Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The recipe card was in a tin.

It wasn't particularly pretty. A battered, dented thing that had once held tea and now held the sum total of his mother's kitchen: a stack of handwritten index cards stained with years of use. Butter smudges. A thumbprint of something dark and sweet in the corner of the one for varenye that Ilya had touched once, years ago, and then pulled his hand away from because if he thought too long about whose thumb had made that mark he wouldn't be able to continue standing in his kitchen in Ottawa like a normal person on a Thursday afternoon.

He found the one he needed.

Kulich.

Irina’s handwriting was small and fast and not entirely legible, because his mother hadn’t written recipes for other people. She had written them for herself in shorthand, just the numbers. Мука — 500г. Flour, 500 grams. Масло — 100г. Butter. Дрожжи — 25г, тёплое молоко. Yeast, warm milk. And then, in the margin, not an instruction but an annotation: не торопись.

Don’t rush.

She’d underlined it.

Ilya set the card on the counter, propped against the sugar canister where he could see it, and began.

Ilya was a baker.

Nobody knew. He kept a kitchen stocked with good flour and better honey and his hands, which were paid to hit things, could braid dough and fold meringue with the same focus he brought to a forecheck. This was the room in his life where his mother still lived.

She had baked the way some people prayed: faithfully and often, as an act of devotion to something she couldn't name but refused to abandon. She'd learned from her aunt in Krasnodar, carried it with her to the small apartment in Moscow where Ilya grew up; the only warmth that place had ever held. She baked kulich at Pascha and pryaniki at Christmas and blini on winter mornings, and when the season was generous she made a simple sponge with berries and cream and black tea, and it was the best thing Ilya had ever eaten in his life.

He kept honey in his apartment. Always. It was the one thing he never ran out of. His teammates thought it was a health thing.

It wasn't a health thing.

Their apartment in Moscow had smelled exactly like this when she baked - warm and yeasty and sweet, like the walls themselves were rising. She had made kulich every year without fail, even the years when money was thin, even the years when everything else was uncertain, because Pascha came and you made kulich and that was that. You didn't have to believe in the resurrection to believe in the bread. You just had to show up and not rush.

Ilya measured flour. Warmed milk. Activated yeast the way she'd taught him, a pinch of sugar in the warm liquid, wait for the bloom, watch it foam. His hands knew this. They'd learned it from hers, not through instruction but through years of standing beside her in that kitchen, watching until watching became doing.

The dough took hours. Rise, punch down, rise again. His mother's note said to let it go until it doubled, and then a little more, because kulich was an indulgent bread and it rewarded patience. Ilya sat at his kitchen table while the dough rose and looked at the recipe card and did not call Shane.

He wanted to call Shane. He almost always wanted to call Shane; missing him was the background hum of the life they’d chosen, one that so often kept them apart. But this moment, the waiting, the kitchen, the smell beginning to build… this was between him and a card and a tin and a woman who had underlined don't rush because she knew her son and she knew he would try to.

The kulich came out golden. Tall and domed at the top. He stood at the counter and breathed it in and it smelled exactly, terribly right.

He left the frosting for later. That was a job for Jackie's kitchen and four sets of small hands that would cover it in sprinkles until it looked less like a sacred bread and more like a celebration. The base was his mother's. The decoration would be theirs.

He wrapped it carefully and set it in a box lined with a clean tea towel.

In the morning, he started on the eggs, which were red.

They were always red. Ilya's mother had been clear about this in the way she was clear about most things, which was absolutely and without discussion. Orthodox Easter eggs were red. The reason was the doing of it.

Ilya dyed them with onion skins, the traditional way, by boiling the shells in water steeped with papery golden brown layers until the color set deep and permanent. Before dyeing, he pressed small leaves and flowers against each egg, clover and parsley and tiny wildflower heads he'd found at the market, and wrapped them tight in cheesecloth so the shapes would hold. When they came out he unwrapped each one carefully and there they were: pale silhouettes against the scarlet. Gardens in negative space.

Ilya's red eggs were, he felt, exceptional.

