Work Text:
September, 2003
The last thing Ilya remembers his mother ever saying to him is ‘you’ve got to get out. You have got to get out, Ilyushenka. This land will eat you alive.’
She cups his face in her hands as though she can hold his softness like milk, contain it, keep it safe before the world breaks the glass of him and he loses it to the rough sandpaper city. There are tears in her eyes, watery blue like his are, the clearest springtime sky, and she whispers the words like a prayer. Kisses him thrice on the forehead. Takes the necklace she has worn in every memory of his and drapes it around his slender, still smaller than her neck. Господи помилуй, she begs the promise from the only Father she has left, and she hands him his freshly washed uniform, his neatly packed gear bag, and she sends him to practice.
Later that day, when he finds her tucked into bed like an unrousable sleep and touches the distant, porcelain cold of her skin, he thinks he understands what she means.
Svetlana and Sergei fly back for the funeral; it’s the first time Ilya has seen them in just about a year. He had not been able to make the trip for Sergei’s final game in Boston, none of them had, though there had been tentative plans in place before the attacks that left even those from across the globe afraid of the air travel. Instead he had set an alarm for some ungodly hour and crawled free of his blankets to watch a terrible internet stream with a three-minute delay and cheered loud enough to rouse the household when the lights in the arena dimmed and the Bears allowed Sergei a final skate to the box that had been his throne for over a decade now.
That afternoon, Irina had begun making plans for Sergei’s homecoming.
She had been devastated, in the politest of terms, when she was informed that her friend had left Russia. Had disappeared in the night like a criminal with four others of his team, forsaking the national pride they had worn as a uniform for the promise of an American paycheck. Ilya had never known of the years in the beginning, when even the thought of her old friend would send Irina into one of her absences, but Alexei recalled them well enough to warn his brother to be careful when he first showed an interest in skating.
Eventually the rift had mended. Or, had mended enough that Sergei had begun to bring his wife and young daughter, American born and American brash and loud in a way that Ilya could only aspire to be – she was so loudly herself, unapologetic and unafraid, and when she stayed in the mausoleum of his childhood home she refused to cave to the silence. – for visits in the off-season. A week here or there, to start, but then months at a time as his professional career started to wane. Long enough for Irina to forget that he had sworn Russia had no meaning to him any longer.
It had reopened only recently, insurmountable, when Sergei had left Boston for good, but not to come home.
For Toronto, of all places.
Svetlana and Sergei let themselves through the sorrow-splintered entrance to what was once a family home, and Ilya’s father shows his first emotion in days. “Нет,” he snarls, face white with anger and eyes red with grief. “Ни за что.”
Ilya couldn’t recall an exact moment in his life when he realized that his parents despised each other as much as they loved each other; it had simply always been so. Grigori doted on his younger wife as much as he demeaned her, and Irina obeyed him nearly as well as she openly baited and berated him. They would scream at each other for hours, a symphony of two people equally unhappy on their own left to fester in shared misery, and Ilya had long suspected that his father would end their arguments with his fists behind closed doors. He was certainly conscious of how his mother would start them much the same.
Grigori was obsessed with the idea that Irina was cheating on him. Sergei was, despite living some four-and-a-half thousand miles away, the usual suspect; it was something of their shared history, childhood friends who had been, before respective marriages arranged by parents and their politics, quite close. It was perhaps why, despite being his mother’s oldest friend and a famous-enough name in their social circle, Sergei had never quite held any sort of welcome in her husband’s home.
“I didn’t come to fight with you,” and Sergei is twenty years younger than Grigori and six inches taller, and broad in the way that comes from use rather than show. If it came down to a fight between them it would not fall into the favor of the man who had relied on brutality and a badge to defend himself. “I did not come here for you at all.” And then, with a strangled noise that might be his name, he pulls Ilya into the first hug he’s received since his mother died.
He has not shed a tear since he found her.
At first it had been the shock of it, the feeling of wrongness that settled under his skin the closer he crept to her bedside, the stillness of the room at odds with the way his hands began to shake inexplicably. It had been too cold in her room, despite the daylight; the window had been left cracked like she had laid herself down among the scent of the flowers just beyond; the same flowers he had woven, lopsided and ragged, into a wreath for her. And then, after the shock had worn off and the brittle reality had set in, he had refused to cry because he was afraid.
