Archive of Our Own ^beta

My honey's heart is blue and a second offbeat,

Always tugging at me like he’s running out of daylight.

Yeah, my baby acts cool, but they all know something ain’t right

Only acting this cool when he's walking with me.

(…) But then the morning comes.

You were there looking for me

But I was gone, turned my back for a moment

And you had fallen apart.

How much of a cruel year can you call my fault?

Not even the memories are immortal.

Terrified on this side of a conversation,

A conversation we'll never come back from.

(…) I loved you when it hurt inside to

But in the low light, you know I'd do anything for you.

(…) Yeah, you've changed, but did I ever know you?

Or did I hold you, facing away from me?

(…) I never meant to hurt you, but somehow, I knew I would.

Will it be like this forever?

I'd reach into your body and fix you if I could.

Will I feel like this forever?

Are you angry?

Do you hate me?

And, darling, time may forgive me

But I won’t.

You know I'd do anything for you,

You know it's true, ‘cause I've said it to you.

Held in my arms, I swore I'd be good to you,

Then sat and watched as you walked away from me.

So, I bled till I cried, till I felt I might die.

To be known the way you should

Is to put yourself through hell.

Still, I waited and tried

Till it killed me, ‘cause you're right:

I can wait if I want,

But it'll never be good enough,

Like I want to believe it is.

Waco, Texas

Ethel Cain

Greatness is made of beginnings, Grigori Rozanov had once told him.

It wasn’t said kindly, or to encourage. It was delivered the way most things were in that house: as a statement of fact, as instruction, as something that did not require comfort to be true; voice flat, declarative, as if it were law rather than a thought. His father believed in beginnings the way other men believed in God—as something rigid, hierarchical, already written. You began correctly, or you failed early, and everything that followed was merely consequence.

Ilya learned young how to stand still under that gaze. Grigori Rozanov was a man built of angles and restraint, a statesman’s spine, a voice that never rose because it never needed to. Affection was not withheld so much as deemed unnecessary; praise existed only as an absence of criticism, and even that was rare enough to feel accidental. Love, when it appeared, came disguised as expectation.

Be better. Be sharper. Be worthy.

And still, Ilya had loved him. That was the cruelty of it: he’d loved him with the desperate, unexamined devotion of a child who wanted to be seen, who wanted to matter, who wanted to one day be pointed at and claimed.

This is my son, the father in his dreams would say as he beamed, warm hand on Ilya’s shoulder.

He wanted to make his father proud the way other boys wanted toys or tenderness. Pride became his native language; achievement his first dialect. Russia itself began to blur with his father’s approval—homeland, legacy and expectation all collapsing into the same heavy shape he carried in his chest.

The phrase stayed with him, lodged somewhere deep and stubborn, and Ilya carried it with him longer than he carried anything else.

Carried it through cold Moscow winters that bit at exposed skin and taught him endurance by force, and through teenage years spent measuring himself against impossible silhouettes. Through the quiet unraveling of his mother’s psyche and, eventually, her suicide, which arrived like a fault line splitting the house open and was never spoken of again, grief sealed off behind the same closed doors as everything else. Carried it through hockey: the ice, the discipline, the clarity of a world where effort translated cleanly into result; through becoming great, unmistakably great, the greatest hockey player of his generation, second only to a player even greater; through the rise that was supposed to explain everything. Through his father’s slow disappearance into dementia and the cruel inversion of roles: the man who had once been immovable, now reduced to fragments, to repetition, to forgetting the very greatness he had demanded. Carried it through Shane Hollander, who somehow arrived too late and too early, all at once.

Greatness is made of beginnings.

Years later, and the words still hit him wrong; still unsettled something vital. Because what happens when the beginning never ends? When it stretches and stretches, shapeless and unresolved, until it starts to feel like stalling instead of starting? When stillness hardens into habit, and motion turns into circling, effort into endurance, and endurance into something that looks a lot like immobility if Ilya stares at it long enough?

Melancholy never announced its arrival. It did not knock; did not reveal itself. It festered, and polluted, and followed him the way a climate follows a country—influencing everything; determining what could grow and what could survive. It grew with him as he grew: boy into man, ambition into reputation, strength into spectacle, until one day he noticed that something had quietly reversed; that while his body kept moving forward, some inner part of him had begun to contract instead, folding back in on itself and becoming smaller; more cautious; more afraid. Until, without ceremony, he’d gone from man back to boy.

There was no moment he could point to and say here. Just the slow realization that he’d lost range; lost reach; lost the ability to imagine himself beyond the narrow corridor of what he already was.

Ilya learned how to live around it. How to step without shifting the arrows buried in him, dyed and dipped in self-loathing, lodged so deep he’d stopped thinking of them as foreign objects at all.

Russia’s Achilles, he thought sometimes, not struck down in a single moment of tragedy but wearing himself out slowly, decade by decade, bleeding internally and calling it resilience, until he could learn to map the pain and memorize where it lay buried; until he could adjust his steps so he wouldn’t press too hard against the places that still burned.

A formal crisis of purpose. An existential numbness that followed dread like a shadow. Ilya chased an enemy that did not exist, or rather existed only inside him, and the harder he ran, the faster it seemed to move; the older he grew, the less he recognized himself; until dissociation felt less like a symptom and more like a solution.

There were things crystallized inside him by the time he came of age—old fear, old voices, sunk deep enough that removing them felt more dangerous than leaving them altogether, stacked neatly where they were. So, he adapted; built a life that avoided pressure.

Ilya functioned. Ilya excelled. Ilya became very good at not making things worse.

Time passed that way: tides rose and fell; cold gave way to heat; weeds withered, and later, flowers bloomed. A year, then another, then enough that counting them as years began to feel arbitrary, so he turned to counting hockey seasons instead—a reminder of what truly demanded his focus. The world rearranged itself around him, yet through it all, Ilya remained suspended in that strange in-between: refusing to be small, or ordinary, or to let this be all there was—and yet unable to move toward anything else. Resistance becoming paralysis; rebellion hollowing itself out.

Greatness, he would think, whenever doubt surfaced. Think of hockey. Think of legacy. Think of Moscow. Think of making it all worth something. But it all slipped through him anyway, and even began to feel small against the loneliness that settled in his bones.

Ilya could be surrounded—locker rooms loud with laughter, dinners crowded with familiar faces, bodies close enough to brush against—and still feel untouched, sealed off behind something invisible and unyielding. But he learned how to smile in the right places; how to nod; how to participate just enough to pass as present; how to keep his worst thoughts folded inward, compressed into something manageable, something that wouldn’t spill. Vulnerability felt indulgent—something dangerous and vaguely shameful, like a failure of discipline, until it felt as if Ilya’s restraint had fully calcified into identity.

Meaning thinned out like sand between trembling, calloused fingers, never quite leaving a trail, and his only response was to intellectualize his every waking thought. Aestheticize it. Minimize it. He learned to swallow everything sharp and forced himself into a version of quiet that passed for composure. He smiled without believing it; laughed without a trace of humor; buried the tired so deep it lost its name, all as he wandered without direction.

Odysseus without Ithaca, shipwrecked across the Aegean, rising and falling according to winds he could never command. Drifting north, south, east, west—everywhere but where he intended—and rowing blind toward an abstract of home that only receded the closer he believed he was to reaching it.

Anything to avoid the phantom weight of his father’s gaze, he supposed—stern and evaluative and never entirely gone, not even when it eventually became his own.

At night, when the noise fell away, his mind refused to follow. Sleep came and went unpredictably, a guest who never stayed long enough to be trusted, and Ilya would lay awake, counting absences; reminiscing over all the different versions of himself he might have been had things tilted even just slightly differently. The boy, the man, the athlete, the lover, the son, the person—they all hovered just out of reach, not painful enough to grieve properly; not real enough to let go.

And quietly… stubbornly… he dreamed.

He dreamed of intensity without decay. Of joy that didn’t come with warning labels; of the Floating Gardens of Babylon; of miracles that made a mockery of restraint. Of greatness, real and tangible and malleable and held in his hands.

He dreamed of being remade—fundamentally altered; stripped down to something truer. He imagined transformation arriving from somewhere outside him, dramatic and undeniable: a moment, a force, a hand reaching down to lift him out of himself. Divine intervention, catastrophe—anything powerful enough to override the inertia he couldn’t seem to escape. Gods and outstretched hands, from above or below, ready to tear him apart and remake him into something unrecognizable and invincible. Ilya dreamed of eradication and replacement; of becoming someone else entirely.

He dreamed, too, of simpler things.

Two pairs of feet on a sofa. A favorite film half-watched. A dog barking in the background. His head resting against someone else’s, just to feel the weight of it. Sentences left unfinished, because someone already knew how they ended. Notes spread through a home, missing signatures, because those went without saying. Shared grocery lists, lost to the sands of time as they fell under the fridge.

He dreamed of smiling—of looking up at the face of the person he loved and his lips twitching of their own accord. Of smiling so big and wide and free at someone, from pure instinct alone, that his cheeks would hurt and his heart would burst.

For a long time, he mistook closeness for contact; mistook being wanted for being known. Bodies were easy, and they asked nothing of him beyond presence and performance. He would find relief in that—in the basic predictability; the way raw physicality could drown out thought, if only for a moment. Touch without tenderness, intimacy reduced to mechanics: belts unbuckling; mouths meeting without hunger; words spoken out of habit rather than desire.

He let it happen because it felt easier than refusing; because it felt like proof that he still existed, even when it left him emptier every time. But it never lasted—the warmth would fade, replaced by that old, familiar hollowing: the sense that something essential had been missed; that he’d once again violated his body in a shortsighted attempt to reclaim something he didn’t know he’d lost.

So, he learned how to leave without ceremony, and how to detach without cruelty, and how to walk away carrying the same unanswered ache he’d arrived with.

Ilya learned to like contradictions. Wood made of cotton—hard at a distance, but gentle to the touch; that split under the faintest pressure and turned itself into seas; that searched for harbors made of wreckage and grey skies beneath which to anchor.

For years, he refused to look directly at it; to ask who he was or what he’d become. Clean lines are boring, he told himself often. He preferred extremes: peaks and valleys; the storm after the calm; vessels that sank under safe harbor; flowers that died at the first touch of dusk rather than hold out until dawn.

What was there to say, really? If what was already felt redundant, what could possibly be gained by revisiting what had been? He searched endlessly for the single explanation that would unlock everything; spent whole nights staring at ceilings, cataloguing absences. A life composed of would’ve, could’ve, should’ve, looping endlessly.

He dissected, deconstructed, broke things apart and rearranged them, yet never moved past thinking: all those lives he hadn’t lived; all that love he hadn’t allowed himself; all the chosen families he might have found if he’d lingered here or hurried there. Other paths; other homes; other versions of himself walking somewhere else if he'd just chosen differently.

Days repeated themselves with the dull insistence of waves against ice, each morning bringing the same hope of rebirth and the same disappointment when everything remained the same. He would dream of change, wake up, and immediately know better.

Greatness, he’d remember, then, as a mantra. Hockey. Legacy. Moscow. Pride.

Sometimes he wondered if this was simply what he was built for; if he was just configured differently for the kind of life other people seemed to fall into without effort.

Some flowers are not made to bloom, he told himself, and found a strange comfort in the fatalism of it. Some things are born to wither, and to ache, and to someday die.

Time continued its work. He grew older in ways that surprised him—laugh lines appearing without memory of laughter; milestones passing without ceremony—as he watched others settle into lives that seemed to seamlessly click into place: relationships smoothing into routines; futures taking on shape and direction. He felt like an observer to his own adolescence and then adulthood: present, but unanchored; participating, but not fully arrived.

Still, something in him refused to go quiet, and Ilya continued to chase intensity the way others chased stability, mistaking extremes for meaning; novelty for direction. Anything to feel the edges again. Anything to break the numbness wide open, even if only temporarily.

Anything that would make the waiting end.

And then, somewhere along the way, Shane Hollander appeared.

At first, Ilya didn’t recognize what was happening.

Shane was just there, in the periphery of his days, in the unremarkable spaces between obligation and routine. Not really someone Ilya noticed, but he knew the name, the face—just vague enough to be in the corner of his mind, like a whisper he couldn’t quite catch. But the league had them marked, tied together in some unspoken script, and so they were going to keep crossing paths, circling each other like two planets pulled by the same gravity. There was an inevitability to it, like a slow current dragging them closer, whether they wanted it or not.

And then Shane showed up that first day in Saskatchewan, awkward and earnest and polite and Canadian, and introduced himself—and that’s how it started. In a voice Ilya came to expect and who didn’t demand anything. In someone, well, frankly, quite boring, and who asked equally boring questions, but then actually waited for Ilya to answer them every time instead of filling in the silence for him. In a boy, meeting a boy; in unexpected pleasantries; in polite remarks; in Ilya Rozanov? Shane Hollander, I wanted to introduce myself and You’re an awesome player to watch and Good luck in the tournament tomorrow.

So simply; so casually; like the fabric of their lives wasn’t forever changing. No thunder, no ceremony, no divine hand reaching down, no fire splitting the sky: just a man, ordinary in all the ways one could be, stepping into Ilya’s orbit and refusing to ever leave it again.

And so, what was he supposed to do but give in to it? He had no choice but to unwillingly surrender to the pull of him, lodged somewhere under his ribs before he’d had the sense to name it for what it was—Shane Hollander, Prince of Hockey, all awkward edges and earnest pauses, polite to a fault, freckles scattered across his face like something incidental, unremarkable, and somehow impossible to look away from.

Attraction followed, sudden and exact, snapping into place like a law of nature—immediate, volatile; less a feeling than a current that flared the moment they shared space. It lived in proximity, in the way the air seemed to tighten when he looked at him, in the certainty that something had already leapt the distance between them and was now humming, alive and waiting. Ilya had spent a lifetime disciplining himself against impulses like this, and still his body betrayed him, responding long before his mind could intervene.

Over time, of years of washing it down and pretending it wasn’t real, genuine tenderness and affection would end up festering and taking root in his chest. And then, before he’d even realized it, before he knew he was ready, before he could’ve given time permission to move forward, it had moved anyway, and ten years had passed, and—love.

The love of his life.

The reason he breathed, and woke up every morning, and put right foot in front of left.

There was no sudden clarity, no cinematic shift in the air. If anything, the change was almost irritating in its subtlety; in the way it refused to announce itself. Ilya had learned to brace for intensity, for upheaval, for things that burned bright and burned out just as fast.

Shane did neither.

Staying was not something people did lightly. It implied patience; attention; a willingness to see what unfolded rather than what dazzled, and so Ilya kept expecting the moment where Shane would grow bored—Mister Boring himself growing bored, he thought, warmly—or disappointed, or quietly distant. The moment where the effort of knowing him would outweigh the reward. He waited for the withdrawal like one waits for pain after impact: already flinching, already rehearsing the detachment that would follow.

It didn’t come.

Instead, Shane learned him, and the pauses in his speech, and the way his eyes drifted when he was overwhelmed, and the particular kind of silence that meant he was thinking too hard and the other kind that meant he’d stopped thinking altogether. He noticed when he ate less, slept worse, or withdrew without explanation. And he never interrogated him, either: just placed a hand lightly at his back when they were alone; tried an earnest attempt at a straight-face joke that fell flat but humored him all the same; and kept the routine of their hook-ups alive and unbending, for years on end. A constant in Ilya’s life, for once.

He didn’t know what to do with that kind of care; the stability of it. It felt undeserved, first of all. Suspicious, second. Tenderness, in his experience, had always come tethered to expectation—do better, be stronger, do not falter, do not embarrass me, do not make this harder than it already is—and Shane’s affection arrived without instruction, without a rubric to follow, which made it terrifying in a way cruelty never had.

Cruelty, at least, was legible.

So he found himself holding back instinctively, rationing the parts he revealed, as though exposure might deplete some finite internal reserve. He gave Shane humor before honesty; charm before truth; kept the darker corners cordoned off, convinced that if he saw too much—the doubt, the exhaustion, the way despair sometimes arrived without warning and overstayed its welcome—something would break.

But Shane didn’t push. He didn’t pry the doors open. He sat outside them, patient, unoffended; present in a way that made retreat feel increasingly conspicuous. And slowly, so slowly Ilya almost missed it, his body began to respond before his mind did: he slept better when Shane was in his bed; ate without thinking about it; laughed and didn’t immediately feel the need to justify it. There were moments, brief and disorienting, where the static in his head softened enough for him to feel something like ease, as though he could set something down for a minute without fear it would be stolen.

He tried to tell himself this was temporary; that everything meaningful eventually was, rehearsing the exit even as he settled in and keeping one foot angled toward disappearance out of habit. But the longer he and Shane kept their arrangement alive—as years passed, and they pushed each other harder, harder, harder, until it was just the two of them standing together at the top, no one to challenge them, no one to match them, no one to understand them quite like each other—the harder it became to imagine leaving without consequence.

He thought of his father’s mantra. How lonely he had felt all those years, twisting the words in his mouth, convinced no one else would understand their weight. But if there was anyone who understood greatness quite like Ilya Rozanov, it was Shane Hollander.

The greatest hockey player of his generation.

And for the first time, the idea of absence hurt in advance, rather than just in his imagination. Between fear and wanting; instinct and possibility, Ilya began to understand the true danger of love: not that it would destroy him outright, but that it would ask him to live: to choose presence over paralysis, to stay awake in a life he had spent years half-asleep inside.

He had never understood what living in a constant state of pain was until Shane, not really. He’d known suffering, yes—deep, gargantuan suffering; had lived inside a tectonic aching that rearranged the ground beneath him for so long it felt structural—but this was different. This was the pain of attachment; of anticipation; of having something to lose. With Shane, he learned what it meant to love fully, with the whole of himself, every fracture exposed; with no real plan for survival if it went wrong. Love that didn’t ask permission; that didn’t wait for him to be ready; that didn’t care about the defenses he’d spent a lifetime perfecting.

Love that hurt, because he kept waiting for it to be taken away from him.

He didn’t know then—couldn’t know—that his whole life up until Shane had been the darkness before dawn. That the waiting, the confusion, the fear, the constant sense of standing on the edge of something vast and unstable, were not signs of failure but of motion. That joy, when it finally came, would not come cleanly or all at once, but would arrive in pieces, in moments so small they were easy to miss if he wasn’t paying attention.

Greatness is made of beginnings, his father's voice still whispered, sharp and insistent; reminding him.

But Shane never asked him to be great. He only asked him to be there.

The words echoed, and for the first time, they didn’t feel like an accusation; didn’t demand proof in trophies or legacy or national pride. He thought of Shane, of the life they’d built together, and for the first time, Ilya could almost nod along, uncertain but sincere. Greatness. Yes. Finally.

Was this the life he had chosen, or had this life chosen him? Sometimes it felt like he had drifted his entire existence—from purgatory to hell and back again—never quite landing anywhere long enough to build something solid. And then Shane appeared, and the drifting didn’t stop, but it changed shape. Suddenly, there was direction, however faint. Suddenly, the ascent toward something livable, if that’s what it was, felt possible.

The pain didn’t leave. It persists and remains to this day, but now he carries it differently; tolerates it; uses it as a kind of talisman. It protects him and reminds him not to fear love or connection, not to flinch away from companionship, but to let them in; tend to them; nurture them; watch them grow.

He was living life on his own terms now, and it hadn’t been fate that’d got him to that point. No god had reached down; no prophecy had unfolded. Ilya had been the one responsible for the hard work; him who’d crawled on his knees out of the pit of complacency over the shards of his broken past.

It wasn’t easy, but he’d done it. Not for Shane, not really, and not for anyone else. He did it for himself. And he did it because pain is fleeting, and love is endless, and his heart, fractured though it may be, was still beating.

Right?

Ilya was not fine.

That much was certain. Loving Shane had not cured him; had not sanded down the sharpest edges of his depression—that bitter word Galina loves to use so much, he thinks, ruefully—or rendered it manageable in the way people like to imagine love can.

The pain didn’t lift. The loneliness didn’t evaporate. The old ghosts didn’t pack up their things and go.

Shane knew this without needing to be told. Galina knew it too, more precisely than anyone else: in the way he watched him enter her office; the way his shoulders sat in their sockets; the way his hands either clenched or lay uselessly open in his lap.

Ilya loved Shane with the kind of depth that made recklessness feel inevitable; the kind of devotion where, if he were drowning, he would already be underwater, lungs burning, arms outstretched, unconcerned with tides or currents or the way some rescues were never meant to succeed.

It did not matter that waves that row against the sea are folded into wind and dissolved into air. Instinct does not negotiate. Who was Ilya, really, if not the somber filling poured over burning moonlight? The night sky could fracture itself into a thousand stars and still, he would outshine them all, as if refracted through a kaleidoscope, brilliant and disorienting.

So, Shane would drown; Ilya would dive after her; and somewhere beneath the surface, he would understand he’d been the one drowning all along. That was the way of it.

But their life together felt impossible to look at for too long without him fearing he’d lose something in the process, so he had no alternative but to enter self-preservation mode. He’d lived so many lives without the sun ever burning his sight; so many of the vessels in his life had either sunk beneath the weight of their own sorrow or been cried into existence and swallowed whole. The past had corroded him too thoroughly; the future remained too abstract to trust.

He would not let the one good thing in his hands slip away.

