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When Shane dreamed, he dreamed of home. Home was a lot of different places - a house in Ottawa, a lakeside cottage, a Montréal university, a federal dorm - but, in his dreams, home had increasing begun to look like Ilya Rozanov. Shane dreamed of his broad hands and his blond curls and his gleaming eyes. He dreamed of the Cupid's bow curve of his mouth and the birthmark he liked to press his lips against. He dreamed of his voice and the way it had curled around Shane's name, like it was something precious to him, like Shane was something to desire - Shanya, he'd call him sometimes. But mostly Shane dreamed of what Ilya had looked like the last time Shane had seen him, sleep rumpled and reaching for him, tangled in bedsheets.
Come back to me, Hollander, he had murmured, and Shane had promised him that he would.
In Shane's dreams, he saw that version of Ilya - warm, intimate, vulnerable - and he saw the moment that Ilya would learn that Shane had broken his promise. That Shane would never be returning to the bed that they had shared, that Shand would… He saw the betrayal, drawing together Ilya's brow, and the deepening frown, and the clench of his hands into fists. How could you? he would demand in Shane's dreams. I waited. I waited for you.
And Shane would reach for him, but it would be useless. Ilya would step back or slip away or fall into darkness, and Shane would rocket up in bed, gasping and panting and weeping, crying out Ilya's name like Ilya might hear him and come running to find him. The ache of missing Ilya would be physical, a pain in his chest - constricting, crushing, stabbing - and Shane would miss that millisecond where he could pretend that Ilya would be able to reach him, right before reality caught up and the distance unspooled between them again. Endless lightyear, and solar systems, and stars. A lifetime between them, and what felt like all of space. Decades of time since they had seen each last, now.
Where would Ilya be now?
Would he be in Boston, where Shane had met him first at a university conference, or in the anonymous research facility where they had reunited, waiting for the information that Shane had sent back from space, working out how best to deploy it? Would he have returned to Moscow, where he had grown up and loved his mama and had friends and a whole life that had been inaccessible to Shane no matter how hard he had tried to know Ilya? Or - and he thought this with a small illicit thrill - would Ilya have gone to Ottawa, like they had planned to do together? Found a house or Shane's cottage, settled down roots, got a dog. How would it work, with Ilya there and Shane nowhere near? And what was to say that Ilya was anywhere at all? A lot of things could happen - heart attacks or car accidents. Ilya could be… and Shane wouldn't know. He had no way to find out. Ilya's dad had been sick when Shane had left. It had been possible that Ilya could get sick in that way too.
Shane dreamed, and he dreamed of home - home as it had existed before, as it existed so impossibly far from him now. He dreamed, and the weight of a new planet stretched put forever beneath him.
Anya rattled her carapace, rocking backwards and forwards with a restless, impatient energy. She drew her forearms up and down the craggy surfaces of her limbs, the rogue scrape of them melting seamlessly with the low thrum of music that hummed deep from within her. After so long of working within close confines with her, of living with her and getting to know her and having her be the only living thing he could talk to, Shane was getting better at deciphering these chirps and hums and various other noises without the help of a translation device. He wondered, sometimes, if it would become a more familiar sound to him that his mother tongue, if he would come to associate speech with a wordless sort of music.
He and Anya were walking along the meandering shoreline of a beach. Waves, grey and rolling, lapped up it. Often, Anya skittered away off in from of him, too excited to keep pace with him, pointedly doubly back when Shane was not quick enough to keep pace with her. His feet slipped and slid over the tops of the loose pebbles that made up that part of the beach and - sensing he would have more luck - he dropped down closer to the waves, off the pebbles and sinking into soft sand. All the while, Anya chittered about the process that had gone into creating the Earth-like scenery, the difficulties that the Eridians had faced terraforming their landscape and adapting their atmosphere into something more suited to Shane Hollander, their resident pet human.
“It's perfect,” he told her, in the lull of conversations that was left open for his feedback. “But - Well, the water temperature… it's been changing a little dramatically. From, you know, boiling hot to freezing. It would be nice somewhere in the middle - for swimming.”
But the water was not a terrible temperature that day, and Shane and Anya ended up sat a few feet above the tide, settling into soft sand. Some of the spray from the water fell like fine rain onto the exposed skin of his face and hands, but he didn't much mind it. If he stared off across the water, he could almost imagine that he was back on Earth, with the horizon stretching towards somewhere that he would know or at least recognise the name of on a map. It was not a bad daydream to have, out of all the ones Shane had, and Anya let him sit with it quietly for a long moment. She settled in against his side, the diluted warmth of her body comforting to him. If this was his life, he couldn't complain.
Anya's limbs thrummed minutely, a tiny tell of agitation. “Shane mate, question,” she asked, and the words hit Shane like a blow to the sternum.
She had asked him this before - and Shane had avoided the question, danced around answering until she had given up. It was what he had been used to on Earth - hearing questions about his private life, thinking about Ilya, sharing nothing - and it had seemed easier, when Shane had been on what he had thought was an involuntary suicide mission, to keep the shape of his grief to himself, to cut it off at the knees by not giving it the form of whatever language he would try to capture it with. The deception had been easy, because Shane had thought he was going to die on a ship in the middle of space before he would ever have to fame it. Now, he was going to live, but the grief would never leave him.
