Archive of Our Own

The journey to Moscow is long and awkward. 

Ilya can feel the cold prickle of Shane’s eyes on him the entire time, but he doesn’t dare look back, or say a word. They haven’t so much as touched each other since the wheels left Canadian tarmac thirteen hours ago, and Ilya’s engagement ring is heavy like cement on his neck. He doesn’t know if Shane wearing his on his right ring finger is making him feel better or worse about this whole situation. 

He just really wants to hold his fiancé's hand.

But there are women here in fur coats, and men here in harsh ties. Everyone steeling themselves for a different kind of cold. When the steward – snow white blonde and ice blue eyes – asks Ilya whether he “would like coffee or tea”, it takes him a fraction of a heartbeat to even recognize the words being said. 

He’s gotten too used to Canada. He’s forgetting how to read his countrymen’s faces. He doesn’t know what it means when the steward’s side profile turns to stone. He doesn’t know what it means when the lady next to him smiles and nods in recognition. He doesn’t know if they’re being friendly, or if they’re sizing him up. 

The Russian immigration officer, too, had looked at him with an unreadable expression when they went through customs, then turned to glance at Shane in the queue beside him. Ilya’s heart had pounded in his chest, the vein in his forehead swelling with anxiety. 

But all the officer said was “welcome home, Mr Rozanov”, stamped his passport, then let them both through. 

It’s another three-hour drive to his mom’s hometown, and Ilya wishes they had just told Farah about this trip so that she could have arranged for a private car instead of whatever this is: a rickety taxi hailed outside Sheremetyevo International, where the driver keeps coughing up neon green phlegm in his throat to spit out the window. 

Shane closes his eyes almost as soon as the meter starts running, and tips his head back to lean against the headrest. It’s a bumpy ride, and Shane is not the best with being in cars. His hand lies palm-up on the the seat between them, and Ilya glances at the rearview mirror to weigh the risk of holding it for a little while. 

The cons eventually outweigh the pros in his mind, and Ilya sighs as he resigns himself to looking out the window. 

He doesn’t miss Soviet architecture. 

“You from Canada?” The driver finally asks, when they come to a standstill at a railroad crossing. 

“Russian,” Ilya replies, and is glad when the rumbling of the train drowns out the silence before the rest of the conversation can unfold. 

“What are you guys doing here?” Is the next thing the driver asks, and that’s when they’re already at their destination and he’s helping them with their luggage. There’s a hand-rolled cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth that makes him look like a deer chewing on a branch. It looks stupid, and Ilya knows what the driver’s going to say before he even says it. “There’s, like, nothing around. Ghost town.”

Ilya goes to respond – because it’s a common question for anyone who sees the desolation here – but he finds the words getting stuck in his throat as soon as he opens his mouth. Because how does he begin to explain to this man that this was the first place he’d ever ice skated? That it was on a shitty rink, with hand-me-down skates, and a drunk attendant, but it was like stumbling onto magic? How does he begin to say that this was the only place in the entirety of Russia where he ever felt normal, and that he’s here to say goodbye to the last person he loves on this whole fucking continent before he can never come back again? 

He feels emotional just thinking about it. 

And this is exactly why he couldn’t tell Farrah about this trip.

Ilya’s story had started and ended here. How do you even try to make someone see an entire life? 

“Visiting family,” Shane replies on his behalf, at last, when the silence stretches on for too long. His Russian accent is inaccurate in a laughable way, but the words are right. Ilya wants to kiss him. 

He’ll do it when they’re in the hotel and away from prying eyes. 

For now, he takes his duffel bag over from the stranger – who’s hacking up mucus again – and hands him a tip. 

“Carsick?” He asks Shane as they make their way up the stairs, in lieu of any more obvious display of affection. 

“Nah, I’m all good,” he replies with an air of seriousness because Shane is an expert in all things Ilya by now. He hears everything Ilya doesn’t say out loud, and can read everything he doesn’t show. Ilya grimaces at him, and Shane smiles back, wistfully. 

Stupid Russia with its stupid laws. 

One of the staff at the front desk is a hockey fan who recognizes them, which is annoying. So they have to waste money on two rooms, even knowing that they’ll just use one anyway. But they brush the back of their hands against each other’s in the lift, and Ilya smothers his palm into Shane’s face when Shane gives him that look. The one where his eyes are crystal clear pools, hiding nothing, and he’s looking at Ilya like Ilya is the best thing he’s ever laid eyes on in his life. 

“Stop looking at me like that, Hollander.” 

“Like what?” He cocks his head to the right, as if he’s cute. 

“You know like what.” 

“What?” 

“Someone’s going to catch us. You’re annoying.” 

“Me?” Shane smirks, looking him dead in the eye. “Annoying?”

The elevator dings earlier than expected and they step away from each other on instinct. But there’s no one outside, and they let out a synchronized breath of relief. 

