Work Text:
It’s when the afternoon sun is low and Ilya is drying dishes in the kitchen that Yuna Hollander asks. Ilya’s not surprised—she’s too strategic not to.
“Are you serious?” she says, passing him a chipped blue mug.
About Shane? Hockey? Moving to Ottawa? Being gay? About Yuna Hollander’s spaghetti bolognese? Most certainly the last one.
There are dark splotches etched onto the wood countertop. Ilya makes himself look at her. “Of course. Otherwise I would not be here.”
Yuna presses her lips in a line. He’s got the curve of her mouth, Ilya thinks.
“Ilya,” she tries his name, then decides. Eel-ya. “Look, Ilya, it’s… Well. You seem like you’re good for Shane. He’s more… he’s happier. David and I thought he was finally resting after the injury and letting himself relax.”
“Okay?” Ilya says. Is Yuna being indirect and faux-Canadian friendly before digging into him?
She sighs, puts down the cutlery and looks at Ilya head-on. The kitchen window lights up her face, frown lines, crow’s feet and smudged mascara.
“Did Shane talk to you about how his father and I met?” she says.
“No. He told me your husband reads New Yorker and played at, uh, how do you say? McGull?”
“McGill.” She purses her lips but he hears the mirth in her voice. “Yes, David played hockey in McGill. I moved to Canada from Japan for university.”
At this Ilya raises his eyebrows. “But your English is very good?”
“My father was a professor of Western literature,” she says. “What I mean to say is, I didn’t plan to live in Canada until I met David. I wanted to go back to Okinawa after I finished my studies. My parents were old and my sister and I were to move in and look after them.”
Ilya knows how this story finishes. He eyes the chipped blue mug. Lighthouse or port? he thinks.
“It was hard to adjust to Canada,” Yuna says. “I missed my family, my childhood friends, my dog, the food and lunar new year traditions.”
“You regret the choice?” Ilya says, voice flat.
“No,” she says firmly. “But I wish someone had told me what I would be sacrificing.”
Ilya crosses his arms. There’s a niece and friends across the Atlantic. “Mrs. Hollander—”
“Yuna.”
“Yuna,” he says. Back home he’d call his in-laws ‘mom’ and ‘dad’. Future in-laws, he corrects and his stomach flips. “I am never going back. Russia is… “ harsh, home, warming.
“I had a choice, yes?” Ilya says. “I could continue in Boston. Go to Russia in the summer. But I am not choosing that. I’m choosing Shane over everything else.”
Yuna studies his face with an expression he can’t understand. Ilya can see the outlines of similarity—they are both high-strung, protective, and speak of the heart from the head. No wonder Shane likes the both of them.
“Then, welcome on in Ilya.” She puts her hand on his shoulder and squeezes. “And don’t you or Shane dare keep secrets from us anymore.”
Ilya ducks his head and looks away. There’s a spot in his heart so full of light that it will blind him if he looks at it.
Ilya fucking hates having to move to Canada to start playing with this new shitty team and being all alone and—
“Shane?” Ilya says as the line clicks.
“Hey,” Shane mumbles, sleepy and warm. There’s shuffling on the other end. He can imagine Shane rubbing at his face.
“Hello.” Ilya rolls over on the bed and traces the dips in the sheets next to him. It’s cold.
“Ilya it’s… it’s like two in the morning,” Shane sighs.
“Yeah it’s a real problem. Now I have to call you instead when I miss you,” he says.
“I swe—” Shane starts and is cut off by Ilya’s phone buzzing.
Ilya stares at the screen one long moment before declining the call.
“You there? I lost you,” Shane says, stifling a yawn.
“Yeah, was just my brother calling. Nothing important.” Alexei, well, Alexei’s always thought himself the more favoured child—Ilya’s sense of competition never lasted beyond hide-and-seek games.
“You sure?” Shane says. His badly-concealed-concern voice is the same as Yuna’s. Is Ilya’s the same as his mother’s?