He packed them in a carton, nestled in paper towels so they wouldn't shift. A dozen eggs, each one carrying the ghost of a flower. He put them in the car next to the kulich.

He texted Shane: Leaving now. Bringing Easter.

Shane replied: Will be at Hayden's by 2. Love you. Drive safe.

Ilya started the engine and drove toward Montreal.

The highway was bright. The trees were still bare, not yet committed to green. Ilya drove without music and thought about the Pikes' kitchen - the noise, the children, the daylight - and how his mother had never had that. Her Paschas had been candlelit and solemn, the heavy beauty of Holy Week, the dark church, the procession, the moment at midnight when the priest said Христос воскресе and the congregation answered Воистину воскресе and the bells rang and the fasting ended and you ate kulich in the dark with the people you loved.

He was bringing her bread into the daylight.

He thought she would have liked that.

The baskets had taken Shane four days.

Four days was an unreasonable amount of time to spend on Easter baskets for children who wouldn’t remember or appreciate the curatorial effort involved and Shane had done it anyway, because he knew these children now. He couldn't read their cries and he still sometimes mixed up which twin was which when they were in matching pajamas, but he knew that Jade collected rocks and didn't like being touched by strangers and watched everything from a distance that was either shyness or strategy. He knew that Emma wanted to be near Ilya at all times and would scale a human leg like a tree trunk to achieve it. He knew the twins were young enough that the basket mattered more than what was in it, and that what was in it still mattered.

Four baskets. Four children. Four carefully chosen stuffies.

Jade's basket had a rock in it.

He'd found it online. An Amuseable Pebble. Soft, grey, with a small embroidered face and stubby little legs. A stuffed rock. He had ordered it within thirty seconds of seeing it.

Because Jade brought him rocks. Real ones. Small, imperfect ones from gardens and driveways and the pockets of her dresses. She'd been doing it for months. Every visit, another pebble, offered without explanation, accepted without question. He had seventeen of them on his nightstand, arranged in a row, small to large. He was never going to throw any of them away.

Emma's basket had a grasshopper.

Because she was their кузнечик; Ilya had called her that and it had stuck. The stuffed toy was green and leggy and had an expression of cheerful bewilderment that Shane felt was deeply accurate.

Arthur's basket had a dragon.

This had been Ilya's contribution. Shane had been browsing the website on his laptop for an hour, making a shortlist, cross referencing options, when Ilya, passing behind the couch, had glanced at the screen and said, "The dragon."

"Which one? There are at least six."

"The one with rainbow spikes."

"Why?"

Ilya had looked at him like he'd asked why water was wet.

"His name is Arthur, Shane."

Shane had blinked.

"Arthur," Ilya repeated. "Like the legend. Knights. Quests. Dragons."

Shane had added it to the cart without comment, privately admiring the connection Ilya had made that he'd missed. It happened more often than Shane liked to admit. It never stopped being attractive.

And Amber's basket had a bunny.

Not just any bunny. A custom one, pale lavender, with her name embroidered on the inner ear in soft looping script. Shane had selected the font. He had agonized over the thread color for longer than he was willing to disclose to another human being, eventually settling on a warm gold that he felt complemented the soft purple without being too loud.

He loaded the baskets into the car. Four of them, arranged on the back seat, each one filled with a stuffed animal, some age appropriate sweets (researched, allergen checked), and a small amount of cellophane grass that was going to get everywhere. That would be Hayden's problem.

He checked his phone. Ilya's text: Leaving now. Bringing Easter.

Shane didn't know what Ilya was bringing. They'd originally planned for Ilya to come to Shane's first, the way he usually did, but Ilya had changed the plan yesterday. He'd meet Shane there, he said. He had something to do first. And something about the way he'd said it had told Shane not to ask.

So he hadn't.

Shane texted back: Will be at Hayden's by 2. Love you. Drive safe.

He locked the front door. Got in the car. Four baskets in the back seat. Seventeen rocks on his nightstand. His boyfriend on the highway from Ottawa carrying something he hadn't explained yet.

Good Friday.

