. Funny, right?” His eyes flick up, searching and accusing. “It seems—”

“—Ilya.” Shane cuts in, firm now. “I’m going to stop you right there. I’m going to ignore what you just said, because it’s so ridiculous and absurd and, most of all, so fucking offensive to me, it doesn’t even merit a response.” His voice is tight and strained. “You think I enjoy not seeing you play? You think it didn’t gut me to have that conversation with you?” A beat. “I told you to put your health first. That’s all.”

Silence settles heavy between them, and Ilya doesn’t know what to argue back. So he just stands there, shoulders rigid, staring over Shane’s shoulder like the answer might be written somewhere on the wall.

“Anyway,” Shane continues, voice quiet. “it’s not about balance. It’s about loving someone even when they’re not at their best, and—”

A sharp laugh breaks free of Ilya before he can stop it. “—Which book did you take that from? No, no, wait, let me guess.” He gestures theatrically. “Loving someone when they are not at their best and, uh, what, I’m never at my best? I’ve not been at my best for years?”

Shane's eyes flash like he's about to say something, but Ilya continues before he has the chance. “That’s the problem, right? You miss that guy you were fucking when you were nineteen and everything was simple. Hey, I get it.” He shrugs, smile turning mean. "Nice dick, nice abs, funny. World at his fucking feet. Good lay, да? Yeah, I miss him too.”

“That’s not—”

“—You’re tired of me,” Ilya says, cutting him off again. “Just say it. It's fine. You think I don't know?”

Shane looks stunned. “I'm not tired of you, Ilya! Do you even hear yourself?”

“I do!” He exclaims in an outburst. “I do hear myself! And I’m also hearing everything you’re saying! You’re telling me I push until I hurt you and that I distance myself from people and you’re making me sound insane, and you want me to, what? What am I supposed to say to that?”

Ilya pauses for a second to gather his thoughts, and when he does, his voice returns as a small whisper. “I know I’m a little sad sometimes. Okay? I know that. But I just want to be left alone in those moments, that’s all, and you don't respect that—”

“—Because I love you—”

“—And—oh, so you agree, then? You don’t respect it?”

“No, I—fuck. You know what I mean—" Shane stops, and shakes his head, clearing his mind. “I just want to understand you, and help you get better, and be there for you, and sometimes you make it pretty damn hard to—”

“—Excuse me?”

Shane closes his eyes immediately, and they both go silent. The fuck muttered under his breath is quiet, but loud enough for Ilya to hear it, and his voice comes icy then, a full octave lower.

“No one is forcing you to stay, Shane,” Ilya says, quietly, the words cold and clean and deliberate now. “If this is too much work for you, you can go. What the fuck is this? I’m not keeping you prisoner. We're in a relationship—or, I don't know, I thought we were, anyway." A beat. "You want to leave tonight? Pack your bags? Fine by me. Take your shit and get out, then. See if I run after you.”

Shane flinches, his face shifting, but he takes a breath still. “Look, I’ll keep saying it as many times as you need me to—I stay because I love you,” he says, enunciating the words clearly, and there’s no restrained composure left in his voice. “I stay because you mean the world to me, and our relationship means everything to me, and I don’t want anyone else.” He spits the word want like it hurts him to say it. “I want you, and I want to try my best to help you get better—”

“—Try!” Ilya exclaims suddenly, leaning forward in a rush, because he’s like a dog with a bone and only knows how to pick at the scab. “Of course! That's the issue, right?” His voice is venomous now, words falling fast. “You are always trying. Always trying so damn hard to be the good guy that you forget you can be angry, you can be selfish, you don't have to be so fucking calm all the time. You’re allowed to be, ah, real and—”

“—Real? Real like you’re being now, you mean?” Shane scoffs. “What, would you prefer if I yelled?”

“Yes!” Ilya exclaims. “If that's what you want, then yes, fucking yell! Or are you scared that if you stop being so perfect all the time and start saying what you’re really thinking, then I will not want you anymore?”

Silence. Then Shane laughs, once, hollow. “I don’t know, Ilya,” he says. “Would you?”

Ilya's eyes narrow as they meet Shane’s, and he shouldn’t say anything, he really shouldn’t, because things are going too far now and he’s about to say words he doesn’t mean, but he’s already in free-fall and cruelty feels easier than vulnerability and some part of him would rather burn the house down than admit he’s afraid of losing it and—

“Maybe not.”

It slips out before he can stop it, before he can sand down the edges or reroute it into something less brutal, and the second it exists in the air between them, he understands clearly that it won’t go back into his mouth the way it came. The implication lands heavy and loud between them, like a glass set too hard on a table, not cracking but never being the same again.

There’s a split second, thin and desperate, where he wants to lunge forward and rewrite his words, to say no, ignore that, that was cheap, I was aiming for the bruise and I found it, I would want you in any version of yourself, even the worst one, especially the worst one, even if you were swallowed whole by your own darkness I would still choose you, I'm not that cruel, I'm not that small.

But the moment for correction passes in the three seconds it takes for Shane to go still. Ilya sees it happen—Shane’s gaze sharpening inward, like he's already filed the sentence away for later examination. He doesn't explode, or even flinch, just absorbs the blow like data, and Ilya can almost see the process unfolding behind Shane’s eyes: memory calcifying around it, the phrase finding a small corner to settle into and live in, to be replayed on nights when sleep won't come easily.

In that awful, lucid instant, Ilya knows he’s built a future doubt; taken one of Shane’s many carefully managed fears and given it a sharper outline.

“I just mean—how would I know, right?” he adds quickly, clumsily, the words tripping over each other in their rush to do damage control, to plaster something gentle over the crack he's just driven straight through the center of them. He can hear the thinness in his own voice, how it reaches instead of lands, but he needs Shane to see the panic underneath his words, needs him to understand that he didn’t mean it like that, that it came out wrong, that it was fear dressed up as accusation, that sometimes his mouth outruns his loyalty or his love. But his words only sound like backpedaling now, like premeditated strategy.

Shane looks at him, and there's no explosion, no raised voice. Just that stare, unnervingly blank, as if he's stepped outside the moment in order to survive it. He starts to open his mouth like he might argue or defend himself point by point like he always does, articulate and precise and thorough, but then he stops, closes it again, swallows dry.

“Ilya,” he says slowly, restrained, each syllable placed carefully between them like something fragile he doesn’t trust him not to shatter. “You’re being cruel.”

And Ilya knows he is. He knows it with a perfect clarity, so sharp it almost feels medicinal, like alcohol poured straight into an open wound: stinging, purifying and impossible to ignore. Knows that there's no confusion left to hide behind, no plausible misinterpretation to cling to, knows he's crossed a line he could see perfectly before stepping over it. Knows this isn't about tone anymore, or about misunderstanding, or about miscommunication, or about Shane being too sensitive or Ilya being too blunt.

Knows he crossed from defensive into deliberate harm and that this is about wanting to land a hit because he feels cornered, because something in him panics at the thought of being the only one exposed. Knows this is about drawing blood because he himself is bleeding.

Ilya's jaw is locked tight, so tight it aches, teeth pressed together hard enough that he can feel the pulse in his temples. He should stop. He knows he should. He can see the apology, the exhale, the admission that he’s spiraling and doesn’t mean half of what he’s saying, and he can still choose it. He can still let the argument collapse under its own weight and apologize and—

“You have always known I was cruel,” he says instead, and the words come out steady, which is the most frightening part. Steady and almost conversational, like he's just offering Shane a simple fact. There's a dare tucked inside it, a challenge disguised as honesty, a test for him to pass. “This isn't new to you.”

What he really means—you knew what I was when you chose me. You saw the sharp temper and how I turn mean when I’m scared and how I don’t know how to stop when I start. You saw how I push and prod and twist and stab until something breaks just to see if it will, and how I say the ugliest thing in the room just to feel less exposed. You saw the worst of me, and you saw every crack in me, and you saw how small I can be, and you loved me for fifteen years anyway, so how can you be surprised now, how can you throw it back in my face when I have been the same since the start—stays lodged in his throat.

“No,” Shane says immediately, and the certainty in it is so quick, so instinctive, that for half a second it threatens to undo Ilya entirely. He expects hurt, anger, the clean satisfaction of having made Shane flinch. Instead, Shane says it like the insult has landed somewhere else entirely, looking almost offended on Ilya’s behalf, as if he's said something cruel about someone Shane loves and Shane won’t allow it to stand. “No, I’ve never known you like that.”

The smallest pause, just enough to acknowledge the fracture without widening it. “You’re being cruel now, though.”

The words hang there, undeniable, and for half a second, Ilya feels the sting of them. But then a sharp, brittle laugh escapes him, and once it’s out it feels like permission. Resentment and bitterness spill free in a grotesque, exhilarating rush, like tearing off your own skin just to see if there’s anything alive underneath, a creature gnawing at its limbs for the privilege of baring its teeth. Because it was an ugly thing he said, yes, but it’s still not enough. It still doesn’t quiet the beast inside him, still doesn’t feel like tasting the fleeting sweetness of advantage, still doesn’t feel like finally standing on higher ground, still doesn’t feel like relief.

The seal is broken then, and insults follow, sharpened to points, each one aimed with terrible accuracy and growing in pitch and cruelty. Voices rising, climbing and climbing, as if volume alone might finally shatter the glass between them.

Somewhere along the way, they move from the kitchen to the living room and from the living room to the bedroom, Ilya following Shane around with a desperate need to break through the walls he’s putting up and tabulate the clean slate of their dynamic.

