Work Text:
Dust Mites
Shane asks Ilya about the first time it happened and Ilya thinks Shane is asking the wrong question. He doesn’t say that, though. He just tells Shane about being thirteen and dodging a fist and trying to find something cold to press against his temple without making too much noise.
Shane says it must’ve been scary and Ilya fights back the urge to say no, it wasn’t scary, it was more shocking. It was unexpected. It was a fluke. The next morning, Ilya woke up and looked at the mottled bruising around his eye and thought this will heal and then it will all be done. This will heal and it will not hurt again. He will not hurt me again.
The second time was the scariest. That’s when it became a pattern. That’s when Ilya realized, with the blood drying on his wobbling chin, that the first time hadn’t been a fluke.
Shane tells him he’s brave and Ilya thinks that brave is a choice but survival is an instinct. He avoided the pain until he couldn’t anymore, until there was nowhere left to hide, nowhere he couldn’t be found, and then he dug deeper into his mind and carved out a new space there where even he couldn’t reach himself.
That had never felt particularly brave to him.
***
Shane tells him they’re taking David out to dinner for Father’s Day in the middle of a startling June afternoon. It’s gorgeous outside, sunlight streaming through the windows so hard it almost seems like a physical weight against the glass. Ilya can see specks of dust sparkling in the rays and he almost lets the comment slide. Almost lets it wash over him like he knows he can, like he’s practiced for a while.
But there is something pushing at the base of his throat, in that little hollow above his collarbone. Sometimes he feels his pulse there, steady and even on a calm morning, quick and excited as he skates around the rink, frantic and pleading when he used to bleed onto the carpet of his childhood bedroom, praying for sleep to arrive.
He tells Shane he doesn’t want to go. That Shane should go by himself. Shane tries to tell him that David wants Ilya there, that he considers him a son, that Ilya is part of their family. Ilya isn’t sure how to explain that David hasn’t seen his blood. On the ice, sure, through the TV coverage when Ilya drops gloves. But he hasn’t seen it up close, dripping even and unhurriedly from the soft places of his body, the ones Ilya’s hands could never reach quite quick enough to shield.
He just tells Shane he feels unwell and Shane doesn’t pretend to believe it, but he doesn’t fight against it either. Right before he leaves, he asks Ilya if today is a hard day for him because of the memories it brings up and Ilya tells him it’s a beautiful day, hasn’t he seen the sun outside?
***
Sometimes Shane will speak of Ilya’s father with disgust thickly coating his tongue. He’ll talk about what Ilya deserved and what children in general deserve and Ilya will think I loved him. I would have let him hit me endlessly just to hear him say it back.
Shane cannot understand what it is to have his world whittled to two. Shane cannot understand that Ilya had just started reaching for her, just started seeing the shape of her, the way she moved and lived and was, when she left. His fingers had just skimmed the surface when the water suddenly gave way. He had not been the only one on the breaking ice.
Ilya understands now that he wasn’t a bad kid. And that perhaps Grigori was bad at being a father. But there was something in the way his father used to call out for him at the end, shouting the syllables like he needed Ilya, like he needed his son, with such a deep dependence, and Ilya knew it wasn’t because he wanted a meal brought to him or the channel on the TV changed but because he needed someone to share the grief.
If he could remember Ilya’s name then he could remember Irina’s and Ilya had laughed once at how cruelly unfair it was, that his father should get to forget it all after causing it, and then he had swallowed down some tears, let them pool in that little hollow at the bottom of his throat.
It is comforting sometimes to think of Alexei being out there, even though they may never speak again, just to know that he does not have to carry this alone. That his brother, for better or worse, was curdled by that grief as surely as Ilya and his father were.
***
Ilya tells Shane once about the way his father always made sure he had the best quality hockey gear. How he came home from school at fifteen and found new skates next to the old stain on his carpet. How Grigori didn’t say anything about it, and how that somehow made it better.
He tells Shane how his father was at every game growing up, even the ones far away, how he let Ilya share his top shelf vodka when he was much too young, how sometimes he’d nod after Ilya scored a goal and how Ilya even now sometimes looks up into the crowd to find his father’s face.
Shane tells him abuse is a cycle and that there is always a period of reconciliation, an offer of hope, but that it’s always false. Ilya wants to tell Shane that he could’ve hit his father back, but that he made a choice not to.
***
Sometimes Ilya finds his father in dreams. He goes looking for him. It’s not the same way he finds his mother, because she finds him first. Always.
They’re not always nightmares. Sometimes Ilya stands across from Grigori and they just watch each other. Ilya is not a child. His body is strong and mature and able to defend itself. Grigori raises his hand to caress the side of Ilya’s face and Ilya does not flinch, does not clench his teeth, does not shield himself.
The dream always ends there, right before his father’s skin touches his.
When he wakes from these dreams, his throat feels tight, but he manages to tell Shane he loves him.
***
Shane asks Ilya about the first time it happened and Ilya remembers thinking this will heal and then it will all be done. This will heal and it will not hurt again. He will not hurt me again.
It is true now and has been true for multiple years and Ilya can’t really remember the last time, the time it became true, the time it finally healed and did not happen again. He wishes he had written it down, wishes it all hadn’t become so mundane. He wants to remember. He wants to hold that memory close to his chest and swallow it down into the hollow in his throat and breathe through it, letting its wisps mingle with the specks of dust sparkling in the sunlight.