The stress in the air pops, the tension in their shoulders easing up a little. 

The rooms are nice. Way nicer than they’d expected any hotel room in this town to be. The gold everywhere is slightly gaudy, but everything smells like lavender and bergamot. 

Ilya eventually finds the minibar, and Shane stares at him in part-fascination, part-horror as he downs two airplane bottles of vodka without pausing to breathe. He polishes the second off with a satisfying “ah” and Shane scrunches his nose. 

“Show off.” 

“Want one?” Ilya throws the third bottle, and Shane narrowly catches it before cracking it open. 

His face contorts in disgust as he chokes on the second swallow. “Ugh. Fuck. Ew. I have no fucking idea how anybody drinks this.” 

His unhindered expression is so endearing that Ilya finds himself smiling. Finds the haze that has plagued him for the last few weeks lifting just slightly. 

Something about the month of April, an old shoulder injury flaring up and this visit that has created a perfect storm for his mental health to hit rock bottom. 

It’s not as if his clinical depression ever really leaves. It’s like a shadow stuck to his heels, or a ghost haunting him, or blinkers closing off his field of vision. But that darkness isn’t always opaque – sometimes it’s gentle enough that he doesn’t really notice it. Sometimes it’s completely solid, like he’s trapped in some basement of his own mind’s making.  

It’s been like that, the past couple of weeks: the shadow following him so dark that it feels even more real than Ilya himself. 

And ever since they got to the airport in Canada, Ilya has been a dead man walking. Puppeteering limbs that can't possibly belong to him, and watching himself go through the motions as if he’d been floating three feet above his body. 

But Shane. God, Shane always makes everything okay, somehow. 

Even when he doesn’t know what to do, which is almost all of the time. He says the wrong thing a lot, and asks questions that don’t help, and sometimes he gets so anxious about helping Ilya that Ilya often can’t decide who between the two of them needs the more urgent intervention. But Shane just… tries so hard to cheer Ilya up on his bad days that it’s like even his depression knows it’s never going to win a fight against the scrappiest, most tenacious motherfucker in the universe. It would be like the story of David and Goliath. 

And just the thought of that makes Ilya grin: Shane, showing up to a fight against a big, bad monster with nothing else but love and maybe a hockey stick, ready to fend off whatever darkness for Ilya. 

He’s seen the way Troy is with Harris. Every time he’s around, it’s as if Troy unfurls in Harris’ presence. His eyes are brighter, his face is more open. Ilya knows he’s like that, too. 

Sometimes, Ilya is scared of Shane thinking that love can cure him. Sometimes, Ilya really believes that love is the only thing that can. 

They unpack their things – Shane hanging up all his clothes like a true psychopath – then draw a bath. The tub is big enough to fit them both, so Ilya sits his fiancé between his legs and hugs him to his chest. The water is hot enough to sear their skin, but somehow still not hot enough to chase away the bite of the wind outside. 

“How are you feeling?” Shane asks, just when Ilya was starting to think that he wasn’t going to.  

Ilya looks for the word in English but can’t find it, so he just shrugs his shoulders. The movement makes the water slosh, and some of it tips out of the bath. He watches the puddle on the floor grow and stop before he finds his voice. “Strange. Like this is not real.”

“What doesn’t feel real?”

“That you’re here.” Ilya presses a hesitant kiss into Shane’s hair. “That I’m here. That we’re here in the same place that my mom is.”

Shane nuzzles his nose against the inside of his elbow. “I’m glad we could do this.”

“Me too.” Ilya clears his throat. “I haven’t been here in a while.”

“When was the last time?”

“When I was a child, maybe.”

“Did your father not want to bring you here?”

“Dumped her here and left. He didn’t even want to pay for her burial, at first. Her parents convinced him to.” Ilya shrugs again. “Second wife and, you know,” he says, even if he’s sure that Shane doesn’t know.

He can feel the weight of his fiancé’s sympathy even if he can’t see it. But like most things involving his family, Ilya doesn’t know how to explain why things have to be the way they are. There’s no other option but this shitty one. And it was all a mess anyway – her status as second wife, the way she died, the reputation of her hometown, the family burial plot, the image that his father had to hang on to to keep his spot among the politburo.

So Ilya never resented his father for this decision. At the very least, his mom is buried where she grew up, next to her parents and grandparents, instead of in Moscow with people who couldn’t even stand the sight of her. 

“I’m sorry.” 

Ilya mindless patterns into Shane’s arm. “It’s okay. It was a long time ago.” 

By the time they get out it’s already close to midnight. Shane is swaying on his feet, and Ilya is too tired for a cigarette. But when they get under the covers, he still finds himself too wired to sleep. 