This is what you signed up for, he thinks. Come meet the monster you married.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Ilya—enough,” Shane says when he catches sight of him stepping into the bedroom after him, his voice taut but controlled, trying to hold himself steady.

“What?” Ilya says, voice edged with frustration and vulnerability. “We’re done talking just because you say we are?”

Shane pinches the bridge of his nose. “Yes! Yes, we—” He pauses, runs a frantic hand through his hair. “We’re just saying ugly shit to each other now, you especially, and I don’t want to argue anymore, not like this—so yes, we’re done talking.”

“Oh, come on,” Ilya says. “I thought you loved playing the therapist!”

“No, that’s not true—” Shane replies, firmer now.

“—No?” Ilya presses, words sharpening with every breath. “You sit there, all patient and, ah, composed, and you act like I’m going fucking crazy, and somehow I'm the problem every time?”

“Ilya, that’s not what I said. That’s not what I said at all, and if you’d just—"

“—But it’s what you meant!” He shoots back, words like flying arrows, each one precise and deliberate, aimed dead center. “You always mean it, don't you, Shane?”

Ilya doesn’t stop there. It feels like free game now, like everything’s now out in the open, and so he provokes Shane, and provokes him again, and provokes him again and again and again and again, not even chasing a reaction anymore, just unable to stop the momentum of it as the argument turns into sport and ritual and something his body knows how to do better than it knows how to rest. Ilya pushes until he knows he's gone too far, until he can feel the sand give way beneath his feet, and he recognizes the moment he crosses the line because Shane’s voice suddenly snaps raw.

“Ookay,” he breaks, at last, but then he’s shaking his head in resignation, and Ilya isn’t really sure he’s ever seen him like this, and—“you know what? Go fuck yourself, you fucking asshole." Shane drags a hand over his face like he can’t quite believe he’s saying any of this, and a frustrated groan escapes his lips. "Is this what you wanted? Huh? Was this the goal? You just, what—you wanted me to sound as ugly as you just so you could feel right for five fucking seconds?"

Shane lets out a short, bitter laugh. "You're fucking pathetic. You know that, Ilya? You fucking know that?" His eyes are bright and furious, and when he looks at Ilya again, there’s nothing soft left in him. "What, you think I don't know you just want to pick a fight so you can act all shocked, or, I don't know, act all fucking high and mighty afterwards? You think just because you feel bad you get to do this to the people that love you? Just because you’re—”

But instinct is detonating before thought can intervene and Ilya’s hand is already moving without permission, something in him breaking loose. His fingers suddenly jump to snap around Shane’s wrist, too tight, immediately too tight. Shane’s eyes widen, flashing with naked shock as he jerks back, breath stuttering into a sound that doesn't belong in this room.

The world stops, and Ilya goes horribly, catatonically still. His hand freezes, still wrapped around bone and tendon, and in that frozen second, he's no longer inside himself at all. He sees it from the outside—the grip, the angle of his hand, the way Shane’s body recoils—and the name that rises unbidden is not his own.

Grigori.

His father’s face overlays his own with sickening, nauseating ease, memory snapping into place like a photograph: his mother’s wrist caught mid-gesture; the quiet intake of breath she never managed to hide; how violence in that house had always been contained, deniable, civilized. No shouting, no spectacle, just pressure and control.

How? he thinks, horrified. How is it possible that even dead you still reach me, still teach me how to move?

Shane stares at him, stunned, like he almost doesn’t recognize what he’s seeing, and Ilya drops his hand as if burned.

For one awful second, neither of them move. They stand there in the wreckage of it, words failing them both, and the distance between them feels suddenly immeasurable. Connected and severed all at once, too close and impossibly far apart. He's never felt farther from Shane in his life.

Shane wordlessly pulls away, and the bedroom door closes behind him with a hollow sound, wood meeting frame. Ilya remains standing by their bed, chest caving inward, aching with a colossal weight like his strings have been cut.

He exhales, long and shaky, and his gaze drifts, unfocused, around the room, the familiar shapes rendered strange.

Is this all I am? The thought comes unbidden. Is this what remains when you strip everything else away? Pain and silence and grief, all solidified into identity?

His self-loathing returns like something long-practiced, and there's comfort in it, perverse as it may be. Disgust for his body, revulsion for the soul inside it. These are familiar restraints, tight but safe. He knows how to live inside them.

Of course his father was never proud of him. It makes sense, of course it does. What use would Grigori Rozanov have had for a son shaking apart, chest heaving, throat threatening to collapse, weakness dripping from him in open defiance of everything that man valued?

A spoiled, arrogant child, too loud in his needs, the kind of boy who mistook wanting for deserving, who believed, somehow, that love was something you could ask for twice or cry your way into, instead of earning it through silence and self-containment? Too soft, too sensitive, too porous, everything leaking out of him when it should have been locked down and buried, every feeling a small act of rebellion against the discipline he was supposed to embody?

No wonder his mother left. Why wouldn’t she? Who would stay tethered to a household where weakness pooled in every corner, where her son mirrored back everything fragile and failing about her own life? A boy who cried too easily, who needed reassurance like oxygen, who could never learn the basic economy of affection—take less, expect nothing, survive anyway?

No wonder his father looked at him and saw excess, saw indulgence, saw something that would never harden correctly. No wonder love curdled into disappointment before it ever had the chance to become anything else.

This is ridiculous, he thinks, even as the spiral tightens, and yet the ugly thing inside him keeps surfacing, reminding him of all the subtle ways he manipulates Shane into staying, of how condescension and bitterness leak from Ilya like a toxin, aging Shane by years and dragging him down into the same mire as Ilya.

He tries to tell himself that at least the self-hatred only runs inside his bloodstream, that at least the mask still holds. No, no, it’s contained, you see. Shane sees arrogance, not rot. Charm, not contempt.

But he knows better. Shane knows he despises himself. Knows Ilya's tired, so impossibly tired, of forcing meaning where there may never have been any, of being surprised by the daily kiss of disappointment, of watching the floor drop out again and again and somehow always finding a lower level beneath it. Knows how he measures his pain against others’, convinces himself his sadness is bigger, grander, worthier, of how he then questions why he ever thought he had the right to police pain and measure it in scales.

And as his throat tightens and his breathing fractures into ugly, choking sounds, the shame rushes back in. I must look pathetic, he thinks. A scratched record of self-pity.

What does he know of pain, really? He, the eternal sufferer, the self-appointed martyr, who turns misery into armor and excuse, who wields it like proof of superiority, even as it eats him alive? He, who lashes out at the slightest intrusion, snarling you don’t know me at people who see him more clearly than he sees himself?

Ilya locks the door, turns the key, and slides down until he’s sitting on the floor, back pressed to wood, lungs refusing to cooperate. Tears come without permission, and he can’t stop them.

When he finally looks up, it’s into the mirror and the face he despises most in the world reflected back at him. Time stalls around the sight of it. The clock ticks, once, twice, seven times, and then a raw, animal sound tears out of him, a noise that doesn't feel human at all.

I hate myself. He hears himself say it, again and again and again, until it loses language and becomes incantation.

His gaze drifts unfocused around the room, until a new uninvited thought follows, terrifying in how calm it arrives.

I want to die.

It settles over him with the weight of inevitability, quiet but fully formed. Die without agency, die without the killing, he thinks, but die. Wake up one morning and just be gone.

Right now, he doesn’t care what Shane would feel. Doesn’t care about grief, or about aftermath, or about the damage it would cause. There's no room left to grow when every step is taken in a body he abhors and the skin of a soul he despises, when every movement feels like running a marathon through sand in a latex suit four sizes too small, when he's hyperaware of the version of himself he presents to the world, living under the constant surveillance of his own third eye. Judge, jury, executioner, the most merciless critic of this long, far too long, feature-length disaster of a life.

When self-esteem turns his insecurities into predators and himself into prey, when his insomnia is written off as a personality quirk instead of what it is, a symptom of something chemically, catastrophically wrong. When he dreams of inhabiting a body assembled in pieces, Frankenstein-like, a face vaguely inspired by his own grafted onto a torso, legs, arms, hands, feet that don't belong to him.

When all that runs through his veins is rage—at the world, at others, at Shane, at his father, at his mother, at himself, at what he is, what he isn’t, what he will never be.

When more than unhappy, he is unhappiness. When he is so, so tired. So unbearably empty.

Ilya stops to assess and re-assess who he was, who he is and who he might become, and finds nothing stable enough to hold onto. If yesterday he was one thing, and today another, and tomorrow something else entirely, what narrative remains? What consistency? What self?

If he no longer remembers who he was before depression—or worse, maybe, remembers it all too well—what’s left? If days blur into weeks, and weeks into months, and months into years, and years into a life?

Shane could leave, he thinks. He wouldn’t, Ilya’s almost sure of it, but he could. And what then? What then, when the only prophecy that has ever proven reliable is that, in the end, you can't really count on anyone but yourself? If even that guarantee is shaky, what remains? What cards are left to play?

He looks at his reflection again, hyperaware of the unforgiving constancy of reality, of the fact that the world doesn't pause to mourn the loss of something that may never have truly belonged to him in the first place. Broken humanity in its rawest form lives inside him—guttural sounds threatening to paralyze his throat, his skull turning into a boxing ring where his own mind beats his soul into submission, and his body into defeat.

Oh, the irony of time.

This is the dark before dawn, after all. The darkest before a hypothetical dawn.

And so, he cries.

Both his hands go numb in the time it takes to feel the warmth of Shane’s lips pressing against his forehead, murmured apologies stacking softly, voices blurring into each other—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—shoulders tucked together as they crawl into bed, and they fall asleep sobbing in each other’s arms.

