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Ilya doesn’t often think about his legacy. He interacts with it all in a detached way; the children he sees playing ball hockey out on the street with his number on their backs, the rookies who tell him they grew up with his poster on their walls, the fans that sometimes stop him for autographs whenever he’s walking along the river path. He and Shane share a modest shelf of trophies that lines one of the walls in their home gym, and Yuna and David’s house plays host to a somewhat less modest shrine of all of his and Shane’s accomplishments, the pièce de résistance of which is a framed photo of the two of them holding the Cup overhead, looking at each other like they’re the only two people in the world.
He knows, abstractly, that he’s done something. That they both have, together. That the history of the sport will have their names carved into its bones, and their numbers will fly from the rafters in Ottawa until they become old and tattered and not a soul is left alive who once witnessed them play.
But when he thinks about his legacy, it’s a question of not what, but who he’ll leave behind.
And right now his legacy is in front of him in the form of Luca Haas, a fresh A on the left shoulder of his jersey, collecting pucks out of the net as the rest of the team files off the ice after warm-ups.
For the first month of the season he’d carried the A like it was something fragile, like he didn’t quite believe in his ability to rise to the level of the responsibility he’d been entrusted with. Now, though, he carries it with a quiet confidence that reminds Ilya so much of Shane in his early years that he feels – sometimes – like his heart will burst with it.
Ilya taps him on the helmet with a gloved hand as they coast off the ice together and Haas turns to look at him, a question dancing uncertainly in his eyes.
They’re halfway to the locker room when he finally asks it. “Can I talk to you?”
“Here?” Ilya asks, trying to gauge what Haas needs right now: his captain, or his friend. “Now?”
Luca pauses, teeth worrying at his bottom lip. “Maybe not here,” he says finally.
A friend, then.
“Tomorrow night,” Ilya suggests. “Day off. You can come for dinner.”
“Yes.” There’s an infinitesimal drop in the line of Luca’s shoulders as he relaxes, just slightly. “Yes, I would like that.”
Maybe it’s something about the interaction, or maybe it’s just a feeling, but Ilya watches Luca a little bit more closely that night. Watches the way that he weaves through defenders like they’re standing still, creates chances that shouldn’t exist, finds the perfect lane for a pass or a shot.
And maybe he’s overthinking it, but Ilya can’t help but feel that Haas – for all that he plays like the all-star that he is – looks like he’s holding something back.
It’s six o’clock on the dot when Anya alerts them to Luca’s presence at the front door, his Swiss punctuality just as reliable as his steady presence on Ilya’s right wing whenever they share a line. He follows Ilya silently into the living room, sinking into the couch and taking the beer he’s offered, passing the bottle from hand to hand as he stares at the label, like he’s not quite sure what to do with it.
“You are making me nervous,” Ilya says finally from where he’s leaning against the wall, watching. He looks for Shane across the room only to find that he’s also watching Luca, with an odd look on his face. Familiarity, almost, like he’s watching a ghost of himself.
All of a sudden Ilya is struck by a vivid vision of a softly lit hotel room half a decade ago in Tampa Bay; Shane sitting on his bed and fidgeting with his hands and looking just as nervous as Luca looks now and– oh. Oh.
Shane looks up, his eyes soft when he meets Ilya’s gaze, and something in his expression says wait. And Ilya remembers – like it had happened just yesterday – the way that he’d held back, given Shane space and allowed him to fill it. The way they’d both used that space to liberate long-repressed truths. The way they’d held each other on the fragile raft they’d created, adrift in the ocean of all the things still left unsaid.
He nods once to tell Shane that he understands, and together, they wait.
Luca raises the bottle halfway to his lips, pauses, and then sets it down. The arrested gesture is so deeply reminiscent of a young Shane that Ilya’s heart stutters inside his chest like it’s being squeezed by a phantom hand.
“Sorry,” Luca says finally, like he knows that they can both sense him holding his breath. “I’m not quite sure how to…”
“It’s okay,” Shane’s voice is measured, even. Quiet, like he’s trying not to upset the room’s fragile balance. “The first time is the hardest. It gets easier after that.”
Luca inhales sharply, pressing his lips together like the act of doing so can hold in the words that are desperate to force their way out of him.
“It helps,” Ilya says, following Shane’s lead, “sometimes, to say it out loud.”
Not that he had, at the start. He’d come to terms with truths about himself at the same time that he’d come to terms with the fact that they were truths that would need to remain hidden for his own safety. He hadn’t necessarily rejected labels, but he also hadn’t embraced them, hadn’t seen the point of a neatly packaged identity that could only exist that way when no one was looking.
And then Shane had sat in his hotel room in Tampa and said I think I’m gay, and Ilya had seen the change this had wrought in him, the confidence that had blossomed when he’d finally given voice to this fundamental piece that made up the complete puzzle of his identity.
