Archive of Our Own

FIRST: You lose track of time—at first it is only minutes, and then it is only hours, and then you are sure that both days and nights have passed but you cannot count how many—while you’re in the woods. You are so cold, and you are hungry, and you are thirsty. There are puddles after the rain that you greedily lap up the water from, but it does not taste the same as the water from the pitcher in your home before the outdoors.

When you are found again, and when you are taken to the orchard, they do not give you water from the pitcher, even if tap water is still a step up from rainwater. You are a good dog, so you drink it, and you will be grateful to the people who have taken you from the cold. And when a new man visits the farm and greets you with laughter and scratches and sheer joy at just meeting you, you start by first deciding that you will love him.

The first thing he does is fall in love with you. You bound up to him and beg for attention, because you have always had to beg for every scrap of attention you get from men of his like, but he gives it freely. He scratches your head and runs his hands through your fur like you’re the one doing him a favor by being there. He doesn’t understand, it seems—this is entirely selfish. This is entirely you wanting something from him.

You’re a friendly dog, you know this. You are good to your people, and you’re happy to be around children and most other pets. You are a good dog.

But you are also a selfish one. You want attention, you want eyes to stay on you. He laughs when you lick his face, and you decide you want his attention specifically. You want him to love you, with his firm hands and his bright eyes and his full-body laugh.

The second thing he does is give you a name. Anya. It’s sweet, cute; you like it better than your old name.

The last people who took care of you had left you out in the cold, and they had given you your first name. The little girl had been the one to give it to you, and it feels a little like she had taken it back with her when she pulled your collar off and patted you one last time before encouraging you to run off into the woods with all its tempting smells and shapes, and then driven off in her father’s truck. That name isn’t yours anymore.

Now, you are Anya. You are his.

He promises not to leave you, promises to take good care of you. He kisses your fur, with his hands cradling your head. He promises to love you.

This is how you go home with him.

You learn that his name is Ilya. You learn that he lives in a big house that does not really feel like a home. Maybe you will help him make it one. You also learn that he is lonely. He is in this big, empty house, and he keeps the television playing at all times because otherwise, the house is silent.

At first, you try to slot yourself into his life just as silently. You aren’t sure where you’re allowed to go and the places that he would not like you to touch. You want to be a good dog for him, and so you just follow behind him as he wanders through the house.

When he sits down on the couch, you hesitate. The father of your last family did not like you to be on the couch, or the bed, or any of the soft places in their home. The little girl hadn’t minded so much, and would let you on her bed when he wasn’t looking. Maybe it was this that made him drive you out to the woods and made her take off your collar and take back your name and take away your life.

You sit at his feet for a moment, staring up at him. He looks back at you, and then at the couch.

“You can come up,” he says, patting the couch next to him. “I do not mind.”

You want to grin at him. Instead, you jump onto the couch and settle down there. You circle once, and then lay down in a little ball with your head on his lap. He laughs, a small but happy sound, and then places his hand on top of your back. He scratches at the scruff of your neck absentmindedly while he puts on the television.

On the screen, some kind of sport that you’ve never seen before is playing. It moves fast, the people on the screen darting back and forth as fast as they can, chasing after a little black dot. You watch in fascination, but aren’t distracted by it enough not to huff a little when he takes his hand away.

You can practically hear him smiling when he puts his hand back. He says, quietly, “You are a very good dog, aren’t you?”

You huff again, because a bark feels like it will be too loud for this large, empty house.

“Look,” Ilya says, motioning towards the television. “That’s Shane on the TV there. Maybe you will meet him soon. I hope you like him.”

Rolling your head closer to his stomach, he shifts so that he can rub your chest. You close your eyes, suddenly feeling very sleepy.

“He’s the love of my life,” Ilya continues. His voice has gone soft and gentle in a way that intrigues you. “He doesn’t know you exist yet, and he likes cats more than dogs, but I know he’ll fall in love with you like I did. He can’t not.”

Ilya sounds remarkably confident about this. You aren’t so sure, but you trust him already—trusting people is already in your nature, and you can tell that he is a good man. He has a kind, open heart; he is nothing like the father of your last family. So you will trust him, and you will be good when you meet this Shane.

“Don’t tell him I said this,” Ilya says after a moment, as if you could tell anyone anything, “but he’s the best player in the league. He’s better than me, at some parts of it. Not all of them. But some of them. He would be so annoyed if I told him that, wouldn’t believe me at all. But it’s true.”

He nods a little to himself, then leans further against the couch, dropping his head onto the top of the backrest. You allow his shift in position, moving your head so that you’re resting on his stomach and looking up at him with one eye. He smiles down at you, stroking over your back gently. It feels good; it makes you feel safe.

When he speaks again, it’s after a long, silent moment. “I miss him.”

There is something so sad in his voice that it makes you sad too. You close your eyes, letting out a little whine that might be mourning or might be sympathy.

You think about the family that raised you from your birth until last week. You think about the little girl who had stroked you so gently with her little hand, who had put headbands with bows on your head and laughed when you shook them off, who had tried to bathe you and laughed when you jumped out of the bathtub covered in suds and water.

Most of all, you think about how lonely she was. You think about how her parents had not paid much attention to her at all, and no attention to you. You think about how she would sometimes hold you so close that it felt as if you were the only thing in the world that could keep her warm. You think about how she would take you on walks by herself, for hours, and no one would notice that she was gone.