Shane, do you take Ilya to be your lawfully wedded husband? Do you promise to—

—I, Shane, take you, Ilya—

—And Ilya, do you take—

—I, Ilya, take you, Shane, to be my lawfully wedded husband. I promise to love and cherish you, in good times and in bad; in sickness and in health. For richer, for poorer; for better, for worse; and forsaking all others, keep myself only unto you, for so long as we both shall live.

In good times and in bad.

For better or worse.

For as long as we both shall live.

A few days later, the house exists in a lower register.

Everything feels muted and padded, like the edges of the world have been wrapped in cotton and the volume turned down. Even the light seems to hesitate before entering the room, dust motes suspended mid-air like they, too, are afraid of falling too loudly.

Shane moves through it like he’s learned a new choreography overnight: slower, wider arcs, a carefulness that borders on reverent. He doesn’t reach for Ilya without looking first, doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t fill the quiet like he used to, doesn’t talk just to hear another voice answering back. There’s no easy overlap of sound anymore, no casual brushing of shoulders or half-finished sentences going back and forth, and where Ilya once missed the silence, now it sits in his chest like something swollen and wrong.

“You’re making tea?” Ilya asks, breaking through the quiet. Shane has his back to him, shoulders hunched over a kettle as he fiddles with the tea bag. “Can you fill a cup for me?”

“Oh.” Shane glances over his shoulder like he’s afraid to startle a deer. “Uh, yeah. Of course. Do you want honey?” He asks, softly. Too softly.

Ilya blinks, forcing a genuine smile. “I always want honey. You know this.”

He notices the immediate smile Shane gives him back, quick and relieved, like he’s passed a test he didn’t know he was taking, and so he tries a joke, attempting to break through the ice. "You married a Russian man, Shane. Remember? We would shower in honey if we could.”

And, sure, Shane chuckles, but it's softer than he would've hoped, and his shoulders loosen only a fraction.

He reaches for the jar, then hesitates, hand hovering midair. “I can do lemon,” he adds immediately. “We don’t have to do honey. Or—”

“—I want honey,” Ilya repeats, sharper than he means to be, the edge sneaking into his voice before he can stop it.

Shane stills. “Okay.” A beat, and then he nods. “Honey.”

They sit at the table by the window, and Shane angles his chair just slightly toward Ilya, not close enough to touch. Every line of his body says I’m here, but equally I won't crowd you. The spoon clinks against the mug, and the sound echoes unpleasantly—it feels too loud for a room this quiet.

“So," Shane says after a while, voice careful, like he’s testing the floorboards before stepping fully into the room. “I know we said no hockey talk, but you should know I called Theriault last night. I told him I’m not getting on the plane with them today. I was supposed to leave to Detroit, as you know, but—I told him I’m staying an extra two weeks, maybe the full month depending on how things go. Family emergency, so they're treating it as a leave of absence.”

Ilya tenses halfway through lifting his mug. “You didn't.” Slowly, he looks up, meeting Shane's eyes and seeing the hesitation there, how he’s already bracing. “Shane. Please tell me you didn't do that.”

“It’s okay!” he says quickly. “There's no harm to my career, if that's what you're worried about. Teams deal with this kind of stuff all the time. Theriault said he understood.” He rubs the back of his neck, eyes dropping for a second. “I told him I’d miss this road swing and we’d reevaluate after that. If things still aren’t stable, then I’ll take longer. If they’re good, then maybe I can come back earlier.

"I just—I want to make sure you’re okay. I need to. And I can't do that unless I'm here." Shane stops, like he needs to make sure Ilya understands this part most of all. "I want to be here. Okay? And my schedule isn't working for us, and I need to be around so you don't have to carry all this weight alone. I know we said a lot of ugly shit the other night, but you were right when you said I've been gone way too much, so that's settled.”

Ilya’s stomach drops. “Shane. I’m okay.” It comes out too fast, too practiced, so he makes himself breathe before he goes on. “Really. I am. You don’t have to do this.”

He is okay. Or, as okay as he can be right now, given the circumstances.

Shane’s mouth presses into a thin line. “I know. I just meant—”

“—I know what you meant,” Ilya snaps, then immediately winces. He exhales, scrubs a hand down his face. “Fuck, sorry. I didn’t mean…”

“It’s fine,” Shane says at once. He reaches out, then stops himself, his hand hovering uselessly over the table before retreating. “It's fine,” he repeats the words, as if to himself. “The decision is made, either way. Farah's already coordinated everything with the team, and they’re putting out a statement today or tomorrow, so I don't care if you disagree. I’m staying.”

Ilya closes his eyes and nods resignedly, because nodding is easier than explaining the sudden aching behind his forehead, easier than starting a fight when the memory of their last one still echoes in his limbs, a phantom pain he hasn’t quite shaken, easier than admitting the small, humiliating truth underneath it all that, yes, beneath the pride and the posturing, he does need Shane to stay, does need him to forfeit hockey for a moment and put him first, does need to feel Shane love him in ways that are tangible and unambiguous, does need the simple fact of his presence like oxygen, and Ilya doesn't really trust himself to survive the night alone with his own head anymore, so yes, please stay, Shane, I need you, yes, please, thank you.

His chest burns, though, because Shane’s care has become so meticulous it’s almost clinical: don’t raise your voice, don’t crowd him, don’t touch him without asking, don’t ask too much, don’t assume stability. And yes, part of it is love—so much love, pure, unadulterated devotion—and Ilya knows, with painful clarity, that he’s never been more grateful to have Shane in his life than he is in this moment; has never loved him more fiercely; has never looked at him and thought you're the axis on which I turn with such certainty. But it’s also love expressed as restraint; domesticity, but held back; intimacy, but handled with pincers, and it might just be the most hurtful thing Shane could ever do to him, because this, this is how it starts, isn’t it? The recalibration, the shrinking, the careful re-mapping of someone else’s life around the volatile center of his own.

Shane smiles at him, tentatively, and it'd almost be endearing if it didn’t make something in Ilya's chest seize up on reflex, that careful curve of his mouth paired with eyes that keep checking his face like they’re waiting for permission to look there.

“We could watch a movie later,” Shane offers, low and accommodating, already prepared to retreat if need be. “Or not. Whatever you feel like.”

Whatever you feel like.

As if Ilya knows. As if feeling is a stable concept, something with edges, with coordinates, with a center he could reliably return to instead of a constant churn that pulls him in opposing directions all at once: the desire to be held knotted together with the urge to be left alone; the craving for noise colliding headfirst with the immediate exhaustion it brings; every impulse arriving already contradicted by the next, until the very question itself is meaningless.

Ilya watches him shift in his chair, barely perceptible, an inch at most, but even that small movement feels calibrated, measured against an internal rulebook he never agreed to follow, and there’s something about the restraint of it that makes his throat tighten, because Shane's always been open, tactile, unguarded, and now there’s a carefulness there that doesn’t belong to him, a hesitance that sits wrong on his body, and Ilya can't help but wonder—when did someone this gentle learn to be afraid of me?

The question drags and catches, bringing more and more questions with it, and before he can stop it, there’s a pressure building behind his eyes, because the worst realizations always announce themselves as bodily responses first: a tension in the jaw; a shallow hitch in the breath; the sudden need to sit very still so nothing spills over.

It isn’t Shane he’s angry at. He knows that, even as the emotion curls sharp and unearned in his gut, because he isn’t doing anything wrong. If anything, he’s doing everything right: being considerate and attentive; careful with his words and his hands and his expectations; sanding himself down in advance so there are no sharp edges left to cut on.

And that’s what makes this whole thing so unbearable, because there’s no misunderstanding to fix here. Shane's instinct to soften, to make their home safe, to make space for Ilya to rest and be comfortable and feel safe in, is beautiful, and exactly what someone loving a volatile or fragile partner should do. Ilya knows this, and he loves him for it—so much he could cry, even. But that carefulness also feels like being reclassified, like being moved from equal to handled, from husband to dependent, because he’s seen this before. Because there’s a particular posture a person adopts when they start to move around someone else instead of with them, when a room starts to reorganize itself to anticipate one person's volatility. Not fear exactly, or not in the obvious sense, but it’s adjacent to it, and it carries the same weight in the body: the constant awareness, the preemptive adjustments, the careful monitoring of tone and silence and space.

Something in him recoils at the recognition, and it feels like memory resurfacing sideways. A different kitchen. A different table. The scrape of a chair leg across linoleum. His mother’s voice trailing off mid-sentence, the room holding its breath to catch what might come next. The fragile tension of her presence bending everything else into silence, an invisible force everyone learned to orbit with careful, whispered steps. The axis hanging over her head and around which an entire household would move more quietly, as if pretending it didn’t exist.

Long before Shane, when he was a child, Ilya would bend himself into shapes no child should've needed language for, would move earth and stone with bare hands just to prove he was worth staying for. He'd strain and sacrifice and make things happen and try and try and try, not because he believed the effort would be rewarded, but because the alternative was unthinkable, and if for nothing else, then at least so that one day he could say he'd lived for the possibility that their relationship might be more than what it was—more than silence, and endurance, and the thin, transactional coexistence they'd dignified with the word family.

He had been good enough, hadn’t he? Quiet when quiet was required, exceptional when mediocrity felt like personal failure, careful not to ask for more than he could justify. He learned early that love was a reward system, that affection followed effort, compliance, performance, and that being wanted was conditional and revocable. So, he became useful, impressive, and still. It hadn’t been enough.

It was never enough.

That futility calcified something inside him. The understanding that there was no configuration of himself that would ever fully satisfy his father, no version that would quiet his mother’s pain, that no amount of trying could alchemize their grief into tenderness.

