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You said I killed you - haunt me, then! (...) Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Shane’s sitting in the penalty box.
Two minutes for interference. He knows the call's coming while he’s doing it—knows from the angle, from the ref’s arm going up before the other winger has even finished hitting the glass, from Hayden’s head snapping towards him with that specific tilt Shane's known since they were teenagers and mouthing him what the fuck, man?!
He knows. He knows.
Theriault's been trying to explain this to him all season long, unsuccessfully. That the penalties, the extra hits, the little unnecessary cruelties that have started to make the highlight reels in a different tone of voice, admiration from some, concern from others, are pretty at odds with what Shane Hollander, Golden Fucking Retriever of Hockey, has come to be known for.
Don't ruin your legacy, kid, he'd pulled him aside to say, hand on his shoulder. I know you're going through a rough time, and we're all here for you, but this isn’t you, Hollander. You're an incredible player, and—
Whatever. It doesn't fucking matter. So the hockey pundits who'd spent fifteen years praising him for all the violence he refused to need had now been handed the darker sequel—Grief, the Player, the widower as a more compelling angle. Turns out the cleanest body in the league still has blood in it. Big fucking deal.
Shane knows all that—knows all about legacy and career and little kids with posters of his face up on their bedroom walls—and he hears Ilya’s voice anyway, warm and dry and unbearably close.
Some things you do because you can’t not do them, Hollander.
So the hit felt good. Sue him. Maybe that's an ugly thing to say, but it's not like he'd say it out loud to his mother or his counselor or even Hayden, who'd probably understand too much and then look at him with that horrible open concern Shane’s come to loathe almost more than pity, since it's all anyone knows how to do now.
Yeah, the hit felt really fucking good, if he's being honest, especially in that half-second right before consequence arrived. Clean, clarifying: shoulder through chest, body into boards, crowd up on their feet. It felt like proof that Shane Hollander still had mass, that he could still move another body through space. That something in the world could still be made to react when he touched it hard enough.
Then the whistle, and the arm, and the penalty box.
The door shuts behind him with a mechanical click, and Shane sits down. A bright number on the board—two minutes. A clean punishment.
Hockey, for all its stupidity and blood, has always understood consequence even when the rest of his life refused to: you do the thing, the whistle goes, the arm lifts, the door opens, you sit. Everyone knows what’s been lost and for how long. Everyone knows when they’re allowed back.
Across the ice, the other penalty box is empty. He doesn’t look at it, which is how he knows he will.
The crowd’s still settling around the hit, one half whistling in approval, the other outraged. On the bench, Wilson leans over the boards, yelling something Shane can’t hear through the glass. J.J. is talking to the ref with one hand on his hip, pretending to argue back, killing time. Hayden uses the opportunity to skate a slow circle near him, his eyes cutting toward the box, and Shane looks away before he can get whatever he thinks he sees.
The penalty clock starts.
2:00.
1:59.
1:58.
Time behaving itself, the smug little bastard.
The other team’s power play sets up, and Shane watches one of the players fake a left turn; watches the defenseman block a shot; watches the middle lane open and close and open again. His mind should be on the next shift, on the score, on whether the hit was worth the two minutes, on whether the league office will call because every goddamn person involved in hockey has suddenly developed opinions about Shane Hollander's emotional state. His mind should be inside the game, because that’s the mercy hockey offers: be here, do this, want one thing at a time.
But at the far end of the rink, the empty penalty box is no longer empty.
Ilya’s sitting there.
Shane’s first thought isn't fear. That will come later, maybe, when he’s alone and has to decide whether seeing his dead husband across the ice counts as a hallucination or a visitation or the brain finally succumbing to psychosis under stress. In the moment though, his first thought is irritation, immediate and intimate and so fucking fond it punches the breath from him, because of course Ilya would sit there like that. Of course he’d choose the far box, the opposite end, the place least useful and most theatrical. Of course he’d sit with one ankle crossed over the other, helmet off, hair pushed back from his forehead, mouth curved, looking less like a ghost and more like a player waiting out a penalty he fully intends to repeat as soon as he’s back on the ice.
