Chapter Text
Ilya
The phone started buzzing while Ilya was still on the ice. He had left it on the bench for the entire morning practice, as always, and it stayed there through the two other missed calls that followed the first. A few minutes before recovery time, Ilya skated over to the boards, pulled off one glove with his teeth, and grabbed his phone. Five missed calls from a number he didn't recognize, with a country code he knew perfectly well, coming in roughly every fifteen minutes. The phone rang again.
"Ilya, what did you do?" someone shouted behind him.
"Your mom keeps texting me."
Laughter erupted from everywhere. Ilya noticed Shane looking at him. He gave him a half-smile before walking away with the phone in his hand.
The corridor leading to the locker room was cold and quiet. Who could be calling him from Russia? It wasn't his asshole brother, and it wasn't Nadia either, the asshole's girlfriend. And it was a landline calling him, not a cell. He thought about not answering. Ilya never answered numbers he didn't recognize, and besides, he had cut ties with Russia years ago, with everything related to it. Russia had never brought him good news. He did a quick mental calculation: it was nearly three in the afternoon here, which meant it was ten in Moscow. Who would be calling from Russia this insistently at that hour? And once again, the phone rang.
"Hello?"
"Ilya Grigorievich Rozanov?"
It was a woman's voice, a very strong Russian accent, in a quiet setting, or maybe that was just the hour. Ilya shuddered when he heard himself addressed by his patronymic. It was since Shane had proposed that he hadn't heard his father's name.
"That's me. Who's calling?"
"Good evening, Mr. Rozanov. My name is Olga Semenova. I'm calling from Moscow Child Protective Services. I'm reaching out about a sensitive matter. Do you have a minute?"
"Yes."
"Are you Alexei Rozanov’s brother?"
"Half-brother."
"On your father's side?"
"Yes."
"Mr. Rozanov, your brother was arrested this morning along with his wife, Nadia Viktorova."
"For what?"
"Drug trafficking, production, illegal arms trafficking."
"Why are you calling me? I'm not paying any bail..."
"This isn't about them. It's about the children. We have Alina and Ivan Rozanov in our custody."
"Who is Ivan?"
"The second child. You were named by the Rozanovs as legal guardian for both children, which is why I'm calling you. Your brother and sister-in-law have temporarily lost parental rights, and so we need to find a living arrangement for the kids. Our policy is to keep children within the family unit whenever possible. We have your address on file in Ottawa, Canada. You don't need to worry about the logistics, as my colleagues will handle the transfer of the children from Russia to Canada..."
Ilya's brain stopped working. The information hit him like stones. The Rozanovs. So they had gotten married, after all. And they had had another child. A child on whom they had imposed legal guardianship without bothering to send a text to let him know. Ilya was disgusted.
"Where are the children now?" he finally asked.
"In an orphanage, Mr. Rozanov."
Ilya closed his eyes for a moment.
"Nadia's family?"
"They've stepped back."
"There must be someone else."
Ilya tried to unlace his skates, but all he managed was to make a rather tangled knot with the wet laces.
"Mr. Rozanov, I understand this is a shock. Let's try to find a solution together."
"What happens if I take them?"
"My colleagues will bring the children to Ottawa."
"For how long?"
"Your brother's situation is serious, Mr. Rozanov. We would hope not to have to move the children again."
"And what happens if I don't take them?"
"We'll find a placement for both of them."
"Meaning a family?"
"Ivan can enter the foster-to-adopt process. His age makes him perfectly adoptable. He's a beautiful baby. They'll line up for him. Alina, well, if she isn't chosen by her brother's adoptive family, she'll stay in the orphanage. We always try not to separate siblings, but you understand that, given the circumstances, placing one is better than placing none."
"How old are they?" Ilya was ashamed to have to ask.
"Ivan is four months old. Alina is six years old."
Ilya was chilled by what he was hearing. He tried to remember his niece's face. He remembered a very small girl sitting on the floor at his father's funeral, her hands wrapped tight around a toy, her feet bare despite the cold in the room. It was the last clear memory he had of her, because he realized he hadn't seen her since that day.
"I'll give you some time to think it over," Olga said, cutting things short. "We certainly don't expect you to confirm over the phone, but we'll send you a summary email of our conversation and you'll have plenty of time to consider everything. Any specific questions?"
A mountain of them. But he simply said: "No. I have to go."
"We'll speak in a week, if that works for you."
