Chapter Text

I

The morning light came in sideways through the bedroom curtains—that particular October grey that Ottawa did better than anywhere, soft and unhurried, like the city itself hadn't decided to wake up yet.

Shane had been awake for eleven minutes. He knew because he'd counted, eyes fixed on the ceiling, listening to Ilya breathe.

It was a thing he did. A thing he'd never admit to doing.

Ilya was draped half across him in that completely shameless way he had in sleep—one heavy arm thrown over Shane's chest, face pressed into the crook of his neck, the ends of his light brown hair curling against Shane's jaw. He smelled like Shane's shampoo, because of course he used Shane's shampoo, and underneath that the particular warmth of him that Shane had spent eleven years trying to file under nothing important and had failed, spectacularly, every single time.

They'd had sex last night. Slow and unhurried in a way that Ilya had started initiating lately, like he was learning a new language—not the sharp and edged thing that had existed between them in hotel rooms and dark apartments and locked doors, but something that took its time, that paid attention. Shane had fallen asleep with his face pressed against Ilya's shoulder and Ilya's thumb tracing small mindless circles on his hip, and it still embarrassed him, in a not-unpleasant way, how much he preferred this version to the one he'd been telling himself he wanted for years.

He was in love with this man. He had been for a long time. It still caught him off guard sometimes, like stepping on a patch of ice you hadn't seen—the sudden loss of footing, the brief and idiotic terror of it.

Ilya shifted. Pressed closer.

"You are thinking too loud," he said, voice slurred with sleep, not opening his eyes.

"I'm not thinking anything."

"Mm." A pause. "You are also lying."

Shane stared at the ceiling. Outside, something had changed in the light quality—darker, flatter. He could hear it before he registered it properly: rain starting against the window, fine and persistent.

"I need to get groceries," he said.

Ilya made a sound like the concept of groceries had personally offended him.

"We have food."

"We have two eggs and half a block of tofu and whatever that is at the back of the fridge that I keep telling you to throw out."

"That is kimchi. It is aged. It is good for you."

"It smells like something died in there."

Ilya lifted his head. His hair was a disaster, curling at the temples, and he had a red mark from the pillow along his jaw, and his hazel eyes were half-open and deeply unbothered, and Shane did not think about how beautiful he was because that was not a thought he entertained because it was too much, too uncountable, and he'd learned early that there were things you couldn't look at directly or they became the only thing you could see.

"I will go," Ilya said, with the absolute conviction of a man who had no intention of going.

"You can't."

It landed quietly. It always did.

Ilya's expression didn't change, exactly, but something shifted in it—the infinitesimal closing of a door. He settled back against the pillow. His jaw worked once.

"No," he agreed. "I can't."

Because they weren't out publicly. Because Ilya was still new to Ottawa, still playing for the Centaurs, and the hockey world was watching him with the fascination it always reserved for things it couldn't categorize, and Shane Hollander showing up on Ilya Rozanov's grocery run would end up on six different sports blogs by noon and someone would connect the dots and their careful, painstaking, privately annotated plan would collapse in a Loblaws parking lot over a disagreement about kimchi.

Shane got up. He folded the blanket—because someone in this household was going to—and found his jeans on the floor, and pulled a hoodie over his head, and did not look back at the bed because if he looked back at the bed he wouldn't leave.

"I'll be back in forty minutes," he said.

Ilya had already closed his eyes again. But his hand was open on the pillow, fingers loosely curled, in the place Shane had been.

"Be careful," he said. "It is raining."

Shane looked at that open hand for a moment longer than he should have.

"Yeah," he said. "I know."

II

He didn't remember the impact.

He remembered the rain, which had thickened to something unreasonable—a real Ottawa downpour, the kind that turned streets into mirrors and headlights into halos. He remembered the wipers struggling. He remembered a sudden brightness in his peripheral vision, the sensation of movement that wasn't his own, and then—

Nothing.

Then: a room.

The room was white, in the way of waiting areas—that particular institutional off-white that aspirationally calls itself cream. There were chairs, and a window, and outside the window was a light that was not sunlight, exactly, but performed the same function. There was a desk. Behind the desk was a woman who looked up when he appeared and said, without particular surprise: "Oh, good. Number fourteen-oh-seven. Have a seat, please."

Shane did not sit. He stood in the middle of the room and the panic hit him like the full weight of his own body, all at once, like being boarded from behind.

