Chapter Text
“Dude, I told you a million times—I don’t know what’s going on either!”
Ilya reaches for the bottle of vodka on Hayden Pike’s sensible marble island, ignoring Yuna’s pointed look. Yes, he knows this is his third glass. Yes, he knows the playoffs start in two days. No, he does not care, because he’s still benched and his fiancé is probably not his fiancé anymore and his entire life is falling apart. He’s drinking the fucking vodka.
“So you ask!” Ilya snaps as he gives himself a generous pour, then a bit more for good luck. Yuna’s look gets more pointed, and Ilya turns so she’s no longer in his line of sight because otherwise he might do something unforgivable. Like start crying in the middle of Pike’s kitchen. “Fuck! You pick up the phone and you call him! This cannot be that difficult, even for you.”
“Oh, fuck off. You think I haven’t tried that? You think I haven’t been calling him all fucking day? He won’t answer, asshole. Maybe—”
Pike snaps his jaw shut, biting off something apparently deemed too much for the “delicate situation” at hand. Yuna’s words, not his, stuck into Pike like pincushion needles when she thought Ilya couldn’t hear, after he had to take a breather in the bathroom when Pike said that maybe this whole thing was for the best. Like Ilya was just some unfortunate blemish in the otherwise perfect life of Shane Hollander.
For a moment, Ilya wants to force him to say it. To finish his fucking sentence. Maybe, he finally cracked under the pressure. Maybe, he went to those meetings and realized he didn’t want to sacrifice hockey for you after all. Maybe, he finally saw some fucking sense and realized he could have literally any man in the world, and it didn’t have to be you. Maybe, he’s just happier without you. Did you ever think of that?
Ilya thinks he would really, genuinely throw up if he heard any of that said out loud. Instead, he raises his eyebrows and says, pointedly, “Swear jar,” before knocking back his glass. It burns like fire, because Pike buys shitty vodka, but Ilya doesn’t care. He drinks, and he lets the flames spread.
. . .
Wind lashes against the airport windows, sending raindrops violently splattering across the glass. It’s the kind of storm that Ilya usually loves: lightning and thunder and the wailing of the heavens, shaking the foundation of whichever building he’s currently sheltered in. He’s never felt much of a connection with nature, having grown up surrounded by city streets and high walls and busy people. He still doesn’t, no matter how many hikes Shane convinces him to come along on. Trees are nice, but they’re just trees; he could take them or leave them. But storms come crashing down like a biblical curse, a reminder that there exists something bigger than all of them and that it is powerful enough to shake the earth and to nourish it at the same time. Evidence of a God Ilya isn’t sure he still believes in.
Maybe storms remind him a bit of his mother, then, bustling him and his brother to church every week like clockwork. Or maybe he just likes the sound of the rain.
They had been particularly nice at the cottage, the storms. The first one Ilya experienced there crept in early in the morning, somewhere in the middle of their second week. It rolled in across the lake, rain creating hazy sheets above the water as the clouds crept ever closer and wind bending the tree branches down towards the dock, sending their unsecured deck chairs tumbling across the grass. When it finally reached them, it hit the floor-to-ceiling windows with a violence Ilya had never seen before, filling the cottage with a white-noise cacophony that he has failed to replicate anywhere else. He lay in bed, legs tangled with Shane’s beneath the sheets, and let it all wash over him, watching the lightning flash and feeling the thunder rattle the foundation. He felt the building shudder and then hold firm, keeping them warm and dry within its sturdy walls.
He loves the stormy days at the cottage. He loves the sunny days too, when he and Shane lie together on the dock and let the heat of the sun soak into their skin. But he privately hopes for storms, as many as he can get. There is a certain comfort in knowing that even as the world outside tilts its head up towards the heaven and wails, inside the walls of the cottage, with Shane, he is safe.
This is not the cottage, though. And all that this storm is making him feel is impatient and irritated.
“No flights are taking off?” he says, looking at Hayes like perhaps he’s just misunderstood the announcement. “Surely this is wrong.”
Hayes looks out the window just as a bright flash of lightning illuminates the tarmac, then looks back at Ilya and shrugs. “Seems pretty bad out there right now. Guess it makes sense they can’t really fly in that. Sucks, though, for sure.”