Shane wasn’t religious. Neither was Ilya, not really. But they were going to a house full of children on a day that meant something, and they were bringing gifts, and that felt like enough.

Shane’s car was already in the driveway when Ilya pulled up to the Pike house.

This was expected. Shane had probably been here for twenty minutes already, performing some version of his arrival protocol: greeting Hayden, assessing the house, asking Jackie questions about the children’s current emotional states that Jackie answered with patient amusement. She understood that this was how Shane showed love.

Ilya parked. Sat for a moment.

The kulich was on the passenger seat in its box. The eggs were in the footwell, cushioned and secure. He looked at them, at the box, at the carton, and felt a flicker of something he hadn’t anticipated. Not nervousness, exactly. Something closer to exposure. Like he was about to carry a private thing into a public space.

These were his mother’s traditions and he was about to put them on someone else’s table.

He picked up the box. Picked up the eggs. Stacked them carefully and got out of the car.

The front door was already open.

He heard them before he saw them. The Pike household at full capacity was a sound environment that could best be described as ongoing. It had layers. There was a base frequency of general household noise: doors, footsteps, the hum of a home with too many people in it. On top of that, Arthur’s voice, which existed at a volume that suggested he was unaware that other decibels were available. On top of that, Emma, who was either singing or arguing or both, it was difficult to tell. Somewhere underneath it all, the quiet. Jade’s quiet, Amber’s quiet, the kind of silence that only registered as present when you knew to listen for it.

And then, cutting through everything: "YAYA!"

Emma appeared at the end of the hallway like a guided missile with pigtails.

She’d grown. They always grew. Every time Ilya saw the Pike children, they had changed in some small but vertiginous way that reminded him that time was passing and children were proof of it. Emma was taller. Her face was slightly different. Less round, more her, the framework of the person she was becoming starting to show through the softness of the person she still was. She hit him at knee height with the force of a small, joyful wrecking ball.

"Кузнечик!" Ilya exclaimed, shifting his fragile packages to one hand so he could catch her with the other. "You are bigger."

"I’M TALLER THAN JADE NOW!" Emma announced, which was delivered with absolute conviction and was almost certainly not true.

"Impressive," Ilya said.

"What’s in the box?"

"Cake."

"CAKE!"

The word travelled through the house at the speed of sound. From the playroom, Arthur’s voice: "CAKE? WHERE? WHAT CAKE?" From the kitchen, Hayden’s voice: "What kind of cake? We have cake. Jackie made cake. Why is there more cake?" And from somewhere deeper in the house, Jackie’s voice, calm and resigned: "Leave him alone, Hayden."

Ilya stepped inside.

The house smelled like sugar and freshly cut grass and something floral that was probably an air freshener but might have been Emma's shampoo. There were paper decorations on the walls - eggs cut from construction paper, lopsided and enthusiastic, taped at child height. A banner that said HAPPY EASTER in letters that got progressively smaller toward the end, as though the artist hadn't accounted for the full length of the word and had been forced to improvise.

Ilya could hear Shane before he saw him, his voice low and patient, talking to someone small. He rounded the corner and found Shane crouching by the kitchen table. Jade was standing in front of him. She had her hand in the pocket of her cardigan.

She was looking at Shane with that gaze of hers, the one that saw everything and gave back nothing. Shark eyes, Ilya had called them once, and Shane had said that was a terrible thing to say about a child, and Ilya had said he meant it as a compliment.

She pulled her hand from her pocket.

A rock.

Small. Pale. Slightly pink, this one, like quartz. She'd chosen it with care. She always chose them with care, but this one was almost pretty.

Shane took it and put it in his pocket like he'd been expecting it, which, at this point, he probably had.

"Happy Easter, Jade," he said.

"Happy Easter, Rain," she said.

Ilya watched this from the doorway, Emma still attached to his leg, kulich in one hand and a carton of his mother's eggs in the other.

Shane looked up. There was a half second where his whole face was honest before he got it under control. He always got it under control. Ilya always caught him anyway.

"Hi," Shane said.

"Hi," Ilya replied.

They were in Hayden Pike's kitchen with a child on Ilya's leg and another one watching them with ancient eyes, and hi would have to do.

