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Ilya is on his way home, sore and damp-haired from practice, when the call comes in. He’s already in a bad mood—everything fucking pisses him off these days, and the wide-eyed glances and careful levity with which his team has been tiptoeing around him only infuriates him more. When the buzzing begins, there’s an instant spike of annoyance, and he’s already halfway through the automatic motion of declining before his eyes flick over to the caller ID in a merely cursory glance. Jane.
The car swerves. Ilya spits out a string of expletives as his knuckles whiten around the steering wheel. Does he answer? Fuck. No, what does Hollander even want? He can’t answer without having…some idea of what he’s facing. What can possibly be urgent enough to call about? They never call, haven’t texted or talked since…the incident. Did someone leak something about them? Or, Ilya thinks darkly, maybe he’s getting engaged to fucking Rose Landry, needs to wrap up this part of his past in a neat little bow, closure. Engaged, ridiculous, the rational part of his mind that sounds remarkably like Svetlana whispers. They’ve barely been together a month. Ilya scowls into the windshield. Still.
He lets the call ring out. Before he can feel too proud about it, his phone starts buzzing again.
Ilya forces himself to ignore it, waits until his phone goes off for the third time and he’s pulling into the garage to finally give in and pick up. He’ll be cool about it, though, he promises himself, keep the conversation bored and distant.
“Ilya,” is the first thing Hollander says, name rushing out like a breath, and every word on the tip of Ilya’s tongue promptly leaves him. Hollander doesn’t give him time to gather himself or even respond, just barrels on. “I need you to know that I’m sorry, I’m really sorry about—about the last time we were together, I really did like it, I do like you, fuck, I wish I could go back and stay and—” There’s commotion in the background, someone is shouting, a loud crackling sound, “I don’t think we’re going to make it, Ilya, they’re trying to make an emergency landing but I don’t think it’s working, we’re falling so fast, oh god, I’d do anything to have that time with you now but it’s too fucking late and I’m never going to forgive myself for not—not telling you when we still had time, even if it, if I don’t matter to you, you matter so much to me, Ilya. You’ve changed me so much, you’ve made me better, you’ve been so good to me and not even fucking, Hayden, or my parents know the shit you do about me and you’ve never judged me for any of it, you act like you like it, and I think—I think you’re the only person I’ve ever been able to do that with, and for you it might not have meant anything but I need you to know that I—” his voice cracks and Ilya’s sitting motionless in his car as the buzzing in his head gets louder and louder and he can’t move, can’t breathe, and somewhere over the Canadian sky Shane Hollander’s plane is going down. “I think, I think I love you. And I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before, it’s not fair, I don’t want to die, Ilya.” The pure tremor of fear in his voice. It nearly kills Ilya right there. “It would have been—really nice, to be with you, if you wanted that, and we could’ve gone to my cottage together and, getting to love you would have been the best fucking thing in my life probably. I wish it hadn’t been like this, I’m sorry for—telling you now, when I’m about to fucking die, but I can’t let you think it didn’t mean anything to me because I—you’re so fucking beautiful Ilya and I’ve never told you that but I’ve always thought it, and every fucking day, every fucking hour I’m thinking about you, and I’m always wishing I were with you. I wish I could be with you now. I hope I get to meet you again in the next life or whatever comes after, and I hope we get to be in love, and we get to be—happy, together.” The hitch of his breath on a sob. “Fuck, Ilya please you need to tell my parents I love them, I love them so much and I miss them and I’m so, so sorry I didn’t call them but I had to call you, because I love you, I love you, Ilya, I love—”
The call drops.
Ilya’s fingers are numb, fumbling on instinct to call him back.
“Hey, this is Shane Hollander. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you.”
He calls again.
“Hey, this is Shane Hollander. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you.”
Again.
“Hey, this is Shane Hollander—”
Shane’s voice is polite, businesslike. Still, unmistakably him. Ilya squeezes his eyes shut as the message ends with a beep.
Shane isn’t picking up. Shane will never pick up.
Ilya will never hear his voice again.
Without warning, the first gasping sobs are tearing out of him, and Ilya is crumpling over the steering wheel, shaking. Shane loves him, Shane loves him, and Shane is dead without knowing that Ilya loves him too, more than the fucking world, would’ve done anything for him, would’ve gotten on that plane and gone down with him rather than this.
“I love you,” he chokes out into the phone, still recording his message. He hopes desperately that somehow, in the midst of the panic and chaos of his last moments, Shane hears him.
Mama, please tell him I love him, I always have. Maybe from the first moment I saw him. Please protect him. Please, please let him go easily, without pain. Please.
—
Ilya doesn’t remember much of the night. He wakes up freezing cold on the couch just past 2 am to an empty bottle of vodka on the coffee table, his head and knuckles throbbing, a gaping hole in the drywall, and the slow, sickening realization as he glances at his now-cracked phone that he’s expected to go on with his life as normal.
Not a single person in the world knows what this means to Ilya. Sure, fellow players, even friends, are dead. Once the news breaks, he’ll be expected to grieve for a respectable week or two, give solemn statements. He’ll attend funerals and watch other people define the Shane they knew, stand in the back and pretend to be a stranger. And then, he’s supposed to move on, keep winning, keep living.
Ilya doesn’t even know if he’ll make it to daylight. He’s bone-tired, wrung out and dehydrated from crying, the future a pitch black field before him in the night. There’s no way forward, when every second takes him further away from Shane, breathing and alive. Ilya curls in tighter on himself. He can’t bring himself to stand up to get water for his desperately parched throat, let alone pull himself together enough to face the cameras and his team without the mess of him spilling out, the desolation, the utter hopelessness. How do you go on?