For years, he’d swallowed his pain whole, learning to move with it lodged in his throat and to read the dismissal before it ever reached a mouth. His father. His brother. His old coach back in Moscow. He could already taste it on their tongues—the thinning patience, the tightening jaw—if he were ever to give his suffering language. Now, at least, he knew the truth.

His pain was real. Profound. Undeniable. Validated. Clinically recognized. Clinically named.

And still. Still, there were moments when doubt slipped in sideways. When he wondered whether anyone was really looking; whether Galina was truly peeling back the infinite onion layers of his ill mind, or merely re-mapping the same terrain from different angles.

Every time he opened his hand, it felt like something seemed to fall through it, and in the hollow of his grip, only the echo of what might’ve been remained: images that time refused to preserve, smeared and half-remembered; like photographs left too long in the sun.

His father surfaced again in these moments. The harsh gaze. The tight frown. The barked orders that never softened with repetition.

Greatness is made of beginnings, Grigori’s voice sounded in his head.

And mine are too small to reach it, Ilya answered back.

Years later, the sentence still had weight. His father was dead now, and there was no one left to ask what he’d make of Ilya’s greatness, of his beginnings; no one left to decide whether any of it counted. But when he looked at his life, even now, Ilya—greedy, selfish Ilya—couldn’t find the grandeur he’d been promised. If greatness meant standing at the top and basking in the glow and warmth of the sun, thoughts uninterrupted, finally at peace, steady in who he was, then—well, he felt like anything but the Great Ilya Rozanov.

He felt the furthest thing from great, actually.

The goddess of time would laugh, then; cosmic indifference in her tone. She’d whisper incapacity into his ear, convince him that this was simply what he was—emotionally amputated, resigned to spend the rest of his life in her icy company. Forever tired; forever stagnant; forever waiting for a hypothetical last breath. Her opaque finger would curve in his direction; assure him that he must already be in debit to life; that nothing else explained the deficit.

Ilya tried to calculate it the way he’d learned to calculate everything else: how much he owed, how much he had already paid, how much remained in him to give before the balance tipped irrevocably against him.

When the thoughts became unbearable, he’d conjure Shane’s face, and the pressure in his chest would ease—not disappear, never that—but soften, just enough to breathe around.

Shane, his harbor. The world could end at their feet and the intertwining of their souls would still feel sufficient, self-contained, complete.

Shane. Anya. Yuna. David. The family he had found. The family the universe had handed him, belatedly, like karmic cashback for all the years spent wandering without a map, searching without knowing what he’d been meant to search for all along.

He’d think of therapy then. Of Galina, and the armchair in her office, and her notebook, and the crossing and uncrossing of her legs as she shifted in her seat in front of him, watching him; studying him; listening to him. Of how giving words to the weight he carried had made it tangible and measurable; capable of being set down, even if only briefly.

On the good days, the people he loved and the life he’d built with them and the support system he’d ensured was in place were enough to quiet the noise.  And yet, he knew how fragile and temporary it all was—like dye in water, first dissipating, and only then coloring.

Because the nights always returned. Late hours when Shane slept beside him, unknowing, while tears soaked into Ilya’s pillow over futures he would never get to live; entire lives he constructed with meticulous care, ingenious in their detail, before watching them collapse every time. A loving brother. A proud father. A living mother. Walking hand-in-hand with Shane through his hometown for his birthday; showing him to the bakery down his street he’d seemingly spent half his childhood in; walking in and finding his family already inside, grinning and smiling and hugging and laughing and loving him.

The lives would vanish at the first taste of moonlight, dissolving in lazy smoke, gently and mercilessly all at once. A mild flame of arson fire that would burn as it ached, turn to ashes as it bit, but never killed him, not even when it died, and so Ilya would spend whole nights tangled in these thoughts, restless and raw, carried along on the currents of memory that refused to let him rest.

And in the quiet, she always came back. The goddess of time, tireless in her collection, charging her tax; meditating over the poetry of a life so well considered, so thoroughly dissected—but frankly, so poorly lived.

At night, she would stand by his bed, shadows pooling beneath his eyes, and ask him what he was searching for. And as he’d answer, laughter would fill the room: deaf, sardonic, ancient.

The goddess of time had always known irony.

Late one night, the cassette of Ilya’s life plays, rewinds, and plays again—the same track on loop in the dark, when the clock ticks loud and the night presses in too close, too thick. It spills over and skips, all at once, like the static in an old tape that just won’t quit and he can’t find the stop button.

Shane sleeps beside him, steady as tides, relentless like the world spinning whether he wants it to or not, and Ilya thinks of older, simpler times: he hears the wild, messy clapping of children echoing through a sunlit Moscow schoolyard; sees their clasping hands like reckless promises; recalls the careless laughter trying to fill even the coldest spaces with light breaking through cracks.

Memories of children’s laughter before the weight of years, silence, and sharp edges settled in. Unashamed glances and stolen moments, not yet buried by the traps of time; not yet burned into scars left long after the light had gone, tangled up in blood and bone and the brittle hope of what might have been. The hands hover, not quite real, not quite memory, ghosting the edges of his mind; opaque echoes of another life, both far away and crawling just beneath his skin.

He thinks of the singsong games he and his classmates would play, guessing the futures stretched before them. Who would be Blonde or Brunette, Bald or Thick-haired, Short or Tall, Fierce or Forgotten? Who would be King or Thief, Policeman or Captain? Lives sketched in minutes, futures mapped like stars—all full of promise and glittering light and terrible, impossible hope.

The world was their oyster then; wide and wild and waiting, full of everything and nothing all at once. Voices jangling in the distance; children’s songs drifting like ghosts and carrying lightness and careless joy, before the world got heavy enough to crush. He had a lifetime ahead of him then, endless and sprawling; days so vast they could stretch forever and swallow him whole without notice. Decades unwritten like blank pages begging for stories to be carved into them. How large were those days? How long the years in front of him?

The river bends, the current pulls, and time steals it all away. He thinks of the boy he once was—little Ilyusha, small and tiny, a messed heap of tangled, blonde curls, tugging at his mother’s headscarf, soft hands fumbling with threads, unaware, unknowing, unafraid, unbroken.

What would he say if he could reach back through time and speak to that child? Would he laugh with that reckless hope he never quite lost? Or would he cry? Or scream? Or maybe he’d just hold that boy—hold him tight and close enough to stop him from ever slipping away; cradle him in silence, soothe him with words that could never fully heal the both of them.

I would just rip the band-aid off, he thinks, because sometimes love means breaking open the heart before it breaks in silence; telling the truth, tired and blunt; honest and harsh; sharp enough to cut clean and deep enough so you can finally see what’s waiting just beyond the horizon. Because existence is a cold weight that presses down, and maybe it’s kinder to know early; to be braced for that cold weight and the unkindness that always comes and never really lets go, rather than shattered by the surprise.

The world is unkind, Ilyusha. Unfair. A ruthless master with hands cold as stone. He would shake him hard and say: Do not believe the lies. Do not let your heart get caught in the cracks.

That little boy, small and bright and trembling—Ilya would tell him about the silence after the noise, about the mother who was there and then wasn’t, about the hollow pit that opened in the room where he lay, still as night. And about how time, that indifferent bastard, keeps moving while you freeze in place, watching the world march on without you.

Ilya spends the night tangled in this thought, restless and raw. Little Ilyusha—blonde curls; mother’s headscarf caught in fingers that don’t quite know how to hold on.

Not much time left before life comes crashing into him, Ilya thinks. Barreling down, rushing toward him and sweeping over him; reminding him of fate’s true master and how it lives in the bottom of a bottle of pills, and the silent room at the end of the hall, and the frozen stillness of his mother’s body sprawled over the bed, and the pit in his stomach as he finds him, forever imprinted. A tidal wave that would crash without mercy, and little Ilyusha would be swept with it, utterly helpless beneath it. Colossal and holy and terrible, that unflinching, unstoppable titan of a force; meeting an object it could not move, and thus would forever be unmovable as a result.

And then, time and space would fold in on themselves, crashing and colliding until little Ilyusha would sit in his stead some twenty-five odd years later, lying in the same bed and listening to the same rise and fall of Shane’s chest beside him. Growing and growing and growing just to become little old Ilya—no gods or religions to catch him; no holy book to latch onto; devoid of any purpose but to hold the fragile semblance of his life and clutch it in his shaking hands. Days pitifully passing by him, dripping and slipping and ticking away like mold growing on stale bread; life perpetually suspended, wasting away, slow and suffocating; pressing down with the weight of a reckoning that never quite comes.

Patiently waiting for a cosmological explosion that would justify all that came before—and then realizing that Shane; Shane, who is his home; Shane, who tears through the darkness and shatters the silence and burns steady and bright like a lighthouse and demands Ilya keep living was that cosmological explosion, and if loving him hadn’t yet fixed what was wrong with him, he didn’t know what would.

Little Ilyusha, he would tell him, time is the cruelest villain, slipping and sneaking through cracks, stealing your footprints as you walk above them. It will leave you with nothing but necromantic ghosts to haunt the corners of your brittle, hollow life. It will give you something back, just to take it away from you again.

A thousand and one dichotomies will live within you; swirl inside you, he would say, and you will but watch.

Rationally, he knows the river of life flows only once, straight and relentless, linearly and streamlined, and he’ll never actually see his old self again. But if the child he once was is to live, it’s inside him. Ilyusha’s dreams are Ilya’s—though his fears even more so.

That boy with curls tangled in his mother’s scarf, small enough to disappear but big enough to dream impossible things. He’s still here, inside, carrying a fragile light that flickers beneath everything, even now. The boy he was, the man he is, and the love he holds all fold into each other inside him like tangled roots, wrapped tight around the stubborn heart of the man lying beside him.

So, what else is left, if not to hope?

Not the wild, reckless hope of youth. No, something raw and aching, a small pocket of light that won’t be snuffed out. Hope that maybe there’s still a chance to rewrite the story; that maybe he’s not just trauma and scars and all the dark diagnoses Galina throws at him like stones. That maybe he’s someone who can grow beyond the wreckage; who can choose to hold onto Shane, and through Shane, hold onto life itself. That beneath all the ruins, the ghosts, the ache that never quite fades, there’s that glimmer, that stubborn little flicker that refuses to be crushed.

What else is there, really, if not to clutch that fragile spark, that stubborn thread? A tiny, trembling pocket of it, yes, but real nonetheless—that maybe he’s still young, and therefore foolish; that an eternity of days stretches ahead of him, still unwritten; that maybe he’s just scarred and traumatized, but not resigned to his circumstances, not yet, not quite.

That maybe there’s solace to be found in what is to come, not only in what was, and the question is no longer who he is, but who he might still become. That he remains master of his own fate, and his future waits for him to sketch it, fragile and new and pregnant and waiting.

That he’s still growing, still becoming, and he can still build a life from the dust; still choose the shape of the days to come; still fight for something more than survival, something that feels more like living.

Even the slowest river moves forward and carves a path, no matter how many stones lie in its way. This inertia, this slow decay, this weight—it doesn’t have to be his story; it doesn’t have to define him. Not if he doesn’t want it to. Not if he doesn’t let it.

Life can still be good, he tells himself, as if it’s even a choice he can actively make. It can. It must.

He smiles then—soft and small and a little broken—and the weight eases just enough to let a breath come all the way in, just enough for his heart to stutter and then steady. Something adjacent to relief; a fraction of space carved out of the pressure that’s lived in his chest for so long it’s begun to feel structural.

He turns his head and finds Shane’s sleeping smile—quiet, unassuming, almost accidental—the soft curve of his mouth caught mid-breath, fierce in its own way, content with the simple fact of being there. Shane’s chest rises and falls beside him, steady and stubborn, indifferent to Ilya's spirals and time’s cruelties and the long arithmetic of survival, and Ilya knows, with a certainty that doesn’t demand anything of him, that for now—just for now—he can keep going a little longer. A few more days. A few more nights like this.

He curls closer, turning into Shane's warmth, pressing his ear to the steady drum beneath skin, the heart inside the heart, and the sound anchors him; tethers him to something solid and living and real. A promise he doesn’t have to articulate; something to hold onto when everything else fractures and threatens to scatter into dust.

The goddess of time laughs, that old familiar sound, somewhere distant, but it doesn’t cut as deep this time. It echoes once, duller now, and passes. The world, impossibly, holds still for a moment, and for a quiet moment in the night, only the hope remains.

Ilya stays there, letting himself be held, thinking that maybe this is enough; maybe it always was. For now, at least.

For now, he can keep going.

He just has to let Shane in.

He does not let Shane in.

Weeks pass. Ilya tries, really—earnestly, desperately—and still the words refuse him, turning to sand the moment he reaches for them; slipping away before they can ever be shaped into something usable.

He knows this. He feels it every time he opens his mouth with the intention of telling the truth and finds nothing there that will obey: his throat tightens; his jaw locks; his eyes slide away on instinct; walls rise faster than he can think to stop them, old and automatic, already in place by the time he realizes what he’s doing.

It’s almost funny, he thinks. My soul and Shane’s are as intertwined as two souls can ever be. And yet.

They sit on opposite ends of the sofa, their feet still touching—a small, accidental mercy—and Shane is talking. He hears the sound of him voice before the words themselves catch up.

“Ilya, what’s going on?" A beat. "Why did you sleep in the guest bedroom last night?”

And still, despite it all, he tries.

Shane, I cannot sleep. Shane, I hate myself. Shane, I loathe every fiber of my being. Shane, hockey no longer means anything to me, not like it does to you.

Shane, I love Yuna and I love David and they have done nothing wrong and they have opened their home to me without hesitation and made room for me like it is easy and made me feel like I belong, but every time I am with them, I feel like an impostor, because my family is broken and yours is not.

Shane, I love you more than anything. Shane, you are everything to me. Shane, I miss Moscow. Shane, I think I resent you for being the reason why I can’t go back home. Shane, I do not think I would be a good father. Shane, I think only you would miss me if I was gone.

Shane, I am not getting better.

Shane, you are the only thing keeping me here.

Shane, Shane, Shane. I really am not getting any better.

Shane, I hate my mother, sometimes. Hate her so deeply for leaving me behind and all alone.

Shane, I miss my mother. I miss my mother so much I think of following her into death, sometimes.

“You snore too loud,” he jokes, instead.

And still, despite it all, he fails.

Summer comes to them quietly, and then all at once.

One day, the cottage smells of damp wood and lake water and sunscreen rubbed in too fast, and the next it feels like the world has rearranged itself around them, just right. The air stays warm well into the evenings; the light lingers, stretching hours thin, refusing to let go; time loosens, rules soften. It becomes possible, suddenly, to believe that nothing is waiting on the other side of this.

Out here, it always feels like the summer belongs to them personally, as though they’ve been singled out by it. As though the season has taken a look at the two of them and decided, yes, you can have this. Yes, you can keep it. Yes, everything else falls like sand through your fingers, so yes, this is yours.

The lake is glassy in the mornings and restless by afternoon, sun breaking against it in fragments that hurt to look at for too long. Shane moves through the space like he belongs to it, like the house has been waiting for him specifically, and the dock creaks easily under his weight, old and familiar and unbothered by him.

Ilya watches him without trying to stop himself, because out here there is no reason to pretend he doesn’t want to; no need to ration affection or attention like it might run out.

No one is watching. No one is counting. There is nothing to win; nothing to maintain. Ilya keeps waiting for the catch—for the moment the ground gives way and the price is named—but it never comes.

It’s terrifying just how light everything feels.

On the dock, Shane sits with one leg dangling over the edge, toes skimming the water every now and then, the other leg bent, knee pulled in, his chin resting against it in that thoughtless collapsed posture that still feels like a small miracle to witness. One hand props his face, and the other rests between his legs, idle and unguarded.

The thought comes then, uninvited and complete: This is where my life makes sense.

Ilya looks to the side and smiles, catching Shane’s mouth doing that thing—soft, almost petulant, like he’s on the verge of saying something or nothing at all.

Sitting beside you, he thinks, the lake wide and blue behind our shoulders; the world reduced to water and sky and heat.

I hope I’m buried here.

Ilya can’t make sense of how this happened; how he ended up here. How, out of all possible configurations of his life, this is the one that stuck.

He looks at Shane and feels that familiar swell; the ache that isn’t quite pain and isn’t quite joy; something fuller and deeper than either, and it hits him, suddenly, how complete he looks like this: unposed, unrehearsed, entirely himself, as though that was always enough. Ilya watches the careless way he holds himself, the trust written into every line of him—and he understands, with almost frightening clarity, that loving him had never been a choice so much as a fact; something set in stone long before he knew it. A grand design, woven and spun by the goddesses of fate into the very threads of inevitability; something he simply happened to discover one unremarkable morning in 2008.

He thinks, not for the first time, that he would have ruined himself trying to earn this if he’d known it was coming. Would have sharpened himself down to nothing, cut away every softness, every indulgence, if that’s what it took. Instead, it was given to him freely, without ceremony, without warning, and the selflessness of that still leaves him reeling.

But if he lets himself think about how much he loves Shane, he might just start crying—so, instead, and because the words insist on being said; because not saying them feels like lying, he just says—

“You’re beautiful.”

Shane laughs, soft and embarrassed, shaking his head like he’s trying to brush the compliment off his skin.

“Ah… so modest,” Ilya says, smiling, because teasing him is half the pleasure, and because watching him fail to deflect affection will never stop being funny to him. “But it’s true,” he adds.

One hand under his cheek, the other between his legs, the slight pucker in his lips…

“I would have been a fool not to fall in love with you,” he tells him, simply. “So, I did.”

Out here, with the days stretching endlessly ahead of them, love feels vast enough to hold an entire life inside it. Vast and unreasonable and terrifying in its permanence; worth carrying quietly, stubbornly, for years, even when everything else begins to fail.

Summer wraps itself around them, bright and unrepeatable, and Ilya, well—he was never much of a fighter, really—he lets summer have him, ripe and flushed and easy; so easy; easy like breathing.

There’s a particular hour of the day that he’s always hated.

It’s an hour that asks questions without asking them outright, arriving just as the day technically ends but the night doesn’t yet declare itself; when the light outside starts to go flat and gray and uncommitted and the world seems to pause expectantly, as though waiting to see what he’ll do with himself now that there are no obligations left to hide behind. An hour that assumes he has somewhere to return to, someone to sit with, a way to occupy space without justification.

He’s spent most of his life learning how to endure it by treating it like bad weather; like something to be waited out rather than engaged with.

Shane is with him. It feels like he is always with him now, threaded into the architecture of his days in a way that should feel like relief, like proof that something has finally gone right. It shouldn’t feel like a problem, and it’s not, not really, except that it kind of is. Not because he’s doing anything wrong, but because Ilya can already feel himself tightening around his presence the way a body tightens around cold water: instinctive and involuntary; a recalibration he doesn’t consciously initiate, and therefore can’t quite stop.

The season’s grueling schedule has stolen Shane in pieces, entire days and weeks parceled out to travel and practices and games that leave Ilya alone in their home more often than not, and he has adjusted to that absence with a fluency that unsettles him when he stops to notice it, slipping back into old rhythms with alarming ease: meals eaten standing up; television left on without sound; thoughts allowed to spool uninterrupted for entire evenings at a time; no one asking him where he’s going or whether he’s hungry or if he wants company.

He has always been good at being alone. Too good. Good in a way that feels less like resilience and more like muscle memory, like something learned so early it no longer feels learned at all. Structural and unexamined, the way you don’t question the shape of your own spine until it starts to hurt.

Shane hums as he moves between the fridge and the counter, preparing their dinner with casual confidence. It's a low, melodic sound, emblematic of casual domesticity, and it should be comforting, but the knife hits the cutting board in an easy, unthinking rhythm—thwack, thwack, thwack—and each sound lands behind Ilya’s eyes like a pulse he cannot quite tune out; like noise his body has not yet learned how to metabolize.

“This might take a while. You want anything? I can make you a sandwich, if you’re hungry,” he asks, not looking up.

“Uh, no,” Ilya says from the couch, where his fingers are curled around an hour-old mug of coffee that’s gone cold without him noticing, his phone balanced uselessly in his other hand; article open on the screen that his eyes keep skimming without absorbing, text sliding off his brain as if it refuses to take root.

He thinks the words come out too fast, too sharp, like they’re hitting the air with a tightness that surprises even him, and he winces. His grip tightens on the mug, and he’s already reaching for the reflexive apology, but Shane doesn’t react, doesn’t stiffen or pull away; just keeps moving. And talking.

“You haven’t eaten since lunch, Ilya.”

Irritation flickers in him, briefly. It’s born less of what Shane says than of the fact that he keeps needing him to answer altogether, the sound of his voice layering itself over the quiet Ilya has been craving for hours and grown used to shaping himself around, letting it settle until it feels like a second skin.

“I’m not hungry,” he says, calmer this time, purposely trying to soften the edges of his voice, but the effort makes his throat feel dry and scraped raw, like something fragile is being dragged across it.

He’s spent so many years alone in empty apartments and hotel rooms and in the hollow echo chamber of his own mind, that having another person track his appetite, his energy, his needs, feels less like care and more like a demand he hasn’t yet learned how to meet.

“You okay?” Shane asks, still not looking at him, just checking in the way people do when they assume the answer will be yes. So, when he answers, it's—

“Yes,” and he again hears how wrong it sounds, clipped and immediate and too tight, as if it’s been yanked out of somewhere constricted before he could smooth it down.

This time, Shane glances over.