"I was—" he started.

"Yes," she said, with great patience.

"My car—"

"I know."

"Is anyone—" He stopped. His voice was doing something strange. He was not a person who panicked. He had spent his entire adult life being excellent at not panicking, at folding everything down into something manageable and small. He pressed his palms flat against his thighs. He breathed. "Is my family okay."

The woman—her name tag said ANNA, large print, as if the Junction got a lot of people whose vision had been recently compromised by trauma—looked at him with an expression that was professionally gentle. "Your family is alive and well. The accident involved only your vehicle."

The floor did not dissolve under him. He noticed he'd been bracing for it to.

"Right," he said.

"You can sit."

He sat.

Anna set a form on the desk in front of him. "The Junction operates on a waiting-period system. You're here until you decide where you're going—what we call your Destination. You have access to all the standard amenities, you'll be assigned a coordinator, and—"

"Where is everyone," Shane said.

She looked up.

"Other people. People who died before—" He stopped. "My parents. They're—they're older, my dad's—is there a place where I can—"

"The Junction isn't like that," she said, not unkindly. "People move through at different times. Sometimes you wait for someone. Sometimes they're already somewhere and you get to go there too." She paused. "Sometimes someone waits for you."

Shane stared at her.

"I can make a note," she said, "of specific individuals whose arrival you'd like to be notified of."

He thought of his mother. His father. Hayden, which was a thought that made something squeeze in his chest because Hayden was fine, Hayden was in his thirties and healthy and surrounded by his four kids and Jackie. He thought, rapidly, of Ryan Price, who had not been doing well the last he'd heard. He thought of the people who had left already—David's parents, gone before he was born; an old Voyageurs teammate with a bad heart; coaches he'd admired.

He thought of Ilya.

The thought arrived sideways, the way it always had—not loudly, not with announcement, but there, suddenly, immovably present.

Ilya in the bed with his hand open on the pillow.

Be careful, he'd said. It is raining.

"I want to be notified," Shane said, very carefully, like the words might break if he set them down wrong, "if a specific person arrives."

"Of course." Anna slid a second form across. "Name?"

He wrote it.

III

His coordinator was a man named Ryan—not Ryan Price, though Shane spent the first week (or what felt like a week, or possibly a month; time was strange here, liquid in a way that made his organizing instincts itch) unconsciously calling him Price before catching himself. This Ryan was thin and slightly manic and had the energy of someone who had been working the Junction for longer than he would admit and had made peace with it through an extremely advanced relationship with irony.

"The celebrity thing," Ryan said, on what might have been the third day, "does follow people here, yes. We get a lot of athletes. You adjust."

"People recognize me."

"You're Shane Hollander. You have three Stanley Cups and a Conn Smythe." Ryan looked at him over the top of his clipboard. "Someone told me you also have a very good jawline, but I didn't want to open with that."

Shane blinked.

"You adjust," Ryan said again.

He did adjust. Slowly, and with the same methodical willfulness he'd brought to everything in his life, he adjusted.

The Junction was not unpleasant. It wasn't heaven—it wasn't anything so resolved as that. It was more like an airport where nobody had anywhere urgent to be: people waiting, people talking, the strange intimacy of transit. There were different wings, Ryan explained—some people moved to communities that suited them, places that had developed their own cultures and rhythms over the years. One long-timer had established what appeared to be a working hockey rink. Shane had not gone yet. He wasn't sure he was ready to play without specific people on the ice.

He thought about Ilya constantly. He had always thought about Ilya constantly; this was not new information. But here there was nothing to structure it around—no practice, no game tape, no performance diet to maintain, no social media he wasn't on anyway—and so the thoughts took up all the space they'd been politely not taking up for the last decade.

The tuna melt. The loon call. The way Ilya said his name when he thought Shane wasn't listening—quieter than usual, like it cost him something. The cottage in August. Ilya in the hammock on the dock, not reading the book in his lap, watching the lake with that particular expression he got when he thought nobody could see him, unguarded in a way that he never was anywhere else, and how Shane had stood in the doorway for five full minutes not going out there because he'd been afraid—afraid, which was absurd, he was not a person who was afraid—of what his own face would do.

He thought about whether Ilya would be okay.