It’s like he’s being pulled in a thousand different directions between time and space. He inhales and he’s seventeen, first time in America and listening to a smoke alarm making annoyingly even beeps in the hallway outside his dorm room. He exhales and he’s six, lying next to his mother, alive and breathing, her heart thumping steadily against the ear that he’s pressed to her breast. Inhale, his father is screaming at him in front of his entire junior hockey team, and he’s trying his best not to move even though his calves are cramping like hell beneath his gear. Exhale, he’s twelve and staring at the door of his mom’s bedroom and knowing, with a stomach full of dread, exactly what’s behind that wood. 

He lets himself drift down the endless river of his childhood, letting all the pain and hurt wash over him, because he knows from experience that fighting this current will only leave him with lungs full of water. 

“Ilya?” Shane whispers from behind him, a good two hours after they’d decided to go to bed. Shane’s voice is hoarse and tacky with disuse, and Ilya wonders how Shane can read him even when he’d been sleeping. 

It’s so dark and Ilya’s so lost in the labyrinth of his own mind that, for a good two minutes, he almost thinks he’d imagined it. But then Shane drapes an arm across his shoulder and presses his forehead between his shoulderblades. He can tell that Shane knows he’s awake. 

Ilya listens silently, patiently, for Shane’s breathing to even out. Then he, too, lets sleep take him. 

***

Shane is worried. 

He’s been worried for a while, especially with the bombshell of the news that Ilya had been going to see Galina for a couple of months and had somehow not told him. 

But Shane also knows that people can’t change what they are. Not so easily, anyway. 

And Ilya had grown up in hell, so it must make sense that the world is constantly on fire for him, even when it’s not.

So Shane knows that the only thing he can do is wait for Ilya to come to him. 

Which Ilya had, with this trip – come to him, that is. He’d mumbled it across the dinner table; an almost inaudible: “I want to go see my mom before we come out”, as he had pushed his dinner around his plate and avoided eye contact like the plague. His shoulders were straight lines of pure muscle, but they had slackened as soon as Shane had replied: “Sure. Next week? I’ll book flights for us”, and Shane found himself both happy and sad at the same time. Happy because he’d said the right thing and it had made Ilya feel better. Sad because Ilya is still so hard on himself, even after so many years away from home, and Shane doesn’t have the faintest idea of how to fix that. 

Even after a decade and finding their way to each other, he still doesn’t know how to show Ilya that he can want things, and have them, and not be punished for it. 

Shane stares, now, at his fiancé sprawled across the hotel bed; his face smushed into the pillow and sunlight cascading down his bare back in fat strips of gold. 

Ilya is beautiful. Always has been. 

Shane will wait. And he’s never, ever going to stop loving him. 

***

The walk to the cemetery is eerily quiet, even though Ilya can tell that Shane has a million questions threatening to burst from that adorable little brain of his. The sky is so matted with clouds that the whole thing almost looks violet, the way it always does in Russia. American skies never look like this, even when they’re overcast, and Ilya wonders distractedly if his mom would have liked Canada. 

She would have liked the big buildings in the city, Ilya thinks. And the wide streets. The freedom. She definitely would not like the cottage – she was never one for nature, despite growing up in it her entire childhood – but Ilya’s sure that she would have come around to it eventually. She probably would have liked the lake. 

The cemetery is tucked away in a forest, and they have to clamber down a grassy slope to get there. Shane almost trips on a rock mid-way down, but Ilya’s hand darts out just in time to keep him upright. They both lean into the brief, thrilling contact before pulling away, eyes automatically roaming the empty field for any unlikely onlookers.

Ilya’s heart beats faster and faster as they get closer to the cemetery and, by the time they reach the entrance, Ilya feels like his stomach is in his throat. He’s so sick he swears he might just throw up. 

He remembers this walk from when he was a child. It had been in the height of summer then, and the tall grass had cut at his bare arms, insects tickling at his ankles. He was so short and he was so busy scratching at his legs that he’d lagged behind the group. Alexei had clearly noticed the distance between them growing, but all he did was walk faster. It’s one of the few memories he has from that time: his brother leaving him behind. 

He rubs away the tightness in his throat with a hand, and focuses on the heat of Shane next to him. 

The arch to the entrance of the cemetery is shorter than he remembers it to be. The pillars, too, are weathered and gray with age. They have to ask the groundskeeper for a list because Ilya doesn’t have her lot number, and he hands over a dusty binder for them to look at. 

Seeing his mom’s name written down on paper is a shock to the system he hadn’t even expected, and Shane has to clap (touch) him on the back to get them moving again. 

Ilya doesn’t even know why he’s so scared as he walks, or why his brain is sending false signals to the rest of his body that he’s being led to his execution. It’s not as if he’s going to arrive at her lot and witness a rotting body, or an angry apparition, or a mother who hates him. It’s land and a non-descript tombstone. Probably. He keeps telling himself that, all the way until they make it to her lot. 

And he’s right. Her grave is really just land, and a ledge, and neatly trimmed grass. There’s a Russian orthodox cross mounted above her tombstone, and Ilya’s hand automatically comes up to his necklace. Her necklace. Their necklace.

