Chapter Text
Shane tells his parents that he’ll be at the cottage for the first time in five years like it’s a warning: he will be ten minutes away, will be back in Canada for the first time since he moved, but he asks that they not be.
“It’s not you guys,” he stresses to the silence over the phone that was previously his mother, her voice drawn thin and tight in the way it always is when they speak now – they used to be close. He used to drive out to have dinner with them every Saturday, the whole two hours from Montreal and again the next morning to go home. He used to stay at his cottage for the entire summer, weeks into months at a time, and would be back and forth to their own like an extension of one home. He never used to keep distance from them like this. Never used to keep secrets. “It’s just—”
There’s no easy way to remind them of the life he’s carved for himself from the skeletal bones of the one that they knew. Of the one that he had let them be part of.
“It’s the kids,” he lobs the word like a grenade across their already tense phone call, the word that has burnt as many bridges between them as it might have built. Of course his parents know about the kids; they’d even met them a handful of times, a lifetime ago when they were nothing more than his nieces and nephew. His parents had met the Pike children a number of times in their more distant youth, but they had never met Shane’s children. “It’s their first time back in Canada since The Accident, and it’s almost the anniversary, and I don’t want—”
He doesn’t want his parents involved. Not even a little bit, not even a dinner or a lunch or even a quick stop by and say hello. He’d already lost enough of himself that even he had difficulties recognizing himself in the mirror most mornings to this. Already lost Jackie and Hayden.
“I don’t want them to be overwhelmed,” he says finally, as though the drive from Boston with all of them in his Telluride isn’t a million times more stressful than an afternoon with the relatives the twins were old enough to remember. As though they don’t thrive in the chaos that follows Ilya like a shadow, tracks into their house like a draft despite his best efforts to keep it at bay.
Yuna sighs across the line a little bit like she understands, but mostly like she wishes she didn’t; she sighs across the line like she has so many times for the last five years, since the weekly dinners vanished like their only son’s presence overnight. They had gone by his house, following word of The Accident hitting the news like it did, and found the lights dark and the door bolted and nearly everything untouched aside from the most personal of his belongings and the closet where he kept his most practical clothing. They had gone by the Pike’s house as well and found it much the same, except the majority of the kids’ belongings were missing while nearly all of their parents’ remained. Shane had called a few days later from Boston of all places to assure them that he was alive, and that he was not coming back.
They had not seen him in person since.
“I love you,” she tells him between sighs, tells him between the distance he has carefully and callously lengthened over the years. Whispers through the cracks of the walls he has built around himself and the children and specifically his parents, keeping them apart. “I know you have been through something terrible, and I know that you have been through so much since then, but,” and the tight wire of her voice finally snaps. She collapses into a sob, something easily hidden behind the plastic of a phone receiver, and drags herself together enough to bid him a farewell. “But you don’t need to do everything alone,” she tells him, uses her voice and her tears and the white-knuckled grip she has on the kitchen phone to remind him that he is already crossing the physical distance between them. An invitation for when he finally crosses the rest and comes home. “You have people who love you, people who will help.”
Shane makes an odd, strangled sort of noise into the phone. “Okay, Mom,” he agrees. “I’ll call you tomorrow. When we,” and his voice retreats, the same measured distance he’s kept them at for five years now, “when we get there.”
When he hangs up the phone, it’s immediately snatched from his loose grip by Ilya, who immediately hands it to Arthur. “Plug it in before you open Minecraft,” he says, running his fingers through the boy’s mop of dark hair as he turns to retreat down the hallway; his face is already tilted down to the screen, focused and silent in the way he gets sometimes, and his socked feet make quiet slapping noises against the hardwood floors. “Lapochka,” he calls after the boy, who lets him know he’s heard by pausing in the doorway of his bedroom. “Plug in your dad’s phone, yeah?”
Arthur, ten years old now and still the same small void of silence and dark eyes that he’s been since he was five, nods in reply. “I will, Lily,” he assures in his quiet, small voice. And then, before he vanishes behind a closed door and a bright screen, he warbles back a soft and sincere, “love you!” that has both Shane and Ilya leaning against the nearest steady surface.
Arthur didn’t speak for nearly two years following The Accident. He didn’t tell any of them that he loved them for another two. It has not, nor will it ever, get old to hear.
Ilya watches him disappear. “Love you, Lapochka,” he calls after, and then glances from the side of his vision at Shane, waits for him to tear his eyes away from the hallway to the kids’ rooms and notice. “How was your mom?” he asks like he already knows the answer – he probably does. Ilya has been the supportive audience to five years of stilted phone calls and Shane slowly tearing himself to shreds, has learned to make himself and the kids scarce or has learned to herd them into the kitchen and a recipe that will have them all laughing over a plate of something sweet later. Has learned enough to know that this call is not a good one, or even a bad one.
Has learned enough to know that tomorrow will be the one to watch out for.
