Chapter Text
Being a professional athlete in a contact sport is an exercise in enduring pain. Sometimes you get benched for three weeks because you have a broken cheekbone after you get hit in the face with a slap shot. Sometimes you play through a strained quad, a bruised shoulder, a mild fever. Most times, it’s just the constant, unending soreness that comes with pushing your body to its limit every single day. Every athlete had an injury they hated most, though, one that’s particularly painful or recurrent or just annoying.
Ilya fucking hated injuring his ribs. There is almost nothing you can do with your body that doesn't involve moving your torso, and the pain is deep, throbbing, and gets just a tiny bit worse every time you breathe. Sitting up hurts, lying down hurts, walking hurts, and worst of all, coughing fucking hurts.
It was the off-season, August, which was a stupid time to get hurt, and an exceedingly stupid time to get the flu. He was actually halfway to healed from the rib fracture he sustained during a charity game when he started coughing, as Sveta put it when she’d called to laugh at him about letting a third-line player from Florida break his ribs, “like a fucking consumptive.”
His head pounded, he couldn’t breathe through his nose, his chest felt like it was going to explode, and the only reason he wasn’t in the hospital was that he’d begged Shane not to take him. Instead, he was in their bed at home, Anya at his feet, inhaling albuterol through a nebulizer.
“This is so soft to breathe,” he said, voice barely discernible through his torn-up vocal cords and the plastic mask on his face. The medicine Shane had given him a half hour ago was beginning to sap away the pain and cool his fever, and he could feel his lungs easing with each inhale. Exhaustion had started to outweigh discomfort, and sleep was pulling him in. Shane hummed. He took Ilya’s hand and pressed a kiss to the center of his palm.
“You’re gonna have to run that one by me again.” He clipped a pulse-oximeter onto Ilya’s finger. The bags under his brown eyes were six feet deep, he had worry written all across his face, and he was still so fucking pretty. The little device flashed. 96. Could be better, would have to get a little worse before either of them would be willing to have this whole debacle go public.
“It feels to breathe like silk feels to touch.” It would have been more convincing if saying two sentences in a row didn’t trigger a volley of coughs that left him panting. Shane put a hand on the back of his neck, cool against Ilya’s fevered skin. “I hate this.”
“I know you do,” Shane sighed. The pulse-ox dipped to 95. He leaned forward to press a lingering kiss to his husband’s forehead, on the tiny scar there from a run-in with some high-sticking asshole when he was a teenager.
“I will probably die of it.” Shane kissed the dip of his temple, then each flushed cheek, then his stubbled chin. “Thank you for kissing me goodbye.”
“You’re not dying.” The Cen’s team physician had been very clear that young, strong athletes did not die of viral pneumonia. “Drama queen.”
“I am not drama queen,” Ilya said. The nebulizer beeped, medication fully dispersed, and he pulled the mask off. There was a little red line on the bridge of his nose where the plastic sat, and Shane kissed that too.
“If you look up drama queen in the dictionary, it’s got your picture.”
“Well, that is not my fault, I am very handsome.” Shane rolled his eyes.
“You haven’t washed your hair in a week,” he said. Ilya coughed again, painful and hacking. Shane put a palm on his husband’s shuddering chest and rubbed slow, smooth circles into his skin. When the fit subsided, he continued. “And you’re still the most beautiful man I’ve ever met.”
“You could wash it for me.” He tried to raise his eyebrows and give it a little charm, but the cracked and wheezy sound of his voice made it sound more than a little pleading. He didn’t think he had the energy to act on it anyway. Shane swept his thumb over Ilya’s sternum and hummed.
“Okay,” he said, “the steam might help your lungs a little. And then I can change the sheets before you get back into bed for the night.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to, asshole,” Shane wrapped up the nebulizer tubing and put it on the bedside table, between the bottles of pills and bottles of water and bottles of lube. Bottle of lube, unused in a week and a half, but still. “I want to. I get to. Do you need anything while I’m up?”
“Tea?” Ilya asked weakly, his throat tightening for reasons that had nothing to do with the virus burning through his system and everything to do with the sweet, caring man who, against all odds, loved him.
“Got it.” If anyone had asked why tears started to prick at the corner of his eyes as his husband walked away, he would have said that he fucking hated having broken ribs.
Ilya dozed while Shane moved around the apartment. Through the thick haze of fever and fatigue, he could pick out occasional noises he recognized. The kettle whistling in the kitchen, the water running in the bathroom, the sound of a camera shutter that he was a little too tired to protest, the clink of a mug being set down. Even through closed eyes, the world swayed around him, and time distorted as he lay propped up against the pillows, unable to move. He wasn’t quite asleep, but images drifted through his mind like dreams nonetheless. A pale, cold hand, a hospital bed, the murky depths of a lake.
He couldn’t have told you how long it was before he felt the back of Shane’s fingers against his cheeks, then in his hair, then down his neck to his shoulder. The air smelled like ginseng and sweat.
“Ilyoshka,” Shane whispered, “bath’s almost finished. Do you want a sip of your tea?” Ilya nodded. He did not need the help Shane gave him to get the mug to his lips, but he didn’t protest. The tea tasted almost exactly like the one his mama used to make him when he was sick as a kid, herbal and honey-sweet.
“I love you,” he said because it was the truest and only thought in his wrung-dry brain.
“I love you too. I’ll love you more with clean hair.”