That some absences were structural, some hungers could not be fed.

And still, here Shane is, trying to feed one of those hungers anyway. Here he is, stalling his career and rearranging his life around the shape of Ilya’s damage, speaking gently around its edges, offering him love and care so freely given it just makes him feel more and more splintered.

In that moment, Ilya's never hated his parents more.

The hatred lands blunt and incandescent, less a feeling and more an impulse. He hates them, father and mother both, for the architecture of cruelty they built together and called a home, for how it functioned perfectly from the outside while hollowing everything inside it out and leaving no evidence. Hates them for how Shane’s voice softens now without meaning to, for how his care has learned to hold its breath, for how his love has started to move with caution instead of ease.

It would be easier if it had been louder or uglier, if there were a bruise he could point to and say this, here, this is where it all went wrong. But there’s no starting point for it, no singular incident he can isolate and hold up as proof. A lifetime reduced to a perpetual where to even start?, only to never start at all. Only atmosphere, and accumulation, and a lifetime of small, reasonable adjustments that taught him, without ever saying so, that love was something you endured rather than inhabited; something that demanded constant negotiation and arrived already laced with skepticism. There are only memories, sharp and intrusive, that scrape against his ribcage and refuse to be buried or dismissed, memories that prove not everything lived in his imagination, even if he was taught to doubt himself early and often. 

Cold Moscow mornings. Breath fogging the air as he waited to be told which version of himself was required that day. His father’s hand, heavy on his shoulder, never striking, never gentle. Corrective doctrine that left no mark but somehow lingered longer than pain ever could. Crying—not forbidden outright, but treated as malfunction; as something inefficient and vaguely embarrassing that needed to be corrected early, before it became habit. Softness framed as defect, vulnerability as rot.

Boys did not sob. Boys did not tremble. Boys did not need.

If both he and Andrei are hollowed out now and their inner worlds resemble one of Goya’s Black Paintings, all rot and shadow and screaming figures swallowed by darkness, it's because of choices made long before either of them could contest them, because grief and rage were siphoned into two young boys and parceled out relentlessly, until resentment became their native tongue. Spoken in different dialects, perhaps, but rooted in the same soil.

If they don't know how to love cleanly, without tally or bitterness or punishment or withdrawal, it’s because the two people who taught them what love looked like modeled it as something you endured, something you braced yourself against rather than moved toward. As a battlefield where everyone lost slowly, and the leftover was just something you survived in increasingly diminished forms. Because they poured everything they could not process—their disappointment, their mourning—into those two boys, impressionable to a fault, desperate for the proud, warm hand on their shoulders, until the damage replicated itself and they became the very thing they swore they'd never become: their parents. 

If he knows anything with certainty, it’s that Grigori and Irina Rozanova live on, not in photographs or stories or even in the fabric of Ilya and Andrei’s memories, but in reflex, in a hand that fires forward on instinct to grab a wrist, in the sound of pain torn unwillingly from someone else’s throat.

And now the cost is already tallying itself, like it always does when something is allowed to continue just because it feels kinder than stopping it, which is why Shane’s gentleness feels like a warning now, why his care registers as danger, why the sight of someone Ilya loves recalibrating their entire existence around his moods fills him with creeping horror. Because his body recognizes the trajectory, because he knows what it does to you, and how it erodes you slowly, and how it teaches you to edit yourself mid-thought, mid-gesture, mid-feeling, until even disappearing isn't enough.

He watches Shane now, notices the careful distance, the self-editing, the restraint, and recoils in horror—because beneath it all, Ilya’s still that very same child, still twelve years old and entering the bedroom where his mother’s body lies still, still thinking that if he can be a little easier to love, a little less volatile, a little more contained, then maybe he can come out whole on the other side of tragedy.

But now he’s thirty, and married, and no longer a child. There’s no bedroom to survive, no impossible household to appease. Shane’s sitting right there in front of him, not some distant dream or faraway concept or some future damage Ilya can pretend not to see, but the man he loves, the man he vowed to share a life with, real and frightened and trying so hard to be gentle. Close enough to hurt, close enough to lose. Whatever Ilya does now will land somewhere—it’ll land on him.

No. No, he loves Shane too much, too fiercely, to ever let him learn that posture, to allow himself to become the axis around which Shane’s life tightens, to accept a devotion that comes with self-erasure attached.

Love shouldn’t require this kind of vigilance. Love shouldn’t feel like a structure built to withstand collapse, rather than invite living.

Love should be the cottage, and the summer, and easy, so easy, easy like breathing.

“Shane,” he says, barely louder than the hum of the refrigerator, as if speaking at full volume might make his words irrevocable. “What you said the other night…” A beat, and the words slip out before Ilya can second-guess them. “I don’t want you to be scared.”

Shane looks up, startled, like he’s been caught mid-thought. “No, no—I already told you. I’m not scared of you,” he says immediately, too fast to be rehearsed. “I could never be scared of you, Ilya.”

Ilya's smile is sad. “But you are,” he answers, gently. “Maybe not of me directly, but—Shane, you are. You're scared of hurting me. You’re scared of being yourself around me, of saying the wrong thing. I need us to be—” The words snag. He stops there, breathing in, letting the air out through his nose.

His eyes slip shut for a moment, because it’s easier to say the next part without having to watch Shane hear it. “I need us to be normal. Even if everything else is… fucked, and completely wrong and messed-up, I at least need us, you and me, to be normal, to be okay, for things to be like they always were. Otherwise…”

He falters. The admission opens under him so quickly it feels like missing a step in the dark, and for a second, Ilya nearly swallows it, nearly does what he always does and turns it into something smaller, more manageable. But Shane is looking at him, and the truth is already there between them anyway, raw and waiting, so he forces himself to say it. “Otherwise, I think I'm going to get even worse, and I don't want to be worse. Okay?”

Something in Shane's shoulders gives, and the careful tension eases just enough to reveal what’s been holding it in place. He swallows, breath hitching, eyes dropping to where their hands rest on the table. “I just want to do this right,” he breathes out, and the simplicity of it nearly breaks Ilya’s chest open.

He smiles, small and sad and full of too many things at once. “I know, мой любимый. That’s the problem.”

He reaches across the table and deliberately cups Shane’s wrist in his hand, consciously holding it loose and gentle. It’s almost exaggerated in its softness, like he’s proving something not just to Shane but also to himself, like he needs to feel the absence of force as much as its presence. “I don’t want to turn you into someone who watches every step you take,” Ilya adds, quietly. “I don’t want you to have to tiptoe around me.”

“I’m not,” Shane insists through wet eyes, though his voice wavers. “I just… I really don’t want to fuck this up, Ilya. You mean too much to me. I want you to feel safe when you’re with me, and especially when you’re home. You’re fighting enough battles in your head. I won’t let you fight them with me around.”

Shane hesitates, as if weighing whether the next thought is allowed to exist here, then adds, softer, “Plus, we'll have children running around here soon enough, right? I want you to be comfortable at home so your memories aren’t, like… tarnished one day, or something.”

Children.

The word lands with a strange weight, tender and terrifying all at once: an abstract future-shaped thing that glows faintly, even as it casts a long shadow. Shane says it like a promise, like something inevitable and good, and Ilya feels the familiar swell of love that always follows and refuses to be reasoned with.

Shane, that steady drum. Shane, that stubborn heart that anchors him when he drifts too close to the edge. Shane, the only constant in a world that spins too fast, too cruel, too silent for Ilya. Shane, the steady pulse beneath his fingers, the warmth in the cold, the wild and fierce and irrational promise that he won’t be left alone to drown in this ocean of shadows.

Shane, the lighthouse and the shadow itself.

Shane and Shane and Shane and Shane.

“I know,” Ilya says, simply. And he does, he really does know. That’s the cruelty of it. Knowing doesn't make it easier, doesn't make the love smaller or the fear quieter, doesn't resolve the contradiction of wanting to be held while fearing what that holding might represent. Knowing doesn't change the fact that sometimes love can be enough, but you still reach the end of what you can do for someone and have to let go, even when it feels like a slow unraveling of light and bone, even when it feels like you're slipping through your own grasp.

Shane squeezes his hand, letting himself close the distance, thumb brushing over Ilya's knuckles like he’s relearning the shape of him. “I’m sorry if I’ve been making it weird,” he says, with a smile that wobbles at the edges. “We’ll figure it out.”

Ilya nods, rather than say everything that crowds his throat, and he leans forward until their foreheads rest together. He breathes Shane in, the faint scent of tea and laundry detergent and something uniquely him, and for a moment, he lets himself pretend his life can be held without consequence.

But then Shane’s thumb stills absentmindedly over Ilya’s knuckles, so slight anyone else would miss it, and in some dark, tangled corner of himself, Ilya feels the future open under his feet. He’s always been too good at reading omens in the ruins of the past, and what he sees now is—his hand closing around Shane’s wrist again. Shane’s breath catching in that same wrong way. The two of them, years from now, standing in some room that looks nothing like this one and everything like it, the house gone silent around them for reasons Ilya can already name.

The ugly prophecy of becoming exactly who he spent his whole life swearing he’d never become: a hand that closes, a house that quiets.

The month passes like Shane had promised him, and Ilya's worse now.

Shane’s been gone for a week, buried deep in the chaos of the playoffs, and Ilya’s left behind with nothing but the hum of their home, and the sound of his own breathing, and a mind that refuses to stop spinning, and the slow poison that's seeping into every crack and corner it can find.

