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A knock at his door interrupts his path through the house and he course-corrects to answer it.
The distorted silhouette visible through the mosaic window makes his stomach contract uncomfortably, reminders of the past attacking him, luring him to believe impossible things. He shakes it off.
All it is, is him seeing ghosts where there are none.
He'd thought, naively, that he was done with that part, but he's long since accepted that he's never so healed that he can't regress right back to where he was.
In an unrelenting, longing spiral.
He opens the door slightly, horrified to find that the ghosts haunting him don't evaporate in the face of reality. Instead they corporealize, become tangible and real, and Ilya isn't sure he isn't hallucinating. That he hasn't lost his final bit of sanity and unraveled fully.
He blinks against the image before him, thinking – hoping – it will change, but brown eyes keep staring back at him, as harrowingly familiar now as they'd been the first time he'd seen them.
No words are exchanged. Loud silence charges the already terse tension between them. Determination molds Hollander's face into something sharp and recognizable. Ilya wills his into detached reticence, even as his fragile heart quivers in his chest.
After what feels like a lifetime, Ilya steps back, goes back to what he'd been doing and leaves the door open behind him.
It's not a warm welcome, but it is an unspoken invite, and it's all Hollander is going to get.
Hollander follows him as he grabs the bag of kibble and pours some in an engraved metal bowl. He places it in its usual spot then moves to slide the door to the backyard open.
The sharp whistle that leaves him seems to ring through the silence. It isn't long before the pitter-patter of paws hitting grass reaches them and Anya all but barges into the house.
She doesn't seem to notice their company in her haste, and it's isn't until she's already got her snout buried in the bowl that she seems to tense with realization.
She looks up at Hollander for a beat before deciding to approach him, cautious until he lowers himself to her and starts petting her generously.
Usually it takes her a bit to warm to strangers, but she becomes more eager and lively the longer his attention is on her.
His calm disposition and nondescript warmth seems to make her forget her usual hesitance.
Ilya can't blame her. He'd made the same mistake once.
If Ilya had allowed it, some reckless, masochistic part of him would be in shambles at the sight before him: Hollander in his kitchen, bathed in sunlight, wrapped around his dog.
"You got a dog," Hollander says, looking up at him from where he's still crouched, hands buried in Anya's thick fur.
As it is, Ilya only feels a pang for a present that never came to be and pushes it aside. "Yes," he says curtly.
The small smile melts off Hollander's face, and with a few last stilted pets of Anya's head, he rises to his full height. Palms flatten his shirt and he clears his throat. "How have you been?" he asks evenly. As if they're simply acquaintances who haven’t seen each other for a month or two. As if it is a regular occurrence for him to show up at Ilya’s doorstep unannounced.
As if it hasn't been years.
"I have been many ways many times," Ilya answers, refusing to give even an inch (there's a joke in there somewhere about how he'd given Hollander all of his inches, but he is too old and weathered to make those jokes anymore).
"Right..." Shane runs a hand over his hair. Short, again, Ilya notes distantly. Like when they'd first met. "And now?"
Anya realizes she's not the center of attention anymore and goes back to her bowl. Ilya watches her as he contemplates the question.
He doesn't know how he is. He is... functioning, on his best days, and not on his worst.
"I am fine," he says unconvincingly and thumbs at his nose. He turns his gaze to Hollander. "What is it you want?"
"I'm not. Fine, I mean." Hollander's voice has gone soft and vulnerable. Dangerous. There's always been a pull in Ilya, this basal instinct to claim and protect Hollander. It isn't any less demanding now, but he isn't the same foolish, greedy guy he'd been at nineteen.
He has scars all over, marred pieces of soul that fester and fester until he can only ever smell the rot coming from within him.
He's learnt to live with it. Just like everything else.
When Ilya doesn't respond, Shane steps closer, eyes shining in that excruciating way of his. "Ilya," he laments, like he has any right to. Like hearing his name from Hollander's mouth doesn't cut through him like a thousand tiny pieces of glass.
Shaking his head, he warns lowly, "Don't."
"We're not children anymore, Ilya," Shane protests doubling down on his name. "We should be able to fucking talk."
"When you want?"
"What?"
"We talk when you want to, otherwise you have team meetings, no? Unskippable, important, imaginary team meetings."
