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There were a lot of dark days when Ilya never thought he'd make it to his next birthday. Two days ago, the day had come. 32. He woke up at a nice hotel with his husband, buzzing with excitement for the next leg of his birthday vacation they would be starting tomorrow. He and Shane were going on an underwater exploration a few hundred miles off the coast of Canada to see the ruins of the Titanic. The vessel had a no-pets policy, but besides that, it was already shaping up to be the perfect trip. He felt like he was the happiest person alive.
Shane, on the other hand, was having a harder time. Ilya wondered if he'd agreed to go on the trip because he thought there was no way they would actually get tickets. This was the first trip of its kind, and was akin to space tourism (at a fraction of the cost). They hadn’t gotten tickets originally, but were able to buy a pair off a Pakistani-British businessman whose son had changed his mind about going. He had Svetlana to thank for catching that for-sale post.
Summers were wonderful. For so long they were the only extended time he got with Shane. That had changed this year, with his husband's transfer to Ottawa. It was bittersweet for Shane, who hadn’t parted ways on good terms, like Ilya had with Boston years ago. It was selfish to feel this way, but he was glad things had happened like they had. When they were outed, Shane's life fell apart, but Ilya felt like his really started. He was so happy to get to have Shane on his team. On his line. By his side, after so long.
Ever since then, Shane's anxiety had been worse. And it had always been bad. Even Ilya could logically see ways that undersea exploration could go wrong. There were hundreds or thousands or whatever pounds of pressure on the submarine thing, and they would be stuck with three very rich strangers in close quarters. It would be worth a little anxiety and discomfort to see the Titanic itself. Ilya had watched the movie so many times while traveling. He had it downloaded on his computer, and at three hours it would take up most of the plane ride to games. He had a soft spot for their romance, and loved the drama of it all.
Rose and Jack really could have both fit on that door though. They really could have.
Ilya felt Shane shuffle in the sheets next to him and took the opportunity to cuddle up against him. He put his top arm gently over Shane’s torso.
Shane reached a hand up to interlock their fingers. He squeezed Ilya’s hand and brought it up to his lips to kiss the knuckles.
“Good morning” he muttered into Ilya’s hand, then kissed it again.
"Good morning, moya lyubov."
“Mmm. You’re poking me.”
“I wanted to spoon.” Ilya rocked his hips to tease his little spoon with his morning wood. Shane pulled himself over and rolled onto his back. He was not in the mood to be rubbed on right now.
“I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“You took your meds, yes?”
"Yeah. I'm just really now sure about this. I know I said that I'd go, but now we set off tomorrow, it feels different."
"Shane, it's safe. The CEO is going onboard, he would not if it was not safe."
"I know. And the other people going on it have done a lot of exploration. Hamish Harding went all the way down into the Mariana Trench."
"What is that?"
"It's the deepest part of the ocean."
"Ah. Then this will be piece of cake for him."
Shane nodded. "And the other guy, the French explorer. Paul-Henri Nargeolet. He's worked on documentaries on the Titanic."
"You are just excited to show off speaking perfect French."
"Shut up."
Silence hung between them for a minute, Shane's mind had wandered somewhere. He continued, "Do you think anyone is going to be shitty?"
"Like homophobic?"
"Yeah."
"Why would they do that. Everyone else is an old man. Older than Scott Hunter, even. We have a lot of muscles, it would be a bad idea."
"I still don't trust them. A lot of people are assholes."
"It is only three other people in the submarine. I think they will all just be focused on the ocean. Not the two super hot hockey players making out in the corner."
"I don't want to do that."
"You don't want to kiss five thousand feet underwater? For my birthday?"
Shane rolled his eyes. “If that’s what you really want, I guess we could do that. I don't want to do a whole thing though. I thought this was to look at the titanic, we can make out anytime."
"Yes, we can." Ilya rolled the rest of the way over so he was on top of Shane. He used his left arm to hold himself up and used his right hand to cradle the other man’s jaw. He pulled him up slightly into a gentle kiss. “We have a lifetime of this.”
⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖
Three days had passed since the Titan submersible was supposed to surface. Sometime overnight, the passengers were projected to run out of oxygen.
Harris had lost hope. He felt like with so many people looking, surely they would find at least something. But it had been three days of no good news and way too many tweets to fill the silence.
These idiots deserve it
why would you even try to see the titanic did these people learn NOTHING from jack and rose
@blink182 @tomdelonge @travisbarker @markhoppis
My stepdad Hamish is on this submarine lost at sea. I’m devastated but coming to the San Diego show tonight so you guys can give me hope and cheer me up.
not my favorite gay hockey players being trapped in a submarine during PRIDE MONTH 💔🌈🏒
Praying for the safe return of everyone on board! How awful, my heart goes out to them. Even to the people with lifestyles I don’t agree with. God loves us all.
this is the funniest thing that’s happened since the suez canal
He went through the motions. He was able to “telework,” but wasn’t doing anything but stare at his monitor and scroll on his phone. Tonight he and Troy had visited his family for dinner on the farm and were planning to stay the night there. His mom cooked a good dinner, the dogs were playful, and the sunset was beautiful. It must have set an hour ago off the coast of Newfoundland. It wouldn’t matter under the sea, but the dark did make rescue efforts harder. There was no way he couldn’t think about Ilya and Shane. All he could do was mentally fast forward to tomorrow, when they would know. When there would be an answer, as awful as it was likely to be.
⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖
The good news was they had died instantly.
The bad news was that they were dead.
The morning came with no news of rescue. For a few hours, the internet thought the submersible ran out of air. In the late afternoon Thursday, they found something. The U.S. Coast Guard shared that a “catastrophic loss of pressure chamber” had occurred.
He read through a short BBC article, “US Coast Guard confirms Titan sub pressure loss”.
There was a linked video of an admiral giving an address. “On behalf of the US Coast Guard and the entire unified command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families.”
To the families. Harris felt like that applied to him, to the team. Was that wrong? Ilya never talked about his parents or siblings, except his dead mom. Harris had heard Shane’s parents call Ilya their son. They didn’t have any other children. The horror of this kept hitting him in new ways. He had gone through the box of tissues by his bed, and gone to using his shirt to wipe the snot and tears that kept coming off his face.
OceanGate’s statement followed soon after.
"We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shane Hollander, Ilya Rosanov, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost.
"These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans.” Had he even heard Shane talk about the ocean before?
“Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.
“This is an extremely sad time for our dedicated employees who are exhausted and grieving deeply over this loss –"
He put his phone down. Making this about how hard it was for the company was something else. The company that had murdered his friends. He needed to stop reading the news. He closed out of Safari, let his thumb hover for a second, and then opened Twitter by muscle memory.
I kinda feel like they should have suffered
So the ship exploded… at the time the coast guard heard an explosion. Big shocker. Why did the military spend millions on search and rescue? What a waste of taxpayer dollars
How do we think the blink-182 guy feels about his step-dad
In a way… Hollander and Rozanov were killed by ice… the very thing they loved (that destroyed the titanic)
People are FAST with these wikipedia edits jfc
The centaurs just got good this isn’t fair ☹ ☹ ☹
Alexa play my heart will go on
Check out the new song by Sink-182 My dumb stepdad’s drowning in a submarine on Spotify!
Harris knew the team had two social media statements drafted. One for if they were rescued, one for if they were not. The first day they went missing he had a call with his boss and told him this would need to be passed up to someone else that frankly, made a lot more money than he did. He wasn’t going to take this kind of emotional damage for his salary. Videos of dogs and car collections was one thing, death acknowledgments were another.
They’d only been on the team together for one year. Harris thought they had so many more. The team was everything he could have dreamed of. For a long time he was the only openly queer person at work – then he had not just Ilya, but Troy. His boyfriend. And now they would be the only queer couple on the team again.