Ilya has his mother’s curls and his mother’s chin. He has a bit of his father in the set of his jaw, that stubbornness, and the slope of his shoulders. Carries himself like his father too, like he’s the biggest one in the room even though he so rarely is. But just as his brother is their father’s likeness as much as he is his legacy, Ilya is Irina’s. He bears her love and her loss and, he thinks, a little bit her weakness too.
His mother’s oldest friend wraps him in a hug that feels like he’s not alone in missing her, and he feels the sting of tears in his eyes. He has his mother’s eyes, too, chipped ice and cloudless skies – Icarus eyes.
“Дяденька,” he gasps around the breath that he has not been able to take in days now, caught in his chest along with the rest of it, the tears and the too many conflicting emotions – he’s angry, he thinks, that she left him. He’s angrier at himself for thinking that. He’s halfway wishing that she had taken him too because he’s not sure how he’s meant to face this world without the one who brought him into it. And throughout all of that, woven through him as much as a heartbeat, is the sharp severed nerve feeling of some vital piece of him, gone forever.
He does not cry then, but he gets closer to it than he has before. Sergei seems to understand because his face is equally dry when he pulls away. His eyes are equally damp.
“It is good to see you,” he says quietly. Gently. He speaks to Ilya the way his mother used to – like she was protecting him. His Russian is still flawless, despite his many years away, but there’s a cadence to it that feels foreign somehow. A precision. Crisp sounding, like a newly ironed shirt. No longer worn soft and smooth. “But also I wish we were not seeing each other like this.”
He hasn’t cried since his mother died, and he’s barely spoken. When the hours had passed and Grigori had finally come looking for the two members of his household he mostly wished were absent, Ilya had been nearly as still and as silent as Irina had been. He was still in the clothes he had worn home from practice, skates slung across his shoulders, and had sunk to the floor against the edge of her bed. At some point he had moved the closest of her lifeless hand to the top of his head, as she had often done to soothe him to sleep.
Instead, he nods his acknowledgement. His agreement. And then, opening his mouth for the second time in days, he is shocked to find that all that will emerge is a broken sounding sob.
Grigori barks at him to будь Сдержанный without turning to look, eyes fixed on the unlit fireplace and one hand clenched around a seemingly bottomless glass of vodka as they have remained all day now (the other hides in the pocket of his trousers, far from prying eyes that might see the way that it shakes), but does not interfere when both Sergei and Svetlana go to his side. When they take his hands in theirs, and begin to whisper their platitudes. On the sofa by the fireplace, stiff and silent like a well-trained hunting dog, Alexei watches the tableau that plays out across the room with something akin to longing.
None of them have, or had, found the courage to look to the parlor; Irina will haunt the space for far longer than these three days.
Irina is laid to her eternal rest on an otherwise beautiful September morning, a grove of aspen trees standing in lieu of the bereaved.
Among the few attendees is her husband, face scoured of anything that might betray a lack of stoicism. Of restraint. He had snapped at his younger son to be composed and held himself to a similar standard; there was no room for imperfections with his position. At his side, trapped in the too-small space between childhood and fully grown, is her eldest son. Other than the memories there is very little that they share: Alexei is large like his father, large in a way that feels fragile, and has the same coloring, the same callousness. The same ambition, and the same inclination toward a more sedentary life. A few of the officials from Grigori’s work – Alexei’s work now soon, too. He would be following the only path that had ever been afforded him. – stood behind them.
Ilya stood with Sergei. With Svetlana. Stood just removed enough to make it clear which side he would have stood on, had the lines ever had the time to be drawn. Had Irina ever been given a different choice of leaving.
After the ceremony they forgo the pominki – there is no mercy, Grigori says simply, for those who take their lives. It is the first, and only, time he has admitted such. The official story is an accident, a terrible accident, a mixture perhaps of some food or some drink and a pill or two too many. A weakened constitution, or a previously undiscovered birth defect. Any combination of misfortune events leading to this: a young mother, tragically gone. Her devoted husband, left to raise strong men in her memory.
Instead, he returns to work, and he brings Alexei with him. And Ilya returns to the ice.