Luca addresses the beer bottle on the table in front of him. “I think I have known for a long time.”
“Known what?” Ilya presses.
Say it out loud, is the silent plea.
“That I’m gay.”
The word hangs there, in a soft silence, in the home of two of the only people on Earth who may be able to completely, fully understand what he’s feeling in this moment.
And if one thing has remained consistent since Tampa it’s that Ilya still has no fucking idea what to say.
And if two things have remained consistent after all this time, the second is that Shane will always have the right words.
“Thank you for trusting us,” he says softly, and Ilya watches as Luca takes a deep, shuddering breath.
“Were you scared?” he asks the room at large, and Ilya can tell it’s not quite the question he wants to ask, but that it’s a small step on the way there.
“Terrified,” Ilya admits honestly. The truth ripping itself free without a moment’s hesitation, having spent long enough sequestered in the shadows. Shane nods, an echo of this.
“Is it worth it?” Luca asks next, and Ilya can tell by the way his voice trembles around it that this is the real question.
Ilya’s gaze finds Shane’s again as if magnetically drawn there and he sees the full depth of his emotions reflected back to him in Shane’s eyes, and he knows that they both know that the answer to this is an absolute, unequivocal yes.
“I would do it all again.” It comes out of him as hardly more than a whisper, and Ilya swallows around the sudden tightness in his throat. “No matter how hard it was I would do it all again, every single time, if it meant that I could have this.”
“I am scared…” Luca begins, and Ilya is hit with another memory of words he once said to Shane, all those years ago.
Yes, it’s scary. But you are brave.
“So was I,” Shane says, like he’s reading Ilya’s mind.
“I am scared,” Luca continues, “that I will do something I regret.”
It’s a difficult line to walk, Ilya knows this all too well. He could tell Luca about the decade spent locked in a daily battle with his regrets. Saying too much, not saying enough, showing his hand too soon, pretending not to care until it was almost too late. Pretending he could maintain the status quo forever like it wasn’t secretly killing him, bleeding him dry and sucking the marrow out of his bones.
He could talk about the moments of darkness where he feared he was losing Shane for good and about the flashes of light in between, on those rare days when their love felt bigger than the whole universe. He could talk about the things that had almost broken them and the things that had made them stronger and the ways they’d spent far too long tiptoeing around the truth of what they are to each other because neither of them was brave enough to look it in the eye.
But all the words die on the tip of his tongue when he opens his mouth, because Shane is looking at Luca with a strangled expression on his face and Ilya wonders – not for the first time – if he, too, is seeing an echo of himself.
“So was I,” he says again. “And there are so many things I regret. Not being honest with myself sooner, not being brave enough to be honest with Ilya, but this–” and the word tears its way from his throat like a raw, unformed thing, “this was worth everything we had to go through to get here.”
Luca nods absently to himself in a way that makes Ilya wonder if he’s even aware that he’s doing it and Ilya watches him, thinking about the careful way he’d asked his questions, about all the things he still looks like he’s holding back.
“You don’t have to tell us unless you want to,” he says gently, “but are you…is there…someone?”
A long beat of silence follows this and then, slowly, Luca nods the affirmative.
The first time is the hardest, Ilya thinks, and he remembers Shane crossing a parking lot in the frigid air of a late Saskatchewan December to shake his hand. He remembers the elevator ride up to Shane’s hotel room in Toronto, that first step through the door. He remembers the first time he’d said stay, and the way it had almost turned into the last time, and he remembers lying in Shane’s bed and saying – through tears – those three words that there is no coming back from.
And then he looks at the man on the couch in front of him, still staring at his beer bottle like he’s not entirely sure how it got there, and he thinks that if he can take solace in anything, it’s that Luca has already survived the hardest part.
“If neither of you are…ready for this yet, I understand,” Shane tells Luca. “But if you ever wanted to bring him here…” You would be safe, is the part that goes unspoken, but they all know.
“Thank you,” Luca says sincerely, looking at each of them in turn, and his voice is stronger now. “For…for showing me that I can be myself.”
And all of a sudden Ilya is blinking back tears as he sinks onto the couch, wrapping an arm tightly around Luca’s shoulders. “Always,” he says simply, hoping it carries the weight of everything else.
“It was perfect,” Ilya tells Shane later, when they’re tangled together in bed and the only illumination comes from moonlight filtering through the window.
“What was?”
“Everything you told Haas.” He presses his lips to Shane’s hairline and the next words are murmured against his skin, voice muffled. “You always have the right words.”
“It was easy.” Shane shrugs one shoulder, a wry smile flickering across his face as he says, “I just said what I wish I could go back and tell myself.”
“He will be okay,” Ilya says softly, not sure which of them he’s reassuring.
Just like they were. Just like they are.
Shane’s smile softens, the most beautiful thing Ilya has ever seen. “I know he will.”