Chapter Text
The last day at the cottage arrived too quickly, as if time itself had decided to move with cruel efficiency, compressing warmth and safety into something fragile that could be folded away at any moment, and the morning light over the lake felt sharper than before, almost too bright, as though it had no intention of lingering.
Ilya stood by the kitchen counter in a half-zipped hoodie, staring at a cup of coffee he hadn’t touched, listening to the quiet hum of the house while his mind kept replaying the same thought on a loop: this is where it ends.
This strange pocket of safety where the world had briefly stopped trying to take things from him.
Behind him, Shane was pacing again.
It had started subtly an hour ago, when Ilya had gone upstairs to pack and Shane had followed without a word, leaning against the doorway like a silent shadow until Ilya had tried to move into the bathroom alone and found Shane already there first, arms crossed, expression unreadable but firm.
“You don’t need to stand outside the door,” Ilya had said at the time.
“I’m not standing outside anything,” Shane had replied.
And that had been the end of that argument.
Now, downstairs again, it was worse.
Shane moved from window to window, checking angles, scanning the tree line, pausing at the back door more often than seemed reasonable, as though expecting it to open on its own and undo everything that had been rebuilt in the past two days.
“I’m just making coffee,” Ilya said quietly, trying to sound normal, like he hadn’t noticed the way Shane tracked him with his eyes every time he moved.
“I know,” Shane answered immediately.
A pause.
Then, quieter: “I’m watching outside.”
Ilya exhaled through his nose, a faint, tired smile threatening to form but never fully arriving.
“I am inside.”
“Yeah,” Shane said. “I noticed.”
There was something almost painfully honest about it.
Like Shane was not even pretending anymore that fear wasn’t driving him.
Ilya finally turned, leaning back against the counter, watching him.
“You are worse than yesterday,” he observed.
Shane didn’t deny it.
Instead, he walked over and stopped just close enough that Ilya could feel his presence like a barrier against the room itself.
“I don’t like the idea of you being out of sight,” Shane said simply.
“That is not normal behavior.”
“Probably not.”
“And yet,” Ilya said, “you are doing it anyway.”
Shane’s jaw tightened slightly, a flicker of frustration passing across his face—not at Ilya, but at the world, at what had been done to them, at the fact that this was even necessary.
“They were inside this house,” Shane said quietly. “They had you on the floor.”
The words landed heavy between them.
Ilya’s fingers tightened slightly around the edge of the counter.
“I know.”
A silence followed, filled only by the faint ticking of a wall clock and the distant movement of wind through the trees.
Then Shane spoke again, softer this time, but no less intense.
“I’m not doing this because I think you’re weak.”
Ilya looked at him more directly.
“I know.”
A beat.
“I’m doing it because I know exactly how close I was to losing you,” Shane finished.
That was the truth of it.
Memory.
Ilya pushed off the counter and stepped closer, slow enough not to trigger that instinctive alertness that now seemed permanently embedded in Shane’s posture. When he reached him, he placed a hand lightly against Shane’s chest.
Shane stilled immediately beneath the touch.
“Look at me,” Ilya said.
Shane did.
Eyes still sharp, still scanning even while focused on him.
“I am not going to disappear in the middle of your kitchen,” Ilya said calmly. “Or the hallway. Or the lake. Or anywhere else your imagination is placing me.”
Shane’s expression flickered.
“That’s not what I think.”
“It is what your body thinks.”
That landed more accurately.
Shane looked away briefly, tension pulling at his shoulders like a wire drawn too tight.
“I don’t like leaving,” Ilya added more quietly.
That made Shane’s attention snap back instantly.
“You don’t have to,” Shane said at once.
Ilya almost smiled at the speed of it.
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
A pause.
The reality of it settled in again between them like something unavoidable.
Two teams.
Two cities.
Two lives that did not officially know about this, not in any way that mattered publicly.
The Boston Raiders were waiting for their captain to return. So were the Montreal Metros. Training schedules, meetings, press obligations, travel arrangements—all the machinery of professional sport that did not pause for fear or trauma or near-abduction experiences in lakeside cottages.
Shane’s hand moved slightly, catching Ilya’s wrist instead, holding it like an anchor.
“I don’t like that part either,” Shane admitted.
“I assumed.”
Another silence.
This one heavier.
Then Shane stepped closer, lowering his voice.
“I already talked to my coach,” Ilya said quietly. “About what happened.”
Shane’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“I know.”
“They are increasing security,” Ilya continued. “At games. At hotel stays. They are taking it seriously.”
“They should be taking it more seriously,” Shane muttered.
