Chapter Text
Ilya Rozanov first sees Death at his mama’s bedside.
Death is dressed in all black, gentle fabrics hanging loosely from its frame. The storybooks tell him that Смерть с косой is a woman, death with a scythe, but this figure is too tall, too broad, to be a woman. There is no weapon, just empty hands and an empty expression.
He won’t remember this for a long, long time.
He’s home early. He’ll never remember why- he was supposed to be at practice, he knows this much, but maybe he forgot something or maybe it ended early or maybe there was just a feeling, something wriggling and dark that tells him he needs to go home. He’ll never remember.
The house is dark when he gets back. This is normal, because no one is home except for mama and she likes to spend her time in the kitchen, where the big windows let in natural light and make her curls glow golden underneath the sun.
Mama isn’t in the kitchen, though. This is becoming more normal. Mama says she’s tired, and Ilya can see it in her face, the way her smile comes slower and slower and the way her hands shake when Papa comes home. She’s stopped going to his games, and it- hurts, a little bit, but Ilya shakes it off, because she still holds his hands and kisses his forehead when he comes home.
He doesn’t remember why he goes upstairs. Maybe to fetch something, maybe to see where mama is. Her door is at the end of the hall, and his is the first one, right next to the stairs. He wanted that one because it was the easiest to sneak in and out, and mama probably knows why, but she let him have it anyway.
Her door is ajar.
Ilya doesn’t remember walking over. The hallway is dark, so he turns on the lamp. It flickers. Dust floats, and he resists the urge to sneeze.
He does remember opening the door, the tired creak of the hinges, and the way the lamplight crawled, slowly, over the floorboards and up the bed and onto his mother’s pale, stiff hand, still grasping weakly at an orange pill bottle.
The light crawls, and crawls, and illuminates the shoes of a stranger.
Ilya doesn’t understand at first. He sees a strange man hovering over his mama’s body, one hand placed in her hair and the other resting limply at his side. There’s a stranger, he’s touching mama, she’s not moving-
Ilya screams.
The stranger doesn’t startle like someone guilty would. His shoulders drop, and he doesn’t look up even as Ilya’s screams devolve into sobs as his mama keeps lying still, mama, mama, please, please, why aren’t you getting up, mama, please, there’s a stranger, and then, suddenly, the man’s head whips up and he stares disbelivingly at Ilya, and Ilya’s choked sobs- cut out, for a moment.
He doesn’t know this man. He knows he doesn’t, because he’s never met anyone with dark hair and dark eyes other than Svetlana, and even then, this man is different from her. His eyes are so unfathomably deep, whereas hers are bright and clear, and the light spilling in from the hallway catches strangely on his form. His hair drifts around his face like there’s a breeze, even though mama’s window has been locked shut for months.
They stare at eachother, Ilya’s hiccuping sobs and the man’s blank expression.
His hand stays in his mama’s hair.
Ilya will remember this scene, stark even through his tears, for the rest of his life.
The man twitches, suddenly, gaze snapping to somewhere behind him, and then Alexei’s hand wraps around his arm to drag him out of the room.
“Lyosha, there’s a stranger, there’s a stranger,” Ilya hiccups, because why isn’t anyone doing anything, that stranger hurt his mama, and then paramedics spill into the room and Ilya is wrapped into Alexei’s arms and when he finally fights his way free to look into the room again, the man is gone, and all that’s left is his mama’s body.
No one believes him. Papa hits him across the face, and his ring cuts a welt into his cheek. Ilya doesn’t move, even as it grows hot and swells.
“You are a man of the Rozanov household,” he says coldly. “I will not have you spreading lies.”
Ilya turns to Alexei, because Alexei was also there; he has to have seen the stranger. Ilya looks up at him, pleading-
And Alexei turns away.
—
The man haunts his nightmares.
Ilya sees him pulling his mama away from him, her beautiful dress slipping like water through his little fingers. The man’s grip on her wrist bleaches the color from her skin until her whole body turns white, skin and hair and eyes, and she disappears into smoke. The man is left standing where she used to be, watching impassively as Ilya cries and cries and cries.
When he wakes, he wakes alone. No stranger, no mama. He clutches her cross tight to his chest, the cold metal cutting into his palm, and closes his eyes.