You think about how you had kept her company as best as you could. You think about how she would whisper her secrets in your ear: they used to be better, they used to take me to the park and they used to play with me, they used to laugh with each other; I miss it, I miss when they loved me, I miss when they wanted to be around me, I miss when I wanted to be around them. 

You do not remember the time she spoke of; you were too young. But you do remember how hurt she would be, when she reached out to them and they did not reach back.

Nuzzling your head against his head, you try to tell him that you’re here now. That you will be his and he will not ever have to miss you, he will not ever have to.

He laughs a little, and it’s just the tiniest bit sad. “Fuck. I’m going a little crazy, aren’t I? Talking to a dog like Shane’ll hear me.”

You blink slowly at him, and you wonder if this is really a sadness that you can fix. You wish he could understand that you understand him, that he’s not crazy, that you’re here, that you will be here until he doesn’t want you to be anymore. You wish you could tell him that you know this loneliness intimately yourself, and you see it in him and you do not begrudge him it.

He leans over, presses a light kiss to the top of your head, and then strokes over the place his lips had touched, smoothing the fur down.

After that, he doesn’t talk for the rest of the night. You curl up against him while he watches the rest of the game on the television silently, and you fall asleep like that.

When you wake, you aren’t sure how long he’s let you sleep like that, but he’s still sitting there and stroking your back gently. His hand must be getting tired by now—the little girl who loved you had always gotten tired after what was not nearly long enough—but he keeps going.

The television is off now, and the house is completely silent. You can barely even hear his shallow, slow breaths. Even the sounds of the house—the water in the pipes, the wind against the glass panes of the window, the rain on the roof—are all muted. It’s as if Ilya’s quiet loneliness has dampened every sound in the house; everything that could interrupt his silence has been pushed far enough aside and away that none of it can be heard.

You sit up, struggling against the plush cushions of the couch for a moment until you can gather your balance. He looks over at you when you move, and you wonder if he had just been staring blankly at the black screen of the television this whole time. His hand drops away from your back, and you lean forward to nudge his chin.

Time for bed, you try to say. You have a real bed, don’t you? This is not comfortable. Take care of yourself.

He blinks sleepily at you, and you know he doesn’t understand. You nudge his chin again, trying to send some kind of signal to him that you want him to be comfortable too. That sitting like this for hours cannot be good for him.

After a moment, he smiles a little, scratches your side, and then stands up. He stretches his hands up high above his head, then closes his eyes as he stretches out a kink in his neck. Once he feels more mobile, he stands up and heads towards the hallway. He throws a look back at you, and waves a hand to beckon you towards him.

Gladly, you go. You jump off of the bed, narrowly avoiding hitting the coffee table and knocking everything over, and then trot after him. You follow him to a room he hasn’t shown you yet, which you assume is his bedroom.

While he gets himself ready to sleep, you sit in the doorway and watch him. He goes about his nighttime routine slowly, like making every movement is a fight. He doesn’t look back at you while he changes, then disappears into another room where you hear the sound of water running briefly. He must be brushing his teeth—the girl who loved you before him was never very good about doing that regularly, but there had been no one who cared enough to reprimand her for it.

Ilya finally comes out of the bathroom looking only vaguely refreshed and mostly more tired than he had before. When he lies down in bed, you go over to the side and wait for him to either ignore you or to give you permission.

You will not join him on the bed until he gives you permission, you tell yourself, because you do not want to make him angry on only the first night you spend with him. You also want him to sleep well—he looks so tired—and so you will settle on the rug here if he would prefer that. It’s a woven rug, one of the ones that looks braided and colorful but isn’t all that soft. Still, you will do it.

He makes a soft humming sound then, and reaches down to pat the foot of the bed. He says, “That side is for Shane. But you can join me, yes? You’ll be good?”

You pant a little laugh, and then jump onto the bed. Yes, you will do as he asks.

It has barely been a day, but your sense of loyalty runs bone deep in your little body, and he has earned it already.

So you curl up at his feet, and you fall asleep quickly.

You dream of the family that loved you before you went home with him. You dream of the little girl brushing your fur out so slowly and gently. You dream of her hands, so small against you; you dream of her growing up alongside you. You dream of her throwing a little birthday party for you, and how just the two of you came. You dream of the ice cream that she let you eat that day. You dream of how warm the world had been, and how loved you felt. You dream of licking her face and trying to tell her, I will never let you be lonely.

When you wake, the bedroom is still dark. You take a moment to gather your bearings, to remember that you’re in a warm house again even if it isn’t a home. You push away the memories of the spring nighttime chill in the woods, and the dew that had gathered over your fur while you slept in a grassy clearing. You push away the memories of your bed before this, worn thread-bare and just a few sizes too small for how big you had grown since it was bought years ago.

Instead of thinking of any of that, you sigh heavily and settle onto Ilya’s mattress, your head resting comfortably on your paws. You close your eyes again, and try to drift back to sleep for as long as he does.

Beside you, though, Ilya is restless in his sleep. He’s dreaming of something terrible, maybe, or maybe this is just how he sleeps. In his sleep, he’s twisted in between the sheets, caught up and tangled amongst them. One arm is thrown over his head and the other hand is fisted in the top blanket.

He keeps shifting around, not quite turning over or around, but flipping his head from side to side without moving the rest of his body, as if he’s trying to clear his mind of something. It looks like he’s trying to shake a dream out of his head but he can’t quite get it to go away. He makes a small, distressed sound out from between lips pressed tight together, and the wrinkle at his brow deepens as his eyes squeeze shut.

You watch him for a long moment, blinking sleepily at this strange, restless version of him. You’ve only seen him, so far, as something playful and laughing on the orchard, and then as something quiet and restful on the couch.

