Work Text:
Ilya wakes later than Shane, as he often does.
The cottage is only just beginning to brim with sunlight, the thin curtains letting him bask in the warmth of it without any harsh lines cutting over the sheets, his bare abdomen, his face. The corner of Ilya’s mouth pulls upward without thought, and he turns over to press his smile into the shape that Shane’s head left behind on the pillow next to him.
If he were back in the city, he would probably lay around for a while longer on a day off with nothing to do. But they’re on borrowed time still, both of them due back at the end of this week, and there is very little Ilya intends to do but spend every moment he can taking full advantage of their time together.
The wood is warm underneath his feet while he tugs on his sweatpants, stretching both arms high over his head as he leaves the bedroom and walks down the corridor toward the kitchen, stifling a yawn into his fist and knuckling at his eye.
Shane does yoga sometimes in the mornings, when the weather is nice. Ilya assumes that’s where he is. But he walks past the window overlooking the deck and the yard, and both are empty. With a soft frown, Ilya continues toward the kitchen for coffee. If there isn’t already evidence left behind to suggest Shane had gotten there first, he’ll make one of those teas that he likes too.
The machine buzzes as he clicks the buttons, waiting for the coffee to brew. He leans against the granite while it fills the mug, letting his eyes wander closed again to the smell of warmth and earthy smoke. His fingers drift mindlessly toward a mark at his hip, the press of Shane’s fingers against flesh until they’d stained. Here, at least, he doesn’t have to hide them.
With coffee in one hand and Shane’s tea in the other, Ilya slides open the door to the deck and goes searching.
There are many things he does not pride himself on, but Ilya thinks he has become very good at being Shane’s boyfriend. He is most used to things that are casual but he hadn’t realized how much he would enjoy companionship in this way, would learn to crave it in the times when he couldn’t be around it. This is called clingy, he has read online. He does not mind being this, and he does not think Shane minds it either.
He descends the steps in the slippers Shane bought him for walking around outside, careful not to let any of the drinks spill from the cups as he walks. The pier extending out over the lake between the trees is empty, and even when Ilya pauses to breathe in the morning air and watch for any breaks in the surface, he does not see familiar dark hair in the lapping water. He keeps walking.
There is only one other place Ilya can think of to look, a small clearing to the other side of the pier with many trees shading the grass and rocks to sit on that overlook the water. They have spent many mornings and evenings there together watching the sun rise and set, watching the clouds and the stars in between when they hadn’t been ready to go back inside yet. It must be where Shane had gone this morning.
A crease forms in his forehead as Ilya walks down the winding trail to reach it. Sometimes Shane just wants to be alone for a while, but sometimes he is upset. Last night had been fine, perfect, even, but Shane does most of his thinking in the late evening and early mornings. Had he been up, thinking, worrying, and Ilya had missed it? He does not like when he misses things.
Still, it relaxes him a little to hear the soft murmur of Shane talking when he approaches. Maybe on the phone? Ilya will offer him his drink and see if he’s allowed to stay. If it is boring, he will go back in and wait. If it is interesting, he will stay and listen for gossip. Yuna had taught him this. Mostly over red wine and many carbs at her dinner table because Shane refuses to join in.
The low hum of Shane’s voice halts and pauses for a moment, muttering things under his breath that Ilya cannot hear from this distance. He smiles at Shane’s back when it comes into view between the trees, watching him pace back, forwards, back, forwards in front of the water. He is not holding a phone.
“—vazhno dlya nego.”
Ilya’s smile fades, his feet frozen suddenly on the pathway. Shane is… speaking Russian? Maybe, Ilya figures, he is practicing. Ilya’s chest grows warm, and he steps off to the side a bit to listen.
“And that means it's important to me, too,” Shane continues in clunky Russian. His accent is bad and the syllables don’t roll off his tongue like they do with his pretty French words, but every inconsistency makes Ilya feel deeply, unbearably fond. He wonders why Shane had not asked him for help with this directly.
Maybe he felt embarrassed? He does like for things to be perfect, Ilya thinks. He lifts the coffee to his lips and quietly takes in a mouthful.
“I’ve rewritten this many times but I didn’t want it to feel rehearsed. I wanted it to feel like a—a—” Shane breaks off, biting his lip. “Fuck. Beseda?”
Besedovat' Ilya mouths silently to himself, a smile stretching his lips.
When he turns again, Ilya can see a few pieces of paper in his hands, crumpled around the edges as if they’d been hastily folded or kept tucked away in his pocket. Held tightly. Shane pours over them with a furrowed brow and pursed lips, a determined set to his gaze. Ilya hasn’t seen them around anywhere before, not in any of Shane’s things or while they’ve been here at the cottage. He wonders where Shane has been keeping them.
