Chapter Text
He could not remember how he found his way to Stonesthrow, but he had through the grace of God and a stroke of luck that on his walk from… Somewhere, he would stumble across a family and their broken down pick-up truck. It would become fate that while Ilya could barely remember his own name, and could communicate in only his broken English, that this family would take a chance on him when Ilya stepped out of the woods bordering the country highway to help.
"You work on trucks before, boy?" The older man, the patriarch, would say. Guarded, on edge.
Ilya would nod, "Sometime. Sports cars too."
And the older man would crack smile half hidden behind a wiry mustache, "Well alright, c'mon over."
Ilya would come on over, and that was how he was taken in by the Lambs. Kent Jacob Lamb, Lori-Anne Lamb, their eldest daughters Nicole Leigh Lamb and Shannon Grace Lamb, and their one year old daughter, Suzanne Marie Lamb. Ilya couldn't get the name Suzanne out of his head, his brain focusing on that name over and over and over again like a melody. Suzanne, Suzanne, Suzanne it sounded like something from story book instead of a real name.
He mentioned his thoughts, putting them into English the best he could while he looked over the Lamb's truck engine, "Sounds like princess, yes?"
As it turned out, the spark plugs only needed replacing, something Kent Lamb had on hand. Ilya replaced them easily as if he'd done the specific job a hundred times before even though he couldn't recall ever doing any of these things. His hands simply moved on their own and as he worked on getting the spark plugs in properly, the Lambs conversed behind him. Ilya, in his brokenish English, could only pick up bits and pieces like: Trafficked, Might deport him if we… Ah, what the hell?
"You got somewhere you're goin' son?"
"No," Ilya replied honestly, letting the hood of the truck fall shut, "I don't know where I am."
"Awe," Lori-Anne cooed, "Poor thing. Have you eaten?"
He shook his head. He had not but— even then, he didn't feel hungry. Ilya only felt… empty and unsure. Not himself but also himself, it was all very confusing. Thinking about where he came from hurt too much— made him feel like someone was smacking an ice pick into the side of his skull. The weight of what he lost had yet to hit him, and wouldn't for many more months, but the loss rattled around in the back of his mind. Ilya knew something within himself had crumbled away while he was left helpless to do a thing about it. Later, he would learn about the plane crash that led to him meeting the Lambs.
But right now, all he knew was that he barely knew who he was and the Lambs had a problem he could fix, and he wanted to do something he knew how to do so badly after days or perhaps of weeks of wandering around lost and somewhat out of his mind.
Shannon piped up then, "We've got PB 'an J's in the truck," smiling so big her missing top teeth were very visible.
"Oh?"
For some reason, that was what got the Lambs inviting him onto the rest of the fourteen hour drive to their little fishing town in Maine. Ilya ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich so fast he barely tasted it, because as it turned out, he was hungry. Then he entertained their cute one year old and their older daughters who didn't hesitate to slow down and explain things when he inevitably couldn't follow whatever it was they were telling him. The truck smelled of pine trees and the way children smell after they've been outside all day, although Ilya himself did not smell much better and he knew it.
"Do you have a name?" Lori-Anne Lamb asked, peering at him through the rear-view mirror.
"I—" Ilya paused, because he knew… he did know his name. Didn't he? It was on the tip of his tongue, "Il—"
"Eli?"
"Maybe. Yes. Yes, it is Eli." He knew his name wasn't Eli, but he couldn't figure out what his name actually was and Eli sounded close enough anyway, even though the letters didn't fit quite right in his mouth.
Ilya has two jobs in the small fishing town of Stonesthrow. Job number one is his easiest job— getting the Lamb children ready for school or the day after Kent and Lori-Anne have gone onto the boat to collect the morning's catch. Once he gets Nicole and Shannon on the bus, he takes care of Suzanne until Lori-Anne comes back to the house to start the admin side of their fishing business. Once she's back, Ilya heads out to the shipyard. He's become something of a boat mechanic over the past couple of months, willing to spend time outside in the cold and damp to get even the most stubborn and barnacle encrusted boats up and running again. Ilya likes the work— he likes seeing the results in the form of old boats back on the water or another person's glee.
A drizzle starts just as he gets everything arranged to start working on gutting the engine of a Lund 1700 Pro Angler with a sleek green stripe all across the top edge. It's a gorgeous boat, there's no denying that, but the fucker who owned it treated the thing like shit. What Ilya wants to do is throw a completely new engine at the boat and call it a day. Instead he's double checking parts against a manual in an effort to figure out what needs replacing.
"Yo, Eli!"
Ilya curses under his breath, "Yes, Allen?"
Allen Hornsby, middle aged and pot-bellied with a ginger beard that crawls all the way to the top of his stomach beams at him, his face ruddy from the chilly rain like a cherub's. Ilya's never met anyone like him in his life, mostly because Allen somehow looks far too young for his age and way too old at the same time.
That, and he has a spech impediment that makes it very difficult for Ilya to understand him, but in the same vein, Allen can barely understand Ilya's accent. Their friendship has been built on forced proximity and an understanding that only comes from mutually misunderstanding each other every single day.
