Work Text:
Ilya got a lot of things from his mother.
The honey-gold curls he could barely look at after she died— all he could feel, hear, in his head was the soft hum of her voice as she brushed them. The sharp, eager slit of his eyes— he knew that his father's hands knew, very well, what his wife's and son's tears felt like. Her wish to please, to help, to nearly suffocate with her care once she no longer appeared cold to those she loved— Ilya thinks, deeply, that this is where Shane would stand on all ten toes in agreement.
All her gifts. What she taught him in the few years he can remember. Ilya can trace the outline of her memory, drawing back to the very first day he was grown enough to know her as anything but his mother. Each receding edge of her smiles, as the years got longer, quiet, making his father bolder, angrier. His brother, unable to listen to her trying to talk him down from his anger, his desire to hurt— his desire to destroy.
Ilya fears that he also inherited that. Managed to become a combination of his parents personalities in the worst way, one that barely allowed room for any kindness in the sick anger he felt. When everything got out of hand, Ilya wanted to take it back in full hold and slam it back into reality. Till blood.
The men of his family were not kind. They did not allow the feeling of grappling through their fall at all they brought down to stop them. Ilya is no different, despite all his mother poured into him in the short years before bleeding inside managed to break through her silence— into a clatter of the pills, a roll of the empty bottle, and then the planes of her fragile collarbones— pale, blue— splayed out on the sofa for Ilya to come across. To live in airless silence until she could not hold herself still. Could not stop herself from taking hold of a way out.
And Ilya—
Got a lot of things from his mother. Maybe this, also.
The years she spent under the iron hold of his father was little compared to what rained down upon Ilya. He knew. Self-pity is shallow. He knows.
But he thinks— that there is not much difference between what is wrong with her and him. Only the cause. Ilya knows all the terms. Has read them until the combined words make more sense than his born tongue does. Listened to Shane slowly talk him closer to admitting that yes— he is depressed. Chemical imbalance. The brain is an organ like any other. Hiding from admitting it is running away from chance at recovery. Yes, yes. Ilya knows it all like he knows where each freckle is on Shane's body, where each rebounding angle of a puck ends up carrying it, where each conversation between them will carry them in terms of surface; texture; position.
But his mother had it, did she not? The same chemical imbalance. Maybe Ilya's father beat that imbalance into her head. Slowly drilled through the delicacy of her blonde brows, the riverbed clarity of her eyes— until it hit the back of her head. Got clean between any notion of love, time passing, time healing, time carrying her biggest pain to his grave— to her freedom.
It managed to then get passed down to Ilya. The black sheep of the family not only in how much they needed him, but in how eager they were to teach him how much they hated that. They knew what every word, every raised hand, every push closer to a brink did to Ilya— ignorance would not pull them through his awareness.
But his mother gave him that gift. The gift of this pain. One he could not massage away like a sore muscle. Ice away. Have it kissed away. Have it talked out the way. Be eased into a balm of being able to handle himself long enough to wait for the episodes to pass. Ilya's mind was the smallest thing in the world, and it shrunk to nothing but a circle of repetition when the episodes came.
Nothing existed outside of the absence of feeling. The lack of it reached a point— like too much air to flame— of becoming the problem itself.
But his mother's starkest gift to him was the very specific way Ilya turned curt during this sickness.
He remembered that, like his brain held it in higher regard than the fucking kindness of her. How curt she could get, as living became a slow depletion of the last of her strength. Ilya remembers— her hand, brushing his hair, jerking and twitching one morning, when he was far too old, father said, to get babied like that, and all because he had sprained his hand during hockey practice, and it twinged all the way up into his spine when he raised his hand, and he had asked her for the help, and even as her lips pinched, eyes barely visible beneath the swollen, cried-out thickness of her eyelids, she did it, helping him, until he must have become too much in his wincing, small voice asking for her to be softer, please, as she dropped the comb in the sink with a breath that seemed caught in her ribs, and a curt, dreadfully toneless take care of it yourself, Ilya.
She woke up sighing, most days, leading up to the end. Ilya recalls it clearer than the brightness of her laughter when she was well. When she fussed and rushed him to practice, all smiles, all hastily made breakfasts that Ilya could not recreate even with the most care; all busy with living in a way she simply sneered at during the final days.
And it stands out to him, still, like a motionless figure in his mind, among all the months and years she spent in motion. All focused on taking care of her family. On being the best she could. For herself, but for them, mainly. It took Ilya far too long to realize than even that, was a distraction from letting herself slip deeper into that stillness that overtook her, in the end.
They were all the same. The lack of will to do anything at all. The way Ilya could not hold back the violence that threatened to curl out of him, on the days where even his own thoughts grated against the walls of his head like chalk beneath a nail. He can never be enough, until he is too much. He can never be soft enough, until he softens to the point of letting go and letting it all slip through his fingers.