Ilya set the box on the counter, carefully. Shane noticed because Ilya was never careful. He opened things with his teeth, threw his phone on couches, once carried a television up three flights of stairs rather than wait for the elevator. But he set these down with both hands. One and then the other.

Hayden appeared. His shirt had a stain on it that was either juice or modern art, and he was carrying a roll of tape and a paper bunny with one ear, which suggested he'd been mid-decoration when the cake announcement pulled him to the kitchen.

"All right," Hayden said. "What's in the boxes, Rozanov?"

Ilya opened the first one.

The kulich stood in the centre on its tea towel bed, golden brown, tall, perfectly domed. It wasn't decorated yet, that would come later, but even bare it was striking, a warm tower of sweet bread that smelled like yeast and butter and cardamom. Ilya's hand rested on the edge of the box a moment longer than necessary.

Hayden peered at it.

"Is that," he said slowly, "a Christmas panettone in witness protection?"

"No," Ilya said, flat and certain, defending a title belt. "This is better."

"It looks like a panettone."

"It is kulich. It is Russian. It is for Easter. It is nothing like a panettone."

"It's kind of shaped like a-"

"Pike." Ilya's voice was mild but his eyes were not. "Do not finish that sentence."

Jackie appeared in the doorway. She took one look at the kulich, one look at Ilya's face, and said, with the diplomatic instinct she'd acquired from managing Hayden for years, "Ilya, it's beautiful. Did you make it?"

"Yes."

"From scratch?"

"From my mother's recipe."

Nobody said anything for a second. Hayden, for possibly the first time since Shane had known him, did not have a follow up. Jackie was looking at Ilya the way she looked at her own kids sometimes, as thought she understood exactly what they were being handed.

"It needs frosting," Ilya said. "Lemon icing. And then the children can decorate it. Sprinkles." He paused. "If that’s okay."

"Are you kidding?" Jackie was already moving toward the pantry. "They'll lose their minds. We'll make the frosting together."

Ilya nodded.

Hayden cleared his throat. "So what's in box number two? Should I sit down for this one?"

Ilya gave him a look that was mostly tolerant and set the carton on the counter. He lifted the lid and Shane heard Jackie inhale.

A dozen eggs. Deep, glossy, lacquer red, the kind of red that looked wet, that looked like it would come off on your fingers. And on each one, pressed into the surface of the dye like a watermark, the pale silhouette of a plant. Clover leaves. Parsley fronds. Tiny flower heads. Flower ghosts, delicate and precise, printed onto each shell in the negative space left by the dyeing process.

Jackie picked one up and turned it in her hand like she was afraid of it.

"Ilya," she said. "These are…"

"They are for the children," Ilya said. "Traditionally they are red. For Easter. In Russia."

He said it the way he'd said the thing about the kulich, practical, factual, as though he hadn't just set a carton of small jewels on Hayden's kitchen counter next to a paper plate of Chips Ahoy.

Emma had materialised beside him. She was staring at the eggs with her mouth open.

"They're so shiny," she whispered, as though she had discovered treasure.

"Yes," Ilya said.

"Can I hold one?"

"You may hold one. Gently."

He placed an egg in Emma's cupped hands. She held it like it was a gemstone, turned it in the light. The red shifted and gleamed and the ghost flower on its surface seemed to move.

"It has a picture on it," she said.

"A flower," Ilya said. "I pressed them onto the egg before I dyed it. The flower blocks the color, so it leaves a shadow."

Emma looked up at him and then very carefully pressed her face against his arm, which wasn’t a reaction Ilya had been prepared for, based on the way he went completely still.

Jade had appeared too. She stood beside Shane, looking at the eggs with that quiet, assessing gaze.

"They're all different," she said.

"Yes," Ilya said. "Every egg is different because every flower is different."

Jade considered this. "That's like rocks," she said.

Shane put his hand on her shoulder. She leaned into it.