Ilya dragged himself to the locker room. His legs moved slowly, heavy in the sharp skates. He sat down and tried to undo the knot on his left skate, but it only got tighter. Ilya swore in Russian as the door opened and his teammates came back in from recovery.
"Ilya?"
There he was. Shane. His beautiful, impossibly perceptive husband. Ilya turned around immediately.
Shane stood in the doorway, hair still damp with sweat.
"Everything okay?"
"Yeah, of course." And he kept trying to unlace his skates.
* * *
In the car on the way home, Ilya didn't say a word. Since they'd left the arena, his phone screen had kept lighting up. Beside him, Shane drove in silence. Every now and then he'd glance in his direction; Ilya could feel the weight of that searching look. He sent a quick message to Svetlana. He started typing in English, then stopped: he switched back to Cyrillic and asked her to talk as soon as possible. Svetlana replied in English with a simple: "Should I be worried?" Ilya replied only: "Da."
Two Russian children, unwanted, unplanned, falling from the other side of the world to turn life as they knew it upside down. He tried to picture his own home with tiny human beings in it and the image was absurd. They had nothing even remotely suitable for children. He thought of Hayden's house, colorful, chaotic, full of toys scattered across every room, loud with no chance of quiet. Ilya liked visiting the Pikes, but there was a difference between seeing them every now and then and playing at being Uncle Ilya, and actually taking on responsibility for his real niece and nephew, for a period of time that could potentially be very, very long.
He thought about his fridge. It contained only the meals Shane cooked, macro-friendly, zero carbs. Ilya always ordered junk. What would he feed the little girl? Salmon and zucchini? And a newborn. Where would he even put him?
And then he knew nothing about children. Nothing useful, anyway. He had spent years in the tight structure of his routine, controlled down to the millimeter: training, away games, media, physical recovery, sleep, nutrition. Everything worked because he and Shane had learned to hold that life together with almost maniacal care. Two children would blow it all up within twenty minutes.
No, he couldn't. Even if it was temporary. He couldn't bail his brother out, again. Those were his problems, not Ilya's. Ilya didn't realize he was biting his nails.
"Tasty?" Shane asked without taking his eyes off the road.
Ilya barely lifted his head and pulled his nails out of his mouth.
"Bad news?"
"Nothing important."
Shane tapped his thumb softly on the steering wheel.
"Want to talk about it?"
If he told the truth, everything would become real. He wasn't ready for that at all, so he said: "I'm trying to figure something out."
Shane nodded.
The phone buzzed again. This time it was a photo. A very small baby was sleeping in a metal crib, mouth just barely open, hands curled near his face. Ivan.
Five seconds later came a photo of a blonde girl, her face framed by two perfect braids, smiling gap-toothed on a swing. He locked the phone and pressed his face against the window, eyes closed. He could always fake a migraine.
* * *
Shane
At home, Ilya moved through the same motions as every other day. He left his keys on the entryway table. He took off his jacket and hung it on the hook. He opened the fridge, found nothing worth noting, closed it again right away. All of it, though, done in complete and total silence. Ilya always talked. He commented on everything that passed in front of his eyes, argued with the television, made fun of people in traffic, recounted completely useless fragments of the day as if they were vital. Even in the worst moments of their relationship, Shane had learned to read his mood from the number of words he produced per minute. He watched him move around the kitchen with his phone still in hand, never set down, often held with the screen facing down. The screen lit up every few minutes and Ilya immediately dropped his eyes.
"You want Thai or Italian?" Shane asked, more to break the silence than out of any real hunger. Honestly, his stomach was tight with anxiety.
"Either."
He ordered Thai. Or rather, he ordered plain zucchini noodles for himself and the most caloric pad thai on the menu for Ilya. They ate with nothing but the sound of cardboard containers and chopsticks hitting the plate with every bite. Ilya ate with his usual teenage-boy voracity in a thirty-three-year-old body, while his phone buzzed, buzzed, buzzed. Ilya would pull it out of his pocket every so often, check the sender, put it away. At some point Shane set his chopsticks down slowly.
"Ilya."
He looked up. He had the most beautiful eyes in the universe.
"Would you tell me, if something was wrong?"
Ilya looked at him for a few seconds. Then he reached a hand across the table and brushed his wrist.
"Yes, moya lyubov'."
His voice was soft. Sincere, even.
The phone buzzed again on the table, this time longer, and stayed lit long enough for Shane to read the name before Ilya flipped it over. Svetlana.
