Chapter Text
epilogue
ilya
“Will you hate me,” Shane says quietly, “if I say that it doesn’t count?”
He smells like summer, that unmistakable scent of sweat mixed with a cocktail of sunscreen and bug spray, a hint of woodsmoke carried on a breeze off the lake, sun-drenched pine needles and dirt and the first place that has ever been a home.
Adversity had been the story of Ottawa’s season from the very start. They’d clawed their way through the ranks, fighting against injury and scrutiny to throw down a performance that will be carved into the foundational bedrock of franchise history. It’s been two weeks since the dust has settled. Two weeks since the storm of media availabilities and interviews following the conclusion of the Stanley Cup finals, two weeks since the entire team had gathered in Bood’s backyard and partied until the early hours of the morning.
Ilya feels like he’s slowly coming back to life.
Winning the Cup is a certain, special kind of magic that he knows will never get old. Seeing so many of his teammates – especially the ones he’s captained since their rookie season – lift it for the first time with stars in their eyes had been an even greater gift. And yet he feels a bit like a frayed, old thread; worn down, stretched thin, pulled within a millimeter of its limit.
It’s been two weeks, and – lying on the dock with Shane as the warmth of the late afternoon sun soothes his aching muscles – he can finally feel a flicker of his old self returning.
He understands what Shane means. There’s a vision he’s held at the back of his mind since before these were things they were even allowed to admit to each other, the closest thing to a prophecy he’s ever made. The two of them at center ice, lifting the Cup overhead. Together.
The fact that it came true, in a way, does nothing to dispel the fact that there’s an asterisk on the victory, because neither of them would have chosen for it to happen the way that it did. That by all rights Shane should have been playing in that final series, in that final game. That he – perhaps more so than almost anyone else – deserved the right to lift the Cup over his head on the ice of the city that had raised him, and say I did this.
But if the alternative is a loss and a lifetime of what if, Ilya will take this victory – any victory, really – if it means that they can share it.
He wants to tell Shane all of this, but the words get stuck in his throat. Somewhere out on the lake a loon calls, loud and clear.
“It counts,” he says instead.
shane
The French have a term for it. Coup de foudre. It translates literally to a lightning strike; that sudden, irreversible impact that tears through you, taking over your entire body, restructuring every atom on a fundamental level. In Shane’s experience, though, falling in love isn’t like this, not exactly. It’s more like waking up softly on the weekend, a slow realization. Oh, it’s you. It’s going to be you.
It’s a realization that happens over and over again, one that will carry on forever in all the same ways that he’ll never quite stop mourning a decade of lost time.
Legacy is like a mosaic, Shane thinks. If you stand too closely, it’s all just brightly coloured squares laid out in a chaotic, nonsensical order. It’s only when you step back far enough that you can see the full picture, the way every last piece – even the ones that look completely unremarkable on their own – works together to create something beautiful.
There are days – like this one – where he can’t quite find that distance. Days where he gets too caught up in making sure that a single fragment of his life is placed perfectly, in the exact right orientation, that he forgets to take into account its role in informing the bigger picture.
Days where he needs someone to take his hand and gently guide him backwards until he finds a different perspective.
Not for the first time, he wonders what his life would be like if he hadn’t been brave enough to introduce himself to Ilya in a Saskatchewan parking lot all those years ago, wonders if he would have turned into anyone worth being.
Wonders if any of it was ever even a choice, or if their fate has always been written into the fabric of the universe in ways they will never know or understand.
There’s an old saying that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. It’s not grounded in scientific fact, of course, because lightning follows the path of least resistance. Electricity craves a conduit, something to direct its energy, something to rip it out of the sky and pull it down to Earth.
Sometimes lightning is so single-minded in its focus that it doesn’t realize that – in its desperate plight to be grounded – it lights up the entire night sky.
Shane has never been the path of least resistance. But there are other ways to be changed; a river carving its way through a landscape one century at a time until you could take the water away, but the scar of it will always remain. Progress that you can’t see until you look back at the years of erosion, quiet and unassuming in its permanence.
Sometimes all it takes to be changed is to be in the right place at the right time, and to surrender to the river’s flow.
Ilya reaches for him and he goes easily, and a thousand little lightning strikes flicker across his skin everywhere that their bodies touch.
The sun is growing softer, that golden summer’s evening glow that sparkles as it refracts off the surface of the lake. The sky is cloudless, a vast expanse of brilliant blue, and the stars – when they rise – will glow in that way that makes him feel like he could walk right into them.
“What are you thinking about?” Ilya whispers. His eyes, just like everything else, are shining.
There are still mountains ahead of them both, and there may always be. But they stand on a summit even now, and the vast landscape that stretches out around them is alive with possibilities. And it’s far too easy to stand on a mountain and become discouraged when the peaks ahead reach even higher, forgetting to look back at the thin, winding trail that begins in the valley, the one that shows how far they’ve come.
“I’m thinking about how I have everything I always wanted,” Shane tells him.
And all is not well, but it will be.