Shane's voice crackles on the other end of the phone, calling daily—hourly, almost—and Ilya listens, nods, even smiles sometimes, but hockey's a distant thunder outside these walls, and mostly he’s alone with himself and all the things he doesn’t want to face but can’t escape. No crowds, no noise, no distractions. Just the silence pressing in and the exhaustion settling inside him, a thick weight pressing down in the still air that fills the rooms.

He breathes it in, exhales it out. Slow and deliberate, like a ritual. The heaviness never lifts.

He's pacing the house sometimes, restless as the bare wooden floorboards creak under his feet, or sitting with his knees pulled to his chest, staring at nothing, or watching himself from across the room, drifting like a ghost in his own skin, trapped between moments and memories, between the life he’s living and the one that feels just out of reach, shimmering behind some invisible glass.

Never mind that purpose used to be a thing he grasped for, chased relentlessly. A steady beacon, a lifeline, a flare of something real in the relentless grey. Greatness. Now, it’s all faded into an abstract shape, blurred at the edges and impossible to hold, and the harder he chases it, the slimier it becomes, like water slipping through fingers. Even the mirror is a stranger these days: a ghost that looks back at him with unrecognizing eyes and twists away when he looks too hard.

Every night, he waits for something to break, some fracture in the surface that might let light in, and it never comes. For all he’s suffered, still purpose slips away, still it dissolves into ash every time he reaches for it. And if he hadn’t suffered enough for his suffering to mean something, then maybe all he’d done was suffer in vain. Just pain for pain’s sake; no story to tell, really, except the old myth of the boy-man who had everything but stood unmoved, silent and hollow.

Catharsis has flickered out quietly, without the roaring release he’d hoped for, and apathy has settled like dust on every surface, hope retreating until it’s a word he barely remembers, a shape that belongs to someone else’s life. Someone who never stared down the long nights with nothing but a gnawing ache and forceful breaths. Someone who, unlike him, isn’t left to grapple with the resulting painful realization.

This is the baseline now. The quiet acceptance of a life hollowed out and stretched thin. Could he do it? Could he accept the circumstances of his present and resign himself to an eternity of… whatever this is?

The goddess of time comes to collect her tax, and Ilya finds the currency of her credit has shifted.

He realizes then—love isn't enough. Not really, not even close, not even when it burns in his chest like a fever that won’t break. No matter how much he wants it to be enough, no matter how much he begs himself to believe it.

It just isn’t.

But—if love's not enough, if Shane's not enough—then, what is? His mind catalogues what he has left inside him to fight for, and he finds he’s run out of reasons to hold onto a life that feels more like a shadow than anything real.

He recalls the memory of Shane lying beside him in bed, chest rising and falling, that steady rhythm that would anchor him every time. I'm sorry, Ilya almost says out loud, even as the words sound dull and insufficient in his head. I'm so sorry I couldn't be better at this. But there’s no one there to hear him, only the empty rooms and the plasterboard walls that stare back at him, flat and indifferent.

Yuna calls, and he doesn't pick up. She calls again, and again, and again, until it becomes clear he’s purposely not picking up. David tries him then, once, twice, thrice, and Ilya turns his phone off and buries it in the crack of the sofa so it won't stare back at him anymore.

He closes his eyes, fingers curling into the rough wood of the table, breath shallow and trembling.

I can’t go on like this much longer.

Мама, he thinks, soft and broken, and it’s all he can conjure. These days, Irina Rozanova is more mirror than mother. Мама, I'm tired.

Little Ilyusha, tepid steps through a long house, silent room at the end of the hallway, door tilted slightly open.

The frozen stillness of a body sprawled over the bed. A headscarf on the floor, his favorite. The bottle of pills, cover knocked loose over the sheets. The pit in his stomach, forever imprinted.

Life crashing into him, barreling down.

Yes, Ilya. The still body, the bottle of pills, the pit inside a stomach. Life will crash into you soon enough.

Ilya walks into the en-suite bathroom. His shoulders are hunched, the shadows beneath his eyes deeper than usual, like they’ve settled there for good.

Anya follows him in, paws echoing in the room, her wet nose pressing insistently, knowingly, against the curve of his knee. He kneels, kisses the crown of her head once, settles his face against the fur of her neck for a minute. Then he stands, fishes his hand in his pocket, places a treat just outside the bathroom door. She hesitates, but eventually follows the scent, tail thudding softly against the wall as she leaves.

Ilya remains where he is, body still, bottle of liquor in his right hand—a gift from David. He draws in a slow, deliberate breath, then another, and then another.

The door closes behind him, and the bolt slides into place.

Softly. So softly it barely makes a sound at all.

A memory comes to him, at some point.

It’s summer in the cottage. Late in the day, when the light has slackened, and a younger Ilya and Shane lie back in the grass. The ground is warm, heat seeping into their skin, and the night sky opens above them in slow increments. Stars appear without urgency, scattered carelessly as though no one thought to arrange them.

He turns his head just slightly to look at Shane, and feels something inside him give way completely. Words tumble out of him—in Russian, because it comes out easier that way, because the words don’t feel embarrassed of themselves there, their meaning soft and full, like a secret the language keeps safe.

Shane blinks. “What did you say?”

Their hands find each other like they always do, absentminded and certain. Fingers threading together, thumbs brushing over knuckles.

“I said that you’re my—” Ilya starts to repeat in English, but then he stops, and for some reason it feels like he's stepping onto ice. He swallows, tries to search for the right word, and it comes out slower, stripped of whatever candor his native language had given him. “My, ah, utopia,” he says finally, hesitant and soft. “A thousand dreams rolled into one. My only fantasy to ever come true.”

He watches the words settle between them. Shane smiles, eyes shining, but also just a little dazed, like he's waiting. Like he’s caught the meaning, but still wants more.

Ilya rolls his eyes, amused. “It means,” he continues, “that you are everything I never thought I could have.”

And Shane’s face crumples slightly under the weight of it, like the words are too much and not enough all at once.

“I mean it,” Ilya adds, unnecessarily, because he always needs to say more, because loving Shane has turned him into someone reckless with sincerity. “Really. All of it.”

Shane swallows hard, breathing deeply. He nods once, like he’s holding back something fragile that could spill if he lets go. Ilya can see it in the slight quiver of his jaw, in the glistening of his eyes just before he turns back to the night sky.

Minutes stretch between them in silence, and Ilya thinks the moment's passed. But then Shane’s voice finally breaks the quiet, soft and steady.

“Ilya,” he breathes, then closes his eyes. “A life without you…” he continues, then falters.

He opens his eyes and turns them to Ilya, as if needing to make sure he won’t shatter if he finishes the thought.

But Ilya already knows the rest. He’d know it in his sleep, in his urn, in his grave.

“It wouldn’t be a life at all. Not one I’d want, anyway,” Shane tells him.

If wishes were ever his to claim, Ilya, that lonely architect of hamlets, knows he'd ask to hold time in his hands. To have it slow at his command, then race ahead; beg it to stand still, then watch it crawl at the constant, unflinching pace it knows. He would push and pull and prod at it, only then to freeze it—right here, right now.

He'd trap this instant still, hold it like a breath suspended. He'd spend years revisiting it, like how people revisit childhood homes or elementary schools, like stepping carefully back into its light and tracing the air for what it once held. He'd linger there, relearn the exact cadence of breath in the air around them, until the fragile geometry of two bodies unafraid was etched in his mind; until the flicker of living memory assaulted his senses like breathing, and he could recreate the scene entirely, with his eyes closed, or in his sleep.

Ilya knows, all at once, he'd spend a lifetime returning to this moment, referencing it like an heirloom. Unflinching time, draped still over that held, idyllic possibility, as fixed as the evening sky.

They stare at each other, distant remnants of wetness in their eyes, until hands find faces and fingers rest on cheeks. A somber look. A caress. A tender touch. Eyes shine in the soft mist between them, and lips, finally, find lips, slow and unguarded and full of recognition, like the quiet sealing of a future Ilya will spend years trying not to destroy, and failing anyway.

There is no clean break.

That’s the first lie people tell about dying—that there’s a moment where everything simply stops. For Ilya, it’s more like slipping underwater with his eyes still open, the world blurring but not disappearing, sound warping instead of cutting out entirely.

The bathroom recedes, and the light above him hums and stretches until it feels like vibration, like something passing through him. His body keeps doing small, stubborn things without his permission—his left hand taking the vodka David gave him for Christmas; his right hand pulling the pills from the cabinet.

Ilya remembers the motions almost as if from outside himself: the pills rattling into his palm, the vodka pouring down his throat, the burn as he swallowed. The gestures had been automatic, absurd in their simplicity, like watching someone else’s body going through someone else’s ritual. The faucet had dripped once, twice; the light had blinked; the edges of the room had melted, fragments of days and months and years had bled together.

And that had been that.

But somewhere beyond the ringing in his ears, the world stirs, and a sound that doesn’t belong to the hum of the bathroom or the drag of his own breathing presses in. Footsteps, rushed and uneven, the soft thud of a doorframe caught too hard. The air shifts, and the room feels suddenly crowded, heavier. Then—noise. Wrong noise. Too loud, too sudden, coming from outside the quiet of the bathroom. A sharp, frantic impact against the door, wood shuddering in its frame, and the bolt rattles once, twice.

Ilya knows immediately.

Fuck.

No. No.

He was supposed to be away.

For years—God, for their entire lives, really—Ilya's moved through the world with the quiet, unspoken certainty that Shane will be there at the end of whatever corridor he walks down. That Shane is a constant, an answer already filled in, like how summer follows spring whether you deserve it or not. He has relied on that inevitability for as long as he's known him: resentful of it sometimes, suffocated by it occasionally, grateful for it more often than he’d like to admit, but never truly doubting it. And now the door shudders again, and something in that certainty fractures.