Standing here, looking at her portrait, Ilya can see that they’re almost the same person. They share the same lips, and eyes, and smile. The air is so still around them that it scrapes at their skin. 

“She’s so pretty,” Shane whispers eventually as he stoops down to place flowers in the space next to her tombstone. He arranges it so that the vase looks full. It doesn’t take much effort, with how big the bouquet is. “You look so much like her.” 

The tears that have been building for days finally well up in his eyes. 

Because she was pretty. She was the prettiest woman in the world to Ilya. And he hasn’t even thought to visit until now, when they won’t have a chance to anymore. 

He wonders how lonely she must have been here, all by herself. It’s clear from the state of their other graves around them that she’s the only one with no visitors at all. 

A tear races down his cheek and he reaches up to swipe it quickly off his face. Ilya bites his tongue so hard that he can taste blood, but at least the intense stinging in his nose recedes. 

They stand there in silence for a good three minutes, hands clasped in front of them like they’re schoolboys in front of a teacher. The air is awkwardly tense, and Ilya shifts his weight from foot to foot because he doesn’t know what the fuck to do. He can’t even remember why he’d wanted to come at all. 

Shane is the first person to speak, and Ilya flinches in surprise at the suddenness of it: “Hello, Irina.” 

His voice is shaky with the gummy weight of a foreign language on his unfamiliar tongue and Ilya would tease him about sucking up to his mom by speaking Russian if he wasn’t feeling so raw. It feels like he’s been turned inside out and all his nerves are on the outside of his body. He’s not touching Shane, but the static between them crackles with something painful. 

Ilya has always felt weird talking out loud to people who have already passed away. He doesn’t quite know why people do it – it’s not as if dead peoples’ ears still work. 

When Ilya had lost his paternal grandfather, Alexei had hugged the coffin and apologized for everything he’d done wrong. Out loud. In front of everyone watching. 

To this day, Ilya doesn’t know whether it had been an act or not. He just remembers cringing and feeling everything inside him twisting itself into knots.

But now, hearing Shane speaking out loud, he understands. 

It’s like writing a letter even though everyone has phones and text messaging now. It’s like buying a postcard instead of just taking a photo. It’s like living with a cross around your neck even when you don’t really believe in God. 

Because sometimes… Sometimes it’s not enough to say “I love you” or “i miss you”, when all you mean is: “I just really wish you were here right now.” It’s a different thing, a different meaning.

Maybe a better one. 

And he hadn’t even had the courage to try it at all. 

Ilya clenches his fists and tries his best to breathe, but his lungs are competing for space with the hot ball of tears growing even larger in his chest. He’s shaking so hard that he’s sure the edges of him are feathery. 

The love of his life next to him fidgets nervously. “My name is Shane. Hollander. I’m your son’s fiancé. Sorry I hadn’t come to see you earlier.”

Then Shane looks expectantly at him – just a little tilt of his head, a glance so brief that Ilya might have missed if he wasn’t already staring at him. 

Ilya braces his knees to keep from falling down. “Hi, mama,” he says. It’s the first time he’s called for her out loud in almost two decades, and the words cut at his throat so viciously that it’s actual, physical, pain. And since he’s not one for self-flagellation (except where no one can see), he clicks his mouth shut. His muscles, which had previously been locked like stone, spur him forward in a random direction.

“Ilya–” 

“I’m okay,” He grits out. “Don’t follow me.”

He walks – slow at first, then gaining in speed so quickly that he’s almost running before he knows it. His vision is so blurry that he can barely see where he’s going; just that when he finally blinks the tears out of his eyes, he’s almost at the entrance of the cemetery. The marble floor there is covered so completely with cigarette ash that it seems almost as if the floor itself is moving, a layer of gray dust shifting like sand in the wind. 

He wipes the pesky tears off his face and pulls his Reds out of his own pocket just to keep himself from falling to pieces. He shakes a stick out of the pack desperately, stuffing it into the corner of his mouth with a damp finger and cupping a trembling hand around a lighter to light it. 

The nicotine instantly flooding his body steadies him a little bit, and the taste of the Marlboro at the back of his throat finally gives him something to hold onto. He stands there, sucking smoke through filter after filter, until his heart starts to slow and he feels drunk with the lack of oxygen. He draws circles in the ground with the tip of his shoe, exposing the pearlescent white below, before moving a few steps to the side to draw another one. Then another, and another. He loses himself in the repetition, trying to forget. Trying to remember. Trying to give this visit the respect it deserves. 

He takes a final inhale of his fourth cigarette and stubs it beneath his sole before walking back.