“Oh yeah,” Shane tells him, arms crossed defensively – he’s had the shrinking and the hiding trained out of him by now, but at home he still indulges in the petulance of his discomfort. Allows himself the tiny motions of avoidance. Of sarcasm, sharp and biting. “She’s great.”
Taking pity on him, Ilya knocks their elbows together. “Yeah, well, I got the car packed while you talked. Food is prepped. Kids are in bed. We can leave first thing in the morning.” Ilya’s quiet confidence in running the household is something that Shane has yet to grow used to, even years later; his mother had once again expressed her worries that he not try to do everything alone, and he once again avoided telling her that he doesn’t. Hasn’t. That he hasn’t done a single thing alone since he was nineteen and freshly-moved to Montreal – that before he had the pillar of Ilya’s strength at his side to lean on, he had been something of the same for Jackie and Hayden.
And he does lean against that strength, slumping to the side until he catches himself against the familiar shape of Ilya’s shoulder. “Thank you,” he says quietly. Gratefully. Like it isn’t Ilya’s exact job to do things like this.
As if sensing the thought, Ilya rolls his eyes. “Is in the job description,” he teases, smile wide and accent rough like it gets sometimes. He’s lived in Boston since he was a teenager, speaks English now with the same fluency he does Russian, but in the quiet hours of their shared spaces his speech often drifts much the same way Shane falls back into much older habits. Like something comfortable, something worn soft and smooth. “You should get some sleep.”
It’s not terribly late, maybe approaching nine, but they’re scheduled to leave the house at five in the morning; it’s somewhere around a six hour drive but it’s easiest in the mornings, when the kids will likely sleep through half of it. Or at least three of them will – Arthur does not sleep in cars, but he does not mind them either. Much as his sisters will likely sleep he will likely remain engrossed in his video games at least until the border crossing. “You staying over?”
There’s no suggestion behind the offer, no heat, not anymore – five years living out of the other’s pockets and raising four children together has tempered the recklessness of their initial attraction into something less explosive – but Ilya smirks anyway. Presses a kiss to Shane’s temple as much as he presses the long line of himself against Shane’s torso. “Probably not a good idea,” he whispers into the hair above Shane’s ear. “You need to sleep.”
“And you don’t?” It’s only about a forty minute drive to the house Ilya lives in with his grandmother, a house he rarely returns to on nights where the kids will need him in the mornings – he spends school nights and special occasions at Shane’s house, spends nights where Shane’s work keeps him from coming home so the kids aren’t alone, but usually on the weekends he makes the drive back up to Salem. It’s not too much to return tonight, but it might be when he makes the same drive at barely four tomorrow, before another drive north to Canada.
Ilya grins at him. “I can sleep in the car tomorrow since you’re driving,” he informs Shane of this fact with unrepentant pleasure, and ducks the playful swat that Shane aims at his arm.
“Get out of my house,” Shane laughs, but tugs him in by his shirt for a kiss before he shoves him toward the door. “Don’t forget your passport. See you in a few hours.”
Ilya, like the girls, sleeps for the first three hours of the drive. Arthur keeps Shane quiet company during that time, softly explaining the various mechanics of the game he’s got loaded on his iPad – Shane has no interest in his fifth grader’s Roblox legacy, but he listens intently anyway because he knows all too well the feelings of having his own interests disregarded like that. Hayden had been the best listener, even when they had first met, learning across hours and years every obscure fact about birds and hockey that Shane had ever wanted to share. It’s far too easy to honor his legacy like this.
“Dad,” Arthur’s soft little voice, pitched even softer to avoid waking the various unconscious members of his family sharing the car with them – Ilya is asleep in the passenger seat and Amber on the seat to the other side of Arthur. The twins had claimed the third row of seats as their own from the very first day Shane bought the car. Shane hmms? to let him know that he’s heard. “Why are we going to Canada?”
Arthur knows that all of them, minus Ilya of course, are Canadian citizens much in the same way that he knows Shane is not his biological father – in the sense that he’s been told, because it is his history to know, but has never quite been relevant before.
“Well,” he tells the boy who only becomes more like him with each passing day. Arthur looks like Shane and acts like Shane and shares the same quiet strangeness with Shane, and while all of the children are his legally Arthur is the only one who frequently gets assumed to be his by blood as well; Shane does not have a favorite between the four of them, but he thinks he might be closest to Arthur. “We’re all going for a vacation. And I’m going for work.”
Shane is going to Canada, going back to his homeland for the first time in five years, because he has to show his face at his job’s main office or else they’re likely to send someone to drag him there by force; he’s been avoiding their many emails and phone calls regarding the issue for awhile now. It had been some mixture of fortune and force of will that had granted his loan to the newest branch, the Boston office, only a week before The Accident. That single ray of hope during those early, terribly dark days had allowed him the chance to take the kids and start over in a place that was haunted only by their parents’ memories and not their loss as well.
It had also bought them a good measure of distance from Montreal.
“You have to work?” Arthur sounds absolutely scandalized at the idea of it, like Shane working is a new concept to him and not a steady constant of their family schedule. “In Canada?”