There's another thud, heavier this time, wood straining in its frame, and Ilya's body reacts before his mind does, heart vaulting into his throat with the instinctive knowledge of being found out. The impact doesn't register as panic—it registers as interruption, which is worse, because interruption implies that this moment, private and sacred in its own way, no longer belongs solely to him. But the idea of being perceived feels distant, theoretical, like something that happens to other people. 

Another shove, harder this time, the sound of a shoulder thrown without hesitation, without care for what it breaks, and a familiar voice finally cuts through the ringing in his ears, raw and already splintering, his name torn loose and flung into the room like something alive. When the door finally gives, it’s with a crack that feels too loud for the space, the bolt ripping free, the room flooding all at once with movement and breath and panic. An abrupt displacement of air, the violent rearranging of space, and then Shane's forcing himself into the room with a desperation that feels almost animal, and Ilya, who's always known him as controlled and maddeningly steady, sees a version of the man he loves that’s fully incompatible with the image he had catalogued of him all these years. But he stays folded over the tub, too heavy to lift his head, too slow to pretend this is anything other than what it is, suspended in the thin place between decision and consequence, where nothing hurts and nothing feels real enough to matter.

And so that’s how Shane finds him—eyes wide and panicked, standing awkwardly near the edge of the sink, shoulders caved inward as though he’s trying to disappear into himself. 

For a split second, Shane doesn’t move at all. His hand comes up to his chest like it might hold something in, like if he presses hard enough, he can stop the sound that’s trying to claw its way out of him. His eyes go wide, too wide, fixed and glassy and already filling, and there’s this awful, weightless pause where Ilya knows his brain is refusing to name what it’s seeing even as his body understands it perfectly. He sees it like how he sees the rest of the bathroom: edges soft, movement delayed, blurred and hazy. How Shane’s hand eventually flies up from his chest to his mouth, eyes going even wider, even brighter. How the color suddenly leaches from his face all at once.

There’s a sound then, breathing gone wrong from Shane's lungs, like something inside him snapping clean in two.

“No—” Shane pants, shaking his head. His voice stutters uselessly, sounds overlapping themselves, breaking apart before they can finish forming, breaths catching in his throat. “Ilya,” he breathes. “Oh my God.”

The words press against him, vibrating through the room.

“Ilya,” Shane says again, and it still comes out wrong, thin and barely there. It hurts to hear it. His name sounds so wrong in Shane's mouth like that, stripped bare and cracked open. “What are you doing?”

He hasn't noticed the empty bottle of pills, yet, Ilya realizes. I'll have to break his heart.

Some distant part of him acknowledges the door once more: how it’s been shoved open, the lock hanging. Hockey flashes briefly again in his mind, stupid and irrelevant. He was supposed to be somewhere else.

Yuna, he realizes. David. The phone calls.

But the thought slips away as fast as it comes, and what remains is Shane. Always Shane. Whole body leaning forward, like if he stops moving even for a second, he might shatter, his eyes never leaving Ilya's face, like looking away would make this real in a way he can’t survive.

His feet remain planted on the cold bathroom tiles, unmoving, the small cracks in the floor offering nothing beneath him but stillness, nothing to anchor himself to, nothing to fall back on. Just Shane and Shane alone: head still shaking, eyes still burning, breaths still coming too fast and too loud, like he’s trying to outrun something already on top of him.

Ilya attempts a silent apology with his eyes, the shape of the words familiar even without sound. Maybe he whispers it, maybe not—he’s not sure it matters—because Shane doesn’t seem to hear it anyway. His attention looks fixed elsewhere, as if his ears are too busy trying to remember the timbre of Ilya’s voice every other time his body betrayed his mind and cracked sounds and muted murmurs slipped out uncontrolled, broken apart by slow, dragging breaths that always came too late. His eyes stay locked on his, and Ilya knows, with a sick certainty, that Shane’s cataloguing them: the movement, the shape of them, how the corner of his right eye bends downward just slightly, a flaw he’s memorized without ever meaning to. The inventory of memories. His lips follow suit, as if Shane’s trying to record the taste and texture and shape of Ilya's mouth: how his smile escapes and the corners almost reach his eyes; how his lips twist at the corners when he’s amused, or when he’s nervous, or when he’s pretending to be okay. The moles—here, and there, and everywhere.

And suddenly, he’s sure it must all feel like someone else’s memory, like something borrowed and misremembered, distant and fogged over, like a story he’d once heard but never lived.

A mirrored thought festers before Ilya can swallow it back down, rotting on his tongue, and the shame of it makes his stomach turn. Being seen like this. Caught in it. He wants to wash the moment away, dilute it, repaint it into something less ugly, something survivable. But Shane is right there, laid bare in front of him, a hundred fractured emotions flickering behind his eyes, and for a brief, irrational second, Ilya’s sure Shane might just be the devil incarnate—some cosmic Lovecraftian horror dragged up from hell itself to ruin his life and spoil the one chance he ever had at relief.

God, I love you, he thinks. And God, I hate you.

A harsher thought takes root: I wish we’d never met. Was Ilya not ruining Shane’s life by letting him see him like this? By letting this image—him on the tub, eyes bloodshot, decision made—burn itself into Shane’s brain forever? Did he not know he was letting his anguish trap Shane in some purgatorial in-between, suspended in time, and letting his torment define him, and funneling it all directly towards him, and turning him into the last thing he'd ever wanted Shane to become—Ilya himself?

Every day felt like drowning, like sinking into quicksand made of suffocating hysteria, and Ilya had tried to tell him as much, again and again. Hadn’t he? Maybe not in so many words, but—it was obvious, no? In how he carried himself, in how he lived for short, small bursts of happiness and merely existed for the hours after. Was this the moment where it became real? Where Shane would finally believe he could understand it just because he was witnessing it?

Would Shane blame himself for this?

Or maybe—and the thought is cruelly comforting—maybe Shane would blame Ilya instead. 

Yes. That's it. He’d hate him for it. Hold onto that hatred like a lifeline.

Shane would believe Ilya had deceived him, masked their co-dependency as love. Yes. Surely. He'd blame Ilya for making him think Shane felt the same way every time they were together. He'd think Ilya had romanticized it, turned desperation into desire, despair into need, dressed it up until Shane thought he was refuge, shield, salvation, instead of what he really was: kryptonite, catalyst—

But then Shane lifts his eyes, abruptly, and they're wide and hopeful and devastatingly open, and when they snap to Ilya, the answer arrives all the same. He knows exactly what he’s allowing inside himself—the idea taking root, hesitant at first, visible in the twitch of his mouth, before spiraling into something frantic and unstoppable, like a seed desperate for harvest, and suddenly the certainty floods Shane’s face so nakedly it almost makes him look away, because he's clearly choosing something enormous without fully knowing the cost.

I can save him, and it’s written all over his face. I can save this broken person who broke me in return, this ruined puzzle that only I can complete, even if it costs me pieces of myself. I can hold him together, and carry what he can’t, and be enough for the both of us.

The thoughts aren’t spoken, naturally, but they’re loud anyway, so loud they press against Ilya’s skull until it hurts.

And of course Shane believes they’ll find a way to rebuild afterward. Dependable Shane. Reliable Shane. Unbreakable Shane. Shane who gives, and gives, and gives, and never learns how to take. Shane, who thinks that if something is broken, you work until it isn’t; if someone is hurting, you stand in the doorway and refuse to leave.

The thought that he'll stay by Ilya's side through it all settles, warm and terrifying, and in the few seconds that follow, it consumes Ilya entirely, shaking him to the core. Because in that stupid, desperate moment, he actually believes it. Every instinct of self-preservation dissolves, and he falls in and out of love with him all over again in the span of brief, micro-seconds.

Maybe Shane's doing the same. Maybe that’s why he reaches out, hand trembling. Close enough that Ilya can feel it, far enough that it remains a question, or—no, not a question—a promise, forming without words, that he will get better, that Shane will be there for every step of it, that they can push through this, that they can move beyond this, together.

Ilya stares at Shane’s outstretched hand. He thinks I haven't done anything yet. 

For one suspended moment, Ilya almost lets him. For a flicker of a second, it almost feels possible.

He's so tired, so bone-crushingly tired. A fatigue that makes tomorrow feel as endless as a lifetime, that rewires how you imagine the future, that turns even love into a wearying effort, that makes even happiness feel exhausting. He feels it: the almost, the unbearable, exquisite almost. He imagines a life where he stays, where he swallows his hopelessness down and survives out of spite and love and obligation, imagines the discomfort, the endless pain of being alive inside a body that never quite feels like home.

Almost he leans into it. Almost he lets Shane touch him, ground him, tether him back to the world. Almost he chooses the long, hard road of staying, of waking up tomorrow and the day after and the day after that with the same ache still lodged in his chest. No matter that it’s pointless, no matter that it’s too late now, no matter that even love—even that tidal wave, that colossal, unstoppable titan of a force—cowers in the face of biology and chemistry and a bottle's worth of pills coursing through his bloodstream.

Save me, he wants to say. Condemn me to a life that hurts. I will suffer every day if I can suffer beside you. I will bleed slower if it’s you holding the knife.

Hope swells, traitorous and uninvited. He hates himself for it, even as he clings to its warmth, because it reminds him of mornings and coffee cups and Shane’s weight pressed against his side in bed, of all the small, stupid reasons he stayed alive long after staying alive stopped making sense.

I could try again, he thinks, weakly. For you.