He’s not quite sure what he’s expecting to see but, as soon as he gets close enough, he notices Shane putting his hand on the tombstone and Ilya, for some irrational reason, feels an unexpected wave of anger. His eyes harden like he’s facing down an enemy on the ice and has to bite his lip to stop from shouting out: Don’t fucking touch her. She’s mine, he wants to growl, his footsteps quickening as though he’s truly about to snatch his fiancé’s arm away from stone. 

Don’t touch her, she’s not yours. You’ve never even fucking met her. 

But then he gets closer and a light, well-timed breeze carries Shane’s voice to him. He’s so attuned to the cadence by now, honed over a decade, that he thinks he could pick it out even in a crowded room. But here, in an empty cemetery of a dying town, the words are crisp and clear like Shane is whispering right into his ear. 

“We chose it together. Ilya and I.” 

Ilya sees, now that he’s close enough, Shane’s ring balanced on the top of his mom’s tombstone. 

“Mine’s unheated sapphire. His is unheated ruby.” 

And like all of his emotions lately, Ilya’s anger goes out like a light. Something crunches under his foot as he steps closer – a discarded cigarette pack, or a leaf – and Shane looks up at the sound. 

“Hey.” His eyes are misty, but they’re not sad. They just look like the eyes Ilya has spent the last decade loving. “Welcome back,” Shane says gently. “Wanna show your mom your ring? I’m showing her mine.”

There’s that strange feeling that clangs on his heart again, but it’s not fear. It’s something more dedicated, more focused. It’s something like nervousness. 

Ilya unclips the ring from his necklace and holds it out before he can even think to refuse. Shane takes it over from him – making sure that their hands brush and his fingers can squeeze his for just a moment – before placing it next to his own. The rings slant towards each other on the bumpy surface of the tombstone, like compass needles finding true north. 

“Your son got the idea for the gems from a reality show,” Shane huffs a small, quiet laugh. “One of those ultra-rich high-society ones. It’s his guilty pleasure.” 

Ilya finds his throat getting unstuck, because this is normal. This is regular banter. This is how they normally interact. And it’s like he’s been teleported to the living room of his Boston home, where Shane is reading and Ilya is binge watching again from season 1. “No. Just pleasure. I’m not guilty about it.” 

“Fine,” Shane smiles, easy and boyish. “Your son watches it all the time.” 

Your son.

Ilya doesn’t know if anyone has ever said that kindly before. It was always his father, saying your son is a fucking weakling, or do you want your son to turn out like you?

Even if his mom is gone, Ilya is glad that she can hear someone talk about him like this, at least once. 

And it’s that thought that knocks down the last of his barriers and reminds him that this is his last chance. This is his last chance to let his mom hear him. 

He clears his throat, and it feels like thorns pricking at his diaphragm. “They have, um, really good houses, mama,” he says, reaching out to brush the back of his knuckles against her name, carved and waiting silently for him in stone. “Big windows, and everything.”

“Yeah, good houses,” Shane nods, then carefully sweeps the rings off the surface into an open, waiting hand. He pinches both between his fingers and turns the gems towards the tombstone. “Anyway, they’re unheated. So if you look at them from the top, they look clear.” He twists them at an angle. “But if you look at them from the side, you can see their color. Cool, right?” 

He does it a few more times, tilting the rings back and forth like Ilya’s mom is really here to admire the way the light catches on hidden crimson and navy. Like they’re just at a cafe, or a restaurant, reuniting after some time apart. Sharing a secret. One that nobody in the world knows, except for David and Yuna Hollander. 

Shane brings both rings to his face – because he’s not wearing his glasses, sadly – and returns Ilya the correct one before slipping his own back onto his finger. The metal has kept some of Shane’s heat, and that temperature grounds him more than anyone could imagine. 

“We have another set,” Ilya says, surprising even himself at how steady the words come out. “Black ones. He bought them when he proposed.” He grins despite himself when an image his mom looking shocked drops, unbidden, into his head. Warmth spreads in his body like concentric ripples on the surface of a lake – slow and hesitant, like it’s not sure whether it’s allowed to exist. “Yeah, mama. This nerd proposed first, can you believe it?” 

“What’s nerd?” 

“Means annoying and uncool.” 

Shane knocks his shoulder into his and scowls, even though it’s clear he’s holding back laughter. 

They sit down, after a while, there on the dry grass. They words pour out of them like they haven’t talked in years: recounting stories and digging out inside jokes and describing their schedules like they’re creating a running record of their lives, reams and reams of transcripts that could tower above them if their words were ever typed out. They don’t touch each other, but their outstretched legs are close enough that Shane can bump their knees together when Ilya’s voice cracks every so often, or Ilya can caress his shoe against Shane's ankle as he tells her about the hard years where they were pretending to be nothing more than archrivals. 

Then, before he knows it, they’ve come to the most recent years of Ilya’s life. 

“Papa passed some time ago. I’m sure you know. But he… Towards the end, all he could talk about was you.” He brings his necklace up to his lips in an unthinking gesture. “Towards the end I think I forgave him, too. I realized he was just… He was a small man. Trying to be something in this big world. So he wouldn’t be forgotten.” 