No, Shane tells himself. This isn’t real.
He purposely doesn’t watch Ilya. He watches the play instead, or he tells himself that’s what he’s doing, anyway. Shane doesn’t watch Ilya, who’s on the other side of the rink, who is absolutely there, who Shane is absolutely watching because he can locate him in a room or a rink or probably a foreign country by some mechanism he’s never been able to explain.
The glass in front of Shane fogs faintly where his breath hits it. He blinks, and Ilya remains.
“What the fuck,” Shane whispers, or thinks, or breathes. He can’t tell which.
Ilya lifts his eyebrows, just slightly.
It’s such an Ilya Rozanov expression that Shane’s whole body recognizes it before grief can ruin it. That tiny upwards flicker. The face he made when Shane tried to lie and couldn’t keep a straight face. The face he made when a ref made a bad call and Ilya immediately had a Russian insult ready to go. The expression he wore across restaurant tables, across hotel lobbies, across benches, across couches, across airports, across anywhere Shane did something predictable enough to be mocked and loved in the same breath.
A penalty? Very good, котенок, Shane swears he hears, though Ilya’s mouth doesn’t move. Finally, some personality.
He hears the voice so clearly, so vividly, he has to close one hand around the edge of the bench.
On the ice, the Voyageurs miss another shot. The puck clears.
1:21.
1:20.
He should be looking at the clock. Should be watching the game. Should be breathing through his nose, getting his heart rate down, considering the next shift, the next face-off, the next clean action. That’s what Shane Hollander does. That’s what Shane Hollander’s always done. It’s the great moral architecture of his life, really—pressure arrives, and he reduces it to tasks. Tie the skate. Take the draw. Make the pass. Answer the question. Stand in front of the microphone. Don’t flinch when other men call your husband something awful under their breath. Don’t chase the ref after a bad call. Don’t look at Ilya when he skates past during warm-ups. Do not, under any circumstances, let the world know where the softest part of you lives.
But the softest part of him is dead and sitting across the ice. So Shane looks.
Ilya leans back, or seems to. The distance is wrong; the arena light flattens him strangely, makes him both too sharp and not sharp enough. Shane would prefer him to be translucent, maybe. He’d prefer some obvious sign of the supernatural, some pale outline, some horror-movie effect that proves this can’t be happening. Instead, Ilya looks… freakishly alive. Sweaty, and irritated, and beautiful like how he’d always been beautiful, especially when he was trying not to be—but alive. Alive enough that Shane’s body almost rises toward him.
"Hollander," the penalty box attendant beside him asks, “You good?”
Shane looks at him too fast. The man is maybe fifty, red-faced, wearing an arena jacket and a headset, eyes still on the ice. He’s not looking at Shane like he’s seen anything. He’s looking at the play, gum tucked into his cheek, one hand resting on the latch.
“Yeah,” Shane replies. His voice sounds normal, so the man nods and keeps watching the game.
Across the ice, Ilya raises his eyebrows.
Asshole, Shane thinks, and for a second the word is so ordinary between them he thinks he's losing his mind.
So be it. Shane sits back in the box and lets himself think about Ilya at nineteen—which he does sometimes, because he can’t pick and choose what surfaces when a rink is this loud and the game is briefly happening without him. Ilya at nineteen was different in ways that are hard to name now. Sharper at the edges, maybe. Less certain of himself, which also made him more certain about everything else, if that makes any sense—though Shane's aware it doesn’t, not really. Some furious young resistance, some ancient loneliness everyone mistook for arrogance if they didn’t know where to look.
Shane had found this, at nineteen, a little annoying, if he’s being honest. He finds it now, at thirty-four, the most—he doesn’t have the words.
Maybe in Russian he does. Ilya loved to say that Russian had words for things that English had to limp towards, which Shane believed because his husband was an outspoken skeptic of linguistic poverty. He’d once told Shane there was a word for the tenderness of wanting something because it was already gone or would be gone, because Russian could admit that love and mourning worked in tandem. Shane can’t remember the word now, only how Ilya had described it, or how his memory remembers it now, at least. Love, shaped by absence. He’d learned it from his mother, apparently, who used it often enough.