“They are trying.”
Shane didn’t respond immediately.
Instead, his gaze drifted again toward the window, toward the trees beyond the glass, as if even now he expected movement out there that didn’t belong.
Ilya reached up and touched his face gently, forcing his attention back.
“You'll see me again. I will be safe,” Ilya said.
Shane looked at him for a long moment.
Then, very quietly: “You better.”
There was no humor in it.
Only truth.
The last stretch of the days evening felt unbearably slow, as though the world itself was resisting the idea of them separating, stretching every second into something too long and too sharp to comfortably exist in.
Outside the cottage, the car waited with its engine running quietly on the gravel road, but neither of them had moved toward it yet.
Ilya stood near the doorway with his bag at his feet, fingers still loosely curled around the strap as if letting go of it would mean admitting the moment was real. The lake behind Shane shimmered in dark light, calm and indifferent, while the wind moved gently through the trees like nothing important was happening at all.
But everything important was happening.
Shane stood directly in front of him, closer than necessary, as always, as if distance itself had become unacceptable overnight. His expression was carefully controlled, but it didn’t fully hide the strain underneath it—the tightness in his jaw, the slight tension in his hands, the way his eyes kept flicking over Ilya’s face like he was memorizing it against his will.
“I don’t like this,” Shane said quietly.
“I know,” Ilya answered just as softly.
A pause settled between them, heavy and fragile.
“I don’t either,” Ilya admitted.
That seemed to undo something in Shane’s restraint.
He stepped forward immediately, closing the remaining space between them, and for a moment neither of them spoke. The air felt too thin for words anyway, filled instead with everything they had not learned how to say yet without it breaking them open.
Ilya reached up first, fingers brushing lightly against Shane’s jaw, tracing the faint bruise there with a tenderness that made Shane still completely.
“You are going to Montreal,” Ilya murmured.
“And you’re going back to Boston,” Shane replied.
Neither of them liked how final it sounded.
“I will be fine,” Ilya added, though the words felt more like something he was trying to convince himself of than Shane.
Shane shook his head once, barely.
“No,” he said quietly. “You will be careful. There’s a difference.”
That almost made Ilya smile, but it didn’t quite survive the emotion sitting behind his ribs.
For a moment, Shane just looked at him—really looked at him—like the idea of turning away was physically difficult. His hand came up slowly, settling against the side of Ilya’s neck, thumb resting beneath his jaw with a steadiness that was almost desperate in its gentleness.
“I hate that I have to leave you here,” Shane said.
“I am leaving too,” Ilya replied.
“That’s not what I mean.”
They both understood anyway.
The silence that followed felt heavier than anything that had come before it.
Then Shane leaned in.
The kiss wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t rushed. It was slow in a way that made it feel even more unbearable, like neither of them trusted the moment to last and were trying to stretch it anyway with intention alone.
Ilya’s breath caught halfway through it, hands tightening instinctively in Shane’s shirt as if anchoring himself to something real. Shane’s grip at his waist pulled him closer immediately, like he couldn’t allow even a fraction of distance between them while doing this, not now, not after everything.
It was not a kiss that tried to fix anything.
It was a kiss that admitted everything was already breaking in slow motion.
When they finally separated, it was only by a few inches, and neither of them fully let go.
Shane rested his forehead against Ilya’s, breathing unevenly.
“Text me when you land,” he said, voice rougher than before.
“I always do.”
“Do it anyway.”
A faint, broken exhale left Ilya, something halfway between a laugh and something far more fragile.
“I will,” he promised.
Shane hesitated for another second, as if still fighting the instinct to hold on longer, then finally stepped back just enough to make leaving possible.
But his hand stayed on Ilya’s for a moment longer than necessary.
So did Ilya’s.
And when they finally separated fully—when Ilya picked up his bag and turned toward the waiting car—neither of them looked away quickly.
Shane stood in the doorway until the distance between them began to swallow the details of his face.
And Ilya kept looking back until the cottage, the lake, and Shane himself blurred into something the road slowly took away from him, piece by piece, no matter how tightly he tried to hold on.
Being back with their respective teams should have felt like slipping into familiar routines again, like muscle memory reclaiming control after an intense interruption, but instead it felt like both of them had been placed back into their worlds with one vital piece of their nervous systems still missing, and neither distance nor professionalism seemed capable of filling the space that had been carved out in them during those days at the lakeside cottage.