You don’t know if you really thought he only had the two sides, but you didn’t consider that he would have this one—so agitated, so distressed. In a moment when he is at his most vulnerable and most private, he is so unsettled, and you don’t know what there is to do about it.

Carefully, you stand up and shift where you’re lying on the bed. You take a few steps forward, closer to him, being sure not to intrude on the empty side of the bed where his Shane will apparently sleep one day. You circle around the spot you’ve chosen a few times, padding down the bedding for yourself. Then you lay with your head resting on his thighs.

At the moment your weight settles on him, he seems to breathe out a little slower, a little more controlled. Like a kind of sigh of relief that he doesn’t know he’s letting out. The hand that was gripping the blanket so tightly it looked like it might hurt lets go and unfurls. Then he finds your back and lets his hand stop there. He doesn’t stroke or scratch, just lingers. Just rests.

You let out a long, loud breath. Like this, the two of you get through your first night together.

SECOND: The house begins to open up to you, over the coming week; Ilya lets you explore freely, and he showers you with attention, bringing home food and a non-reflective water bowl and a soft, new bed and unchewed toys.

He takes you on walks around the neighborhood, and doesn’t seem to mind that you like to stop every few feet to investigate the grass around you. He never gets impatient with you, and gently guides you away from eating things instead of scolding you for wanting to do so. He does not seem to hate that you are a dog, because you are his dog.

He begins talking to you, just sharing all of his thoughts as they come, even if they aren’t relevant to you as his dog. The second step to being a good dog is to listen.

Harris, from the orchard where you had lived in between the girl who loved you and Ilya, helps with your training, but you’re already a well-trained dog and you know it. You impress them both with tricks and with how well you listen to them. You know your name already, and you come when you’re called. You would never run so far that you couldn’t hear them call, but they don’t know that, and so you let them put a collar around your neck with a name and an address and a phone number.

You lay down when they tap the floor, and hand them your paw when they offer their own palm out to you. Ilya gives you a treat—one of the really good ones, the kind with the peanut butter—and talks animatedly about how smart you are. He talks with his hands when he’s excited, waving one arm around while the other rubs at your belly. Harris laughs at him, but he’s beaming at you like he’s proud, so the laughter is probably harmless.

After a few days of training, Harris tells Ilya that it’s pretty clear that you’ve gone through all these steps before. This means that there’s probably a family that used to love you, and whether you were abandoned in the woods or you ran away is up for debate. Given the lack of a collar, you were probably left out in the cold, but he doesn’t actually know.

Ilya seems horrified by this. He seems personally offended on your behalf, completely unable to comprehend why someone would abandon you outside. You, too, do not understand why you were left outside with no sense of how to get home.

A little sadly, you nudge your nose against his palm to ask for another treat. You make your eyes big and watery at him. Because he is weak and he loves you already, he gives you one of the peanut butter ones. Harris rolls his eyes.

Your conversations usually happen while Ilya’s making dinner. You’ve been living with him for a week or so, and you think that you’re starting to settle in for real now. He keeps you warm and he feeds you and he takes you outdoors without a leash, but you never stray far from his line of sight and he never turns away from where you’ve run. He keeps his eyes on you no matter where you go. It’s starting to feel like this could last.

He’s standing at the stove, slowly stirring something in a pot, when you wander over to him. You’re sniffing at the floor, because it smells like beef and you’re hoping that he’ll have dropped some scraps on the ground. When you look up at him and bark once, hoping that he’ll feed you some of whatever is in the pot, he looks over and laughs.

“This is not good food for dogs,” he says, still smiling. “And Harris says I shouldn’t be feeding you people food anyway. He says it encourages bad behavior or something.”

You bark once. All of the pots and pans on the stove combined smell really good.

He laughs, then turns back to the stove at the sudden increase in the volume of the bubbling. “This is just boiling potatoes for now, but I am making okróshka. My mother used to make it in the summer, so it is not the right season yet, but I am feeling nostalgic today.

“Also, Shane hates this meal and so I have to make it when he’s not here. I don’t understand what he doesn’t like about it—he says something about how soup being cold is contradictory to soup as a concept, but I think he should give it at least one more try.” 

You look up at him, wondering a little about the softness in his expression. How gentle he looks as he talks about his Shane; and at the same time, how passionate he looks. It’s like something in him lights up when he gets to talk about Shane. You wonder if he does not get to do this a lot.

Settling on the floor at his feet, you lay on your stomach and keep your eyes on him. He keeps stirring at his potatoes, and talks all the while.

“I hate Shane’s diet for many reasons, even if he thinks I just don’t get it because I don’t take care of my health like he does.”

Ilya huffs a laugh, glancing down at you. You bark again, trying to tell him you’re listening. You don’t know if he understands, but he does keep talking, so maybe he does.

“He has a point, a little bit, but I do too, I think. Maybe if he ate more okróshka, more meals made with more love, instead of all his soulless previously prepped frozen meals, and more food in general, probably, he would be healthier in his head. He thinks I don’t see how he uses food like control instead of like nutrition, and then uses that stupid diet as an excuse. He thinks I don’t know him like I do.”

With that, he reaches over the pot to turn the heat on the stove off. He steps around you to dig through a cabinet and get a strainer, then places that in the sink to drain the potatoes. He’s silent while he does it, pouring the water carefully so that none of it splashes out of the sink. Your gaze follows him as he moves around the kitchen.