It makes him sick. At himself. At all those around. At the people who caused him this crippling of his mind, to where there is no limit to what he is willing to do to get away from them all; into the respite of his silence, his own self-obsessed suffering.
His father had dragged his mother out of bed by the hair, once, when she could hardly get up to do anything at all. Prepare the breakfast table, make his father tea, get Ilya ready for evening practice, clean the bathroom, go out to buy Alexei his cigarettes and his cheap spirits. Live. Continue the equation of being a human his father deemed worthy of not tossing against the wall until it worked again, like a cheap machine. The smear of blood against the linen kitchen towel as she dragged away the blood leaking from her nose in between making bliny that morning— Ilya would remember it each time he thought of her.
And that was not fair. It was not fair of him to attribute that morning to his mother, and not to the long list of his father's sins. The same ones that pushed Ilya to never visit his grave to change water for the flowers. The same ones that tainted those final weeks of his mother still being alive with the memory of her blood against the mundane paleness of those winter mornings. Ilya cannot clean his mind; she could not clean the blood out fast enough to prevent another bludgeoning from father for not being speedy enough with her labour.
But Ilya— Ilya has the same disease. He becomes curt. He pushes Shane's attempts to help, to talk, to give him a distraction or a supporting hand away with hissed cursing, feeling something like life spark up in him at the crumpling of his lover's brow. Cruelty. The mustering of enough energy to speak is only so he can bark out whatever is necessary to make someone really want to pummel his face in.
The realization that Ilya wants that to happen, just to overwrite his mother's blood with his own, is only ever enough to push him further into that haze of nothing. Airless silence. He maintains it with blood, clenched teeth, a buried head in the sheets, a tossed blyad, uydi ot menya the only sign of life Shane would get.
His parents' blood, Ilya considers, must have separated within him like oil and water, but still kept the effect of spark and propane. He has his mother's pain; her silence; her meanness when all she wanted was patience. He has his father's cruelty; his desire to dominate; his desire to destroy to hide how much he wants to be destroyed.
It's the only thing that can get his head to work, when he is like this.
Having spent the past few days doing nothing but turning from one edge of the bed to the next, Ilya is disgusted with himself in the shallow way that everything happens here, now. Here, he is dried out like a pond in summer's sweltering mouth of heat. There is no pain, there is no certain loss or bloodshed. Ilya cannot give anything, nothing. He never could.
It's too cold within him for any sort of life to sustain itself. His clothing is plastered to him. The bedside lamp is shattered where he showed it to the floor, its light searing through the silent darkness he wanted. The sheets reek. Ilya likes to imagine all the rot within him slowly slipping through the cracks, the places where his stitched mind comes undone, and all of it slowly seeping deeper into the mattress, where it will eventually rise to a stench so horrendous that someone will burn the entire room down along with him.
Ilya's brain is uptight. The movement of his head to shift position, to burrow deeper into the covers, to drag a hand around the ache carrying in his back from barely getting up for days, is enough to make him lean beside the rock of emptiness inside him for support. The shade is good for covering his eyes; he does not want to see what he has let himself dissolve into.
Shane has not slept here for a week. Ilya does not know where he is at night, when he isn't peeling the door open an inch to check in him, and he finds he is fine with that. The man has done it all, as if he can simply lure Ilya out of the bear trap his brain has insisted on regressing into with enough kindness. Enough trying. Water. Tea, each variant Ilya has in his apartment. Sandwiches. Ilya's favourite sweets, the hard candy with soft middles, and caramel biscuits, and chocolate bars, and all of it. Shane has given him all of it.
Ilya wants nothing.
Back when this first began— these episodes— Ilya tried to reason his way through them. It was always the same slow drawl before it kickstarted into complete shutdown. The symptom list was a boring cliché he had memorized. Even Shane's encyclopedic memorization of every part of his lover's problems paled in comparison to how well Ilya had memorized the disease. It was order. Structure. It was a thing to cling to, in the beginning.
In the beginning, he tried to tough it out. Sixteen, still wet behind the ears, still assured that he was better than the weakling spirit of his mother. If Ilya could go back, he thought, he would laugh at the foolishness of the idea. Then, he would pummel himself in the mouth for insulting his own mother, and the teenage variant of him would welcome the violence with trained submission.
Tough it out. Skate it out. Work it out. Lift enough, run enough, swim enough. Listen to the loudest music, watch the bloodiest movie, jerk off to the kinkiest porno. Faster. Higher. Be better. Train harder, work harder, rise higher, beat them harder, listen better, insult faster. Never let the chain you wrapped around yourself in sick craving for embrace show. Never let them jerk you around; never resist your father dragging you where he pleases. Never let them use you; give it all.