For all that Arthur is so much Shane’s copy that it’s easy to forget the only blood they share is that which was spilled to land them together, he’s also quite a bit Ilya’s image as well. “Yes, Mouse,” Shane bites down on the smile he feels because he doesn’t want his son to think that he’s making fun of him; Arthur is worse with facial expressions than even Shane was as a child. “The Métropolitaine main office is in Canada, I used to work there.” With your dad, he doesn’t say. It usually upsets Arthur, the contradiction that Shane both is and is not his dad – he understands it on an intellectual level but not an emotional one, the idea of a separate set of parents. He doesn’t fully remember Hayden or Jackie, after all.
In the rearview mirror, Arthur pulls himself out of his game long enough to give Shane a flatly disgusted face at the idea. “Do I have to go?”
Their SUV nearly swerves into the opposite lane with the force of Shane’s refusal – his knuckles go white around the steering wheel and his jaw clenches, and a cold feeling of terror prickles along his spine like a threat. His children will go nowhere near Montreal, let alone the Metros’ office, as long as he lives. “No,” he says simply. Sharply. There’s steel in his voice now that he does not smooth soon enough; Arthur shrinks, and nods, and returns to his game. “Sorry, Mouse,” Shane offers a few miles later, when the panic has receded and allowed him some measure of softness again. He locks his true feelings away like he does the rest of it; Shane is a man who controls every aspect of himself because he must. Because people will die if he does not.
He’s not oblivious to the violence that’s been sewn under his skin, the capacity he has for destruction – his government made him a weapon because he was the only one with the control to wield it, steel resolve stronger than any blade or bullet.
He just normally keeps that part of him much farther from his family.
Arthur kicks his feet against the back of Shane’s seat and hums a familiar tune – some movie soundtrack, since that’s the majority of what he listens to, that Shane would probably recognize better if it were not coming from a distracted ten year old – in response. “Don’t worry so much,” he says instead of telling Shane that it’s okay; Ilya, and the kids by his example, are too good at calling him on his bullshit for Arthur to excuse the burst of misplaced anger. Instead of absolution he instead acknowledges the root of it, calling out that Shane is not mad at him but scared for him, for them. “Lily always takes care of us while you’re at work.”
Shane can’t help but worry. After all, Ilya and the rest of them still think The Métropolitaine is actually a bank.
He calls his parents again around noon, when they’ve had enough time at the cottage to unpack and eat lunch and let the kids have the run of the property just enough to be excited. His mother picks up like she’s been sitting by the phone. “Shane,” she greets, voice tight. It’s barely ten minutes between the two houses, the closest he’s been to his parents in half a decade, and the strain of respecting those meager minutes is clearly difficult for her. “You made it safely?”
The twins and Ilya had spent the last hour yelling back and forth at each other while Amber leaned too far into Arthur’s space to watch the movie on his iPad that she could not hear through his headphone, and Shane had gotten maybe four hours of sleep. They arrived safely, but perhaps not sanely. “Yep,” he doesn’t tell his mother the rest of it. He’s fully aware of the cruelty of keeping her from the children, even if he can’t bring himself to regret it. “Everything is—”
A flash of movement from the side of his vision reveals Amber’s neon colored shoes disappearing into the branches of a pine tree as she scuttles up the trunk; she’s been a climber since she was a baby. “Zolotse!” he calls, trying to snag her attention, but he’s all the way back on the patio and the twins have the bluetooth speaker playing music just too loudly. “Fuck, hang on,” he tells his mother while ducking inside to the kitchen. Ilya glances up at the entrance, checking the fridge for ideas of what to make for dinner; he sees the phone pressed against Shane’s ear and nods, understanding, and holds his fingers to his lips. “Amber’s up a tree,” he says flatly. It’s hardly the first occurrence.
Ilya shuts the fridge and sighs, dragging a hand through his curls, before sliding through the glass door in the direction of the forest.
“Sorry,” he tells his mother, trying to wrestle himself back into the secretive son and not the man currently watching his co-parent shoving his head into the wrong copse of trees to retrieve his youngest child. “Sorry, give me a second, I need to — Wrong trees, Cvetok! Mouse, can you point us in the right direction?” he asks, and Arthur slides from his stool at the counter to trot out into the yard already pointing his arm like a hunting dog, leaving his iPad open for his return. It’s a good sign, Arthur taking up residence in the kitchen with Ilya like this. It’s what he does at home, means the disruption to his surroundings and his routine hasn’t been too much for him. “Sorry, the kids aren’t used to this much nature. Or this much time in a car.”
His mother makes a noise that sounds suspiciously like a sob, and Shane wants to hang up the phone. Wants to holler for all five of this ragtag unit, his family held together through determination, through desperation – battle-born – to get in the car and flee. Far from the memories and from Montreal and from the danger the danger none of them know is looming closer by the day; from the danger that killed their parents. The danger that Shane walks like a tightrope, no net beneath. He’s done many terrible things in his life, but none worse than this: torturing his parents with the grandchildren they can never meet.