The thought occurs to him that he doesn’t have to go on, that there’s a medicine cabinet full of pills just a few rooms away, and he clutches his phone like a lifeline. Someone would have to find you, he reminds himself, Would you do that to Svetlana, or Marleau? It’s enough to quiet the idea, for now.
He flicks on his phone, scrolls through his notifications just for something to do so he doesn’t have to think anymore.
There are messages, Marleau linking an article from last night (dude this is crazy, sounds scary asf hope theyre all good), discussion in the team chat about the game tomorrow. One from Sveta, same article, Plane carrying Montreal Metros loses contact during malfunction, and just a single text, Are you okay?
The absurdity of the question almost makes him laugh.
He loved me, he thinks. I knew him better than anyone else. I loved him more than any of you, more than hockey, more than anything. My whole fucking world is gone.
If only they had more time. If only they hadn’t been so afraid. So much careful planning around the secrecy, so many moments wasted between them. A world, a chance at being happy at his fingertips, so close he can taste it, and slipping quietly away. It’s incomprehensible, how easily a whole lifetime can vanish in a second. How someone as extraordinary as Shane can just cease to exist, just like that, as if he’d never been there at all.
Ilya is too tired to hold back the fresh tears gathering in his eyes. He presses his face into the couch cushion, shudders through silent sobs until he exhausts himself enough to fall back into a restless sleep.
—
When he wakes up again, the sky is just lightening, not yet sunrise. His phone is buzzing insistently where it’s pressed against his thigh.
It happened, Ilya thinks, his heart dropping. The news is out. He can’t do it, he can’t face the public questions and make distant but sympathetic comments in press conferences and play with the joy and vigor and ease that had always come with having the challenge of Shane hanging over him, he isn’t ready. He’ll never be ready. He’ll quit hockey, and he’ll move somewhere nobody knows his name where he can fucking die in peace, and nobody will be around to care anymore by then, his teammates will move on and Sveta, well, he hopes with a sudden ferocity that she finds someone who loves her. Who deserves her. She’ll be in love, and she’ll survive.
With this train of thought, he finally digs up his phone, bracing himself for the flood of messages and headlines.
The air leaves his lungs. 9 missed calls from Jane.
A chain of messages. ilya please call me, the most recent one reads.
Ilya is so frantic to unlock his phone he nearly drops it. The call connects instantly.
“Ilya,” says the familiar voice in his ear, relieved, and a high, broken sound wrenches helplessly out of his lungs. Shane sucks in a breath, shaky. “Ilya, hey, hey. I’m okay, we landed safely, fuck, I’m so sorry I couldn’t call sooner but my phone was dead and we landed in the middle of nowhere and they were ferrying us all over—but I’m back in Montreal and I’m safe, I’m safe, okay?”
“Shane,” Ilya manages to get out before his throat closes up, his words strangled by the tears building up for the third time in the past 12 hours. He has to stay there, folded over for a moment, struggling to breathe as he tries not to throw up from the violent wave of relief that crushes through him.
“I know, Ilya, I know,” Shane says, soft and pained, Shane who is alive, who is okay, who is safe, and Ilya is already on the airline website, squinting through the blur at the phone screen as he books the first flight out to Montreal.
—
Ilya’s definitely been spotted multiple times, boarding a plane to Montreal on a game day with rumpled clothes and deeply inconspicuous sunglasses just after the news that Shane Hollander’s plane landed safely, but he can’t bring himself to care. He ignores the many glances and occasional phone camera as he pushes his way out of the airport, and manages to coax the driver into bending traffic rules a little with a generous tip.
He calls Shane as he walks up to the apartment, realizing he doesn’t know the code—he’s never used the front door before.
“Ilya?” Shane asks once he picks up.
“I am outside your apartment. Let me in, please,”
Shane makes an incredulous noise.
“You’re—what?” Ilya doesn’t answer, listens to the sound of Shane making his way through his apartment. Now Shane is opening the apartment door, now it’s slamming behind him, now Shane is hurrying down the stairs, footsteps echoing. Now the front door is swinging open, and—oh, Shane is in front of him, wide-eyed and rumpled and beautiful and alive.
“Hey,” says Shane softly, and Ilya collapses into his arms.
Shane is so warm, so solid, so real, and he smells like airplane and sleep and himself, safe and familiar. A newly hydrated Ilya feels tears well up in his eyes again, nuzzles into the curve of Shane’s neck and shoulder to take in greedy lungfuls of him.
“It’s okay, hey, it’s okay,” Shane is murmuring to him, rubbing soothing circles into his back, and Ilya fucking sobs at the gentle press of lips against his forehead.
“I love you,” he says into Shane’s skin. He pulls back, reluctantly, but he needs to see Shane’s face, his eyes. “Fuck you and I love you and you are not allowed to leave me like this, ever.” Shane sniffles out a laugh, gives Ilya a watery smile that nearly makes his heart give out.
“I love you too, so fucking much. Not gonna leave you. I’ll pilot the fucking plane if I have to.”
Ilya nods into Shane’s shoulder. He’s suddenly exhausted, the emotion of the past night draining out of his overworked body. He lets Shane carry him up into the apartment and to bed, lets Shane turn him over and curl around him, a warm weight along his back, arm tucked securely around his ribs. He lets Shane press kisses along his shoulders and murmur I love you against his ear, so close it’s like they’ve never been apart.
Stay with me, he thinks, maybe says, and Shane whispers back,
“Always.”