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When Ilya woke, it was like he’d been pulled out of frigid water. Panting and alone on the shoreline.
For a moment, he just laid there, staring at the ceiling, breath uneven and out of reach, heart beating too fast for a body at rest. His arm was draped over Shane’s waist, holding him against his own chest. His lover’s face was nuzzled into the hollow of his neck, burrowing as far into Ilya’s body as practicality allowed. It was a familiar position. One he had spent many hours daydreaming about before he was allowed to have it.
He treasured each moment Shane spent pressed against his skin. Two bodies merged into one.
Only after his mind had watched his love for a few moments, and found him both calm and asleep, did his heart begin to slow.
Shane was warm. Shane was real. Shane was here.
That should have been enough.
It wasn’t.
Ilya had learned, over the years, that night was when his thoughts got loud. Suffocatingly so. During the day, they behaved. Rotten words sat politely behind his teeth and waited their turn, and never got called on. His body became a mausoleum for conversations long dead before they could ever begin.
His body treated repression as instinct.
But at night, the words didn’t wait. They crawled up his throat and pressed until his skin, his heart, ached from the effort of holding them back. They forced themselves into the darkest parts of his memories and demanded they be acknowledged.
He shifted slightly to soothe his stiff muscles, carefully, barely any movement at all, but Shane stirred anyway. He always did. A small sound left him—half sigh, half groan—before pressing his face more firmly into Ilya’s shoulder, eyebrows knitting together and fingers tightening into the fabric of Ilya’s shirt on instinct.
“‘Lya?” Shane murmured, voice rough with sleep. “You ‘kay?”
Ilya scrunched his eyes closed. Opened them.
He found himself staring, once again, at the ceiling without focus, then brought his gaze down to the crown of Shane’s head. His hair stuck up at a strange angle, flattened where Ilya’s chin had been resting moments ago, but messy elsewhere. He felt an almost painful swell of affection at the sight, something so domestic and tender. Something he never thought he would be allowed to have—at least not with Shane.
But now, the love was his to keep.
“I woke you,” he said with an apologetic lilt. Fingertips danced across Shane’s cheek, his thumb dusting away the sleep that had settled in the corner of his eye.
Shane hummed, shifted impossibly closer, and draped a leg over Ilya’s thigh without thinking. “You didn’t. Not sleeping deep anyway.”
Ilya swallowed hard around his anxiety, the lump that seized control of his heart, as Shane's hand glided across his chest and found its rightful place on his bicep. Kneading at the muscle there, Shane sighed.
“You’re tight,” he murmured, voice blurred by sleep, “Like, tense. Nightmare?”
The question was whispered like a secret, as if Ilya would not want to hear the word if Shane had struck gold. Being known was hard, but Shane made it soft, light.
Ilya had learned early in his life that attention was something to be managed. That if you wanted to keep it, you stayed useful, stayed quiet, stayed good. Love, in his experience, arrived with conditions attached, invisible rules you learned only after breaking them. It could disappear in a heartbeat. Even now, held as softly as this, part of him stayed alert, waiting for the moment the warmth would be withdrawn.
He waited, like a hurt dog, for the other shoe to drop. For the body to be found. For the truth to out itself.
But Shane did not love like that. In the sanctity of their home, there was no hesitation in the way he reached, no calculation in the way he stayed curled up against him. As if loving him was as effortless as breathing, Shane encompassed every aspect of his life.
Sometimes, Ilya wondered if Shane knew how easy he was to love in return.
“No,” Ilya said truthfully. Then, after a beat of thought, “Not exactly.”
While Shane loved others easily, the feeling never quite extended to himself. Caring inward felt indulgent, even reckless, like wanting more than his share. He’d never say it outloud, never admit to such sadness lingering in his soul, but Ilya knew it was true. He could see it in his body, in the way he held himself, in the way he apologized too freely, in the way food was just survival. Necessary but not needed.
Shane hummed, though it sounded unsure.