Immediately, Ilya feels the familiar prickle of being perceived, of having his interior weather suddenly subject to observation. He wants, irrationally, to apologize—not just for the tone of his voice but for the tension he hadn’t meant to reveal; for the fact of it existing at all—but the apology gets stuck somewhere between intention and execution, caught in an old instinct not to explain unless asked; not to offer softness preemptively; not to create needs where none have been explicitly named.

“I didn’t mean—” Shane starts, then stops, recalibrating in real time. “You just seem far away.”

Ilya presses his tongue to the back of his teeth, the way he does when he’s trying to hold something in place. He shakes his head, attempting to hide the way he’s gritting his teeth. “I'm here.”

Which is true, technically, but not complete, and the incompleteness of it settles between them like yet another piece of furniture neither of them knows quite where to put.

Shane joins him on the couch, and they sit together, close but not touching. He can feel the heat coming off his arm, the easy sprawl of him, the quiet certainty with which he occupies the room, and alongside the affection that wells up reflexively, there’s something else too—something thinner and sharper; like the awareness of a sound just below the threshold of hearing.

Being alone taught Ilya how to make himself very small very efficiently; how to fold himself into manageable shapes and disappear without drama. But being with Shane requires the opposite—it requires expansion and noise and presence, and some days that feels like relief, and others it feels like labor he hasn’t trained for.

He talks, idly at first, about practice; about a teammate who can’t stop overthinking his shots; about the way the season feels like it’s speeding up and slowing down at the same time. Really, he just talks and talks and talks, never stopping, and Ilya listens, and nods in the right places, but he's tracking the steady rhythm of Shane’s voice rather than the content, and waiting rather impatiently for him to finish, because, really, when will he run out of things to talk about?

He loves him—with a depth that still startles him when he stops to examine it; in a way that feels almost retroactive, as though Shane has been quietly rewriting Ilya’s past just by existing in his present—but that love, for all it encompasses, does not translate cleanly into ease. It presses down as much as it lifts, heavy and demanding and tiring, because why is Shane talking so much, and now Ilya feels an itch crawling through his body and he can hear the refrigerator and the clock and he's tense all over and when will he stop talking and please, please stop talking and—

“—I’m not boring you, am I?” Shane asks suddenly, half-teasing.

Silence is a space he’s usually expected to fill; a gap he’s supposed to bridge with a joke or a comment or a smile, but he’s out of currency. All he can feel is that low hum of the refrigerator, and that ticking of the clock, and Shane's never-ending voice, now replaced by his attentive gaze, and the awful, tender reality of being seen by someone who loves him.

He doesn’t answer.

“Ilya?” Shane presses.

“No,” he says, and again it comes out wrong, too fast, too tight, like a door slammed against instinct. He hears it again; hears himself doing that thing he hates.

Shane’s eyes widen just slightly, cheeks flushing, and he sits up straighter. “Wait—am I annoying you?”

Ilya stammers. “No, no, I just—” The sentence falters, collapses. “Fuck." A beat. "I'm sorry.”

Shane blinks, surprised. “Uh. Okay,” he says carefully, and then turns his body fully toward him, attention sharpening rather than retreating.

It would be easier, Ilya thinks dimly, if he did not always do this; did not treat confession like an invitation every single time. If okay really meant okay, I understand, and we're done; and not okay, now tell me more, and let's talk.

“I just—” He tries again, the sentence stretching and doubling back, refusing to land cleanly. He thinks of deflecting, but the space Shane creates for him is so gentle that he owes it to him to try.

“I spent a long time being alone, and I got very used to it, and now you’re here, and you are—” He shakes his head, already regretting the direction this is going. “Is not you,” he adds quickly, reflexively, because that is what you say when you’re afraid of causing damage. “It's not,” he repeats, noticing Shane’s raised brow. “Is just…”

He pauses, exhaling hard. “Look, I’m really used to silence,” he says finally, and then, because honesty has momentum once it starts, “and it's just all a bit much sometimes. The talking, and the questions, and the—blyat, I am not explaining this well.”

Frustration twists in his chest, sharp and humiliating, and he takes a breath, covering his face with his hands. “Is just really loud sometimes,” Ilya adds, quieter, sound muffled by his fingers. “I'm sorry.”

The words aren’t pretty. He knows that. Shane would be justified in taking offense; in hearing complaint where Ilya means confession; in scoffing at him and standing up and leaving him to his demons, because what do you mean he is gone most of the week and the short time we get together I'm already bristling at the sound of his voice and—

“—Hey,” Shane says gently, nudging him. “Hey. Look at me.”

Ilya does, and whatever he expects to see there—hurt, irritation, withdrawal—isn’t present. Shane’s expression has softened instead, recognition settling into place.

“I get it,” Shane says quietly. “Really. I do. You know I do.” He pauses, steady and solid in front of him. “You don’t have to entertain me, Ilya. It’s okay. We can just sit.”

Something in him loosens at that, slow and careful, and he nods once. Shane reaches out, his hand settling at the back of his neck, thumb brushing over the short hairs there in an absentminded, grounding gesture, and Ilya leans into it before he can stop himself, resting there for a second like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

He thinks of all the hours he has spent convincing himself that being alone was preference rather than adaptation; that the walls he built were aesthetic rather than structural; that he chose distance when in truth he learned it. He thinks of how easy it would be to retreat even now; how familiar the shape of withdrawal feels; how safe.

Instead, he exhales.

“Okay,” he says.

They sit together in the quiet, the house humming softly around them. He feels the itch to reach for his phone; to anchor himself to something distant and predictable; to fracture the moment before it can ask anything more of him. He resists it.

Outside, the hour finally gives way, night settling in decisively at last, and Ilya, who has spent so long mistaking solitude for safety, lets his phone stay off for a few hours, pulls the shades up, and risks letting himself get a little known.

It starts with the light—the way it catches on every windshield and every leaf and turns the whole street into a series of white-hot needles pressing into the backs of Ilya’s eyes.

He hadn’t meant to stay out this long, but Shane is still at the rink, or maybe he’s on a plane, or maybe he’s just away, and the house had felt too small and too full, like it was shrinking and collapsing on itself, and Ilya had figured he could outrun the claustrophobia if he just kept moving; if he just felt like a person who does normal things; if he just walked his dog without falling apart.

The walk starts out like any other, or at least that’s what he tries to tell himself, but the air feels immediately too sharp against his face when he steps out and the sunlight is hitting the pavement in jagged, aggressive shards that make his head throb with a dull, rhythmic ache. The world is too open; the wind is humming in his ears like a broken radio; and already he can feel the sweat slicking his palms against the leather of Anya’s leash.

And the street—it’s too loud, and there’s the distant hum of tires and the screech of a bird and the wind rattling the dry leaves, until it all feels like it’s scraping against his raw nerves. He’s trying to walk straight; trying to pretend his legs don't feel like they're made of cooling wax, but every sound is landing on him like a physical blow. A car door slamming three blocks away; the rattle of a plastic bag in the gutter; the wet, rhythmic panting of the dog at his side. It’s all too much; it’s all too loud, and he’s also now sharply aware of the fabric of his own shirt rubbing against his skin, grating like sandpaper, until his jaw is locked so tight his teeth ache.

He just needs the sound to stop. He just needs five seconds of actual, vacuum-sealed silence so he can figure out how to draw a full breath.

Anya’s usually calm, but today she’s sensing the static in the air, the vibration of his shaking hands, and she’s feeding off it—pacing, whining; her nails clicking against the sidewalk like a countdown he can’t stop.

His lungs feel like they’re full of glass, and then Anya stops, her ears twitching, her body tensing into a cord of pure, vibrating muscle—a squirrel, another dog, a shadow, he doesn’t know what she sees—and before he can even tighten his grip, she lets out the first bark; a sharp, jagged explosion of noise that feels like it’s happening inside his own skull.

She begins pulling at her leash, wild and electric, thrashing like a live wire under tension. The sound ricochets off the walls of Ilya’s chest, pounding behind his ribs like a drum he can’t silence.

“Anya, enough—” he tries to tell her, but her barking remains sharp and relentless and seems to never fucking end. “Blyat, enough—”

Each new grating sound strikes the edges of his patience, a spike hammering and rattling the walls inside his chest until his breaths come short and ragged. He clenches his jaw; shuts his eyes; but she won’t stop; she just barks, and barks, and barks, and barks—

Before he can stop himself, Ilya snaps, and a jagged yell tears free like a raw wound, ripping through the air like a snapped wire, voice cracking. His hands twitch, then clamp down hard on the leash, jerking it back with a desperate force that surprises even him— the force he reserves for the ice; for throwing players against the boards; for when he’s looking to hurt.

Anya yelps, painfully, as her neck is pulled, suddenly jerked sideways; startled into obedience. It’s a sharp, sudden thing, a crack in the tension—and her cries immediately die down, recoiling just a step. For a moment, there’s nothing but quiet.

Finally, he thinks. Silence.

His chest heaves in relief, and he looks down. But Anya’s still there, and she’s watching him: ears pinned flat against her skull; eyes wide and searching; cautious and uncertain; hesitant in a way that’s wholly unfamiliar to Ilya.

Hesitant with him. Hesitant because of him.

It cuts deeper than anything, and a cold pit opens in his stomach, swallowing him whole, his grip slackening immediately on the leash. His chest heaves again, heart hammering against ribs he can’t steady.

It hits him then, deep and sharp, and he swallows hard. What the fuck just happened? What did I just do?

He looks back at Anya, mind spinning, as a tight knot of panic and shame starts twisting in his gut, and the silence stretches, heavy and unrelenting between them.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

The words tumble out, breathless and tangled with ragged gasps, and Ilya drops to his knees, reaching for her fur with shaking hands.

“My girl,” he whimpers. “My sweet, sweet girl—”

The tether anchors him to something real, something true—Anya, his Anya—even as everything else threatens to break.

“I'm so sorry. I am so, so sorry." Tears slip freely down his cheeks now, and he’s sure he must look crazy to anyone who happens to walk by, but he doesn’t care. "Please—please forgive me, I—”

Slowly, her tongue begins to graze his fingers—tentative at first, but then she’s licking more gently, hesitating between each touch, eventually soft and steady. The weight in his chest both loosens and tightens as her tender licks crack something wide open inside him, held in the quietness of her forgiveness.

“Anya,” he cries, “Anya, I'm sorry.” He feels her lick his fingers more enthusiastically. “I am so sorry, Anyusha, I—” She settles at last, resigned, and he buries his nose in her neck, eyes closed, still reeling. “So, so sorry.”

The restless energy drains away, and a calm is forced like a fragile truce. But the ache inside Ilya stays: it swells and lingers long after they return home together; long after the memory of his outburst fades for her and only love for him remains.

He hangs her leash by the door as he normally would; fills her water bowl as he normally would; even leaves a few extra bone-shaped treats by the rug in silent apology. Then he drags himself up the stairs, crawls into bed, and cries the rest of his day away.

“What are some new things you learned this week?”

Galina’s voice echoes in his mind. She asks him the same question at the start of every session, and it irritates him, sometimes—the labor of inventory, the demand to scroll back through his life and label what was new; what was old; what could be discarded. Resents how needlessly clinical it made his interactions feel; how it inevitably forced him to re-contextualize them every time.

“Nothing,” he would reply, more than once. Jaw tight, exhausted. “I learned absolutely nothing.”

Galina would lean back, nodding and smiling, already knowing the answer before he’d spoken, based on how he’d entered the room, how he’d sat in the chair, how tightly his body was holding itself together; and she’d open her notebook.

Because they both knew he was always learning things.

Like the way Yuna kissed his cheek after he handed her a birthday gift, hugged him tightly, refused to let go for a solid minute until he couldn’t help but collapse against her, heart impossibly tender. Then thanked him, and called him son, and kissed his cheek again, and how his chest had throbbed so sharply he’d excused himself under the pretense of the bathroom because being loved like that still overwhelmed him; because having a family that loved him back was still new enough to hurt; because being called someone else’s son, by his mother-in-law no less, made him ache every time, suddenly and violently, for his own mother, who he desperately loved but couldn’t grapple with the fact she’d left him behind and all alone.

Or the way Shane looked at him when he returned to the table—warm, kind, and completely knowing—and how the sensation landed like sunlight as his hand found Ilya’s thigh under the table and he traced a heart on the denim of his jeans, using his index finger.

Or how he'd caught him one morning, head hunched over at the kitchen table, making annotations in a book where he could faintly make out the words “Russian” and “Language” and “Course” from over his shoulder; how he'd approached him then, and Shane had looked up, and smiled, and said wait, listen to this and tell me if it sounds right, and carefully sounded out Y-a te-by-a ly-u-bly-u, and his heart contracted in real time at the sound of the splintered syllables and the broken Russian that had somehow never sounded so loving.

How he learned every day, slowly and against his own disbelief, that love is elastic, against all odds and physics; that every time he thought his heart had reached its limit, that he couldn’t fit more love into it, it expanded anyway, made room, restructured itself without tearing. That when he would think, no, I cannot possibly love Shane any more, his heart would tell him it beat and vibrated and pulsated and ruptured and somehow stitched itself back together again for him.

Galina’s exercise matters, even when he resists it. It anchors him to forward motion; reminds him that days are passing, that time has not stalled completely, that he is changing even when it doesn’t feel like progress. That if nothing else moves, he is still accumulating something—knowledge, awareness, proof of continuity.

But that is on the good days.

Today, he feels inert. Today, he feels like he lives a half-life. Like he’s paralyzed; like he can’t move forward; like he only knows how to stop moving altogether. Today, he feels like he’s been existing, but never truly living; like he’s immobilized in some ancient grief; like this permeating sadness is a second skin, old and silent; like he can’t help but to weigh and measure his worth in the empty footprints left behind in a life that, if not screamed, will vanish unmarked and unremembered.

Today, he feels like he’s a subordinate to that stubborn, old parasite of pervasive melancholy, who’d long learned to pull the strings of his puppet from how early it had festered within him. Like there are old shadows burrowed deep within his chest, choreographing a dance that’d been playing long before he knew what to call the music, before he ever understood what love or hope even meant.

Today, he feels hopeless.

Today, it feels like a bad day.

A really bad fucking day.

And so when he grabs his computer while Shane's away grocery shopping, opens an Incognito Window and anonymously begins to type on an online forum for writers, I am writing a book where the main character is a doctor and I am trying to write a scene where she finds his friend who tries to kill himself with pills and I need it to be serious enough that a hospital would have to intervene but not serious enough to be fatal; how many would they have to take for the scene to feel realistic—then pretends not to wait hours until he hears the ping of a notification, and when someone finally replies with a number, neat and confident and practical, like it’s a problem with a solution and not a person at all, he leans back in the chair, quietly satisfied.

A number, free of any qualifiers—like a dosage chart.

Like a simple recipe he can follow.

There, he thinks. There's something new I learned this week.

Ilya holds the knowledge close to his chest.

Doesn’t act on it. Doesn’t do anything stupid. Just keeps it locked away in his mind, far from view; just out of reach. Like a bridge he’s memorized the height of, counting the steps to the railing every time he crosses but never actually stopping; never actually looking down; just keeping the geometry of the fall tucked in his pocket like a lucky coin.

He doesn’t do anything with it, even though months have passed, and the seasons have bled into one another, and the sky’s turned grey again, and maybe he should, maybe he really should, because the temptation is heavy and everything feels bad and he pretty much knows Shane has finally run out of the energy required to pretend that things are fine just for Ilya’s sake. That this is just a phase, or that it’s just a rough patch, or that this can all be excused away with a joke they can both laugh at—a joke Ilya keeps throwing at him like a blunt stone until the edges have worn smooth.

And it’s not just the guest bedroom anymore, either—it’s the way the air feels like lead every time they’re in the same room and the way his heart does this violent, sickening stutter when he hears Shane’s footsteps because he knows the question is coming; knows that Shane’s tired of being the only one reaching across the gap; and he wants to say something, he really does; he wants to scream all those things he thought about on the sofa months ago and continues to think every night, but he just stands there quietly and watches the hope die out of Shane’s eyes a little bit more every single day, until there’s nothing left but this fragile exhaustion that makes him look decades older than he is.

So, when Shane follows him into their bedroom one night; when he doesn't let the door close behind him; when he stands there in the dim light of a house that was never meant to be Ilya’s permanent home but has become his tomb anyway, it feels like the end of a very long, very quiet war of silence.

“You just need to let me in,” Shane whispers, lying beside him, voice low and urgent, like a fragile prayer cracking with something close to hope. “Just let me in. Talk to me. Please, Ilya.”

His breath catches, trembling in his chest. He doesn’t meet his eyes, not letting himself look—just slowly turns away, curling onto his side. His jaw clenches tight enough to taste bitterness; red-rimmed eyes thick with sorrow as tears pool at the corners and stare past the dark.

You deserve so much better, he thinks.

“I don't know how,” he breathes, voice barely more than a ghost.

The words fracture in the air. A pause stretches, and the room holds its breath. Shane’s gaze lingers on him—waiting, pleading, desperate for a crack in the walls that won’t come. His hand twitches, reaching out, but stops just short of touching skin.

And then his hand abruptly slides out from under the covers and, with a soft, impossibly loud click, turns off the light. The switch cuts through the silence, and darkness floods the room, folding around them both.

Ilya can feel his tearful eyes remain fixed on the curve of his back for hours afterward. Neither man sleeps.

The thing about that evening is that, at first, it feels actually nice.

Not before Shane arrives, of course. Their home is lit in that low, end-of-day haze that makes everything look more forgiving than it is, like the world is offering a small mercy for having survived the week, and nothing dramatic or catastrophic has happened, yet until he hears Shane's key turning in the lock, Ilya feels restless.

He has moved through the rooms all afternoon as if something unnamed were stalking him, drifted from kitchen to living room to bedroom and back again without ever fully arriving anywhere; anxious in the particular way that comes from having nowhere urgent to be and nowhere safe to land inside your own head. He’s touched objects as though they might anchor him, scrolled through his phone without reading, reheated coffee without ever drinking it, stood at the window and watched the weather as if waiting for it to change, then reprimanded himself for wasting most of his day away.

Tomorrow, he'd thought. There's always tomorrow.

The day has passed the way days pass lately: unremarkable, vaguely exhausting, full of motion without direction. He has eaten. He has showered. He has answered messages with the correct number of words. He has performed being fine with the meticulous care of someone who understands that convincing other people is easier than convincing himself; and the house has carried the residue of it all—a half-finished glass of water left on the coffee table; a lamp left on even though the light outside is still good.

You're fine, he had told himself earlier, standing at the kitchen counter with his hands braced against it. You're resting. You deserve rest. This is what normal evenings feel like.

By the time Shane’s key turns in the lock, Ilya has already constructed and dismantled three versions of the evening in his head. In one, they are easy. In another, they are distant but civil. In another, they are careful and trying. None of them involve raised voices, because he doesn’t plan for a fight. He doesn’t wake up thinking, tonight I will ruin us. The narrative that he is volatile by default is one he resents precisely because it is so easy to believe. Because, really, it doesn’t even begin as a fight, but something affectionate and light, like nothing at all; the kind of nothing that lives comfortably in the familiarity and domesticity of two people who have been together for a long time.

Because, again—between Shane arriving and their night taking a turn, the energy feels, for once, nice.

He comes in later than planned, denim jacket slung over one shoulder, hair slightly damp from the rain, that particular brand of tired clinging to him that Ilya has learned to read like a second language—the quiet depletion of being needed by too many people for too many hours; of having spent the entire day being reasonable on command. He looks good like this, a little undone, softened at the edges, and Ilya, half-sprawled on the couch with his phone abandoned near his thigh, feels the familiar flicker of warmth spark before he can stop it.

“There he is,” Ilya calls, already smiling because the smile is real; the relief is real; because loving Shane is the only reflex he has never had to practice. A held breath finally empties without permission, and he feels something unclench inside his chest. “You alive?”

Shane pushes the door closed with his heel and exhales like he has to return to himself, rubbing the back of his neck the way he does when he’s tired but trying not to bring the tiredness with him.

“Hi,” he says, and then he smiles, small and genuine; the kind of smile that costs very little because it’s reserved for just one person. “Barely.”

He takes his shoes off, drops his bag by the door and places his keys in the bowl by the hallway, padding across the house in his socks.

Ilya teases him. “You know, people usually sleep here. Are you coming back to live with me again, or…?”

He snorts, and Ilya is already crossing the room without thinking and angling to press a kiss to his lips, breathing him in as though proximity itself is medicine. He runs his hands through Shane’s chest, and he feels solid under Ilya’s fingertips; present. A fixed point around which he has learned to orbit, because loving him has become a kind of muscle memory; instinctive and necessary.

There is a solidity to Shane that Ilya has built parts of himself around, like scaffolding erected against collapse. Today, it feels as if removing it would alter the very architecture of his entire body.

“You are late,” Ilya says, voice fond.

“I know,” he grimaces. “I’m sorry. Practice ran long. It was—”

“—It’s okay,” he grins, cutting off the explanation before it can become an apology. “Well, it always runs long, but it’s okay. I know Theriault loves you very much. You score him too much goals not to.”

He laughs, moving into the kitchen, and the evening begins to settle into something almost sacred in its ordinariness. Shane rinsing his hands beneath the tap. Filling a glass with water. Stealing a banana from the fruit bowl, beginning to peel it. Ilya opening the cupboard under the sink; nudging the trash can with his foot. Shane dropping the peel inside; lifting the banana for the first bite, but Ilya already leaning in and stealing half with his mouth, as if by instinct. The soft choreography of two people who have memorized each other’s movements without ever needing to say so out loud.

