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Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov had become a fixture of the Pike household. Sometimes just one of them, other times together. Occasionally, they’d even arrive separately and find that the other was already picking which one of the twins’ tiaras to wear in the living room. A couple of times, Jackie had arrived to find Ilya already napping on her couch.
Admittedly, she found it pretty endearing. Shane was always a huge help around the house, and the kids loved their Uncle Ilya. Even Hayden, who pretended to be annoyed every time he spotted Ilya’s shoes deposited by the door, insisted they stay for dinner if they so much as suggested leaving early.
This is to say, it was normal for Jackie to walk into her house and find their furniture pushed against the walls with a grown man (or two) running around the living room, accompanied by three overgrown toddlers.
It was not, however, normal for the grown man to be sitting with hunched shoulders in the middle of the room, violently shaking, while her four kids crowded around him, looking terrified. Jackie’s breath hitched.
“Ilya? Kids?” She asked, tentatively walking in, eyes immediately darting to the bright red juice spilling all over the carpet.
None of them moved. The kids were still crowding around Ilya, his eyes shooting frantically around the room like he was trying to pick everything up with only his mind. He seemed like he was shaking, small enough jolts of his body that Jackie could have blamed the movements on a trick of the light. She wanted to scream.
“Ilya,” she tried, “are you— okay? Did something happen?”
Her eyes shot towards the plastic cup on their coffee table, lying horizontal and completely empty, then back to the juice. The kids were on a cranberry kick, and that shit stained like a motherfucker. God, she was going to hate cleaning it up.
For what was either six hours or the six longest seconds in history, nobody responded, and she started to get anxious. And frustrated. And anxious about being frustrated.
“Ruby! Jade!” She tried, raising her voice and stepping towards them. It wasn’t as kind as she’d usually want to speak to them, but she was freaking out and nothing was getting through.
Finally, her sweet twins turned to her, wide-eyed and scared.
“Come here,” she beckoned, reaching her arms out and holding a hand to each of their heads. “What happened?”
“Uncle Ilya spilled the juice,” Ruby muttered, her voice that strange mumble-whisper her kids seemed to take on whenever they spoke, chastised, down to the floorboards.
“Then he started crying,” Jade added, worrying her top lip between her teeth.
What the hell?
“Ilya?” She tried again, starting to feel her impatience climb up her neck and rest at the base of her skull, a migraine waiting to happen. He didn’t answer. “Rozanov?”
“Ilya!” She snapped, harsher than she’d wanted, but at least loud enough to get his attention.
She regretted it immediately when, instead of turning towards her the way he usually would, he fucking flinched. Shoulders curling, head down. She felt like she was going to be sick.
To her right, Amber started to yawn, shifting uncomfortably, and Jackie remembered where she was, who she was with.
“Ruby, Jade,” she called. Steady, authoritative. Composed, or something close enough for now. “Get Amber and Arthur to bed, yeah? We’ll be up to tuck you in in a few minutes.”
For a second, the twins turned to her, frowning like they were about to argue. Her voice lowered, softened. “It would really help your Uncle if you did. Please, babies?”
Thankfully, despite only being eight, her girls were perceptive and started to scramble up the stairs, each one guiding one of their siblings upstairs.
She sighed, turning back to Ilya. He was still shaking, and Shane and Hayden were nowhere to be found. Jackie almost started crying, too.
Slowly, she kneeled in front of him, trying to look calm, but doubting she succeeded at all. She’d never felt so out of her depth. Meltdowns, panic attacks, tears— she dealt with them every day, several times a day. She was a pharmacist and a mother; her life was basically a constant stream of people in tears.
She’d never been faced with someone so precious looking so haunted.
“Ilya,” she tried again, softer this time. Still, it made his entire body tense at once. This time, though, he didn’t flinch away from her, and that was enough progress for her to power through. “Baby, what’s wrong? I—”
She paused, abruptly, struck with the sudden realization that she didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what was wrong, what to fix, how to fix it. Her eyes started to sting, and she tilted her head back, blinking helplessly and feeling ridiculous.
“Ilya, I— please?” She was starting to sound desperate now, scared. She crawled to him, slowly, relaxing when he didn’t pull away, uncaring of the way her skin got wet and sticky, her white dress, the good dress, stained. “Just say something.”
Horrifyingly, he just croaked, “I’m sorry.”