“You wake up like this sometimes,” he said, voice soft and unguarded, his fingers still tracing shapes onto Ilya’s arm. “Like you’re checking if things are still ok. Safe.”
And though Ilya’s throat tightened, holding back a million words that screamed for release, he tried to speak with a joking tone.
“And—” he dipped down to press a gentle kiss to Shane’s cheek— “are they?”
Shane’s mouth curved faintly upwards, eyes still closed. “Yeah,” he said simply. “I am.”
The certainty of his words, the weight of his tone, told him that Shane truly believed it. He really thought nothing was wrong. Somehow, that was worse than hiding it on purpose. Did Shane—sweet, stubborn, precious Shane—really see nothing wrong with the way he treated himself? Perhaps Shane thought of himself as beyond care. Like his mother, Ilya thought, then ripped himself out of those memories before they could linger.
Ilya lowered his forehead to Shane’s hair, breathing him in. He didn’t speak again—just for a moment or two—but his arm tightened around his lover’s waist, careful, reverent. He needed Shane to know he was precious, to feel it in the very way he was held.
He should leave it there. Let Shane drift back under, let the moment pass untouched. They were so tired, and practice tomorrow was only so many hours away. They would need the rest. Shane was always particular about his in-season sleep schedule. Though pedantic was a better word.
He knew how to hold things in, how to wait for a better time that never came. He was very good at it.
But Shane deserved more than cowardice.
“I can’t sleep,” Ilya admitted, staring up at the ceiling.
Shane tilted his head up just enough to look at him, and waited. Eyes puffy from sleep and unfocused.
That had always been Shane’s quiet superpower. He waited like he had time. Like Ilya wasn’t something that needed to be managed or decoded.
“I think too much,” Ilya whispered, because it felt safer to explain his own feelings than beg for Shane’s. “At night.”
“Mmh.” Shane’s thumb rubbed slow circles on Ilya’s collarbone, mapping out shapes no one else could see but them. Then, he traced his hand down Ilya’s chest, his stomach, resting it just below his navel. “You wanna talk, or you want me to distract you?”
Both, Ilya thought. Neither, maybe. He exhaled, long and shaky, and led Shane’s hand back up to his chest, intertwining their fingers and pressing a soft kiss to his knuckles. As much as Ilya wished he could, he could not fuck Shane into feeling better. Though he had tried many times.
“I want to say things,” he said. “But when you are awake-awake, I… I don’t know how.”
Shane stilled, but didn’t speak. His attention sharpened, searching Ilya’s face for all the words he wasn’t saying, in a way that felt like being carefully held. Suddenly, Ilya felt like glass.
“Okay,” Shane said softly. “You can say them now.”
Ilya laughed under his breath, humorless. “You are half asleep.”
“Still counts.”
Ilya hesitated and hummed a half-hearted affirmative. Then another breath. Then—
“I worry,” he said finally.
Shane smiled, pleased with his husband’s openness. Though, Ilya knew, that feeling would soon disappear. “About what?”
“About you.”
A pause.
Shane exhaled, slow and controlled, like he was already bracing for a fatal impact. “I’m fine.”
This was the part where Ilya usually swallowed it all back down. Waited for daylight. Retracted every syllable and retreated into himself, into the tepid persona that he used to wear like skin. But the night didn’t care about his fears; it demanded truth.
“I didn’t say you weren’t,” he said instead of a direct denial.
“You didn’t have to.” Shane began to sit up, and shifted back just enough to look at him properly. His expression was unusual, almost too calm. It scared him. While Shane moved away, as though space would protect him from the conversation brewing, Ilya longed to hold him again. To whisper in his ear that he was not fine, that he was far from it and that it was ok. But despite his own despair, he let Shane take the space he needed. His hands gripped at the sheets, desperate for something to hold onto. “I’m good, Ilya. Really. It’s been a tough season. I'm just…tired.”
“I know you are tired.”
“Everyone’s tired.”