For Ilya, the Boston Raiders’ training facility was loud in the way only professional sports arenas could be—skates scraping across ice like metal against stone, coaches shouting clipped instructions that echoed off reinforced glass, teammates laughing too loudly as if nothing in the world had ever been uncertain enough to change the rhythm of their lives—but underneath all of it there was still a constant, low awareness of absence, as if part of him was still standing on that wooden deck by the lake watching Shane pace between the windows, unwilling to let the world get too close.
His phone had barely been on for twenty minutes before it started vibrating again.
And again.
And again.
At first he ignored it, because ignoring notifications was something athletes learned early, a survival mechanism for anything that might pull focus from training or strategy meetings or recovery sessions, but the persistence of it was different this time, sharp and insistent in a way that felt less like communication and more like pressure building against a locked door.
Shane.
You there?
Answer me.
Ilya.
Are you at practice or alone?
The messages stacked faster than he could read them properly, until the screen felt like it was no longer simply lighting up with text but actively demanding attention, and by the time he finally made it into the locker room and sat down on the bench to start taping his stick, there were already more than twenty unread messages waiting for him, each one slightly less patient than the last.
He stared at them for a long moment without replying, not out of neglect but out of the simple, practical understanding that he was surrounded by teammates, coaches, equipment staff, and cameras, and that answering Shane in the middle of this environment would only escalate something that was already beginning to feel uncomfortably intense.
So he slipped the phone into his locker and closed it.
Ten minutes later, it vibrated again through the metal.
Then again.
Then again, in a rhythm that made several of his teammates glance over in mild confusion before returning to their conversations.
Across the continent in Montreal, Shane Hollander stood in the corridor outside the Metros’ training ice with his phone clenched so tightly in his hand that his knuckles had turned a dull, bloodless white, his body still half dressed in gear because he had walked off the ice without explanation the moment the last message had gone unanswered for more than a few minutes.
“He’s not responding,” Shane said, not really to anyone, though Hayden slowed as he passed, uncertain whether to intervene.
“Maybe he’s in meetings or—”
“He would answer,” Shane cut in immediately, the certainty in his voice sharp enough that it stopped the suggestion mid-sentence, because it wasn’t speculation to him, it was pattern recognition, and the pattern had changed in a way that his brain refused to accept as normal.
Because silence, in Shane’s mind now, had stopped meaning “busy.”
It meant “something has gone wrong.”
He unlocked his phone again, thumb moving too fast across the screen, refreshing messages that still hadn’t changed.
Nothing.
A tightness built in his chest that he couldn’t fully suppress, not because he lacked logic, but because logic had already been overridden by memory that still felt too recent to belong in the past.
Without another word, he turned and left the facility entirely, ignoring the confused calls behind him, because the idea of standing still while he didn’t know where Ilya was felt physically impossible in a way that no amount of professional discipline could override.
When Ilya finally checked his phone again, half an hour later, the screen lit up with missed calls and messages stacked so densely they blurred into one another, and for a moment he simply stood in front of his locker listening to the distant noise of practice continuing as if nothing in the world had shifted.
Then he opened a voice message.
Shane’s voice came through immediately, lower than usual, controlled in a way that was clearly deliberate but failing to hide the strain underneath it, like something tightly held together that was threatening to come apart at the edges.
“Call me back. Now. I don’t care what you’re doing.”
A pause.
A breath that sounded too sharp.
“Just—please.”
That last word landed differently, not like an order but like something closer to fear trying to disguise itself as command, and Ilya closed his eyes briefly before pressing the call button, leaning back against the metal locker as it rang.
Shane picked up before the third ring finished.
“Ilya.”
His voice was immediate, not relieved in the usual sense, but as if something inside him had finally been forced to release pressure that had been building too long to hold safely.
“I am here,” Ilya said calmly, lowering his voice instinctively as a teammate walked past without noticing him, his tone steady despite the weight of Shane’s reaction already pressing against him through the line. “I am at the arena. I am at practice.”
“Why didn’t you answer?”
“I was practicing.”
“You didn’t text back.”
“I was practicing,” Ilya repeated, slightly firmer now, because repetition was often the only way to anchor Shane back into the present when his mind had already started projecting into worst-case scenarios.
There was a pause on the other end, but it wasn’t calm.
It was strained.
“I needed to know you were okay,” Shane said, and though the words were simple, they carried an edge of urgency that didn’t fully resolve even after they were spoken.
“I am not gone,” Ilya said more softly, letting the sentence settle deliberately between them. “I am not missing. I am not on a floor somewhere.”
The silence that followed was heavier than the words that preceded it.
In Montreal, Shane stood alone in a hallway that suddenly felt too narrow, his shoulder pressing against the wall as if he needed physical resistance to stay grounded, because his body still hadn’t fully learned how to exist in a world where Ilya was not constantly within reach.