“I wonder sometimes,” he says absentmindedly, “if he knows how much I see him. I think sometimes he feels like he is the only person in the world who understands him, and maybe I cannot understand him all of the time, but I believe I know him better than he thinks. I can see so many of the things he isn’t saying.”

You wonder how true that is. You think you believe him—faith, like trust, is a thing that runs deep in your bones—but you also aren’t sure. He says all of this as if it is a given fact, but you wonder if Shane would agree with it. You wonder, too, if Shane feels the same way about Ilya.

The first real thing you understood about Ilya was that he was lonely. This is something that is becoming more and more clear as the days go on. He lives in this big house, all alone. He spends his time making elaborate meals for himself; meals that he cannot share with anyone else because there is no one here to eat them, and even if Shane were here, he would not want them.

He goes out of the house sometimes, telling you that he’s off to practice, and when he comes back, he’s so tired. He’s tired, and he doesn’t seem like there’s anyone or anything around who makes him less tired. No one ever visits, and he never says he’s leaving to go see someone else. It’s just him and practice and these big meals for a family of one.

You bark once, and he looks over at you with a smile that he doesn’t seem to know he’s wearing.

“He loves me,” Ilya says, “and I love him. So it’s all okay.”

You wonder how much he isn’t telling Shane. Does Shane know how lonely he is? How sad? How tired?

These are not questions that you will get the answers to any sooner than you will get a scrap of beef. All you can do is what you do best: be at his side, and listen to his every word.

After he rinses the potatoes in water, he grabs a large mixing bowl out of the same cabinet as earlier. Humming softly to himself, he fills the bowl with water and then mixes several other ingredients in it—sour cream, an awful smelling sour cream that you try not to wrinkle your nose at, eggs, onions, and some other things you don’t recognize. He whisks it all together, humming the whole time.

“When my mother would make this,” he tells you, with a glance down to make sure that you’re still there, “she would put on music and dance while she cooked it. If she was making okróshka, I knew that it was a good day; it was summer and bright and lively and she was happy.”

You nudge his ankle, and he laughs lightly at your wet nose touching skin. You wonder where his mother is now, and why he talks about her in past tense.

“It’s funny,” he starts. “I started making it on my bad days, because it reminds me of her good days, and that makes me feel a little better, I think.”

It took until then for you to realize that today was a bad day for him. In retrospect, it makes sense: he collapsed on the couch and fell into a nap almost the instant he got home from his practice; he hasn’t showered in much longer than he usually lets himself go without washing; it seemed to take an insurmountable amount of effort to get up to make food, despite his stomach rumbling for the past few hours; and you haven’t seen him on his phone, texting, once tonight.

With that realization, you resolve yourself to pay better attention, because he deserves someone who sees these things about him. You bark again, like a promise to both yourself and to him, and you sit up. He snorts.

“Fine, fine, you win, I won’t tell Harris if you won’t,” he says, and then plucks a cut of the beef off the stove and feeds it to you from his palm.

THIRD: You meet Shane, and you are not sure of him at first. He seems afraid of you, or hesitant about your being in Ilya’s house at all. He does not really know what to do with you, you think, which reminds you of the mother who once housed you. But he reaches out to stroke your ear anyway, and you pant in Ilya’s arms, and Shane smiles a little. He says you’re soft, and you try not to feel so smug at his praise. You bark once, lightly, so as not to scare him; you guess that the third step to being Ilya’s dog is to love Shane, too. They let you stay.

“This is Anya,” Ilya says, as an introduction. “She is my dog.”

You look out at the man in front of you from where Ilya cradles you in his arms. He’s tall and broad, around the same size as Ilya, and he’s looking at you warily, like he isn’t sure how to respond to you looking back at him. So, this is Shane, then.

“You—” Shane doesn’t seem to know what to say to Ilya either— “What? How?”

“Someone abandoned her in the cold,” Ilya tells him. “Monsters.”

With that, you think of the little girl who smoothed out your fur and hugged you tightly before she got back in her father’s truck and drove away with your collar and your name and her warm love. You think of how you sat and watched the car drive further and further away, until you couldn’t see it anymore in the great wide distance between you.

You think of how long you sat there, waiting, because surely she would come back for you. Surely she would come when you barked, when you called for her. You always went to her. Surely—

Ilya kisses the top of your head, and you startle back into reality, huffing a little. He says, “She needed a home. I needed a dog.”

You think about that—it did not, at first, seem like he needed a dog. It seemed like he just loved you when he saw you; loved your playfulness and your affection and your enthusiasm and your ability to do as told. You needed a home more than he needed a companion. It was as simple as you needing him—his warmth, his kindness, his love—and you didn’t realize, at first, that he needed you too.

But when he says it, you understand it to be true. He needed a dog just as much as you needed a home. You look at Shane, and you hope that he will not argue about you being allowed to stay. You do not want Ilya to have to miss you. You do not want to have to miss Ilya.

And you would, you realize. It’s only been a week or so of living here, but you would miss him.

Shane reaches out a hand, slowly, like he’s scared that you’re going to bite him. You stay so still, still enough that you hope he feels brave. He strokes one of your ears; his touch is gentle, tentative, and barely present. It’s nothing like the firm pats and scratches from Ilya’s unfearing hands.

“Man,” he says, sounding somewhat awed. “She’s so soft.”

You let him pet you, in a slow, unsure kind of manner, and slowly, he seems to grow a little more comfortable with you. When the three of you go inside, Ilya having put you on your own feet again, Shane watches you chew on a stuffed animal of some sort with more entertainment than uncertainty. He doesn’t look quite as nervous anymore as you settle down on the rug by the coffee table.