This was the thought that recurred at something like three in the morning, on the nights when the Junction's carefully simulated dark felt too much like the real thing. Whether Ilya would be okay. Because Ilya was—Ilya had depression, which was a thing they had been navigating together carefully, with the help of his therapist Galina and the muted terror of two people who didn't entirely know what they were doing. Ilya had a history that included things Shane still only knew in pieces. Ilya had, in the past year, adopted a small unhinged dog named Anya who knocked over everything in his apartment and whom he loved with a helpless tenderness that broke Shane's heart to look at.

Ilya had Anya. He had the Centaurs. He had Svetlana, who would call. He had Scott Hunter, who was somehow both one of Ilya's favorite people and someone he'd never admit that to. He had Ryan Price, a little. He had Shane's parents—Yuna, who had taken to Ilya with the same fierce territorial love she brought to everything she cared about, and David, who called Ilya son when he thought Ilya couldn't hear him. They knew about the two of them now; Shane had come out to them himself, the summer before. They had chosen Ilya without hesitation.

He would be okay.

He will be okay, Shane thought. Nightly. In the dark. With less conviction each time.

Months passed. Or years. Ryan eventually told him it wasn't linear and to stop trying to calculate it, and Shane tried to stop calculating it with limited success.

He met people. An old defenceman from the '72 Summit Series who wanted to talk hockey until the end of time, which was convenient given the circumstances. A woman who'd been a marine biologist and knew more about the ocean than Shane knew about anything, who laughed when he told her he had a lake and a pier and jet skis. A teenager who'd never quite made it out of the hospital and who asked Shane, with total frankness, if hockey was actually fun and seemed relieved when he said yes, it is, actually, most of the time.

He thought about what his life had been. He turned it over the way you turn a stone in your hand—feeling for the weight of it, the edges. The things he'd done right. The things he'd been too careful about, too slow, too scared. The years he'd spent in hotel rooms telling himself that what he felt for Ilya Rozanov was something other than what it was, calling it rivalry, calling it frustration, calling it an inconvenient physical response to a person he theoretically disliked, right up until the night Ilya had made him a tuna melt and said his name—just his name, Shane, no mockery in it—and the whole elaborate architecture of denial had come down like a thing that had never been built particularly well.

He thought about the cottage. July light on the water. Ilya doing the loon call badly and then doing it better after Shane corrected him, and the satisfaction of that, the small domestic ordinariness of sitting on a pier teaching Ilya Rozanov to call to loons in the dark.

He thought: I was happy. I should have said it more.

He thought: He knew. He knew, he always knows before I do.

He thought, finally, on an evening that felt like autumn: If he's okay. If he lived his life. If he found something. Then that's enough. That has to be enough.

He went to the hockey rink.

He played for the first time.

It felt like something breaking open, and then like something settling.

IV

Ryan came to find him on the ice.

He didn't have to say anything. Shane knew from the way he was standing—slightly off his usual manic efficiency, hands in his jacket pockets, watching the game with an expression that was trying to be neutral.

Shane stopped. Let the game continue around him.

"Who," he said.

Ryan looked at his clipboard. Then at Shane. "You want to—do you want to sit down first?"

"Ryan."

"He's here," Ryan said.

The ice under Shane's feet felt very still. Very certain.

"When," he said.

"About an hour ago. I came as soon as I could find you." Ryan paused. "He's in intake. He'll be processed in—"

"Take me to the lobby."

"Shane—"

"Please."

Ryan took him to the lobby.

V

It was a room like all the other rooms in the Junction—functionally neutral, neither warm nor cold, the kind of place that had been designed to impose nothing on the people who passed through it. Shane had walked through it fifty times without looking at it. Now he sat in one of the beige chairs and looked at everything, every crack in the ceiling, every scuff on the floor, like he might be tested on it later.

He did not know how long he sat there.

He did not know, he realized, what it would mean if it was Ilya walking through that door. If Ilya was here, that meant—it meant that out there, in the world they'd lived in, Ilya was—

It meant something had happened.

And Shane's first terrible thought, the one he'd been trying not to have since Ryan said he's here, was not even grief. It was something more complicated and more shameful: how long. How long had it been. Because time moved strangely here but it moved out there too, relentlessly, and if it had been long enough—if Ilya had had whole years, decades, a life—

Then Shane had no right to this lobby. He had no right to be sitting in this chair like he was waiting for someone who was still his.