Then, from the back door, a sound like a small cavalry charge. Arthur appeared, in a Montreal jersey as always, carrying a small plastic hockey stick and he had clearly been in the yard, because he was trailing grass and hadn't thought to drop the stick on his way in. Arthur never put the stick down; Shane had never seen him without it.

"YAYA!"

"Arthur."

"DADDY SAID YOU BROUGHT CAKE AND EGGS."

"I did."

"CAN I SEE?"

"You may look at them. They are-"

Arthur was already at the counter. He had climbed. Shane had not seen him climb. He had simply materialized at counter height, which was alarming.

He reached for an egg.

Ilya's hand was there first. A touch of a goalkeeper's instinct.

"Gently," Ilya said. "They are real eggs. They are not toys."

Arthur held the egg. He studied it carefully, like he was working out what it could do.

"It's like a hockey puck," he said.

"It is not like a-" Ilya started.

Arthur wound up.

It happened in approximately one-point-five seconds. Arthur set the egg on the counter. Stepped back. Adjusted his grip on the plastic stick - bottom hand firm, top hand loose, a proper hold that no one had taught him - and took a slap shot.

A genuine, weight shifted, follow through slap shot. At a hardboiled egg. On a kitchen counter.

The egg sailed off the counter and straight at Shane's head.

Shane ducked. He did not decide to duck. Fifteen years of professional hockey had wired his nervous system to react to projectiles before his brain could process them, and his brain caught up only after his head had already moved, which meant he spent a full second crouched in Hayden’s kitchen having dodged an egg fired by a child who could not yet tie his own shoes.

The egg hit the cabinet behind him and exploded. Red dyed shell and hardboiled white across the counter, the backsplash, and a portion of the floor that had until this moment been clean. The smell of sulphur and vinegar hit immediately and there was a smear of deep red on the white cabinet door that looked, briefly, like evidence from a crime scene.

"GOAL!"

Hayden was on the floor. Literally on the floor of his own kitchen, hands on his stomach, laughing so hard no sound was coming out. His face was red. His body was shaking. He looked like someone in the late stages of a medical event.

Shane straightened up. There was a piece of red shell on his shoulder and the smell of sulphur in his nose.

Ilya was staring at Arthur.

His face was doing something complicated. There was grief there, obviously. A hand-dyed, flower pressed, tradition honoring egg had just been destroyed by a toddler's slap shot. But underneath the grief, and clearly winning, was something much more dangerous: pride.

He turned to Hayden, who was still on the floor.

"Pike."

Hayden wheezed.

"Pike." Ilya's voice had changed. He was no longer mourning an egg. He was scouting. "Why did you not tell me you are harboring a future number one draft pick in this house?"

Hayden, from the floor: "What?"

"His wrist. His follow through. Did you see the rotation?" Ilya crouched next to Arthur, who was beaming, radiating the unhinged confidence of total impunity. "Arthur. Who taught you to shoot like that?"

"Nobody!" Arthur said, thrilled.

"Nobody," Ilya repeated. He looked at Hayden. "Natural talent. Natural talent, Pike, and you said nothing! I could have been training him by now. I am the number one hockey player in the-"

"Excuse me," Shane said from across the kitchen, egg residue still on his face. "You are not the number one-"

"Arthur deserves the best," Ilya said, without looking at Shane.

"I am the best!"

"Arthur," Ilya said, ignoring Shane entirely, "this summer, we begin training. I will teach you everything."

"We are NOT training a toddler," Shane said.

"You’re right," Ilya said. "We are training a prodigy."

Arthur picked up another egg.

"PUT IT DOWN," Hayden, Shane, and Jackie said simultaneously, from three different parts of the kitchen.

Arthur put it down.

Ilya looked at the remaining eleven eggs, his mother's eggs, his careful, beautiful, tradition honoring eggs, and then at the smear of red on the kitchen cabinet, and then at Arthur, who was standing in the wreckage holding his plastic stick like a trophy.

"We will make ugly ones later," Ilya said to Shane. "For the egg hunt."

"Are the ugly ones going to survive long enough to be hidden?" Shane asked warily.

Ilya looked at Arthur. Arthur looked at Ilya.

"No promises," Ilya answered.