Wrapping his arms around Ilya’s waist from behind, Shane laughs lightly as he watches you. “I love you, but I have to ask this: are you sure you didn’t steal someone else’s dog?”

“No!” Ilya exclaimed, indignant. “Listen, listen.”

You tune out the conversation as Ilya explains to Shane the situation. No, he did not steal you. He returned to you all the warmth in the world. You’ll give that back to him tenfold, you mentally promise Shane, who clearly loves him too. You’ll take care of him while no one else is here—when Shane isn’t here.

You will wait for him at the door and you will sleep with him on the couch and you will drag him outside when leaving the bed feels impossible. You will nudge him into standing when he naps on the couch long past sundown and you will rest your weight on his chest to soothe the nightmares and make sure he sleeps through the full night. You will sit at his feet when he can’t be alone and you will make him laugh when he feels that laughing is a skill he has lost.

You are a good dog, and you love him. Ilya has said the first part a hundred times already, and you yourself know the second part to be true. You know it like a promise, you know it like an instinct.

Wishing you could say all of this to Shane, you bark a couple times, loud even in the expansive living room. It interrupts their conversation, but neither of them seem too bothered by it.

Ilya comes over to start tossing a toy around for you, and you chase after everything he throws. You have so much energy thrumming in your body, bursting to get out. You nearly crash into a wall when a squeaky toy bounces off of the floor and a little too close to it. Ilya frets about it, but you bound back over to him and clammer into his lap in a way that seems to ease his worries.

Now that Shane is here, finally, after all this time of hearing about him and never meeting him nor really knowing if he actually existed, the house seems to come alive. There’s noise and there’s movement and there’s joy, all overflowing and flooding the house. It seems to bring Ilya to life, and that brings you to life too.

The house feels more like a home with the two of them reunited. It feels more like a place where people actually live, instead of somewhere temporary, impersonal. Instead of a place where a singular person just exists. No, like this, with Shane, there is life built into this home.

They cook dinner together, and dance in the kitchen until the pasta sauce burns. Shane twirls Ilya around and you bark at them and they laugh. There is so much laughter in the house now. You bark again, looking up at them as they dance, and Ilya rewards you with a pat on the head while Shane exclaims something about the sauce and the smoke alarm and rushes back towards the stove.

After cooking, they eat together in the dining room instead of on the couch, and they sit on opposite sides of the table. You lay under Ilya’s chair and watch them kick their feet at each other playfully while they eat. Ilya sneaks you some meat, and Shane reprimands him but doesn’t actually move to stop him or take it away.

When they take you for a walk after dinner—only once Ilya has put boots on your feet, much to your chagrin—they keep a careful foot of distance between them. All day, they have not separated from each other’s sides once. Even while playing with you, they pressed so close together in the way they sat on the floor that they might as well have been one person. Even while cooking, they held hands to dance. Even while eating, Shane’s foot was hooked around Ilya’s ankle.

But when you go on your walk—you trot happily at Ilya’s side, jumping ahead only when there’s a particularly interesting smell in the grass beside the sidewalk, never falling behind—they do not touch. You walk on Ilya’s left, so close that he sometimes nearly trips over you, still not quite used to walking with a dog beside him. Shane walks on his right, his hands stuck firmly in his pocket.

It’s kind of odd, to watch them go from touching so consistently and so familiarly to not wanting to be close at all. To this strange amount of distance kept between them. Ilya keeps stealing glances at Shane, when he’s not looking at you. He looks like he wants something, like he’s longing for something, and he thinks that he cannot ask for it.

You glance between them, and you wonder about it.

At some point on the walk, you get tired. You sit down on the sidewalk and stare at Ilya with wide eyes until he turns around and starts to head back the way you came. Shane teases him for giving in so easily, and Ilya makes some comment back about being a good dog dad and wanting to respect your boundaries. He says it with a smile, though, so you suspect that he’s not all that hurt by Shane’s comment. You’re glad—you quite like that he gives in so easy.

It’s when the three of you get home that things seem to fall back in place, so subtly but so easily that you forgot that there had ever even been a strange tension on the walk. You saw the distance between Ilya and Shane and you saw how different that was compared to the two of them in private, and it’s not until Shane breathes a kind of sigh of relief as they cross the threshold that you see it slip away.

As soon as the front door is closed and their shoes have been kicked off—and once your boots have been carefully removed—Ilya kisses Shane deeply and sweetly, walking him back against the wall. Shane goes easily, one hand splayed across Ilya’s back and the other tangled in his hair, pulling him in closer. You watch for only a moment, then decide that this is too private to watch and head back towards the fireplace where your bed is.

Curling up there, you go over the things you have found out today. You have found out that Ilya loves Shane, and is not so lonely when Shane is around. You have found out that the mysterious—the much spoken of but never present—Shane does exist, and loves Ilya in return. You have experienced Shane’s bravery firsthand, and you have also seen in him a kind of fear that you don’t know what to make of.

Shane is an enigma. He comes into Ilya’s home and he brings it to life. He makes it louder, makes it softer, makes it warmer, fills it with sunlight despite the gray weather. But as soon as they leave the house, something on his face hardens. He seems to retreat into himself, folding back and hiding the parts of himself that are loud and soft and warm. Ilya seems to know that he does this, and does not seem to know how to stop this. You aren’t sure that Shane wants to stop it.

