Chapter Text
When Shane came to live with his new foster family, the Wilsons, the first thing he learned was how to really listen. And it was not the easy, “eyes open, ears alert” kind of listening he’d practiced his whole life in the foster system. It was more like the house spoke to him. Because the floorboards of the old house groaned only under a certain weight, warning him that someone dangerous was coming, or cabinets were slammed shut harder when Charles, his mean, alcoholic foster father, came home drunk, which happened frequently. Even if Shane had only been there for a few days, he could already tell how dangerous this man was.
And then there was the quiet, of course. The weird, low, almost choking quiet that came right before Charles’s temper really snapped, right before his voice turned evil, mean and dangerous, right before everything escalated.
All this considered, one could say that Shane learned the language of the house really fast because he had to.
The second thing he learned was where to stand and how to move at all times to avoid danger. The hallway outside the upstairs bedrooms was narrow, just wide enough for two people to pass if neither of them wanted to touch. And Shane learned to hug the wall when he moved through it, to keep his shoulders tucked in and his hands close to his sides. He also learned not to run because running made noise and that noise invited unwanted attention. In the form of his usually drunk and very aggressive foster father.
He’d been at Lydia and Charles Wilson’s house for two weeks when he realized the quiet nights were actually way worse than the loud ones. On nights when Charles came home drunk and was yelling for no reason, at least Shane knew what was coming. The chaos that ensued had a pattern, or it felt like something he could try to brace for.
But the quiet offered no warning with Shane just waiting for something to break around him.
That evening, he sat on the edge of his bed with his shoes still on and his old, worn backpack clutched between his knees. The room smelled faintly of stale air and something even older, something that had soaked into the carpet long before he arrived. The walls were bare except for a crooked poster of Wayne Gretzky, one of Shane’s idols.
Across the room, the other bed was currently empty.
The other boy the Wilsons fostered, Ilya, had been here longer. Shane knew that much. They hadn't talked much yet but he knew because Ilya didn’t move around like someone who was new. He didn’t look around like he was cataloguing exits or looking for escape routes. And he didn’t jump when doors slammed, at least, not outwardly.
No. It was more like Ilya moved through the house like he already knew where the danger lived.
Shane also knew that Ilya was from Russia. The social worker that had brought him to the Wilsons had said it slowly, carefully, like Shane might not understand. “He immigrated when he was little. His mom passed away and his father couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of him.”
Shane didn’t know what all that meant, exactly. He just knew Ilya talked a little differently. His vowels were softer and his rhythm was a little strange. Sometimes he dropped words, like he was translating them in his head before letting them out.
Shane had watched him that afternoon like he had been the past two weeks, quiet and intent, while Ilya was taping up a cracked hockey stick at the kitchen table and their foster mom, Lydia, hovered nearby, asking questions she already knew the answers to just for the sake of conversation.
“How was school?”
“Fine.” Ilya shrugged.
“You hungry?”
“Later.”
She’d touched Ilya’s shoulder when she passed him, gentle, almost apologetic. Ilya hadn’t shrugged her off, but he hadn’t leaned into it either. Shane recognized that distance because he’d learned it in other houses.
The front door opened downstairs and Shane’s stomach dropped. There were footsteps. Heavy and uneven.
Charles.
He froze, every muscle locking in place and the house seemed to hold its breath with him. Somewhere below, a drawer slammed shut and a muttered angry curse followed, thick and mean.
Shane stared at the floor, at the scuffed toes of his sneakers, counting the stains in the carpet. One, two, three.
A deep voice was raised before another object hit a surface hard enough to rattle.
Shane swallowed.
Then the door to their room opened a crack and Ilya slipped inside without making a sound, closing it carefully behind him. He pressed his back to the wood like he was bracing it with his body. He didn’t look at Shane at first. He just stood there, listening, head tilted slightly to the side.
After a moment, he nodded to himself. “Bad,” he said quietly, rounding the word. Like he was reporting the weather and not their foster father’s evil moods.
Shane nodded back, even though his throat felt tight. He still didn’t know the rules yet, didn’t know if he was supposed to answer or not.
However, it didn’t seem like Ilya minded the quiet. He crossed the room in three long steps and grabbed the foot of his bed. Without asking, or explaining, he shoved it sideways until it bumped against Shane’s and metal scraped softly against metal.
Shane sucked in a breath, panic flaring because of the sudden, loud noise.
Ilya froze instantly, hand flat on the frame, listening again. The sounds downstairs continued. It was distant, but so aggressive and angry. But at least it wasn’t moving closer toward them.
“Okay,” Ilya finally murmured. He climbed onto his bed and lay down on his side, facing Shane. He didn’t say anything else. He just reached out and hooked his pinky around Shane’s without asking for permission.
Shane startled at the contact, breath hitching.
Ilya squeezed once. And it somehow immediately grounded Shane. He had never had a foster brother before and he liked not being alone in a house with two strangers. Especially since Charles Wilson was terrifying and very unpredictable.
“You shake,” Ilya whispered, like it was an observation, not a judgment. “Is okay.”
Shane let out a breath he didn’t realize he had been holding.
Then they lay there in the almost dark room, hands linked, listening to Charles yelling and throwing stuff around. Shane started to count Ilya’s breaths because it was way easier than counting his own.
In, out. In, out.
At some point, Shane realized his heart had stopped racing. And at some point, he fell asleep. Ilya’s breathing was still in his ear, steady and soft, like a rhythm that carried him somewhere safe.
Ilya had learned English fast. Faster than the social workers expected, anyway. And definitely faster than the teachers in his new school gave him credit for. Of course, he still thought in Russian sometimes, usually when he was tired, scared, or annoyed but English was the language of survival now. It was the language of school forms and house rules and adults who yelled at him way too much.
