Archive of Our Own

In the northern hemisphere, year round, it’s always the same constellations that wheel around the pole, never dipping beneath the horizon. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, mother and child. Cassiopeia and its five second-magnitude stars. Cepheus keeps watch nearby, with Draco winding between them in a celestial coil. March in Montreal is spring; the Plowman, with its kite-like shape and its brightest star Arcturus, appears to herald the coming thaw, winter loosening its grip on the city. Death giving way to life, as the poets would say. 

On the night Ilya’s father dies, the Metros win 3-1 against the Raiders. That quiet night, the full moon was shining over Moscow, light pooling silver on his father’s hospital windows and the wet pavement below them. Clear skies, no visible stars.

It doesn’t even register, at first, that his father’s death anniversary was creeping in. Ilya supposes that it makes sense. The years that followed his father’s death were characterized by bigger life changes, fear, panic, and indescribable moments of joy: moving to Ottawa to play for a new team, running the Irina foundation, almost dying, being outed, and then finally getting married. For the most part, his father’s death was just some blip in his consciousness. Just a day that passes by and gets forgotten in favor of things he considered to be of higher priority. 

And so it makes sense, now that he’s got nothing much to worry about, that the date should return to him, insistently pressing in the forefront of his brain. Ilya finds himself just a little bereft. Mostly, he doesn’t know what to do about it, so he does what he does best: he hides it from Shane.

A lot of it is humiliation, on his part. The persistence of grief and discovering that the scar that is his father’s death still aches to touch. So he smiles when he’s supposed to smile, cracks a joke when he’s expected to make one, takes Anya out for a walk that turns into a run which eventually ends with him on a park bench watching people pass by. Briefly, he wonders what Moscow looks like now. A place that was once home but exists now only in his memories. Five years after his father’s death, Ilya is found like this: staring out into a cloudless blue sky, making things up in his head.

Ilya remembers the first suit he ever bought with his own money. Tailored to his body, precisely measured, all that fucking bull. Coach Leclaire had, among many other things, drilled into his players’ minds the importance of presentation. His rookies, most of all—”all eyes are on you, Rozanov, better act like you deserve it.” Ilya understood, in the abstract way that he understood most things: overall first draft pick, Shane Hollander’s rival, the menacing Russian planting his roots in American soil. 

And so Ilya had gone to the tailor that most of the older players in the team went to. Stood very still as his measurements were taken. He can still remember the old lady’s hands even years after the fact, wrapping the measuring tape around his thighs, his wrists, then his neck. “You’re a big boy for your age,” she had croaked, and then moved on. Ilya had wondered what that meant. If she meant anything by it at all. Maybe just a passing remark, but Ilya always looked for meaning in things. Easily one of his worser problems.

But that hadn’t been the first time he’d ever worn a suit. No, not at all. The first time that Ilya ever wore a suit was at his mother’s funeral. Some off-rack thing, thrust into his hands by a teary-eyed aunt he never saw again after that moment. Ill-fitting, tight around the shoulders and loose around the waist. It made sense, of course. No one had predicted that Irina Rozanova was going to down an entire bottle of pills the day before. Apologies to the dead, they all supposed. That suit was all they could find to make her son look presentable with such short notice. They had said the same words to him then, too. “Sorry, Ilyushka. This is all we could find. You’re such a big boy and they didn’t have your size.”

Always a big boy, Ilya. Always just swallowing things.

Shane wants to ask about it. This, Ilya knows without even trying. He can feel it in the way that Shane’s gaze seems to linger a second too long whenever he looks over. In the way he hovers at the doorway of their bedroom, like he’s waiting for some sign from Ilya to cross an invisible boundary he’d unknowingly set. Fourteen years of knowing each other has made Shane familiar to Ilya's silence, and the one brought on by memories of his father is one he knows best.

So when he climbs up to the bed and settles beside Ilya, he doesn’t ask. When he grabs his book and turns the pages, he doesn’t ask. When Ilya holds him a little tighter than he usually does, he doesn’t ask. A kindness, really, even if Ilya doesn’t think he deserves it.

Here are some facts: Alexei was born four years before Ilya. This means that he had the chance to live four years in a world without his younger brother. This also means that he got to spend more time with their mother. Of course, this also meant that Alexei was stuck longer with their father, but Ilya thinks the former outweighs the latter by a margin. Give and take, and all that. The balance of the world. Another fact: Ilya has always lived in a world with Alexei. His shadow, his ghost, the monster beneath his bed all rolled into one. 

One last: when Ilya got the call about his father, Ilya found himself wishing that it was his brother who died instead.