“So, you’ll have to forgive me if I get things wrong. And for the cursing.”
Ilya bites down on the laugh that tries to come up his throat.
“We’ve never met, but I’ve seen you before. Not in pictures, but in his face. In his smile. In his laugh,” Shane goes on, slow and careful with each word. “On his good days. On the bad ones, too.”
Oh, Ilya realizes distantly. His grip slackens on the mug in his hands. This is not for him.
“I see you in the parts of him that are brave. And stubborn. He’s always so scared of being his father, but I think—I think he doesn’t know how much he isn’t. He couldn’t be. Because of you.”
Something in Ilya’s chest seizes. He swallows around a growing knot in his throat and makes himself mechanically set down the mugs when he feels like he might drop them, and then he leans his bare shoulder blades back against a tree, lets the roughness of the bark ground him. He blinks once at the dirt, Shane’s fumbling certainty carrying him like the water.
“You’ve been there with us through—everything, really. From the first time I met him. Even now when he’s nervous or unsteady, he touches the chain around his neck. I don’t know if he knows he does it. I think it makes him feel safe,” Shane says. “I’ve done it too. It’s—comforting, thinking that we aren’t alone. We’ve both lived lonely lives, in some ways. Even now we have secrets we have to keep. But you’ve always known. You had to.”
Ilya’s eyes are wet when he opens them again. He feels a fullness behind his ribs, in his shoulders; why would Shane be speaking to his mother?
“But as much of a comfort as it’s been to feel like you’re out there somewhere, watching over us, keeping our secrets,” he enunciates, the emphasis just slightly off as he takes in a breath, “I would give anything if it meant you could still be here. For him.”
Fuck. Ilya shoves his palms against the sockets of his eyes and tries to quiet his breathing.
“I don’t know the whole story. I don’t know if I ever will. But I don’t think I need to know it to know how important you are to him. I’ve—fuck, sorry. I think I’ve said that part already. I’m…” paper crinkles as he trails off, eyes flicking across his notes again.
Ilya pictures him bent over a thick Russian for Dummies textbook—stupid American name, because Shane is not dumb—in a hotel room somewhere, exhausted from practice and games, maybe even on the phone with Ilya while he mouths out the shapes of the words as he memorizes them.
He hadn’t told his mother about liking men as well as women. He hadn’t even had a name for it back then, not yet. And he wouldn’t have been allowed to utter one anyway. But sometimes he pictures how the conversation might have gone if he had, if she would have been fierce with protectiveness or wilted with weary concern. She’d have loved him either way. That is the part that matters.
And Shane, here, not only speaking with her but doing it in a way that implies she already knows, has maybe always known, sort of makes Ilya want to lie on the dirt and sob.
He’s sitting on the ground, he realizes suddenly, knees pulled to his chest, eyes blurry on the two mugs sitting to his left. When had that happened?
“He says mama in his sleep sometimes,” Shane says quietly when he gets his bearings again. Ilya drops his forehead to his knees. “Not nightmares, but… something else. A memory, or a dream. I don’t know. I know I can’t take his grief away, and I don’t want to. In a lot of ways, it’s made him who he is. My Ilya.”
Over the sound of moving water around them, Ilya’s hitched breathing hardly registers.
“And yours. Which is why I want to—I need to ask you first, before I ask him. It might be pointless, and I might never get an answer in any way that I can be sure of. But I need to know, I need him to know that I asked.”
The world tilts underneath him again when the words register. It takes him a moment’s delay to parse through what Shane means, some of the words not quite right, but Ilya can understand the gist of it. Shane wanting to ask him something.
Ilya should go inside, stop listening. Pretend he didn’t hear.
But he can’t bring himself to move, holding still, as if he might hear a response if he were quiet enough.
“I need to confess that it’s not easy for me. To ask. I’ve… zhertvovat'?—compromised, I guess—on a lot of things. When it comes to Ilya, I don’t like the idea of putting our future in someone else’s hands. Letting them make choices we haven’t even gotten to make ourselves. I’m selfish about him. I want so much of him, I want all of him, and I don’t know what I would do at this point if I had to go without. I’m not sure if I could.”
Shane’s footsteps, slick in the damp, dewy grass come to a slow stop. The paper crinkles again. Ilya holds his breath.
“So when I say that I’m asking you, it doesn’t really feel like a big enough word. I don’t even think he knows how much I would give up for him if he asked me to,” he continues. “But he wouldn’t ask me to. We love each other that way—where we would hurt forever if it meant the other never felt any pain.” He’s quiet for a long moment. Then, gently, “I’m tired of pain. I don’t think we deserve it, and I know you didn’t either.”
His exhale is heavy as he moves back to sit on the rock he’s shared with Ilya so many times before, glowing in the sun shining over the water. Ilya turns until his cheek brushes the bark of the tree behind him, watching the rise and fall of his shoulders. He seems calmer now.