Still, some English words never felt right on his tongue. Family, for example. He was pretty sure it had meant something once, at least in his mother tongue, Russian, but in English, it just sounded strange, almost alien.
He had no family. Not anymore. Not here in Canada.
Ilya had always known when people were lying. Not because he was unusually clever, though he was, but because lies had a certain sound. There was a pause that came too late or too early or a breath that caught at the wrong moment. He knew that adults lied when they promised things would be okay. And kids lied when they said it didn’t hurt and that they were fine.
But Shane didn’t lie.
That was the first thing Ilya noticed about him when he came to live with the Wilsons. The second thing was how bad he was at pretending not to be scared.
Ilya watched him out of the corner of his eye, the way he hovered near doorways, the way his shoulders tensed whenever Charles moved too quickly or abruptly. Shane tried to hide it, but he wasn’t really good at it yet. He hadn’t learned how to make himself invisible.
He would need to. Especially in Charles’ house.
And Ilya hated that, because he knew what it meant to be seen by their foster father.
Shane had been with the Wilsons for two weeks and they had developed some sort of routine. In the mornings, they walked to school together. It just made sense since they went to the same school and neither of them wanted to be alone. Ilya noticed how Shane talked more than usual when he was nervous, how he made little observations about the weather, the way the sun caught on a puddle, or a dog trotting past with its owner.
And Ilya listened. He never interrupted or teased him. He just walked beside him, letting Shane’s voice fill the quiet space between the old houses and the dirty sidewalks. He liked the sound of it, the rhythm, the way Shane’s words stumbled sometimes, and the endless warmth behind them. It made the mornings a little less cold and definitely a little less lonely.
At school, kids asked Shane questions—just like they had asked Ilya when he first arrived. Only Shane’s questions weren’t mean. They weren’t about the way he spoke or the way he looked.
“Do you know Algebra yet?” and “where do you wanna sit?”
Ilya had gotten different questions like “why do you talk so weird?” or “where are you from, weirdo?”
He had answered simply: “Russia.” Or sometimes, “Moscow.” That seemed to satisfy them, maybe because it sounded important. He never mentioned his mother. Or the hospitals that smelled like bleach and death. Or how his father had just stopped coming home one day, then stopped answering the phone, then disappeared entirely.
He didn’t tell the other kids how fast a person could become invisible. They wouldn’t understand anyway.
That afternoon, when the shouting back at the house started early, Ilya felt it in his bones that it was bad. Really bad. Lydia’s voice cracked halfway through a sentence, a door slammed and then a chair scraped hard across the kitchen floor.
Ilya was already moving before the first crash sounded.
He didn’t run because he had quickly learned that running only made things worse. He walked fast, steps measured, and expression neutral. He took the stairs two at a time and slipped into their room just ahead of the worst of it.
Shane was sitting on his bed like he’d been left there. Frozen. And Ilya thought that he looked so small even though he was roughly the same age as him.
Ilya shut the door and leaned against it, heart pounding. And it was not from fear, but from anger.
He hated the man downstairs with a passion that scared him sometimes. It felt sharp and piercing, like a blade. But it was a feeling that, to him, was at least easier than grief.
He crossed the room and shoved his bed over again without thinking, like it was instinct. Ilya knew that Shane needed to be closer to him, needed to feel another body nearby, another heartbeat.
When Shane flinched at the noise, Ilya paused and listened like he usually did.
Charles’ yelling was still distant. Which meant they were safe for now.
Ilya then climbed onto his bed and reached out, catching Shane’s hand before he could pull it away.
“Breathe,” he whispered. “Slow.”
Shane followed his instruction, like he had done before.
Years later, when he looked back, Ilya realized that that night had changed him. It was a decision that he didn’t voice at the time because words were fragile, especially in English, and could be retracted.
This one is mine.
He didn’t mean it in a possessive way but more in a responsibility way. The way people protected something breakable because no one else in the world would.
And he would protect Shane.
Over the next few weeks, Ilya learned where Shane’s fear lived: behind his dark eyes and in the way his voice thinned when adults raised theirs at him.
Shane on the other hand learned that Ilya noticed everything: every bruise on him, every missed meal, and every shift in his tone, no matter how minor it was.
Sometimes Shane asked questions late at night when it was just the two of them in their small room, bed against bed.
“You miss Russia?”
Ilya shrugged. “Sometimes.”
“What about your dad?”
Ilya went still for a second. Then he said carefully, “Is gone.”
Shane didn’t push after that and that mattered to Ilya. They didn’t talk about the bad things much, instead they talked more around them. About Hockey, school or even the future, in vague, impossible terms, because they were still too young to understand it all.
“When I’m older,” Shane said once, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling, “I’m gonna go pro and play somewhere really, really cold. Colder than Victoria. And somewhere it’s always loud and full of life.”
Ilya snorted softly. “Everywhere is loud.”
“Not like here.” Shane shook his head.
Ilya thought about that for a long moment. Then he nodded, understanding without needing to say it. “Okay. Somewhere really, really cold is good.”
He didn’t say I’ll come with you. He didn’t say don’t leave me. Even though those were exactly the words running through his head whenever Shane talked about the future.
He just said, “I will too.”
That night, when the house finally settled into its dooming, uneasy quiet, Ilya lay awake, listening to Shane’s breathing even out beside him. He stared at the ceiling, memorizing the cracks, the shadows, the way the streetlamp’s light sliced across the room.
He had already lost one family and he would not lose another, if he could help it.
Some things were worth protecting.
And even at his young age, Ilya was sure that the boy right next to him in the other bed was one of those things.