Shane looked back down at his plate. No reason to worry, Ilya talked to Svetlana all the time. Then Svetlana switched from texting to calling, and Ilya picked up immediately. And spoke in Russian. Usually with Svetlana, Ilya mixed English and Russian, especially when Shane was around. He had the impression Ilya was talking at triple his normal speed. Ilya hung up and Shane watched him stay still with the phone in his hand for a couple of seconds too long.
"Is something wrong, Ilya?" Shane asked.
"No," Ilya said, heading over to throw away the takeout containers.
Later they tried to watch a movie on the couch. After nearly forty minutes Shane couldn't have told you what was happening on screen. Ilya sat beside him with one arm resting behind his shoulders, every now and then stroking his hair and kissing it. Shane tried to focus on the film: a man running somewhere. Explosions. Music too loud. Ilya's kind of thing. Just past eleven the phone lit up one more time. Ilya locked it without even looking at it, just before hauling himself off the couch with an exaggerated stretch.
"I'm wrecked, I'm going to sleep," he said to Shane, before leaning down to kiss his husband.
"I love you," he murmured.
"I love you too."
Ilya gave him a tired smile before disappearing upstairs.
Shane stayed on the couch a few more minutes with the movie still running and the noise of the television filling the apartment, then picked up the remote and switched off the racket. He made himself a herbal tea, just to fill at least half an hour before going up to his husband. Maybe Ilya needed a little time alone, and he'd rather give him as much space as he could.
Whatever was going on, Ilya was afraid to tell him.
* * *
Ilya
Sleep wouldn't come. Not that he'd particularly expected it to. By five in the morning Ilya was tired of staring at the ceiling. Shane, curled on his side, was snoring softly beside him. He felt the urge to reach over and touch him, but held back. Unable to sleep, he went downstairs and opened his laptop.He logged into his email and looked through the documents he hadn't wanted to read. One email had Alina and Ivan's medical records. Another had their birth certificates, with the blue registry stamps and the worn edges of the original pages, another had the guardianship order. He opened the next attachment: the exit permit, the latest school records, a short letter from Alina's teacher, and a sheet written by the social worker.It said Alina had been having trouble sleeping since her parents were arrested, and that Ivan was significantly underweight for his age.
The more emails he opened, the more there seemed to be. He filed them all away. When he noticed his hands were shaking and his breathing was getting harder to control, he went out the front door and stood for a few minutes in the cold of the Canadian night. This was not the time to fall apart.He went back inside, lay down in his bed, and managed to close his eyes for half an hour, until Shane's 6:00 alarm jolted him awake. He heard his husband get up, carefully, and stayed in bed a little longer.
* * *
When he opened his eyes, it took Ilya a moment to remember where he was. In those few hours of sleep he had dreamed of his mother Irina, or rather, he had dreamed of a faceless woman he knew was his mother. In the dream Irina was reaching out her hand to him. He was probably a child, because the woman seemed so tall and large. Then his brother appeared, eyes full of hate, calling him faggot through clenched teeth.
Faggot, he said. Faggot. And then his mother came close and gently covered his ears, without a word.
Ilya would have given anything to hear her voice one more time. He kept his eyes shut a moment longer, hoping her face might somehow reappear, but she was gone. From downstairs came the low hum of the coffee machine and, every so often, the quick tap of fingers on a keyboard. Shane had been up for hours, probably already deep in game footage or the statistics he reviewed with near-obsessive focus. Ilya sat on the edge of the bed for a few seconds with his phone in his hand before dialing Svetlana.
"Ilyusha."
He rubbed a hand over his eyes and walked out of the bedroom. He crossed the hallway quietly and went down a couple of steps, far enough to hear Shane moving around in the kitchen without having to hold a conversation in front of him.
"Did I wake you?"
"I'm in Boston, idiot. It's almost nine. So? How are you doing?"
"They sent more documents."
"Did you read them?"
"Not all of it. There's so much. And they keep asking for this form and that form."
"Do you want me to go to Moscow? I can get a flight tomorrow. I'll check on the situation, talk to someone, see the kids."
"I can't ask you to do that, Svet. And I don't think they'd tell you much anyway."
Svetlana lowered her voice slightly. "What's the timeline?"
Ilya looked toward the floor below. From where he stood he could only see a corner of the kitchen and Shane's back in front of the computer.
"I don't know yet. Svet, I don't know anything. I don't even know exactly what my brother did. It's a fucking mess, Jesus Christ."