Ilya groans. “Sucks, he says, like we are not stuck in worst airport in America.”
“O’Hare isn’t that bad. The food is decent, at least, and there’s plenty of seating.”
Ilya groans again and slumps back in his chair, crossing his arms across his chest. “It is bullshit! Planes fly in the rain all the time. I do not know why this is different.”
“I get it, man. The quicker we’re out of here, the quicker we’re home, right? I love hockey, but I definitely miss my wife when we’re gone this long.” Hayes eyes Ilya, clearly weighing something, then adds, casually, “It’ll be nice to see Hollander too, right? Or—Shane, I guess. I don’t know if it’s weird to call him Hollander in this situation.”
Ilya’s chest tightens, just for a moment, before it relaxes again. He looks over at the window as well, watching the rain come down in thick sheets, and says, “He is in Montreal right now. Though if we are still benched tomorrow … yes, I will drive there, I think.” He looks at Hayes and smiles. It’s a little pinched, a little tired, but it still feels like the realest smile he’s given Hayes since he first shook his hand and welcomed him to the team. What a relief, to no longer have to hide the most important part of himself. What a fucking relief, to finally have this. “And yes. It will be nice, to see him. I am looking forward to it.”
Hayes bumps his shoulder against Ilya’s, and they watch the storm rage on.
. . .
Ilya is in the car, and Yuna is searching Shane’s apartment for a screwdriver, because she is not leaving this building until she sets eyes on Shane’s face. Shane has always been a terrible liar, ever since he was little. His lies live in plain sight, embedding themselves in the deep furrows of his forehead and the nervous flicks of his eyes and the pinched corners of his lips. She used to think she knew all of his tells—that he could never lie to her as hard as he tried. Then, there was Ilya, rookie season, summer before, and all that certainty came crumbling down around her.
Maybe she still does know them, though. Maybe, for the big lies—the ones that really matter—it’s less that he’s lying to her and more that she’s lying to herself.
Yuna purses her lips, takes a deep breath, and finally locates Shane’s toolkit beneath the kitchen sink. It looks completely untouched, either through disuse or through great care (either of which are possible), and it contains a powered screwdriver with replaceable tips in a variety of sizes that she remembers David buying for him when he first moved in. She tests a few of them on the closest door she can find until she finds one that fits the screws on the hinges. Then, she marches up the stairs to Shane’s bedroom, feeling very much like she’s going to war.
“Open the door, Shane. I’m not going to ask again,” she calls through the wood, because ever since the Summer 2017 Ilya Incident, she and David have been trying harder to respect Shane’s boundaries. The sanctity of a closed door is certainly one of those boundaries, and under normal circumstances, she would think twice about what she’s about to do.
But these are so very far from normal circumstances.
Yuna waits a few moments more. When she hears nothing in response, she sets her jaw. “Okay then,” she says, then gets to work.
She’s only removed the top hinge, which clatters to the ground before she can catch it and leaves a small but noticeable scuff in Shane’s hardwood floor, when the lock on the door clicks. It opens a few tentative inches, just far enough to reveal wide brown eyes—ringed with red, Yuna notices and promptly catalogues—and a pinched expression. “Mom, what the fuck?” Shane says, and it’s such a relief, seeing his face and hearing his voice, that Yuna drops the screwdriver and immediately bullies her way into his room before he has the chance to lock her out again.
There’s nobody else there. No gun to Shane’s head, no bomb strapped to his chest, no threatening letter on his desk or incriminating email open on his laptop. There’s just Shane, sitting in his room with the window shades drawn and his bed unmade, like he’s just crawled out of it, wearing a rumpled pair of sweatpants and a too-big t-shirt and looking at her like he thinks she’s going to eat him alive.
It's a valid fear. Because she just might.
“You’re going to tell me what’s going on,” Yuna says, because she has one son in the car with a broken heart and the other in front of her still wielding the hammer, and she cannot figure out for the life of her why he picked it up in the first place. “Right now.”
. . .
Ilya joins the meeting with his camera off, because he’s not above petty gestures.
Shane joins the meeting a few moments later sitting in front of his wall of trophies, a miniature Stanley Cup replica framing him on either side, because the two of them are more alike than anybody ever knew or guessed. Ilya wonders idly if he’s using the same chair he came on less than 24 hours ago, and the corners of his mouth twitch upwards.