—
He doesn’t see the man again until years later. He’s lost definition in Ilya’s dreams, softening from a haunting figure to a drifting shade, until some nights it’s just mama walking away on her own, ignoring his pleas. Don’t leave me, mama, please, please, I’m scared. Don’t leave me alone.
Ilya is fifteen, and hockey is all he has left. He’s the earliest to practice and the last to leave, something the coaches call inspiring and Grigori calls insufficient. He’s loud and mean and the best out of the entire Moscow team, even though he’s younger than all of them. It makes him friends and even more enemies. He doesn’t care, because as long as he’s the best he can keep playing, and that frantic rush of adrenaline and ice keeps his mind quiet just as well as sex and cigarettes.
Practice ran long that day. Punishment for the last game, even though Ilya scored three goals and an assist. He takes it without comment and doesn’t comment when Coach rages at one of the second liners for being slow and weak, unable to take a fucking check without crying. Is that how you represent Mother Russia?
It’s always dark when he exits the arena, but today it’s nearing 10 p.m. Ilya slings his equipment bag over one shoulder. Usually, he’ll listen to music on his walk back, something Svetlana suggests in a way that’s more of a command because she always gets mad at him for not knowing her favorite songs when they go out.
In mid-February, the snow is thick and permanent, coating everything in a dull white blanket. It snowed last night, and it’s forecasted to snow again. Any tracks Ilya leaves will be gone by morning, like he was never there.
He goes to put in his earbuds, but before he can select anything, a strained whimper echoes out from the space behind the rink.
Ilya freezes.
He turns his head. Waits for a moment.
There’s another choked-off whine.
The smart thing to do would be to walk away. Grigori will be expecting him, and it’s always worse if he’s late.
There’s another sound, plaintive and scared.
Ilya quietly gets his hockey stick out of his equipment bag, leaving it on the steps of the rink, before slipping into the alleyway behind the building.
He can’t see anything for a moment. It’s already night, and the alleyway isn’t lit at all, so it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust.
But when he does, there’s no injured person, or even an assailant. There’s not a person at all. Just-
Ilya lowers his stick and scrambles to the puppy lying in the snow, shaking violently, each breath coming out in a wheezing exhale. The rest of its litter is already still- the mother slumped at an angle Ilya knows is unnatural. Her blood is frozen to her fur, icing her to the dirty floor.
It’s just this one, pink and wriggly with snow already coating its skin. Its eyes are frosted shut.
Ilya stares, and stares, before kneeling and carefully cradling it with shaking hands. It lets out a tiny wail, trembling in the palms of his hands, and before he knows it, he’s tearing out of the alleyway, hockey stick shoved carelessly beneath his arm and bag thrown over his shoulder.
What the fuck am I doing, he thinks, holding the puppy to his chest. His hands are shaking, his heart is pounding out of his chest, and tears are burning at the back of his throat. He won’t cry, he fucking won’t, he hasn’t cried since his mama died and he won’t fucking cry over a stray that won’t even last the night-
He takes the right instead of the left that would take him home. Alexei would tell him to leave the thing outside, and Grigori would probably-
The puppy whines again. Ilya scrambles to a stop outside of Sveta’s house, knocking frantically on the door, and hopes and prays she’s home.
Despite their efforts, the puppy grows weaker and weaker, and Ilya watches it helplessly. He’s holding it in his lap, Sveta’s warmest blankets wrapped around it, gentle cloth baths with warm water and Ilya’s shaking hands, and it’s still not fucking working.
“Ilyusha,” Sveta says quietly. When he doesn’t say anything back, she sits next to him instead of making him leave and laces their fingers together. Her head rests on his shoulder, curls soft against his cheek.
He leans into her.
Time passes.
Sveta falls asleep, eventually, her hand falling limp in his.
The puppy wheezes weakly, its breath slowing and becoming more and more strained. “мой щенок,” Ilya says. It’s barely more than a breath. “У тебя всё получится. пожалуйста, пожалуйста.”
It’s useless. He knows it’s useless.
It’s so small. It's still got no fur, its eyes never even opened, he thinks hysterically, and he’s about to do something drastic- like cry, maybe, even though he hasn’t cried since mama died, or maybe scream and wake up Sveta and then she can hit him for being a dramatic fucking child-
“I’m sorry.”
His head whips up, and there, sitting cross-legged in front of him, is the stranger.
Ilya stares. The stranger looks back. He seems- shocked, almost, to have gotten a reaction, even though he’s the one who spoke to Ilya in the first place.