But Shane is also kind. When they close the bedroom door to you—the first time that Ilya has ever closed a door to you—and you cry outside of the bedroom, he allows Ilya to open the room to you again. When he opens the door to find you sitting there, you look past him to see that the side of the bed that you have always left for Shane is occupied for the first time. Still, though, the foot of the bed where you have slept is still open for you.

“Anya, sweet girl,” Ilya coos, taking you into his arms. “What is wrong? Are you lonely?”

You lick his cheek, and you watch as Shane tries not to smile. Ilya lays down in bed next to him, and you settle yourself on the bed beside him. You make sure to leave enough room on Shane’s side of the bed for him, but he doesn’t take it. Instead, he lays perpendicular to Ilya and rests his head on Ilya’s stomach. Again, now, they are always touching as much as they can.

With that side of the bed now open to you, you splay your legs out and place your head on Ilya’s arm. You look at him carefully, thinking only of how warm and comfortable you are. You’re starting to feel comfortably drowsy as Ilya strokes over your head in smooth, soothing motions. After a moment, Shane starts to copy him. He places his hand on your back and you breathe even and slow underneath the comforting weight of him.

You will love him as well as you love Ilya, you decide. You will keep him company too, and you will make him smile and you will make him breathe easier and he will only ever have to miss you as much as he misses Ilya.

FOURTH: The fourth step to being his dog is to keep his secrets. Ilya has a lot of secrets, and you are a very good secret keeper. You do not tell Shane that Ilya sometimes feeds you scraps of food while he cooks, though you suspect Shane knows anyway. You do not tell Harris and Chiron that you get way more treats from Ilya than Chiron does. You do not tell Ruby and Emma that Ilya’s favorite is Ruby and Shane’s favorite is Emma. You do not tell the new Pike family puppy, Buttercup, that Ilya thinks her name is undignified.

You do not expect Shane to start to tell you his secrets, too. But you will keep them, because you know Ilya would want you to take care of him as best as you can, and this is the best you can do.

When Shane moved in with you and Ilya, you weren’t entirely expecting it.

You knew that something was happening, because Ilya was home a lot for two weeks and didn’t go to any practices or games and because Shane seemed twice as stressed as usual. You also noticed when Ilya’s moods started cycling through happy and sad and happy-sad on a faster spin than ever before. You knew, too, that both Shane and Ilya were having tense, unsure conversations constantly.

But then Ilya left you with Yuna and David for two days and when he came back to bring you home again, Shane was there, sitting amongst a dozen cardboard boxes that held his entire life, and he was starting to unpack one. You immediately ran up to greet him, tail wagging, and he laughed as you knocked him over in your excitement. He let you shower him with your affection for several minutes before pushing you away.

“I’m going to be around all the time now,” he said; quiet enough that Ilya might not have been able to hear him. “How does that sound?”

You licked over his face again and he scratched at your back and you remember thinking that him being around all the time wouldn’t be that bad at all.

There’s an adjustment period to Shane and Ilya and you living together. They don’t fight about things, exactly, but sometimes the house gets tense and quiet and they sit in different rooms and don’t talk to each other for a while. You usually sit with Ilya in those moments, because you’re his dog, and he probably needs you more.

But you love Shane too, in his own way. He likes to wake up early, and he starts taking you on his runs. You jog at his side, happily panting and jumping ahead and then falling back in line again. He keeps a watchful eye on you as he runs, like he’s scared that you’ll make a run for it one day, but he’ll get used to trusting you eventually, you hope.

They’re out of the house for the same practices and games, leaving you alone to your own devices during the days. Sometimes they both go out at night, but they always make sure to take you on a walk together first. Unlike that first walk they took you on, now they hold hands and bump shoulders and smile the entire time. You like it better this way.

One night, Ilya goes out but Shane doesn’t. You hear the argument about it from the moment they slam the car door shut to the moment they open the front door and enter the house.

“Shane, come on,” Ilya is saying.

“I don’t have to go everywhere with you,” Shane replies stubbornly, pulling off his shoes and placing them carefully on the shelf by the door. “I just want a quiet night, okay? I’ll be here when you get home.”

Ilya makes a groaning sound, paused at the front door with his shoes still on. “It’s not as much fun without you.”

“You’ll be fine,” Shane says, and even you can hear the rolled eyes in his tone. “Channel all that energy from your Boston days and go dance until two in the morning, or whatever it was you did.”

“Oh fuck you,” Ilya says, and Shane was probably joking but now Ilya sounds actually hurt.

Shane rounds the corner into the living room where you’re lying on the couch. He calls back behind him, “Have a good night, Ilya,” and then there’s quiet, and then the front door slams closed again.

You blink sleepily at Shane when he throws himself onto the couch with a huff. He rubs the heels of his palms against his eyes, then curls over himself with his head over his knees. You can tell, very simply, that he isn’t okay—every aspect of him screams how anxious and tense and frustrated he is.

You stand up, pacing in a small circle on the couch cushions until you’ve gotten your balance enough to walk to the other end of the couch where Shane sits. You sit yourself down right next to him, and he lifts his head.

Looking at you a little blankly, he says, “What.”

You look back at him, and you wait. You don’t make any noise, because you have learned that too much barking scares him off, and he’ll seclude himself in a different room with headphones on if you get too loud. Ilya always tells you that his sensory overload is not your fault, because you are a dog being a dog and you should not have to apologize for that, but you always still feel a little bad. It is not your fault you have both a bark and a bite, but you still want to tell him sorry for your instincts, sometimes.

Right now, though, your instincts are telling you to be quiet. He does not want your bark or your bite; Shane does not need your protection, he needs your love. You wish you could tell him that he already, always, has it.