Ilya never talks about his family, but if Shane is surprised by this information he doesn’t show it. Instead, he chews on the inside of his cheek and says: “You would be so proud of the man Ilya is today, Irina. He did it, despite everything. Despite his father.” 

The silence stretches and Ilya’s brain, strangely, picks up on the faintest scent of flowers in the air. The fragrance doesn’t sour like he expects it to, the way he always expects every good thing to turn into something bad whenever he talks about his father. 

And then he realizes that it’s because this is the first time he hasn’t felt that sick, queasy fear that normally rages at the very thought of his family. 

The tears come again, emotion rolling inside him like an unstoppable wave, and now he’s crying for real. Now, they drip from his eyes like a stream. He wipes his nose against his sleeve, and buries his head in his hands, breaths sticky under his breastbone. 

“I tried my best,” Ilya says, not entirely sure who he’s saying it to but that statement, at the very least, is the truth. “I wanted to make you happy.” 

Sobs tear themselves from his throat in violent, shuddering quakes, but he doesn’t give a shit about how stupid he must look. He doesn’t give a shit about anything anymore. He hasn’t cried like this in years, even though he’s always wanted to. Even though he’s needed to for a long time.

He’s not scared of it now. He’s not scared of drowning. 

Not here, not anymore. 

Because Shane is here, and his mom’s here too. They’ll pull him out from the tide. 

The gasps that he’s heaving feel like someone pulling pieces from him. They hurt awfully, and they burn like heated knives, but they’re just splinters leaving his body piece by piece. 

“I’m so sorry you weren’t happy,” he cries around the tightness in his chest, suddenly unable to stop babbling, wanting so badly to exorcise his ghosts. “I hope you were happy mama, at least sometimes. When I was around. I can’t – I hate thinking that you were never happy a day in your life. But that can’t be true, right? You told me. You told me I was the best thing that happened to you.” 

Shane rubs his palm up and down his back, and the contact brings him up from the cavernous depths of misery. Just enough so that he can breathe. 

“I love you,” Ilya sobs. “I love you. I’m sorry you couldn’t stay. I’m – fuck, I wanted to grow old with you. We could have run away together. I would have – I would have brought you with me. I wish you were here, mama. I really wish you were here.” He digs the heels of his palms into his eyes and breathes wetly. “But I hope you’re someplace better. I hope you’re having all the food you want, and your parents are there with you, and you managed to put on your pointe shoes again. I hope you’re dancing. I hope you’re happy. But, fuck – I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t enough for you to want to be here.”

Even as the words leave his mouth, he knows it’s not fair. That his mom wouldn’t have wanted him to think that. Because even he knows what it’s like to be on that edge – that tempting, thin, tenuous edge. He knows that there’s no rational thought in the place between life and death; only desperation for salvation, or for courage to lean into the ending. 

But Ilya’s heart houses every version of him that has ever existed. The twelve year old him, who had no chance of understanding anything beyond the fact that his mom chose to leave, and it was him who found her. It houses the fourteen year old him, who was so angry all of the time, at everything, that it was almost as if rage was the only thing he could feel anymore. It houses a boy, who’s lived his entire life believing he has no right to be happy because he was never enough for anybody in his family. 

“I’m so fucking sad, mama,” Ilya cries, shame and hurt unfurling in his chest like a spool of ribbon. Now that he dares to tug on it – now that he’s no longer lying to himself – it’s all coming apart. “And I don’t know if this sadness was from you, or because of you, because of what you did, or it’s just me. But I’m just… Sometimes I can’t remember how to breathe.”

He knows Shane is crying next to him now – Ilya can see his hand coming up to wipe away his own tears and, for once, Ilya feels like they’re really the same person. People joke about it all the time – how they can somehow finish each other’s sentences, or how they seem to speak even without words – but Ilya had always secretly thought of Shane as his better half. The pure, untainted one between the two of them. The one who Ilya holds up the entire fucking world for, because there’s no one else that would even remotely be worth the effort. Not even himself.

But now, Ilya knows that Shane can see who he really is, and he still isn’t running away. He can see all the awful dirt and tar that Ilya has hoarded his entire life because there was never any place to excavate it, and still choosing to stay. Shane doesn’t tell him to man up, this is unbecoming. Shane doesn’t even avert his gaze from this overwhelming magnitude of pain. He’s just rubbing Ilya’s back, as if he’d really follow him into the darkness, if only Ilya would just ask.

So maybe Ilya really is as important as Shane. As important as anyone else in the world. And maybe he can still be loved, despite everything. 

He leans on Shane’s shoulder for just a few seconds, because nobody’s around to see anyway. Shane shudders beneath him, like he knows exactly what he’s trying to say. 