"I fucked up. I know that, okay? But I am owning my part in all of this. You– you–" He trails off, as if he can't say the words. The accusation is heard regardless.
"You think I don't know?" Ilya spits. "You think I don't regret it? I would take it back if I could."
Ignoring Hollander flinching at his words, Ilya stalks to the junk drawer furthest in his kitchen and rummages through it until he finds what he's looking for.
He exits through the still open back door and leans against the porch railing as he lights a cigarette.
Slow footsteps follow him out.
"I always knew you were fast to panic, Hollander, but I didn't know that would happen. I would have kept my mouth shut. I wouldn't have invited you to my house." Ilya doesn't turn to him as he speaks, drawing in smoke whenever the emotion threatens to get the better of him. Trades one corruption of his lungs with another.
"I reacted badly. Like, nuclear fucking bad. But you never–" Hollander releases a shuddery breath. At the edge of his vision, Ilya sees his hands wrap around the wooden railing. "Whenever I though I understood, you would change everything.”
Ilya huffs. "And you have to understand everything!"
"Yes, Ilya!” Hollander erupts. “I had to understand this if I was going to risk everything for it."
"I was risking everything, too.” Ilya runs a hand through his hair, exerting control only where he can.
Hollander has turned towards him. Ilya can feel the weight of his gaze, knows exactly what the expression on his face looks like, even without facing him head-on. "Yes but I wasn't photographed with a different woman every fucking week!" Hollander snaps, voice thready and angry. Still, even now.
It’s empty even in his mind, but he still defends, "We weren't together."
The laugh that leaves Hollander is serrated, sounds like it hurts as it leaves him. "That's not the point. It gave you protection, a layer of deniability."
It’s becoming increasingly clear that they never really understood each other, that Ilya had convinced himself that Hollander got him purely because he wanted it to be the case. He wanted to feel seen and understood, and he wanted it to be by Hollander. He shakes his head, hoping to clear of some of his delusion retroactively. "You think if the world found out about us, Russia would care that I had also fucked a thousand women?"
The fire burns out of Hollander and faces away from Ilya once more. "No, of course not. I meant... between us."
Ilya stubs the remainder of his cigarette on the railing and turns to Hollander. "What?"
"I get it, okay. I get it now. We couldn't be anything so you never allowed it to be anything else. Not that first time in Montreal and not in Russia. Or in– in Vegas. But it took me a while to get there. To be able to separate my wants and desires into what was allowed and what wasn't, and then when I finally did, when I thought I'd managed to figure out how to do this thing between us, you completely switched up on me. Every time you were that... gentle, or forthcoming, or whatever with me before, it's always been horrible right after." Shane is speaking to his yard, unseeing eyes staring into thin air, as if he's watching a replay of the past in his mind. "You get on me for things always being on my terms, but they never were. I was always just following you, Ilya."
"You think those were my terms?" It had most certainly not been. There is no part of any of it that happened according to what Ilya wanted. He made due with the circumstances while trying to keep them both out of worlds of trouble.
Hollander taps his fingers against the wood beneath his hands, a frown creasing his forehead. "You are the one who decided when we were anything and when we weren't." His voice is so small, dejected. Ilya wants to mend it, before realizing that’s an insane urge.
"And those two years I spent chasing you?” Ilya asks for clarification. There’s a creeping hopelessness taking hold of him, starting in his gut, and just growing. He had always known the impossibility of their situation, but he’d been far too intrigued and charmed to let that stop him from the part he could have. He should’ve known it was a terrible idea – had known it in fact. Even then. Knew almost all the ways it would leave him in ruins to give into it. Not this one. He had predicted that this is where he’d end up.
"You were fucking other people the entire fucking time. And you ghosted me for six months right after. What the fuck was I supposed to think other than he got all that he wanted from me, why wouldn't he dip?" Shane steps away and descends the stairs, walking aimlessly into the grass.
Ilya hates himself even before he says it. "I wasn't gonna give up everything for a piece of ass I'd fucked a couple of times."
Shane turns back and stares up at him, arms spread out helplessly, "Then why the fuck are you so mad at me? If I never fucking meant anything to you, why the fuck do you care if I was with Rose?"