You give him a little huff in answer, and he cracks a small smile. “Sometimes I think you can understand us.”

That earns him another low huff. He reaches out and scratches behind your ears in the way that he has discovered you like.

“I love your dad,” he says softly, “but he doesn’t always get it.”

He strokes his hand down your back, his eyes on his movements instead of meeting your eyes. He watches his own hand carefully brushing up and down your fur for a long moment before he speaks again.

He admits, “I wanted to go out tonight. He was right about that. But I just…the team is overwhelming, sometimes. In a way that he’s used to, but that…it’s a lot for me. I don’t want to fuck this up. I don’t want this to turn out like last time.”

You don’t know what last time means, exactly, but you know that something happened to Shane before this and it lingers with him now. You know that there was something that Ilya couldn’t protect him from, and that scares you, because the two of them are the strongest and bravest people you know. But this is not the time for you to wonder about that distant past, because Shane is getting that scrunched up, closed off look he gets when he’s going to cry.

Leaning forward, you lick his cheek. You want to comfort him, but you aren’t sure that you can.

“Gross,” he mutters, but he’s smiling now and he’s still petting you and so you’re pretty sure that he’s not all that mad.

Then he says, “Ilya has so much faith in them. In the team. But I can’t help how scared I get. I’ve spent so many years trying to be what everyone else wants from me, and I—I don’t know what these guys want from me.”

You can understand that much—you, too, spent years trying to be the perfect dog for a family that did not want you, and then Ilya brought you to this new place, this warm home, and you didn’t know what to do with yourself. You didn’t know what he wanted out of a dog. You knew only that you wanted to make him happier than he was.

“It’s in my nature, I guess,” Shane murmurs. “You know? To try to be good, for everyone. I just wish it was in my nature to know how to do that right in the first place. And I wish trying so hard didn’t make me feel so lonely.”

He’s petting you with both hands now, stroking over your back in long, even movements. He blinks several times, and then the tears start to spill over. He seems to crumple in on himself then, and buries his face in your fur, his whole body shaking.

Carefully, you rest your head on his bent shoulder in the closest thing to a hug that you can think of. You wish you could tell him that he is good. That he makes Ilya so happy, so settled, so at peace. That he is the best player in the league, no matter what team he plays for. That he feeds you and walks you when Ilya doesn’t have the energy, and he pets you even though he seems wary of animals as a whole, and so he is so very good to you.

He’s smart, funny, strong, and so loyal. He has a well of love in his heart that only Ilya competes with. You wish you could tell him that he would be a very good dog.

But you can’t tell him that, so you just lean on him and he leans on you. He trembles around you, and you close your eyes, trying to keep your breaths as even as possible.

“Don’t tell Ilya,” Shane mumbles into your fur. “He worries so much.”

This, too, you know to be true. But you also know that he does it out of love. Still, you will not share Shane’s secrets. You will keep Shane safe; here, and right now. You’re sure that when he’s ready, he will tell Ilya on his own.

When Ilya finally comes home, you and Shane are sleeping on the couch together. Shane is lying flat on his back with his head propped up against a pillow, and you are lying on his stomach with your head on your paws. You get excited when the door unlocks, because you always do, and you’re jumping up and bounding over to Ilya as quickly as you can.

The sudden shift in movement must startle Shane awake, because when you lead Ilya over to him in the living room, he’s awake and sitting up. He’s pulled his legs up to his chest, and he’s interlaced his fingers loosely around his ankles. He doesn’t look at Ilya when you and him enter, but he does offer you a hand to sniff when you jump onto the couch again.

For a moment, Ilya just stands there, watching the two of them. Then he says, trying for a joke, “You are coming for my spot as the favorite dad, Hollander?”

Shane snorts. “That is the one thing I can never compete with you in.”

You love them both, but you will not deny that you are Ilya’s dog, at the end of the day. Despite that, you lean against Shane’s hand, encouraging him to scratch your head, and he gives in just as easily as Ilya always does.

Finally, Ilya steps over to the couch to sit on the other side of you. He starts stroking your back, messing up your fur and then smoothing it out again. Subdued, he asks, “What happened tonight, Shane? I thought—things were fine. And then suddenly you were angry and sad and changing your mind about wanting to go out and I did not understand what was happening.”

Shane swallows. He keeps his eyes on you when he talks, as if he’s confessing to you more than to Ilya.

“I just got in my head,” he says, low and quiet. “I don’t—it was just something stupid someone said. And I just don’t know what they want from me. I don’t know how to be what they want.”

Ilya breathes out slowly, measured but heavy. “Sweetheart, they just want you to be who you are. They want to be allowed to know you. Not hockey legend Shane Hollander, but just Shane, who is our second line center and who makes bets with his captain over who can score more goals in a season.”

“Oh God, you told them about that?”

Ilya shrugs, unrepentant. “I did not tell them the prize for the winner, if that helps.”

“Asshole,” Shane says, but it’s fond. Then his smile sobers a little. “I think I don’t know what my role is on this team yet. And I just—I need to figure that out, okay? It’s nothing to do with you, or us. I just—need to figure out how to be their teammate instead of just being the captain’s husband.”

Shane pulls his head away from you, so you turn around to Ilya. You nudge his hand with your nose, urging him to keep giving you attention so that Shane doesn’t feel so analyzed while they both formulate their thoughts. Ilya scratches the scruff of your neck, looking at you thoughtfully.

