Chapter Text
Ilya returns to Russia that summer, mostly because he feels as though it is expected of him; Sergei asks him if he would like to, as if he has some choice in the matter, but all he knows is that not even Canada is a safe enough distance from his father’s displeasure.
Nothing in the city has changed – same loud, same busy. Same traffic. Same air that smells heavy and thick and smoky. He coughs in the single breath he takes between the airport and the cab, and thinks that he didn’t use to notice how much it tasted like an ashtray here. – but the house is unrecognizable. Familiar paintings or pieces of furniture of his mother’s are missing, as is any mention of her; there is a single portrait of Ilya and Alexei together in the entry, but otherwise the house has been scoured of evidence that anyone else once lived there. It is Ilya’s childhood house, but it is no longer his home.
No longer Alexei’s either, it seems. He comes for dinner that first night and argues with Ilya seven times, and their father only once. After the second course is completed he stands from the table without being excused, and he slams the door on his way out; Polina mentions that she hopes he makes it to his apartment safely.
Polina is perhaps the biggest change of all.
She is about as young as his mother had been, but that is where the similarities both begin and end. Her hair is long and straight and muddy brown, flat and thin like a silk scarf, and her eyes are large and keen and rich hazel. Irina had always been slim, willowy, thin like a memory long before that’s all she was; Polina is shorter, much shorter, and solid in a way that makes her feel real. Feels like someone who has always been here, pressing weight into the floorboards until they have learned her steps in a way the previous occupants were always too scared to. She feels like the rest of the house does now, all pale ivory and polished wood, like she has erased his mother and replaced her with her own image, her own essence. She sits at their fine table like she is appraising it for value, and she looks at the brothers like they are diminishing hers.
She is also, he learns during that first dinner, Grigori’s new wife, wed in a small ceremony of only her family and his work colleagues at the start of the spring.
“That’s…” He cannot think of a single platitude to cover the sharp spike of anger he feels at the way his father has buried every trace of his mother’s existence in the grave alongside her, like she never existed to him at all. If he did not want to keep her he should have let her go. “Congratulations.”
His new stepmother thanks him politely, shrewdly, eyes fixed over his shoulder at the future success that his good favor might bring her; Grigori cuffs him along the back of the skull. “Говори по-русски,” he growls. Polina speaks some English, about as much as Ilya had before he moved to Canada, by virtue of being younger, of enjoying the television shows and movies that trickle in from the West, but Grigori still speaks only a handful of words. It’s simply nothing he’s ever needed, or bothered, to know; his position within the government, such as it is, conducts itself entirely in its native tongue. From the very first slip of a ‘whassup’ to Alexei when Ilya first saw him Grigori had snarled out his rule that the language be banned entirely within his home. He does not want to give them the chance to speak against him.
“Moi pozdravleniya,” he drawls without meaning it, and retires for the night to a bedroom that no longer feels as though it belongs to him. The sheets smell like lavender instead of the clean scented detergent that Lisa, Sergei’s wife, uses and the carpet beneath his feet is too plush. There’s too much empty space when he finally lays down on a mattress that is too wide across and too soft against his spine, too many shadows in the room for the childhood fears to hide in. The blankets are too heavy against his arms and too light across his feet, and when he rolls onto the side that he normally finds the most comfortable he finds that the springs beneath him apply pressure in all of the wrong spots, and it takes nearly half the night tossing and turning to find something comparable.
There’s no Svetlana here to curl into the space behind him. He finds, that first night, that he misses Toronto terribly.
The following week, after Ilya skates circles around his old teammates during one of the off-season practices they invite him to attend, Grigori spends so much of the evening bragging to his peers about who his son will grow into under the right guiding hand that he forgets entirely that it is also his thirteenth birthday.