“Yes,” Ilya agreed. “But not everyone skips dinner, then pretends it was accident.”
Shane’s jaw tightened.
“I ate today.”
“You did. You do not always. Yesterday, you only ate dinner with me once I begged.”
“That counts.”
“It does not. Fine isn’t giving in. I make your boring food, still you wish I made you nothing. Pretend I do not see you fading, lying. Three meals, Shane. That is what counts.”
Shane scoffed softly, a defensive sound Ilya normally only heard on the ice. “Jesus. You sound like my mother.”
Ilya winced, but kept his voice steady. “I sound like someone who notices. She asked me if you were ok, I had to tell her the truth: I do not know.”
“I don’t need monitoring,” Shane said, a little sharper now. “I’m not—” He stopped himself. Swallowed whatever he was going to say and tried again. “I’m not falling apart.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“But that’s what you mean,” Shane said, hands curling into fists. “You think I’m doing badly. You think I can’t handle my own shit. We are athletes, Ilya. Everyone watches what they eat!”
Ilya reached up and cupped Shane’s face with both hands as the man started to stand up. “I think you carry too much. Alone.”
Shane looked away, his head still perched in Ilya’s hands, staring at the far wall like it might offer him backup. “You’re reading into things. I don’t eat if— if I'm not hungry. That’s fine.”
With a firm grip on his chin, Ilya turned Shane’s face back towards him, forcing their eyes to meet. Finally, the weeks of worry found their way to his voice. When he finally spoke, it came out too quickly, before he could think it all through, or pass it through a softer lens.
“When I cannot sleep, you worry. When Pike is busy, stressed, you worry. But when you are hurting yourself, what, we cannot care? Shane Hollander does not deserve our worry? Our fears? Is that what you think?”
The words settle between them like a landmine, one foot down but yet to move.
“I’m not hurting myself,” Shane grinds out, shaking off Ilya's hands, voice angry for the first time in so long it almost catches him off guard. From the way Ilya’s face drops, and his arms stutter and contemplate as they reach back towards him, it has scared him too.
You’re ruining this. It was a nice night. You’ve ruined it, his brain yells at him. But his mouth keeps moving without permission.
"I'm not. I don’t do that. I work hard.”
“And when you pass out on the ice, will that just be you working hard too?”
“I haven’t—”
“—does not mean you will not. You will. Your body will not care about winning if it cannot keep itself alive.”
Though they do not fall, tears settle in the corners of Shane’s eyes. For a moment, Shane looks stuck in himself, unable to move but desperate for motion. Unable to speak but longing to yell.
It’s like he is stuck in quicksand; every move he makes just forces him deeper into his own mind. And Ilya, whose hands carefully reach down to settle on Shane’s knee, has half a mind to feel bad for taking this moment of paralysis to speak again. But not bad enough to stop the words that pour out of his mouth.
“I love you. And you are scaring me.”
“Please—”
“No, Душа моя, please. I need to say this.”
And though Shane’s mouth opened to rebut, to argue, no words came out. Instead, he shuffled closer and let his forehead rest against Ilya’s shoulder. Holding Shane again felt like the first thing he had done right all night.
“I worry about you,” the words tumbled out with less grace than he’d rehearsed them in his head for the past few weeks. “All the time. I worry you think you must earn things. Space. Food. Me.”
Shane doesn’t speak. He’s not sure he could if he wanted to.
“You are so good to me, sweetheart. You do not let me be sad alone. You listen, you know. Know what I need. I am trying to understand you—the food, the loud thoughts—because I don’t know how to love you properly if you keep telling me everything is fine when it isn’t. You hurt me, because you make me let you struggle alone. I could not forgive myself for letting you die slowly in our house. In our bed.”
Shane flinched. “I’m not starving.”
“No,” Ilya agreed, because semantics felt like the least of their issues to deal with. “You eat just enough to survive your life. You are surviving. Very quietly. At your own risk.”