“You know… your career is very committed to ruining my plans,” he says, mid-chewing.

“Oh?” Shane pauses to take another bite, amused. "And what plans are those?”

“Well, I was going to dramatically miss you,” Ilya replies. “All alone; very sad. Oscar-worthy, da?”

Shane’s smile widens, and everything feels easy. Everything feels true, and light, and uncomplicated, and Ilya’s world feels as if it’s narrowed into something manageable; snapped back into alignment now that he’s here.

“I missed you too,” Shane says, back now turned to him as he opens the fridge and scans it absently, and it sounds like universal truth on his lips. “So much. Spent all day itching to go home, actually. Hayden kept ribbing me about it the whole time, the asshole. Like he doesn’t act the same way with Jackie and the kids.”

This is how evenings are supposed to unfold, he thinks. Without harsh angles, without sudden turns.

“Have you eaten yet?” Shane asks then, glancing over his shoulder and feigning being casual.

Ilya nods, leaning against the counter. He notices his raised eyebrow, and rolls his eyes. “I ate, Shane. Relax, I did not starve to death without you. Tragic, I know.”

And then, because he still has a slightly disbelieving expression on his face, he moves past him to stand in front of the fridge. "See?" He points at the container sitting in the second row. "I made dinner. Or, well, I ordered dinner. Same thing. There are still some leftovers for you, if you want. Not that you will, because it’s not your usual bird food, but I try.”

Shane laughs, and he pretends not to notice the way his shoulders loosen beneath it. “Just checking!” He sing-songs.

“Yes, yes, I know. You worry,” he watches him, leaning against the counter, his eyes fond. “Is cute. Very charming.”

There’s a version of this evening where everything stays light. Where no edges sharpen, no voices rise, and the hours slip by gently in the home they share together. Where it’s just another quiet night, tired and unremarkable, the weight of a long week settling between them as they hold each other on the sofa, watching bad TV. Where the light simply thins out, and time slows just enough to let them breathe, and heal, and love, and rest, and be.

But that is the moment—Shane smiling, humming, and turning back to the fridge—where it begins to shift, even though he doesn't know it yet. Because beneath the teasing, there is an observation, and beneath the observation, there is an old, unarticulated tension that has been accumulating quietly over months, perhaps years.

Worry can feel like devotion, but it can also feel like surveillance, and for Ilya, the line between being cherished and being monitored is thinner than he likes to admit. Because Shane always checks; always calibrates; always asks if he has eaten; always asks how he slept; always asks what his mood is like in subtle, disguised ways; always doubts him when he answers. And it is loving, yes, but it is also careful and, worse—it’s constant.

He watches him move through the kitchen, registers the small efficiencies—the competence, the steadiness, the quietness—and something in him, restless and half-asleep, stirs at the sight of it, because he has learned, over time, that quiet moments are where his thoughts grow teeth. Quiet moments are dangerous and invite thought; and thought invites inventory; and inventory invites questions; and questions, well—questions are rarely kind; questions don’t usually have answers he can live with.

So, he nudges.

“You know,” he says lightly, tone still joking; still smiling, because he cannot leave the silence alone, “normal people would maybe take a day off. See their partner in daylight. Check if the sun still exists.”

Shane looks at him, eyebrow raised, smiling.

“Just once,” Ilya continues. “For science, you know?”

Shane snorts. “For science?”

“Da, yes. Just to see if the world would end.”

It’s teasing, and affectionate, and they’re even laughing, and it’s nothing, really. But teasing is rarely just teasing—more a blade wrapped in velvet; more affection with a question embedded inside it. And Ilya knows this about himself: that he picks; that he can’t resist pressing gently on places that might bruise, not because he wants them broken, but because he needs to know how strong they are.

“Well, I think it would survive.” He laughs.

Ilya tilts his head, a teasing smile playing on his lips. “Careful. One day, I’ll start thinking you just don't want to see me that often.”

Shane’s smile falters slightly then—and it admittedly sparks a faint pleasure inside him.

“Relax, Hollander,” Ilya waves his hand away. “I'm just messing with you.”

But Shane’s not really smiling anymore, and his fingers are rubbing the back of his neck, the movement automatic and weary, and Ilya knows the tell of that gesture all too well.

The body always betrays first.

He looks down, the weight of exhaustion and a quiet guilt settling into his gaze. “You’re right, though,” he admits, softer now. “I know I’ve been gone a lot.”

“Ah,” Ilya says, his smile thinning just a fraction. “Admission. I would say it's progress, but you tell me this every time.”

“And every time it’s true.”

“Mhm,” Ilya hums, the note low and casual. “How convenient.”

Shane reluctantly laughs again, despite himself, but there is a trace of apology woven through it now—and apology, for Ilya, has always implied imbalance.

It’s not like he means for the words to cut, or for his voice to sound sharp, or for the conversation to shift from teasing to accounting, from play to pattern, from a playful exchange to ledger-keeping. It just does, as a boat caught in a steady current can’t help but pull away from the dock.

His gaze steadies on him, and he feels it then; that small internal checklist he runs when conversations change temperature.

Don’t, he thinks, though he doesn’t know what he’s asking for.

“I just—” Shane starts, then exhales. Eventually, he settles for something simpler. “This week’s been a lot.”

“For you,” Ilya replies immediately, a fraction sharper than before. He hears it as he says it; knows the edge is unnecessary, but it slips out anyway, because somewhere inside him there’s that ledger he can’t stop updating.

Really, he doesn’t know why he says it like that. The words are small, almost nothing, but he feels them land; feels the shift in the air like a pressure change; feels the way they introduce measurement like a third presence into the room.

When he’d announced to Farah and his team he was taking the year off, framing it in the careful, almost clinical language of a leave of absence under the advice of the MLH/MLHPA behavioral health program as if that made it sound intentional instead of desperate, it had felt like the smartest decision available to him.

His moods had been worsening in ways he could no longer dismiss as fatigue, his temper flashing hot and fast over things that should not have touched him, and he knew—in the bone-deep, humiliating way you know your own fault lines—that another season of airports and hotel rooms and locker rooms and media interviews full of expectation would split him open.

The travel, the constant relocation, the performance of steadiness night after night, the weight of the “C” stitched to his chest as if leadership were something you could simply wear into existence—he didn’t trust himself to carry it without cracking. Captain Ilya Rozanov couldn’t stand in front of a room of grown men and ask them to be composed and disciplined, when the words felt false even in his own mouth.

He hadn’t been entirely happy about stepping back, and the relief had come braided tightly with shame. And Shane, for all his gentleness about it, hadn’t been entirely convinced either—the idea of one of them radically scaling back while the other kept moving at full speed had sat between them like an unanswered question: Ilya home alone for stretches at a time, too much quiet and not enough structure, while Shane chased another season, another Stanley Cup, gone for days that blurred into weeks, only being able to come home in the narrow seams the schedule allowed.

It didn’t look like balance. Didn’t feel like it, either.

Still, when Ilya admitted one night, low and halting and unable to quite meet Shane’s eyes, that he wasn’t coping well with the pressure; that something about this year felt different in a way he did not trust, he had relented without making him fight for it.

Your peace of mind, Shane had said, matters more than anything. More than your pride or… optics, or any of that shit. That's all bullshit.

If you feel you need to step back, then step back. You know I’ll be here for you every step of the way.

A few months into the season, though, and the clean certainty of that choice had begun to erode. The games kept happening without him; Shane kept traveling; the quiet at home kept stretching; and both of them, in different ways and rarely out loud, had started circling the same uneasy question. How much good had it actually done?

This week’s been a lot.

For you.

Shane glances at Ilya, studies his face for a second longer than usual. “Yeah,” he says carefully. “For me.”

Something in him resents the care in that tone. The deliberateness.

Why are you already managing this? We’re not even fighting yet.

But he shrugs instead, like it’s meaningless. Like the truth isn’t that he no longer knows what to do with Shane’s forward faith anymore—the belief that effort accrues, that patience is rewarded, that love can be protected if you name the risks early enough. Like it doesn’t all cave in his chest and land as a whimper; as a thud.

Like it doesn’t irk him, deep down, to watch Shane travel the country and play the sport he loves and succeed and have a father and a mother to return to and be so composed through it all and just have this whole life bursting around him, throbbing and moving and alive, while Ilya, by contrast… doesn’t. Like it’s not bittersweet jealousy that spikes in his chest when he thinks of how greatness—all that greatness Grigori Rozanov once expected of him—feels like a middle name for Shane, settling so naturally on his shoulders it seems it was always meant to be there.

Shane’s voice breaks his thoughts. “Hey,” he says, gentle, recalibrating. “I was thinking… since I’ve barely been home, maybe we could just have a really good weekend.”

Ilya smiles by instinct. “We always have good weekends. You going soft on me, Hollander?”

“No, I know,” Shane says, voice light. “I just mean—easy. No stupid stuff. You know? Just us.”

Easy. The word echoes unpleasantly.

Ilya listens for the crack, leaning forward on instinct. Easy.

Easy. Easy. Easy.

It feels like implication, for one—that something about them is not, well, easy, or that they're predictable in the wrong ways, or that the weekend requires preemptive management; like bad weather you can forecast if you study the sky long enough or if you watch the clouds closely enough.

Like Ilya’s the bad weather: rain and storm and tide and tempest.

“Stupid stuff?” He repeats, still smiling, because he hasn’t yet decided whether this is a wound. “What stupid stuff?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Shane says quickly. “Nothing specific. Hockey, for example—let’s not talk about hockey, or Theriault, or the Voyageurs.” A pause. “Or the Centaurs. Any of it.”

Ilya tenses. “Okay…?”

“I just—sometimes things get more than they need to be, right?” He continues. “So, let’s just have a good weekend. Nothing heavy; just you and me. We can do whatever you want. Well—I have some ideas, of course, but, bottom line, I just want us to spend some time together and enjoy it,” Shane smiles, like he’s proud of himself; like he’s not speaking the words he’s actually speaking.

“Wait, what?” Ilya laughs, surprised despite himself; despite the fact he's catching onto his hidden meaning. “You think we fight?” he asks, laughter still in it, but weaker now, because his brain is a half-second behind his body.

“Uh, no, not really.” He frowns. “I mean—I’m just saying I don’t want us to.”

“But we're not,” he insists, smile thinner. “You are the one talking about it.”

Shane blinks. “I just thought—”

“—You come home,” Ilya says, and now the words are speeding up and his English is beginning to fray at the edges, “you ask if I eat, if I am okay, and now you ask if we can not fight. Is… strange.”

“Oh. I'm sorry,” he says softly, and now he looks almost confused at how this is tilting. “I guess I just thought… Since we’ve been under a lot of pressure lately, both of us… I just thought to bring it up, but you're right. Maybe I’m overthinking it. It doesn’t matter.”

The softness does it. The care; the immediate willingness to concede; the unshakable belief that this can be managed if approached correctly. To Ilya, it does not feel like overthinking—rather that Shane is already accounting for volatility that has not yet occurred.

“Well,” he says, shrugging, but his pulse has quickened without his consent, “if you’re already afraid of an argument, maybe that is why they happen.”

Shane opens his mouth, then closes it again, frowning. “I’m not afraid.”

Ilya hums. “It sounds like it.”

He looks at him and feels the familiar, dangerous urge to press harder, because part of him needs to know where the breaking point is; needs proof that this love is not as fragile as Shane seems to think, or maybe that it is—he isn’t sure which answer would be worse.

 “Alright… Okay, yeah, you’re right,” he exhales, a little tired but still kind. “I don’t want us to fight this weekend. I’ve barely been home lately, I’m tired, and I just want us to have a good few days together before I have to leave again. That’s all.”

And that is the thesis, whether he means it or not.

Can we not fight?

As if fighting is a decision he makes in the morning, like choosing a shirt. As if volatility is a preference; as if peace is something he withholds. The thing Shane doesn’t understand—can’t, really—is that asking for peace feels, to Ilya, like an accusation dressed up as kindness, because peace implies that something in him needs managing, smoothing down, contained before it spills; like being asked to behave. It feels like being told in advance that there is something that needs to be toned down inside him—and maybe there is. God knows there have been days when he has scorched the earth around him without meaning to; but the way he says it, calm and hopeful and a little too earnest, makes it sound like a choice Ilya is actively failing to make.

Like the only thing standing between them and a perfect, uncomplicated weekend is his inability to be.

He feels the irritation bloom before he recognizes it for what it is. It arrives quietly, like a headache you don’t notice until it’s already nested behind your eyes, born out of being anticipated and how it makes him feel less like a partner and more like a risk assessment.

“We’re fine,” he says again, slower this time, like Shane simply hasn’t heard him properly. “Nothing is wrong.”

“Okay. Great!” He smiles, tender, and somehow that makes it worse.

“We are okay,” Ilya insists, and hates how defensive it sounds even as he says it.

Shane shifts his weight, a small movement, but he clocks it instantly. “Hey, you don’t need to convince me. I didn’t mean to imply something was wrong. Just want us to be good,” Shane replies, smiling. “I’m excited for the weekend. It’s going to be great.” A pause. “Okay, so, do you wanna go down to my parents’ tomorrow and grab lunch with them? Mom mentioned she was testing some new recipes and I think she…” Shane’s voice trails off.

You don’t need to convince me. I didn’t mean to imply something was wrong.

It lands wrong. Too close to reassurance; too close to something you say when you think the other person is already catastrophizing; and the word convince lodges itself under his skin. Convince implies doubt. Doubt implies instability. Instability implies that somewhere in Shane’s mind there’s a version of Ilya who can’t be taken at face value.

He thinks I’m spiraling, he realizes. He thinks I’m already spiraling.

“—I'm not convincing you,” he says suddenly, voice bristled, interrupting him.

“Uh… what?”

“When I said we are okay, you told me I was convincing you. I'm not,” he says sharply, then forces himself to soften his voice. “I am telling you.” A beat. “We are okay. We are good.”

“Oh. Yeah, okay,” Shane says, smiling, even lifts his hands up in surrender. “Great. I think so too.”

That should end it. It’s designed to. An exit ramp; a neat little period at the end of a sentence that’s gone on too long.

And for a moment, Ilya almost lets it. Almost laughs it off, almost reaches for him and lets the evening reset itself into something salvageable. A healthier version of himself would take the offered peace and move on, but something has already begun to coil inside him, something that feels older than this conversation, older than their home, older than even Shane. It feels like the echo of every time he has been told to calm down; to be reasonable; to regulate himself for the comfort of others. So, instead, he hears subtext where there may be none, and recognizes something else underneath Shane’s words—relief. Like he’s glad they’ve dodged something.

The thought needles him. Why is Shane bracing at all?

“Why did you say it like that?” Ilya asks quickly, words rushing now. “Like I am—” He stops, searching for the words, irritation making his fluency in English temporarily slip. “Like I'm a bomb you have to walk around with, or something.”

Shane looks up, surprised. “What? I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to. It was kind of obvious,” he replies.

He frowns, confused now, not guarded yet but inching closer. “Ilya, I just meant I’ve missed you. I don’t want to waste the weekend arguing about dumb shit. That’s all. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Dumb shit,” he repeats. “So we’re fighting about dumb shit, now?” He goes to protest, but Ilya continues. “That is what you meant, da?” There’s something almost curious in his tone now, like he’s examining the shape of the thing and turning it over. “You come home and already you're planning how to avoid me.”

“I’m not avoiding you,” Shane scowls. “I’m trying to be with you.”

“By telling me in advance not to fight?” Ilya laughs softly; drily. “Very romantic.”

“Okay, look, Ilya, I don’t want this to turn into—”

“—Into what?” He cuts in. “Say it.”

Shane hesitates, and that hesitation is gasoline. “Into one of those conversations,” he says carefully, choosing each word like he’s stepping across thin ice. “Where we both get hurt and nothing actually gets resolved.”

Ilya stares at him, a hollow laugh pushing at his ribs. “So, you already know how our conversations end now.”

Shane’s mouth tightens. “I mean when we end up having the same argument over and over and it never ends.” A pause. Then, softer, “I really didn’t mean it like that, Ilya.”

But the phrase lands wrong, again, and he feels it click into place alongside a dozen others he never consented to carrying. Inventory is happening in real time now. He can feel it—the quiet categorization of their dynamic; the subtle implication that arguments are not isolated incidents but recurring phenomena to be mitigated.

“Okay. So now it's a pattern,” Ilya says. “Good to know.” Something inside him tightens, defensive and mean, and he knows this feeling—the way the ground gives a little, then a little more, until stopping feels impossible. “You talk to me like I am a case study sometimes, you know? It doesn’t feel great, to be honest.” He can feel his pulse in his throat and in his fingers, his body already halfway into fight-or-flight even as his mind scrambles to justify it.

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Shane replies, frowning. “I was just… saying something stupid. It’s meaningless, really; I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sorry.”

Shane takes a breath, and then another. He looks tired now, worn down in a way that makes Ilya’s chest ache even as it enrages him, because still he feels the argument tipping, still he feels it slipping out of the realm of misunderstanding and into something darker, something with teeth; uglier the more he apologizes, the more he makes this blurb of nothing into an actual thing. Ilya watches it happen in real time, horrified and fascinated, the more Shane gives it name and shape and corporeal form.

He keeps apologizing.

The rain outside is louder, or maybe it’s just that his blood is louder in his ears.

You could stop right now, he tells himself. You could laugh. You could push him to your lap and kiss him and say sorry and tell him you're being stupid and let it die down and go enjoy your weekend together and—

“No, no. You always do this, actually,” Ilya says, voice deceptively mild now. “You decide ahead of time what kind of conversations we are allowed to have. Why are we setting rules for how I’m allowed to exist in my own home for the next two days? I don't understand it.”

“Huh?” Shane asks. “That’s not what’s happening. To me, at least, but…” He stops, and takes a moment.

“No?” He tilts his head. “Shane,” he presses, mouth curving. “I say something wrong; you stay calm. I get upset; you stay calm. I say something mean; you stay calm. Makes me think you’re just forcing yourself to stay calm. Very impressive.”

Shane groans softly. “Come on. Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” Ilya asks sharply. “Say that you like me better when I’m quiet? When I agree? When I don’t make, ah—” he gestures vaguely, “—mess?”

He’s looking at him like he’s grown two heads, so Ilya just thinks: make him understand, explain further, make him feel it.

“I talk. You talk back. I talk. You talk back again. In the end, no one is satisfied." He laughs, drily, pausing for a beat, before continuing. "Like, wow, what a great relationship,” he mocks. He keeps going, voice tightening. “You want me to… what? Turn myself off so you can relax? Say sorry if I have a shitty feeling at a bad time and it ruins your weekend?”

Shane’s jaw sets. “Of course not. I want to be here with you. If you’re feeling bad, then of course we can talk about it. You’re not—you’re not listening to me,” he says, not unkindly, which somehow makes it worse. A pause, and then he sighs deeply. “You know… We can’t keep doing this every time one of us says something slightly wrong, Ilya.”

“And this is what, exactly?” Ilya snaps. “Or are we pretending we did not have the same conversation last week, and the week before?”

Shane exhales, slow and deliberate. “I’m not attacking you.”

React, Shane, he thinks, vicious and desperate all at once, heat blooming behind his eyes. For once, react. Say something real. Say something ugly. Say something you mean. Don’t just stand there like a mannequin.

“No,” Ilya says, laughter already clawing its way up his throat, “you are dissecting me. Much better. So nice of you. Thank you so much, Shane. Do you want me to suck your dick as reward?”

Shane’s eyes, infuriatingly soft even now, flicker with something unguarded as they catch the light, before the shutters come down again. “Come on, Ilya, that’s not fair. I am talking with you; I listen—”

“—You are talking at me,” Ilya replies, heat bleeding through. “And you listen so you can fix. Not so you can hear me.”

Say you hate me, Ilya thinks, vicious and pleading all at once. Say it like you mean it. Hate me the way you love me. Make me feel something; like I exist here.

Instead, Shane keeps talking, explaining, clarifying; choosing his words like they’re glassware he doesn’t want to break, and something inside Ilya curls in on itself, wounded and mean, because he can see it—the emotion pressed down beneath restraint, the turbulence reflected back at him, and the knowledge that he can still pull that reaction from someone settles into his chest with a shameful, heady relief. He still has that much power; still has the capacity to destabilize. Still matters enough to not be indifferent.

Not yet, anyway.

“You treat me like I am made of glass, Shane.” He continues, and now the wobble in his voice is there, the crack he hates. “You act like I'm about to break. Like I am this close to ruining everything.” His voice drops to a quiet whisper, eyes misty. “It makes me feel like loving me is work.”

Shane’s composure fractures at the emotion in his voice. “Because I’m scared!" He drags an anxious hand through his hair, breathing harder now. "And—and so are you! You don’t have to pretend you’re not; it’s fine to say it. I’m fucking scared, okay?”

There it is. The soft underbelly. And Ilya sees it—the exposed place, the honesty, the fear—and instead of softening, something in him hardens.

“Scared of me,” he says quietly, already deciding that is what he heard.

“No,” Shane says, immediately. “No, not of you.” His voice drops to a breath. “Just scared. Of this whole situation. Of not knowing what to do, or what to say. Of messing up." A beat. "Scared of losing you.”