Give them it all. Ilya gave it all, until he had nothing, and then the quiet truth had settled in. That he had nothing, and he didn't want anything. Not a single thing. Not a slip of light bled through the tar, the bitterness, the loneliness of that admission. The wins, the success, the money, the found brotherhood, the sex, the rush, the escape. Ilya wanted not one part of it, and it paralyzed him to his bed for a week, before his coach finally managed to get through to him enough to get up and move his rusted over joints into movement. Action.
Living. Trying to get used to being human. Understanding, that this is how normal people are all the time, and there will be no claps on the back for it.
Ilya had cried like his mother was dying all over again, when it suddenly made sense, why his father beating on him during that bedbound week did nothing— whilst his coach's patience over the phone, guiding him through a breathing exercise, managed to get him up in record time.
His mother had given him all of it. Each part of her. It was true. Undeniable like gravity.
You can do it all, Ilya realized during that first week of the episodes beginning. You can run to try and get away from your own head. You can call it weakness, or being a baby, or any other form of meltdown. You can work yourself to the bone, give yourself all the time in the world. Read everything, research to the edge of science and psychology, and to the beginning of poetry, lyricism, erotics.
But some night; some odd, grey morning, where even the sun seems like a dangling thread of a warmth you can't feel— it will settle in your stomach. The world won't end, your brain won't implode. But it will grow weighed, somewhere below your ribs.
That you do not want do this anymore, and that you can imagine nothing at all taking that away. None of it is wanted. None of it can even be worth it.
And then all you want, is nothing but an empty room. White curtains in the window. The softness of a childhood forgotten makes you shed yourself till there is nothing left; and then you have your airless silence, and there is no pain, because there is no you, any longer.
And Ilya, suspended in bed, the fresh glass of water Shane brought him what seems to be years— minutes— ago standing in still silence on the bedside table; feels nothing but the heaviness of not wanting anything. His mother, even, must be too far away now, in some place too peaceful to be left behind in order to see her sickest son. Ilya cannot wish upon a single thing when nothing is worth the pain of trying, or failing, or doing it and realizing that it does not help make you feel something— that nothing makes you feel human.
Futile gestures from his lover. Ilya knows his hair is a mess plastered to his scalp like a mottled nest. He knows that his phone, buried somewhere in the gap between the bedframe and the mattress from his first day of this catatonia, when he came to the quiet realization that he doesn't want to read, or watch, or listen, or see— it occasionally buzzes with a text, or chirps, for a minute, with an incoming call he won't answer. Shane must have not told anyone that Ilya was plastered to his own mind like a fly to a windscreen. The thought reaches Ilya's brain before falling away like everything else.
Futile. It is a war that does nothing but progress in the heart of its only victim. Ilya feels a fuzz of blank, colorless blackness where the future is; the past is voices, flashes and particles of his mother's hair, his father's heavy hands on his head, his brother's drunken leer and loose mouth. The cold of the ice flecks in his face, weight of a puck, length of a rush of life in his stomach, the adrenaline, the speed, the sweat, from the sex or his heart giving out or his knuckles thumping with life, all throughout what was his life. All the money, all the love and all the cruelty in the world, and it is not enough to make Ilya above this.
All the patience of his lover, and he has let the unstable scale of neurotransmitters defeat him until he is nothing but chewed up pulp. Knowing nothing. Being known for not much at all. The past is where Ilya belongs. Will belong.
Years bleeding inside as much as he caused people to bleed outside; and there is nothing to show for it.
Nothing but— as well, as— and— and—
His mother was a candle in the wind for as long as she could handle living under the threat of being put out. Ilya had grown up to slowly realize it, to slowly overcome the idea that he could have stopped her from leaving them, and to slowly knuckle his way past the years he spent doing all he could to put the image of her— sprawled dead, fingertips trailing the floor, hand thrown over her eyes like the brass chandelier was crawling into her skull— out of his head and his sick guilt.
It had taken too long to forget death, long enough to realize that he had to live instead of rotting in the past.
The boldness of the similarity between them was enough for Ilya to have to survive long enough to grow up, and know that no, no— he was not her. Not in her kindness, her love for gardening and dirty comedies, her joy for the smallest thing, her submission and delegation, her acceptance, her lack of physical fight. Not in her meekness when hit, not in her jutted lip when he told her he loved her. Not like what he remembered in his childish brain, and not like everything his father said about her— wretched and insulted her over— even with her six feet below his shoes; polished by her, just a week before she gave in to the pain.
Gave in.
Ilya breathed in the reek of his own sweat, as the jostling of something arose in his stomach.
Gave in was a sweet lie he had spent years chewing and swallowing, all to make it easier. His suspicion knew nothing.
