Chapter Text
Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea,
Thy tribute wave deliver:
No more by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.
- A Farewell, Alfred Lord Tennyson
For one moment all Shane feels is joy.
Pure, untamed joy that courses through his veins like the rush of an icy river seeking the sea. The next – nothing.
It feels almost surreal, he thinks, how something can change so drastically in such a simple moment; in the time it takes for a hand to tick forward on a clock, or a heart-monitor to spike and descend, the course of a person’s life could change forever.
You never know when fate decides to cut your string short.
The last thing he sees is gorgeous: Ilya’s face, lit up with joy yet slightly overshadowed by the beginnings of panic, found in the crease between his eyebrows and the minute widening of his eyes.
It’s not something anyone other than he would notice, Shane realises, but he can’t think on it any longer as the second in which these thoughts cross his mind has ticked over and he’s met with not Ilya’s troubled expression, but a powerful impact and the startling cool of the ice before his conscious fades.
From then on, he watches the stark picture through a lens.
He watches the game be stopped, and the medical team rushing on to the ice, and his teammates shouting, and the other team shouting, and the fans; some frozen in shock, some screaming, all horrified, and everything’s too overwhelming, or at least it should be, but he’s watching the scene play out as if he’d left his emotions still on the ice with the rest of his body.
And then he sees Ilya.
Ilya drifts unseeing across the ice, limbs motionless and his hockey stick gripped loosely in his hand.
Shane can see him withdrawing himself and putting up a wall, building up a defence before his emotions can be unleashed for others to view and record, but as the stretcher bearing a man beginning to regain consciousness is removed from his sight, a crack forms in his rigid façade as he resists the unbearable pull to follow.