“Okay,” he says, finally. He smiles at you, and you pant happily at him; you feel it as the tension begins to slip away from them and dissipate into thin air. “Take your time. We’ll be okay.”

“We’ll be okay,” Shane repeats. He looks down at where Ilya is petting you and nods once. “Your dog is a good listener.”

Ilya smiles at you. “Yes, she is the best.”

LASTLY: And years later, you find that the final step to being his dog is the same as the first one. You have to love him.

When the car hits you, the first thing that you think as you start to register the pain that has blossomed through your entire body, is that Ilya told you to stay. He told you to stay, and you know what the command means and you know that you are supposed to listen because he wants the best for you.

But you did not stay. You ran. You ran out into the road after a squirrel that darted up a tree and out of sight only seconds before the car came barrelling towards you.

And then there is yelling, and honking, and you are so scared.

You hear a stranger’s voice—“Why isn’t your damn dog on a fucking leash? What the fuck is wrong with you?”—and you hear Shane, too—“Why the hell were you driving so fast? There’s a fucking forty kilometer speed limit here, you fucking dick!”—and then you see a blurry-looking Ilya come to you. You see him drop to his knees and his expression comes into sharp focus: horrified, pale and gaunt and painted over with terror. You have never seen him like this, so it must be terrible.

You want to reassure him, but your breath does not come quietly or easily and it comes out as more of a pained whine than a reassuring bark. He puts his hand on your head, and he strokes so softly, and he whispers something that you can’t hear very well.

He does not seem to want to move you, which means it must be worse than terrible, but after another moment, Shane comes to him and convinces him to take you to the veterinarian. You do not like the veterinarian, no matter how much Ilya tries to bribe you with treats, and you do not want to go.

But you are also in so much pain. It reverberates everywhere, from your chest outwards, right down your bones to your toes. Even your tail hurts. Ilya sits in the backseat with you in his arms, cradling you. He keeps stroking over your head, reassuring you that everything is going to be okay, it is, sweet girl, don’t worry, we’re getting you to the doctor, it’s going to be okay—

It does not feel like it’s going to be okay. It feels like the pain is never going to end. You don’t know what the doctor is going to be able to do to fix this. Maybe she can give you pills like the ones that Ilya takes in the morning, the ones that seem to make his daily life just that much less of a fight. You have not had to nudge him off of the couch and force him onto a walk in weeks, since soon after he started taking it.

Meanwhile, Shane drives. He is not usually a very fast driver, but there is a sense of urgency in the car that scares you a little. Everything is scaring you a little right now.

When you get to the pet doctor, they rush you into a room in the back. The lights are very bright, and they do not let Ilya into the room with you. The fear from the car has not lessened; instead, it has become almost a tangible thing in you, something with shape and weight and shadow. It lingers over you and crawls inside of you and it rots there.

After a long, long time, the doctor steps away from you. She murmurs something soft that is maybe supposed to be comforting, and then she steps away, out of sight. While she’s gone, someone else tends to you. This doctor wraps your legs with bandages, works the blood out of your matted fur and then smooths it all down with a comb. Then she pulls a blanket over your legs and stomach, leaving only your head and your back visible.

You don’t feel much pain anymore. You wonder if the needle they stuck in you earlier numbed it all and took away the fight, like the pills do for Ilya.

Once, the little girl who loved you before him—and this feels like another life, sometimes, something so distant in your past that you can barely remember it, even if there are other days when you catch a whiff of a memory in the air and want to go chasing it down—had another pet. It was a hamster, a tiny and annoying thing that would run around in his cage and make all kinds of noises that you didn’t like. You would watch him, sometimes, and wonder about eating him, but you never did. It would make your girl sad, probably.

Then, one day, the hamster just stopped moving. He lay in a corner and he did not move again. You sat in front of the cage and waited for the girl to come home from school and find him. This is the first time you learn that sometimes pets go to sleep and they do not wake up again.

You wonder if this is what is happening to you. You are very tired.

There is noise on the other side of the room; the sound of a door opening and people coming inside, maybe. There’s a pained gasp in that direction, and you recognize the scent of Ilya and Shane as they come nearer to you. You want to go to them, you want to lick Ilya’s cheek and you want to nuzzle Shane’s hand and you want to be surrounded by their warmth.

You want them to tell you that it’s going to be okay, but you think that would probably be lying.

When he and Shane come to you, Ilya is crying. You do not know how to fix this sadness, not this time. You love him, and you know that your memory will be safe in his heart, but that will not ease the hurt.

You look at Shane first, and it takes a lot to make him cry, you know, but there are tears streaming silently down his cheeks now. Shane blinks hard, and he squeezes Ilya’s hand tightly in his own. He opens his mouth as if to say something, and then chokes on all words.

You hope that the tears and the hurt ease sooner rather than later, but you do not know if they will. You do not think your hurt would ever ease, if you could not spend your forever with the two of them.

Letting out a soft whine, you look at Ilya and you see all the love in the world in his own watering eyes. His hand is firm and warm and comforting at the scruff of your neck. You know what is happening now, you do, you are a smart dog, and—and you did not want him to ever have to miss you. You do not want to leave him now. But the final step to being his dog, maybe, is letting go.

He presses a kiss to the top of your head, and he keeps his hand on you. You remember how lonely he was before you were with him, before Shane was in the house too, before the three of you became a family and built a home. You hope that you do not leave him that lonely again. You hope that you were good.

“I love you,” he murmurs to you alone, between breathy, hurting sobs. “You’re the best girl, okay? The best.”

The best, you think. You close your eyes, and all you feel is his hand. All you feel is warm.