He can't actually believe the words leaving Ilya's mouth, can he? Then again, Hollander was always a bit more literal than most people Ilya knew. He imagines himself following Hollander down into the yard, grabbing hold of his chin as he so often had, guiding those unfocused eyes to him, offering them a place to cling onto with a firm hand.
He stays where he is.
“You punish me for it and you don’t even fucking want me, Ilya!”
“I did not pu–” Ilya starts to deny, but Hollander speaks over him, seemingly not have registered that Ilya had spoken at all.
“When you know how I felt about you. How much I needed you. That’s why you knew you could just leave me hanging and come back as you pleased. You didn’t–”
Ilya has heard enough. “I thought you were going to marry her!” he yells. His voice splinters around the words, his ever-present accent roughening the syllables more than his emotion ever could.
Hollander freezes. “What?”
Ilya works his jaw and glares at Hollander. Shane stares back at him with wide eyes, his lips slightly parted. Ilya follows the movement of his chest as it rises and falls with each labored breath, for one, two, three beats before turning and plopping down onto the chair closest to him. He rubs a tired hand over brows and leaves it there to hide behind.
The stairs creak under Hollander’s weight as he comes back to him.
Comes back to him, Ilya thinks bitterly.
Hollander’s shadow falls over him. It breaks Ilya’s heart – just a little – to realize it’s the first part of him that has touched Ilya in years. Off the ice, anyway.
“Ilya, I’m gay,” Hollander says softly, and it’s so absurd and out of left field, a complete turn from the rest of their conversation that Ilya snorts. His smile only widens when he looks up to find that compelling earnesty on Hollander’s face.
“What makes you think that?” Ilya prods because he can’t help it. Because teasing and frustrating Hollander has been his favorite pastime since he was a teenager. And as much as Ilya would like to pretend his matured and grown, at his core, he is still that uncertain little shithead he was then.
Hollander huffs and rolls his eyes. “Shut up,” he says, fast and firm, as he’d always said it. It’s achingly familiar. “I’m not like you, Ilya; I could’ve never married a woman.”
“You haven’t heard of lavender marriages, Hollander?”
“Fuck off.”
“You will marry a man, then?”
Hollander’s gaze rakes over his face, and Ilya’s chest hurts. His mouth falls open with an inhale as if preparing to say something. There’s a ringing in Ilya’s ears. He has never wanted to physically extract the words out of someone’s mouth so much before.
In the end, Hollander only gives him a skewed, uncertain smile. He turns his attention to the trees in the distance and Ilya allows himself to just look. Hollander has always been a fascination of his, so easy to just perceive, to marvel at. A wonder in the flesh. Heat licks between his shoulder blades. Time has been good to Hollander. With sudden and sharp clarity, Ilya imagines him at different stages of life; at five, with a gap-toothed smile; at seventeen, cheeks flushed and awkward beyond youthful adjustment; at twenty-six driving Ilya insane and breaking his heart; at thirty-seven, not yet passed, but so clear in Ilya’s mind that he can almost reach out and touch that version of Hollander.
Hollander’s warm find him again and all other versions of him cease to be. There is only this Hollander, the one Ilya could actually reach out and touch.
He doesn’t.
A shoed foot taps at his and Ilya looks down to see their feet pressing together. Embarrassingly, it warms his insides.
Hollander clears his throat and throws himself into the chair next to Ilya. His foot finds Ilya’s again.
They sit in silence for a long time. Long enough for Anya to eventually come looking for them, moving between Ilya and Hollander for greedy, little cuddles.
“You were wrong,” Ilya breaks the silence after what feels like hours. The sky has softened, the sun melting into the horizon, ceding its fight against the darkening sky.
“So you keep telling me,” Hollander responds equally as soft and unobtrusive. Anya is resting her head in his lap and his fingers scratch softly.
Ilya keeps his gaze on the orange light in the distance. “I couldn’t have married a woman, either, Hollander,” he admits, voice barely a whisper. The breeze picks up his words and seems to carry them anyway.
Hollander’s finger pause minutely, but they don’t lock eyes.
Silence settles over them once again. Their surrounding stripping any remaining tension between them and leaving only a languid, viscous ambiance in its wake.
“Can I stay?” Shane asks, voice roughed with disuse.
Ilya grunts and affirmative and sinks deeper into his chair.