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The apartment was quiet in a way that felt earned rather than accidental, the sort of quiet that only came after months of learning how to exist in the same space without bristling, without sparring, without reaching instinctively for armor; outside the windows the city glowed in late-evening amber, and inside, Shane lay half-propped against the headboard with a book he hadn’t turned a page of in twenty minutes, listening to the soft, familiar sounds of Ilya moving around the bedroom, the thud of a drawer, the whisper of fabric against skin, the faint exhale that always seemed to carry more weight than breath alone should.
They had been together long enough that Shane could catalogue Ilya’s moods by the rhythm of those sounds, long enough to recognize the difference between tired and restless, between irritated and haunted, and tonight there was something brittle in the air, something that made his shoulders tense even before he knew why.
“Ilya,” he said lightly, because lightness was often the safest bridge, “are you planning on coming to bed or are you reorganizing your entire wardrobe at midnight?”
There was a pause, then a soft huff that might have been a laugh. “You are very impatient man, Hollander,” Ilya replied, his accent thickening when he was distracted. “I am coming.”
Shane glanced up as Ilya stepped out of the bathroom, towel slung low around his hips, skin still damp and flushed from the shower, hair curling at the nape of his neck, and for a second the world narrowed the way it always did when he looked at him, to the sharp lines of his shoulders, the long plane of his torso, the scar at his collarbone from a game years ago that Shane had teased him about endlessly.
But then Ilya turned slightly to grab a pair of sweatpants from the dresser, and the overhead light caught something on his upper thigh, something that made Shane’s breath snag in his chest so abruptly that it felt like being checked hard into the boards.
At first he thought it was shadow, a trick of muscle and light, but then Ilya shifted again and the marks were unmistakable: pale, jagged lines crisscrossing the smooth skin high on his thigh, some faint and silvery with age, others darker and more recent, angry-looking against the tan.
For a long moment Shane didn’t understand what he was seeing, because his brain rejected it, refused to connect the evidence with the only explanation that made sense, and then understanding hit him in a rush so violent it left him cold.
“Ilya,” he said, and his voice did not sound like his own.
Ilya stilled.
There was a particular stillness Shane knew well, the coiled, predatory kind he wore on the ice, and this was not that; this was something else, something smaller and more fragile, like a deer going rigid in a clearing.
“What?” Ilya asked, too casual.
“Don’t,” Shane said softly. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m asking.”
Ilya’s jaw tightened, and he pulled the sweatpants up with quick, almost aggressive movements, as though fabric could erase what Shane had already seen. “It is nothing,” he said. “Old injuries. You know how it is. Hockey.”
Shane swung his legs off the bed and crossed the room in three strides, his heart hammering so hard he could feel it in his throat. He reached out before Ilya could step away, his hand closing around Ilya’s wrist, not hard, just enough to anchor him.
“Don’t lie to me,” he whispered.
For a second they just stood there, inches apart, breath mingling, tension crackling in the space between them like static, and then Ilya tried to pull his hand free.
“Shane,” he said, and there was warning in it, and something else too, something dangerously close to pleading. “Let it go.”
“No,” Shane said, and he tightened his grip just slightly, enough to make it clear he wasn’t going to back down. “I saw them. I saw the scars. Those aren’t from hockey.”
Ilya’s eyes flashed, that familiar stormy blue going sharp and defensive. “You think you know everything about me,” he snapped. “You think because you have seen me naked a hundred times you have seen all of me?”
“That’s not what this is,” Shane shot back, anger rising fast to mask the fear clawing at his insides. “I’m not trying to win something here. I just—” His voice broke, and he swallowed hard. “I just need to know why.”
Silence fell heavy between them.
Shane watched the fight play out across Ilya’s face, the instinct to deflect, to joke, to turn it into a challenge, warring with something deeper and darker that flickered in his eyes like a dying flame.
Finally, Ilya looked away.
“It is stupid,” he muttered.
“Nothing about this is stupid,” Shane said, softer now.
Ilya let out a harsh breath and dragged a hand through his damp hair, leaving it sticking up in uneven spikes. “You will look at me differently.”
“I already look at you differently,” Shane said. “You’re the love of my life. That’s pretty different.”
That earned him a faint, incredulous huff, but Ilya still wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“Please,” Shane said. “Talk to me.”