“Sorry,” he says again, but this time it’s not for the yelling and the swearing and the churning chaos that clings to their family like a mold. This time it’s for the distance, and the secrets, and for stealing their son from them. “I’m sorry, it’s—”
He can’t have the torment of this weighing on him, not when he’s due in Montreal in the morning. Through the window he sees all four children now accounted for. The twins are still dancing along to whatever playlist they’ve made most recently, and Amber is out of the tree – but not yet on the ground. She giggles from her perch on Ilya’s shoulders as he twirls them alongside her sisters, leaning them both down to scream lyrics with Ruby and Jade, and Arthur lays in the grass near them. Even from this distance it’s easy to see how content he is, hands and feet swaying along to whatever soundtrack he’s got playing. It quiets a bit of the guilt that tears through him, remembering what he’s doing this all for.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” and even to his ears his voice has gone distant again, the flat desert that gives nothing away; he cannot be the Shane who laughs, who loves, when he talks to his parents. Not if he wants to keep them safe. “I promise I’ll explain it all to you one day, but right now I need to go. I need—”
As if summoned, Ilya appears beside him. One hand slides beneath the back of his shirt, and the feelings of fear and guilt and danger vanish at the touch; he leans back, knowing Ilya will take the weight of him, and glances helplessly at the phone. The call is still going but he can’t hear his mother anymore. He thinks she’s finally left him.
“I’ll call you again in a few days,” he promises, knowing he’ll probably break it. He’s broken so many others by now it hardly matters.
And then he ends the call, and he slides to the floor. He thinks he might be crying, if he remembered how to, but at the very least he feels as though he could be; he’s never liked hurting people, especially like this, and never his parents. With a noise of discomfort that lingers from the car, from the stiffness in his knees at six hours in an SUV, Ilya follows him. “You could always go see them,” he says, sounding more confused than anything. Ilya knows that Shane has not seen his parents since The Accident mostly because he’s been there, in Shane’s home, for nearly the same length of time. He knows that he speaks to them a handful of times a month, and knows that they used to be close. He does not, however, know why it must be this way now. “It sounds like she wants to see you.”
“I can’t,” Shane says helplessly.
Ilya wraps an arm around his shoulders and pulls him close, tucks Shane’s head against his shoulder like he might with one of the kids; Shane breathes in the familiar smell of him, the one that smells like the products he uses for his hair and their shared laundry detergent and mostly just like home. “I have never asked,” he tells the empty kitchen beyond them rather than telling Shane directly. It’s a small thing except for the way that Shane has never felt more understood in his entire life. “What happened with them. I have assumed, but I have never asked. But the woman on the other end of these phone calls does not fit the picture of those assumptions, and I guess—” He squeezes the arm that has moved down to Shane’s side, presses a kiss to this first part of his head that he can reach, all to stop the way Shane’s body has already begun to tense up. “I guess now I think I should ask why not.”
Through the glass of the door they can see the kids still enjoying the outdoors, and always each other’s company. Ruby has dropped to the grass beside Arthur – not talking to him, not touching him, but including him through proximity. Amber and Jade are dancing with an energy that means they might actually go to bed at a normal time tonight, and he takes a moment to look at the both of them, Jade a teenager now and Amber the age that the twins were when he adopted them, and think about how far they’ve come. And then whatever was in him that could not break during the call with his mother absolutely shatters, and Shane takes in a deep breath that shakes the same way his hands do.
“Because Jackie and Hayden didn’t die in an accident,” he tells the air beyond his now vacant gaze, one hand trembling and the other twisted so strongly into Ilya’s shirt that he thinks the fabric might tear. “They were murdered in their home while the twins were at school, with Arthur and Amber hidden in a closet, and the men are still out there.”
Ilya takes a similar breath, one that feels wet and desperate like he’s drowning, and flicks a protective glance to make sure all four of them are out of earshot. And then they flick down to meet Shane’s. “You know who they are.” He does not ask. Does not accuse. Simply understands.
Shane squeezes his eyes shut rather than answer immediately. “Yes,” he admits finally, “but I can’t prove any of it. And they don’t know about the kids but they might know about me, and if they see me spending too much time with my parents or talking to them too much—”
“I get it.”
The strangest part about it is that Ilya looks like he truly does get it, like he understands the guilt and the fear and the paranoia. The terrifying uncertainty. He looks at Shane like he’s answering a question he never before thought to ask, and like whatever he’s learned has settled something between them.
He doesn’t ask any additional questions – Shane knows there’s probably a thousand of them spinning around in his head, because he knows what Ilya looks like when he is biting his tongue, but he’s grateful for it. Even admitting this much has felt like a weakness he cannot afford; it’s hard enough, keeping the buzz of panic at bay on a good day, but in between his parents and the ticking time bomb of a clock that is his return to Montreal he simply cannot risk falling even the smallest bit apart like this. He leans into Ilya’s touch, presses his face into the familiar spot against his collarbone. This, not the sex, has always been the basis of their arrangement – the way that one fills in where the other cannot, and the way they support each other through all of it. “Thank you,” he murmurs quietly.