The last funeral that Ilya had attended before his father’s had been his mother’s. Ilya likes to believe this specific moment is a dream; some part of him knows it’s a memory. The dream-not-memory goes like this: his father’s hand is a tight grip over his shoulder. For the first time in a long while, it’s sunny in Moscow. Alexei is both blank-faced and teary-eyed beside him, muttering under his breath every now and then. Ilya does not know if he’s murmuring the prayers, or if he’s saying something else. He does not try to figure it out, because his father’s hand is still a tight grip over his shoulder. Clumps of dirt are shoveled, one after the other, on top of his mother’s casket. His father leans down to whisper, lip touching the tip of his ear: “It’s better like this, Ilya. It will be okay soon.”

One of the last arguments Ilya had with Alexei had been about the size of their father’s gravestone. 

Alexei wanted it to be grand; almost half as tall as he was, their family name engraved on the marble in letters so large anyone could see it from a mile away. Ilya wanted it to be small. Humble. Something more like their mother’s, who had only gotten a slab with the inscription of her name and two dates. For some reason, Alexei took offense to that. “Fuck you Ilya,” he had said, “so fucking selfish.”

Ilya laughed, low and terrible. He didn't even bother looking up at his brother—partly because he wanted to humiliate him, mostly because he didn’t know what would happen if he looked at him then. Instead, he kept his eyes on the catalog spread across the table, glossy pages full of marble samples and engraving fonts. “Selfish,” he repeated, turning the word over and over. No matter what he did, it tasted bitter against his tongue. Ilya had been a lot of things: selfish had never been one of them. He made it known to Alexei as much. “Selfish because, what, I don’t want to build our father a gaudy fucking monument?”

He could feel the sharpness of Alexei’s glare. “What the fuck do you—”

“Or, wait, no. Am I selfish because it won’t make you look good enough to them?” Ilya continued, waving his hand toward the door, the world beyond the heavy oak separating their father’s office from everyone else. “Always want to be the perfect fucking son, huh? You gonna pay for it?”

Alexei said nothing to that, but he did scoff, then stepped closer. Some part of Ilya knew what the argument really was about. It wasn’t about the stone—of course it wasn’t. It never was. It was about their father’s legacy. It was about their own legacies as his sons. Grigori Rozanov's boys, performing grand gestures for their father one last time. Alexei wanted the world to see them still when Ilya wanted nothing more than for memory to swallow them whole. Take them both under like the earth had their parents.

“Papa is dead,” Ilya said after a moment’s silence, pressing his fingers against the edge of the page he had been staring at for a while now. With all the strength he could muster, he lifted his head to finally look at his brother. His hair was disheveled, eyes bloodshot, though Ilya did not know if it was from crying, a lack of sleep, drugs, or a combination of all three. He liked to think Alexei would not have been that irresponsible, given the alarmingly worrying amount of police officers crawling around their estate at that exact moment. “Papa is dead,” Ilya repeated, “He doesn’t need a fucking billboard announcing that.”

Alexei’s lips twisted into a scowl, eyes flashing, angrily spitting, “You don’t get to decide what he deserves.”

“And you do?”

“You always do this,” Alexei replied. “You come in here, acting like you’re fucking better than it. Acting like you’re above it all—”

“I am.”

“Fuck you, Il—”

“Then you shouldn’t have fucking called me!” Ilya shouted. “You should have fucking—shit—fuck you, Alexei. Why the fuck did you call me then, huh? I am fucking above it all. I am better than everyone in this fucking—why did you call me, huh? Why? What’s the fucking point?”

It had been a humiliating outburst. He felt, almost, like a child. Fucking Moscow and its ability to make him regress. Always, always this place. In his anger, Ilya had been twelve again. Ridiculous; it seemed that everyone under the sun could change except for him. He turned away, stood up, and moved to the window to stare at the sprawl of their yard.

“Ilya—”

“Make it as big as you want,” Ilya said, cutting him off. Whatever Alexei had to say now, he did not want to hear it. The fight had drained from him, just as quickly as it had come. “Put the whole fucking skyline of Moscow on it, for all I care. Just fucking leave me alone.”

They both knew it was a lie. Ilya would always care. But it was much easier to pretend he had given up than to continue arguing over a man who had never given them anything worth remembering. In the end, no matter who won, their father would still be dead.

“It’s my father’s death anniversary, soon,” Ilya says eventually before Shane could even ask. He says it in the middle of the grocery aisle, while Shane was mid-motion, placing a bag of onions inside their cart. 

Shane looks up, face excellently blank. Ilya doesn’t know what that means. “I figured,” he says simply, then starts pushing the cart again.