Then Ilya tilts his head back and closes his eyes, the sun shining down on them adding to the pounding headache in his skull. Adding to the liberation that he feels, like throwing open a locked door in his brain and having it flood with light. Slowly, the wetness on his face dries and leaves only tacky trails of salt. He takes a deep breath, and waits for his heart to slow. 

Ilya pinches his nose then wipes the gooey snot on the bottom of his shirt before facing his mom’s portrait again. “But don't – don’t worry, mama. I can always breathe when I’m with Shane. He reminds me how to, and why I do it.” In the corner of his eye, he can see Shane’s hand twitching like he can’t bear to not hold onto him. “I can see a future with him, mama. And in that future I am so happy. I am so happy that I don’t even know how to be sad anymore.” Then a small chuckle bubbles out of him, and he thinks Shane must be so confused at this rollercoaster of emotions. “Us and our dog, Anya. She’s so smart that it’s actually quite creepy.”

Shane laughs, a resonant, earthy sound that sounds like a slice of heaven. “Yeah, she really is.” 

“God, my head hurts so bad,” Ilya moans, rubbing at the sides of his temples with his fingers. “I fucking forgot how much it sucks to cry like this.” 

Shane smiles, a small groan escaping his lips. “My head is hurting too. We should’ve brought water.”

“Yeah,” Ilya nods. “I’m probably going to cry some more.” He can already feel the next wave coming, because he’s just remembered another memory with his mom. One of the last ones, before she went and did what she did. “I think I'm going to cry this whole trip. My god.”  

It feels strange, facing the pain head on, like it’s just a stranger that he'll bump into from time to time as he goes about his day. There’ll be a few days, maybe, where he'll find himself on the same bus as it at the same time, sitting across from each other. But if he really looks, he'll realize that the stranger’s just trying to get somewhere too – the same way he is. It’s not some monster, or carnivorous animal wanting to tear Ilya limb from limb. It’s just trying to live out its life to its natural conclusion, like anybody else. 

Ilya thinks this must be what Galina means by accepting every emotion for what it is, good or bad. 

It would definitely help his whole healing process thing if sobbing your eyes out wasn’t so fucking painful, though, and he says as much to Shane, who snorts.

They spend the rest of the morning like that – oscillating between laughing and crying. Dipping into the pain then emerging at a fond recollection. Ilya’s mom hears about MLH drama, and how it feels to win a Cup, and how Ilya almost fucking died in a plane crash. She hears about the Irina Foundation, and Shane’s weird bird food, and they bicker in front of her about stupid shit. Like who’s the faster skater and who fell in love first. Shane hears about his favourite memories with her, and the stories she used to read to him. 

By the time they can even bear to tear themselves away for lunch, their eyes are red and their faces are puffy. But their cheeks are sore with how hard they’ve smiled. For the first time in months, Ilya’s feet, as they bring him out of the cemetery, don’t feel like lead weights that he has to drag behind him. 

For the first time in years, Ilya sees the world as it is, not as he wishes it was. 

***

They spend hours the next day at the cemetery, too. They had a reservation at a fancy place for lunch – courtesy of Yuna – but they end up getting the food to go and eating it with his mom. 

“You should have seen the face on the chef, mama,” Ilya cackles. “It was like we asked for his firstborn child.”

“For a moment I wasn’t even sure if they had takeout boxes.” 

They finish their food at record speed, even while talking the whole time. 

They somehow find themselves on the topic of smoking half an hour later and Shane, the bastard, pronounces: “Irina, if you want him to stop smoking so much, give us a sign.” 

And right as he finishes, a branch falls from a nearby tree and Ilya almost leaps out of his skin. 

“Fuck you.” Ilya folds his arms and glowers at Shane as soon as his adrenaline levels return to nornal. “Mama, if you want him to stop with his macrobiotic diet bullshit, give us a sign.” 

A flock of geese flies noisily overhead and Ilya leaps to his feet. “Aha! That’s a sign too, Hollander!” 

They spend fifteen minutes fighting about it before calling a truce, but at least they both have the sense to look embarrassed as soon as they remember where they are.  

“Is there a word for not really believing in one God but wanting to believe that there’s an afterlife?” Ilya asks, taking a bite of his dessert. He almost expects the cross on his neck to start burning, but it stays inert. No more branches fall, no birds squawk. 

Shane hums. “I don’t think so. Not in English anyway.” 

“We should start a new religion,” Ilya says. “Where good things happen to everyone we like and bad things happen to everyone we don’t.”

Shane laughs. “Sounds good. Our first victim can be Roger Crowell.” 

“Yeah. He should always be stuck in traffic whenever he needs to get somewhere.” 

“There should always a screaming baby on his flight.” 

Ilya laughs. “Do you believe?” 

“What? In God?” 

Ilya nods, tenderly wiping a stray sesame seed from the corner of Shane’s mouth. 