Ilya had lived his whole life once before, before Shane had anything to do with it. He was entirely capable of doing it again. He had never needed anyone to wait for him.

And also:

Ilya's hand open on the pillow. The particular way he said Shane, with the weight of something that had been held too long.

Shane pressed his palms flat on his thighs and breathed.

The door opened.

He looked up.

Ilya walked in.

He was—he was the same. That was the first thing. He was entirely, impossibly the same—the curling light-brown hair, the set of his shoulders, the hazel eyes moving over the room with that habitual wariness he'd always had, like even a waiting room might require defensive strategy. His mother's gold cross sat at the hollow of his throat. He was wearing a Henley, dark blue, and jeans, and he looked like Ottawa in October, like the moment before practice when he hadn't fully committed to the day yet.

He looked like the last morning.

He moved through the room in that unhurried way of his, and then his eyes found Shane.

He stopped.

The whole room—what little there was of it—seemed to stop with him.

Ilya's face did something that Shane didn't have vocabulary for yet. It went through devastation in the way water goes through a crack in a wall—not dramatically, not all at once, but with a terrible and total certainty. Something in his jaw. Something in his eyes. The habitual wry composure, the careful performance of unbothered—all of it, gone, like it had never been there to begin with.

He didn't move.

Shane thought: I've spent eleven years cataloguing every expression this man has ever made and this is a new one. This is one I've never seen.

He thought: He's been without me for some amount of time and it shows.

He thought: He looks like someone who's been waiting.

Ilya's lips parted. He looked at Shane the way people look at things they're not sure are real—with his whole face, holding himself very still, as if any movement might break whatever this was. His eyes moved over Shane's face with a hunger that had nothing sexual in it—it was something older and more fundamental, the specific desperation of inventory: here, still here, still.

"Shane."

His voice was wrecked. Just his name, barely a word, barely sound, said as if he'd had to excavate it from somewhere very deep and the excavation had cost him.

Shane stood up.

He wasn't sure when he'd decided to. His body just did it, the way bodies do things they've been waiting to do for a very long time. He stood, and he looked at Ilya across the small distance of the lobby, and he felt all his earlier doubt—am I entitled, did he move on, do I have any right—evaporate in the face of the one thing that had never changed in eleven years of knowing this man: the way Ilya looked at him when his guard was completely gone.

Like Shane was the only fixed point.

He crossed half the distance. Stopped. Close enough to see the colour of Ilya's eyes—hazel, gold in the undertones, blown slightly wide.

"Hey," Shane said.

Ilya let out a breath that was close to something broken. His jaw worked. His hand, at his side, moved fractionally toward Shane and then stopped, like he wasn't sure he was allowed.

"You are," he started. Stopped. His English, which was usually precise and deliberate, was struggling in a way Shane hadn't heard since the early years. "I have been—" Another stop. He closed his eyes. "I did not know," he said finally, quietly, "if you would be here. Or if—if you had already—"

"I waited," Shane said.

Ilya opened his eyes.

"I asked them to tell me when you arrived," Shane said. "And then I waited." He paused. "I've been waiting."

Something moved through Ilya's face—something too large for it, briefly, before it settled. He looked at Shane with an expression that had no performance in it, no calculation, no strategic wryness to hide behind. Just Ilya. Just the person who had been a habit and then a necessity and then, finally, the whole organizing principle of Shane's life, looking at him like he was a thing that had been given back.

"I was worried," Ilya said, "that you would not wait for me."

"I know," Shane said. "That's why I stayed in the lobby."

A sound came out of Ilya that was not quite a laugh. It was too rough for that, too close to its opposite.

"How long," Shane asked. He needed to know. He'd been telling himself it didn't matter and it did, it mattered enormously, he needed to understand how much time Ilya had lived without him and whether it had—whether Ilya had been—

"Long enough," Ilya said. He looked away briefly, jaw tightening. Then back. "Long enough that it was—" He stopped again. When he looked at Shane, his eyes were very clear and very serious. "I did not stop," he said. "I want you to know that. I—I continued. I did things. Good things, I think. The Foundation. The camp. Ryan—Price is—" The corner of his mouth moved, barely. "He is annoyingly well-adjusted now. You would be proud."

"And you?" Shane asked.

A pause.

"I had Anya," Ilya said. "She was—she was very important."

"Yeah," Shane said. His voice was doing the thing it did when he wasn't managing it properly. "I know she was."