But trying again feels infinite and endless, exhausting in a way Shane alone can’t fix. The shape of that future stretches out too far and wide, an endless corridor of effort and recovery and explanations and small daily survivals, and love—even love like this—doesn't make the corridor shorter, or narrower. If anything, it stretches it further and further and further, endlessly.

So, the seconds hang and bend and lose their shape. Five pass, maybe more, and Shane’s breathing turns shallow, audible now, like he’s trying not to panic and failing, like he’s counting in his head because if he stops counting, everything else will collapse. By the ten second mark, his chest is burning—Ilya can see it in the fast rising of his shoulders, like he’s bracing for impact, even as his hand remains hovering between them, suspended in the thinning space between panic and restraint. It waits for the smallest sign: a twitch in Ilya's jaw, a tremor at the corner of his mouth, anything that Shane can feel like a shift in gravity, like permission rippling through the air, something that can justify closing the distance.

But Ilya knows that if Shane touches him now, really touches him, if skin meets skin and the waiting ends, then the spell will break—the fragile suspension that's holding this moment in place will shatter and whatever stillness has settled over them will give way to something louder, messier, impossible to contain. If Shane touches him, this will all derail and collapse and become something else entirely.

You just need to let me in, he remembers, from their bedroom all those months ago.

God, Ilya wants to. He wants to lean forward, and put the weight of his body into Shane's hands, and let himself be held up for once, instead of doing the holding, the pretending, the surviving. He wants to believe that love can be enough if it’s this stubborn, this relentless, this unwilling to let go.

Ilya watches as Shane’s hand falls, slow and defeated. The disappointment hits first, brutal and unmistakable, and Ilya watches it bloom in real time—how Shane's eyes start to water and his mouth presses thin, like he’s swallowing something bitter. It looks too much like Ilya's own reflection on bad days, the collapse of self-worth, and the recognition makes his chest tighten painfully.

Ilya thinks he sees the quiet certainty that Shane isn’t enough settle into him with frightening ease—the idea that Ilya’s need to crawl into his own skin outweighs his will to live for Shane, and, well, Ilya can’t disagree, no matter how much it feels like tearing himself open to admit it. But then there’s something else in Shane’s face too: that maybe this isn’t really about illness, or despair, or any of the thousand and one reasons Ilya’s given him over the years, but maybe something simpler and crueler.

A lack of love.

You idiot, he thinks, throat tight. How could you ever think that? You're the best part of me. The only good thing I ever did. And even that I managed to ruin.

“Ilya,” Shane says, and it isn’t a question or a plea this time. Just his name, spoken in a tone so fragile it might shatter, or fracture halfway through.

Ilya watches him with red-rimmed eyes, bloodshot and tired, outlined by dark circles, and he knows with absolute certainty: If nothing else, I lived to love you.

Fifteen years of it. Fifteen years of shy smiles and stolen looks across the ice, of face-offs with knowing grins just before the puck dropped, of long drives and longer winters, of cottages and coffee mugs and two lives quietly stitched together by routine and devotion and the simple miracle of being chosen, over and over again.

Love. Love. Love. Love.

God, he thinks helplessly, how I loved you.

But because Ilya loves him—because he loves Shane too much—he forces his face to soften, to settle into something calm and resigned and at peace. Forces his features to ease out, just slightly, just barely, but enough where Shane could see it. I'm okay, he attempts to convey, letting acceptance wash over him like a mask, because he knows Shane well enough to understand what he needs to see in order to stop fighting.

So Shane thinks he’s given up. So Shane understands, or even just thinks he understands, that sometimes love is enough, but you still reach the end of what you can do for someone and have to let go, even when it feels like a slow unraveling of light and bone, even when it feels like you're slipping through your own grasp.

But then—because Shane is Shane, because he's always been like this—he reaches for Ilya anyway. Head raised confidently, gaze locked on his, hand still hovering, still reaching, still trying.

Still. Still, after all the signs, after all the exit-ramps where it would've been easier to turn away, to tell himself this was too much, too hard, too painful, Shane reaches for him like it's a habit he never learned to break.

Dependable Shane. Reliable Shane. Unbreakable Shane. Shane who gives and gives until there’s nothing left and then digs deeper anyway. Shane who never learned how to take no at face value; who never learned how to believe that Ilya breathing, existing, living, might not be as inevitable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west; as birds chirping and flowers blooming in the spring. Might not be as certain as the cottage in the summer, where they first found and loved each other all those years ago now, or as certain as the flies that hang low around the dock, and the loons that call out at night around them, and the shadows that hit the counter just right when the sun shines down above them.

To him, Ilya existing is part of the natural order, the truth around which his entire life is built, and everything secondary. There’s no Shane without Ilya, no Ilya without Shane—so, Ilya must exist. As does the rain, as does the wind, as does the sun, as does the moon. As does the cottage, as does the summer.

But Ilya had wanted to live, not just to exist.

I can change your mind, Shane must think, but Ilya’s eyes burn and the truth tastes bitter.

I'm so tired, мой любимый.

The words carry hidden subtext, and he only realizes he’s spoken them out loud when Shane’s eyes dim in response. His breath stills, like he’s still waiting for Ilya to contradict his own words, like time itself might reverse if he waits, but then the hope drains out of his face. His eyes finally leave Ilya’s, and they trail down.

The pill bottle he’s clutching tightly. Close to empty in his hand. The cover loose on the floor.

Recognition hits Shane all at once, and he freezes, his entire body turning rigid. “No—”

Shane…

He takes a step forward and stumbles, catching himself on the wall, face blanching, and Ilya thinks, dimly, absurdly, that he’s never seen him look like this: unmoored, terrified, already unraveling. “Ilya, please—Please, no—” He’s shaking his head, pleading, voice cracking, but Ilya doesn’t answer.

I am so sorry.

Shane swallows hard, and tries again. “Ilya.”

I am so, so sorry.

Then, louder, more desperate, a broken sob pouring out of him by accident. “Please, no, Ilya. Please, God—!”

His lips keep moving—Please keeps happening. Ilya can’t follow everything, just the feeling of it: the desperate gravity of being wanted to stay.

You deserve better, he thinks, so much better.

Suddenly, Ilya wants to tell him everything at once—that this isn’t Shane’s fault, that it never was, that loving him was the best thing he ever did, that none of this cancels out the life they built together. He wants to say thank you, and forgive me, and please don' let this ruin you.

There isn’t time. There was never enough time, even when he had all the time in the world.

Something inside him starts to give way, finally, like a tired, clenched muscle letting go. There’s no moment of clarity, no cathartic certainty, just the dim understanding that the choice has already been made, that whatever he thought he was still weighing had tipped the scales minutes ago. Maybe hours. Maybe years.

The world narrows, and his body feels both heavy and light, like it no longer belongs to him. He slides against the tub, the porcelain cold against his back, but even that sensation feels distant and dulled. Time has stopped behaving itself.

Shane starts to move closer, frantically, and Ilya feels the floor creaking, the fabric brushing tile, the weight dropping beside him, but the bathroom feels too bright and too dim all at once, and the buzz of the overhead light is stretching into something almost musical, almost soothing.

Reflexes and thought blur, minutes stretching like elastic, until Shane suddenly flickers into the center of it, unbidden, vivid, and Ilya feels everything at once. Love, sharp and immediate, a reflex he doesn’t even question anymore. Resentment, quieter but no less real, curling in his chest like smoke, for how easy it's always been for Shane to want him alive, for how uncomplicated survival seems from the outside, for how Shane's goodness makes this so much harder. Guilt, crushing and familiar, because Ilya knows Shane will carry this whether he wants to or not. And beneath it all, shamefully, disastrously—

Relief.

It terrifies him more than anything else. Because if this was just pain, just despair, just anguish, Ilya could explain it away. He could justify it. But relief means this was never just about escaping hurt. It’s about escaping effort and the endless maintenance of being loved by someone who refuses to give up on you.

He looks at Shane, kneeled over him, touching him everywhere, and sees a future unspooling in fragments: Shane, alone in their kitchen weeks from now, staring at a mug that still has his fingerprints on it. Shane in a grocery store, reaching automatically for the brand Ilya prefers and only realizing halfway down the aisle. Shane waking up in the middle of the night with the certainty that something's wrong, that something's missing. Shane, retiring from hockey long before anyone imagined, a shell of a man reshaped by grief, carrying bitter resentment for the sport that took so much time away from him. Shane, thinking about how he'd scaled back his schedule and still it wasn't enough, and I should've just quit hockey altogether, and this is my fault, and one month, one month is a joke, how could I have thought one month was enough, guilt eating him alive and swallowing him whole. Shane, alone in the cottage, not knowing what to do with the space Ilya used to occupy, late-nights spent questioning where he'd gone wrong, where he'd failed, where it became clear for Ilya their love wasn't enough to hold on. Shane, years—no, decades—from now, frail of mind, asking after Ilya in moments where lucidity slips away, before realization inevitably dawns and he’s forced to relive the grief all over again, another echo of time's interminable cruelty.

I am so, so sorry.

Memories bleed in uninvited. Saskatchewan, 2008: too young, too cold; Shane’s I’m not sure you’re supposed to smoke here startlingly charming against the winter chill; how he’d looked at Ilya in the years that followed like he was something rare, like he was someone worth risking it all for every time. Two boys becoming men together; hotel rooms with thin walls and terrible lighting. Shane half-asleep and smiling anyway when Ilya crawls back into bed; an ice rink at dawn, empty except for them—Shane having quietly rented it for a night for Ilya’s birthday after he’d randomly muttered one day he wished they could skate together like they’d done at All Stars all those years ago. Shane skating lazy circles while Ilya watched from the stands and pretended not to stare and just thought I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

The memories don’t come gently. They crash and overlap, smearing together and intruding relentlessly, refusing to stay in the past, and Ilya feels them in his body, in his chest, in his throat, tightening until it hurts to swallow.

