Chapter Text
Ilya was always hyper-aware of how he was perceived. People often assumed it was vanity, but it never was; it was simply survival that fashioned his palms into fists.
Since he was a child, weakness was not supported or even corrected; it was eradicated, pulled out by its roots, and burned into the ground. It started as a defense against his father and his expectations of a perfect second son. But Ilya had inherited his mother’s softness, her delicate features, airy laughter, and tendency to feel everything too deeply.
Alexie had been protective of him once, when he was young and sickly, brought into the world too soon. Their father had blown out any embers of brotherly love in Alexie’s heart, their mother’s focus on Ilya had only soured things further, till protection mottled into resentment.
Alexie watched his father’s disdain towards his withdrawn mother and learnt that looking for protection was a sign of weakness. Eventually, he started joining their father in hurling insults at Ilya.
Nezhenka. Soft.
Slabak. Weak.
Ilya learnt not to flinch at the words; he engraved them inwards, not as a part of his identity but as a warning of what could never surface.
So, he became the menace he was always meant to be. On the ice and in the class. In his home and with his friends. He learned how to hold himself still, how to swallow a reaction before it could spill out of him, how to make sure nothing in him could be read too easily. If softness needed to exist, it would exist unobserved.
Something in his heart clenched forever when he found his mother unresponsive in her bed, surrounded by pillows and blankets that could never keep her warm enough. He stood stone-faced during her funeral, a trembling hand clasped around her cross, secure inside his pocket.
He had kept a tight lid on his feelings his whole life, Shane changed this at an alarming rate. He was never someone who didn't show affection; it was affection that made him fight for his team, affection that made him travel back home to Russia every summer, affection that made him fall into bed with Svetlana, but affection had never reduced him to a smiling, sniffling idiot before. He was grinning at Shane and his horrible sexting when Marleau spoke,
'Wow, this Montreal girl works you up, brother.’ He could feel his cheeks heat up,
‘Shut your idiot face, Marly.’
‘You're straight up blushing, Roz.’
Something twisted in his gut; he knew Cliff meant no harm. He rarely ever did. He was, in many ways, the closest thing Ilya had left to a brother. But that didn’t matter. The word itself felt like exposure, like being seen in a way he had spent years learning how to avoid.
The response came out before he could swallow it, sharp and absolute.
‘No. Never in my life have I blushed.’
A beat.
‘Russians do not do this.’
The moment stayed on in his mind for longer than it needed to, because the heat and the giddiness refused to leave.
His body, it seemed, had begun to ignore instructions.