He dreamt about it often, as a child. Thought about it often, especially when he stared out of his window and into the sprawl of Moscow blanketed in the white snow. Escaping. He never thought about it as leaving, because that implied that the longing was borne out of choice and not necessity. Escaping fit his situation better. How his mind operated. Ilya was thirteen when he first packed a duffel and stored it beneath his bed, collecting dust for how long it had been there. He remembers laying down on the floor, on his side, looking under the bed and staring at the bag. He did it whenever his father was in one of his moods—yelling, slamming things around, pretending that Ilya was the root of all his problems in the world. He did it whenever Alexei would get home, mad at something or other, cornering Ilya and telling him that their money was wasted on him. Ilya had been thirteen, then fifteen, then seventeen, staring at the bag and thinking: I could escape now. I’m going to escape now.

Ilya never did escape. Not really. What happens is his father dies, a long time later, and what Ilya becomes is alone.

It wasn’t always so bad. 

There was a time, in his childhood, where Ilya imagined that they could be happy. A specific time, the memory of which always comes to him clearer than most. Sunlight passing through the kitchen window of their old apartment. His mother humming tunelessly while she stirred soup on the stove, the radiator clanking as Alexei banged his toys against it. His father was absent, already gone for a week. Ilya remembers sitting at the table with his chin in his hands, watching the steam rise from the pot and thinking—very seriously, with the conviction only children could ever possess—this has to be what life is supposed to feel like. Nothing bad could ever find them if the door stayed closed. If his father stayed gone.

Ilya had held on to that feeling for hours, maybe the whole evening, sharing grins with Alexei from across the table. But the key always slots and the lock always turns, and the world almost always immediately snaps back into its proper place: voices sharpen, the walls start shrinking in around them, Irina Rozanova staring into space like someone had cut the strings holding her together. And Ilya learned then that there was no reason for him to ever expect anything. Happiness is fleeting. A fluke. Whichever door he opens, his father will be waiting for him.

When Shane eventually offers to retreat to the cottage for the rest of the week, Ilya agrees without hesitation. In the car, driving down the long road to Lake Muskoka, they sit in silence. Ilya leans his head against the window and watches the world pass him by, the endless green, on and on and on.

One of Ilya’s first friends in Boston had been a quiet guy named Peter, a goalie who lasted two seasons with the Raiders before retiring early due to a knee injury. Peter, who couldn’t look at the body of his uncle until the last night of the wake. When Ilya asked about it, some drunken question thrown in a quiet moment, Peter had said that looking made it real. “Irreversible,” he whispered, his words raspy around the edges, the stone of grief still lodged firmly in his throat. “That’s what it felt like to me. I couldn’t go back after I saw him there. It would mean he’s dead, and I would not see him as anything other than dead. If I make it real, it will be real.”

How many times can a person die? All of science agrees that it happens just once. The philosophers, the poets, they have more liberal notions of quantifying death. Ilya, for his part, agrees with the latter. It’s not just once, not really. It happens more in stages: the first death, when the body goes cold. The ceasing of synapses, the heart beating its last. What religion would call the departure of the soul. 

But that’s only the first part of it. When Ilya, through Alexei’s detached and staticky voice, had heard that his father was dead, the first thing he did was to straighten his shoulders, just like he always did when he heard his name. Regardless of the fact that he’d been in Boston at the time, fresh off a game and still in his gear in the Raiders locker room, miles and miles and miles away. Surely, his father has not yet died by that point. Not fully, at least. He couldn’t have been dead if his being could still reach through to him. If Ilya could still hear the gravel of his voice, the rough cadence: Ilya, straighten up. You look like a pussy slouched over like that.

Logically, then, there must be a second death. Less tangible than the first, and certainly quieter. Ilya wondered—and still does—when that would come. It must be when the voice finally loses its authority, right? When he stops expecting his father at every corner. When he forgets his face, the sound of his footsteps, the way his breathing hitches ever so slightly whenever he’d place a heavy hand on Ilya’s shoulder. The complete erasure of memory. When there’s no one left to remember, then surely that must be it?

Sveta had said to him at the funeral: “Your father is your father.” Ilya remembers resisting the urge to laugh, swallowing the spit and bile that pooled in his mouth. His father is his father and will always be his father, even beyond the grave. Never so dead, after all. Not while Ilya lived. Not while Alexei lived. Sickness in perpetuity. Blood always stains.

