Chapter Text
The bed is soft and comfortable, the pillow resting softly beneath Ilya’s head as he finally lets himself rest. It’s been a travel day from hell, beginning with a pleading phone call from Galina, Andrei’s wife, and ending with Ilya on the other side of the world. It’s a strange feeling, one he hasn’t felt since that first trip to the cottage with Shane. The distance from Ottawa to Montreal already feels far too long, and even though he can hear Shane’s voice on the phone next to him now, Ilya still feels impossibly alone, that kind of loneliness that permeates his bones and is forever etched into the Moscow skyline.
“Should be quick,” Ilya says, “She’s staying in the hospital tonight, and the doctors said her surgery is tomorrow evening, I think. I should stay for a day or two after maybe, to help her recover.”
“Okay.” Shane is quiet for a moment. Then– “Will she, uh, be okay? You think?”
“I don’t know. I was trying to figure out when I was in airport, what she has. Her heart condition, it’s bad. The surgery, it’s a test? Like it’s an experiment, they don’t know if it will work.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. We’re not close. She married my brother, after all. But Galina is a good woman. She’s afraid to leave, I guess. So, she needs my help, I will come.”
“I love you. Just be safe, okay?”
“You worry too much, Hollander,” Ilya responds, the forced levity palpable in his tone, “It’s fine. Quick trip. I’ll be back home for dinner on Sunday.”
“I don’t know why, but I just have a bad feeling about this. It’s so risky. But I’m just overthinking it. It’ll be alright, right? Dinner on Sunday.”
“Dinner on Sunday,” and there’s a certain finality to it as Ilya repeats it back, like a promise. As much as he needs these words to be true, his stomach feels slightly unsettled as he speaks. Ilya is many things but a liar isn’t one of them; he’s not one to make promises he can’t keep.
“Okay. You should sleep, Ilya, it’s like 3 A.M your time.”
“I will. Don’t worry, okay? Everything will be okay. Ya tebya lyublyu.”
***
Ilya feels like he’s just closed his eyes when he’s being roughly shaken awake. There’s hands on him, the lights on and glaring harshly into his eyes, and there’s so many shouting voices overlapping that Ilya can’t quite understand what’s happening.
As his eyes adjust to the light, Ilya realizes it’s not the bedroom lights on, but flashlights, darting around the room and shining directly into his eyes. The flashlight-holders, the mysterious hands slapping his face and pulling the blankets onto the ground, belong to men in navy blue hats, jackets, each with a gun strapped to their hip or in their hands.
Fuck. Ilya is awake now. Police.
One of the bigger men in the group grabs Ilya’s arm and roughly pulls him out of bed.
“Fucking gómik. Disappointment to Russia. You’re coming with us.”
Ilya’s heart drops as he’s forced to his knees. Logically, there was no other reason for the police to barge into his home in the middle of the night, but guessing was one thing, and hearing his worst fears confirmed aloud was another entirely.
His face is pushed roughly into the carpet by someone from behind, and the silver handcuffs are cold as they click closed, pinching his skin and making him wince. Ilya waits for the same rough hands to pull him upright, waits to be dragged to some godforsaken prison, but the moment never comes. Instead, he curls inward and releases a hiss of pain as he feels the steel-toed tip of a boot come into contact with his stomach. After the first kick, the next hit to his face shouldn’t have surprised him, but Ilya still feels frozen, like he’s moving through quicksand and his brain just can’t quite catch up to his surroundings. This very scenario had been his nightmare for as long as he knew that Russia would never love him the way he loved her, and yet it feels surreal, even as the blood begins to pour out of his now-broken nose. This was the stuff of bad dreams and tales to scare children and thinly veiled threats from his brother, not something that could actually pop the beautiful bubble that he and Shane had worked so hard to craft.
Thinking of his brother, actually, Ilya realizes he must have been behind this. No one else could have told the police where he was, and no one else would have even known. Ilya wonders distantly what finally made Andrei snap. The money, maybe? The fact that Ilya was here, paying for his wife’s hospital bills and not Andrei’s cocaine? Or had he been watching, waiting, planning this all along and waiting until Ilya finally had his shit figured out to come in and ruin it.
He’s probably somewhere in the corner, watching, only Ilya was too fucking slow to notice and now he’s not even capable of lifting his head. He’s not capable of anything, actually. Ilya has never been so helpless in his life. On the ice, he shoves and degrades and grins the whole way through, always winning the fights he started and managing to sneak in a win in the meantime. And off the ice, Ilya is still different in North America. There, he winks at his rival in the shower and smiles awkwardly to Yuna fucking Hollander in the elevator and still, he takes what he wants, albeit slower and softer and with far more caution that he’s ever possessed on the ice. And it’s worked, somehow he’s found a family that doesn’t care that he’s fucked up, doesn’t care that some days he can’t stop thinking about that feeling of being twelve and wondering why Mama isn’t waking up.
And Ilya forcefully directs his mind away from that memory, for even almost twenty years later, the bruises and blood and broken bones were still far less painful. But Ilya doesn’t have much more time to think or reflect on how royally fucked he is or wonder if he’s ever going to see Shane again, because then someone kicks his head a little too far back, and Ilya, with the strange sensation of being removed from his body, feels his head snap back against the floor, hard, and things get very confusing very quickly.