And it should be sweet, should land as devotion, but it just makes his chest ache, irritation flaring as though he meant it as an accusation. Ilya’s smile twists, bittersweet. “But maybe you are already losing me. Have you thought of that?”

Every day, there is less of me left, he wants to say.

Shane’s face registers the words with a pained expression, flinching. “Don’t say that,” he says, instinctively.

“I say what I want,” Ilya snaps, and then he looks to the side and shakes his head, almost as if to himself. “What the fuck is going on today…” he proclaims under his breath, and his eyes return to Shane’s. “You think you have to manage me! Let’s talk about that! How fucking normal do you think that is, huh?”

He knows he should stop. Knows, distantly, that this is the moment where you choose to de-escalate, to step back, to say okay, I hear you and mean it. But he's on autopilot, and the brakes are not working, and the foot on the pedal won't lift.

From here, the slope can only steepen.

“Okay, look, we’re not going anywhere with this—”

“—No, no, hold on, because I’m learning a lot of things about our relationship I did not know about, so it’s good we’re finally talking. It’s good you’re finally being honest, Shane, for once.”

They stop for a second and stare at each other, flushed, breathing hard.

“Tell me,” Ilya says, more calmly now. “Why do you manage me?”

“Ilya,” Shane says, tightly. “I don’t manage you.”

And the intensity in his voice comes back full force. “Yes, you do! Yes, you fucking do, Shane!” Ilya exclaims. “You check, you double-check, you monitor how I sound, how loud I am, how quiet I am, you walk on, ah, eggshells around me, and you tell me you love me as if any of this makes any fucking sense!”

Shane swallows, defensive but gentle, and the frustration is creeping in now despite his efforts to keep it contained. “I do love you. I just try to keep things from exploding because I know sometimes you don’t mean what you say when you’re hurt, and these arguments are pointless, anyway. Why are we even fighting about this?”

“So now I hurt you?” Ilya says.

“Sometimes,” Shane admits, because he’s honest to a fault. “Yes. Sometimes you do.”

There is a moment where he could absorb that and let it be information rather than indictment. Instead, he feels the familiar burn of humiliation, which quickly reshapes itself into offense. “And you don’t?” Ilya asks. “You don't hurt me? I see how you look at me every day. You think I am, what, unstable?” he says at once.

“No,” Shane shakes his head. “No, I don’t think that. I think you’re struggling, yes. In fact, I know you’re struggling, and I try to make things easier for you, because I care.” A beat. “I’m allowed to care, Ilya. I’m allowed to worry.”

“Care,” he repeats, tasting the weight of it on his tongue. “Or control?” The words don’t ring true as he says them—he doesn't feel that with Shane, not really—but Ilya says them anyway, because he needs it to sting.

Shane doesn’t take the bait or rise to it, though; just lets out a sharp, disbelieving scoff. “What? I’ve never tried to control you. I try to get you to talk to me, to open up, and you tell me you can't and that you don't know how. So, I back off. I wait for you to come to me. I don't pressure you. I don't corner you. What else can I do?”

“You could be here, to start.”

Ilya hears how it sounds as soon as it leaves him, and Shane’s expression falters instantly. “No, no, no,” he shakes his head, already bristling. “Do not give me that look, Shane. You said it. You admitted it. Not me.” A beat. “You’re never home anymore! We barely see each other. And then when you finally are here for one weekend, you tell me not to argue and to be quiet. Like, what?” The air between them tightens. “But fine,” he adds, the edge turning brittle. “We don't have to go there, since apparently it makes you so uncomfortable.”

Ilya exhales through his nose, looks away, then back again. “So, you don't think I’m unstable. I mean, clearly you do, but—okay. Sure.” He ponders for a moment, and then his voice shifts, lighter on the surface. “What, then? Do I annoy you?”

“What? Ilya, no. You don’t annoy me. I spend half our time together wondering if I annoy you.”

“I exhaust you?” He presses.

Shane hesitates—just a second too long—and there it is. Confirmation.

“Ah. So, you're exhausted. Okay. Good to know,” Ilya says casually, voice lower now, which is worse than if he raised his tone to yell. It assumes a forceful tone, pretending he’s fine with the reveal, but the hurt laces through all the same. “Exhausted because… why? You resent me? Because you resent that I'm not getting better? Help me understand.”

“No, no—of course not,” Shane says, voice level through sheer effort. “I’ve never thought that; I have never resented you. I—Jesus. Is this what you’ve been thinking this whole time?”

There he goes again, Ilya thinks, just talking and talking and talking, and never actually saying anything. Shane’s voice just keeps forming polite sentences that slide cleanly into one another and eventually loop back on themselves, carefully choosing his words to be as inoffensive as possible, and Ilya feels his patience disintegrating. His thoughts are splitting, one half listening, while the other is pacing restlessly inside his own skull.

Shane shakes his head to himself. “No, never. I've never resented you," He repeats. "I have wanted you to feel better, yes, but that’s not the same thing.”

“Okay. So, you don’t resent me, but then you keep asking me not to struggle? How does that work?”

Shane doesn’t miss a beat. “I ask that you don’t destroy us while you struggle.”

Ilya’s rendered silent. “Destroy us?” He echoes softly, digesting the word.

The surprise and hurt must show in his expression, because Shane’s face falls. “I don’t mean—”

“—But you do,” Ilya cuts in. “You do mean it. You think I ruin things.”

“I think,” Shane says carefully, “that sometimes you push until it hurts the both of us. And I don’t know why.” A pause. “Like today. What are we even fighting about?”

And Ilya doesn’t know the answer to that either, so they just stand, silent for a moment. What else is there to say?

But then Shane sighs, and his voice comes out soft, wavering under the pressure, trying to wave the white flag. “I’m just trying to help you, Ilya. I really don’t want to fight.” A beat. “We can just let this go and still have a good night.”

Ilya considers the word for a minute; rolls it around in his mouth. “Help,” he repeats, a syllable-shaped knife, because he's a predator hunting for a weak point. “That’s what you call what we’ve been doing the past ten minutes?”

Shane’s lips tighten, eyes frowning but careful.

“Funny you call it help,” Ilya continues. “because, to me, it feels like a cage, if I’m being honest.”

Shane’s patience thins. “Yeah, no. We’re not doing this, Ilya. Sorry, but—no. I know sometimes you feel you need to push away the people that love you, but you can’t do that with me, so…”

Ilya’s smile is sharp, almost cruel. “That’s a new one. Push away?”

He sighs, exhausted, but eventually nods.

“Aw. And you stay anyway. How noble.” He mocks, and then he’s shaking his head, disbelieving. What the fuck are they even arguing about?

“Yes. I stay because I love you.”

“Or because you like being the good one,” Ilya says, and now it’s turning, really turning. “You like being the stable and reasonable person in our relationship. You feel superior, da? Makes you feel better?”

Shane’s eyes flash. “I have never felt superior to you.”

And he knows he’s feeling cornered now, because all of his arguments are wrapped around trying to defend himself.

Bite back, he thinks. Lash out. Hurt me.

“Sure,” Ilya says, but there’s a sharpness under it now. “but you feel, ah… sane next to me. That's what this is, right?” He gestures vaguely between them, mouth twisting. “You calm. Me chaos. You patient. Me difficult. Is a nice balance for you. Especially now that I'm not on the ice anymore. Must be great being able to go out there and say your husband stayed back home. Not having to split the attention with me.” A bitter laugh. “I take up so much space, right?”

Shane grits his teeth, but he stays quiet, which only encourages Ilya to keep going. “Actually,” he adds, like the thought has just occurred to him, though it clearly hasn’t, “you were the one who told me it was better to skip this season. Funny, right?” His eyes flick up, searching and accusing. “It seems—”

“—Ilya.” Shane cuts in, firm now. “I’m going to stop you right there. I’m going to ignore what you just said, because it’s so ridiculous and so fucking absurd it doesn’t even merit a response.” His voice is tight, strained. “You seriously think I enjoy not seeing you play? You think it didn’t gut me to have that conversation with you?” A beat. “I told you to put your health first. That’s all.”

Silence settles heavy between them, and Ilya doesn’t argue. He just stands there, shoulders rigid, staring somewhere over Shane’s shoulder like the answer might be written on the wall.

“Anyway,” Shane continues, voice quiet. “it’s not about balance. It’s about loving someone even when they’re not at their best, and—”

A sharp laugh breaks free of Ilya before he can stop it, and the interruption is immediate. “—Which book did you take that from? No, wait—let me guess.” He gestures theatrically. “Loving someone when they are not at their best and, what, I’m never at my best? I’ve not been at my best for years?”

Ilya’s eyes flash, and he continues. “That’s the problem, right? You miss that guy you were fucking when you were nineteen and everything was simple. Hey, I get it.” He shrugs, smile turning mean. "Nice dick, nice abs, funny. World at his fucking feet. Good lay, da? Yeah, I miss him too.”

“That’s not—”

“—You’re tired of me,” Ilya says, cutting him off again. “Just say it. It's fine. You think I don't know?”

Shane looks stunned. “I am not tired of you, Ilya! Do you even hear yourself?”

“I do!” He exclaims in an outburst. “I do hear myself! And I’m also hearing everything you’re saying. You’re telling me I push until I hurt you and that I distance myself from people and you’re making me sound insane, and you want me to—what? What am I supposed to say to that?” Ilya pauses for a second to gather his thoughts, and when he does, his voice returns as a whisper. “I know I’m a little sad sometimes. I know that. But I just want to be left alone in those moments, that’s all, and you don't respect that—”

“—Because I love you—”

“—And—oh, so you agree, then? You don’t respect it?”

“No, I—fuck. You know what I mean—" Shane stops, and shakes his head, clearing his mind. “I just want to understand you, and help you get better, and be there for you, and sometimes you make it pretty damn hard to—”

“—Excuse me?”

Shane closes his eyes immediately, and they both go silent. The fuck muttered under his breath is quiet, but loud enough for Ilya to hear it, and his voice comes icy then, a full octave lower.

“No one is forcing you to stay, Shane,” Ilya says, quietly, the words cold and clean and deliberate now. “If this is too much work for you, you can go. I’m not keeping you prisoner. You want to leave tonight? Pack your bags? Fine by me.”

Shane flinches, his face shifting, but he takes a breath still. “Look, I’ll keep saying it as many times as you need me to—I stay because I love you,” he says, enunciating the words clearly, and there’s no restrained composure left in his voice. “I stay because you mean the world to me, and our relationship means everything to me, and I don’t want anyone else.” He spits the word want like it hurts him to say it. “I want you, and I want to try my best to help you get better—”

“—Try!” Ilya exclaims suddenly, leaning forward in a rush, because he’s like a dog with a bone and only knows how to pick at the scab. “Of course! That is the issue, right?” His voice is venomous now, words falling fast and hard. “You are always trying. Always trying so damn hard to be the good guy that you forget you can be angry; you can be selfish; you don't have to be so fucking calm all the time. You’re allowed to be, ah, real and—”

“—Real? Real like you’re being now, you mean?” Shane scoffs. “What, would you prefer if I yelled?”

“Yes!” Ilya exclaims. “If that's what you want, then yes, fucking yell! Or are you scared that if you stop being so perfect all the time and start saying what you’re really thinking, then I will not want you anymore?”

Silence. Then Shane laughs, once, hollow.

“I don’t know, Ilya,” he says. “Would you?”

His eyes narrow as they meet Shane’s, and he shouldn’t say anything, he really shouldn’t, because things are going too far now and he’s about to say words he doesn’t mean, but he’s already in free-fall and cruelty feels easier than vulnerability and some part of him would rather burn the house down than admit he’s afraid of losing it and—

“Maybe not.”

It slips out before he can intercept it; before he can sand down the edge or reroute it into something less lethal, and the second it exists in the air between them, he understands, with a clarity that feels almost physical, that it won’t go back into his mouth the way it came. The implication lands heavy and final, loud and absolute; like a glass set too hard on a table that does not crack but will never be the same again.

There’s a split second—thin and desperate—where he wants to lunge forward and rewrite his words, to say no, ignore that, that was cheap, I was aiming for the bruise and I found it, I would want you in any version of yourself, even the worst one, especially the worst one, even if you were swallowed whole by your own darkness I would still choose you, I am not that cruel, I am not that small.

But the moment for correction passes in the time it takes for Shane to go still. Ilya sees it happen—the quiet internal shift, the way Shane’s gaze sharpens inward, as if he has already begun filing the sentence away for later examination. He does not explode, or even flinch dramatically. He absorbs the blow like data, like something to be catalogued and understood, and Ilya can almost see the process unfolding behind Shane’s eyes: memory calcifying around it, the phrase finding a corner to settle into, to live in, to replay on nights when sleep will not come easily.

In that awful, lucid instant, Ilya knows he’s built a future doubt; taken one of Shane’s quiet, carefully managed fears and given it a sharper outline.

“I just mean—how would I know?” he adds quickly, clumsily, the words tripping over each other in their rush to do damage control, to plaster something gentler over the crack he has just driven straight through the center of them. He can hear the thinness in his own voice, the way it reaches instead of lands, but he needs Shane to see the panic underneath his words; needs him to understand that he didn’t mean it like that; that it came out wrong; that it was fear dressed up as accusation; that sometimes his mouth outruns his loyalty or his love. But his words only sound like backpedaling now; like premeditated strategy.

Shane looks at him, and there is no explosion, no raised voice. Just that stare: steady, direct, unnervingly blank, as if he has stepped slightly outside the moment in order to survive it. He opens his mouth like he might argue; might defend himself point by point the way he always can, articulate and precise and devastatingly thorough, and then he stops; closes it again; swallows dry.

“Ilya,” he says slowly, and the slowness comes as restraint, each syllable placed carefully between them like something fragile he doesn’t trust him not to shatter. There is something devastating in how controlled it is; how measured; how determinedly even. “You’re being cruel.”

And Ilya knows he is. He knows it with a perfect clarity, so sharp it almost feels medicinal, like alcohol poured straight into an open wound—stinging, purifying and impossible to ignore. Knows that there is no confusion left to hide behind; no plausible misinterpretation to cling to; knows he has crossed a line he could see perfectly well before stepping over it. Knows this is not about tone anymore, not about misunderstanding or miscommunication or Shane being too sensitive or Ilya being too blunt.

Knows he crossed from defensive into deliberate harm; knows this is about wanting, consciously, to land a hit because he feels cornered; because something in him panics at the thought of being the only one exposed.

Knows this is about drawing blood because he himself is bleeding.

His jaw is locked tight, so tight it aches, muscles jumping under the skin, teeth pressed together hard enough that he can feel the pulse in his temples. He should stop. He knows he should. He can see the apology, the exhale, the admission that he’s spiraling and doesn’t mean half of what he’s saying.

He could still choose it. He could still let the argument collapse under its own weight and apologize and—

“You have always known I was cruel,” Ilya says instead, and the words come out steady, which is the most frightening part—steady and almost conversational, as if he is offering Shane a simple fact rather than a blade. There is a dare tucked inside it, a challenge disguised as honesty; a test for him to pass. “This is not new to you.”

What he really means—you knew what I was when you chose me. You saw the sharp temper and the way I turn mean when I’m scared and the way I don’t know how to stop when I start. You saw the way I push and prod and twist and stab until something breaks just to see if it will, and the way I say the ugliest thing in the room just to feel less exposed. You saw the worst of me, and you saw every crack in me, and you saw how small I can be, and you loved me for fifteen years anyway, so how can you be surprised now, how can you throw it back in my face when I have been the same since the start—stays lodged in his throat.

“No,” Shane says immediately, and the certainty in it is so quick, so instinctive, that for half a second it threatens to undo him entirely. There is no calculation in it, no self-protection; just truth, unvarnished and firm. “No, I’ve never known you like that.” The smallest pause, just enough to acknowledge the fracture without widening it. “You’re being cruel now, though.”

The words hang there, ugly and undeniable, and for half a second, Ilya feels the sting of them—feels the exact point where he could still reach out and take them back.

The laugh escapes him then, sharp and wrong, brittle as breaking ice, and once it’s out it feels like permission. Resentment and bitterness spill free in a rush that feels grotesque and exhilarating all at once, like tearing off your own skin just to see if there’s anything alive underneath; a creature gnawing at its limbs for the privilege of baring its teeth.

Because it was an ugly, ugly thing he said, yes—but it’s still not enough; still doesn’t quiet the beast within him; still doesn’t feel like tasting the fleeting, poisonous sweetness of advantage; still doesn’t feel like finally standing on higher ground; still doesn’t feel like relief.

The seal is broken, then, and words follow. Insults sharpened to points, each one aimed with terrible accuracy, climbing in pitch and cruelty—voices rising, climbing, climbing, as if volume might finally shatter the glass between them. Somewhere along the way, they move from the kitchen to the living room; from the living room to the bedroom, Ilya following Shane with a desperate need to break through the walls he’s putting up, to tabulate the clean slate of their dynamic.

This is what you signed up for, he thinks. Come meet the monster you married.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Ilya—enough,” Shane says when he catches sight of him stepping into the bedroom after him, his voice taut but controlled, trying to hold himself steady.

“What?” Ilya says, voice edged with frustration and vulnerability. “We’re done talking just because you say we are?”

Shane pinches the bridge of his nose. “Yes! Yes, we—” He pauses, runs a frantic hand through his hair. “We’re just saying ugly shit to each other now, you especially, and I don’t want to argue anymore. Not like this—so yes, we’re done talking.”

“Oh, come on,” Ilya says. “I thought you loved playing the therapist!”

“No, that’s not true—” Shane replies, firmer now.

“—No?” Ilya presses, words sharpening with every breath. “You sit there, all patient and, ah, composed, and you act like I’m going fucking crazy, and somehow I'm the problem every time?”

“Ilya, that’s not what I said. That’s not what I said at all, and if you’d just—"

“—But it’s what you meant!” He shoots back, weaponized arrows flying now, each one precise, deliberate, aimed dead center; his voice climbing an octave with each sentence. “You always mean it, don't you, Shane?”

He doesn’t stop there. It feels like free game now, like everything’s now out in the open, and so he provokes Shane, and provokes him again, and provokes him again and again and again and again; not even chasing a reaction anymore, just unable to stop the momentum of it; the argument turning into sport and ritual; into something his body knows how to do better than it knows how to rest. Ilya pushes until he knows he has gone too far, until he can feel the thin lines in the sand give way beneath his feet, and he recognizes the moment he crosses them because Shane’s voice snaps, sharp and raw and unmistakably human.

“Ookay,” he breaks, at last; but then he’s laughing, bitterly, and shaking his head in quiet resignation, and Ilya isn’t really sure he’s ever seen him like this, and— “you know what? Go fuck yourself, you fucking asshole. This what you wanted? Huh? Was this the goal? You wanted me to finally sound as ugly as you just so you could feel right for five fucking seconds?” Shane drags a hand over his mouth like he can’t quite believe he’s saying any of this, eyes bright and furious and disbelieving all at once, and when he looks at Ilya again, there’s nothing soft left in him. “You're fucking pathetic. What, you think I don't know you just want a fight so you can act all shocked and high and mighty afterwards? You think just because you feel bad you get to do this to other people? Just because you’re—”

But instinct is detonating before thought can intervene and Ilya’s hand is already moving without permission, something in him breaking loose. His fingers jump to snap around Shane’s wrist, too tight, immediately too tight, and his breath stutters into a sound that does not belong in this room. Shane’s eyes widen, shock flashing bright and naked as he jerks back.

The world stops, and Ilya goes horribly, catatonically still. His hand freezes, still wrapped around bone and tendon and warmth, and in that frozen second, he is no longer inside himself at all.

He sees it from the outside—the grip, the angle of his hand, the way Shane’s body recoils—and the name that rises unbidden is not his own.

Grigori.

His father’s face overlays his own with sickening, nauseating ease, memory snapping into place with the clarity of a photograph: his mother’s wrist caught mid-gesture; the quiet, almost polite intake of breath she never quite managed to hide; the way violence in that house had always been contained, deniable, civilized. No shouting; no spectacle; just pressure and control.

How? he thinks, horrified. How is it possible that even dead you still reach me; still teach me how to move?

Shane stares at him, stunned, like he almost doesn’t recognize what he’s seeing, and Ilya drops his hand as if burned. He doesn’t recognize himself, either.

For one awful second, neither of them moves. They stand there in the wreckage of it, words failing them both, and the distance between them feels suddenly immeasurable—connected and severed all at once; attuned and utterly lost; too close and impossibly far apart. Ilya’s never felt farther from Shane in his life.

The silence turns dense and unrecognizable, and Shane wordlessly pulls away, the bedroom door closing behind him with a final, hollow sound, wood meeting frame.

Ilya remains standing by their bed, chest caving inward, aching with a weight so dense it feels ancient, geological, tectonic; like a man whose strings have been cut. He exhales, long and shaky, and his gaze drifts, unfocused, around the room, the familiar shapes rendered strange.

Is this all I am? The thought comes unbidden. Is this what remains when you strip everything else away? Pain and silence and grief, crystallized into identity?

The self-loathing returns with the intimacy of something long-practiced, and there is comfort in it, perverse as that is. Disgust for his body, revulsion for the soul inhabiting it—these are familiar restraints, tight but safe. He knows how to live inside them.

Of course his father was never proud of him. It makes sense; of course it does. What use would Grigori Rozanov have had for a son shaking apart, chest heaving, throat threatening to collapse, weakness dripping from him in open defiance of everything that man valued?

