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The first sign was the sniffling.
It wasn't constant; that would have been too obvious, too easy to name. It was intermittent. Tactical, almost. A single wet inhale every four to seven minutes, irregular enough that Shane kept thinking he'd imagined it, regular enough that he had, by the third period of watching film, started counting.
Ilya was on the other end of the couch. He had been on the other end of the couch for two hours. He had also, in that time, rearranged the throw blanket four times, gotten up twice for water he didn't drink, and was now sitting with his knees pulled up slightly (not dramatically, not in any way he could be called out on) but up, in a way Ilya's knees were not typically up when he was fine.
Shane did not say anything.
He was very good at not saying anything. He had been practicing for years.
He made it another eleven minutes.
"Are you sick?"
Ilya didn't look away from the screen. "No."
"You've been sniffling."
"Dry air."
"It's March."
"Still dry."
Shane looked at him. Ilya had the slightly glassy quality of a man trying very hard to look like a man who did not have a slightly glassy quality. His jaw was set. There was a tension in his face that wasn't irritation (or wasn't only irritation) and Shane had spent enough years studying Ilya's face to know the difference between the face he made when he was annoyed at Shane and the face he made when something was wrong and he had decided it wasn't.
"Ilya."
"Shane."
"You're sick."
"I am not." A pause. Then, quieter, with great dignity: "I have a slight... something. In my throat."
Shane closed his laptop.
"Don't," Ilya said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You are doing the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have many faces." Ilya finally looked at him. His eyes were a little red at the corners. "This is the face where you want to take my temperature and then tell me about fluids."
"You should have fluids."
"I have water."
"You haven't touched it."
Ilya looked at the glass on the coffee table. He picked it up and drank from it with the deliberate energy of a man making a point. He set it back down. "Happy?"
"Ecstatic," Shane said. "Do you have a fever?"
"No."
"How do you know, you haven't—"
"Shane." The way he said it landed somewhere between exhausted and fond, which was the way Ilya said most things to him. "I am fine. It is nothing. I am just." He made a vague gesture at his own face. "Slightly. Something."
"Slightly something."
"Yes."
Shane picked his laptop back up. He gave it forty seconds.
"There's DayQuil in the medicine cabinet."
"I know where the DayQuil is."
"And we have those—"
"I know." Ilya reached over without looking and put his hand on Shane's knee. Just set it there, heavy and warm. "I know where things are, Малыш. I live here."
Shane looked at the hand on his knee. He looked at the film still paused on the screen. He did not say anything else, which was a significant personal achievement.
He did, however, pull the throw blanket off Ilya's feet and redrape it more evenly across his lap, because the man had been sitting with one foot uncovered for twenty minutes and it was bothering Shane on a cellular level. Ilya pretended not to notice. Shane pretended he hadn't done it.
They watched the rest of the film like that.
The next morning, Ilya was not fine.
He was in bed at 9 AM, which was the first sign. He was horizontal and not asleep, which was the second sign. He was staring at the ceiling with the slightly aggrieved expression of a man who had been betrayed (by his immune system, by the concept of illness, by the universe broadly) and did not have anyone to be mad at except himself, which he found unsatisfying.
Shane came in with tea.
"I don't want tea."
"It's not for you." Shane sat on the edge of the bed and drank from his own mug. He looked at Ilya. "How bad?"
Ilya considered the question. This was notable, as usually he said fine or nothing reflexively, before the question was finished. The fact that he was considering it meant it was bad enough that even fine felt like too much work.
"Not terrible," Ilya said finally. "Head. Throat. The..." He made a vague gesture at his own chest.
"Congestion?"
"Yes." A pause. "No fever. I checked."
Shane nodded. "Okay." He finished his tea. He stood up. He went to the medicine cabinet and came back with DayQuil, a throat lozenge still in its wrapper, and a glass of water that was not the glass from last night.
Ilya looked at the collection of objects he was being presented with. He looked at Shane.
"I said I was fine."
"You said not terrible."
"Same thing."
"Functionally very different things."
Ilya sat up slowly, with the careful energy of a man whose head was doing something unpleasant when he moved too fast. He accepted the DayQuil. He accepted the water. He did not accept the lozenge.
"I don't want this."
"It's for your throat."
"My throat is fine."
"You just said it wasn't."
"I said it was slightly something."
"That was yesterday. Today you're horizontal at 9 AM."
Ilya opened his mouth. He closed it. He took the lozenge with the dignity of a man who had decided to lose this particular battle in order to preserve the war.
"Thank you," Shane said.
"I hate you," Ilya said, and meant it the way he meant most things he said in this manner, which was not at all.