And Jackie had never wanted to see Shane more in her life, right then. On her knees, something about the way she hoped for him felt religious. She’d relearn how to pray if it meant he’d walk in and make her understand, make Ilya stop looking like a dog waiting to be struck.
Suddenly, something clicked.
She blinked rapidly, feeling more like her face was spasming, feeling stupid and silly and like she’d never been outside a day in her life. Most of all, she felt relieved. The fucked up kind of relaxed you registered after you found out what the twist was and knew, if nothing else, what was looming over you.
She reached her hand out towards his, slow and gentle. She could tell instinctively that Ilya was watching her, eyes narrowed.
From there, it was easy.
It was easy to rest the tips of her fingers against his knuckles, easy to curl her palm towards his, easy to let her touch hover.
“I’m not mad,” she said, warm, letting it hang in the air between them. “I wouldn't hurt you even if I were.”
“But I—”
“I'm not mad,” she repeated, cutting the sentence halfway. Now, her hand slipped to cover his completely.
Taking her thumb to his wrist, she drew small circles around his pulse, feeling it beat steadily under her, revelling in the way it started, steadily, to slow.
Ilya's hands were warm; they always had been. They liked to joke, the four of them, that he was a summer man born in the cold. That his hands were compensating for the chill that followed him to every country. Ilya complained hockey was a terrible, terrible sport to move for, and that when he retired, it would be somewhere tropical.
She cleared her throat, tried again. “Ilya, are you hurt?”
He shook his head, swallowing. His throat bobbed. “The wine only spilled. Kid wine, ah, juice. In plastic cup. I would not let kids around broken glass.”
Jackie melted further, if that was even possible. She felt so incredibly fond. Down to her bones.
“I know that. I'm asking if you're hurt.”
Ilya blinked, looking at her through red-rimmed eyes like she was crazy. “I'm not child. I spill juice, nothing more.”
“You look kind of shaken about it,” she pushed.
“I thought I made you angry. Is my fault. Did not mean to worry you.”
Jackie supposed she'd always been too impulsive for her own good because the unsure hunch of his shoulders, the small frown tugging at his lips, the way his eyes shifted away from her, ashamed— it all made her lean forward and pull Ilya against her.
Thankfully, they weren't strangers anymore, not like they once were, and even in some half-panicked daze, Ilya recognized the contact instinctively. He leaned into her, forehead against her shoulder, sighing like he had been holding his breaths in his chest, like he hadn’t been sure he was allowed to inhale.
“I'm sorry. Am acting like baby.”
“Nothing to be sorry for,” she tutted. “You're sounding like Shane.”
Ilya just huffed, none of his usual fire, and curled forward, into her. They both looked ridiculous when Shane and Hayden walked in, carrying a six-pack each and laughing like they had no cares in the world.
They stopped immediately.
“What the fuck?”
“Are you okay?”
Jackie cleared her throat, pulling Ilya closer, letting him hide. “Yeah. Yeah, we're fine, Ilya just spilled some juice and it freaked us out for a minute.”
“I'm sorry,” he whispered again, quickly, like the words were ripping themselves from his throat. He shifted, drawing his arms to curl around Jackie's waist like he was afraid she’d be the one to let go first.
The effect was instant. Shane was by their side in record time, leaning into Ilya's space, rubbing his back, whispering sweet assurances and little half-baked questions that fell on deaf ears, mixing syllables of Russian and English into a quiet drone that Jackie wasn’t intended to understand, so she stopped trying.
Hayden, meanwhile, had rushed to the kitchen and come back with a mop and a whole bunch of paper towels. He worked quietly around them, carefully soaking up the worst of the spill, and letting the soggy paper towels pile onto an empty dinner plate one of the kids had left out.
Ilya just breathed shakily, forehead still pressed against Jackie’s shoulder. She could feel his exhale stutter against her shirt.
“I'm sorry.”
“Ilya,” Shane answered, in the same sweet tone as Jackie's ‘baby’ from earlier.
“You are too good to me,” he muttered. “Russia was… in Russia, was different.”
Just as she geared up to tell him she would personally catch a flight and beat up the entirety of Moscow herself, before Shane could start his spur of endless reassurance, Hayden broke the silence.
“Yeah,” he agreed, and the entire room stilled like it had been frozen, “they're totally too good to you.”
Ilya sucked in a breath. Jackie braced herself to get up and sock her husband in the face.
“But I'm not,” he continued. Firm. Serious. “and I'm telling you, you're fine, Roz.”