Roger Crowell is sitting in his stupid office with his stupid tasteful wall décor behind him, wearing a stupid green necktie and a stupid black suit. He frowns at his screen and says, “Mr. Rozanov, if you could please turn your video on?”
Shane’s slightly blurry mouth (stupid hotel WiFi) presses flat in what could seem like irritation if one didn’t know any better. Luckily, Ilya knows best of them all, and he knows what Shane looks like when he’s trying not to smile. Ilya smiles too, all teeth, flips off Crowell’s tiny thumbnail, settles further back into his pile of sheets and pillows, and says, “Yes, one moment—let me find the button.”
Zoom is a wonderful website, Ilya decides as he turns his camera on. It lets you use all sorts of video filters.
Shane’s mouth goes flatter, which makes Ilya want to bite his cheeks until he can’t hold back the laughter he’s clearly suppressing. Crowell sighs again in the manner of one whose patience is wearing thin. Too bad for him; Ilya’s patience with this whole business wore thin two days ago. “Mr. Rozanov,” he says again. “If you could please remove your video filter?”
Ilya tilts his head, and the virtual dog ears atop it move with him. “Oh, of course—this new technology, it has so many buttons. I will fix.” He navigates through the filter menu with one-handed ease, setting his filter instead to a thin rainbow border around his thumbnail. It’s simple, quiet, unobtrusive—unobjectionable in every way but one. If Crowell wants to contest this one, he’s going to have to finally say the quiet part out loud.
Ilya’s phone pings.
Jane: He’s going to keep you benched out of spite
Crowell, on screen: “Mr. Rozanov, if you could please attempt to be professional?”
Ilya raises his eyebrows. “What? You can see my face now, so this is better, no? Can we continue, or is the purpose of this meeting to talk about most appropriate Zoom filters?”
The resolution is terrible, but Ilya still thinks he sees Crowell’s eyebrow twitch.
Another text:
Jane: You’re an asshole. I love you so much
Ilya looks at Shane’s pixelated thumbnail and wishes, more than anything, that he were sitting next to him right now so he could hold his hand. He grips the bedsheets instead, thinking about a dozen other evenings in hotel rooms and what they meant and how they led to here. How they were wonderful, and brief, and difficult, and complicated, and sometimes painful, and how Ilya wouldn’t give them up for fame or hockey or money or anything.
Ilya glances down at his phone again—Shane, hundreds of miles away, holding this little piece of Ilya in his hands and loving it so fiercely and completely, even when their entire careers are on the line—and thinks, If Crowell thinks he’s going to pull us apart now, then he doesn’t know a fucking thing.
“Fine,” Crowell says, annoyed. The smile finally wins the battle against Shane’s self-restraint, just for a moment before he locks it away again, but it’s still the most beautiful thing Ilya has ever seen. “Let’s just get this over with.”
. . .
Yuna is standing in the Pikes’ backyard, holding an empty glass of what was once red wine. She swirls it between her fingers as if there is still wine to aerate, because when she gets anxious like this, the restless urge to move swells within her. If she doesn’t do something to let it out, it explodes.
It had exploded earlier, in Shane’s apartment. Standing in his room, looking at him—alive and unharmed but withdrawn, skittish, unwilling to meet her eyes—and thinking, There is something wrong with my son, and I have no way to find out what.
Because Shane won’t tell her. He won’t even admit that something is wrong. He’d said it, over and over and over again: I’m fine, nothing’s wrong, I had to do it, you don’t understand, you can’t be here, he can’t be here, just get out get out get out.
Had to do what? Yuna had demanded. What don’t I understand? Why did you have to do it? Did somebody make you? Did somebody hurt you? Did somebody make you feel like you couldn’t have this, like it wasn’t safe, like it wasn’t yours to protect? Your phone, Shane, let me see your phone—no, do not walk away from me, let me see it now, right now—
And then things had gotten, perhaps, a bit too heated.
Spark, powder keg, ignite. Boom.
So now Yuna is here, at the Pikes’ house, with Ilya, who is trying to pretend like he hasn’t shattered into a thousand little pieces that he keeps leaving strewn about the ground behind him.