“I know,” Shane said finally, though it came out quieter than before, less certain than he wanted it to sound. “I know that. It’s just—when you don’t answer, my brain doesn’t stop at normal explanations.”
Ilya exhaled slowly, understanding immediately without needing clarification, because he had seen it now, the way Shane’s protection had hardened into something reflexive after the attack, something that didn’t wait for rational input before reacting.
“I am surrounded by my team,” Ilya said gently, though firmly, grounding the facts one by one. “There are staff everywhere. There are cameras. There is security. I am not alone.”
“I don’t care,” Shane replied instantly, honesty breaking through restraint. “I still need to know you’re okay.”
That admission hung between them for a moment, unpolished and raw in a way Shane rarely allowed anyone to hear.
“I will answer,” Ilya said after a pause, his voice softer now but still steady. “But I cannot respond every few minutes while I am training.”
A longer silence followed, and when Shane finally spoke again, his voice had dropped slightly, less sharp but no less intense.
“I just need you alive,” he said simply, as if that were the only conclusion his mind would allow.
“I am aware,” Ilya replied quietly.
“No,” Shane said, more firmly now, though not angrily. “I don’t think you are. I don’t think I fully am either.”
That honesty shifted something again, settling into the space between them with uncomfortable clarity.
“I am not going anywhere,” Ilya said, slower this time, anchoring each word carefully. “Not like that.”
Shane didn’t respond immediately.
When he did, it was quieter than before.
“Okay.”
But it didn’t sound like resolution.
It sounded like endurance.
When the call ended, Ilya remained leaning against the locker for a few seconds longer than necessary, phone still in his hand, listening to the absence of sound that followed, while somewhere across the continent Shane stayed exactly where he was in the corridor of the Montreal rink, still staring at nothing, still waiting for the next silence that might mean something had gone wrong again, even if everything had already been confirmed to be fine.
A month later, the first thing Shane felt when he stepped out of the airport in Boston was not exhaustion from travel or the dull ache of a long flight, but something far sharper and more immediate that he had been carrying for weeks without fully admitting it existed, as if his body had been running on a constant, low-grade alarm since the moment he last watched Ilya disappear down a gravel road at the lake house, and only now, standing in a different city on unfamiliar pavement, did he realize how tightly that alarm had been coiled inside him the entire time.
He adjusted his bag over his shoulder once, then again, not because it needed fixing but because his hands needed something to do while his eyes scanned the pickup area with an intensity that bordered on frantic restraint, and even though he had told himself on the plane that he would be calm, that he would be normal, that he would behave like someone visiting a boyfriend and not someone chasing oxygen after a month underwater, the truth was that the moment he saw Ilya waiting near the edge of the arrivals lane, everything else simply stopped mattering.
Ilya stood slightly apart from the crowd, as he always did, dressed in a dark coat that made him look both too composed and too distant for someone Shane had spent the last four weeks thinking about with a kind of relentless fixation that had become almost physical, and yet the instant their eyes met across the space between them, something in Ilya’s expression shifted so subtly it would have been easy to miss if Shane hadn’t been watching for it every single day.
But he had been.
Every day.
So he saw it.
The small change in posture. The slight softening at the corners of Ilya’s mouth. The way his shoulders loosened as if some internal weight had finally been acknowledged as real and survivable.
Shane did not walk.
He crossed the space between them like something pulled forward by gravity that had been denied too long to behave politely now.
Ilya did not move at first, just watched him approach with that quiet, unreadable focus he sometimes wore in public, until Shane was close enough that the noise of the airport dulled into something irrelevant, and then, finally, Ilya stepped forward too.
The impact of the collision between them was not dramatic in appearance, but it was immediate in effect, because the moment Shane’s hands found Ilya’s waist and Ilya’s hand caught the front of Shane’s jacket, the last month of distance collapsed into something that felt almost violent in its relief.
For a few seconds, neither of them spoke.
Shane just breathed.
Deeply.
Like his lungs had been waiting.
“I hate this,” he muttered finally, voice low and rough against Ilya’s shoulder, not quite accusation and not quite confession, but something more honest than either.
“I know,” Ilya replied quietly, fingers tightening slightly at Shane’s back as if anchoring him in place.
Shane pulled back just enough to look at him then, really look at him, as though verifying with his eyes what his mind had been refusing to fully accept for a month at a time, and there was something unguarded in his expression now that he rarely allowed anyone else to see, a kind of exhausted relief that made him look younger and more unsteady than he ever did on ice or in interviews.