“I know you’re proud of him. How could you not be? The man he is. How deeply he loves. The decisions he makes. I want you to be proud of this decision too, if he says yes. I want—I want you to approve. Of this. Of me. For him. He’s brought so much good to my life. I want to be good for him, too.”
He’s not using the word, but Ilya knows what he means. What he’s talking about. The impossibility of it—the way Ilya had been certain, even if he’d found someone he’d wanted to have a life with, they would never know this part of him. He hadn’t realized how much he would have wanted them to. Wants Shane to.
He had meant it when he’d told Shane his mother would have loved him. Grief is funny like this; feeling like it’s ripping him open and stitching him back together all at the same time.
“I don’t know if you can hear this. I feel a little stupid, to be honest, out here by myself. But I hope you’re listening. Even if I’m messing up all the words, I hope you understand.”
She does, Ilya wants to say. I have told her all about you, moy lyubimyy. She knows.
“I love your son. I want to love him for the rest of my life. And I hope—I hope that that’s something you’re okay with. I would promise to try my hardest, but it’s really not difficult. It might be one of the easiest things I’ve ever done,” Shane confesses with a breath of a laugh. “He makes me better, and I think I make him better too. So, please, just—” he breaks off abruptly with a sob. “Fuck.”
The sound ricochets through Ilya’s body, his own tears spilling over despite the bittersweet stretch of a smile across his lips. He lets his eyes shut, sits silently with Shane even if Shane has no idea he’s there. Thinks, over and over and over again, thank you. I love you. Thank you.
It takes several minutes for Shane to stop sniffling and wiping at his face, the sun just about fully risen now where it hovers above the water. Even the birds have quieted, the rough bark and jagged rocks all, for a moment, soft and shining.
“If you’ve got any power in what happens here, please just—” Shane rasps, his head bowed, hands clasped around the papers. “Please just let us have this. Let this one thing be good, and safe, and ours. I promise we won’t take it for granted. I’ll thank you for it every day, every time I see that cross on his neck, every time I see pieces of you in him. Every time he aches and you can’t be there, I will. I promise, I will.”
Ilya tips his head back against the tree, brings his hand up to his necklace and holds the gold between his fingertips. Feels the weight. By the water, Shane’s voice wobbles, but he holds steady.
“Irina,” he says, in a choppy Russian pronunciation and then in English. “Mama,” he says, “ya sdelayu pravil'no dlya tebya. Ya obeshchayu.”
A ray of sunlight splits the branches over Ilya’s head, shines down on his face. He lets it warm him for a moment, takes a breath in, lets it out.
Shane doesn’t make any move to get up just yet, and the cups near Ilya’s ankles have gone cold. When the wind picks up and the sounds of nature fade back in around them, he uses the cover of it to gather up the mugs and quietly make his way back up the steps toward the house.
His mother’s cross taps against his chest with each step, in tune with the beat of his heart.
+
Shane slips through the sliding doors into the dining room just after eight o’clock, and he seems surprised to see Ilya sitting at the dining table, sipping a fresh cup of coffee with a blanket around his shoulders.
“Oh,” he says, closing it back behind him. “Hey. Have you been up long?”
Ilya smiles. “No. Not long.” He points over to the cup on the counter, idling on Shane’s mug warmer. “I made you tea.”
Something in Shane’s shoulders relaxes, and Ilya’s smile widens. His Shenochka; always waiting to be corrected, even if he hasn’t done anything wrong. Even if he’s done something far, far from it.
“That’d be great. Thanks.”
There is a flush to his cheeks when he sits down beside Ilya at the table, his tears dried but the swollen skin around his lashline betrays him. Ilya drapes the blanket around his shoulders too and doesn’t mention it, pulls him close until their sides are pressed together while they face the windows.
Shane’s hair tickles his jaw as he turns his face into Ilya’s neck. Slowly, carefully, his mouth grazes the spot just to the left of Ilya’s cross. Ilya’s hand cradles the back of his neck. He touches a smile to the top of Shane’s head.
“What were you doing out there, hm?” he asks, unable to help himself. “You were not here when I woke up. I missed you.”
Shane lifts his chin, noses against Ilya’s cheek until their mouths touch, warm with their drinks. He’s smiling. “You didn’t come and find me.”
Ilya tilts enough to kiss him properly, soft and slow, the way they can out here with nothing to interrupt. He’s stopped counting down the seconds. He pushes his lips against Shane’s over and over again, tastes the mouth that had called him my Ilya with his tongue.
“I knew you would come back.”
Shane grins against him, sunlight on his face.
“Always,” he breathes.
I’m happy, mama, Ilya thinks as he leans in again. Can you believe it?