(There is a moment, she finds, in every hug where it starts to feel like you’re the only thing holding the other person together. Where the knowledge plants itself in your mind that if you let go, they will begin to crumble in front of you, and the only thing you can do to stop it is to hold them again. Yuna tries to end all hugs before they reach this point of no return. She normally doesn’t shy away from responsibility, but the emotional weight of it all is simply too much for her to bear.
She felt Ilya’s point of no return coming as soon as she wrapped her arms around him and drew him into her chest, sitting in the car outside the Pikes’ house after a silent and tense journey through Montreal. She felt it, and she clutched Ilya so tightly she felt her own bones creak, and she held him together until she couldn’t anymore.
Sometimes, responsibility isn’t so bad.)
Yuna clutches the wine glass tightly too. She doesn’t have the grip strength to break it, but for the briefest of moments, she wants to. It’s a selfish thought—this isn’t even her glass, it’s Jackie’s, and it’s a nice glass, not worthy of shattering—but it would help, she thinks. To have the broken thing on the outside, rather than burying the shards of it deep in her chest where it hurts to breathe. To have something tangible in hand. Something she can fix.
A shadow passes across the living room window. A moment later, the glass door opens, and Ilya steps outside, a cigarette held between two fingers. He hesitates for a moment, gives Yuna a slightly guilty look, then lights the cigarette and stands downwind of her. The cherry burns bright against his lips, a flash of bright orange-red against pale pink, and Yuna feels a stab of righteous anger in her stomach so sharp she almost lifts her shirt to check that she isn’t bleeding out.
Yuna steps closer to Ilya, uncaring of the smoke, and squeezes his shoulder tightly. Over her own white knuckles, she says, “I’m going to fix this, okay, hon? It’s going to be all right. I promise.”
Ilya exhales, acrid. “Okay,” he says, and she knows he doesn’t believe her. But that’s okay. He doesn’t need to believe her, and maybe it’s better, anyway. In case she’s wrong. But she knows she isn’t.
Something is wrong here. Something is wrong with Shane. And Yuna is going to figure out what it is.
. . .
The moment Shane picks up the video call, he says, “Did you know that Canada is a one-party consent country? For recording, that is. I looked it up this morning, just in case. So, you know, basically, it’s not illegal to record somebody without their consent as long as you’re a part of the conversation.”
Ilya, still coming off the high of hearing Shane tell Crowell to shove his stupid homophobic statements right up his asshole because Shane was going to marry Ilya and fuck Crowell and hockey and anybody else who tried to stop it (he may be editorializing a bit), has absolutely no bandwidth to parse whatever Shane is trying to say to him right now. He gives Shane a look he hopes conveys this, and Shane huffs, exasperated.
“I recorded our meeting. On my phone, that is. The sound quality isn’t great, probably, since I just put it by my computer speakers, but I couldn’t figure out how to do a recording on the computer without Crowell knowing I was doing it, which would have defeated the purpose of the whole thing. Which was to, uh, I guess have some insurance? Just in case he tried to blackmail us or manipulate us or whatever? Which I guess he kind of did, so, you know, it was definitely worth it.” Shane frowns, his nose wrinkling. Ilya wants to kiss it so badly. “I hope we don’t have to use it, of course, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.”
Ilya gives in to the impulse and kisses his phone screen with a loud smack. When he pulls back, Shane is looking at him with that surprised-delighted expression Ilya loves so much. If he were in person, he’d be able to see the sparkle in Shane’s eyes. Fuck this whole fucking road trip; he should be in Shane’s arms right now. “Did you just kiss your phone?” Shane says.
“I could not help it,” Ilya says, pressing his nose right up to the glass and trying as hard as he can to see that sparkle in Shane’s eyes. “You are so fucking sexy.”
Shane flushes, and Ilya resists the urge to lick his screen. This is, probably, a bit too far. Also, Shane has sent him many articles about the number of germs present on the average phone screen. Ilya had no idea so many types of germs even existed. “Ilya.”
“So sexy when you tell big scary hockey commissioner to go fuck himself,” Ilya coos. “I am hard just thinking about it.”