The next two days were, in Shane's professional assessment, a lot.
Not because Ilya was dramatically ill. He wasn't. It was a head cold, moderately unpleasant, nothing requiring anything beyond DayQuil and fluids and rest. Shane had confirmed this by taking his temperature twice (normal both times), observing his breathing (fine), and performing what could charitably be called a wellness assessment that Ilya submitted to with great sufferance.
The problem was that Ilya was slightly unwell in the way that he was never unwell, and he had no idea what to do with it.
He couldn't sit still. He kept getting up, for water, for food he didn't eat, to check his phone, to stand near the window in a way that suggested he thought fresh air was on the other side of the glass but had not committed to actually opening it. He lay down, lasted twenty minutes, then relocated to the couch. He relocated back to the bed. He relocated to the chair in the corner that Shane had forgotten they owned.
He asked Shane to put on something to watch and then provided commentary on everything Shane selected.
"This is too loud."
"It's a documentary."
"The music is loud."
"I can turn it down."
"No, it's fine." Forty seconds of silence. "Can you change it?"
Shane changed it. He put on something quiet. A nature documentary with very gentle narration and no dramatic musical stings.
"This is boring," Ilya said.
"You told me to change it."
"I didn't say to put on something boring."
"What do you want?"
Ilya looked at the television with the expression of a man who did not know what he wanted but knew that he wanted something and that its absence was Shane's fault. "Something else."
They went through four more things. Shane ended up putting on an old game, nothing that required investment, and Ilya subsided into a slightly disgruntled silence that was, from Shane's experience, the closest thing to contentment Ilya managed when he felt bad and couldn't admit it.
He fell asleep an hour later, sitting up, his head tipping incrementally toward Shane's shoulder over the course of twenty minutes in a process he was obviously completely unaware of. Shane watched it happen. He watched the moment it became inevitable. He stayed very still.
Ilya's head settled against his shoulder and stayed there.
Shane turned the volume down two more notches.
He brought soup the second evening, which went the way these things went.
"I'm not invalid," Ilya said, from the couch, where he had been for six hours except for the periods when he'd been in the kitchen getting things himself and then returning to the couch.
"It's dinner."
"I can make dinner."
"You haven't."
"I was going to."
Shane set the soup down on the coffee table. It was the good kind. He'd made it himself, which Ilya knew, because Ilya knew the difference between his soup and the kind from a can, and he watched Ilya look at it and do the thing he always did, which was resist and then stop resisting in a way that was still technically resistance but pointed clearly in the other direction.
"It's too hot," Ilya said.
"I know. I just made it."
"I'll wait."
"Okay."
"Stop watching me."
"I'm not watching you."
"You are watching me wait for the soup to cool."
"I'm in the same room. That's not watching."
Ilya looked at him. Shane looked back. Ilya picked up the soup.
"It's still hot," Shane said.
"I know it's hot," Ilya said, and ate the soup, and did not say anything about how good it was, but ate all of it, and put the empty bowl back down on the coffee table, and then shifted sideways on the couch until his feet were across Shane's lap.
Shane accepted the feet. He rested his hands on Ilya's ankles and didn't say anything.
"You are very smug right now," Ilya said.
"I'm not smug."
"You are internally very smug."
"I made you soup and you ate it. That's not smug, that's just — you needed soup."
Ilya made a sound. It was not agreement. It was not disagreement. It was the specific sound he made when he was conceding a point and would die before saying so.
"Fine," he said. "The soup was good."
"I know," Shane said.
Ilya kicked him, very lightly, with the foot that was across his knee.
Shane kept his hands on his ankles.
By the third day, Ilya was mostly better, which created a different problem: he was mostly better and bored, which was worse than being sick and reluctantly still. He wanted to go back to practice, which the team doctor was not in favor of. He wanted to go to the gym. Shane said no. He negotiated about the gym for forty minutes, moving through phases (argument, rationalization, appeal to Shane's sense of fairness, a very transparent attempt to make Shane feel like the unreasonable one) and Shane held the line, which he was able to do because he had been holding lines against Ilya Rozanov since he was nineteen years old and at this point it was just a skill he had.
"Twenty minutes," Ilya said. "On the bike. Not even—"
"No."
"Shane."
"You're still congested."
"I'm barely—"
"Your voice sounds like a screen door."
Ilya stopped. "A screen door."
"Yeah."
"What does that even—"
"You know what I mean. You're hoarse. You're still not a hundred percent. One more day."
Ilya looked at him with an expression that could have been frustration or could have been something that was using frustration as a mask for something else - the particular look he got when someone was taking care of him in a way he had no defenses against and was annoyed at himself for not having defenses against.