Ilya has never given God much thought. The Rozanovs were never particularly religious. They were Orthodox on paper, a box checked on government forms and school records, but not so much in practice. His father certainly had not been a believer, having regarded faith with the same dismissive skepticism he reserved for everything outside of science. Irina Rozanova, even less so. At least, when she was younger. The woman who existed in the stories of his long-dead aunts had always seemed too restless, too wild to surrender herself to something so intangible as faith. But something had changed in her final years. Snapped, more like. The suffering of marriage and motherhood wearing grooves into her certainty. Or maybe it was loneliness. Whatever it was, she found solace in God. When she wasn’t locked inside the bedroom, Ilya would find her praying, lips moving soundlessly like she was carrying on a private conversation with someone only she could see.

His hand flies to the crucifix resting against his chest; his mother’s before it became his. The metal is warm from the heat of his body, one corner worn smooth after two decades of being in his possession. The only tangible reminder he has of her apart from the photograph he managed to steal from his father’s bedroom the last time he had been in Moscow. Grigori had gotten rid of everything else: the books she read stories to her sons from, the clothes she wore, the portraits they had taken together as a family. Every trace of her carefully erased until it was almost impossible to imagine she had ever existed at all. Except for these two things: a necklace and a photograph, salvaged by Ilya in desperation and secrecy. The last reminders of his mother’s painful existence.

Ilya closes his eyes and rolls the cross between his fingers. He tries to remember if she ever did the same with it. If she ever sat by the window on sleepless nights with the chain looped around her hand, staring out into the neverending trees. If she ever watched her own reflection in the glass and found it hard to recognize the face staring back at her. If she ever prayed for herself or for him. Did she ever believe that anyone was listening? When did the last thread snap? When did she decide that faith wasn't enough? The memories refuse to cobble together into anything solid. Bitterly, he thinks about the fact that he’s been missing her for longer than he’s known her. He can’t even really remember the shape of her smile anymore, nor the sound of her laughter. Time has sanded away too many details. Nothing holds, everything of her has been taken away. 

It doesn’t really matter. Whether she had clutched the cross until her knuckles ached, whether she had whispered a thousand desperate prayers or none at all, it had not changed what happened. In the end, as all things end, she is still gone.

For all that Grigori Rozanov was grand in life, he was awfully quiet in death. So quiet that even as they lowered him to the ground, Ilya still could not believe that his father was dead.

The night before, at the last wake, after the prayers had been said and the guests have filtered out, Ilya had left the room where his father’s casket lay and ducked into a quiet hallway, needing air that did not feel so thick with emotion and memory. From the corner of his eye, he saw shadows moving. Half-expecting a ghost, he turned. But there was nothing there. There would be nothing there ever again.

Ilya remembers the last time he saw his mother. That warm afternoon with her warmer smile, her hip pressed against the baluster. “Are you coming with me, Mama?” Ilya asked from the doorway, watching Irina Rozanova stand beneath the sunlight that was filtering through the curtains. He’d committed that memory of his mother to his mind instantly, even before he knew that it would be the last, because Ilya was his Mama’s boy and he loved her. And loved her, and loved her, and loved her. 

“I’ll be fine,” she replied. “You go on without me.”

It didn’t fully sink into him until the first year has passed that Ilya has no home to return to. Not anymore, not really, not ever. It came to him late at night, at the cottage, while staring at the ceiling and feeling the night breeze creep in from the window. He’d closed his eyes and ignored the panging in his chest, then pretended, for a short while, that he was back in cold and lonely Moscow—outside of his house full of ghosts, that awful place, missing it anyway.

There’s one other memory he replays in his head from after the funeral. 

Ilya had been smoking his second cigarette, staring into the sky when the door behind him opened and Alexei stepped into the porch. The warm, yellow light from the kitchen creeped against the floorboards for a moment, the sound of voices drifting out before the door was slammed shut, leaving the both of them in silence.

Neither of them acknowledged the other. Alexei moved to the railing at the edge of the porch, a glass hanging loose from one hand. Ilya remained seated on the bench, shoulders hunched against the cold. Moscow was still caught at the tail end of winter. The snow had mostly melted, but the air still had that cool bite, creeping beneath his turtleneck and settling deep inside his bones. Montreal would have already been warmer, Boston even more so. Spring, well underway.

Ilya watched the smoke he exhaled drift into the darkness. Beside him, Alexei stared out across the grounds. Their earlier argument still stung. He wished, irrationally, that he’d hit his brother harder. But then, what would have been the point? What injury could compare to a dead mother and a dead father? Could anything hurt more than being an orphan? The monster that had loomed over both their lives for decades had finally disappeared. The tyrant, creature of misery. In the end, they’d both hated him. Why that never brought them together, Ilya would never really know. 