A spoiled, arrogant child, too loud in his needs; the kind of boy who mistook wanting for deserving; who believed, somehow, that love was something you could ask for twice or cry your way into, instead of earning it through silence and self-containment—too soft, too sensitive, too porous; everything leaking out of him when it should have been locked down and buried, every feeling a small act of rebellion against the discipline he was supposed to embody?

No wonder his mother left. Why wouldn’t she? Who would stay tethered to a household where weakness pooled in every corner; where her son mirrored back everything fragile and failing about her own life? A boy who cried too easily; who needed reassurance like oxygen; who could never learn the basic economy of affection—take less, expect nothing, survive anyway?

No wonder his father looked at him and saw excess, saw indulgence, saw something that would never harden correctly. No wonder love curdled into disappointment before it ever had the chance to become anything else.

This is ridiculous, he thinks, even as the spiral tightens, and yet the ugly thing inside him keeps surfacing, reminding him of all the subtle ways he manipulates Shane into staying; of how condescension and bitterness leak from Ilya like a toxin—his face unbearably aged as a result; his mind dragged down into the same mire as his.

He tries to tell himself that at least the self-hatred circulates only within his bloodstream; that at least the mask still holds. No, no; it’s contained, you see. Shane sees arrogance, not rot. Charm, not contempt.

But he knows better. Shane knows he despises himself. He knows that he’s tired, so impossibly tired, of forcing meaning where there may never have been any; of being surprised by the daily kiss of disappointment; of watching the floor drop out again and again and somehow always finding a lower level beneath it. Knows how he measures his pain against others’, convinces himself his is bigger, grander, sadder, worthier; of how he then chastises himself and questions why he ever even thought he had the right to police pain and measure it in scales.

And as his throat tightens and his breathing fractures into ugly, choking sounds, the shame rushes in. I must look pathetic, he thinks. A scratched record of self-pity.

What does he know of pain, really? He, the eternal sufferer, the self-appointed martyr, who turns misery into armor and excuse; who wields it like proof of superiority, even as it eats him alive? He, who lashes out at the slightest intrusion, snarling you don’t know me at people who see him more clearly than he sees himself?

Ilya locks the door, turns the key, and slides down until he’s sitting on the floor, back pressed to wood, lungs refusing to cooperate. Tears come without permission, hot and relentless, and he can’t stop them.

When he finally looks up, it’s into the mirror and the face he despises most in the world, and time stalls around the sight of it. The clock ticks—once, twice, seven times—and then the sound tears out of him, raw and animal, a noise that does not feel human at all.

I hate myself.

He hears himself say it, again and again and again, until it loses language and becomes incantation. His gaze drifts, unfocused, around the room, until a new thought follows, quieter.

I want to die.

It arrives fully formed, uninvited, terrifyingly calm.

Die without agency; die without the killing, he thinks, and the idea settles over him with the weight of inevitability, but die. Wake up one morning and be gone.

Right now, he doesn’t care what Shane would feel. Doesn’t care about grief, or about aftermath, or about the damage it would cause.

I just want to disappear.

There is no room left to grow when every step is taken in a body he abhors and the skin of a soul he despises; when every movement feels like running a marathon through sand in a latex suit four sizes too small; when he is hyperaware of the version of himself he presents to the world, living under the constant surveillance of his own third eye—judge, jury, executioner—the most merciless critic of this long, far too long, feature-length disaster of a life.

When self-esteem turns his insecurities into predators and himself into prey; when his insomnia is written off as a personality quirk instead of what it is—a symptom of something chemically, catastrophically wrong; when he dreams of inhabiting a body assembled in pieces, Frankenstein-like, a face vaguely inspired by his own grafted onto a torso, legs, arms, hands, feet that do not belong to him.

When all that runs through his veins is rage—at the world, at others, at Shane, at his father, at his mother, at himself, at what he is, what he isn’t, what he will never be.

When more than unhappy, he is unhappiness. When he is so, so tired. So unbearably empty.

Ilya stops to assess and re-assess who he was, who he is and who he might become, and finds nothing stable enough to hold onto. If yesterday he was one thing, and today another, and tomorrow something else entirely, what narrative remains? What consistency? What self?

If he no longer remembers who he was before depression—or worse, maybe, remembers it all too well—what’s left? If days blur into weeks, and weeks into months, and months into years, and years into a life?

Shane could leave, he thinks. He wouldn’t, he’s almost sure of it, but he could. And what then? What then, when the only prophecy that has ever proven reliable is that in the end, you can count on no one but yourself? If even that guarantee is shaky, what remains? What cards are left to play?

Ilya looks at his reflection again, hyperaware of the unforgiving constancy of reality, of the fact that the world does not pause to mourn the loss of something that may never have truly belonged to him in the first place. Broken humanity in its rawest form lives inside him—guttural sounds threatening to paralyze his throat, his skull turning into a boxing ring where his own mind beats his soul into submission, and his body into defeat.

Oh, the irony of time. This is the dark before dawn, after all. The darkest before a hypothetical dawn.

And so, he cries.

Both his hands go numb in the time it takes to feel the warmth of Shane’s lips pressing against his forehead, murmured apologies stacking softly, one after another, voices blurring into each other—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—shoulder tucked together as they crawl into bed, and they fall asleep sobbing in each other’s arms.

Shane, do you take Ilya to be your lawfully wedded husband? Do you promise to—

—I, Shane, take you, Ilya—

—And Ilya, do you take—

—I, Ilya, take you, Shane, to be my lawfully wedded husband. I promise to love and cherish you, in good times and in bad; in sickness and in health.

For richer, for poorer; for better, for worse; and forsaking all others, keep myself only unto you, for so long as we both shall live.

In good times and in bad. For better or worse.

For as long as we both shall live.

A few days later, the house exists in a lower register.

Everything feels muted and padded, as if someone has wrapped the edges of the world in cotton and turned the volume down just enough that nothing can quite reach a crescendo. Even the light seems to hesitate before entering the room, late-afternoon sun filtering in soft and amber through the kitchen window, dust motes suspended midair like they, too, are afraid of falling too loudly.

Shane moves through it like he’s learned a new choreography overnight: slower, wider arcs, a carefulness that borders on reverent. He doesn’t reach for Ilya without looking first; doesn’t interrupt; doesn’t fill the quiet the way he used to, doesn’t talk simply to hear the reassurance of another voice answering back. There’s no easy overlap of sound anymore; no casual brushing of shoulders or half-finished sentences handed back and forth, and where he once missed the silence, now it sits in his chest like something swollen and wrong; an ache that refuses to be named.

“You’re making tea?” Ilya asks, breaking through the quiet. Shane has his back to him; shoulders hunched over a kettle as he fiddles with the tea bag. He’s making the same kind he always does, muscle memory intact, water measured by instinct rather than thought. “Can you fill a cup for me?”

“Oh.” Shane glances over his shoulder like he’s afraid to startle a deer. “Uh, yeah. Of course. Do you want honey?” He asks, softly. Too softly.

Ilya blinks, forcing a genuine smile. “I always want honey. You know this.” He notices the immediate smile Shane gives him back— quick and relieved, like he’s passed a test he didn’t know he was taking—and so he tries a joke, attempting to break through the ice. "You married a Russian man, Shane. Remember? We would shower in honey if we could.”

And, sure, Shane chuckles, but it's softer than he would've hoped, and his shoulders loosen only a fraction.

He reaches for the jar, then hesitates, hand hovering midair. “I can do lemon,” he adds immediately. “We don’t have to do honey. Or—”

“—I want honey,” Ilya repeats, sharper than he means to be, the edge sneaking into his voice before he can stop it.

Shane stills. “Okay.” A beat; then a nod. “Honey.”

They sit at the table by the window, and Shane angles his chair just slightly toward Ilya, not close enough to touch. It’s an offering, but not a claim—like every line of his body says I’m here, but equally I will not crowd you. The spoon clinks against the mug, and the sound feels too loud in the quiet, echoing unpleasantly.

“So, I know we said no hockey talk, but you should know I called Theriault last night,” Shane says after a while, voice careful, as if he’s testing the floorboards before stepping fully into the room. “I told him I’m not getting on the plane with them today. I was supposed to leave to Detroit, as you know, but—I told him I’m staying an extra two weeks; maybe the full month depending on how things go. Family emergency, so they're treating it as a leave of absence.”

Ilya tenses halfway through lifting his mug. “You didn't.” Slowly, he looks up, meeting his eyes and seeing the hesitation there, the way he’s already bracing. “Shane. Please tell me you did not do that.”

“It’s okay,” he says quickly. “There's no harm to my career, if that's what you're worried about. Teams deal with this kind of stuff all the time. They’ll understand.” A beat. “I told him I’d miss this road swing and we’d reevaluate after that. If things still aren’t stable, then I’ll take longer. If they’re good, then maybe I can come back earlier.

I just—I want to make sure you’re okay. I need to. And I can't do that unless I'm here. I want to be here, Ilya. Okay? And my schedule isn't working for us, and I need to be around so you don't carry all this weight alone. I know we said a lot of ugly shit the other night, but you were right when you said I've been gone way too much, so that's settled. I don't care if you disagree.”

His stomach drops. “Shane. I—I'm okay. Really. I am,” he says, deliberately slow, so the point comes across cleanly; so he doesn’t think it’s too fast, too defensive, that the words tumble out like a practiced response. “You really don’t have to do this.”

He is okay. Or, as okay as he can be right now, given the circumstances.

Shane’s mouth presses into a thin line. “I know. I just meant—”

“—I know what you meant,” he snaps, then immediately winces, regret flashing hot and sharp. He exhales, scrubs a hand down his face. “Sorry. I didn’t mean…”

“It’s fine,” Shane says at once. He reaches out, then stops himself, his hand hovering uselessly over the table before retreating. “It's fine,” he repeats his words, almost as if to himself. “The decision is made, either way. Farah also knows. I’m staying.”

Ilya nods, because nodding is easier than explaining the sudden pressure building behind his eyes; easier than starting a fight when the memory of their last one still echoes in his limbs, a phantom ache he hasn’t quite shaken. Easier than admitting the small, humiliating truth underneath it all, that yes, beneath the pride and the posturing, he does need Shane to stay; does need him to forfeit hockey for a moment and put him first; does need to feel him love him in ways that are tangible and unambiguous; does need the simple fact of his presence like oxygen, and he does not trust himself to survive the night alone with his own head so yes, please stay, Shane, yes, please.

His chest burns, though, because Shane’s care has become so meticulous it’s almost clinical: don’t raise your voice; don’t crowd him; don’t touch him without asking; don’t ask too much; don’t assume stability. And yes, part of it is love—so much love; pure, unadulterated devotion—and he knows, with an almost painful clarity, that he’s never been more grateful to have him in his life than he is in this moment; has never loved him more fiercely; has never looked at him and thought you are the axis on which I turn with such certainty. But it’s also love expressed as restraint; domesticity, but held back; intimacy, but handled with pincers—and it might just be the most hurtful thing he could ever do to him, because this, this is how it starts, isn’t it? The quiet recalibration; the shrinking; the careful re-mapping of someone else’s life around the volatile center of his own.

Shane smiles at him, tentative in a way that would be almost endearing if it didn’t make something in his chest seize up on reflex, that small careful curve of his mouth paired with eyes that keep checking his face like they’re waiting for permission to exist there. “We could watch something later,” he offers, voice pitched low and accommodating, already halfway prepared to retreat. “Or not. Whatever you feel like.”

Whatever you feel like.

As if Ilya knows. As if feeling is a stable concept; something with edges, with coordinates, with a center he could reliably return to instead of a constant churn that pulls him in opposing directions all at once: the desire to be held knotted tightly together with the urge to be left alone; the craving for noise colliding headfirst with the immediate exhaustion it brings; every impulse arriving already contradicted by the next, until the very question itself becomes meaningless.

He watches him shift in his chair, barely perceptible, an inch at most, but even that movement feels calibrated, measured against an internal rulebook he never agreed to write, and there’s something about the restraint of it that makes his throat tighten, because Shane has always been open, tactile, unguarded, and now there’s a carefulness there that doesn’t belong to her; a hesitance that sits wrong on his body like borrowed clothing.

When did someone this gentle learn to be afraid of him?

The question doesn’t arrive cleanly. It drags and catches and brings others with it, and before he can stop it, there’s a pressure building behind his eyes, hot and sour and familiar in the way the worst realizations always announce themselves as bodily responses first—a tension in the jaw; a shallow hitch in the breath; the sudden need to sit very still so nothing spills over.

It isn’t Shane he’s angry at—he knows that even as the emotion curls sharp and unearned in his gut—because he isn’t doing anything wrong. If anything, he’s doing everything right: being considerate and attentive; careful with his words and his hands and his expectations; sanding himself down in advance so there are no sharp edges left to cut on, and that’s precisely what makes it unbearable.

There’s no misunderstanding to fix. His instinct to soften, to make their home safe, is beautiful, and exactly what someone loving a volatile or fragile partner would do. Ilya knows this, and he loves him for it—so much he could cry, even. But that carefulness also feels like being reclassified; like being moved from equal to handled; from husband to dependent, because he’s seen this before. Because there’s a particular posture a person adopts when they begin to move around someone else instead of with them; when a room subtly reorganizes itself to anticipate one individual’s volatility; when quiet becomes precautionary and kindness learns restraint. Not fear exactly, or not in the obvious sense, but it’s adjacent to it, and it carries the same weight in the body: the constant awareness, the preemptive adjustments, the careful monitoring of tone and silence and space.

Something in him recoils at the recognition, a layering of unease that feels like memory resurfacing sideways. A different kitchen. A different table. The scrape of a chair leg across linoleum. His mother’s voice trailing off mid-sentence, the room holding its breath to catch what might come next. The fragile tension of her presence bending everything else into silence; an invisible force everyone learned to orbit with careful, whispered steps. The axis hanging over her head and around which an entire household would move more quietly, as if pretending it didn’t exist.

Long before Shane, when he was a child, Ilya would bend himself into shapes no child should have needed language for; would move earth and stone with bare hands just to prove he was worth staying for. He would strain and sacrifice and make things happen and try and try and try, not because he believed effort would be rewarded, but because the alternative was unthinkable, and if for nothing else, then at least so that one day he could say he had lived for the possibility that their relationship might be more than what it was—more than silence, and endurance, and the thin, transactional coexistence they had dignified with the word family.

He had been good enough, hadn’t he? Quiet when quiet was required; exceptional when mediocrity felt like personal failure inflicted upon him; careful not to ask for more than he could justify. He learned early that love was not a constant, but a reward system: that affection followed effort and compliance and performance, and being wanted was conditional, revocable. So, he became useful, impressive, manageable; and still it hadn’t been enough.

It was never enough.

That futility had calcified something in him, settled too early and too deep. The understanding that there was no configuration of himself that would ever fully satisfy his father, no version that would quiet his mother’s pain; that no amount of trying could alchemize their grief into tenderness. That some absences were structural; that some hungers could not be fed.

In that moment, Ilya has never hated his parents more.

The hatred lands blunt and unfinished, incandescent and indiscriminate; less a feeling and more an impulse. He hates them, father and mother both, for the architecture of cruelty they built together and called a home; for the way it functioned perfectly from the outside while hollowing everything inside it out; for the kind of damage that leaves no evidence and therefore no vocabulary. Hates them for how Shane’s voice softens now without meaning to; for how his care has learned to hold its breath; for how his love has begun to move with caution instead of ease.

He was taught that love sharpens its knives quietly; that it asks for less only so it can take more later; that it studies you, learns you, adapts around you, just so it can survive you; and beneath it all, buried but still breathing, is that same child. Still trying and believing, against history and evidence alike, that if he is just a little easier to love, a little less volatile, a little more contained, then maybe this time the tenderness won’t come with an expiration date.

It would be easier if it had been louder or uglier; if there were a bruise he could point to and say this, here, this is where it all went wrong. But there’s no starting point for it, no singular incident he can isolate and hold up as proof; only atmosphere and accumulation and a lifetime of small, reasonable adjustments that taught him, without ever saying so, that love was something you endured rather than inhabited; something that demanded constant negotiation; something that arrived already laced with skepticism. A lifetime reduced to a perpetual where to even begin?, only to never begin at all. There are only memories, sharp and intrusive, that scrape against his ribcage with the persistence of something unfinished and refuse to be buried or dismissed; memories that prove not everything lived solely in his imagination, even if he was taught to doubt himself early and often.

Cold Moscow mornings. Breath fogging the air as he waited to be told which version of himself was required that day. His father’s hand, heavy on his shoulder; never striking, never gentle; corrective in a way that left no mark but somehow lingered longer than pain ever could. Crying—not forbidden outright, but treated as malfunction; as something inefficient and vaguely embarrassing that needed to be corrected early, before it became habit. Softness framed as defect; vulnerability as rot.

Boys did not sob. Boys did not tremble. Boys did not need.

If both he and Andrei are hollowed out now, if their inner worlds resemble one of Goya’s Black Paintings—all rot and shadow and screaming figures half-swallowed by darkness—it is because of choices made long before either of them could contest them; because grief and rage were siphoned into two young boys like inheritance, parceled out unevenly but relentlessly, until resentment became their native tongue. Spoken in different dialects, perhaps, but rooted in the same soil.

If they do not know how to love cleanly, without tally or bitterness or quiet punishment or withdrawal masquerading as dignity, it’s because the two people who taught them what love looked like modeled it as endurance; as restraint; as skepticism; as something you braced yourself against rather than moved toward. As a battlefield where everyone lost slowly and the leftover was just something you survived in increasingly diminished forms. Because they poured everything they could not process—their disappointment, their mourning—into those two boys, impressionable to a fault, desperate for the proud, warm hand on their shoulders, until the damage replicated itself and they became the very thing they’d swore they would never become: their parents.

If he knows anything with certainty, it’s that Grigori and Irina Rozanova live on, not in photographs or stories or even in the fabric of Ilya and Andrei’s memories, but in reflex; in a hand that fires forward on instinct to grab a wrist; in the sound of pain torn unwillingly from someone else’s throat.

But the cost is already tallying itself, quiet and efficient, the way it always does when something is allowed to continue only because it feels kinder than stopping it, which is why Shane’s gentleness feels like a warning now; why his care registers as danger; why the sight of someone Ilya loves recalibrating their entire existence around his moods fills him with a quiet, creeping horror. Because his body recognizes the trajectory—a life shaped around someone else’s fragility; love negotiated instead of inhabited; a bond sustained by vigilance rather than joy. Because he knows what it does to you, and how it erodes you slowly, and how it teaches you to edit yourself mid-thought, mid-gesture, mid-feeling, until even disappearing politely begins to feel like maturity rather than loss.

He watches Shane now—the careful distance, the self-editing, the way his kindness is restrained—and something inside him recoils in horror at the familiarity of it. It settles in him, heavy and inexorable like gravity, impossible to outrun once acknowledged.

Ilya loves him too much, too fiercely, too honestly, to let him learn that posture. To allow himself to become the axis around which his life tightens; to ever accept a devotion that comes with quiet self-erasure attached. Love should not require this kind of vigilance. Love should not feel like a structure built to withstand collapse rather than invite living.

Love should be the cottage, and the summer, and easy, so easy; easy like breathing.

“Shane,” he says, barely louder than the hum of the refrigerator, as if speaking at full volume might make his words irrevocable. “What you said the other night…” A beat, and the words slip out before Ilya can second-guess them. “I don’t want you to be scared.”

He looks up, startled, like he’s been caught mid-thought. “No, no—I already told you. I’m not scared of you,” he says immediately, too fast to be rehearsed; too earnest to be dismissive. “I could never be scared of you, Ilya.”

“But you are,” he answers, gently. “Maybe not of me directly, but—Shane, you are. You're scared of hurting me. You’re scared of being yourself around me; of saying the wrong thing. I need us to be—” The words snag. He stops there, breathes in too shallowly, then lets it out through his nose as if that might steady him. His eyes slip shut for a moment, because it’s easier to say the next part without having to watch him hear it. “I need us to be normal. Even if everything else is… fucked, and completely wrong, I at least need us—us, you and me—to be okay, to be normal. For things to be like they always were. Otherwise…”

He falters. The admission opens under him so quickly it feels like missing a step in the dark, and for a second, he nearly swallows it; nearly does what he always does and turns it into something smaller, more manageable. But Shane is looking at him, and the truth is already there between them anyway, raw and waiting, so he forces himself to say it. “Otherwise, I think I'm going to get even worse, and I don't want to be worse. Okay?”

Something in his shoulders gives then, and the careful tension eases just enough to reveal what’s been holding it in place. He swallows, breath hitching, eyes dropping to where their hands rest on the table like they don’t quite belong together anymore. “I just want to do this right,” he breathes out, and the simplicity of it nearly breaks something open in Ilya’s chest.

He smiles, small and sad and full of too many things at once. “I know, moy lyubimyy,” he murmurs. “That’s the problem.” He reaches across the table then, deliberately cupping Shane’s wrist in his hand, consciously holding it loose and gentle. It’s almost exaggerated in its softness, like he’s proving something not only to Shane but also to himself; like he needs to feel the absence of force as much as its presence. “I don’t want to turn you into someone who has to watch every step you take,” Ilya adds, quietly. “I don’t want you to have to tiptoe around me.”