Shane doesn’t know if there even was a word. Ilya lied about language constantly, in part because he enjoyed being untranslatable and also because English annoyed him on principle. Maybe the word was real. Maybe it wasn’t. What Shane remembers instead is Ilya lying on the floor of the cottage with Anya’s head on his stomach, one hand gesturing above him while he explained that English was too clean with time, too confident in its separation of was and is and will be, while Russian, he said, Russian knows better. Shane had been half-listening while making coffee, amused and in love and probably missing the point because he’d believed there would be more chances to hear it again. A little constellation of chances, a pocket of infinity tucked inside each one.
Across the ice, Ilya taps two fingers against the glass. Shane can’t possibly hear it—the arena is too loud, the boxes too far apart, the game too alive between them—and yet the sound still lands inside him. Ilya used to do that when he wanted Shane’s attention in public and couldn’t take it outright. Two fingers against a table. Against glass. Against the back of Shane’s wrist. Look now. Look at me. Look, Hollander. Look, Shane. Look, котенок. Look, look, look.
Shane’s mouth goes dry. He doesn’t know what his face is doing—he hopes nothing, or—fuck, he hopes it’s doing something. He wants Hayden to look over and see him seeing this, because if Hayden sees it too, then the world has changed in a way that’s irrevocable and every midnight prayer of his has come true. He wants the penalty box attendant to turn around and say, hey, what the fuck, is that Ilya fucking Rozanov, is that your dead husband, Hollander and he wants to put his fist through the glass before anyone alive can have Ilya’s name in their mouth before him.
The puck clears again, and the crowd roars.
0:44.
Ilya stands, rolls one shoulder like the penalty’s boring him. The movement is casual and impatient, and Shane knows it. Knows the long line of him, the arrogance in the hip, the irritability in the neck. Knows the old little performance of a man about to be released from consequence and already annoyed by the time that’s been taken from him.
Fuck. His heart hurts.
For a moment, Shane’s thrown backwards into another February, another game, another penalty box, Ilya alive behind glass while Shane scored and refused to look at him while skating past, because looking had rules then. Everything had rules then. Rivalry had rules, marriage had rules, secrecy had rules, professionalism had rules, and Shane, obedient to a fault, had followed every last one. He’d skated past the box without turning his head.
He’d known Ilya was watching, though. Had felt it along the side of his face like heat.
How many times had he done that? Moved past love because the room required it, the rink required it? The team, the cameras, the league, the old fiction of staying in control of the narrative—how many times had Ilya looked and Shane not looked back, because there would be later, because there would always be later, because later was the whole ridiculous fucking architecture they’d built their entire lives on?
Across the ice, Ilya’s hand rests on the penalty-box door, and Shane’s does the same. The symmetry is so cruel he almost laughs. Almost cries.
0:35.
For the first time since the penalty started, the ice stills. Players drift toward the faceoff circle. Hayden bends over at the waist and flexes the leg he blocked a shot with. J.J. says something to another player. Shane should use the stoppage to talk to the team, to track the next play, to think, to prepare. Instead, he just continues to look across the ice at Ilya, and Ilya looks back at him, and the whole arena seems to have briefly transformed into an elaborate machine built only to keep them apart.
Ilya mouths something at him. Shane thinks he catches the first shape of it, and—no, fuck. Of course he doesn’t. The word dies against the glass before it can become anything useful. He can’t read Ilya’s lips from here, or anywhere, because there’s no here that gets him close enough to a dead man. Even as an impossible hallucination, or a ghost, or a grief vision, or whatever fucked-up category this belongs to, Ilya still can’t make things easy for him.
His mouth moves again, slower this time, exaggerating just enough to be insulting, and Shane leans forward before he can stop himself.
The penalty-box attendant glances at him again. “Hollander."
No answer.
"Shane," he tries again. "Are you all right? You look like you're zoning out, man. You're on in thirty.”
Shane doesn’t reply. Doesn't even look at him. Just watches Ilya’s mouth—four words, maybe? Or three. English or Russian, he can’t tell. The distance ruins it, the glass ruins it, death ruins it.