Shane is silent for a long time. Then he says: “I love you so overwhelmingly that I find it hard to believe that we weren’t brought together by something bigger than us.” He rests his chin on a knee. “But honestly? I’m not sure.” 

Ilya places his last dumpling on Shane’s plate as a substitute for “I love you too”. 

He doesn’t know about faith – he’s never been able to rest on that lofty cushion, despite how much he’s always wanted to – but he knows about worship. 

He knows about devotion. 

He knows what it’s like to love something so much that you’re even willing to believe in miracles. 

***

Shane wakes up on the third day and his fiancé’s already getting ready to leave the room. He throws a hand over his eyes to block out the rising sun. 

“Hey,” Ilya greets, and there’s a lightness in his face that Shane hasn’t seen in a while. He feels the Gordian knot in his chest untwist. “Morning.”

“Morning,” Shane replies, but he’s sure he’s saying it wrong, because Ilya laughs. 

“Is it okay if I go to her myself today?” Ilya spritzes cologne on the inside of his wrists, and Shane breathes in deep. The scent wakes him up from deep in his core. “I can send you the address for a church if you wanted to go check out the architecture, or something.” 

Shane nods, grabbing a pillow and sticking it under his head. “What time – Will you let me know when you’re done?” 

“Bring us lunch?” Ilya requests, and bends down to kiss his fiancé, palms roving solidly against his chest. Shane’s breath hitches, and he rubs a thumb against Ilya’s cheek. 

“Of course,” he says and he can feel Ilya deflate with relief under his hands, the way he always does when something is taken off his plate. 

Ilya sits by her grave, later, and just listens, quietly. It’s so substantially silent that he thinks he can hear spring: can hear the flowers blooming from the ground, the grass coming back to life, the butterflies in the trees. He thinks about what it means to have been someone in his mom’s position. Far from home, giving up everything, chasing after a better life, almost tasting it, and having it be withheld from her anyway. Ilya wonders if a different path will emerge for him once him and Shane step into the sunlight; or whether this curse is generational. 

He was always his mother’s son, after all. And Alexei was his father’s, an invisible fault line running through the family ever since they were children. Alexei, all bravado and soldier toys, tagging along for civil servant functions and hanging onto every word uttered by his father. Ilya, meanwhile, always refusing to go. And whenever he could get away with it, he would follow his mom back home, linking his arm with hers. 

He speaks when he’s ready to, and it feels natural: “You know, mama. You always told me not to want things. You said wanting things is what makes people unhappy.” Ilya plants his hand on the ledger and tries not to imagine what’s underneath. Tries to remember his mom as the beautiful being she always was. Tries to commit her portrait to memory. “For a long time I tried not to want anything. Even when I made it to the MLH – I didn’t care about being first draft, or MVP, or winning the Cup.” He exhales. “And I even tried not wanting happiness. Just waited for it to find me, you know? Didn’t do anything to look for it.

Then I met Shane. And suddenly it was impossible to not want. I tried, but it was impossible. He was… He’s everything. Because of him, I want every single thing in this world.”

The enormity of them and what they’re about to do in a few weeks threaten to overwhelm him, but he locks his eyes on his mom and finds equilibrium. She’ll look after them from above. He knows it. 

“So don’t worry, mama. I’m going to want enough for the both of us now. And I’m going to take it all.” 

***

On their last day, they stay with her until they really have to leave for the airport. And as he listens to Shane say, with finality: “Don’t worry, Irina. I’ll make him the happiest man in the world”, Ilya knows the next time he thinks of Russia, he won't think of stiff uniforms and hateful eyes anymore. Instead, he’ll think of this: his mother in front of him and his fiancé at his back. He’ll keep this memory tucked close to his chest, where it'll never fade and the world will never find, try as they might. 

As they do the drive then wait for boarding in the airport lounge, Ilya feels strangely empty; like he has nothing left in him. 

But then he ponders it for a moment and realizes: no, he has more in him than he left Canada with. 

Because for most of his life, he’s lived believing that he was bad. That there was nothing worth saving. There was too much pain and anger and hurt, that there was simply no space for anything else. 

Turns out, all he needed was a talk with his mom. To lie in her lap, even if it’s just only stone now, and feel the wind like her hand caressing through his hair while he unloads everything he never dared to speak out loud. 

So, as he gazes out of the airplane window and watches Russia get further away, he realizes he’s finally empty. And now there’s a chance for bright new things to come in. 

The announcement comes over the speakers, tinny and muffled but clear enough: “Ladies and gentlemen. We have left Russian airspace, and the seatbelt signs have now been turned off–”

Ilya looks to his left, and between their partitions, Shane's palm is already there. Waiting for him to hold. 

He slips his hand into Shane’s and smiles, the tears pouring down his face feeling like a baptism. Or like rain putting out a blazing forest fire. It's salvation, and renewal.

He’s ready. 

They're ready.