Chapter Text
The bang comes first.
It's louder than anything Ilya's ever heard on a plane, louder than turbulence, louder than the landing gear dropping, a sound with no business existing inside an aircraft, and it's loud enough that his Coke can jumps clean off the tray table and hits the seatback in front of him before his brain even finishes registering that something is wrong.
Then the plane drops.
Not the stomach-flip of an air pocket. A real drop, a losing-the-floor drop, the kind where for one endless half-second Ilya's body weighs nothing at all and his mind goes completely, blankly white. His hand finds the armrest on pure instinct and grips down so hard his fingers ache almost immediately, tendons standing up under the skin. Overhead, the seatbelt light is already flashing, already too late, because half the cabin wasn't buckled in the first place.
People are screaming. Not the nervous, embarrassed half-laugh you get when a plane hits chop over the ocean, actual screaming, raw and unashamed, and it takes Ilya a full three seconds to understand that some of that sound is coming out of his own throat. He hadn't decided to make it. His body just did, the way his hand had just gripped the armrest, like every part of him had quietly agreed to panic without consulting the rest.
Someone near the front is praying out loud in French. Someone else is saying oh my god oh my god oh my god on a loop, like a stuck recording. The overhead bins rattle against their latches. A woman's purse spills into the aisle, lipstick and a phone charger skittering under the seats.
The plane levels, not gently, not like a plane is supposed to, but with a hard, wrenching shudder that throws everyone forward against their belts before rocking back. For one full second, the cabin goes utterly silent, like three hundred people just remembered, all at once, how to hold their breath.
Then the pilot's voice, tight and clipped over the intercom, cutting through the quiet. Ilya's brain is moving too fast and too slow at the same time, snagging on individual words and losing whole sentences to static. Engine. Emergency landing. Brace. Remain calm. None of it actually helps, because "remain calm" is a request his body has already, categorically, declined.
Someone a few rows back, Chouinard's voice, unmistakable even wrecked with fear, shouts a single word.
"Fire!"
Ilya doesn't turn to look. Some animal part of his brain understands that if he sees it, it becomes real in a way it currently isn't, and he needs another few seconds of it not being real. His hands are shaking too hard to be useful for anything, so he gives them a job: phone out, thumb on the screen, Instagram already open before he's consciously decided to open it, like some part of him has clearly been rehearsing this exact moment without telling the rest of him.
His thumbs hover over the keyboard. The cursor blinks. There is so much to say and no time at all to say it. He could write for an hour and still not get to everything, every apology he's owed Shane, every year he wasted being scared of the wrong things, so he doesn't try. He writes only the two things that actually matter, if this ends up being the last thing Shane ever reads from him.
Ilya: Shane, you are the best thing in my life. He quickly swiped at his eyes and kept writing. I love you. Always. Maybe from the first time I saw you.
Ilya: A million memories. Thank you for those. Whatever happens, I am with you. Safe in your heart. I believe it.
His thumb hovers over send for a fraction of a second, one last, useless impulse to write something better, something worthy of being the last thing, before he sends it anyway, because there isn't time to make it good, only time to make it true.
He stares at the screen after it goes through. Hates it, actually. Hates that Shane is going to read this hours from now, alone, probably on a bus or in some hotel room, with no way to call Ilya back and ask him what he meant, no way to argue with it, no way to take any of it back if this turns out to be nothing.
It's going to turn out fine, he tells himself. He doesn't believe it. He can smell something now, faint and acrid, threading in under the recycled cabin air, and some part of him already knows exactly what that smell is going to turn into.
The wheels hit the runway wrong.
He feels it in his teeth before his brain catches up to what's happening: a jolt so hard it snaps his head forward, then a second impact, worse than the first, the whole frame of the plane groaning like something enormous being pulled apart in two directions at once. The overhead bins burst open all down the cabin, bags raining into the aisle. Someone two rows up screams as their bag catches them across the shoulder. The plane is still moving too fast, still not stopping, still tilting hard to one side in a way that no landing is supposed to tilt, and Ilya has just enough time, one single, complete thought, almost calm in its clarity: this isn't the landing. This is the crash.
Then his head snaps sideways into the window, and the world goes white, and then orange, and the sound stops being sound and becomes something closer to pressure, filling his skull from the inside.
He smells the fire before he sees it. He's almost grateful for that, one small mercy, that his other senses give out before his eyes have to.