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For once, the party was too loud, the drinks were too much. For once, Ilya couldn’t stand it anymore. He could feel it all washing over him and he felt… nothing. So, with a few nods and a shake of a cigarette pack, he was granted release from the environment by his teammates. Once outside, he wandered, letting his feet take him away from the hotel, away from the noise. He lit a cigarette, just one, and walked.
He walked and tried not to think. He ignored the onslaught of images, thoughts, memories. He walked and ignored the tightening in his chest. He walked and he saw nothing, felt nothing.
Ilya knew that eventually he would need a stopping point, that he couldn’t just walk and ignore forever. He couldn’t continue to float. The beach, for some reason, is what he landed on. It wasn’t somewhere he found himself often, not even something he gave much thought to.
But, there was something so simple about it, the water. It flowed and moved as it should. No one to obey. It was clean, easy. And it was empty. Not a person for miles. It was exactly what Ilya needed right now, right?
The sand was slightly colder, the sun long since set. He settled in and lit another cigarette, something he won't tell Shane about, but knows he’ll be able to tell anyway. He stares at the ocean and finally, the dam breaks. His thoughts come rushing out in a mixed mess of sorrow and anguish.
He wondered, sometimes, if his mother did the same. If she reached for the water, if she watched the way it ebbs and flows. If her mind, too, shattered once allowed. If she walked and wandered, if she found a place to find peace.
Did she know peace? Would he ever?
His mother was dead, has been. She comes to him in dreams, whispers his name and leaves lingering touches that haunt him in his waking moments. His dad was dead, a new development. He had a father, then he had half a father. Now he has nothing.
So, where does that leave him? What was he now? An orphan? Half a son? A hockey player? A friend? Loved?
Was he loved?
He doesn’t know, doesn’t know if there's anyone left to love him. Was he worthy of it anyways? Or, even worse, was he built for it?
The fears come to him sometimes, when it's quieter. Without a hockey stick in hand or Shane under him, without the loud opinions and musical laughter of Svetlana. The absence of everything, it leaves him susceptible to the worst of his brain.
One half paces and worries that maybe whatever had been wrong with his mother will come to claim him. He’s always felt it, known it's waiting, but what will become of him when it does?
The other half taunts and mocks. It promises that all the frustration, anger, and hurt he felt towards his father will someday be handed back to him. It laughs that this sort of thing is genetic, that maybe he isn’t so grand, so unbreakable. That maybe, just maybe, his mind will one day fail him too.
To know all of this, to really understand it, would you look at him and say he’s built for love?
He knows he’s capable of love. God, sometimes when Hollander looks at him, he feels hope but most of all, he feels agony. Each time they face off or text or when Shane sleeps later than him and he can watch the way his eyebrows scrunch together. Ilya feels the love grow when he remembers tiny, unimportant to anyone else, details about Shane.
He feels it growing and growing and growing.
And he is terrified.
If he’s not built for it, yet he feels it, what happens when Shane doesn’t love him back? When he wakes up one day and decides this is all too much, if he gets too close and sees beyond the Ilya he knows. Things with him sometimes feel precarious as is.
Ilya is a fool for there is no love awaiting him.
So to answer the question from before. Yes, he was an orphan. No, he was no longer a son. Yes, he’s a hockey player and yes, he’s a friend. But no, he was not loved.
That’s the conclusion he comes to and it tears his insides to shreds. He doesn’t cry, not because he can’t, but now is not the time. Now is not the time to mourn who he is, who was born as. Instead, Ilya forces himself to focus hard on the waves in front of him. He gets lost briefly, in the push and pull of the ocean, in the cigarette smoke painting his insides, in the lack of noise but overwhelming noise all at once.
“Hey,” a soft voice calls from behind him.
Ilya knows who it is, and wishes he could feel more shocked at him showing up. But, as he does, all he feels is this earth splitting pain at being known so well and yet not at all. He turns over his shoulder and looks at Shane in all his beauty, wearing his ever familiar athletic clothes, his stylist-picked outfits ditched.
Ilya gives him a short nod, before turning back towards the water. Shane lets out a small groan as he sits down in the sand next to him, squirming a bit till he is settled, hands spread out behind him. His left lay close enough to Ilya’s that he could reach out, wrap his around and seek that warmth.
“Smoking? Really Rozanov?” Shane laughs from next to him, making a little tsk sound.
Ilya manages a small smile in return. “Just the one,” he jokes back, though it falls flat.
“Those things will kill you,” he lectures, and Ilya sees him toss a smile at him from the corner of his eye.
What would kill him first he wonders. Depression, dementia, or cigarettes. He won’t make it out of this world unscathed, maybe it would be nice to have a hand in what will deal his final blow.
“Probably,” he mutters, debating pulling out another one just to see what Shane would do.
They sit in silence for a bit, the only sound the crashing of the waves. Again, it doesn’t surprise him that Shane chooses to break it.
“Why’d you leave the party?” And if Ilya wasn’t crazy, if he hadn’t completely lost it yet, he would think that Shane almost sounded… sad. Which didn’t make sense, considering they could barely interact at the party without risk. Risk of outting, risk of proving that maybe they can be loved, so much fucking risk.
“Don’t know,” Ilya shrugs, unsure how he would explain that he just couldn’t be there anymore.
Shane doesn’t respond to that, but his pinky finger twitches against Ilya’s. It was nice. It wasn’t love. Not for Shane anyways. It was simply… care maybe, if that was possible.
Ilya pulls one more cigarette from the pack, let Shane say what he must. “Go back to the party, Hollander,” he breathes out.
He does not want him to go, but he says it anyway. Like something inside of him wanted him to crash and burn all of this, to push Shane away before he could… infect him? Destroy him? Who knows.
Ilya can’t accept whatever this is Shane is trying to give him. Doesn’t he see that? Doesn’t he know?
“Nah,” Shane shakes his head, “no fun anyway.”
And maybe he actually means that, or maybe he wants Ilya to read more into it. Maybe, Shane wants Ilya to hear the unspoken that even if they can’t touch, even if they can barely talk, being in the same room is enough. Shane may actually be sad that Ilya isn’t there, that he notices his absence.
Ilya knows he notices Shanes, always. Can feel it like a wound sometimes, the complete lack of Shane Hollander overtaking his senses.
Is it dangerous to hope that Shane feels the same?
“It’s pretty here.” It’s spoken in a whisper, like Shane barely means to say it.
“It is,” Ilya responds, equally as quiet. A moment neither wants to disrupt, a painting that is perfect.
They sit. They don’t touch past the small grazes of their hands. Ilya thinks that maybe he can’t be loved, maybe it isn’t in the cards for him. But god, he’s never been more sure in his life that he can love.
That he loves Shane Hollander with every rotting piece of him.