The word please felt fragile in his mouth, like something he wasn’t used to offering, especially not in arguments, and he saw Ilya register that, saw the way his shoulders sagged just a fraction.
“I do not like to talk about these things,” Ilya said at last, his voice low and rough. “In my family, we do not talk about weakness. We survive it, or we pretend it does not exist.”
Shane’s chest tightened. “Is that what this is? Weakness?”
Ilya’s lips twisted. “That is what I was taught.”
He moved past Shane then, slow and deliberate, and sat on the edge of the bed, elbows braced on his knees, hands clasped together as though in prayer. Shane hesitated only a moment before sitting beside him, close enough that their thighs touched through the thin cotton of their sleepwear.
“My mother,” Ilya began, and the words seemed to scrape their way out of him, “was not strong the way people think strength should look.”
Shane went very still.
“She was soft,” Ilya continued, staring at the floor. “She liked music, and books, and she cried at movies even when they were not sad. My father hated that. He said she was weak, that she embarrassed him.”
There was no self-pity in his tone, just a flat recitation of facts, which somehow made it worse.
“One day,” Ilya said, and his voice faltered for the first time, “I came home from school early because practice was cancelled. I was twelve. The house was quiet. Too quiet.”
Shane felt a sick, dawning dread settle in his stomach.
“I found her in the bathroom,” Ilya said, and now his hands were trembling, just slightly. “She had taken pills. There was water running in the sink. I remember thinking she would be angry I was home, because I would see her like that.”
He laughed then, a broken, disbelieving sound. “I was so stupid.”
Shane reached for him without thinking, his hand covering Ilya’s where they were knotted together, and this time Ilya did not pull away.
“I called for my father,” Ilya went on. “He came, he looked at her, and he looked at me, and he said nothing. Later, he told me that this is what happens when people are selfish. When they think only of themselves.”
The words hung in the air like poison.
“He said she chose to leave us. That she chose to make me find her. That she chose weakness over family.”
Shane felt anger rise hot and blinding in his chest. “That’s not—”
“I know,” Ilya cut in quickly, as if he could not bear to hear the contradiction. “Now I know. But I was twelve. And my father was… not a man you argued with.”
There was something in his voice on that last sentence that made Shane’s skin prickle.
“He was angry all the time after that,” Ilya said. “At her. At me. He would say I had her softness, that I would break like she did. He pushed me harder in hockey. Harder than before. If I cried, he would tell me I was proving him right.”
Shane’s fingers tightened around Ilya’s hand. “Did he ever—”
“Yes,” Ilya said quietly. “He did.”
He did not elaborate, and Shane did not make him, but the implication was clear enough that Shane’s jaw ached from clenching it.
“My brother,” Ilya continued after a moment, “was older. He learned from my father. He learned that love is something you earn, and that it can be taken away. He hated that I was good at hockey. He hated that after my mother died, I became the focus of my father’s attention.”
His mouth curved in a bitter smile. “When I was drafted, when I started making money, he became more interested in me, kept calling me up for money so he could do coke and other shit. If I said no, he would say I had forgotten where I came from. That i'm a faggot who abandoned his family and sick father.”
Shane could see it now, the pieces of Ilya he had known for years clicking into place with awful clarity: the relentless drive, the way he punished himself after a bad game, the way he flinched from praise as though it were a trick.
“Sometimes,” Ilya said, and his voice dropped so low Shane had to lean in to hear it, “I think my father was right.”
Shane’s head snapped up. “About what?”
“About weakness,” Ilya whispered. “About breaking.”
He finally turned to look at Shane, and the vulnerability in his eyes was so raw it made Shane’s breath catch.
“There are days,” Ilya said, “when I wake up and it feels like there is a weight on my chest that I cannot lift. When I score three goals and everyone is cheering and I feel nothing. When I come home to you and I am so afraid you will see how empty I am that I start a fight instead, because anger is easier.”
Shane’s throat burned.
“And sometimes,” Ilya continued, “I think the world would be better without me in it. Quieter. Less complicated. You would not have to love someone who is… like this.”
The confession landed like a physical blow.
“Don’t,” Shane said fiercely. “Don’t you dare decide that for me.”
Ilya’s eyes widened slightly.
