Chapter Text
March 2017 – Montreal
Ilya looked down at Shane’s bruised, still face, and all he could think of was his mother.
His reaction was nonsense. Ilya knew this. In every way that mattered, it was not the same thing. His mother had been sprawled on the bathroom floor, half-open eyes dull and unseeing, a sour pool of vomit by her head, body already cool to the touch.
Shane—Shane was alive. He was alive, and in the best hospital in Montreal, and being monitored by a vigilant team of doctors and nurses. The machines that were attached to him proclaimed his life. There was his heartbeat: 62 beats per minute. His blood oxygen was 99%. There were all sorts of other numbers and charts, none of which alarmed the nurse who had bustled in and then bustled out again. That meant that everything was good—except for the fact that Shane had not woken up yet. That, Ilya knew, was very, very bad.
It was the stillness. That limpness. Shane was always so alert: eyes carefully studying the situation, body held taut and quick to react. Now, he was lay unmoving except for the slight rise and fall of his chest.
His arm was in a sling. They would not bother to put a sling on a corpse, Ilya told himself.
None of these facts mattered to the terrified animal that scrabbled inside him, however. Ilya wanted to put his face to Shane’s chest and howl, the way he had howled as a twelve-year-old boy, but he could not. He wanted to reach out and touch Shane, reassure himself that he was still alive, still real and within reach, but he couldn’t do that either, because Shane’s parents were across the bed from Ilya, seated right next to Shane.
It was a small miracle that Ilya had not been immediately thrown out. The shock on their faces when he’d first stepped into the room—Ilya had felt it like a blow.
“Hello, I am Ilya Rozanov,” he’d said, and immediately felt like an idiot. There was no chance Shane Hollander’s parents did not know who he was. Still, he had to observe the niceties. “I come—”
His voice had cracked then. An embarrassment. He’d had to swallow a few times before he could continue.
“I come to check on Hollander. And to give my apologies. Marleau did not mean to hit him like that. He feels very, very bad. We all do.”
Shane’s mother had said nothing; her face had been composed, but her eyes—if looks could kill, Ilya would be dead already, probably without enough pieces left worth burying. Shane’s father, however, had pulled together his composure and said, “Of course. Thank you, Mr. Rozanov. Appreciate the visit.”
It was clearly a lie, and if Ilya were a decent man he would have left them to their worry and their grief. But he was no decent man, and had never pretended otherwise. He was greedy and selfish, so he made his way to the other side of the bed while making polite noises, and Shane’s father—David—had made some polite noises back.
Along the way, Ilya learned a few important things. No, there was no bleeding in Shane’s brain or dangerous swelling; no, he had not woken up yet; no, the sling was not for a broken arm, but a broken collarbone.
After the exchange of information—so dry, so matter of fact, when the inside of Ilya’s head was nothing but a long, continuous howl—a silence fell. Cocooned in that silence, Ilya stood beside Shane: less than a foot away, yet separated by a chasm that might as well have been a million miles across.
The silence lengthened, became unbearable. Ilya needed to leave, but to move away was agony. So, too, had it been with his mother; he had clawed and kicked and fought like a crazed animal when they had tried to pull him away from her.
But he was no longer a child, he was a grown man, and Shane was not dead. He was alive. Ilya would repeat this to himself as many times as it took for it to sink in. Shane was alive, he was being cared for, and Ilya could not stay, because the situation was passing beyond uncomfortable to downright odd.
He forced himself to take a step away from the bed. “Thank you for letting me visit, Mr. and Mrs. Hollander,” he said. “I am sorry again. Very, very sorry.”
“I know Marleau didn’t mean it,” said Shane’s father. He sounded sincere, but also exhausted—worn out and a little afraid. Shane’s mother had not looked at Ilya again after that first murderous glance. “It means a lot that you came to check on Shane in person.”
Ilya nodded, began walking towards the door, then stopped. Before he could change his mind, he turned to Shane’s father and said, “Mr. Hollander, can I give you my phone number?”
Shane’s father looked confused, but said, “Yes, of course.”
“Thank you. When Shane wakes up, please text me or call me. I will appreciate it very much.” When, Ilya told himself. When, when, when. Not if. When.
David’s face cleared. “Absolutely. Here, let me give you my number, and if you text me now, I’ll add you to my contacts.”
“Thank you,” said Ilya. He searched his brain furiously for more words, better words, to express his gratitude, but finally had to settle on a second “Thank you.”
He sent the text (Hello, this is Ilya Rozanov), confirmed that David had received it, then nodded one more time, turned around, and walked away. Out the door, out of the hospital, and eventually onto a plane that took him out of the province and out of the country.
But Ilya knew the truth. No matter where he was, part of him remained always with Shane at his bedside.
###
The days passed slowly, dragging Ilya along with them like an unwilling man across concrete. He played the best he could, which was to say very badly, but not as badly as Marleau. They lost one game, and then another. Nobody in the locker room could meet his eyes, or Marleau’s. He couldn’t blame them; he couldn’t bring himself to look at Marleau either, or himself, for that matter.
Ilya tried to make himself care, and found that he could not. Hockey, for so long his one refuge from the feelings that threatened to crush him, no longer became the place into which he could pour his energy and his will.
He could not stop playing in his mind, over and over, the look Shane gave Ilya as he flew across the neutral zone. The horrible crunch as Marleau slammed into him. How still he had lain on the ice after, crumpled and strangely small against the pale expanse. A discarded napkin.
Had Ilya distracted him? He could not shake the feeling that if he had done something different, tried harder somehow, he could have stopped it. Saved Shane. If he had been faster on the face-off; stolen the puck; not been so distracted by Shane’s smile, the gleam in his eyes, the spray of freckles across his nose and cheeks.