"Comin' to The Whale's Tail? Triva tonight."
Ilya hears: Whale's Tail and agrees with a simple nod before going back to looking at all the engine parts in front of him and the engine in the manual.
"Alright! See you there man. By-the-bye, the pistons are shit. Want me to pick some up? I'm headin' into town for a supply run."
"… Yes?"
"You didn't hear a word I said, did you?"
Ilya shakes his head and Allen guffaws.
"Man," says Allen, swatting at an invisible fly, "Don't change, Eli. I like you."
"Mm. Yeah, thanks," Ilya swats the air back, and only looks up when Allen has finally left him alone. He messes up some of the parts he laid out for the pure hell of it, then rearranges them in their proper order before placing them one by one into the box the parts came from. Without new pistons, there's no point in reassembly, which means Ilya has an entire day to burn until someone else comes along with this or that issue— usually dead batteries or clogged fuel lines; easy fixes.
Ilya carries the box back into the office that isn't really and office, but rather a giant shed that was converted into an uninsulated office space with wire shelves to store various parts, half-completed products, and sometimes lunch boxes. After setting the box of Lund engine parts back where he found it, he snaps his jacket up off the coatrack and—
"Eli, honey, you goin' out?"
"Yes?" Ilya half turns to face Pam, the office "manager", aka Allen's wife. She's far too gorgeous for him, but a lot of the women in Stonesthrow are way too pretty for their men. He's not sure where they come from or how they end up here. Sometimes, Ilya likes to think that Stonesthrow is made up of people like him— lost, discombobulated— alone and saved by the kindness of one Stonesthrowian.
Pam waves a folded up twenty between her manicured fingers, "Mind picking me up a pack of Marlboros?"
"Golds?" Ilya crosses back over, plucking the twenty from her fingertips.
She winks at him, "Oh, I just love how you know me. Use the change and get a snack, you're losing weight again."
Frowning, Ilya looked down at himself, "I am not."
"Your ass shrunk like a shirt in the wash."
"No!"
"Honey…"
His frown deepens because she's correct, he has lost some weight. Again. He was in a bad way when the Lambs decided to put him in their attic apartment out of nothing but the kindness of their hearts. Time? Time was sand slipping constantly through his fingers. Ilya cycles through sleeping for nearly twenty hours a day to staying up for days on end over and over. Between that and the migraines, and nightmares— food is such an afterthought. He knows it's disrespectful and probably a slap in the face to the Lambs' incredible generosity to not eat the food they prepare, but he can never remember when mealtimes are and the plates Lori-Anne occasionally brings up ended up half touched.
Ilya's better at eating now, mostly due to his jobs. Getting Nicole and Shannon ready also means making breakfast, which means he eats then, and then the men at the Shipyard always have lunch together, so he does that. The Lambs also are very traditional in their family dinner habits, which is something dully familiar to him. Traditions. They even go to church every Sunday, something Ilya is certain he hasn't done regularly since his mother died.
"Rest in Peace my butt," Ilya says. Pam snorts into her palm and waves him at the door.
He decides to take the scenic route along the grey-sanded shores of the beach— appropriately named Grey Beach. The sand is grayer now though and will become near black once winter truly hits. They're only in early November now and Kent keeps telling Ilya that they're expecting a rough one. Ilya had to remind him he's from Russia and is used to winters that kill. Even in the current temperature of -2, Ilya is only slightly chilled under the layer of the wool coat he's been borrowing from Kent.
The water licks lazily up the shore, turning the sand to charcoal as the foam settles between the grains. Ilya draws his curls off his neck, using the hair tie permanently affixed to his wrist to tie them into a bun at the back of his head. He's been too afraid of cutting his hair— afraid of not recognizing himself in the mirror— to do anything about his hair.
Ilya's memories are scattered like debris after a car wreck, the best of them the glitter of a shattered window, the worst of them giant chunks of metal gouged across black asphalt. They often hit him in flashes or in his dreams. Ilya remembers being so in love it hurt, he remembers being alone in Boston and feeling the weight of his aloneness whenever he was away from his team. He remembers the smell of his mother's perfume and summers basked in sunlight by a lake.
On the days he remembers his father and Alexei, those are the gouged days; the days where he lays in bed paralyzed by the pieces of himself he has yet to recover.
When he recovers himself— all of these shattered remains of the person he was before— and assembles them like he reassembles the engines of boats, he will find a way to repay the Lambs for their kindness and compassion. Sometimes, Ilya's not sure if he would do what they've done for anyone else, but other times, he remembers brown eyes and a squareish smile, and he knows there might've been one person he would've done everything for.
Ilya's brain is broken. This is something everyone in the small town of Stonesthrow knows as it's very hard to avoid becoming known when he occasionally loses himself to his broken brain and freaks out out of nowhere. So, when Ilya tells the boys he's stepping out for a cigarette after Allen made them all take a trivia selfie where the flash sent cheers that he wasn't hearing in his mind, pride unlike anything he's ever known swelling in his chest, they pat him on the shoulder and let him go.