Everything’s been ruining the fucking message for months now.
0:27.
Shane’s watching Ilya closer now, and his eyes are just so—familiar. Knowing. That look he saved for when Shane was being very serious about something that didn’t warrant seriousness, or when Ilya won a fight between them by saying something devastating and then immediately wanted to be forgiven for it. The look that meant, I know, любимый. I know. Come here anyway.
Shane’s breath catches so hard it hurts.
The whistle blows, and the puck drops.
0:21.
Ilya sits again.
Shane almost says no. Out loud, maybe. He catches it behind his teeth, feels the word slam there and stay. No. Don’t sit. Don’t vanish into the glass. Don’t become something I can’t reach again. Stay standing. Stay visible. Stay where I can see you. Stay, stay, stay.
0:14.
The crowd starts to rise as his two minutes are nearly over, everyone in the building wanting to count Shane Hollander back into usefulness. He used to love this part from the box, how the last few seconds gathered themselves beneath him, the body leaning forward before the door even opened, time narrowing to latch and ice and the first hard stride back into the game. The penalty box was punishment, yes, but also promise. Wait long enough, and the game lets you return. Wait long enough, and the door opens. Always.
Grief has no door of its own.
Ten.
Ilya’s watching him.
Shane wants him to say something. Wants the universe to commit, finally, to whatever cruelty it’s chosen. Haunt him properly or leave him alone. Give Ilya a voice or stop giving him a face. Don’t make Shane sit here behind glass with ten seconds left of a dead man and expect him to step back onto the ice as if two minutes could ever be enough.
Nine.
Shane thinks about the cottage. About the lake at dusk, black-blue and endless and stupidly beautiful. Ilya barefoot on the dock with a cigarette in one hand and Anya’s toys in the other. Thinks about Irina, whose face Shane knows mostly through photographs because that’s how Ilya knew her too, and how unbearable that seems now, how indecent, the idea of a mother reduced to a few angles of light and paper while her son tried to build her back out of longing and a twelve-year-old’s memories.
Shane hadn’t understood that properly when Ilya said it once, a long time ago, but he thinks he understands it now. Or he’s starting to, which is worse, because it implies that one day, he might try to reach for Ilya and not be able to find his body, or his voice, or the exact warmth of his thighs pressed against Shane’s under a table, and he’ll have to lean on photographs, and clips, and interviews instead. The public record of a man who’d once been private in Shane’s hands. It implies that one day Shane might remember the line of Ilya’s mouth from a magazine cover more easily than from the dark of their own bedroom, might hear the star player’s voice infamously saying is lie, liar told you that, I said fifty in a viral throwback best-of clip on social media instead of Ilya laughing into his throat in bed, might lose the man and keep only the archive.
No. His hand tightens on the edge of the bench until his knuckles hurt. No.
Eight.
Seven.
Shane thinks about the Russian word Ilya learned from his mother, the one he still can’t find, and he thinks that loving Ilya has taught him more about loss than anything else in his life.
Six.
Hayden clears the puck again, and it slides to the other end of the ice. The bench yells, and the crowd starts counting down the timer. Shane understands, nauseatingly, that they’re counting him back into the game and Ilya out of the world in the same breath.
Five.
At the far end, Ilya stands.
Four.
Shane’s hand tightens on his stick, and he gets up.
Three.
For one suspended moment, they’re both waiting for the doors to open.
And because grief is cruel, because the mind will take any shape the world gives it and force meaning through until meaning screams, Shane thinks, absurdly, that this is almost fair. Two boxes. Two doors. Two men behind glass on opposite ends of the ice, separated by the full wide length of the rink and every year of their lives and the impossible distance between breath and no breath, life and no life, death and no death, and still, somehow, waiting together. Ilya at the far end with his eyes on him. Shane at this end with his eyes on him. For one second, there’s a geometry to it. A rule. A structure. Two small boxes of mercy built into the arena.
Two.
Ilya’s hand is on the latch.