“You’re good,” Sergei tells him afterwards, sounding a little bit awed and rather insultingly surprised. He had accompanied Ilya to practice simply because he had not yet found the strength to leave him alone, not in the house where he so frequently was, but had stayed to watch when it became quite clear, and quite quickly, that the level of play from this boy who was not yet a teenager, let alone a man, was in a class far beyond what could have been predicted. The praise, though seemingly minimal, carried the weight of a man who had played in the national league of two nations now and won the highest honors in both, and who now made his living recognizing talent exactly like this. “Better than I was at your age.”
For one brief blink of a moment, a single flash of a snapshot, he sees who Ilya is beyond the sadness that chokes him like a collar, the grief he carries as a series of stones that sometimes drag him under. He tosses the curls that are plastered sweat-dark and heavy from his brow and his face tugs into a lopsided smile, pink lips tugging in a way that looks like a reflection of what Irina’s had been. “Yes,” he agrees with a flash of bright teeth and a glint of mischief in his eyes. “Much better.”
And Sergei goes to laugh only to find that he cannot – it is playful banter, is the innocent chirping of the game and of friends, but it is also painfully true. Ilya is, quite simply, one of the best players that he has seen outside of the career veterans. With the right training, and the right opportunities?
“You are good,” Svetlana agrees; she has been her father’s shadow at every hockey event since she was a toddler, has cut her teeth and a good portion of her personality on hockey. Sergei might love the sport but she lives and breathes it, feels it in her blood, and while she’s played with a few girls’ U12 teams in the past there just aren’t the same avenues open to her as there would be had she been the Vetrov son. Her watchful, constant presence at the rink is something so familiar to Sergei that he forgets, when Ilya startles, it might not be to others.
In the handful of days that they have spent together – and they had met before, many times, but as children. As an extension of their parents, rather than their own selves. It was not until their previous visit, just over three months long that summer that Ilya turned eleven, that they had formed a true friendship. In a matter of days Ilya had run the entire race of the spectrum from a youthful crush to adolescent opposition to something warm and safe and familiar, like a favorite sweater. – the two have not spoken a single word to the other. They have also, however, been in constant physical contact of some kind barring this single session with his team on the ice. “You could be great.”
The small scrap of sunshine that has found its way through the cloudy blue-grey of Ilya’s gaze dims, and Sergei watches as Ilya gives in to the pull of the sadness that dogs his retreat further from them.
That night, Svetlana slips from her bed and tip-toes across the hall into Ilya’s. He is already awake, probably has not fallen asleep, but he does not otherwise react to the familiar intrusion. Instead, he lets her curl behind him like a cat and slide both her arms around his waist.
“You will be great,” she says against the curls at the back of his neck, the baby soft ones that hide like a secret beneath the many layers of him. Her Russian is not as good as her father’s, drawn thin and brittle from her distance to the culture – her mother is American and she is American and her schooling has been, until recently, American. She speaks English like a native, Boston accent thick and easy from her lips, and though he would call her Russian fluent he would not always call it effortless. When she presses the word – so similar to what she had said this afternoon aside from one glaring difference that soothes the riot of darkness and self-loathing that it has brewed. She speaks now in a future tense not of possibility, but of promise. – against the back of his neck, he realizes that perhaps she simply did not know the difference.
“The greatest,” he corrects, sleepily, into his pillow. They both pretend that he is smiling as he says it.
She hmms a soft little sound of agreement, of acknowledgement, and tugs him closer; she feels the slow release of tension from his spine as it happens, and his breathing hitches once before deepening into that of true relaxation. A few minutes pass of him playing with her fingers tangled with his own, and then she squeezes for his attention. “Where is your heart?” she asks him, apropos of nothing, in the quiet of a bedroom frozen prematurely in its childhood.
He tries to roll over, to look at her, but cannot. Between the blankets and the way she has secured herself to him like a backpack, he is trapped. “Right here?” he asks, suddenly unsure of the very knowledge that he previously knew to be correct, and brings her hand up with his to tap at his chest.