It was a cheap lie. His mother had spent years— fucking decades— slowly eroding from the inside out; looking for shade to cover her eyes in from the domination of his father, the leeching of his brother, the fragility of Ilya himself. The drag of her mind, until she could no longer carry it and first had to sleep in; then sleep the noon away; then miss events; then forget to pick Ilya up, or prepare dinner, or be silent in the face of his father; or get up for weeks at a time from bed; or get up to do anything but count the pills like dimes, and put the dot at the end of the line. Forever.
Years had been spent watching her slowly struggle, rise, before being beat down again. Ilya had held her hand, kissed her cheeks, helped her with chores when hockey and arithmetics wasn't consuming all his time. Years had been spent in the warmth of her love and the sting of her pain finally overflowing.
She was known for nothing but weakness. But she was the strongest woman Ilya had known. The only person Ilya has ever seen fight so much against her own mind without giving up.
Slowly, dragged over like getting a mouthful of air, Ilya shifted over onto his side. The bedroom door was parted like an invitation. Beyond, Ilya could hear the TV on, volume only overpowered by Shane doing something in the kitchen. Outside, the city was settling down to sleep. Beyond the shut curtains, the sodium streetlights breathed life onto the concrete scowls of the streets.
It was an airless silence, nothing to be known, that Ilya wanted to exist in.
But he did not want to die in it.
Always looking for a thing to lean beside. It was surprisingly easy to forget all you once lived for when all you wanted was something simpler than death; a complete non-existence.
But it was a shallow wish, Ilya considered, swollen eyes stuck to a crack in the ceiling plaster. Lodged in his throat was something that would unravel if he put a name to it.
It would be the move of a fucking coward, to get so far down the road of genetics, of brain structure, of giving his father the last laugh— and all to carry on his mother's legacy of collapsing. After having held out for so long, the carrying of pain becomes a seasonal thing, much like the birds leaving and the playing seasons changing. Having lived for so long, receding to carrying his mother in his heart, before rising to ask what's right, instead of what's wrong.
Easier to learn helplessness, to stop getting up, than to get to know what it meant to see the black of the future gain texture. Gain color. Gain something to lean beside, no matter the pain it would always bring to go on forward.
It was too cold, inside of himself, Ilya considered. It was too unlike his fucking mother, who always managed to get up, to work through it, to love something enough to want to see it continue on.
You don't need to do anything besides live, sunshine, Shane had muttered nights ago, hand in the thick clump of grease that had become Ilya's hair. Don't think about what's easier. Please, think about what you can do, because you've done it before, all on your fucking own, too. Not that you have to do that anymore. I'm here, sunshine.
The silence sustains itself on nothing. Ilya's mother had sustained herself on her family, no matter how much pain it brought her. The sheer amount of years she lived with nothing but her own strength to keep her company, when not one of them had a name to put to her oddness, as his father called it, and— Ilya was her son.
He was, in more than just simple genetics.
Ilya was not unlike her. And he had gotten far too much from her to suddenly dismiss this similarity. He was— he was no blind fist, like his father or brother. One that saw nothing but its target, ignoring the blood it shed on its way through the brick or the flesh. Ilya was as much his mother as he was his father— as much her endurance, as he was his cruelty.
He was—
The bedroom door parted wider. It seemed to be laughing at him, now, as light from the hallway spilled in.
The intact lamp flicked on, and a pause in Shane's shuffling followed. Ilya knew, as well as he could in the glum, cold, shuttering churning of his brain, that his lover was taking in the change of Ilya's plastering to the bed.
More shuffling. The crack in the plaster was a creaking beacon. A clasp of a spark among the tar eating at him. Go on, it seemed to say with its very own eyes. Ilya nearly choked on his next exhale around the thing lodged in his throat. This is somewhere to be. This is all you may have, now, but it's still something.
Shane had slowly made his way around the bed, slowly sitting down beside Ilya. His greeting, hey, love, sunshine, was barely more than a breath.
The sky, the world, the crack seemed to dip its eyes closer to the warmth of his lover next to him. The sodium lights outside, the shade you can still have in the summer.
Ilya felt a hand on his face, cupping, softly. He made a noise, and finally— finally— managed to shift his head enough to look at Shane. To meet the shine of a smile, breaking through the dark circles painted beneath Shane's eyes, with his own swollen head, jottled thoughts. Still efforts.
Go on, his mother's voice in his ear. First day of kindergarten, first official hockey practice, first time making varenyky with her, first time on the ice, properly, first time winning, first time feeling worthy of living.
Go on, finish, if that's what life is for you now. Something to end.
Ilya looks, beyond the blur, all the cold making him feel as if he is bleeding out, and sees.
There is a plate of tuna melts in Shane's hand, outstretched. Easy. Just a thing there, not having to breathe to exist. Not having to prove its worth to simply continue on.
His lover, feeling him through his fall. His lover, offering upon offering, waiting, until Ilya can take on his own.
The ball in his throat breaks, shatters like a crystal vase thrown against the plaster.
You’re still alive.