He glanced sideways at his brother. The darkness softened the edges of Alexei’s face, but not enough. He could still see traces of their father there: the roundness of his jaw, the shape of his mouth. Alexei continued to ignore him, which made Ilya bolder. He turned his body in full and openly stared at Alexei’s grim expression. Perhaps it’s all settled into him. The finality of it all. There’d be no more opportunities after tonight. No more yelling, no more calls, no more reasons to stand in the same room. Ilya had meant every word he’d said earlier—he would never come back, and he would never see Alexei again. After all the years, after everything he has given and endured, the only word left was this: enough. 

There’d been some grief to it. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he remembered the old teachings of his childhood. The Bible always said to love your brother. Yet, sitting there in the cold, Ilya could not imagine what love was supposed to look like between people like them. How, when Ilya was so afraid? When Ilya would always be afraid? How much of Alexei was in him? How much of their father was in both of them? What changed, down the line, all those years ago? When did all the good die out in his brother? We are orphans now, he had thought. It’s supposed to be us. But Ilya had never felt more alone than he did in that moment. That one particular, miserable moment. 

Alexei finally downed the rest of his drink. Ilya expected him to turn around and walk back inside, say goodbye to the rest of their guests and tuck his daughter in bed. To not ruin the moment, the longest they’d ever been in each other’s presence without tearing at each other’s throats. Instead, Alexei set the empty glass down on the railing, walked towards Ilya, and stopped in front of the bench. For a moment, Ilya stopped breathing. Neither of them moved. Until, finally, Alexei took him by the hand and pulled him up. He pressed a soft kiss against Ilya’s cheek. He reeked of vodka. He whispered something unintelligible against Ilya’s ear, then mumbled the rest of it in the crook of his neck. When they parted, Alexei’s eyes were glassy and red-rimmed. Deep down, Ilya knew it had nothing to do with the alcohol.

In the morning, he drove back to the airport alone. Alexei did not even see him out of the estate’s gate. Ilya never speaks to his brother again.

“Do you ever think about where we go when we die?”

Ilya can tell the question startles Sveta, if the sharp breath she suddenly takes is any indication. He’s standing on the back porch, pretending to stretch his legs after the three hour drive up to the cottage. Through the glass, he’s watching Shane curl himself up into the corner of the couch, Anya sprawled across his lap, begging for his attention. The TV flickers soundlessly, switching from channel to channel. Knowing his husband, he’s probably looking for some boring documentary as background for when he eventually prepares dinner for them.

“Ilya,” Sveta says eventually. “Are you okay?”

Ilya sighs in response. Then, “No, obviously.”

Sveta clicks her tongue. Ilya hears rustling. “Do you want me to come there? I’ll endure stupid Quebec for you. I can be on a flight there tomorrow morning earliest, afternoon la—”

“No, no, Sveta,” Ilya sighs. He rubs the bridge of his nose. “I just… I want you to answer the question.”

Another pause. “Really?”

“Really. Humor me.”

“Well, I’ve never really given it much thought,” she says after a while. “I mean, people die, and then…”

“And then?”

“I don’t know, Ilya. I honestly don’t. Why are you asking?”

Sveta’s voice is gentle all throughout. Patient. Kind. Ilya shifts his attention back to Shane, watching him laugh at whatever is being said on screen, watching Anya nuzzle her small head further into his stomach. Then, he looks up to the sky. This far out, the stars are always so bright. How could he explain it all to Sveta when he doesn’t really know what to say? When he doesn’t even know what answer he wants to hear? A non-believer looking for something to believe in. It sounds like the intro to a horrible, drawn out joke.

“Ilya?” Sveta’s voice crackles through the receiver. “Really, are you okay?”

“I am,” he replies. When he finally looks back down, Shane is staring at him. “I guess I’m just remembering things.”

The last time Ilya saw his father alive, the man had mistaken him for Alexei. From the bed, he tugged at Ilya’s sleeve, forcing him to lean closer. With a frail voice, he whispered, “Alexei, take care of Ilya, okay? I don’t want him wandering around. And tell him to come home early. It’s bad to stay out late.”

Ilya remembers gritting his teeth. Remembers feeling the rage, the pain, every single human emotion crashing down on him all at once. He wanted to ask what it meant. Instead, he nodded, then said, “Okay, Papa. Okay.”

When the door closed behind him, Ilya’s eyes were dry. Three months later, his father was dead.

Ilya has only ever prayed out of his own volition a few times in his life, and he remembers each of them with startling clarity: once, at his mother’s funeral, right before they lowered her casket into the ground. The night before the draft, wishing that whichever team he gets into, he’d make it good. 

