Chapter Text
It was Tuesday morning. Ilya knew he should be happy. Still, he stayed in bed just a little longer than usual. He had a home that smelled of freshly ground coffee and clean laundry, and he had Shane. But in the pit of his stomach sat a block of concrete. It was a physical presence, a heavy mass. A feeling you couldn't quite call a feeling. That made him constantly nauseous and kept his breathing shallow, high in his chest.
Since his father’s death a few years ago, the anger had arrived. Not a flaming anger that sets everything on fire and turns it to ash, but a cold, unintentional resentment toward everyone and everything. Ilya was trapped in a body at war with itself. The fact that he had lost his 'quiet and chaotic self' was perhaps his greatest loss. He was angry at Anya for barking too loudly, at the rain tapping against the window, and especially at the world for simply moving on.
His father had not been a kind man. In the years before dementia had hollowed him out, he had been a source of coldness and unpredictability. And his mother... his mother had become a ghost when he was twelve. The day he found her was the day the world stopped being a safe place for Ilya.
Now, later, he had finally let love in. And that was the problem. Shane’s warmth acted like antifreeze on a frozen trauma. Now that he was finally safe, the rage over that lost childhood, the missing affection, and the years of survival finally dared to surface.
His heart beating fast like an untamed animal in a cage too small. It wasn’t panic. It was a claim. A claim on a life that had been stolen from him.
When someone like Ilya feels truly safe for the first time, a survival mechanism often kicks in: self-sabotage. Because Ilya cannot direct the pain toward his deceased father, he aims it at the person closest to him. Shane.