Work Text:
Ilya’s phone password is 1221. No one but him would know that, but the phone’s password is 1221. Not even Shane knows, though Ilya surmises that he'd be able to guess. His own password is Ilya’s birthday, which Shane had argued is “secure enough” because who would ever think that his password is Ilya Rozanov’s birthday? No one. No one would think that. Someday, when he’s able to look back on it as a funny little anecdote, and when he’s much less concerned about his privacy, he’d be able to tell that the funny twist about the password is that it’s the number of a hotel room and not referring to the twenty-first of December at all. Because other than Jesus Christ, Ilya’s sure he doesn’t know anyone whose birthday is in December. So, in a roundabout way, maybe Shane was right. Maybe this lack of known relation is the most secure that his phone is ever going to get.
Even if, by some miracle, someone manages to divine the correct numbers out of thousands of possible permutations from thin air and bypasses the four-number gatekeeper, well, that’s just a problem for an alternate version of Ilya, who was stupid enough to lose his phone in the first place.
In the contacts are plenty of numbers, most of which have no name—a transfer error—some of which have [RUSSIA TEAM] or [RAIDER] or [CENTAUR] attached. The funniest, perhaps, is his contact for Ryan Price which has three and a half team names beside his surname before the phone, finally, forbade Ilya from adding any more letters. He doesn’t tell anyone about it, though. He doesn’t think anyone else would find it as funny as he does.
Only a handful of contacts matter, anyway. That can easily be guessed from the fact that they’re marked for easy access. One Sveta ♥️, who logs an average of five calls a month between a minute to thirty minutes each, depending on the particular crisis Ilya is having at the time. And then there’s Galina Therapy, who has only ever called Ilya twice but Ilya keeps her number pinned anyway, just in case. Farah Jalali, full name to differentiate her from Farah (Nevada). There’s two numbers there that Ilya could dial in his sleep, muscle memory: one he hasn’t called since the fourteenth day of March 2017 and the other he’s only ever drunkenly dialed once several months after, out of habit. No one ever picked up on the other side.
And there’s this girl named Jane. But who cares about Jane, right? There’s nothing interesting about Jane, just that the texts between them send out every single day and the calls last an average of one hour each time. And, sure, the conversations with her are always oddly ended and there’s some bit of context or two missing but Ilya’s never ever going to lose his phone and he doesn’t care about the poor soul who would ever attempt to decipher the texts. No state secrets there. Jane doesn’t even exist at all, really. Not to anyone that matters, or anyone that would care.
The photos are pretty interesting. He can concede on that ground. There’s a photo of the front face of a dacha in Yekaterinburg in winter, half painted in baby blue at the upper part and brown-stained wood for everywhere else, where Ilya had spent a few holidays in a bid for escape after his mother’s death, almost two thousand kilometers away from his overbearing father and his even worse brother. Ilya has fond memories of that dacha, in particular that second room with the pale orange door to the right of the stairs. If he closes his eyes, he can still feel the softness of the duvet on the bed beneath his fingers, even if he no longer remembers whose warm body it had been on top of him. There’d been many girls those summers, the faces and names of whom lost to time. And two boys, but Ilya’s never telling.
And then some pictures of the sky at sunset in various places all over the world that he’s been: Moscow, Sochi, Boston, Montreal, Milan, various other North American cities that have all blurred together in his mind. Once, a rare sunrise, in front of a lake in a cottage some four hours of continuous driving west of Ottawa; a ray of light against the shadowy foreground of the leaves of a yellow birch. Tourist spots from Boston—multiple angles of Old Ironsides’ mast. Paul Revere’s house. A picture from afar of green metal, at the Gate B of Fenway Park. There are tons of photos of city skylines and views below taken from the window of an airplane flying to and from Moscow. The last one of the series is a two-minute video of takeoff, the view going from the runway to the airport to the city to nothing but white clouds and endless sky. A picture of a loon, mid-flight.
The more recent ones are photos of people, mostly. A close-up of Sveta’s face, red lips split on a grin, fingers cupped around a steaming cup of the shitty tea she likes that she gets delivered all the way from Korea. Cliff and his newly adopted labrador with only three legs. Wyatt and his grimace, showing off a sickly, purple bruise on his shin after Ilya accidentally hit him with a puck during practice. There’s the zoomed-in curve of a man’s bare, freckled shoulder, but showing nothing else. Harris carrying a crate of apples across the gym’s parking lot while an unhelpful Bood is a blurry figure laughing a few steps behind him. Then a leg on top of a throw pillow, too tanned to be Ilya’s but who’d be able to tell, anyway? A picture of a picture in sepia showing the blurry half-face of his mom nuzzling the crook of baby Ilya’s neck.
When Ilya finally goes to recently deleted he sees this carousel. Snapshots of a life: Shane’s scrunched up face after taking a sip of the smoothie Ilya made for him. Shane feeding a stray tabby that wandered into his parents’ garden. Shane picking up the stray tabby and taking her inside. A closeup of Shane’s face with his glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose. Shane looking over his shoulder and smiling at him while wearing Ilya’s indigo hoodie. Multiple screenshots of Shane’s fifteen-message long rant about the Metros’ botched game against Toronto, and then another screenshot of Shane saying he doesn’t really care about the game anyway. A video recording of Shane and Yuna laughing over an unearthed baby picture of Shane with blue marks all over his face from a marker. Shane, in bed, grinning sleepily at Ilya. Shane, asleep, his head pillowed over Ilya’s lap. Shane, hunched over a table, reading something from David’s laptop. Shane and Ilya’s faces squished together in front of a mirror. Shane holding Ilya’s hand. Another video recording of Shane telling Ilya ‘I love you. I love you. I love you so much, I wish… Well, I don’t know what I wish, I—wait, are you recording th—’. Shane reluctantly wearing Ilya’s Centaurs jersey. Shane under the sunlight, under moonlight, under firelight, against the backdrop of starlight. Shane and Shane and Shane and Shane and Shane, from Ilya’s point of view. Every single photo and video has thirty days left.
Ilya presses delete all.
I left the memory of us sleeping on a cliffside in my head
but deleted the picture we took, dead-eyed from waking up to work
at 5 AM on another coast, the night sea barely visible beyond your head
laid against my thigh, sprawled black hair, it was easy work
to be in love with you, but it was impossible to love you
in a way you felt.