“Is what I do,” he says instead of reminding Shane that it is, quite literally, his job. “I take care of the family.”
Shane doesn’t call his parents at the end of the week.
Instead, Amber breaks her arm.
It happens when Ilya is inside making dinner, and Shane is somewhere in the car between Montreal and the cottage – the twins are lounging on the couches on the patio, the ones they’ve dragged away from the fire pit to catch the warmth of the indirect late afternoon sun, and Arthur is keeping him company in the kitchen on his high stool throne. Periodically he looks up from his crossword puzzle app with his soft voice and his soft questions, catching Ilya’s attention with a quick “Lily?” that has never once failed to stop him in his tracks.
The kids couldn’t say his name properly, back when he first met them.
Rather, the twins could but the younger two couldn’t, Arthur barely five and Amber just about to turn four – Arthur still wasn’t talking back then at all. Ilya met the newly minted Hollander clan only a few weeks after The Accident, which he had recently learned was not in fact an accident, and Arthur hadn’t begun speaking again until nearly two years later. – and it had taken exactly one meeting for the children to hone in on the sleeves of tattoos that adorned both arms. They were all in greyscale, which had become Ilya’s specialty, and he and the children had bonded as they used him as a coloring book in those early days. One of the largest flowers on his right arm was the stargazer lily he had gotten when he first moved to Massachusetts, and somehow the association had stuck. All five of them, Shane occasionally included, had referred to him as Lily ever since.
Ilya is preparing dinner and Arthur is asking for help with his crosswords – it was something they had been doing together for a few years now. Arthur had always struggled with the vagueness of the clues and Ilya found the riddles helped improve his English skills, and it had become one the few activities they shared. – and the twins are doing something, and apparently Amber has squirreled herself up a tree despite her father telling her not to. Something about there having been a fire a few years back, the new growth at the bottom probably not strong enough despite looking it.
Ilya hears a scream, and is already outside for the sickening thump that follows.
“Zolotse!” he calls instinctively, a burst of speed he had not thought his smoker’s lungs capable of getting him to her side in record time. She’s conscious, moving and crying, but her arm is bent in between her wrist and her elbow where he knows there’s not meant to be a joint of any kind. The twins, momentarily frozen at the sight, are close behind him. “Lastochka,” he catches Ruby’s wrist before she can crouch at her sister’s side; her eyes are wide and wet and scared but she steadies when she hears his voice. When she meets his gaze. “Birdie, I need you to go inside and call 9-1-1. From the landline, it will help them find us. Bunny?” Jade sticks to his side like a burr as soon as she hears her name, or the childhood nickname that has followed her across two sets of parents now, tucking herself beneath his arm and putting one shaking hand on Amber’s shoulder to comfort both of them. “Can you call your dad?”
The twins, all of fourteen years old and aged far beyond that by what they have survived, move as a unit to follow his direction; his cell phone is in his pocket, easily at hand, but he knows them well enough to know the distraction will help them more than anything else. Despite the years they are still learning how to be children, stepping from the role of eldest siblings to alternate parents nearly overnight after the deaths of Jackie and Hayden. It was still the work of their united front for Shane and Ilya to dissuade them from taking on too much responsibility where Amber and Arthur were concerned.
They sprint for the house, parting only to allow Arthur, walking with his same soft steps towards them, to pass; Ilya brushes Amber’s curls now damp with sweat from her forehead, and brushes his thumb beneath her eye. “I know it hurts, Zolotse. I’m going to move your arm a little bit, okay? I need to make a sling.” She whimpers, but allows him to position the arm across her stomach. He had taken a series of first aid courses when he first met the children, certifications offered through the city college that would ensure his preparation for any disaster; he might have lied to Shane when they first met, lied about his experience with kids and his qualifications to care for them, but he had followed through with those lies as soon as he could. He’s just contemplating using his t-shirt for the sling when Arthur arrives, and drops to the grass beside his sister.
“Mouse,” she tells her brother with a seriousness that is usually only found in the only Hollander son, as though she is reading the words from a book, “my arm hurts.” She has, at least for the moment, stopped crying.
Arthur raises an eyebrow in a way that is entirely Shane. “Well,” he tells her in return, “it’s broken.”
And then he takes her sweaty hand in one of his and hovers the other an inch or so over the break, and the air around it goes shimmery almost, wavering and flickering like a desert mirage, and when Ilya blinks it away Amber’s arm is perfectly intact.
“Dad said to stay out of the trees,” he chastises her softly, but pats at her arm as he does so; he usually avoids physical contact. From him it’s the equivalent of throwing his arms around her. And then, as if remembering that Ilya was also there, he fixes him with the serious, dark eyed stare that has always reminded him of Shane. “The magic is a secret,” he informs Ilya calmly, like this is normal – it likely is, for him. It’s also normal for Ilya, but neither of them have known this about the other until now. It answers nearly all of the questions he’s been biting back about Jackie and Hayden’s deaths because he knew how on edge it made Shane, being back here.