Shane laughed, a little thing, more of a huff and maybe a wheeze at best, but it was enough, and the tension broke.
“Careful, there, babe,” she giggled, “you're being awfully nice to Ilya. Almost like you two are actually friends, or something.”
“Please,” Hayden scoffed, “I'm just being realistic. He has nothing to apologize for this time. I cry all over you two at least twice a week.”
“Is true,” Ilya sniffed, finally relaxing for real and dragging his head up from Jackie’s shoulder, “Hayden is little piss baby.”
“Fuck you, Roz,” he bit back, no venom to it. His tone was more similar to that of telling the twins to eat their veggies or Arthur to go to bed.
It was the gentle, loving sort of annoyance— you're dear to me, I say this because I care, I love you.
“Come on,” Jackie coaxed, “let's move to the couch. Shane can help you up. Hayden's gonna pour us all some water and I'll go grab some of the sweats you left here last time, yeah?”
Ilya's jaw tensed, the grip on her waist tightened momentarily and loosened immediately. He looked like there was something he didn't want to say, like he was chewing on the words and didn’t like their taste.
“Don't—” he swallowed, pausing. “I— You— come back?”
Her heart felt like it was going to burst. “‘Course. It'll just be a minute for you and Shane to catch up. I told the girls I'd be up to tell them good night, anyway.”
For a second, he hesitated. Then, seemingly remembering the kids, finally nodded, loosening his grip, turning to latch onto Shane instead.
“I'll take Arthur and Amber first,” Hayden called. “They're probably already knocked out.”
She nodded, heading up the stairs and making a beeline to Ruby's room, where their voices were carrying through. Carefully, she rapped on the door twice.
A sleepy, tired little voice answered. “Come in.”
Jackie's heart jackrabbited against her chest. It was growing far too big for her ribs, these days.
On the other side, both the twins had curled into the bed, pressed together and whispering to each other despite the way their eyes drooped with sleep. She huffed. Sometimes, she wondered why they'd bothered with separate rooms.
“Hi, bugs,” she cooed, sitting down at the edge of the bed, close enough to rest her hands on their heads. “You did really good tonight. Thank you.”
“We did?”
“Mm,” she hummed, brushing Jade's hair out of her face, “Uncle Ilya is feeling a lot better now. You two handled it like champs. Your siblings are fast asleep now.”
“He's okay?” Ruby's small, worried voice sounded sharp in the quiet of the room. She sounded shaken, still.
“Yes,” she nodded. “Yeah… yeah, he's okay. He just got scared for a minute, is all.”
“Scared?”
“Sometimes,” she sighed, lowering her voice, “sometimes there are bad people that hurt others for no reason. When your Uncle Ilya was small, someone used to hurt him. He just remembered and got scared it would happen again.”
“It won't,” Jade declared, determined and fiery like she was prepared to personally stand between Ilya and anyone who wanted to hurt him.
Jackie snorted. “No, it won't. It's okay now. No one's hurting him anymore, and we all love him very much, don't we?”
The twins nodded eagerly, in sync, knocking their foreheads together and reeling back in surprise at once. Jackie laughed, fondly, letting the tension seep out of her.
“He loves you girls a lot, too.”
“Can we hug him?” Ruby asked suddenly, feeling the bed shift as Jackie finally got up to leave.
She paused, feeling like she was going to cry all over again. “In the morning, honey. I'm sure she'd love that. Just go to sleep now so it comes faster, yeah?”
Satisfied, the twins nodded again, slower this time and buried themselves under the blankets. She leaned in, pressing a soft kiss on each of their foreheads, and slipped out of the room, aching.
After that, she went through the motions mechanically. Changing her dress, grabbing clothes Ilya had left over the last time he’d been over, thinking about how she'd break Grigori Rozanov’s fingers if she could.
By the time she made it down the stairs, all three of the boys were sitting on the couch, Ilya in the middle, honest-to-God cuddling.
She grinned, feeling lighter immediately. “You guys look comfy.”
“Do not look,” Ilya snapped. “Is embarrassing.”
“Moment of weakness,” Hayden agreed.
Shane tilted his head back to look at her and sighed, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. “They're being stupid again.”
She snorted. “When are they not?”
“Hey,” Ilya pretended to bristle, “you cannot be mean to me. I am… vulnerable.”
“You're ridiculous.”
“Bah,” he scoffed, “is same thing.”