Shane sees the long fingers, the tape-marked knuckles, the small scar near the thumb from some old slash he’d complained about for three days and insisted didn’t hurt when Shane kept asking him about it. He sees the impatient lean, the shift forward, the body preparing to return before return has technically been allowed. That old arrogance of being alive. That old faith in the door opening—because doors, in hockey at least, have always known their part.
For a second, Shane believes it. For a second, he believes the other door will open too, and Ilya will step out onto the ice, annoying and so beautiful and so alive under the arena lights, and they’ll both re-enter the game from opposite ends, and the whole monstrous last year will fold in on itself as the faraway dream it once was, and it’ll all be over. Finally, it’ll all be over. He believes it so completely that his body moves toward it, his chest opening around the possibility before his mind can stop it, because his body has never been very good at theology or physics or death. His body only knows beloved and there and go and look now.
One.
The latch clicks beside Shane. Across the ice, Ilya’s still there, and he’s—fuck.
Ilya’s smiling.
Not the show smile, not the camera smile, not the vicious smile, not the sad smile. Not the smirk, either. Softer. Older and younger at once, somehow, all the hard lines of him loosened. He looks tired, maybe. No—he looks past tired. Like the fight’s gone out of his body and left the person underneath it, the boy Shane met before either of them had learned what the world would take, the man Shane married after the world took plenty and still somehow not enough.
Shane fucking hates it. Hates it. Hates the softness. Hates the lightness. Hates the fact that it’s his mind playing fucking magic tricks on him out of—what, mercy? Hates that Ilya gets to stand there looking at peace while Shane’s still here with the bathroom tiles engraved in his skull. Hates him for having the fucking nerve to look absolved and unburdened, because it reminds him of how, for months, every single person has tried to hand him peace with folded hands, and how he’s hated them for it, hated every soft-eyed stranger who seemed to think death could be made bearable if only you used a gentle enough verb. Hated every useless consolation people have kept telling him all year long: at least he’s at peace now, Shane. At least he isn’t suffering now, Shane. At least he’s with his mother now, Shane.
What the fuck is the point of saying that? To make it nice? To make it a story? Ilya missed his mother so much he went to her—is that what they mean? Is that what they think will comfort him? He’s with his mother now, like he caught a flight, like he packed a bag, like he kissed Shane goodbye at the door and promised to call when he landed?
Shane doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t believe any of that shit. He doesn’t believe Ilya’s watching over him, doesn’t believe he’s in a better place, doesn’t believe he’s in heaven with his mother making soup or laughing about old photographs or whatever bullshit people need to tell themselves so death doesn’t look like death. He’s wanted to grab them by the collar and say: You don’t know that. You don’t get to know that. You don’t get to make his death nicer. It’s fucking offensive. He’s dead.
And now he wants to reach across the rink and put his hands on Ilya’s face and punch the smile out of him. Rip it off. Make it change, make it angry, turn it into a snarl, a flinch, a Russian insult, anything but this holy, forgiving bullshit. He wants to drag him back into the worst of it by the collar, back into the bathroom, because at least there, Shane had still been touching him. He wants to march over, and—
And—
And nothing. Because there’s no face to cross the ice for, no body to get his hands on. Because it’s the middle of the game and twenty thousand people would be watching Shane Hollander lose his mind trying to punch the air in an empty box. Because it’s Ilya, and there’s no version of Shane that could get his hands on him and do anything but hold him. Because Shane would give anything, anything, to touch that face again, to punch or slap or push or kiss or cup or hold.
Shane feels tears prickling at the back of his eyes. He doesn’t—he doesn’t want this. God help him, he doesn’t fucking want this. Not like this. Please, not like this. Not here, not now, not ever. Not while everyone’s watching. Not while it feels like the world’s ending around me. He wants the Ilya who still needs him. The Ilya who’s still miserable, still unfinished, still in that bathroom so Shane can punish himself forever for stepping away. He wants the open wound, the necrosis, because it’s proof, because the horror is a place he can keep returning to with his hands open, because that way he can say I’m here now, I’m here, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, baby, but I’m here now, even though he wasn’t, even though he stepped back, even though he let strangers take over and time went on to do whatever time does.
