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When Shane wakes up, he knows he’s in for a rough day. His head feels full of cotton and his entire body hurts, but not in the typical I’m-a-professional-athlete kind of way. It hurts in the my-bonemarrow-hurts kind of way. Like he, down to his very essence, deeper than muscle tissue and sinew and fiber, is tired and sore and aching.
He knows the drill: Finds and fills a glass of water, messages Coach Wiebe that he won’t make the optional skate today, sits at the kitchen table with a measly slice of toast and chokes it down, even though it’s bland and tasteless on his tongue.
He should shower. He knows that. He knows it’ll help him feel better, help lessen the congestion blocking his airways, ease some of the pressure building behind his forehead, but the thought of standing, of disrobing and standing upright for the five minutes that it’ll take, sounds more exhausting than going to practice would be.
Shane forces himself to stand, anyways. He makes his way back to his and Ilya’s bedroom and curls back up underneath the duvet, resting his head on the pillow of Ilya’s chest.
Ilya, who’s awake, but hasn’t gotten out of bed, either.
“Are you going to the skate?” he asks, his voice hoarse, and he winces at the burn in his throat from his sinuses draining.
He expects Ilya to sigh, grumble under his breath, and make a scene out of vacating the warmth of their bed.
Instead, Ilya mindlessly returns to threading his fingers through Shane’s hair.
“No,” he answers after a few pulses of silence.
In one single word, Shane knows. He knows the weight of Ilya’s exhaustion. He knows the courage it takes Ilya to admit the truth.
It’s something Shane will never take for granted.
He wants to lean up and kiss Ilya, so he tilts his head and finds his chin, feeling the day-old stubble against his lips and nuzzles into it. Ilya, his Ilya, who is so beautiful and funny and sad, sometimes.
“You are okay?” Ilya asks. His accent is thicker now than it usually is, when Ilya has the energy to worry about things like his English and sentence structures and translations. Here, now, in their bed, he knows Shane will still hear him. Will listen to him no matter what. Will understand what he says without ever needing to hear words spoken at all.
“A head cold, I think,” Shane answers sullenly. “Maybe allergies? I feel bad.”
The fingers at his scalp continue their ministrations and Shane closes his eyes, losing himself momentarily in the feeling. He sighs into Ilya’s chest. “I love you,” he says, quiet and thick and just that little bit slurred that comes when someone isn’t quite awake anymore but isn’t asleep, either.
They stay like that until Shane does, actually, fall asleep. If he dreams, he doesn’t remember it.
Ilya’s side of the bed is empty when he wakes up. Shane heaves himself up and finds him on the deck. There’s a cool cup of coffee sitting in front of him and an abandoned cigarette on an ashtray beside it.
(Shane doesn’t pretend to know the exact shape and size of Ilya’s depression, but he knows enough of it. He knows, for instance, that Ilya likes to come outside in the mornings with Anya, right on the edge of daybreak to watch the sun rise over the water. He tells Shane that he takes this time to talk to his mother, because it’s something he remembers her doing when he was younger: sitting on their balcony, a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other, overlooking the sunrise.
Typically, Shane doesn’t bother him when he’s outside talking to her. He has, in the past, joined Ilya, sitting beside him and listening to Ilya’s steady baritone. He can understand more Russian now than ever before, but he doesn’t listen to Ilya’s conversation. Instead, he lets the shape and cadence of his voice wash over him like a balm to his ever-running mind.)
“I texted Yuna,” Ilya tells him when he comes back inside, pressing a kiss to the crown of Shane’s head as he passes him. “I told her we will not make Family Dinner tonight. We are not feeling well.”
“Is she on her way here, then?” Shane asks.
The smile that lifts the corner of Ilya’s mouth is more telling than the nod he gives Shane.
She arrives with very little fanfare. There’s a soft knock on their front door before she lets herself in, and then she’s padding around their kitchen with a lunchbox full of frozen soup and an assortment of cold and flu meds.
They let her take over their kitchen when she suggests — carefully, casually — that they go clean up. Shane reaches for and pulls Ilya with him to their bathroom. Their shower is succinct, perfunctory. Shane basks in the steam as Ilya lathers the washcloth and wipes him down. Ilya hangs his head and holds onto Shane’s hips as Shane works shampoo and conditioner into his honey blonde curls.
They return to steaming soup and a tidied kitchen. Yuna sits them down and eats a bowl herself.
It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. It’s love.
There’s small talk interspersed here and there. Ilya asks about David, and Yuna tells them that he’s on a morning fishing trip with a colleague from work. Yuna asks about Anya, and Shane admits that she’s still at the Dog Hotel following their late return the evening before.
Yuna, of course, insists on cleaning up their dishes. Not because they can’t, she swears, but because she wants to.
So Shane allows Ilya to pull him away, this time. Ilya settles himself on the chaise before pulling Shane on top of him. They don’t quite fit on it, not individually and certainly not together, but they don’t care. Shane returns his head to its home on Ilya’s chest, feeling the steady thump of his heartbeat. Ilya returns to weaving his fingers through Shane’s hair, but not before he presses a kiss to his forehead.
That’s how Shane falls back asleep: his ear pressed to Ilya’s heart, his mouth just slightly ajar to compensate for his stuffed up nose, and Ilya’s hands in his hair.
Ilya is still awake when Yuna walks in. The sunlight catches him from where it’s shining in through the window, and she locks in on the wispy curls that fall around his face.
“It has been a low day, for me,” he says quietly. Shane hums in his sleep, and his hand is held tight to Ilya’s shirt, and it makes Yuna kinda want to cry at the sight of her baby boy so vulnerable.
She doesn’t, though, because Ilya still isn’t looking at her and she doesn’t want to make him any more uncomfortable than he already is — and she knows a crying mother is going to do exactly that, no matter the why.
“Can I do anything to help?” she asks instead.
And she fully expects Ilya to shake his head. To tell her no, but thank you and try to change the subject. She knows that he talks to Dr. Galina and has a system in place for days exactly like this one, and she does not need to be privy to any of that information, nor does she feel owed any.
Only, instead, his chin wobbles. His hand falters in Shane’s hair before he takes a deep breath and continues its movement. “You already have,” he says, and his words are carefully controlled. Deliberately neutral.
She blinks away the sudden moisture in her eyes. Clears the tightness away in her throat.
There’s a blanket on the back of the loveseat that she reaches for, and after a second’s hesitation she drapes it over Shane and Ilya. Then, because she can and because these are her boys and God, they’ve already been through so much in their lives —
She leans down and presses a kiss first to Shane’s temple, then to the crown of Ilya’s head.
She stands back up and Ilya’s very clearly forcing himself to hold it together, lest he wake Shane back up.
“Call me for anything, okay?” she tells him, and he nods.
“I love you,” she says as she opens the front door, her shoes back on and keys in hand.
There’s an audible sniff from the other room, and she can’t see him, but she knows he’s finally given himself over to the emotions he can’t bring himself to show to anyone other than Shane. There’s a hitch in a breath that she pretends not to hear.
“I love you, too, Yuna.”
She clicks the door shut behind her.