There was no one like Ilya. He’d made the Centaurs how they were, helped it grow into Harris’ favorite place with his favorite people. And Shane, his other half, he had just gotten there. They were supposed to do things next season, they had a planned social media schedule. Collaborations with the Irina Foundation. Yes, he could still work to promote the group and cause, he could still make posts for Pride night. It was going to feel absolutely awful going through with any of that.
The future ahead of them didn’t feel real. If someone on the team was supposed to die, shouldn’t that have happened in the plane crash? Why was their captain taken in something as random and stupid as a submarine explosion?
His phone buzzed with an Instagram post notification from the NHL.
With great sadness we announce the loss of two players in a catastrophic accident. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov…
He did not check the comments.
Harris read every article, torturing himself analyzing the details. If the two were referred to as husbands. What photos the news outlets used. How their families were mentioned. If they focused on Ottawa or their cup wins with Boston and Montreal.
He could not stop crying. His phone kept buzzing with messages from friends and family, but he couldn't bring himself to respond to any. At a point, Troy called, and he kept it together enough to let him know he was at home and safe. After that, he let his phone die and laid in the silence until he fell into a restless sleep.
⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖
Somehow, September had come. The pre-season started because it had to.
Life went on. Hockey continued, because it was a multi-billion dollar industry that still had plenty of players who hadn’t imploded underwater over the summer to fill the rosters.
Harris sat at his desk, not doing much of anything. He needed to hit some deadlines, and had told Troy he wasn’t expecting much free time this week because he was just working so slowly.
There was a knock at the door. Harris had told his boyfriend he didn’t have to knock over and over, but he still did as a courtesy. Maybe because of a couple times the opening door had scared him and he screamed.
“Come in.”
“Hey,” Troy said as he stepped through the door covered in sticky notes. He took a seat in his usual chair near the desktop setup.
“How are you?” Harris asked.
“I’m okay.”
“That’s… better than I was expecting.”
“Yeah. This sucks.”
Harris nodded in agreement.
“I shouldn’t hang out for long, some of the guys wanted to go out and get drinks. I don’t want to, but I’m the captain now. So. I have to.” He shrugged. “I wanted to show you something though.” He pulled out his phone and rolled his chair next to Harris. “It’s not much, but there’s a transcript that just came out of the final messages of the Titan. From the trial going on.”
Harris looked at the bold headline. ‘All good here’: Titan sub’s last message before implosion. Troy let him take the phone and scroll through the article. Someone had typed out that message minutes before communications went out.
Troy interrupted him before he got to the end. “People online are saying it means what James Cameron said was wrong. They probably didn’t know anything was going wrong. They didn’t suffer.”
Harris looked up from the phone to Troy. The hockey player was blinking back tears. Harris reached a hand up to wipe one out of the corner of his right eye.
“Troy, that’s such good news. I don’t know if I remember the last time we got good news.”
“Becoming captain doesn’t count?” He said sarcastically. Harris knew how much he hated becoming captain like this.
“Shush.” He pulled Troy in for a kiss, and stayed pressed up against him after. “You’re doing so good with the team. I’m proud of you. And it feels so much lighter knowing they didn’t die in the middle of Shane freaking out.”
Troy nodded against his chest. “I wouldn’t go that far. He still may still have struggled being that far underwater. But yeah, I’m glad they didn’t die slowly. Or know what was happening.”
Harris took a shaky breath. “Me too. This is going to sound stupid. But that’s how I always wanted to die. You know how much I’ve been in hospitals. I don’t want to go out that way. In my sleep, when I’m older would be nice. But going out in an instant, with someone you love? That sounds like the best way.”
“Yeah. It does. It sucks for us, but I’m glad neither of them had to live without the other. They would have hated that.”
“That would have been really hard. For either of them.”
“But it sucks for us. For everyone still here that didn’t go on a stupid journey in a sardine can to see the Titanic. What were they thinking?” Troy asked rhetorically.