He’s hated the idea of Ilya at peace, because peace feels like letting go of the only version of Ilya that death has left him—but then he’s smiling back at him from the far penalty box, and Shane understands that he also doesn’t want him trapped there forever, either. In the bathroom, in May, in the last breath, the last night, the last terrible sequence of events Shane has rearranged ten thousand times and never once survived differently. He doesn’t want Ilya held forever at the exact point of leaving just because Shane can’t bear to be the one left behind.
The smile changes, and he instead sees Ilya at nineteen in a hotel room, naked across the bed, unbent, unbowed, unbroken; Ilya at the cottage, wet-haired and laughing on the dock, Anya trying to lick lake water off his knee; Ilya half-asleep in the blue hour before morning, face open in a way daylight never got to keep, pressing his cold nose into Shane’s shoulder and muttering something Shane never translated because he thinks he understood it anyway.
For less than a second, less than a blink, less than mercy would allow if mercy had any authority in who gets to live and who gets to die, Ilya’s still there, still standing in the other penalty box, head tilted, eyes on Shane like there’s still time, like if Shane can just hold himself perfectly still, the universe might forget its own rules and leave them there.
Ilya’s mouth moves, or maybe it’s just that Shane needs it to. Maybe the dead are always speaking and the living are always just out of reach, too close and somehow too far away, trapped behind glass, behind time, behind the roar of the crowd. But—no. Shane knows it before he understands it. Words, arriving as memory, first wound, first challenge, first prophecy.
Will you disappoint them, Shane Hollander?
The boy in Saskatchewan with blood on his mouth and arrogance bright as a flare, asking the question that had followed Shane half his life without either of them knowing it was about grief the whole time. Will you disappoint them? The team. The league. The cameras. The version of Shane who thinks following Ilya into the dark would be its own form of love, because staying in a world that turns without him feels too much like betrayal.
Ilya smiles wider. The dead don’t return whole, and maybe the living don’t remember whole either, but for that one suspended second, he’s not the bathroom anymore, or the tub, or the body going slack beneath his hands, or the silence after the dispatcher’s voice. He’s every age he ever was and every age he never got to be, twelve and nineteen and thirty-four and eighty-six and every number in-between, all gathered into one impossible face across the ice, all burning through that one impossible smile at the far end of the rink.
Ilya had been a boy once.
That’s what comes to Shane then, stupidly enough. Not the star, not the rival, not the dead husband, not the specter, but Ilya at nineteen with all that life in him, all that promise, all that beauty, standing like the world hadn’t yet convinced him it was worth staying in and somehow staying anyway—for a while, for a second, for too long, for not long enough. For Shane, for hockey, for Anya, for the cottage, for their marriage, for every morning Shane now has to enter without him. Ilya had been a boy, and then he’d been a man, and then he’d been Shane’s, and then he’d been tired, and then he’d been dead, and now he’s a penalty box under arena lights while twenty thousand people scream Shane back into motion.
A soul becoming a body and then a memory and then a room and then nothing Shane can hold at all.
Shane looks, and the far box is empty.
No light. No smoke. No vanishing. No dissolving. Just there and then gone, like how he’d been there and then gone in May, like how he’d been there and then gone all year—at the edge of the bed before Shane remembered, in the reflection of dark windows, in the doorway to the cottage when the wind moved wrong, in the pause after a joke no one else knew how to finish. Love, shaped by absence. Love, shaped by rooms Shane keeps walking into with his heart already reaching for something that hasn’t been there for a long, long time.
His hand slips once on his stick.
“Go,” the penalty box attendant tells him, some impossible Russian softness tucked beneath the vowel. Or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe Shane only hears it that way. Maybe it comes from further away than that, from the other end of the ice, from the empty box, from the voice Shane has spent all year hearing in wind and glass and those two seconds before sleep, close enough to answer, too distant to keep.
Go, любимый.
So Shane goes.
The door opens, and he stumbles back onto the ice. The cold hits him the way it always does, which is completely, which is all at once, which is the only thing Shane Hollander has ever loved about the cold.