“Yeah,” he replied. “I have a mate. His name is - Ilya.”
Shane had never said Ilya's name to anyone before - Rozanov, yes, or Doctor Rozanov, but never Ilya. Not if it meant that they might guess what he and Ilya meant to each other - and they would have guessed, if Shane had said Ilya's name. He said it once and all he wanted to do was say it again and again until he was blue in the face, until he could be certain that it would be the last thing that he ever said. Almost, he had said it to Scott Hunter, because Scott had become something like a friend when he and Shane had started to collaborate on the early stages of Project Hail Mary together, toying with the idea of space travel to answer the questions of the Petrova Line. Scott had carried a picture of his husband - a smiling, dark haired man - in his wallet, and Shane had supposed that he, of everyone, would be safe to share this secret with. But of course it had stayed a secret, and Shane had been the only viable replacement for Scott's dead astronauts with the know how and whatever genetic quirk made him receptive to the induced sleep, and Scott had supposed that Shane was a lesser sacrifice because he apparently didn't have anyone waiting for him on the other side of it except for a class full of kids who would likely forget him when they grew up and parents who he only managed to call every other week. Never mind, Shane had been a son; never mind, Shane had been a colleague and a teacher; never mind, Shane had been a friend and a godfather; never mind, Shane had Ilya. He'd played his cards too close up his sleeve, and Scott had been fighting to save the world and the husband in his pocket.
But now Shane was sitting on a beach with an alien by his side, and Anya was his friend - a true friend, a best friend. The kind Shane had dreamed of having when he was little and quiet and painfully awkward. And Ilya was something Shane could talk about to her. Something that Shane wanted to talk about.
“How long Shane know mate, question.”
“Not long enough,” he breathed. “Not long enough at all.”
Which was not an answer, really, because Shane did not think he would ever feel like he had long enough with Ilya. Not a week, or a year, or a decade, or even the rest of their lives. And they had gotten so little time together - they'd wasted some of it being rivals, and most of it hiding, and they'd never managed to reach the part where they got to actually have it. The happily ever after, the fairytale ending, the summer at the cottage that they had whispered across a shared pillow. It hadn't been perfect, of course, but it had been the start of something - the start of something that Shane would never get to know now.
“A thousand years would not be long enough,” Shane added, and Anya vocalised a long, mournful sound. Shane reached out and wrapped his arm around her. He continued, “I would've spent a lifetime with him, but - you know, Anya Shane save stars, save Erid, save Earth… save Ilya.”
“Ilya like Anya, question.”
“He would have loved you. I wonder if they'll show him the tapes from the Beatles - I hope so. I think he'll get a kick out of seeing us together.”
Shane huffed a laugh, shaking his head. He didn't know if Scott would show Ilya the tapes, or if Scott would even receive them - he could only hope that the Beatles had reached Earth intact - but he hoped that he would. He hoped that Ilya would want to watch them. He hoped that Ilya was in a place where he would be shown them, still with Project Hail Mary, because there was nothing to tie him to Shane otherwise. Shane's parents might see the tapes, because Shane was their son, and maybe Hayden and Jackie and the kids, because it would be easy to find out about the regular space that Shane had occupied in their lives, but Ilya was less obvious.
Anya said, “Hail Mary nearly ready for return journey. Shane go home. Shane find mate.”
Shane's breath caught. He - Well, he had never thought that the Hail Mary would ever fly again, as battered and twisted and worn down as it had been when it had only somewhat gracefully crash landed onto the Eridian surface. It had never been intended to go as long and as far as Shane had pushed it, nor encounter some of the obstacles that it had. And when Shane had chosen to rescue Anya instead of using the fuel to try and make it back to Earth, he had known that he was probably closing a door on the only chance he ever would have to return home again. Anya had offered to try and have it fixed, and he had taken her up on the offer and watched as a large team of Eridians had squirreled away with it, and he had been content (or as content as he could force himself to be) that he had seen the end of it. He had never expected for it to actually get fixed.
He cast his eyes up to the heavens, blinking against the burning press of tears.
“Shane go home, question.”
It had taken, from Earth's perspective, fifteen years for Shane to reach Erid. Over a decade that Ilya had lived without him. And then the eight years that Shane had lived on Erid, and then the return journey… Ilya would be in his sixties by the time Shane returned to him. A whole lifetime gone. Married, a father, thinking of Shane as nothing more than an old fling that had never worked out the way he had wanted it to. A story to tell his grandkids, if they ever cared enough to ask what their granddad had been like when he was younger. What would Shane be returning to? What would be the point? Whatever life Ilya had built, Shane would be upsetting for a life that he probably would never be able to have anyway.
But probably would not be definitely. And this was Ilya that he was thinking of, Ilya that he would be risking it for. Shane knew his answer, but the question would be what was best for Ilya. He thought of Ilya, spread across his pillow. He thought of what he might say.
And Shane knew.