He palms himself through his shorts, biting his lip and angling his phone down so Shane can see. When he tilts the screen back up, he can see the way Shane’s pupils have blown wide with arousal, even as his mouth says, “I think we should, um, talk about next steps? We have the statement from Farah ready to go, and there’s no reason not to post it tonight. I have some pictures in mind I can show you?”
“Oh, I have some pictures in mind as well,” Ilya says, stretching back on the bed and giving Shane a lazy grin. “Though I think perhaps you will not want these included in the post.”
“Ilya,” Shane says, but Ilya can see him already shuffling around, propping his phone up so he has both hands free.
Ilya grins. “Shane,” he says, and then, in Russian, “My love. My sunshine. My beautiful armchair,” because something is buzzing away in his chest and the only way he can let it out is like this, staring at Shane through the screen and wishing video did justice to his freckles and wanting, wanting, wanting, and even more than that, knowing that finally, he can have.
“Armchair?” Shane says, brow furrowed, and Ilya laughs and sets the phone down so he can take off his shirt.
. . .
Ilya’s phone is still set to receive messages from exactly one person, and it has remained silent all day. The same cannot be said of Yuna Hollander’s phone, which is why the first indication Ilya gets that something has shifted outside the walls of this house is the hiss of air through Yuna’s teeth, the bright white of the phone screen reflected in her irises.
“What?” Ilya says, sitting up straighter in Hayden Pike’s terrible armchair. It has a mysterious stain spread across one of the arms, something dark and black that has irrevocably marred the fabric. The hazards of raising children, Ilya supposes. (Something sharp and wanting begins to claw its way up his throat; he swallows it viciously down, as he has been doing all day. Every time, it gains another inch. Soon, it will choke him, and there is nothing he will be able to do about it.) “What has happened?”
Yuna visibly rolls the words between her teeth for a moment, then passes her phone to Ilya. “From your coach,” she says. Her voice holds a kind of quiet fury he rarely hears from her—the kind that means she’s mad, but isn’t quite sure who with yet, so she’s holding that rage inside her chest beneath her ribs until she decides who to spit it towards. “He’s been trying to call you, apparently. As your emergency contact, I was his next step when he couldn’t reach you.”
Ilya, who is not entirely convinced this fury is not directed towards him, is not comforted by this. Yuna must see the anxiety on his face, because she hastens to say, “Nothing’s wrong! You haven’t done anything wrong. I’m not mad at you, I’m just—” She lets out something halfway between a scoff and a sob, which is such an unexpected sound it briefly renders Ilya motionless, a statue of marble in Hayden Pike’s living room. “I’m just trying to decide how we can spin this into a discrimination lawsuit, because the fact that you’ve only been cleared to return to play after Shane—” She cuts off again, pressing a hand to her mouth and angling slightly away from Ilya, as if trying to hide her grief from him. As if he has not been breaking down in her arms all day. “It’s not right,” she says, and then, “I need to make a call.”
Yuna turns and whisks out of the room, presumably to find a Pike and bully their phone away from them since Ilya still has hers. Ilya blinks at the space she once occupied for a long moment, then looks down at the phone, feeling like he’s floating somewhere high above his body.
It’s open to an email, from Wiebe. There are lots of words and sentences that Ilya, even after all these years, finds exhausting to parse on the best of days, and this is certainly not that. He focuses on a single paragraph, six sentences, fifty-nine words that land across Ilya’s mouth like the blade of a hockey stick. Two minutes for high-sticking, he thinks and runs his tongue along the flats of his teeth so he can taste the coppery blood.
As Ilya is now unsuspended and cleared for the first playoff game, he will need to return to Ottawa tomorrow for mandatory practice and a few meetings with management. I’m sorry, kid. I promise, I tried to give you time, but it was out of my hands. We’re here for you, though. Whatever you need. Just say the word.
What Ilya needs is to go back in time 24 hours so he can hijack a plane, fly to Montreal, and pin Shane down beneath his stupidly soft bamboo sheets until Shane remembers that he was the one to get on one knee and ask Ilya to spend the rest of his life with him.
Ilya hits the “reply” button, because what the fuck else is he going to do? This is Ilya, he types. I will be there.
He sends the email, then turns the screen off, leans back in the armchair, and tries to think about nothing at all.