“Da,” he agrees, because this was an echo of a conversation he’d had as a child with his grandmother, when he first learned of magic and secrets. His response had been the same then. And then he glances at Amber, who seems about as unsurprised as Ilya isn’t, and back at the house where the twins are just re-emerging; Jade still has her cell phone pressed to her ear, assumedly on with Shane, and Ruby has ended her call to emergency services.
He knows better than anybody what will happen to them, if anybody finds out about this.
“Arthur.” In the five years that he has been at least halfway responsible for the children, he has never once called the boy by his given name – he is Mouse, usually, or Lapochka in the quiet, sleepy hours. He is never Arthur, never the name chosen with love and care by a mother who did not survive long enough to explain why it was important to her. As if sensing the shift his back straightens, and he brushes the hair from his eyes to meet Ilya’s stare head on. “You have to be more careful, what if—”
What if it had been anybody else. What if Ilya had not been the sort of man he was. What if, what if, what if.
“You can’t let anybody find out.” One hand is cupping Arthur’s cheek, the other Amber’s; both of them lean into the familiar touch like housecats, and for just a moment he wishes they were still the same small children he first met, when he could take them in his arms and keep them safe from the world. Especially now, after this week, after the truths he has learned about the children he already loved like they were his own. “It’s not safe. There are people—”
Amber flinches. Arthur withdraws – not physically, not away from Ilya, just into himself. Hides, like he does when the world is too much for him.
Shame hits Ilya with the same all-encompassing force as the panic had when he had heard Amber scream, hard enough to stagger him. Of course they know of the dangers that exist for people like them. He’d had his suspicions before now, as soon as he’d learned their parents had been murdered like that – and in Montreal, of all places, the seat of the exact people he tried to warn them against. Or course they know.
The twins approach with trepidation, seeing that the scene has largely calmed; Jade’s phone is in her pocket and Ruby’s hand is in hers, and they both smooth the expressions of worry from their faces when they arrive. “Mouse,” Jade looks at him with such maternal disapproval that Ilya can picture exactly what Jackie must have looked like. He’s seen a few photos, staged and smiling, that survived the attack and their fleeing from it, but there’s something not quite real about the clean, carefully posed family interned in film. Jade’s expression feels tangible, feels like something passed down. Feels real. “You didn’t.”
He sets his jaw and juts his chin, Shane’s stubbornness in every inch of it, and refuses to speak. Ruby sighs, and releases her twin to brush a hand through her brother’s hair. “I know Amber was hurt, but Lily is right there.”
He blinks. Opens his mouth, but can’t find the words. Swallows, throat dry. “You all know?”
“Of course we do?” He faces matching expressions of teenage disdain that he fears he’s had more than a fair hand in perfecting, and Jade gestures with one hand as if to say obviously. He doesn’t know why he’s so surprised – they’re one of those families that are bound together by genuine love, by respect, and the kids are actually as close as they seem to be from the outside; they’re also fiercely protective, especially the twins over the older ones, due to everything that’s happened. “Arthur’s like Mom was, we’ve known our whole lives.”
“We know not to say anything,” Amber, who is the one closest to Ilya by virtue of being the only Pike-turned-Hollander to have no memories of a life without him in it, pouts up at him. And then she makes a similarly obviously gesture like her sister had, and he laughs.
“Okay, okay. Sorry for worrying.”
Ruby leans against him, pats her hand against the first part of him she finds. “It’s just because you love us, we know,” and something about the simplicity of it catches in his throat, the way she acknowledges the bond between the five of them – he’s never had the words to explain to them exactly how they’re not even a little bit his. That, more and more and more, he wishes that they even a little bit were. – like it’s a known quantity in their lives. Like it’s given. “We can just tell the ambulance that we panicked.”
“Someone should probably call Dad back,” Jade mentions, and Ilya fumbles for his phone and thumbs away the thirteen missed calls that have accumulated in the short time between Jade hanging up and him pressing redial.
“She’s fine,” he says instead of any form of greeting, or instead of allowing Shane to even draw a breath. He can feel the other man’s panic across the line, can feel the heaviness in the way Shane doesn’t interrupt him; it’s only the years of trust between them that keeps Shane even slightly in check. “She’s fine, the twins panicked. It’s maybe sprained but not very badly.” When he hears an exhale, shaky and stressed, he waves off the children in a motion they have been well-trained to know means the two adults need a moment – all four of them cover their ears with their hands. “She’s fine, Mr. Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Pull over. Breathe with me. No one will feel good if you crash on the way here.”
He counts down from fifteen, allowing for Shane to slow the car and pull over, and then begins a series of slow, exaggerated breaths in a cadence that has become second nature to him over the years. Soon he can hear the matching echo across the line, and then finally Shane’s voice. It sounds wrecked. “She’s okay?”
“Lyubimiy, would I be this calm if she were actually hurt?”