The shock quickly smooths out into something quiet again, and his eyes drop to Ilya’s lap.
The puppy. Ilya clutches it tighter, even though- even though what? It’s already dying. It’s already going somewhere Ilya can’t follow.
The man’s eyes drift up to Ilya’s again.
The same deep, endless well as three years ago, and Ilya-
“You killed her,” he doesn’t mean to say, but he does mean to say, and it comes out choked and wrong. The man doesn’t even flinch.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. Empty, flat tone, like Ilya losing his mama was nothing, like it doesn’t hurt like crawling over broken glass, like he isn’t fucking hollow-
“You can’t kill the puppy,” he snaps, and oh god, oh fuck, he is going to cry in front of this fucking stranger that killed his mama and is somehow here, in Sveta’s bedroom, three years later and looking exactly the fucking same. “You can’t take it too-” Tears choke his voice, and they finally spill over his cheeks, dripping down to his chin and falling onto the puppy.
The puppy-
The man shakes his head.
Ilya didn’t even hear its last breath.
He just- stares, for a moment. It’s so still, so quiet. The air is so, so heavy in his lungs.
Ilya is frozen; he can’t move, even as the man rises to his knees. The man reaches closer- Ilya flinches, but he can’t fucking move, he can’t-
The man brushes his fingers gently over the puppy’s head. “She didn’t suffer,” the man says quietly. “She wasn’t in pain. She felt warm with you.”
He withdraws, fluid, and sits back where he was. His hands are folded neatly in his lap, and he keeps looking at Ilya, looking, looking, looking.
Ilya doesn’t know how long he sits there, eyes fixed to the floor and leaking tears, but when sunlight begins to bleed through the curtains, and Sveta stirs, the man has disappeared.
He can feel the brush of fingertips against his cheek, cold.
—
He’s sixteen, at his mama’s grave. He’s brought flowers, and he sits and says nothing. There’s nothing to say. All he has to talk about is hockey, and she knows everything already.
When he gets up to leave, it’s already sunset. He adjusts the flowers silently and kisses her headstone.
There’s another burial happening, far enough that Ilya can only make out vague impressions instead of faces.
He doesn’t know why he watches. He doesn’t understand why he’s compelled to stay, to watch the priest deliver his final blessing, to watch the family pray-
Until he does, and he sees a figure in black kneeling by the grave.
The man looks up.
Even from this far, even while everyone else is blurry, Ilya sees his face in startling clarity.
A blank expression, deep eyes, and-
Freckles.
Ilya stares, and stares, and the man stares back.
The man looks away first, this time, and between blinks, he’s gone.
—
“Do you think there’s a grim reaper?”
He’s high, he’s so high. The walls pulsate, and one of the posters on Sveta’s wall smirks at him before walking into another frame. Sveta takes another drag of the joint before passing it to Ilya again. He takes a hit.
It’s the last time he’ll see her before the International Prospects Cup. He’ll make a name for himself, and he’ll finally be able to leave Russia and play for the NHL. He’ll finally be free. It’s heartbreaking, and also the one thing he desperately needs so badly he could kill for it. He’s told Sveta none of this, and somehow she still knows. It’s probably why she offered him the weed after they finished fucking.
She gives him a look out of the corner of her eye, the one that says I think you’re being stupid, but I’ll humor you anyway. He doesn’t deserve her.
“Maybe,” she says. “My papa used to tell me stories about this soldier who caught Death in a magic bag because he was scared of dying and wouldn’t let it leave.”
Ilya knows that story. He also knows she’s probably making fun of him.
It’s probably the weed that makes him ask again.
“No, like,” he says, and has to wait for Sveta to finish hitting the blunt, “a grim reaper that comes to take souls after they die. A real one.”
Ilya watches the smoke drifting around Sveta’s room. The window is open even though it’s winter because Sveta would kill him if her sheets smelled like weed, so the smoke never lasts. It drifts out into the street and is replaced by the cold bite of snow.
“Maybe,” Sveta says again. Ilya turns to look at her. She raises an eyebrow.
“Is this about your mother?” she asks quietly, and Ilya looks away.
Yes. No. Everything is about her, but this-
He thinks about black eyes and freckles, the pale expanse of hands, gentle against the puppy’s head.
“No,” He says. “Just wondering.”
He puts out the blunt.