“To be fair, Oceangate did use a lot of deceitful tactics in promoting their company, and presented itself as pretty credible. As safe. That’s why the lawsuit is happening. I sure as hell wouldn’t have gone on that trip, but I can see how the experience they sold seemed appealing and trustworthy. Their marketing –”
“Harris. I didn’t need a real answer. I just wanted to bitch. I mean, vent. Thank you though.” He squeezed his boyfriend, and then stood up. “I should get going. Do you want to join us? It’s mostly rookies, but you’ll know me.”
Harris looked over at his neglected computer. He wasn’t going to get anything done tonight anyway. Talking to players was part of his job, he could justify this as time worked.
“I think that would be nice. Give me a minute to pack up,” he said. He grabbed his jacket and a few belongings off the desk. His eye caught on a framed photo of the team from last year, with Shane and Ilya dead center, holding hands.
He was going to miss them for the rest of his life.
“I’m ready,” he said, pushing in the chair. Troy reached out to get the lights, and Harris felt a small peace settle over him as he stepped out of his office.
They walked in silence out to Troy’s car.
⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖
Three months earlier
“I can’t fucking believe you got us killed,” Shane said, adjusting his halo.
“The CEO was on the ship!” Ilya defended himself. He crossed his arms, which was made difficult by his oversized white robe.
“Yeah, and now he’s here. Or in hell. I didn’t really pay attention to what happened at the gates.”
“This is not so bad.”
“Heaven is nice, that’s not the point.”
Ilya shrugged. He had accepted the afterlife a lot easier than Shane. Maybe it was because he spent life thinking about death more than Canada’s golden boy.
“Shane, I did not kill us. It was the Titanic.”
“Lots of people went to the Titanic without dying before. I looked this up before we went on the trip.”
“Actually, a lot of people who saw the Titanic, as passengers, died.” Ilya smiled, because he knew he was being a smartass.
Shane shook his head. Every variant of this conversation had gone similarly. Ilya made jokes about their death, Shane tried to poke holes in his logic, and eventually they let it drop.
He wasn’t as upset as he pretended to be. Third-degree murder accusations made for good chirping. He was upset, of course, but not at Ilya. It was hard to be mad at his husband when he looked so hot as an angel.
Shane asked “Which rink did you want to go to today? The one here or did you want to scrimmage?”
“Mmm. I am thinking your practice rink. Then we have plenty of time before lunch.”
“That sounds good. I’m really excited to meet your mom.”
“I am too. For you to meet each other. She’s going to love you.”
“Like you love me?”
“No. Different because I love you in the way I made a scheme to get us blown up together in a submarine so we would be together for all eternity.”
Shane kissed him, and could feel the smiles between their lips.
⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖
September
Orange leaves and the gold light of sunset bathed the cottage in the clouds that Shane and Ilya had made into their year-round home. Though the days were shorter, the longer cozy nights inside more than made up for it.
They had settled in for the night in bed when the trouble came. Shane was trying to reread a particularly dense paragraph about Russian history when he heard some chatter.
“Ilya, can you grab your headphones or watch your videos on mute?”
“I am not watching anything.” He showed Shane his screen, which had a Gameboy emulator on it.
“Do you hear that though?” There was a clink.
“I do. I can go investigate the kitchen, maybe there is a squirrel?”
“Sure — agh!” Shane bolted upright as his T-shirt turned wet. It smelled like beer and was cold.
Ilya yelped at the same instant. He felt like liquid was splashing off of him, thwarting his plan to sneak up on the possible squirrel. “The Fuck?” He said as he struggled to take off his now-wet shirt.
Back at the bar in Ottawa, the living Centaurs players made a toast.
“We poured one out, now a second toast!” Wyatt cheered. He held up his drink to initiate.
Troy tilted his bottle to clink the glass. “To a kick-ass season. And to Rozanov and Hollander, again.”
Their teammates nodded, and put together what was left of their drinks.
Troy continued, “I want to make them proud. I think we can do that. So, cheers!”
“Cheers!”
They won the Stanley Cup that year, OceanGate shut down, and everyone, alive or dead, lived happily ever after.