When the Centaurs’ plane almost crashed. Ilya, by the window seat, surrounded by his screaming teammates. Eyes closed, praying that Shane would have a long and happy life. Secretly, to his mother, telling her that he doesn’t want to see her yet. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. 

There’s this nightmare he keeps having that he does not tell Shane about. In it, Ilya wakes in what feels like the afterlife, and for a moment, he thinks he’s made it. Heaven, or wherever else. He’d see the faint image of his mother in the distance, and some other figures. And he knows it’s his mother because who else would it be, really? Who else would welcome him with a grin so wide and with open arms? But then he’d turn to his side and Shane wouldn’t be there. Shane isn’t there. Shane won’t be anywhere. And Ilya would keep looking and looking and looking, moving through an endless field, until it becomes clear to him that Shane never arrived at all. That whatever comes after death has space for everyone except him. He never tells Shane about it. Something about giving a name to things. Peter’s story rings clear in his mind: if he makes it real, it will be real.

“You know I love you, right?” Shane whispers, fighting against sleep, his thumb slowly tracing patterns against the skin of Ilya’s knuckles. Ilya doesn’t answer immediately; he looks at Shane, takes him in, lets the words find root in every corner of his mind. His fingers tighten over Shane’s hand. 

“I know,” he replies after a while. It’s all that Ilya has left to offer, for now. 

Alexei had always called him a faggot, among many other insults. At first, Ilya thought Alexei called him that because it was the worst possible insult he knew. Then, later on, he found out that it was because Alexei arrived at the gym a little earlier than usual and saw him kissing Sasha after practice. 

And yet Alexei never told anyone else. Never made it public. Never even used it as leverage in a way he easily could have, especially when their father’s attention had started narrowing into something crueler and more transactional. Whether it was an act of kindness or mercy or love, Ilya never knew what to feel about it. He still doesn’t, even after all these years. 

There is one bearable memory that Ilya has with his father. A good one, actually, surprisingly enough. One he keeps, clings to like a child. Back when life was easier, when Ilya and Alexei had both been young, when his mother’s sadness hadn't fully consumed her yet. Ilya, on wobbly knees and unsteady legs, skates on his feet, taking his first steps on the ice. His father, on the other side, an unlit cigarette stick lodged in the middle of his smiling lips—waving at Ilya, calling his name: it’s like flying, Ilyusha. Just glide, one, two—

“What happens when we die?” Ilya asks, voice so low it’s almost swallowed by the night surrounding them.

Shane doesn’t answer right away. They’re sitting on the back steps, staring into the lake, the fire crackling behind them. Above, the skies are clear; so clear that Ilya could make out a handful of constellations, marked by their brightest stars. When he turns back to Shane, he finds him leaning back on his palms, also looking up. “I don’t know,” he says finally. “I don’t trust anyone who tells me they do.”

Ilya lets out a quiet breath. Not the answer he’s looking for, really. He’s in a mood. They had a small ceremony earlier. Ceremony is a word he uses loosely. He’s not quite sure what it was: him, Shane, and Anya, circled around the fire while Ilya muttered a few prayers for the dead. “Okay,” he replies, too tired to insist on it.

“It’s not what you’re looking for, I know.”

“It’s okay.”

Shane continues on. “I mean—I guess the body stops, right? And it’s—”

“Really, Shane, it’s okay.”

“—either slowly or all at once. Your heart stops, your lungs quit, everything that keeps you going just… shuts off.”

Shane meets his gaze after the last word, face carefully blank. His mouth opens and closes a few times, like he’s searching for the right words. Grappling with the enormity of the question. Or, maybe, trying to check if they’re both still real. If the moment is really what the moment is. “Shane,” Ilya tries once again. But Shane just shakes his head.

“No, it’s—my grandfather died from an accident. Motorcycle collision. GCS 3. Coma, brain death. My dad and my uncles tried, but there was nothing more they could do. I don’t really know what I’m trying to say. I just—”

“Shane.”

“Brain death. That’s what it all ends with. Because everything else can go on, but if the brain has died—if there has been a permanent and irreversible loss of all brain functions, then there’s nothing more to do. Death is death is death.”

It’s familiar enough a concept to Ilya. He’d been twelve then, but he understood what the doctor meant when they said they couldn’t do anything to save his mother. She had gone too long without oxygen to the brain. That same permanent and irreversible loss. In the months that followed her death, Ilya often wondered how things would have gone if he had just gone home earlier. If he had found her earlier. If he called for help right away instead of, for one fleeting second, thinking that she was just sleeping.