There's been times where they've tried to keep him in once place and those times ended in lots of screaming, many punches thrown, and eventually tears. Everyone in Stonesthrow has probably seen the worst of Ilya, but nobody has held it against him.
They could be, but he thinks he'd be able to tell if they were lying and trying to save face with him. Americans are like that, very poor at hiding their true feelings.
Ilya lights a cigarette, a memory flickering in the back of his mind. Smoking is bad for you.
"Oh, is it?" he whispers into the frosty night, taking a long drag, humming with pleasure as the smoke warms and makes a home in is lungs. Home used to be a person for him, he knows that, but he can't make his home-person appear in his mind no matter how hard he tries. The closest Ilya gets are snapshots of features. Freckles and dark lashes, beautiful stretchmarks, a perfect cock.
He smiles despite himself. Of course his home-person would be a man. That's just his luck. Kicking a rock, he shakes his head and exhales all the smoke in a cloud.
"Eli, you alright, son?"
"Sir," Ilya turns around, hands buried in his back pockets; he forgot his coat.
Kent walks out, scratching at the collection of gray-black stubble across his jawline, "Just making sure you're not freaking out. Bad night for it, there's a storm coming."
Craning his neck up to the sky— clear and blanketed by stars, Ilya says, "Liar."
"In the morning, dummy. Saw the clouds on the horizon this morning."
"Hm, is shame."
"Is shame," Kent parrots, mocking Ilya's accent terribly, "Lori-Anne's gotta get you in some English lessons or something. Don't you ever get bored in the house sometimes? All our books are in English."
"I read English… slowly. Is not so bad, words are— speaking can be," he shrugs, flicks some ash onto the sidewalk, "Harder. Russian to English…"
"Hey man, I get it. Lemme bum one off you."
Ilya throws him his pack of cigarettes and the lighter. Kent snaps them out of the air like a cat snagging a bird. His reflexes are very impressive. Kent once mentioned military service in the past and although it's difficult to imagine Kent Jacob Lamb with a gun in his hands, there's not a doubt in Ilya's mind that he was a good soldier.
Kent takes a few puffs, humming, "How would you put yourself in Russian, if you could?"
"What?"
"How you feel, Eli."
Ilya has to think about this very carefully, because the truth is— sometimes he doesn't feel anything at all and that nothing terrifies him more than anything else. Even his despair laden fits are easier to deal with than nothing.
He sniffs, takes another drag, "Toska smertnaya"
"Toes-kaya smart-what-now?"
A sharp bark of a laugh escapes Ilya, "No, Toska smertnaya. Is like… I don't know. Want, but… sad want."
"Huh… Sad want."
"There was somebody—" Ilya hesitates for a moment, deciding to busy himself by puffing on his cigarette, the words running away from him.
Kent raises his brows, "Ooooh, a lover?"
A smile somehow manages to twitch onto Ilya's face, "Yes. I think so. Maybe, but he— she," Ilya quickly corrects, "Doesn't like that phrase. Too gross or something."
With his brows somehow remaining raised, Kent clears his throat, "Eli, you know we're kind of backwater but we're not that backwater. So your lover was a man, shoot, Eli… I bet he's missing you like crazy."
"Maybe…"
They fall into a comfortable yet loaded silence standing out here in the cold smoking beside one another.
"I want to," Ilya begins, his voice suddenly throaty, his vision blurring with tears. The hardware shop across the street turns into a warped haze, "I want to be a whole person again. For him. With him I was… I was a person."
"Oh, Eli. Don't say that now, you're a person. You're still a person no matter what's happened to you. Look at me, son."
Ilya looks up. Kent stands beside him, arms open in what seems to be an invitation for a hug. For some reason, comfort, probably, Ilya accepts the hug, wrapping his arms around the older man loosely even though Kent goes in for a bear hug.
"Now you listen. Lost memories or not, you're still a person— a damn good one too, so don't go around thinking any thoughts like that no more, understand? I don't think your lover would approve of you thinking like that." Ilya snorts, but Kent pushes on, as he's wont to do, "I bet he's going crazy wondering what the hell happened to you."
A hot, fat tear slithers down Ilya's cheek, "I hope not."
"Well he'd be a fool not to."
"What!?"
Kent squeezes him— hard, it feels good, grounding— less like Ilya is about to lose his ever loving mind in front of the Stonesthrow community for what might be a one hundredth time— hopefully they have punch cards. They should have those by now, right?
"You're a good guy—"
"You don't know that."
"Oh? I don't? Because let me see here… even with your brain scrambled like eggs, you walked out of the woods asking about fixing a strange family's truck, then proceeded to fix said truck without asking for a damn thing. Sounds pretty good to me."
Ilya rolls his eyes, "I could've been serial killer."
"I don't think serial killers like cookie dough ice cream and bumming it out with a bunch of salt chasing oldies. Take the compliment, Eli, and pass me another smoke. It's fucking cold out here, Jesus."
He passes Kent another cigarette, realizing that Kent never returned his lighter to him, which probably means he's never going to see it again. Ilya drops his hands back down into his pockets and looks back at the sky.
Maybe, somewhere out there in the world, his lover is looking at the same stars he is.