Across the line, Ilya can hear the sound of Shane closing his mouth so sharply that it causes his teeth to clack together; neither of them have favorites, but the children do. Amber laid claim to Ilya the day she met him and has rarely left his side since, and their bond is something recognizably special. If she were actually hurt he would probably burn the world down around them, and Shane knows this. “Okay,” he agrees. “Yeah.”
He starts nudging at the kids to let them know they can uncover their ears, first Ruby and then gesturing at her to pass it along the line; when it reaches Amber she also gets to her feet, brushing the leaves and pine needles and grass from her clothing. “She screamed when she went down and it scared everyone. The twins did the right thing, you should be very proud: Ruby called 9-1-1 and Jade called you. I held Amber’s hand so she didn’t cry. Arthur held my hand so I didn’t cry.” He winks at the boy, who grins up at him. “We’re all fine, I promise.”
Unlike Shane, Ilya always keeps his promises.
“Okay,” Shane exhales across the line, and there’s the sound of the car engine turning over. The turn signal as he pulls back onto the road. “Okay. I’m still about forty minutes out, but I’ll be back for dinner.” It sounds almost domestic, the way he says it. Sounds a little bit like home.
Ilya puts the call on speaker for the children to yell a chorus of hellos and goodbyes to their dad, Amber taking center stage just long enough to prove that she was indeed alive and well, and ends it after Shane reiterates that he’s still a bit away. He corrals the kids into the house to begin winding down for their eventual dinner, and he handles the ambulance when it arrives; the female paramedic smiles at him when he tells her the story of shared panic, looks at him with something almost like recognition. Mentions the jitters most first-time parents go through, and tells him Amber’s arm is fine – he’s aware how much she looks like she might be his, the only one of them to inherit their father’s coloring over their mother’s, which helps soothe the suspicion of the 9-1-1 call. And then they leave and the lasagna is in the oven, and Ilya follows the children into the other room to join them around the table.
“I was just about your age,” he offers finally. “When I lost my mother.”
All four of their faces snap up, eyes wide. Surprised. Like maybe, somehow, they understand that this is a wound Ilya so rarely addresses. “Was it—” Ruby blinks, lowers her voice. Squeezes her brother’s hand in fear. “You know?”
She doesn’t say the word. Most people like them, or related to people like them, don’t. Superstition and magic are such close kin, after all.
There’s no easy answer to that question. Or, rather, none that are appropriate to share with the children that he only knows because their father once hired him to keep them fed in his absence. The children who have, like he has, lost their innocence and their identity to a largely unknown evil. “I didn’t know about them at the time,” and it’s so strange, remembering a life before this. Before magic. “Didn’t know about any of this. But yes, it was... related.”
It’s easier for all of them to pretend that she didn’t leave him by choice. Hurts a lot less, too.
That night, after the kids have gone to bed – dog-piled across the two beds in Jade and Ruby’s room, the stress of the day melting into something tacky that sticks them together like glue – Ilya sits on the opposite end of the couch as Shane and changes everything between them.
“Was it Witchhunters?”
There’s very few people on earth who know of them, and even fewer who know them by that moniker – it’s generally confined to the organization itself, or to the witches they hunt. Shane snaps his attention away from his book so quickly it looks as though it should hurt, and stares at Ilya like he’s seeing him for the first time again. Like everything he’s wondered over the years since finally makes sense now. After a moment of contemplation wherein his silence more resembles a bird of prey than a man at home, he lowers his glasses and something cold and suspicious settles across his gaze.
“Hayden and Jackie,” he elaborates. He had suspected when Shane first told him, because it lined up all too well with the stories he’d heard: couples, families, killed in their homes with the discoveries staged as accidents. A way for the shadowy agency that had built its spiderweb throughout various world governments to eliminate the threat they thought anybody who even condoned magic would prove to be. From what little he knew – the history of it all was sporadic, entire generations all but wiped from the earth with their knowledge lost forever. It had begun back during the Middle Ages but this current generation, this modern version that had the global reach of innovation? They had been founded in Montreal just before the first World War and had spread outward, satellite offices in major metropolitan areas across the world now. – it was a state sanctioned genocide.
Shane’s gaze is still sharp and his face is still flat, and then he seems to come to the same realization that Ilya had that afternoon. That if Ilya knows about Witchhunters then he also knows about witches, and if the four children have known to keep this a secret when two of them have never quite known the parents who would have warned them, then clearly someone else had. He sets his glasses down on the table, and then seems to melt into the couch like whatever has held him up all of these years has finally given out.
“Yes.”