It was true. Nothing about their habits, what they ate, who walked the girl to school, what cartoons she watched, whether the baby slept through the night. He didn't even know the sound of their voices.
"What did Shane say?" Svetlana asked.
Ilya said nothing. On the other end of the line there was a very short silence.
"Oh, Christ."
"I'll tell him."
"When?"
"I don't know."
"Ilyusha."
This time Svetlana's voice softened just slightly. "Still stuck in the same place, huh?"
From downstairs Shane laughed at something on his computer screen.
"I'm trying to figure out what to do."
"No," Svetlana said calmly. "You're trying to fix everything on your own. Same as always."
"Two kids, Sveta. What the hell am I supposed to do with two kids?"
For the first time since all of this had started, the words came out of his mouth out loud. He felt the real weight of them immediately.
Svetlana was quiet for a moment.
"What the hell are you two going to do, Ilya."
* * *
Shane
For the rest of the week Shane did nothing but watch Ilya. He couldn't focus on anything else, even if he'd wanted to: the thought that his husband was going through something bad, or if not bad, something worrying, and that Shane was in the dark about it, wouldn't leave him alone. Ilya didn't seem to have changed his routine by a single beat, which for all its chaos held together around a few fixed rules. Up at eight, a short run or morning workout, then practice. It was just this phone permanently attached to Ilya's hand, never left unattended, often held with the screen facing down. He knew it was Svetlana texting him, or rather, answering Ilya's messages, and Shane couldn't figure out why Ilya needed to reach her so badly. When he thought about it, he felt a small stab of jealousy. After all, they'd been close as teenagers, they'd slept together many times, for years. Just as he and Ilya had, when he thought about it.
In those days Shane found himself thinking often about that call with Svetlana. He knew enough Russian to catch scattered words, especially when Ilya spoke slowly or was trying to make himself understood. The call with Sveta had been fast, fragmented, packed with swearing and god knows what else. He had caught two words clearly because Ilya had repeated them several times: Двое детей. Two children. There was a thought in a corner of Shane's mind that he refused to give space to. Shane trusted Ilya completely. Ilya would never betray him with anyone, and certainly not with Svetlana. But those two children: what could they mean, if not that Svetlana was pregnant? And that the father was, obviously, Ilya?
No, he couldn't let himself give space to that irrational thought, not the day before a game. So he made Ilya a protein shake and poured it into his water bottle, which he tucked into his hockey bag. He checked that everything was there, noticed the hockey socks were missing. Shane grabbed a pair of his own and put them in the bag, which he carried out to the car. Ilya joined him a few minutes later.
Ilya just stared out the window, distant and silent. Shane came close to detouring to McDonald's and letting him order one of those egg sandwiches that Shane found disgusting and that Ilya would wolf down in the morning, but he had the nagging feeling that even a McGriddle wouldn't help that morning.
Once they got to the arena, Ilya greeted his teammates with a nod, got dressed, and went straight to the ice. No Bad Bunny blasting from his phone to, as he put it, charge the team up with a little perreo, no jokes at Hayden's expense, or Scott Hunter's, or Troy's, or any other teammate present.
Everyone looked at Shane. Troy asked what all of them, he knew, were wondering. "Did you guys fight? Trouble in paradise?"
"We didn't fight. He's just... acting weird, I don't know."
"He'll get over it."
On the ice, Ilya missed everything he could miss. He was missing passes, losing the puck, too slow against his teammates. His bad mood spread through the whole team who, as if they were a hive, responded to their captain's lack of focus with a collective disorientation. Ilya took few shots, and missed all of them.
Coach Wiebe blew the whistle to stop the scrimmage.
"Rozanov, what the hell is going on today?"
Several guys automatically turned toward him. Ilya pulled out his mouthguard with a sharp gesture. "Nothing."
The coach stared at him for a moment. "Then wake up."
For a few minutes it seemed to work. Ilya came back into the drill with more focus. Then he fumbled an easy reception again and the puck got away from him.
This time Wiebe didn't even raise his voice. "Bench. Five minutes."
Ilya pushed over to the boards without argument. He sat bent forward, elbows on his knees, helmet still on. After a few seconds he pulled out his phone, something else Ilya never did. When they finally made it back to the locker room, Shane watched him pull off his gear in silence. His teammates went quiet out of respect, each one worried about their captain in his own way. That evening, though, Shane was not going to let it go.