Shane’s eyes are wet now, lashes clumped together in that way that makes emotion impossible to hide. “I’m not,” he insists, though the insistence wavers. “I just… I don’t want to fuck this up, Ilya. You mean too much to me. I want you to feel safe when you’re with me, and especially when you’re home. You’re fighting enough battles in your head. I won’t let you fight them here too, in our home, or with me.” He hesitates, as if weighing whether the next thought is allowed to exist here, then adds, softer, “Plus, we'll have children running around here soon enough. I want you to feel comfortable here so your memories aren’t, like… tarnished one day, or something.”

Children.

The word lands with a strange weight, tender and terrifying all at once: an abstract future-shaped thing that glows faintly, even as it casts a long shadow. He says it like a promise; like something inevitable and good and anchoring, and Ilya feels the familiar swell of love that always follows; that relentless affection that refuses to be reasoned with.

Shane, that steady drum. Shane, that stubborn heart that anchors him when he drifts too close to the edge. Shane, the only constant in a world that spins too fast, too cruel, too silent for him. Shane, the steady pulse beneath his fingers; the warmth in the cold; the wild and fierce and irrational promise that he won’t be left alone to drown in this ocean of shadows.

Shane, the lighthouse and the shadow itself.

Shane and Shane and Shane and Shane.

“I know,” Ilya says, simply. And he does, he really does know. That’s the cruelty of it. Knowing does not make it easier; does not make the love smaller or the fear quieter; does not resolve the contradiction of wanting to be held while fearing what that holding might represent. Knowing does not change the fact that sometimes love can be enough, but you still reach the end of what you can do for someone and have to let go, even when it feels like a slow unraveling of light and bone; even when it feels like you're slipping through your own grasp.

Shane squeezes his hand then, finally letting himself close the distance, thumb brushing over his knuckles like he’s relearning the shape of him. “I’m sorry if I’ve been making it weird,” he says, attempting a smile that wobbles at the edges. “We’ll figure it out.”

Ilya nods, rather than say everything that crowds his throat, and leans forward until their foreheads rest together, a familiar gesture that still carries the comfort of ritual even now. He breathes Shane in, the faint scent of tea and laundry detergent and something uniquely his, and for a moment he lets himself pretend that his life can be held without consequence.

But somewhere deep inside him, in the dark and tangled corner of himself he rarely allows language to touch, a thought takes root, quiet and merciless and patient, and it feels like foresight—like a prophecy being written, slow and deliberate. And Ilya, who has always been too good at reading the future in the ruins of the past, knows, even as he leans into the warmth, that love alone could never undo inheritance, and that wanting not to become something has never guaranteed you won’t.

The month passes like Shane had promised him, and Ilya is worse now.

Shane’s been gone for a week now, buried deep in the chaos of the playoffs, and he’s left behind with nothing but the hum of their home; the sound of his own breathing; a mind that refuses to stop spinning. It feels like a slow poison, seeping into every crack and corner it can find.

His voice crackles on the other end of the phone, calling daily—hourly, almost—and Ilya listens, nods, even smiles sometimes, but hockey is a distant thunder outside these walls, and mostly he’s alone with himself and all the things he doesn’t want to face but can’t escape. No crowds, no noise, no distractions. Just the thick silence pressing in; just the exhaustion settling inside him, quiet and relentless; a weight pressing down in the air that fills the rooms, thick and still.

He breathes it in, exhales it out; slow, deliberate, like a ritual. The heaviness never lifts.

He’s pacing the house sometimes, restless as the bare wooden floorboards creak under his feet; or sitting with his knees pulled to his chest, staring at nothing; or watching himself from across the room, drifting like a ghost in his own skin, trapped between moments and memories; between the life he’s living and the one that feels just out of reach, shimmering behind some invisible glass. 

Never mind that purpose used to be a thing he grasped for, chased relentlessly—a steady beacon; a lifeline; a flare of something real in the relentless grey. Greatness. Now, it’s all faded into an abstract shape, blurred at the edges and impossible to hold, and the harder he chases it, the slimier it becomes; like water slipping through fingers. Even the mirror is a stranger these days; a ghost that looks back at him with unrecognizing eyes and twists away when he looks too hard.

Every night, he waits for something to break; some fracture in the surface that might let light in, and it never comes. For all he’s suffered, still purpose slips away; still it dissolves into ash every time he reaches for it. And if he hadn’t suffered enough for his suffering to mean something, then maybe all he’d done was suffer in vain—just pain for pain’s sake; no story to tell, really, except the old myth of the boy-man who had everything but stood unmoved, silent and hollow.

Catharsis has flickered out quietly, without the roaring release he’d hoped for, and apathy has settled like dust on every surface, hope retreating until it’s a word he barely remembers; a shape that belongs to someone else’s life. Someone who never stared down the long nights with nothing but a gnawing ache and forceful breaths; someone who, unlike him, isn’t left to grapple with the resulting painful realization.

This is the baseline now. The quiet acceptance of a life hollowed out, stretched thin, worn ragged by all the years that came before. Could he do it? Could he accept the circumstances of his present and resign himself to an eternity of… whatever this is?

The goddess of time comes to collect her tax, and Ilya finds the currency of her credit has shifted.

He realizes then—love is not enough. Not really, not even close, not even when it burns in his chest like a fever that won’t break. No matter how much he wants it to be enough, no matter how much he begs himself to believe it. It just isn’t. But—if love is not enough; if Shane is not enough—then, what is? His mind catalogues what he has left inside him to fight for, and he finds he’s run out of reasons to hold onto a life that feels more like a shadow than anything real.

He recalls the memory of Shane lying beside him in bed, chest rising and falling; rising and falling, that steady rhythm that would anchor him every time. I'm sorry, he almost says out loud, even as the words sound dull and insufficient in his head. I'm so sorry I could not be better at this. But there’s no one there to hear him—only the empty rooms and the plasterboard walls that stare back at him, flat and indifferent.

Yuna calls, and he does not pick up. She calls again, and again, and again, until it becomes clear he’s purposely not picking up. David tries him then, once, twice, thrice, and Ilya turns his phone off and buries it in the crack of the sofa so it won't stare back at him anymore.

He closes his eyes, fingers curling into the rough wood of the table, breath shallow and trembling.

I can’t go on like this much longer.

Мама, he thinks, soft and broken, and it’s all he can conjure. These days, Irina Rozanova is more mirror than mother. Мама, I'm tired.

Little Ilyusha, tepid steps through a long house, silent room at the end of the hallway, door tilted slightly open.

The frozen stillness of a body sprawled over the bed. A headscarf on the floor, his favorite. The bottle of pills, cover knocked loose over the sheets. The pit in his stomach, forever imprinted.

Life crashing into him; barreling down.

Yes, Ilya. The still body, the bottle of pills, the pit inside a stomach. Life will crash into you soon enough.

Ilya walks into the en-suite bathroom. His shoulders are hunched; the shadows beneath his eyes deeper than usual, as if they’ve settled there for good.

Anya follows him in, paws echoing in the room; her wet nose pressing insistently, knowingly, against the curve of his knee. He kneels, kisses the crown of her head once, settles his face against the fur of her neck for a minute. Then he stands, fishes his hand in his pocket, places a treat just outside the bathroom door. She hesitates, but eventually follows the scent, tail thudding softly against the wall as she leaves.

Ilya remains where he is, body still. He draws in a slow, deliberate breath, then another, and then another.

The door closes behind him, and the bolt slides into place.

Softly. So softly it barely makes a sound at all.

A memory comes to him, at some point.

It’s summer in the cottage. Late in the day, when the light has slackened and softened into something almost tender, and a younger Ilya and Shane lie back in the grass. The ground is warm, heat seeping into skin and bone, and the night sky opens above them in slow increments. Stars appear without urgency, scattered carelessly, as if no one thought to arrange them.

He turns his head just enough to look at Shane, and feels something inside him give way completely. Words tumble out of him—in Russian, because it comes out easier that way; because the words don’t feel embarrassed of themselves there; their meaning soft and full, like a secret the language keeps safe.

Shane blinks. “What did you say?”

Their hands find each other the way they always do, absentminded and certain. Fingers threading together; thumbs brushing over knuckles.

“I said that you’re my—” Ilya begins to repeat in English, but stops, slow and careful, and for some reason it feels as if he's stepping onto ice. He swallows, tries to hunt for the right word, and it comes out slower, stripped of whatever candor his native language had given him. “My, ah, utopia,” he says finally, hesitant, soft. “A thousand dreams rolled into one. My only fantasy to ever come true.”

He watches the words settle between them. Shane smiles, eyes shining, but also just a little dazed—as if waiting; inviting. Like he’s caught the meaning, but still wants more.

Ilya catches the look and rolls his eyes, amused. “It means,” he continues, “that you are everything I never thought I could want.”

Shane’s face crumples slightly under the weight of it, like the words are too much and not enough all at once.

“I mean it,” Ilya adds, unnecessarily, because he always needs to say more; because loving Shane has turned him into someone reckless with sincerity. “Really. All of it.”

Shane swallows hard, breathing deeply. He nods once, tight, like he’s holding back something fragile that could spill if he lets go. Ilya can see it in the slight quiver of his jaw, in the way his eyes glisten just before he turns back to the night sky.

Minutes stretch between them in silence, and he assumes the moment has passed. But then Shane’s voice finally breaks the quiet—soft; steady. “Ilya,” he breathes, then closes his eyes. “A life without you…” he continues, then falters; opens his eyes and turns them to him as if needing to make sure he won’t shatter if he finishes the thought.

But Ilya already knows the rest. He’d know it in his sleep; in his urn; in his grave.

“It wouldn’t be a life at all. Not one I’d want, anyway,” Shane tells him.

If wishes were ever his to claim, Ilya, that lonely architect of hamlets, knows he'd ask to hold time in his hands. To have it slow at his command, then race ahead; beg it to stand still, then watch it crawl at the constant, unflinching pace it knows. He would push and pull and prod at it, only then to freeze it—right here, right now.

He'd trap this instant still; hold it like a breath suspended. He'd spend years revisiting it, the way others revisit childhood homes or elementary schools, like stepping carefully back into its light and tracing the air for what it once held. He would linger there; relearn the exact cadence of breath in the air around them; until the fragile geometry of two bodies unafraid was etched in his mind; until the flicker of living memory assaulted his senses like breathing, and he could recreate the scene entirely, with his eyes closed, or in his sleep.

Ilya knows, all at once, he would spend a lifetime returning to this moment; referencing it like an heirloom. Unflinching time—draped still over that held, idyllic possibility; as fixed as the evening sky.

They stare at each other, distant remnants of wetness in their eyes, until hands find faces and fingers rest on cheeks. A somber look. A caress. A tender touch, steadying. Foreheads touch. Breathing syncs. Eyes shine in the soft mist between them, and lips, finally, find lips, slow and unguarded and full of recognition, like the quiet sealing of a future Ilya will spend years trying not to destroy, and failing anyway.

There is no clean break.

That’s the first lie people tell about dying—that there’s a moment where everything simply stops. For Ilya, it’s more like slipping underwater with his eyes still open; the world blurring but not disappearing; sound warping instead of cutting out entirely.

The bathroom recedes, and the light above him hums and stretches, the sound elongating until it feels like vibration; like something passing through him rather than reaching him. His body keeps doing small, stubborn things without his permission—reflexes clinging to habit long after intent had moved on; long after his left hand had taken the vodka David gave him for Christmas and his right hand had pulled the pills from the cabinet. He remembers the motion almost as if from outside himself: the pills rattling into his palm, the vodka pouring down in a burn that dulled everything else, the swallowing, the chases of liquid and chemical blur. The gestures had been automatic, absurd in their simplicity, like watching someone else’s body move through someone else’s ritual. The faucet had dripped once, twice; the light had stretched, the edges of the room melting and breathing with him, while fragments of days and months and years had bled together, meaningless and meaningful at once. And that had been that.

Somewhere beyond the ringing in his ears, the world stirs, and a sound that doesn’t belong to the hum of the bathroom or the drag of his own breathing presses in—footsteps, rushed and uneven, the soft thud of a doorframe caught too hard. The air shifts, and the room feels suddenly crowded, heavier; as if the space itself has noticed and leaned closer. Then—noise. Wrong noise. Too loud; too sudden to belong to the quiet ritual of the bathroom. A sharp, frantic impact against the door, wood shuddering in its frame, and the bolt rattles once, twice.

Ilya knows immediately.

Fuck.

No. No.

He was supposed to be away.

The impact against the door does not register as panic. It registers as interruption, which is worse, because interruption implies that this moment—private and terrible and sacred in its own way—does not belong solely to him.

There is another thud, heavier this time, wood straining in its frame, and his body reacts before his mind does, heart vaulting into his throat with the instinctive knowledge of being found out. Another shove, harder this time; the sound of a shoulder thrown without hesitation, without care for what it breaks, and a familiar voice finally cuts through the ringing in his ears, raw and already splintering, his name torn loose and flung into the room like something alive.

When the door finally gives, it's with a crack that feels too loud for the space, the bolt ripping free, the room flooding all at once with movement and breath and panic. Ilya stays folded over the tub, the cold edge biting into his ribs, too heavy to lift his head, too slow to pretend this is anything other than what it is. The idea of being perceived feels distant, theoretical; like something that happens to other people. He stays where he is, suspended in that thin place between decision and consequence, where nothing hurts quite as sharply and nothing feels real enough to matter.

And that’s how Shane finds him—eyes wide and panicked, pale light bleeding in through the bathroom window, his body folded awkwardly over the edge of the bathtub, shoulders caved inward as though he’s trying to disappear into himself.

For a split second, Shane doesn’t move at all. His hand comes up to his chest like it might hold something in; like if he presses hard enough, he can stop the sound that’s trying to claw its way out of him. His eyes go wide, too wide, fixed and glassy and already filling, and there’s this awful, weightless pause where Ilya knows his brain is refusing to name what it’s seeing even as his body understands it perfectly. Ilya sees it how you see things underwater—edges soft, movement delayed—the way Shane’s hand eventually flies up from his chest to his mouth, eyes going even wider, even brighter; the way color leaches from his face all at once. There’s a sound then, not a word, just breath breaking wrong in his lungs, sharp and panicked; like something inside him snaps clean in two.

“No—“ Shane pants, shaking his head.

The sounds stutter uselessly, overlapping themselves, breaking apart before they can finish forming; Shane’s breath catching sharp and ugly in his throat. “Ilya,” he breathes. “Oh my God. Ilya.”

The word doesn’t reach Ilya’s ears so much as it presses against him, heavy and frantic, vibrating through the room. 

“Ilya,” Shane says, and it comes out wrong—thin, barely there—and it hurts to hear it. His name sounds wrong in Shane’s mouth like that; stripped bare; cracked open. “What are you doing?”

The rest dissolves; turns into noise; into motion without shape—Shane still shaking his head, eyes burning, breath coming too fast, too loud, like he’s trying to outrun something already on top of him. 

He hasn't noticed the empty bottle of pills, yet, Ilya realizes. I will have to break his heart.

Some distant part of him acknowledges the door: the way it’s been shoved open, the lock torn useless; hanging. Hockey flashes briefly again, stupid and irrelevant. He was supposed to be somewhere else.

Yuna, he realizes. David. The phone calls.

But the thought slips away as fast as it comes, and what remains is Shane. Always Shane. The way his whole body leans forward, like if he stops moving even for a second, he might shatter. The way his eyes never leave his face, like looking away would make this real in a way he can’t survive.

His feet remain planted on the cold bathroom tiles, unmoving, the small cracks in the floor offering nothing beneath him but stillness; nothing to anchor himself to; nothing to fall back on. Just him and him alone: head still shaking, eyes still burning, breaths still coming too fast and too loud, like he’s trying to outrun something already on top of him.

Ilya attempts a silent apology with his eyes, the shape of the words familiar even without sound. Maybe he whispers it, maybe not—he’s not sure it matters—because Shane doesn’t seem to hear it anyway. His attention looks fixed elsewhere, as if his ears are too busy trying to remember the timbre of Ilya’s voice every other time his body betrayed his mind and cracked sounds and muted murmurs slipped out uncontrolled, broken apart by slow, dragging breaths that always came too late. His eyes stay locked on his, and he knows, with a sick certainty, that he’s cataloguing them—the movement, the shape of them, the way the corner of his right eye bends downward just slightly; a flaw he’s memorized without ever meaning to. The inventory of memories. His lips follow suit, as if Shane’s trying to record the taste and texture and shape of his mouth; the way a smile escapes and the corners almost reach his eyes; the way his lips twist at the corners when he’s amused, or when he’s nervous, or when he’s pretending to be okay. The moles—here, and there, and everywhere.

And suddenly, he’s sure it must all feel like someone else’s memory; like something borrowed and misremembered, distant and fogged over; like a story he’d once heard but never lived.

Shane’s face clouds for a brief second, expression tightening, and Ilya feels the look of silent ire like a weight. There are no vivid recollections now, no passion, no love, no desire—just anger, fast and familiar, and he knows that look too well. The flood of rage—maybe at him. Probably at himself. Undeniably at both of them. At what could have been; at what was; what is.

Don't look at me like that, he wants to say. You knew what you were getting into. It never leaves his lips.

A mirrored thought festers before he can swallow it back down, rotting on his tongue, and the shame of it makes his stomach turn. Being seen like this. Caught in it. He wants to wash the moment away, dilute it, repaint it into something less ugly, something survivable. But Shane is right there, laid bare in front of him, a hundred fractured emotions flickering behind his eyes, and for a brief, irrational second, Ilya’s sure Shane is the devil—some cosmic Lovecraftian horror dragged up from hell itself, sent only to ruin his life, to soil the one fragile chance he ever had at solace; at relief.

God, I love you, he thinks. And God, I hate you.

Ilya never hid what he was, either—anger and rejection pressed into the shape of a love letter, handed out freely; impossible to truly belong to anyone beyond the parasite of melancholy gnawing at his ribs. And whether Ilya was ever entirely Shane’s or not hardly matters, because he had to know that he was his; had to have known it for fifteen years now, ever since that day in Saskatchewan; ever since hotel rooms and ice rinks and stolen glances and the brief, electric brush of fingers that always lingered too long. How could he not know? Ilya had claimed him with little more than a brush of lips; marked him with his initials without ever saying the words aloud, and Shane must have known, somewhere deep and quiet, that he never really had the strength to fight it.

A harsher thought takes root then, spreading fast and mean. I wish we’d never met. Was Ilya not ruining Shane’s life by letting him see him like this? By letting this image—Ilya on the tub, bloodshot eyes, decision made—burn itself into Shane’s brain forever? Did he not know what he was allowing to bloom and be harvested; to begin and be destroyed; all at once? Did he not know he was letting his anguish trap Shane in some purgatorial in-between, suspended in time, and letting his torment define him, and funneling it all directly towards him, and turning him into the last thing Ilya had ever wanted Shane to become—Ilya himself?

Every day felt like drowning, like sinking into quicksand made of suffocating hysteria, and Ilya had tried to tell him as much, again and again. Hadn’t he? Maybe not in so many words, but—it was obvious, no? In how he carried himself; in how he lived for short, small bursts of happiness and merely existed for the hours after. Was this the moment where it became real? Where Shane would finally believe he could understand it just because he was witnessing it?

Would Shane blame himself for this?

Or maybe—and the thought is cruelly comforting—maybe Shane would blame Ilya instead. 

Yes. That's it. He’d hate him for it. Hold onto that hatred like a lifeline.

Would Shane believe Ilya had deceived him into confusing their dependency with love, into thinking he felt the same way every time they were together? Would he think Ilya had romanticized it, turned desperation into desire, despair into need, dressed it up until Shane mistook himself for refuge, shield, salvation; instead of what he really was, kryptonite, pain, catalyst—

But then Shane lifts his eyes, abruptly, and they’re wide and hopeful and devastatingly open, and when they snap to Ilya, the answer arrives all at once. Ilya knows exactly what Shane is allowing inside himself—

the idea taking root, hesitant at first, visible in the twitch of his mouth, before spiraling into something frantic and unstoppable, like a seed desperate for harvest, and suddenly the certainty floods Shane’s face so nakedly, it almost makes him look away. It gathers in her: in the straightening of his spine, in the way his eyes narrow, in the fragile steadiness of choosing something enormous without fully knowing the cost.

I can save him, and it’s written all over his face. I can save this broken person who broke me in return; this ruined puzzle that only I can complete, even if it costs me pieces of myself. I can hold him together, and carry what he can’t, and be enough for the both of us.

The thoughts aren’t spoken, naturally, but they’re loud anyway; so loud they press against Ilya’s skull until it hurts.

And of course Shane believes they’ll find a way to rebuild afterward. Dependable Shane. Reliable Shane. Unbreakable Shane. Shane who gives, and gives, and gives, and never learns how to take. Shane, who thinks that if something is broken, you work until it isn’t; if someone is hurting, you stand in the doorway and refuse to leave.

The thought that he will stay by his side—not for a day, not for a week, but through it all—settles, heavy and warm and terrifying, and, in the few seconds that follow, it consumes Ilya entirely, shaking him to the core. Because in that stupid, desperate moment, he actually believes it.

Every instinct of self-preservation dissolves, and Ilya drowns in thoughts of Shane—Shane smiling down at him, leaning in for a kiss; then porcelain, and pills scattered across the sink; Ilya's own body slackening, skin cooling, fingers heavy and unresponsive. He falls in and out of love with him all over again in the span of brief, micro-seconds, and he knows, with quiet certainty, that Shane is doing the same.