“But before the cells in the brain fully die out, right in between,” Shane continues, “I think the brain panics. Fires everything at once, like it’s trying to hold on. And then it floods everything in the end, one last dream. One last hurrah before the end.”

“And then?”

Shane pauses, then sighs. “And then it’s just memories. Stuff you forgot you ever knew, things you made up, things that happened and never happened. All of it just mixing together into this one, giant rush. The brain, throwing everything it has left into the air before the signals go down and everything goes dark. And you’re in it. And you don’t even realize it’s ending. It just feels like the biggest dream you’ve ever had.”

“How do you even know—”

“And then it stops,” Shane continues anyway, ignoring Ilya. His voice is soft, distant. Ilya looks down and stares at his hands. “And then nothing. No pain, no awareness, no more you. Just… nothing. Like before you were born. It’s just nothing, in the end. Pitch black.”

Ilya swallows. “That’s it?”

“That’s it for you. But the rest of it—the body, the energy, the atoms that make you up. It all returns, right? When you go to the ground, and the rot sets in, and you  just… return. All these pieces of you, back to where it came from: the earth, the skies, the burning core inside of stars. You are there one moment and then you’re gone, just scattered across the universe.”

“How do you know this?” Ilya asks, finally getting the question through from his throat to his lips and into the space in between them. Shane laughs.

“I don’t. Not really. No one knows what happens when they die.” Shane says. “That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? Everything I just said could be complete bullshit.”

“You sound very confident for someone who doesn’t know.”

“I guess that’s the point,” Shane tips his head back towards the stars. “Maybe there’s a heaven. Maybe there’s something else. All the religions could be right. They could also all be wrong. Maybe there’s nothing. Maybe we’re all living in somebody else’s dream right now.”

Ilya snorts despite himself. “Sure.”

“No, really, I’m serious,” Shane insists. “Think about it. Every night, you fall asleep, and your brain invents entire worlds. People, conversations, places you’ve never been. And while you’re dreaming, it all feels real.”

“And then you wake up,” Ilya finishes for him. Shane nods.

“And then you wake up.”

“So that’s the answer then?” Ilya asks quietly after a while. “Death is a dream?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But if it is, then it’s okay.”

Ilya squeezes his eyes shut, buries his face into his palms. “Why?” He tries to imagine the stars above them, scattered across the sky, impossibly far away. He tries to imagine himself dissolving among them, reduced to atoms and memory and whatever came after memory. 

“Because you always forget your dreams.”

When Ilya opens his eyes, he’s in their bedroom. Beside him, Shane has one arm tucked beneath his head, quiet snores escaping his lips, fast asleep.

This is what Ilya whispered to his mother’s gravestone, the last time: “I love you, Mama, but I will never see you again, okay? I hope you forgive me. And I hope you forgive Alexei, and I hope you forgive Papa too, okay? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with any of this, I don’t know how to carry it right. If there is anything after this, I hope it’s better than what you had here. I love you, Mama. I love you. I’m sorry. I love you.”

In the morning, Ilya asks Shane, “What did we do after dinner last night?”

Shane wipes his mouth with a napkin. “Huh?”

“Last night, after dinner, did we—I don’t—did we go outside?”

“We just went to bed, really,” Shane says slowly, voice tinged with concern. “You washed the dishes, we watched a little TV after,  and then we went to sleep. Are you okay?”

Ilya opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. Then he shakes his head. “Yeah. I am. Forget it. I must be thinking about something else.”

It wasn’t until two months after the funeral that Ilya found out—from Polina, who had answered his drunken text two days after he sent it—what happened the night his father died. In his sleep, the text read. We called an ambulance, but he was dead when it arrived. Alexei was trying to call you the night before, because Grigori had been angry about something. I don’t know. I wasn’t completely there. I’m sorry, Ilya. You couldn’t have done anything anyway, so you can stop asking now, okay? We all knew it was going to happen.

He’d been half tempted to demand the full story from Alexei, but that would be falling back into old habits. And, not that he’d ever admit it out loud, Polina was right. The full story won’t change anything. 

He wonders, sometimes, if he pities Alexei more than he hates him. At their father's funeral, when he knew no one was looking, he stared at his brother and wondered if he was grieving at all. He had been, after all, the one who was left in Moscow to care for their father at his worst. Ilya had the benefit of hockey—Alexei could not escape their father even if he tried. 

But then Ilya remembers. And remembers, and remembers.