"One more day," Shane said again, quieter.
Ilya looked away. "Fine," he said. "One day."
He made Shane watch film with him instead. Three hours of it. He was, Shane had to admit, completely correct about every read he made, and made absolutely sure Shane knew this. It was deeply exhausting and also, in a way Shane would not be putting into words any time soon, kind of great.
Three weeks later, Shane got a cold.
He knew it in the morning by the scratchy throat, the muffled quality to everything, the slight weight behind his eyes. He catalogued it and put it in a box labeled inconvenient but manageable and made coffee and prepared to deal with it.
Ilya walked into the kitchen, looked at him, and said: "Hm."
Shane looked up. "What?"
"Nothing." Ilya poured himself coffee. He looked at Shane over the rim of the mug with an expression of intense, barely suppressed interest. "How do you feel?"
"Fine."
"Yes?" The word was entirely neutral and somehow the most threatening thing he'd ever said.
Shane put his coffee down. "Ilya."
"Малыш."
"Don't."
"Don't what?" Ilya's expression was beatific. "I am just asking how you feel. You seem—" he tilted his head, studying Shane with the attentiveness of a man who had been observing Shane Hollander for twenty years and intended to use every bit of that data "—slightly something."
Shane closed his eyes.
"Maybe you should sit down," Ilya said. "You look tired."
"I'm not tired."
"Mm." Ilya opened the medicine cabinet. He emerged with DayQuil, a throat lozenge, and a glass of water that he set in front of Shane on the kitchen counter with the careful precision of a man laying out a chess move. "These are for you."
Shane stared at them. He stared at Ilya.
"I know where the medicine cabinet is," Shane said.
"Yes," Ilya agreed warmly. "But now you don't have to go get it."
"I was going to be fine."
"Of course." Ilya picked up his coffee. "But maybe you take the DayQuil first."
"I'm not—" Shane stopped. He looked at the DayQuil. He thought about the screen door comment. He thought about three days of blanket redistribution and soup and held lines and Ilya's feet in his lap. He thought about twenty years of this man.
He took the DayQuil.
"Good," Ilya said, with deep satisfaction, and then ruined the entire effect by sitting down next to Shane, hip against hip, and stealing a sip of his coffee.
"That's mine."
"You're sick. You should rest."
"I'm not—"
"Rest," Ilya said. He put his arm around Shane's shoulders, heavy and warm, the way he did things when he'd decided that was what was happening. "I will take care of everything."
"You're going to be insufferable," Shane said.
Ilya pressed his mouth to Shane's temple. He was smiling, Shane could feel it. "Yes," he agreed. "But you will have fluids."
Shane slouched into him despite himself. The kitchen was quiet. Outside, it was gray and cold, and inside it was neither of those things.
"The soup from before is still in the freezer," Ilya said, very casually. "I can heat it up."
"That's my soup. I made it."
"Yes. For sick people." A beat. "So."
Shane could not actually argue with that logic. He had made the soup. It was soup for sick people. He was, technically, a sick person.
"Fine," he said. "But I'm choosing what we watch."
"Absolutely not."
"Ilya—"
"You will choose something terrible and boring."
"You called a nature documentary boring."
"It was boring."
"There were whales—"
"Shane." Ilya tightened his arm around his shoulders. "I will choose something. It will be good. You will complain about it anyway, but it will be good."
Shane thought about this. He thought about the fact that Ilya had, three weeks ago, rejected fourteen things and fallen asleep on Shane's shoulder, and that the thing that had eventually worked was a hockey game from 2019, and that Ilya had watched the whole thing from Shane's shoulder without waking up until Shane had stopped being able to feel his left arm and very carefully tipped him back against the cushions, and that Ilya had made a small indistinct sound when he did it and grabbed the hem of Shane's shirt.
"Okay," Shane said. "You pick."
Ilya looked at him. There was something in his face, not soft, exactly, because Ilya's face was never exactly soft, but something. The thing that lived behind the smile and the commentary and the twenty years of knowing exactly where to press. The thing Shane had been watching surface slowly for years, the thing that had no name they'd ever used out loud.
"I will get the soup," Ilya said. "You go sit down."
"I don't need to—"
"Shane."
Shane went and sat down.
He heard Ilya in the kitchen, heard the refrigerator, the pot, the competent sounds of a man who had learned, over years, how to do this. He pulled the blanket off the back of the couch. He redistributed it. It didn't need redistributing but he did it anyway, because apparently that was a thing he did now, and sat in the quiet with the gray light coming through the window and waited for the soup.