Like a dam breaking, or at least the secret that has dictated his life and every relationship in it for years now, Shane begins to speak. “I didn’t know about them, or about Jackie, for the first couple of years... It’s not— I’m not—” It’s obvious what he’s trying to say, though not why he refuses to; Shane is clearly aware of witches, is raising one. It’s almost like the superstition of the other side, a refusal to speak of the people lest they be summoned. “I was just their godfather, but by the time Arthur was born I was already part of it and—”
“My grandmother,” Ilya interrupts. Shane knows Larisa, at least vaguely; she has never liked Shane, never liked his face or his voice or his secrets, but she loves the children. Mostly he knows that she laid claim to Ilya sometime in his adolescence and moved with him from Russia to Massachusetts, and that he carries his mother’s last name – her last name – now rather than his father’s. He does not know what she has to do with this exactly but he can guess, given everything. “She was the one who explained it all to me.”
Shane perks up a bit, leans closer. It’s a recessive trait, a buried inheritance rather than a taint to the entire bloodline, but it runs in families. If one person in the line is a witch then everyone following them has at least a chance at being one as well. “Is she?”
He shakes his head. “No, she is like you.” Not a witch, but raising one.
It takes him a moment, but eventually Shane understands; he thinks of the bare bones he knows of Ilya’s family, the scraps he has been allowed to learn over their five years of sharing space and time and a handful of children and sometimes a bed. It’s not very much, but it might be enough. “Your mother?”
Ilya breathes out a moment to weigh those five years, on how he and Shane have been friends for years now and lovers for longer, and he takes a leap of faith. “Yes, her too.”
And then he offers himself, and a tiny storm cloud, in the palm of his hand; the weather witches were the first to be killed, back when this all began. The ones decided to be too dangerous to be allowed to survive to adulthood. Some of the very rarest of their kind to remain. At the first miniscule flash of lightning from the storm that mimics the tumultuous pounding of his heart, dark with fear, Shane’s gaze falls from apprehension to awe. His lips part, stunned, and his eyes darken. One hand moves as if to touch, gentle and longing.
And Ilya watches, from one blink to the next, as Shane completely shutters himself away.
He watches as Shane turns the small space between them, the half a couch cushion between Shane’s toes and where Ilya has tucked his knees up, into a much greater separation. Watches as Shane rebricks the fortress of his life with Ilya on the outside of it this time, trapped behind walls he knows all too well to be impenetrable.
“I think,” Shane says, unfolding himself from the couch; the blanket that had been half-heartedly tugged across both of them is folded and draped along the back of the couch, and the book he had been reading is carefully aligned along the edge of the coffee table. When he stands he takes the time to adjust his clothing, soft joggers and a flannel shirt that might have begun its life as Ilya’s, to run his hands through his hair. It’s worse that he doesn’t rush. At least if he were running away it would seem more instinctive, but this is a retreat. This is thought through. “I think you’re right, I should go see my parents.”
The proof of Ilya’s betrayal vanishes as quickly as Shane’s easy demeanor has. “Shane, it’s nearly eleven pm.”
He’s moving now, a steady bustle around the living spaces as he retrieves his phone from the charging dock in the kitchen, his wallet and keys from the bowl by the front door. When he stops to put on his sneakers he freezes, and his eyes glance down the hallway to where the kids are sleeping. And then, with the same wide-eyed worry, they flick back to Ilya.
He’s scared, Ilya realizes. He’s scared to leave the kids alone in the house with him.
“Shane,” he reaches out to snag his wrist, a move he’s made hundreds of times before this – he’s grabbed his wrist and his hand and his belt loop and his hip, has tugged him close by the first part of him he can reach, and Shane has gone easily every time – but for the first time Shane flinches. Visibly braces himself for the contact, and it’s what stops the protests from his lips. And he knows Shane doesn’t hate witches because he loves Arthur like he physically can’t not, like the center of the universe was the sunshine of his smile and nothing more, but it’s clear that the same regard does not extend elsewhere. “So this is okay for Arthur, for your friend Jackie, but I am the bad guy for it?”
He stops in the space between the living room and the hallway like a door, effectively drawing lines between Ilya and the children like he won’t allow the two to meet again. “Everything I do,” his voice is flat and gives nothing away, a blank canvas of what he might be feeling; it’s the way he talks to his parents. “Everything I have done is to keep them safe. I moved to a different country to keep them out of the world that killed their parents, and you?” A single crack reveals the man beneath, grieving something lost long before tonight. “I can’t have you bring that world back to their house.”
And this doesn’t feel like his mother’s leaving, doesn’t carry the same rage and remorse bleeding from the single wound he’s never been able to heal – this is worse. Because his mother might not have loved him enough to fight for him, but at least she had ever loved him at all.
Shane blinks himself out of whatever hesitation had stuck him there, straightens his shoulders and his spine, and moves down the hall to the twins’ room. Ilya listens to the soft, shushed sounds of him rousing them all from bed, and the hushed explanations as to why. Ruby and Jade sound confused over the late night visit to their somewhat grandparents, but Amber sounds excited for the adventure. When he reemerges, he’s leading the two youngest by the hands. He doesn’t look at Ilya when he shuffles the sleepy children into their jackets. “Say goodbye to Lily,” he tells them gently, like nothing is wrong.
“Goodbye Lily,” they chorus in their familiar tones, and he sits back to watch as he loses his family for a second time.