“I didn’t like not being able to see you,” Shane said.
“I noticed,” Ilya replied, faintly.
Shane let out a short, almost disbelieving breath at that, something that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t carried so much residual tension.
“I called you too much,” he admitted.
“Yes,” Ilya said simply.
Another pause.
Then, softer, Shane added, “I still meant it every time.”
That made something in Ilya’s gaze soften further, and before either of them could overthink the moment, Ilya reached up and pulled Shane closer again, this time with more certainty, guiding him down just enough that the kiss they shared felt less like an arrival and more like a return to something that had been missing so long it had begun to feel unreal in memory.
It was not rushed.
It was not careful either.
It was simply inevitable.
Later, the door to Ilya’s apartment had barely clicked shut behind him when Shane was already there.
Shane’s hands stayed locked around Ilya’s back like he was verifying something real, fingers pressing slightly into fabric, shoulders tense in a way that made it clear he had been holding himself together only by refusing to imagine what it would feel like not to find Ilya here.
“I hate being away from you,” Shane said finally, voice rough and low against Ilya’s shoulder, as though the words had been forced out of him only now that there was no longer any distance left to defend against.
“I know,” Ilya answered quietly, and his arms tightened around Shane a little more in response, as if the admission alone carried weight enough to require grounding.
Shane pulled back just enough to look at him then, really look at him, not through screens or messages or delayed replies that left too much space for imagination to grow teeth, but directly, in front of him, where everything was immediate and undeniable.
“You look the same,” Shane said.
“I would hope so,” Ilya replied faintly.
“That’s not what I mean.”
The words came out sharper than intended, then softened immediately, like Shane had realized too late how fragile the moment actually was.
“I mean,” he continued, quieter now, “I can actually see you.”
Something in Ilya’s expression shifted at that—not amusement, not quite sadness, but recognition, because he understood exactly what Shane was trying not to say outright.
That distance had done something to him.
That not knowing had done something worse.
Ilya reached up and cupped Shane’s face with one hand, thumb brushing lightly along his cheekbone as if confirming he was solid under the touch, and Shane leaned into it immediately, eyes closing for a brief second like the contact had taken the weight out of his lungs.
“You are here,” Ilya said gently.
“I am here,” Shane repeated, as if saying it out loud made it more stable.
A pause stretched between them, but it wasn’t empty.
It was full of everything they had not been able to say during the month apart—messages sent too quickly, calls cut too short, the constant undercurrent of Shane’s voice when he couldn’t see Ilya and his mind kept filling in the gaps with things neither of them wanted to name.
Shane’s hands slid down to Ilya’s waist again, more deliberate this time, holding him like he was afraid that if he didn’t maintain contact, the world might try to take him again without warning.
Shane leaned in then, slower this time, like he was giving Ilya the chance to stop him if he wanted to, though neither of them actually believed he would, and when their lips met it was less like a greeting and more like something that had been building pressure for weeks finally finding a way out.
Ilya’s hand tightened at the back of Shane’s neck.
Shane exhaled sharply through his nose like something in him had finally loosened for the first time in a month.
When they broke apart, it was only slightly, just enough to breathe, just enough to keep looking at each other.
“I kept thinking about this,” Shane admitted quietly.
“Only this?” Ilya asked, faintly.
A ghost of something almost like a smile crossed Shane’s face.
“No,” he corrected. “Everything. But mostly this.”
Ilya studied him for a moment longer, then guided him further inside.
Shane didn’t let go even as they moved.
Not once.
At some point, the tension that had been living in his shoulders for weeks began to ease—not disappear, not fully, but soften into something survivable now that Ilya was within reach again, breathing the same air, standing close enough that Shane didn’t have to imagine where he was anymore.
“You’re still checking exits,” Ilya noted quietly after a moment.
“I’m not,” Shane replied automatically.
Ilya gave him a look.
Shane paused.
Then exhaled.
“…Okay, I am a little.”
That earned a faint, tired huff of amusement from Ilya, and for a brief moment the apartment felt less like a hiding place and more like something closer to normal life, even if nothing about their situation was ever going to be entirely normal again.
Shane leaned his forehead briefly against Ilya’s.
“I can breathe again,” Shane admitted quietly, like the words surprised him even as he said them.
Ilya looked at him for a long moment, studying the way Shane’s shoulders had finally dropped from that constant defensive height they had carried since the cottage.
“You were breathing before,” Ilya said.
“Not like this,” Shane answered immediately, without hesitation.
That ended any attempt at humor between them.