Chapter Text
The first time he thinks about it, it’s near the end of his first year in Boston. It’s not like he’s expecting to need it, exactly, but… he’s talking on the phone with Sveta, catching up on goings-on back home, and she lets slip that some guy Sasha’s been seeing is in the hospital, or maybe in jail. The official story is that he was being drunkenly aggressive towards a cop and had to be subdued by force. Or something like that. Nobody is talking about how he and Sasha weren’t even talking to the officer before it happened, or about the names people on the sidewalk heard being thrown around.
It happens here, too. Ilya knows it happens in Boston, of course it does, but it feels like the response here would be different, like maybe someone would be willing to tell the whole story. Like just speaking up and naming it as a hate crime wouldn’t be dangerous in itself.
He thinks about Shane, timidly asking him in July whether he was scared of being found out back when he was messing around with Sasha. He thinks about how, at the time, they hadn’t felt the full weight of what they were doing. Not really. Now, he thinks about Sasha’s friend lying in a hospital bed, or maybe in a cell, with nobody willing to name what happened to him. He realizes, suddenly, that he’s so scared he can feel it in his gut, actually. He doesn’t know what this thing with Shane is, knows it can’t really be anything, but as he’s staring down the barrel of returning home for the summer it’s like he’s swallowed a lead weight.
So he meets with the good people of Flaherty, Boole, and Perez on a Tuesday morning in March, signs a confidentiality agreement, and forces himself to talk about it. Catherine Flaherty, a small but severe looking older woman, looks back at him from across the table in her shiny, brightly lit office, and takes a deep breath. For the next hour, she calmly explains to him what the process would be to file for asylum in the United States.
In the end, he decides against it. Catherine tells him in no uncertain terms that, once he files, he absolutely may not return to Russia unless and until he becomes a US citizen. It all feels too big, too fast, and Ilya just nods and tells her he’ll think about it and reach back out when he makes his decision. He does not contact her again, and ignores her emails until she gives up. He doesn’t tell Shane.
When Shane finds him on the roof in Vegas a few months later, he’s staring out at the night and feeling like that lead weight could carry him straight to the street below and through to the earth’s core. “That must be nice,” Shane says, when Ilya tries to explain that he’s going home soon, and Ilya is completely alone and full of anger and acrid fear. He wishes he’d let Catherine pull the trigger back in March. He feels like a coward for even thinking about it, when all he really has waiting for him is a sick father and a desperate brother.
He kisses Shane, out in the open on this rooftop in Las Vegas, to remind himself that there are good things waiting for him next year. That even if he and Shane can’t be anything, the danger that comes from kissing this man here on this rooftop is nothing compared to what could happen if he did this in Moscow. A week later, he’s home, and that leaden weight feels like it’s taken up permanent residence in his gut.