“You don’t get to tell me my life would be better without you,” Shane went on, his voice shaking now with a mixture of rage and desperation. “You don’t get to rewrite my reality because your father filled your head with bullshit.”
He cupped Ilya’s face in his hands, forcing him to hold his gaze.
“You are not your mother’s death,” Shane said, each word deliberate. “You are not your father’s cruelty. You are not your brother’s greed. You are the man who stayed up all night with me when my knee was wrecked and I thought my career was over. You are the man who sends money to your old coach anonymously because you don’t want credit. You are the man who kisses me like I’m the only thing in the world that matters.”
Ilya’s breath hitched.
“You think the world would be better without you?” Shane’s voice broke entirely now. “My world would collapse. Do you understand that? There would be a hole in it so big I would fall straight through.”
Tears were spilling down Ilya’s face, silent and unrestrained, and Shane had seen him furious, triumphant, smug, devastated by a loss, but he had never seen him like this.
“The scars,” Shane said more gently, brushing his thumbs under Ilya’s eyes. “When did it start?”
Ilya swallowed hard. “After my father died,” he admitted. “Everyone said I should feel relieved. And I did, a little. But mostly I felt… nothing. And then I felt guilty for feeling nothing. It was too much.” He closed his eyes briefly. “Pain is simple. It is clean. It makes the noise in my head go quiet for a while.”
Shane pressed his forehead to Ilya’s. “You don’t have to make the noise quiet alone.”
“I do not know how to do this,” Ilya whispered. “To let someone see this part of me.”
“You’re doing it,” Shane said. “Right now.”
They stayed like that for a long time, breathing each other in, the air thick with confession and fear and something else too—something steadier.
“I loved my mother,” Ilya said after a while. “Even after finding her like that. I never thought the world was better without her. It was worse. It has always been worse.”
Shane felt his chest ache. “Then why would it be different with you?”
Ilya let out a shaky breath that might have been a laugh. “You are very stubborn.”
“Yeah,” Shane said softly. “And I’m not going anywhere.”
He shifted, guiding Ilya back against the headboard, wrapping an arm around his shoulders, pulling him close until Ilya’s head rested against his chest. He could feel the damp warmth of tears through his shirt, could feel the steady thud of Ilya’s heart against his ribs.
“We’re going to get you help,” Shane said quietly. “A therapist. Someone who knows how to untangle this stuff. I’ll go with you if you want. I’ll sit in the waiting room, I’ll sit in the room with you, I don’t care. But we’re not pretending this isn’t real.”
Ilya was silent for a long moment.
“In my family,” he said slowly, “therapy was for people who had failed.”
“In your family,” Shane replied, unable to keep the edge from his voice, “they also thought beating a kid made him stronger. Maybe we don’t use them as the benchmark.”
That drew a weak, watery smile.
“I am afraid,” Ilya admitted.
“I know,” Shane said. “But being afraid doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human.”
He tipped Ilya’s chin up gently. “And I love all of you. Even the parts that scare you.”
Ilya searched his face as though looking for cracks, for hesitation, and whatever he found there seemed to steady him.
“I love you,” Ilya said, the words fierce and fragile all at once. “More than I know how to say.”
“Then stay,” Shane replied. “Stay and let me love you back.”
Ilya nodded, once, sharply, as though sealing a pact.
Later, when they lay tangled together under the sheets, the lights off and the city reduced to distant hum, Shane traced gentle, absent patterns over Ilya’s thigh, careful and reverent, not avoiding the scars but not making them a spectacle either, as though they were simply another part of the map of the man he adored.
“They will fade more,” Ilya murmured drowsily.
“Maybe,” Shane said. “But even if they don’t, they’re just proof you survived.”
Ilya was quiet at that, his breathing evening out, and Shane lay awake a while longer, listening, counting each inhale and exhale as though committing them to memory.
He knew love was not a cure, that it could not erase twelve-year-old boys in silent bathrooms or fathers with fists and venomous words, but he also knew it was a force, stubborn and relentless, and he intended to wield it with everything he had.
In the darkness, he tightened his hold just slightly, and Ilya shifted closer in his sleep, as though even unconscious he understood that he was not alone, that the world, for all its cruelty, still held one place where he was wanted exactly as he was.
And for now, that was enough.