"I spoke with your parents." Ilya's voice dropped. "After. Your mother already knew what you were to me—she always knew—but I wanted her to understand it properly. What it actually was. I sat with them and I told them." He exhaled slowly. "Not the facts. They had the facts. I told them—" He paused, searching. "I told them how it felt. From the beginning. All of it." He looked at Shane directly. "I thought you would have wanted that."

Shane thought about his mother. About Yuna, who would have sat across from Ilya with her hands flat on the table and listened without interrupting, which was the most love she knew how to show. About David, who would have poured him something to drink and not said much and been completely present the whole time.

"Yeah," he said. "I would have wanted that."

Ilya exhaled.

The distance between them was an arm's length. Had been an arm's length for some time now. Shane was aware of it the way he was always aware of the space between himself and Ilya—kinetically, with the part of him that had never fully unlearned the habit of mapping where Ilya was at any given moment.

"You look the same," Ilya said quietly.

"So do you."

Ilya's eyes moved over his face again, that same inventory, cataloguing. His hand had stilled at his side.

"I was scared," Ilya admitted, with the particular bluntness he saved for true things. "The whole way here—I was scared you would not be." He stopped. Tried again. "That I would get here and you would already be somewhere, somewhere I could not find, somewhere—"

"Ilya."

He stopped.

"I was here," Shane said. "I was here the whole time."

He closed the last of the distance. Ilya went very still—that absolute stillness he only had in moments of intensity, on ice before a face-off, in hotel rooms before whatever this would become—and Shane put his arms around him, because it was the obvious thing to do, because it was what bodies did after this long of not being allowed to, and Ilya's arms came around him with a force that was not quite holding but was something adjacent to it, something that had been held in reserve for a long time.

He was solid. Real. He smelled like himself—something warm and specific that Shane could not have described but had spent eleven years knowing in the dark.

"You are still shorter than me," Ilya said, into Shane's hair. His voice was wrecked but there was something in it now that wasn't before.

"You're still annoying," Shane said.

A pause.

"Yes," Ilya agreed. He pulled back enough to look at Shane's face. His hands came up, one on either side, thumbs brushing across Shane's cheekbones—over his freckles, which Ilya had called stunning once, badly, in English that hadn't quite had the right word, and Shane had been embarrassed about for months. "Still have the freckles," he observed.

"They're part of the package."

"I know." He said it like he'd always known. Like he'd had a long time to make his peace with it and had. "Shane."

"Yeah."

"I am very—" He paused. Breathed. "I am very glad," he said, with enormous care, "that you were here."

Shane looked at him. His husband. His rival. The most infuriating person he'd ever known and the one his whole life had organized itself around without ever asking permission.

"I'm glad you're here," he said.

Ilya exhaled.

Outside the Junction's window, the light was doing something—shifting, warming, the flat white of it becoming something more gold. Shane didn't know what that meant. He suspected Ryan would explain it eventually, probably while being very dry about it.

He didn't need to know yet.

"Come on," he said. He didn't let go of Ilya's hand. "I'll show you around. There's a hockey rink."

Ilya blinked. "Of course there is."

"The ice is actually pretty good."

"You have been playing hockey," Ilya said, as if this was a personal betrayal, "this entire time, and you did not wait to play with me?"

"I had to do something with my time."

"How long were you waiting?"

"I told you, time doesn't really—"

"Hollander."

"I don't know exactly."

"You counted," Ilya said. "You always count. How many days."

Shane looked at their hands, linked. He thought about the ceiling of the Junction and the lobby chair and the eleven minutes of that last morning and Ilya's face when the door had opened.

"A lot," he said.

Ilya was quiet for a moment.

Then: "That is the most Canadian answer I have ever heard."

"We're going to be here a long time," Shane said. "You don't need an exact number."

"I am going to find out," Ilya said. "I will ask the Ryan. He will tell me. He will not be able to help himself, you know this about him already, I can tell."

"You haven't even met him yet."

"I know his type."

Shane laughed. It came out of him easily, which surprised him—he'd forgotten that this was a thing that happened with Ilya, had always happened, even in the beginning when everything else between them had been complicated. The laughter.

He tightened his grip on Ilya's hand and led him forward.

The Junction opened ahead of them—all its strange neutral corridors, its waiting and its arrival, its particular quality of time that felt like forever and not like anything at all.

They walked into it together.