She laughs, sharp and loud and unapologetic, before quickly stifling it in his pillow. “When you play, Lyulya.” And he still does not get it. Even on the ice his heart remains the same: behind his ribs. He wonders if this is another of those moments where she does not have the correct word for things, like perhaps there is an American meaning to the word that doesn’t translate well, and he understands that. Russian is a language as vast and nuanced as its nation, multiple words for concepts that are too similar to be described as separate from each other. Shades of the same color, like a painting. He shrugs, moving her, to show that he is unsure, and she sighs. “You play with your whole body,” she tells him. Speaks from a place of knowledge, of experience. Like the coach her father has become. “But you do not play with your heart.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works.” As far as he knows, a heart is for pumping blood and for breaking. Nothing more.
She makes another little hmm, this time addressing the chasm of loss that has torn his wide and open like a liar’s smile, the hundreds of tiny jagged pieces he falls to when he falls into bed each night, before she presses a kiss to his shoulder. “Maybe one day.”
After the ninth day’s panikhida, Sergei tells Ilya that it is time for him to go; he says exactly that. “Ilyusha,” he often addresses the still largely silent boy who haunts his mother’s memory with some variant of familiarity. Ilya is reserved for his brother, for their father, bricking the distance between them with formalities and with a blind eye to the emotions that they have discarded only for the youngest member of their household to trip over. “It’s time for you to go.”
Often the best way to coax a word or two from him is to confuse him. To surprise him. To shake loose the stones in his chest and allow him to exist for one moment unburdened. “Go?” he repeats, a question.
He and Svetlana have mostly slept – or not slept, but gone to bed at least. Sergei is more than aware of the frequent nighttime exchanges of their bedrooms, but has not found cause to put a stop to it. They are children still, and have been some measure of intertwined since they were only toddlers; there is nothing inappropriate to their intimacy. Not yet, at least. – through the arguments that he and Grigori have engaged in like a warzone this past week or so. His confusion makes sense here. “Your father knows that you will be a star player some day. He wants—”
He does not want. That is the problem. He wants the rewards of having a famous hockey player for a son, the power and the prestige and the riches, but he does not want the responsibility of raising him to be one. Especially not one like Ilya, too much like his mother, who feels everything too greatly.
“There are better chances for you,” he does not only mean on the ice. “Outside of Russia.”
Ilya blinks at him. His eyes are wide and hollow, like the frozen tundras; not cold, only empty. Grey, like a sunless sky. “He is,” and his voice cracks here, a different sort of noise than the navigation of puberty. It is sharper, like something is breaking. “He is sending me away?” He looks in that moment, small and lost and so close to sorrow, like Irina had when Sergei first met her. The same hollow stare, the same halo of curls, the same nervous hands tugging the same chain around his neck; he is already so much like her that Sergei knows, knows as Irina had known, that he will share the same end if they do not find him safety.
“He is sending you with me,” he stresses. And then, faltering, “if you would like to, that is.”
He frames it as a choice because Ilya has none.
The quiet stretches. Hangs. Pulls thin and delicate like a spider’s web, caught between them. “To Canada?” It is a strange and foreign land to him, a strange culture and customs – it is in most ways the opposite of what he knows. He has already lost nearly everything that mattered most to him, and this move would remove the last bits that remained. The way his voice catches on the word, wavers, already feels like a refusal. Like one thing too many to rest upon his still-young shoulders. And then, when Sergei has resigned himself to finding a new way to fail his oldest friend, the clouds part and Ilya beams at him. “I will be the best thing you have ever done in the NHL.”
Somehow, despite the sting against his two Stanley Cups, he thinks Ilya might be correct.
The local U13 season starts only a few weeks after he arrives in the city, and he asks Sergei if he will be allowed to participate – his English is abysmal and his paperwork has been stalled across a series of desks for eight days now as the government of Canada attempts to legally define the grey area between a billet family and a legal guardian, but it is the first thing he has asked for himself in ages. He joins a team of suburban boys who are playing their second season together, most of whom also attend the same school, and spends a few weeks feeling as though he enjoyed the game more back in Russia.
He is still the best on his team. It’s just that now he doesn’t have the language to enjoy it.
“I love hockey,” Svetlana tells him after he has failed to score a shot against Sergei for the second night in a row. There is a pond in their neighborhood that freezes in the winter, and they often drag a net down to practice on. It does not chafe, having Sergei block his shots like this – he might be retired now but he was, within the last few years even, one of the best goalies in the league. Boston had retired his number, had hung his jersey in their rafters and his name in their Hall of Fame after his final game. Ilya is perhaps the most talented twelve year old boy in the North Toronto Hockey League, but he is also, and most importantly, twelve years old.