Ilya became attuned to every buzz and beep on his phone. It was the first thing he looked at when he woke up, which he did, often—he lost the ability to sleep more than two hours at a stretch—and the last thing he checked before he fell into restless, unsatisfying sleep. No word from Shane’s father.
He combed every news story and set Google alerts for Shane’s name. He began to track every Shane Hollander hashtag on Twitter. He created a Reddit account and joined r/MontrealMetros, where he read every piece of gossip and speculation on Shane’s condition, along with an avalanche of hatred: for the Raiders, for Marleau, for himself.
The vitriol did not bother him. There was nothing they could say that could outdo what he thought about himself. They wanted him dead? Get in line behind him, he thought with black humor.
Sveta visited him; they had dinner. She asked him, with an unbearable kindness in her eyes, how he was doing. Ilya had shrugged and looked at her as if she were stupid for asking such a question, then changed the subject. Her lips had tightened, but she did not bother pursuing the matter further. They talked hockey, of course.
The entire time, a vision of a crumpled heap in Metros blue continually played behind Ilya’s eyes.
###
He broke within the week. There was a rare three-day break between games. Ilya excused himself, vaguely implying that he had estate matters to see to, rented the most boring car he could find, and began to drive northwards.
Once he disentangled himself from the eternal hellish snarl that was Boston traffic and began to pick up speed on 89, he discovered that there was something meditative about driving such a long distance. Music kept him company at first. Songs from his childhood and early teens; some heavy metal, a lot of rap and hip hop—Missy Elliott and Jay-Z and Ludacris, songs he had not listened to in years. They brought back memories of sharing earbuds with Sveta as they listened to the CDs she had smuggled back from her trips to the United States or had pirated off the Internet.
But after a time the music grated on his nerves, so for the last half of the journey he drove with only the demons in his head for company.
He arrived at the hospital in the late afternoon. The sun hovered at the horizon, a giant crimson ball that washed the hospital buildings in blood-red light. Ilya was not superstitious, not by hockey player standards, but it was difficult not to take the strange sun as a bad omen.
The same nurse who showed him to Shane’s room the first time was there again. She looked a little surprised, but took him back without comment. There was nobody else in Shane’s room. Perhaps his parents were at dinner; perhaps they had given up on the vigil. Ilya was grateful for the moment of privacy—for the opportunity to take in the sight of Shane without having to control his every expression, or suppress the shaking in his hands.
The bruises on Shane’s face were fading into lurid yellows and greens, but otherwise he looked much the same. Eyes closed, body limp. Wires and tubes snaking into and out of his body; pouches of fluids on poles and machines on wheels next to him.
“Shane,” Ilya said softly, and then said, in Russian, because English was beyond him at the moment: “I am sorry.”
Nothing. No response, only the slow, even cadence of Shane’s breaths. Of course. Ilya knew, in the rational parts of his brain, that Shane could not hear him. But the irrational child inside him raged anyway.
He reached out and touched Shane’s good hand. It was warm and dry. Nothing like the unnatural coolness of his mother’s hand on that worst day of all days. It was oddly reassuring, to feel that difference for himself.
He slid their fingers together; clasped his hand around Shane’s.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, this time in English. Just in case Shane could hear him, it would be good if his beautiful boring man could understand him. Just in case. “I wish this did not happen. If only I was faster that day—if I can go back—go back in time.”
He lost all words then. A thick clot filled his throat, choking everything out, including his breath. He squeezed Shane’s hand very, very gently. He could feel the calluses on his fingers, near-mirrors to his own.
“I love you,” he said in Russian, because English was beyond him again. “The last time I said this, you could still hear me, but I made sure you could not understand because I cannot bear the thought of you knowing. But now…perhaps you will never know. And I cannot bear the thought of that, either.”
He let out a breath. “I am stupid. Very stupid, and a coward. A stupid coward who loves you.”
On impulse, he leaned down and brushed his lips against Shane’s forehead. The softest kiss, there and then gone. He remembered the fairy tales his mother used to tell him as a child—about the power of kisses and true love.
He knew now exactly how far that power extended.
“I love you,” Ilya said in English. And then again, for good measure. “I love you.”
He watched Shane for a few more moments—memorizing the precious lines of his face, the constellation of freckles, the rhythm of his breaths. Just in case, just in case.
He was about to disengage his hand from Shane’s when he felt something. A twitch of a finger? Ilya froze and leaned closer. Did Shane’s mouth move, was that a flutter of an eyelid? Or was Ilya hallucinating from love-sickness and lack of sleep?
No, Shane’s mouth was definitely moving, his fingers now twitching repeatedly in Ilya’s hand. His eyelids fluttered once and then again; his head rolled from side to side.
Unable to move, barely able to breathe, Ilya watched all of this. Hope, terrible and enormous, swelled in his chest.
Shane’s eyes finally opened, his gaze bleary at first and wandering all over the room, as if they had forgotten how to focus. They eventually fell on Ilya, and he frowned. Ilya realized then that he was smiling—no, he was grinning, he was grinning so widely that his cheeks hurt, which must be a terrifying sight to someone who had been unconscious for a week. He probably looked like a serial killer, or a psychotic clown from one of the unwatchable horror movies Connors loved so much. He battled his smile down into a more reasonable expression.
“Shane,” he said. “You’re awake.”
Shane blinked. The look of confusion on his face intensified. No joy, no recognition, no spark of pleasure at seeing Ilya—when had he started taking that look for granted? How many years had that been there, unnoticed and unremarked until it was suddenly gone?
Deep in Ilya’s stomach, a kernel of dread began to form. He released Shane’s hand but not his gaze.
“Rozanov?” Shane finally said, his voice cracked and rusty. He licked his lips. “What…what’s going on?” He tried to move, only to wince. “What are you doing here?”