“Papa,” Ilya whispers into the fire. Ahead of him, right where the lake meets the soil, Shane is holding Anya up, pointing into the sky. Much closer, Ilya focuses on the flickering embers rising up, watching them drift and then disappear into the darkness. He closes his eyes for a moment, feeling faintly ridiculous as he does. “Wherever you are, I hope you are not afraid. I hope you are at peace. And I hope that Mama has found you.” 

For a long moment, he says nothing else, simply listening to the crackling and the faint laughter from Shane. Then, because he does not know what else to offer, he adds softly, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

The words are foreign in his tongue, and he’s not sure he means them. But he sends them into the night, anyway, hoping it reaches whoever it's meant to reach. Five years after his father’s death, Ilya is found like this: head bowed, trying so hard to believe.

They asked him to speak at the funeral. Asked him if he had any last words to say to the dead, some final gesture that might give sense to whatever it is that remained. Ilya declined to speak, then said that his brother will say enough for the both of them. 

Before Ilya leaves Russia for the last time, he makes one last stop at his father’s grave. He leaves a folded up piece of paper on top of the stone. In it are three words.

“Are you okay?” Shane asks as he sits down. It’s a tight fit against the steps, but Ilya can live with that. He always likes Shane close. Loves the absence of space.

“Yes, I’m okay.”

“What were you saying, earlier?”

“A prayer for my father,” he mutters. “Just a short one. It was nothing.”

Shane hums. From the distance, a loon calls out. Ilya, so used to the sound at this point, only jumps the slightest bit. Still, Shane laughs. Ilya turns to glare at him. “Don’t start,” he warns weakly. 

“Still afraid of the little wolf-bird?”

“I’m not scared.”

“Sure you aren't.”

Something about the moment seems familiar, like it has happened before, just that Ilya can’t remember when. The memory eludes him. Trying to grasp it feels, almost, like sand slipping through his fingers. Before he could stop himself, he asks, “Have we done this before?”

“Done what before?”

“This,” he waves his hand around, gesturing at themselves, then the trees and the lake beyond. “It feels… I don’t know. Like this has already happened.”

“Maybe it has.”

Shane has a grin plastered on his face. Ilya shoots him an annoyed look. “I’m serious.”

“So am I. Maybe this is all a dream.”

That, too, is familiar. “Fuck off. You’re not funny,” Ilya says, though he does wind his arm around Shane’s waist, holding him close. Just in case. 

They sit in silence for a while, nothing but the gentle lapping of the waves and the rustling of the leaves beneath the mild breeze carrying them through it. Shane leans his head against Ilya’s shoulder. Ilya, in turn, rests his cheek against the top of his head. His free hand is resting against his throat, near his mother’s chain.

“I don’t miss him.”

“I know.”

Ilya sighs. He dislodges himself from Shane. When they part, Shane leans back on his palms. His head is tilted towards the sky. Ilya keeps his eyes on him when he speaks again. “Does that make me a bad son?”

Shane doesn’t answer immediately. “No,” he eventually says, voice resolute. “No, I don’t think it does. I don’t think you’ve been a bad son at all, Ilya.”

“But I think I should miss him.”

“Doesn’t mean you have to.”

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

“Maybe,” Shane concedes with a shrug. He’s still staring up at the sky. “Doesn’t make it any less true.”

They fall quiet again. Ilya finally tears his gaze away from Shane to stare straight ahead, into the dark beyond the trees and beyond the lake, fixed on a point where there’s just nothing; where the space is as dark as the sky above them.

“I won’t pretend to understand it,” Shane says after a while. Ilya turns to him, watching him watch the night sky. 

“Understand what?”

“What you’re feeling,” Shane continues, sighing. “Your grief, if that’s what you want to call it. Or not, I don’t know. If you can’t name it, all the more that I can’t.”

Ilya averts his gaze just in time to avoid Shane shifting his attention back to him. It’s his turn, now, to look at the sky, at those pinpricks of light against the endless black. Like muscle memory, his eyes are drawn to the patterns the stars make. He sees it all so clearly—Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. Cassiopeia. Cepheus and Draco and the Plowman. The entire cosmos, all reflected in Ilya’s blue eyes.

His eyes. His father’s eyes. The great wide blue. All the same, at the end of the day. Everything, a part. Him, Alexei, his mother, his father. Shane, too, in the end. 

“Is this a dream?” Ilya can’t help but ask.

“Does it matter?”

Ilya blinks, once, twice, and then he shakes his head. “I guess not.”

Shane doesn’t say anything to that. Instead, he stands up, then takes Ilya’s hand with a smile. His skin is warm and feels real enough. “Let’s go inside,” he says, voice quiet in the late night. Directly above him is Polaris, the north star.