Work Text:
Shane doesn’t remember yelling after him, though he must have. He doesn’t remember getting into the Uber either, or the precise moment that his knocking tilted from annoyance into concern. All Shane knows is that one minute, Ilya is saying goodnight to his teammates, lax with the smug contentment that only a win against Montreal can imbue, and the next, he’s taking a phone call with a curt da, Alexei? that has every bit of celebration slipping shortly from his face.
Then Ilya bolts, and Shane’s recourse is quite simple.
He follows.
“Rozanov, I know you’re in there,” Shane calls out again, rapping his knuckles loudly against Ilya’s door. His cell phone is in his other hand, ringing on loop due to Lily’s lack of a voicemail box. “Come on, I’m not leaving until you answer.”
Finally, the door swings open, revealing Ilya with an incredulous look on his face.
“Quiet, Hollander. You want someone to see? You will wake neighbors.”
I’ve been louder, Shane thinks to say, but the crack dies on his tongue the instant his eyes fall to the base of Ilya’s throat, where his pulse is skipping wildly. “Rozy, seriously. What’s going on? Are you okay?”
And Ilya could lie, couldn’t he? It would be all too easy to put on a disinterested disposition, just another of the uniforms he regularly wears, and brush the whole thing off. Return to his evening, orphaned in every meaning of the word.
Only, Shane is still standing there. Shane ‘not here and just a lot of windows’ Hollander, who balks at the mere idea of being perceived together in public yet shouted his name in concern in the arena where any number of stragglers could have seen and heard, has not budged from his doorway, and it is this steadfastness in the face of his instinct to flee that has him saying, “My father. He is dead.”
It’s the first time Ilya has voiced this new truth, unfamiliar in his mouth the way the English -th sound (mother, father) had once been. He has the absurd urge to laugh then, though no part of it is mirthful. Bile rises in his throat next, and he’s sure he’s about to vomit all over Hollander’s stupid Reeboks when something else claws its way out instead.
Words.
Once he starts, he can’t stop. They spill forth half in Russian and half in English, straight from the hollow place in his chest: the shock of grief, though more for the relationship they never had than for the loss itself. His palpable relief at the news; the self-loathing he feels at this relief. Love, and how confused it makes him feel. Resentment, too, ice-cold, at the fact that his father got the mercy of forgetting but Ilya had to remember every strike, couldn’t possibly forget if he tried.
(Oh, how he tried, every single time he took to the ice.)
When Ilya eventually catches his breath, he’s seated at the foot of his bed with no recollection of moving there. But Shane is there—there’s his explanation—standing in the space between his legs with his face cradled in his palms. Ilya can’t help but wonder if he looks as wrecked as he feels, his eyes wild and pupils blown from need or fight-or-flight or something in between.
If the bob of his throat when their gazes meet is anything to go by, Shane concludes the former. Wordlessly gestures higher up the bed with a jut of his chin, blinking in surprise when Ilya acquiesces without protest.
“What do you need?” Shane asks gently once Ilya is resting against the headboard, because I’m sorry for your loss certainly won’t cut it, not when it’s only a half-truth.
“Nothing.”
“Ilya. Come on.”
At the sound of his given name—the name given to him by his mother, not his father—Ilya makes a wounded sound.
“You know,” he bites out, an unconscious echo of Vegas.
“But I don’t. I don’t know what this feels like, and I especially don’t know what it feels like for you.”
“You were not listening when I explained?” Ilya volleys back. There’s no bite in it, though, only dry wit that has Shane’s lip twitching just so. A beat later: “I need you.”
Shane nods. Slowly, as if afraid to spook a wild animal, he joins him on the bed. Leans in to nose at his cheek.
When their lips finally meet, Shane expects Ilya to be bullish, restless, a little sloppy, but he is nothing of the sort. This, Shane realizes, is yet another answer to his question. What do you need, and the answer is a reminder that his body does not always have to be pushed to the very limits of what it can withstand.
Not his father’s fists, or his coaches’ pressure, or even pleasure dialed up to the extreme, but tenderness.
Has Ilya ever known the feeling before? Once, maybe, and when Shane tugs Ilya’s shirt over his head, his mother’s cross falls onto his bare chest as if in posthumous agreement.
Shane’s shirt goes next. Ilya’s hands move on instinct to the broad expanse of his back, where his fingers begin tracing patterns, figure-eights and fractals that graduate to Cyrillic confessions unrecognized by Shane.
Tomorrow, there will be a twelve-hour flight to catch and arrangements to make, unaided by Alexei and Polina. There is the matter of the gravestone, what lies to memorialize in marble: beloved husband and father. There is the matter of the clothes Grigori is to be buried in, too, white to signify purity of the soul. Another lie, the family legacy.
There is the matter of the funeral mass that will run too long, and the people in attendance who will make Ilya out to be a villain, whispers of ungrateful and not even there to care for his own father and too American now somehow also interspersed with criticism of his gameplay, no winning of any sort. There is the matter of the plot beside his mother’s, the plot that he wants for himself and that his father does not deserve. He wants to do none of this; he wants to do all of it, a final show of worth and filial piety and perhaps even love.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Tonight, though, Ilya’s hands continue skating over Shane’s skin, shakier and more frantic now as Shane’s own hand slips beneath his waistband and grips him in a sweet fist: спасибо. я тебя люблю. спасибо. я тебя люблю, over and over again.
Tonight, there’s just this.