He sticks his tongue out at her, tired and defensive. “I am good at hockey.”
He is. Very good, current two-day scoring drought notwithstanding. It was a known quantity, something he could depend on now that every other part of his surrounding world had changed: Canada was nothing like Russia, but Ilya was still good at hockey. Would only get better.
Instead of laughing at him, instead of shoving his sweaty face away from her, Svetlana instead examines Ilya like she’s uncovered some secret. “But you don’t love it?”
It feels like too much of a betrayal, admitting that he never has. That he took up skates first because it got his mother out of her memories, out of her head, and later because it got him out of their house. That he began playing hockey because that was the only option available for him on the ice, and stayed with it because he was good enough at it to earn the scraps of his father’s more decent attentions. That hockey is, and was, and always has been merely a means to an end for him. Feels like a betrayal to admit that to her, who lives and breathes and bleeds the sport she will never play professionally because her mother feels like she is too pretty for it.
Feels even worse to admit that, other than his mother, he’s not sure he’s ever loved anything at all.
“I love,” he scuffs the blade of his skate against an imperfection in the ice, shaves a layer of it with a satisfying, rasping shhk. It’s as close to the truth as feels safe. “The freedom of hockey.”
She stands, limbs long and graceful, and tugs him along with her; she skates like she does not know how to be anywhere else than on the ice, smooth as breathing, and she does not let go of his hand until he has fallen into pace with her. “It’s okay, Lyulya,” she addresses words that he has not had the courage to speak to her, and he might love her just a little bit for it. For that, and so much more. “You don’t need to love hockey to be good at it.” And then, slyly, “or even to be great at it.”
He shoves at her then, but barely manages to disrupt her. She’s not as good of a skater as he is but she’s very close, the closest he’s met, and there’s something that sparks in him whenever they are on the ice together.
“But,” she warns as they walk back to the house later. Ilya has his skates slung across one shoulder and the bag of their gear across the other, and Svetlana uses his stick to catch at his ankles and try to trip him. Behind them Sergei snorts a laugh and calls for her to try from another angle. “Without that love? That heart? You will only ever be great.”
He disregards Svetlana’s words easily, and does not think of them again for nearly six months.
And then, on an otherwise unremarkable Saturday afternoon at the end of March, Sergei takes him to watch an exhibition game that no one from his team has qualified for. They drive all the way to Kingston, the longest car trip that Ilya has taken in his life – and it is under three hours, which Svetlana tells him is really not long at all, but the only times Ilya left the city back in Russia had been by train. He finds the experience of the American road trip, though they are in Canada now, boring by the thirty minute mark. – and watch as the best of the U13-U15s under the parent umbrella of the OHL play a series of games wherein they do not keep score. “How do they win?” he asks, or hopes he does, in the English that still slips off his tongue like an eel, impossible to catch.
“They don’t,” Sergei explains in Russian. “At this age, it’s just about getting seen. Becoming known. They’re trying to get drafted to an OHL team in a few years, and this is where the scouts learn who they are.” And then, seeing the way that Ilya’s hands have knotted themselves around the strings of his hoodie, he nudges their shoulders together. “Next year, they will learn who you are,” and Ilya smiles at him, shyly.
The game begins and, despite their young age, Ilya cannot but think that he is better than any of the players on the ice. That is, until, a slip of a player hits the ice like a lightning bolt and does not stop moving until he’s scored two goals, and nearly gotten an assist.
He moves like he is the ice, rather than simply being on it. And while he’s probably the smallest of the players in the game he might also be the bravest; one of the defensive line catches him against the glass behind the box and he lets it happen, slips free at the bottom like he’s found a trapdoor, and it’s like artwork all its own the way he steals the puck and, in the ensuing scrum, dekes it back around to shoot a textbook five-hole that leaves at least three opposing players looking like they’ve been standing still. Beneath his visor there’s a small knife of a smile, something sharp and pleased, and he hits a few backwards cross pulls that seem effortless. Almost joyful.
In that moment, he finally understands what Svetlana has been trying to tell him: you do not need to love hockey to be good at it. Only to be the best.