“So cruel to me while I lay here dying.”
“You’re not dying. Stop saying that.”
The process of getting to the bath was a bit of a blur for Ilya. Shane’s arms were around his shoulders, then his forehead was against the edge of the smooth tile sink, and cold hands were tugging at the hem of his shirt. Then he was coughing, and those same hands were on his cheeks, smoothing over his heavy eyelids. Then Shane was helping him into the steaming water, which he must have put some kind of salt into, because the moment the water kissed his sore, bruised ribs, he could feel tension seeping out of his strained muscles.
“Hollander, you are… how do you say in English? чудотворец. Miracle maker.”
Shane laughed, and Ilya pried his tired eyes open to see a smile light up his face. He hadn’t been smiling much in the last few days.
“And you,” Shane said, “are very sweet when you’re sick. Tip your head back.” Ilya did as he was asked. The steam really was helping. Shane put a hand on Ilya’s forehead to shield his eyes and tipped a mug full of warm water through his hair. Then, gentle, careful fingers were scratching at his scalp, massaging away his lingering headache. He dragged his eyes open again (when had he closed them?), to see his husband kneeling next to the bathtub, the look on his face so fond it looked almost painful.
“So pretty on your knees for me. Maybe I could return the favor,” he teased, though the words came out slurry and breathless. Shane snorted.
“You can’t breathe through your nose. If I put my dick in your mouth right now, you’d suffocate.” He scooped up another mug of bath water and poured it through Ilya’s curls.
“It would be worth it.” Any other day, he would have made good on his offer, but he was tired. So tired that it felt like his bones were made of lead, foreign and heavy and apart from his body. He could feel a washcloth being run over skin, which must have been his, but the weight of the water made his vertigo shift from swaying to sinking, and he thought that he must have been much too far away for Shane’s hands to reach him. He was starting to feel a little nauseous.
“If I leave you here for five minutes to change the sheets, are you going to drown?” There was a hand on his cheek. He leaned into it.
“Я не- I don’t know. Probably not.”
“Ilya.” It held a note of a reprimand. Understandable after almost a week of taking care of a feverish Ilya, who had been somewhere on the scale between bitchy, whining, or incoherent the entire time. He was leaning towards incoherent now. He blinked hard a few times to rouse himself.
“No,” he said. “I won’t drown.”
“Good. I love you. Stay put.”
He did try. He closed his eyes and focused on taking deep breaths, long, slow inhales to let the steam loosen the horrific tightness in his chest. But, as the minutes trickled on, the warmth of the water stopped feeling soothing and started to prickle at his skin. He tried to turn on the cool water, but when he got his fingers around it, the angle wrenched at his ribs, and he was only able to get the tap trickling before he gave up. He put his head under the dribble anyway. It stung his skin, icy instead of cool. The nausea continued to rise in his throat until he had no choice but to ungracefully lever himself out of the tub and onto the floor.
That was where Shane found him when he came back, with his cheek on the toilet seat, naked and dripping wet. He was a little too woozy to catch the rush of motion that followed. A towel was wrapped around his shoulders, another run over his head, under his eyes to catch the tears that had fallen.
“What happened to staying put?” Shane’s hands were on his cheeks. Ilya shook him off.
“I tried. I felt-- bad. Sick. Too hot.” He retched again, tea and bile, then coughed, then panted against the pain until he had enough breath back to say, “I’m fucking pathetic.”
“You’re not pathetic. You have two broken ribs and pneumonia.”
“You shouldn’t have to do this.”
“There’s no ‘have to’ here. I’m- this is my job, Ilya. I like my job. You wouldn’t bench me in the middle of a play because you worried it was too hard, right?” He was quiet, and there was something searching in his gaze. Ilya shook his head. No, he wouldn’t. “So, don’t ask me to stop taking care of you.” His voice was firm, commanding, more than it usually was outside of the rink.
“Okay.” He started coughing again, which really just proved Shane’s point. They hadn't done the ‘through sickness and health,’ part of the wedding vows, but he supposed this was what people meant when they said that, the freedom to fall and know that someone would be there to catch you, that they would do it gladly just to know that you were safe.
“Okay,” Shane said when the coughing abated, and Ilya stopped clutching at his chest. “Let’s get you into bed. There are clean sheets and an ice pack waiting for you in there.”
“You love me.” It was a statement, not a question. He tipped forward, his forehead colliding with Shane’s chest. Strong arms looped around him, held him tight. He could feel the rumble under his cheek when Shane spoke.
“So much.”
They settled in their bed, which for the first time in days didn’t smell like fever sweat, Ilya’s head in Shane’s lap, an ice pack pressed to his ribs, and a cool cloth on the back of his neck. The sun was beginning to set, golden light trickling through the blinds. Shane was holding the ice pack steady with one hand and reading a book with the other. He wasn’t even looking in Ilya’s direction when he said, “Stop fighting sleep, baby. You’re going to lose.”
“No,” Ilya said, petulant. “I want to keep looking at you.”
“I will be here when you wake up,” Shane replied, endlessly sweet and patient. Ilya couldn’t believe his luck. “I’ll probably be the one to wake you up. For dinner or your next neb, whichever comes first.”
“What’s for dinner?”
“Mom is bringing over some kake udon.”
“She loves me.”
“Everyone loves you, Ilyoshka. Rest. Please.”