The room seemed to shrink around them, as if even the walls had leaned in to listen. Shane pressed closer into him, words refusing to form.
“You do not have to speak, but can I ask? Please, Душа моя?”
A nod brushed against his shoulder. A tense breath pushed its way out of Ilya’s mouth.
“Are you not eating? On purpose?”
Shane’s jaw tightened. He exhaled through his nose, then nodded once, slow, reluctant.
“You… do not like your body? That is why? Or—”
This time, Ilya felt Shane shake his head from side to side. No, it wasn’t that. A small relief.
“...maybe you think you cannot have it? Like with Snickers bar, you are not allowed?”
A wet sob filled the silence of their bedroom, and Ilya didn’t need a nod to know that Shane meant yes. The dam broke.
Ilya’s hands moved without hesitation, sliding under Shane’s arms to hold him close, anchoring him against his chest. Pressure, in moments like these Shane craved it. It was the only thing that kept him grounded in reality. Shane’s face buried into the crook of his neck once again, trembling, the weight of all the days he’d carried alone leaving him in half-gathered breaths.
“It’s okay,” Ilya whispered, voice low and steady, pressing gentle kisses into Shane’s hair. “It’s okay to be scared. It’s okay to be tired. You don’t have to do it all alone. Not ever. Not with me.”
Shane continued to shake, muffled apologies spilling against Ilya’s neck. His hands shook as they danced around Ilya’s form, grabbing at every inch of skin they could find. Desperate to be closer. To feel.
“I’m sorry, I tried so hard to be good. I didn’t mean… I didn’t want you to—”
“You are good. You are. You have nothing to apologize for,” Ilya murmured, tightening his arms around him. “I love you, and I will never stop. You’re allowed to need me, Shane. You’re allowed to be sad. You’re allowed to… just be.”
“I just— I’m not trying to hurt myself. It's habit.”
“Yes,” Ilya said gently. “That is exactly my point. It shouldn’t be.”
They’re moving again, till Shane is settled safely on Ilya’s lap, head tucked into his chest. Over and over, Ilya repeats to himself: he is safe, he will be safe. Somewhere along the way, he thinks he started to say it out loud, too. But he can never quite be sure if the words made it to his mouth.
“Does it— does it fucking kill you too? All of it? The cameras, the people. Staying good.”
Ilya's fingers threaded through Shane’s hair, pressing small, deliberate circles into the nape of his neck, desperate to relieve the tension there. “Yes,” he admitted, voice trembling too much. “But not with you.”
Shane’s chest heaved against him, small whimpers breaking through the sobs. “I can’t… I can’t stop it,” he whispered, voice raw, almost inaudible. “Even when I want to.”
“I cannot fix this. I cannot make it go away. But I want to be here, do not push me away, Душа моя. Let me help you carry it, like you do for me.”
There’s a moment of waiting, and then:
“I think you need to speak to someone. Someone who is smarter than me.”
“Ilya—”
“Is not just the eating, Shane. You know this. I cannot lose you to yourself.”
The silence returned, cloaking them in the feeling of darkness, as Ilya realised Shane’s words had left him once again.
“You are tired, we will sleep, yes? And I will hold you just like this, and we will talk in the morning. For now, we rest,” and though Ilya speaks with confidence, he knows he is merely offering up a choice to Shane: accept the help, or deny.
“I don’t want anything to change.” The soft words brushed against the skin of Ilya’s neck.
“I know, but it must.”
When morning comes, Shane will deny it all again. And still Ilya will hold him, and tell him what he must hear. But for now, there is no camera to perform for, no lie to be told. There is just the two of them, and the life they have built for themselves.
They shift, and turn, until they are on their sides again—Ilya holding Shane from behind. From the darkness, a truth appears.
“Ilya?”
“Yes, Золотце.”
“I’m not even hungry anymore. I’m just tired.”
“I know, Душа моя.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do not be. You have been very brave; now it is my turn. Yes? Tomorrow we will be brave together.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”