Some part of Ilya is stuck on the plane that took him out of Moscow. Another part is in his mother’s bedroom. He refused to leave anything at his father’s funeral but it keeps nagging at him—his father’s body so small in that large coffin. When Ilya was a child, before the hockey, he wanted to go to all his father’s meetings. It was later that he understood the kind of politics his Russian policeman father was involved in. There’s was always a room Ilya could never follow his father into. Ilya could sit in the cold dirt with him.
“I didn’t call you at two in the morning,” Ilya snickers, imitating Shane, “to talk about that. I have a more important question for my sexy Canadian man. Are you wearing your glasses and any boxers?”
“Ask nicer.”
So Ilya does and he doesn’t sleep very much that night after all.
After the movers have cleaned out and Ilya’s had his last sugary coffee at that one cafe in downtown Boston, he packs his car with the last remaining things he didn’t trust the movers with. His mother’s old leatherbound journal and paintings jostle against postcards from Svetlana’s vacation home in St. Moritz.
“Ach Hollander, this sounds like shit a grandmother would listen to,” Ilya says, turning them onto the highway.
Ilya’s driving them to Ottawa because Shane’s too jittery to drive. Shane, deciding he needs to be helpful, has been setting the playlist for the drive. Shane, unhelpfully, only listens to classical boring music. Boring Shane Hollander. His boring Shane Hollander. A warmth curls in his chest around those words.
Shane rolls his eyes and keeps tapping away on his phone. “My mom’s asking how you’re doing and if you’d like tacos or burgers for dinner.”
“Burgers,” Ilya says. “And you can tell Yuna your music is very boring. She should teach her son better.”
“Come on, the Russian rap we were listening to last time was awful.” Shane reaches over and pulls on Ilya’s curls.
“Hollander, you are being boring again. Very boring. So boring,” Ilya says. He sneaks a glance at Shane who’s already staring at him, annoyed little smile and all.
Ilya can keep looking. He could keep looking at Shane until he’s driven them off the road and into a ditch where someone would never find them. He does not have to look away. Stolen glances during games. There is always a camera somewhere—that foggy summer before rookie season the last time he couldn’t hear the click of the shutter. That summer is warm, perfect, and frayed at the edges with threads that will unravel in utterly banal and terrible ways. The past is a lighthouse, not a port, his mother taught him. His father’s body sinks into cold earth in a graveyard. One for honourable men in the line of service.
Even in death, he and Irina could not be reunited. Ilya glances again at Shane. And where will his be?
“You know what they gave me as a welcome gift to your country?” Ilya starts conversationally. Shane’s hands are still in his hair.
“Mmmh?”
“They give me, how do you say, an evaluation.” Ilya finds it fucking hilarious.
“Like a form?” Shane’s staring at his phone. Probably adding more boring songs to the playlist.
“No, a psychological evaluation. They brought in a psychologist with a fancy degree and fancy big words. Everything,” Ilya says. How has the recent death of your father impacted you?
Shane looks up at him now. “How… was it?”
Ilya grins. “I told them to come back to me with someone who doesn’t have an English dictionary in their mouth.”
“Ilya—” Shane starts but is cut off by the next song.
“What is this shit?” Ilya says. Shane’s already laughing as Ra Ra Rasputin plays.
“I forgot I added it,” Shane says, grinning. Ilya rolls his eyes. His lighthouse and his port, he thinks.
“You are very annoying asshole,” Ilya says. “Asshole Canadian. I didn’t know they made them.”
Russia’s greatest love machine, the song croaks. Shane pulls on his hair. “Hey, you wanna tell me about the evaluation?”
Ilya snorts. “It was fine. They had a lot of questions about my move. How I feel about it—” he waves a hand “—very annoying.”
The song slowly drifts to a merciful end. The sun glares down on him, warm and postcard-perfect.
“Can you give me my sunglasses?” Ilya says. He glances at Shane: biting his lip and looking at Ilya. “What?”
“You know how much I appreciate it, right?” Shane says, eyes wide.
Ilya snorts. “Of course, you are my Canadian princess I must save.”
Shane pulls on Ilya hair again and Ilya yelps.
He follows the line of the sun down the road; a lighthouse drawing him forward.
“My sunglasses, yes?” Ilya says. And then, softly, “I know, Shane.”