Chapter Text
He woke up with his throat wrong.
Not badly wrong (not strep, not the deep-seated rawness that came before something serious), but wrong enough that swallowing had a texture to it, a drag, inflamed tissue catching on itself. His head had the preliminary weight of congestion that hadn't fully settled yet, pressure building behind his cheekbones in the slow purposeful way of something staking a claim. His nose had started, minimally, and when he breathed in through it he felt the slight resistance, the narrowing.
He ran his tongue over the inside of his cheek.
Definitely a cold. Beginning stages, maybe a day in, still in the part where it had declared itself but hadn't fully committed to how bad it intended to be. He had had this cold before, or close enough to recognize it. The same progression every time: throat first, then the sinuses, then the chest if he was unlucky, then the two-week aftermath of residual congestion that he always underestimated and always suffered through. He knew what was coming. He had played through worse than what was coming. He did a quick inventory, assigned severity (low, manageable, a nuisance), and got up.
He dressed in the dark without waking Shane, or thought he hadn't, and came downstairs to find Shane already at the kitchen island with his coffee and his phone, fully in practice gear, which meant he'd been up for at least forty minutes and had been trying to be quiet about it.
Shane looked at him. One look, about a second.
"I moved my skate," Shane said, and looked back at his phone.
Ilya stopped.
"You moved it?"
"Pushed it to noon." Shane turned the phone face-down. "You can still do yours if you want. I'm staying."
Shane Hollander had a standing 7 AM voluntary skate that he attended with the consistency of someone who did not regard the word voluntary as meaningfully different from mandatory, which was to say he attended it the way he attended everything: completely. In four years of sharing a city and then sharing a house, Ilya had watched him miss it twice. Once for a funeral. Once for a weather delay at O'Hare that Shane had brought up with residual irritation for roughly three weeks, which was about two weeks and six days longer than the situation warranted. He treated optional practices as opportunities and opportunities as obligations and obligations as non-negotiable facts of his existence, and he had missed this one a total of twice.
"I have a cold," Ilya said. "Maybe."
"Yeah." Shane got up, crossed to the counter, got the second mug (Ilya's mug, the large one), and poured water from the kettle that had already been heating. He'd had it ready. He put it on the counter in front of Ilya's stool with a tea bag already in it. Earl Grey, not the green tea Shane kept buying and sometimes set in front of Ilya with the optimism of a man who had not yet accepted that the answer was going to be no.
Ilya looked at the mug.
"You don't need to stay," he said.
"I know," Shane said, and sat back down.
The tea was too hot. Ilya sat down and put both hands around the mug anyway, because his hands were slightly cold and the warmth was good, and his throat pulsed with each swallow of nothing, and the pressure behind his cheekbones sat there doing its preliminary work. Shane had his coffee and his phone and the focused attention of someone moving through a Tuesday morning without performing anything or making a production of staying home. He was just there, in the kitchen, in the grey Ottawa morning light coming flat off the snow outside.
Ilya looked at him for a moment.
Shane was scrolling through something, the coffee halfway gone, the particular settled quality of a man who had already run his schedule, made his adjustments, and arrived at the place he intended to be. He had, as far as Ilya could determine, no agenda beyond this: sit here, drink coffee, let Ilya drink his tea.
The tea cooled.
Ilya drank it.
Shane refilled it without being asked, from the kettle he'd kept on low. He sat back down. He did not mention having kept the kettle on low.
The cold declared itself fully over the following three days in the standard order: throat first, then the sinuses dropping in like they'd been waiting for an invitation, then the chest arriving on day three with a tightness across the sternum and a cough that showed up at two in the morning and stuck around. Ilya had had this cold before or close enough. He knew the approximate shape of it. He knew it was not serious and knew it was going to be miserable and knew those two things could be simultaneously true.
What he did not know, and what the next several days would establish with some clarity, was whether Shane had a tolerance limit.
He tested this without exactly planning to. It was more that the testing was the natural behavior of a man who had spent enough of his life understanding that care operated within tolerances, that the tolerances had edges, and that the edges existed whether or not anyone acknowledged them. He had learned to read for the edges. He was reading for them now.
Day one: the blanket situation on the couch required four separate adjustments. The bedroom blanket was right but was in the bedroom. The couch blanket was not right - too light, not the problem it would have been if he were simply cold but a problem now because he was alternating between cold and too warm and he needed weight, not temperature. Both blankets together was too warm in a way that became apparent after about twenty minutes of lying under them. The bedroom blanket alone on the couch was, ultimately, correct. Shane carried it back and forth all four times without a word, without a sigh, without any of the small physical signals that communicated resentment, not an extra beat before he stood up, no particular quality to the silence that followed. He picked up the blanket and carried it and sat back down.
Day two: the soup was wrong. It was a reasonable soup: clear broth, soft vegetables, the one Shane made every time either of them was sick, calibrated and correct. Ilya ate half of it and said it wasn't right. He was aware, even as he said it, that this was not a coherent complaint. The soup was fine. His sense of taste was flattened from the congestion and everything had the same approximate quality of nothing and what he meant was that nothing would have been the right soup. He said it anyway and watched Shane's face.
Shane looked at the bowl for a moment. He took it to the kitchen. He came back twenty minutes later with something darker, a stronger base, ginger in it and something that might have been miso, that smelled good enough when he set it down to momentarily clear Ilya's left nostril. Ilya ate all of it. He did not say anything about it being better.
Day three: Ilya decided he felt well enough to shovel the front walk. This was not true. He had arrived at this conclusion through a process that involved being on the couch for most of two days and being bored and the particular restless discomfort of a body that was sick but not sick enough to stay still. He got as far as the hall. He stood in his socks and looked at his boots and bent slightly to reach them and his sinuses registered the movement with a spike of pressure behind his left eye that was significant enough to make him stop.
He straightened up.
Shane was in the kitchen doorway with his arms crossed, not having said a word, not moving, not going anywhere.
Ilya looked at him. Shane looked back. The expression was a specific one in Ilya's internal catalog: I have already decided how this ends and I am prepared to wait for you to arrive at the same conclusion. Take your time.
Ilya went back to the couch.
"Fine," he said.
"Okay." Shane came and sat down and opened his laptop and angled the screen toward Ilya. "Pick something."
"I picked last time."
"You fell asleep during it."
"I saw enough of it."
"What happened at the end."
Ilya considered. "The fish. Something with the fish."
"You have no idea what happened."
"The fish was fine. I could tell." He pulled the blanket up. "What happened to the fish."
"I don't know, I wasn't paying attention either."
"Useless," Ilya said. "Both of us."
Shane handed him the laptop. Ilya took it and scrolled through the available options with the detached judgment of a man who found most streaming content to be mediocre and was going to choose something anyway. He landed on a nature documentary about bird migration, which turned out to be better than expected, and fell asleep around the forty-minute mark and woke up when it was dark and Shane had made dinner. The dinner was the right soup.