Maybe that’s why Shane reaches out, hand trembling. A promise forming without words — that Ilya will get better; that Shane will be there for every step of it; that they can push through this; they can move beyond this, together.

Ilya stares at Shane’s outstretched hand. He thinks I haven't done anything yet. He thinks he can save me still.

For one suspended moment, Ilya almost lets him. For a flicker of a second, it almost feels possible.

He’s so tired—so bone-crushingly tired; the kind that sinks into your marrow and rewires the way you imagine the future, until even happiness feels exhausting. A fatigue that alters proportion, that makes tomorrow feel as endless as a lifetime, that turns even love into a wearying effort. He feels it: the almost. The unbearable, exquisite almost. He imagines a life where he stays; where he swallows his hopelessness down and survives out of spite and love and obligation; imagines the discomfort; the endless ache of being alive inside a body that never quite feels like home.

Almost he leans into it. Almost he lets Shane touch him, ground him, tether him back to the world. Almost he chooses the long, hard road of staying; of waking up tomorrow and the day after and the day after that with the same ache still lodged in his chest. No matter that it’s pointless; no matter that it’s too late now; no matter that even love—even that tidal wave; that colossal, unstoppable titan of a force—cowers in the face of biology and chemistry and a bottle's worth of pills coursing through his bloodstream.

Save me, he wants to say. Condemn me to a life that hurts. I will suffer every day if I can suffer beside you. I will bleed slower if it’s you holding the knife.

Hope swells, traitorous and uninvited, and Ilya hates himself for it even as he clings to it, because it feels warm in a way nothing else does; because it reminds him of mornings and coffee cups and Shane’s weight pressed against his side in bed; of all the small, stupid reasons he stayed alive long after staying alive stopped making sense.

I could try again, he thinks, weakly. For you.

But trying again feels infinite and endless; exhausting in a way Shane alone can’t fix. The shape of that future stretches out too far and too wide, an endless corridor of effort and recovery and explanations and small daily survivals, and love—even love like this—does not make the corridor shorter, or narrower. If anything, it stretches it further and further and further, endlessly.

So the seconds stretch and bend and lose their shape. Five pass, maybe more—Ilya isn’t sure—and Shane’s breathing turns shallow, audible now, like he’s trying not to panic and failing; like he’s counting in his head because if he stops counting everything else will collapse. By ten, Shane’s chest is burning—Ilya can see it in the way his shoulders rise too fast; in the way his jaw tightens like he’s bracing for impact.

By fifteen, Shane’s hand twitches. It’s barely anything—a tremor, really—but Ilya feels it like a pull in his gut; like gravity shifting. Shane’s fingers ache toward him; toward Ilya’s wrist; toward his shoulder; toward anywhere at all, aching for contact the way people ache for oxygen when they’ve been underwater too long. But Ilya knows that if Shane touches him now, really touches him, this will all derail and collapse and become something else entirely.

You just need to let me in, he remembers.

God, Ilya wants to. He wants to lean forward, and put the weight of his body into his hands, and let himself be held up for once instead of doing the holding; the pretending; the surviving. He wants to believe that love can be enough if it’s this stubborn; this relentless; this unwilling to let go.

I don't know how.

Ilya watches as Shane’s hand falls, slow and defeated.

The disappointment hits Shane

first, sharp and unmistakable; brutal and immediate, and Ilya watches it bloom in real time. The way his eyes water and his mouth presses thin, like he’s swallowing something bitter and familiar. It looks too much like his own reflection on bad days, like a mirror image—the collapse of self-worth—and the recognition makes his chest tighten painfully.

He sees how the quiet certainty that Shane isn’t enough settles into him with frightening ease, as if it’s been waiting there all along: that his desire to crawl into his own skin outweighs his will to live for him—and, well, Ilya can’t disagree, no matter how much it feels like tearing himself open to admit it.

But then, there’s something else in Shane’s face too, and all at once he thinks he sees it—the idea that maybe this isn’t really about illness, or despair, or any of the thousand and one reasons he has given him over the years, but maybe something simpler and crueler. A lack of love.

You idiot, he thinks, throat tight. How could you ever think that? You are the best of me. The only good thing I ever did. And even that I managed to ruin.

He watches him, eyes wide, red-rimmed, bloodshot, tired and outlined by dark circles, sleepless, and knows this with absolute certainty: If nothing else, I lived to love you.

Fifteen years of it. Fifteen years of shy smiles and stolen looks across the ice; of face-offs with knowing grins just before the puck dropped; of long drives and longer winters; of cottages and coffee mugs and two lives quietly stitched together by routine and devotion and the simple miracle of being chosen, over and over again.

Love. Love. Love. Love.

God, he thinks helplessly, how I loved you.

But because Ilya loves him—because he loves him too much—he forces his face to soften, to settle into something calm and resigned and at peace. Forces his features to ease out, just slightly, just barely, but enough where Shane could see it.

I'm okay, he attempts to convey. He lets acceptance wash over his own features like a mask, because he knows Shane well enough to understand what he needs to see in order to stop fighting.

So Shane thinks he’s given up. So Shane understands, or thinks he understands, that sometimes love is enough, but you still reach the end of what you can do for someone and have to let go, even when it feels like a slow unraveling of light and bone; even when it feels like you're slipping through your own grasp.

But then—because Shane is Shane, because he has always been like this—he reaches for him anyway. Head raised confidently; gaze locked on his; hand still hovering, still reaching, still trying. Still. Still, he reaches for Ilya. Still, after all the signs; after all the exit-ramps where it would have been easier to turn away, to tell himself this love was too much, too hard, too painful, Shane reaches for him like this is a habit he’s never learned to break.

Dependable Shane. Reliable Shane. Unbreakable Shane. Shane who gives and gives until there’s nothing left and then digs deeper anyway. Shane who never learned how to take no at face value; who never learned how to believe that Ilya breathing, existing, living, might not be as inevitable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west; as birds chirping and flowers blooming in the spring. Might not be as certain as the cottage in the summer, where they had found and first loved each other all those years ago now, or as certain as the flies that hang low around the dock; and the loons that call out at night around them; and the shadows that hit the counter just right when the sun shines down above them.

To him, Ilya existing is part of the natural order; the truth around which his entire life is built; and everything secondary. There’s no Shane without Ilya; no Ilya without Shane—so, Ilya must exist. As does the rain; as does the wind; as does the sun; as does the moon. As does the cottage; as does the summer.

But Ilya had wanted to live, not just to exist.

I can change your mind, Shane must think, but Ilya’s eyes burn and the truth tastes bitter.

I'm so tired, moy lyubimyy.

The words carry hidden subtext, and he only realizes he’s spoken them out loud when Shane’s eyes dim just a fraction, and it’s like watching something beautiful fracture. His body knows before his mind catches up, breaths stilling as if he’s waiting for him to contradict his own words, as if time itself might reverse if he waits, and the hope drains out of his expression, painfully.

His eyes finally leave Ilya’s, and they trail down. The pill bottle Ilya’s clutching tightly. Close to empty in his hand. The cover loose on the floor.

Recognition hits Shane all at once, sharp and unkind, and finally, Ilya thinks, finally, he knows what is happening, what this moment is, what Ilya has already decided to do.

Shane freezes, his entire body turning rigid. “Ilya.” He takes a step forward and stumbles, catches himself on the wall, knuckles whitening, and Ilya thinks, dimly, absurdly, that he’s never seen him look like this—unmoored, terrified, already unraveling.

I am so sorry.

“Ilya, please—Please, no—” He’s shaking his head, pleading, voice cracking, but he doesn’t answer.

Shane swallows hard, and tries again. “Ilya.”

I am so, so sorry.

Then, louder, more desperate, uncontrollable sobs pouring out of him. “Please, no. Please—!" His lips keep moving. Please keeps happening. He can’t follow all of it, only the feeling of it: the raw, desperate gravity of being wanted to stay.

You deserve better, he thinks, so much better. The thought is both sincere and cowardly, and he knows it.

Ilya wants to tell him everything at once—that this isn’t Shane’s fault; that it never was; that loving him was the best thing he ever did; that none of this cancels out the life they built together. He wants to say thank you, and forgive me, and please do not let this ruin you.

There isn’t time. There was never enough time, even when he had all the time in the world.

But then it happens—and Ilya doesn’t even know what it is at first, only that something inside him quietly gives way, like a tired muscle finally letting go after being clenched for too long. There’s no moment of clarity, no cinematic certainty; just a sudden, bone-deep understanding that the choice has already been made, that whatever he thought he was still weighing tipped the scales minutes ago. Maybe hours. Maybe years.

The world narrows, and the edges blur further. His body feels heavy and light at once, as though it no longer quite belongs to him, and he slides against the tub, porcelain cold against his back, but even that sensation feels distant, dulled. Time has stopped behaving itself.

Shane is moving closer, frantically—Ilya feels the floor creaking, fabric brushing tile, weight dropping beside him, but the bathroom feels too bright and too dim all at once, edges blurring; the buzz of the overhead light stretching into something almost musical, almost soothing. Ilya hates himself for the loosening that comes with it; for the way his shoulders drop as though he’s been carrying something impossibly heavy and has finally decided to set it down.

Reflexes and thought blur, minutes stretching like elastic—until Shane suddenly flickers into the center of it, unbidden, vivid, unignorable, and he feels everything at once.

Love, sharp and immediate, a reflex he doesn’t even question anymore. Resentment, quieter but no less real, curling in his chest like smoke—resentment for how easy it has always been for Shane to want him alive; for how uncomplicated survival seems from the outside; for how his goodness had made the choice so much harder. Guilt, crushing and familiar, because Shane will carry this whether he wants to or not. And beneath it all, shamefully, disastrously—

Relief.

It terrifies him more than anything else. Because if this were only pain, only despair, only anguish, he could explain it away. He could justify it. But relief means this was never just about escaping hurt—it’s about escaping effort; escaping the endless maintenance of being loved by someone who refuses to give up on you.

He looks at Shane, kneeled over him, touching him everywhere, and sees a future unspooling in fragments: Shane, alone in their kitchen weeks from now, staring at a mug that still has his fingerprints on it. Shane in a grocery store, reaching automatically for the brand he prefers and only realizing halfway down the aisle. Shane waking up in the middle of the night with the certainty that something is wrong, that something is missing. Shane, retiring from hockey long before anyone imagined, a shell of a man reshaped by grief, carrying bitter resentment for the sport that took so much time away from him. Shane, thinking about how he'd scaled back his schedule and still it wasn't enough, and I should've just quit hockey altogether, and this is my fault, and one month; one month is a joke; how could I have thought one month was enough?, guilt eating him alive and swallowing him whole. Shane, alone in the cottage, not knowing what to do with the space Ilya used to occupy; late-nights spent questioning where he'd gone wrong, where he'd failed; where it became clear for Ilya their love was not enough to hold on. Shane, years—no, decades—from now, frail of mind, asking after Ilya in moments where lucidity slips away, before realization inevitably dawns and he’s forced to relive the grief all over again; another echo of time's interminable cruelty.

I am so, so sorry.

The memories start bleeding in again, uninvited and relentless.

Saskatchewan, 2008—too young, too cold; Shane’s I’m not sure you’re supposed to smoke here startlingly charming against the winter chill; the way he’d looked at Ilya in the years that followed like he was something rare, like he was someone worth risking it all for every time. Two boys becoming men together, in hotel rooms with thin walls and cheap mattresses and terrible lighting. Shane half-asleep and smiling anyway when Ilya crawls back into bed; an ice rink at dawn, empty except for them—Shane having quietly rented it for a night for Ilya’s birthday after he’d randomly muttered one day he wished they could skate together like they’d done at All Stars all those years ago. Shane skating lazy circles while Ilya watched from the stands and pretended not to stare and just thought I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

The memories don’t come gently. They crash and overlap, smearing together and intruding relentlessly, refusing to stay in the past, and he feels them in his body; in his chest; in the way his throat tightens until it hurts to swallow.

God, he thinks, helplessly, as he's hit by a rush of affection so intense it borders on delirium, God, I love you.

God, you are everything to me. The start; the end; the in-between.

He loves Shane fiercely—enough to want to stop breaking him, shattering pieces of a heart that has already endured too much; enough to want to stop the slow and quiet unraveling of someone who’s already given too much. But he also loves him enough to know, deep in the dark, tangled corner of himself he never dares name out loud, that staying just to hold on, just to survive out of duty or fear or a love that feels more like a chain than a sanctuary, would slowly eat them both alive. He doesn’t want to become the cracked soul Shane has to guard every day; the weight pressing down on his every breath; the storm that never quiets.

A life half-lived, stitched together by obligation and fear and a love that feels like a weight too heavy to bear, would hollow them out until there’s nothing left but a fragile shell, until quiet resignation serves as devotion. Until there’s nothing left but a house made of living, walking ghosts.

He won’t be that ghost. Not when Shane dreams of children; real children, whole and grinning and alive, not just broken promises half-stitched together by tears and hope. Not when he dreams of laughter and noise and chaos echoing through a sunlit house; of a little girl with his stubborn fire; a little boy with his shy smile. Not when he dreams of a family; when he imagines a home brimming with life and love and the kind of messy joy that fills every corner; when he pictures Yuna and David watching their grandchildren play under a golden sun by the lake. Not when he sketches a family woven through time like threads of gold and a life bursting with everything he’s ever hoped for.

He can’t bear the thought of shrinking Shane’s world down to a cage, where every moment is a trap; every silence a warning; every day is a delicate tightrope walk above an abyss. Can’t bear the idea of inadvertently raising new Ilya’s—children who, like him, will grow up scarred and scared, inheriting his shadows and carrying hidden scars that ripple forward, from one generation to the next, until they’re teaching their own children the same careful choreography of fear and self-erasure, unconsciously.

No. Ilya is still conscious. He's still conscious enough for this, and he won't be the reason Shane learns to live on edge and turns into a constant guard against pain. Won't let him inherit a life of endless vigilance, of measuring every quiet, of monitoring every dark moment like a fragile glass about to shatter. Won't let him become a husband tethered by fear or a father burdened by worry. Won't let his children bend themselves into shapes no child should need language for, as he once had, only to grow up resenting him, as he now does. No.

God, Shane as a father. The image burns sharp and bright; a cruel contradiction to the shadows he feels creeping closer. That impossible, fragile dream burns through him like a blade, but it’s a vision Ilya wants to protect, even as it tears him apart.

You will be an amazing father, he wants to say, but his vision dims and his eyes close, and Shane’s voice is there. Not clearly. Not as words. It comes in fragments, syllables breaking apart before they reach meaning, but the shape of it is unmistakable. Shane is screaming his name, and it lands somewhere far away. Ilya has known the shape of Shane’s voice for half his life—the way it dips when he’s scared, tightens when he’s trying not to be, the way his name sounds different in Shane’s mouth than in anyone else’s. That shape reaches for him now.

“I’m here,” Shane is saying, even if the words don’t quite land. “I’m right here, Ilya—just hold on—don’t—don’t close your eyes. Oh my god—”

Ilya wants to answer. The urge is instinctive, almost comical in its persistence — his mind forming the response automatically, like muscle memory.

I'm sorry. I love you. I did not mean to hurt you like this. Kiss Anya for me.

But thought no longer translates cleanly into action. The distance between intention and movement has stretched too wide, like trying to shout across a frozen lake and realizing the sound won’t carry.

“Please, Ilya, please—”

His body feels strange now—heavy in places, absent in others. His hands don’t feel like hands so much as ideas of hands. His mouth doesn’t quite feel attached to him anymore, just something that exists somewhere below his eyes.

“No, please, God, Ilya—!”

There’s a flicker of panic then, brief but sharp; the last flare of instinct clawing upward.

This was not how it was supposed to feel. He thought there would be certainty at the end. Peace, or darkness, or at least clarity. Instead, there’s this liminal, suspended state—half in, half out—where he can still feel Shane’s presence like gravity; like a force pulling at him even as the rest of the world starts to dissolve.

Memory intrudes again, but softer this time. Shane’s hand, warm against his hip in a crowded room. The way he always lets him steal the blankets, even when it left him cold. His quiet, unconscious habit of reaching for him even in his sleep; fingers catching in his shirt and curling into fabric like an anchor, as if letting go had never once been an option. Ilya swaying Shane in his arms at their wedding; the swell of piano—love is touching souls, and surely you touched mine, because part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time… Shane’s face tilted up toward him, open and certain, like the future had already been decided long before either of them had words for it, and Ilya’s heart—God, his heart—that stubborn, disobedient thing, doing what it always did in the presence of him and straining past its own limits, past what it thought was possible, past where he could tell one of them ended and the other began; cracking open and mending in the same breath, expanding again where it had sworn there was nothing left to give. Full, so full, so unbearably, impossibly full; just beating and vibrating and pulsating and rupturing at the sight of his husband in his arms, grinning up at him; his warmth beneath his hands; his breath brushing softly against his throat; his hips swaying easily within the circle of Ilya’s arms, like this was always where he was meant to be; his lips mouthing him beautiful words. You’re in my blood like holy wine… I could drink a case of you, darling, and I would still be on my feet…

I made a life with you, a distant part of Ilya thinks. The thought doesn’t hurt the way it used to. It drifts through him and passes on, like everything else.

The bathroom tilts, or maybe it’s Ilya tilting inside himself. He’s aware, dimly now, of pressure at his shoulder; at his arm. Of Shane’s hands—one shaking his shoulder, the other holding his phone; screaming maniacally about how there’s been an emergency and my partner took pills; sobbing their home address into the phone and repeating it twice when the sudden hiccups rough up the sound of his words.

Shane always had steady hands. Ilya has watched those hands lace skates, sign contracts, cup his face with maddening certainty. It feels wrong to register them like this.

Don't, Ilya wants to say. Please don't remember me like this.

But memory is already forming, already calcifying, already embedding itself and pressing into bone. He can feel it happening—the slow, merciless way our minds harden around fear; the way this moment will lodge itself into Shane’s brain whether either of them wants it to or not. The way it will become a fixed point in his life and surface every now and then in some unrelated quiet.

He hates that. Hates himself for it.

The edges of his vision darken, not all at once but in pulses, like blinking too slowly. Each time the darkness recedes, it comes back stronger, thicker, harder to push through.

He feels cold now. Not literal cold or even the presence of chill; more the absence of warmth entirely. It settles into his limbs and into his chest, beneath his skin, and it makes everything feel farther away. The world is finally, mercifully, letting him go.

Ilya hears his name again, and this time, he doesn’t even register the sound, only the weight of it. The meaning presses against him like a hand against glass: close enough to see, too far to touch.

Shane, I am with you, he thinks, and the thought is oddly calm. I will search for you on whatever life is next, and the one after, and the one after that. I will find you, and I will be better, and I will do this right next time—I promise. Wherever I go next, I will search for you there.

Or, more simply, I love you.

The panic fades, and something gentler than fear replaces it. A loosening, a quiet unspooling; that constant ache he’s carried for so long softening and that background noise beginning to dim, like turning down a volume knob that’s been stuck on high for years.

Ah, he realizes, distantly, weightless. This is what I wanted. For it to stop hurting so much.

The irony—that it's Shane who once made everything bearable, and Shane who now makes even leaving unbearable—registers, but without bitterness now, without panic, not even with regret. The dichotomy swirls inside him, and he just watches it spin, as he’s done so many times.

Ilya thinks, with a strange, aching tenderness, that Shane was the first and only person to give his adult life shape and meaning. The first person who ever made him feel real. Chosen. The first and only person to see him; really see him.

It's only fitting, he thinks hazily, that you are the last.

The sound of his hand giving out and hitting the walls of the bathtub is sharp and small, and the last thing he feels is pressure—fingers curling around his, desperate, grounding, familiar. A tight grip; impossibly tight; impossibly terrified, as if Ilya might slip away if it's loosened for even a second.

You will be okay, Ilya thinks, fading, not because he knows it’s true, but because he needs to believe it. You have always been stronger than you think.

The thought drifts. Then another. Moscow in the summer. Greatness is made of beginnings. His father’s gaze, harsh and loving and proud and tight all the same. The smell of honey cake in his babushka’s oven. The feeling of a boy’s lips on his at thirteen. Pushok, the stray cat he and Andrei used to feed every night; the tuna cans they’d hid in their neighbor’s toolshed and paid for with their birthday money, split evenly. The bakery by his old house, the path drilled into him, memorized: thirty steps from the front door, eight to the right, down the side alley—

Shane, Shane, Shane—

A woman’s voice, a fragile thread of song, lulling him to sleep and singing him a familiar lullaby, weaving through the quiet like a thread of light in the dark. Her tender hands through his unruly curls; tucking him in his bed; her lips brushing his forehead, so softly it feels like air. The faint warmth of her fingertips lingering on his skin. Ilyusha, my love. My darling boy.

He hears it then—Ilyusha, pronounced just right: the l’s,y’s, and u’s rolled exactly as he’d once heard them; exactly as he’d spent the last twenty years echoing in his head.

Мама, he thinks, finally, finding her in the dark. Мама, I missed you. Мама, I forgive you. Мама, I’m coming to see you.

And then—

Nothing; nothing that feels like a thought at all. Just sensation thinning out, sound dissolving.

Nothing, or maybe something softer than nothing, and Ilya lets go.

Ой, the thought comes, somewhere. Оно мягкое. Очень мягкое. Мягкое, как—