God, he thinks, helplessly, as he's hit by a rush of affection so intense it borders on delirium, God, I love you.

God, you're everything to me. The start, the end, the in-between.

He loves Shane enough to want to stop breaking him, shattering pieces of a heart that's already endured too much; enough to want to stop the slow unraveling of someone who’s already given too much. But he also loves Shane enough to know that staying just to hold on, just to survive out of duty or fear or a love that feels more like a chain than a sanctuary, would slowly eat them both alive.

A life half-lived, stitched together by obligation and fear and a love that feels like a weight too heavy to bear, would hollow them out until there’s nothing left but a fragile shell. Until there’s nothing left but a house made of living, walking ghosts.

He won’t be that ghost. Not when Shane dreams of children, real children, whole and grinning and flesh and bone, not just broken, empty promises. Not when he dreams of laughter echoing through a sunlit house, of a little girl with his stubborn fire and a little boy with his shy smile. Not when he dreams of a family, when he imagines a home brimming with love and the kind of messy joy that fills every corner, when he pictures Yuna and David watching their grandchildren play under a golden sun by the lake. Not when he sketches a family woven through time like threads of gold and a life bursting with everything he’s ever hoped for.

He can’t bear the thought of shrinking Shane’s world down to a cage, where every moment is a trap, and every silence a warning, and every day is a delicate tightrope walk above an abyss. Can’t bear the idea of inadvertently raising new Ilya’s—children who, like him, will grow up scarred and scared, inheriting his shadows and carrying hidden scars that ripple forward, from one generation to the next, until they’re teaching their own children the same careful choreography of fear and self-erasure, unconsciously.

No. Ilya's still conscious. He's still conscious enough for this, and he won't be the reason Shane learns to live on edge or turns into a constant guard against pain. Won't let him inherit a life of endless vigilance, of measuring every quiet, of monitoring every dark moment like a fragile glass about to shatter. Won't let him become a husband tethered by fear or a father burdened by worry. Won't let his children bend themselves into shapes no child should need language for, as he once had, only to grow up resenting him, as he now does. No.

God, Shane as a father. The image burns sharp and bright, a cruel contradiction to the shadows he feels creeping closer. That impossible, fragile dream burns through him like a blade, but it’s a vision Ilya wants to protect, even as it tears him apart.

You will be an amazing father, he wants to say, but his vision dims and his eyes close, and Shane’s voice is there. Not clearly. Not as words. It comes in fragments, syllables breaking apart, but the shape of it is unmistakable.

Shane starts screaming his name, and it lands somewhere far away. He's known the shape of Shane’s voice for half his life—how it dips when he’s scared, how it tightens when he’s trying not to be, how Ilya's name sounds different in Shane's mouth than it does in anyone else’s. That shape reaches for him now.

“I’m here,” Shane is saying, even if the words don’t quite land. “I’m right here, Ilya—just hold on—don’t—don’t close your eyes. Oh my god—”

Ilya wants to answer. The urge is instinctive, his mind forming the response automatically, like muscle memory.

I'm sorry.

I love you.

I didn't mean to hurt you like this.

Give Anya a kiss for me.

But thought no longer translates cleanly into action, and the distance between intention and movement has stretched too wide, like trying to shout across a frozen lake and realizing the sound won’t carry.

“Please, Ilya, please—”

His body feels strange now—heavy in places, absent in others. His hands don’t feel like hands so much as ideas of hands. His mouth doesn’t feel attached to him anymore, just something that exists somewhere below his eyes.

“No, please, God, Ilya—!”

There’s a brief, sharp flicker of panic, the last flare of instinct clawing upward.

This wasn't how it was supposed to feel, he thinks. He thought there would be certainty at the end. Peace, or darkness, or at least clarity. Instead, there’s this liminal, suspended state—half in, half out—where he can still feel Shane’s presence like gravity, like a force pulling at him while the rest of the world starts to dissolve.

Memory intrudes again, but softer this time. Shane’s hand, warm against his hip in a crowded room. The way he always lets him steal the blankets, even when it left him cold. His quiet, unconscious habit of reaching for him even in his sleep, fingers catching in his shirt and curling into fabric like an anchor, as if letting go had never once been an option.

Ilya swaying Shane in his arms at their wedding; the swell of piano—love is touching souls, and surely you touched mine, because part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time… Shane’s face tilted up toward him, open and certain, like the future had already been decided long before either of them had words for it, and Ilya’s heart—God, his heart—that stubborn, disobedient thing, doing what it always did in the presence of him and straining past its own limits, past what it thought was possible, past where he could tell one of them ended and the other began, cracking open and mending in the same breath, expanding again where it had sworn there was nothing left to give.

Full, so full, so unbearably, impossibly full. Just beating and vibrating and pulsating and rupturing at the sight of his husband in his arms, grinning up at him; his warmth beneath his hands; his breath brushing softly against his throat; his hips swaying easily within the circle of Ilya’s arms like this was always where he was meant to be; his lips mouthing him beautiful words. You’re in my blood like holy wine… I could drink a case of you, darling, and I would still be on my feet…

I've made a life with you, a distant part of him thinks. The thought doesn’t hurt the way it used to. It drifts through him and passes on, like everything else.

The bathroom tilts, or maybe it’s Ilya tilting inside himself. He’s aware, dimly now, of pressure at his shoulder, at his arm. Of Shane’s hands—one shaking his shoulder, the other holding his phone, screaming maniacally about how there’s been an emergency and my partner took pills, sobbing their home address into the phone and repeating it twice when the hiccups rough up the sound of his words.

Shane's always had steady hands. Ilya has watched those hands lace skates, sign contracts, cup his face with maddening certainty. It feels wrong to register them like this.

Don't, he wants to say, but his lips stay shut. Please don’t remember me like this.

But memory is already forming, already calcifying, already embedding itself and pressing into bone. He can feel it happening—the slow, merciless way our minds harden around fear. How this moment will lodge itself into Shane’s brain whether either of them wants it to or not, how it'll become a fixed point in his life and surface every now and then in some unrelated quiet, something he'll carry even in rooms where Ilya isn't present.

Ilya hates that. Hates himself for it.

The edges of his vision darken, like blinking too slowly, and each time the darkness recedes, it comes back stronger, thicker, harder to push through.

He feels cold now. It's the absence of warmth more than the presence of chill, really, and it settles into his limbs and into his chest, just beneath his skin, making everything feel further away. The world is finally, mercifully, letting him go.

Ilya hears his name again, and this time, he doesn’t even register the sound. The meaning presses against him like a hand against glass: close enough to see, too far to touch.

Shane, I'm with you, he thinks, and the thought is oddly calm. I will search for you on whatever life is next, and the one after, and the one after that.

I will find you, and I will be better, and I will do this right next time—I promise. Wherever I go next, I will search for you there.

Or, more simply, I love you.

The panic fades, and something gentler than fear replaces it. A loosening, a quiet unspooling, that constant ache he’s carried for so long softening and that background noise starting to dim, like turning down a volume knob that’s been stuck on high for years.

Ah, he realizes, distantly, weightless. This is what I wanted. For it to stop hurting so much.

The irony—that it's Shane who once made everything bearable, and Shane who now makes even leaving unbearable—registers, but without bitterness now, without panic, not even with regret. The dichotomy swirls inside him, and he just watches it spin, as he’s done so many times.

Ilya thinks, with a strange, aching tenderness, that Shane was the first and only person to give his adult life shape and meaning. The first person who ever made him feel real. Chosen. The first and only person to see him, really see him.

It's only fitting, he thinks hazily, that you're the last.

The sound of his hand giving out and hitting the walls of the bathtub is sharp and small, and the last thing he feels is pressure—fingers curling around his, desperate, grounding, familiar. A tight grip, impossibly tight, impossibly terrified, as if Ilya might slip away if it's loosened for even a second.

You'll be okay, Ilya thinks, fading, because he needs to believe it. You have always been stronger than you think.

The thought drifts. Then another. Moscow in the summer. Greatness is made of beginnings. His father’s gaze, harsh and loving and proud and tight all the same. The smell of honey cake in his babushka’s oven. The feeling of a boy’s lips on his at thirteen. Pushok, the stray cat he and Andrei used to feed every night; the tuna cans they’d hid in their neighbor’s toolshed and paid for with their birthday money, split evenly. The bakery by his old house, the path drilled into him, memorized: thirty steps from the front door, eight to the right, down the side alley—

Shane, Shane, Shane—

A woman’s voice, a fragile thread of song, lulling him to sleep with a familiar lullaby, weaving through the quiet like a thread of light in the dark. Her tender hands through his unruly curls, tucking him in his bed, her lips brushing his forehead, so softly it feels like air. The faint warmth of her fingertips lingering on his skin.

Ilyusha, my love. My darling boy.

He hears it then—Ilyusha, pronounced just right: the l’s,y’s, and u’s rolled exactly as he’d once heard them, exactly as he’d spent the last twenty years echoing in his head.

Мама, he thinks, finally, finding her in the dark. Мама, I missed you. Мама, I forgive you. Мама, I’m coming to see you.

And then—

Nothing, nothing that feels like a thought at all. Just sensation thinning out, sound dissolving.

Nothing, or maybe something softer than nothing, and Ilya lets go.

Ой, the thought comes, somewhere. Оно мягкое. Очень мягкое. Мягкое, как—