Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

By the time Shane notices Ilya is gone, he has already spent fifteen minutes assuming he'll turn back up.

The gala is big enough to lose people in for a while, all chandeliers and donor smiles and politely circulating trays. People drift. Conversations multiply. Doors keep opening into other rooms.

Ilya could be anywhere. At the bar. Cornered by some sponsor. Outside smoking and pretending not to. Shane has, in fact, spent the better part of the last month learning that if he gives Ilya ten minutes, Ilya usually comes back, like a stray cat if he thinks about it.

So yes, at first he assumes it's temporary.

Rose is talking to someone from a foundation whose name Shane immediately forgets, nodding at exactly the right intervals and somehow making earnest philanthropy sound almost interesting. Shane glances over her shoulder once. Then again.

No Ilya.

Bathroom maybe?

He waits another few minutes, lets himself get trapped in a conversation about youth hockey funding, escapes it with what he hopes is not a visible degree of relief, and looks around again to find nothing. No sign of broad shoulders he's intimately familiar with, no head of blond curls he wants nothing more than to sink his fingers into, no quirked smirk, no blue eyes that defnitely see too much.

Nothing.

The room, which had already been too bright, goes a little sharper around the edges. Rose must see something in his face because when she gets free of her conversation she comes over and says, low enough that no one else hears, "What's wrong?"

Shane looks past her, scanning the room one more time.

"I can't find him."

Rose follows his line of sight without making it obvious. Her expression stays smooth. "Maybe he stepped out?"

"Maybe."

But it doesn't sound right even to him.

Because Ilya had not looked like someone planning to leave. He had looked—Shane stops himself there, because this is not the place to start cataloguing looks, but still. The night had been fine. Better than fine. Easy, mostly. Rose had seemed to like him. Ilya had seemed to like Rose. Shane had let himself relax into that in a way that now feels, in hindsight, suspiciously careless.

Rose says, "Do you want me to—"

"No." Shane shakes his head once. "No, it's okay."

She studies him for half a second longer, then nods. "Okay. But if you need help, just shout for me."

That gets the smallest pull at one corner of his mouth.

"Thanks."

"You're welcome." She touches his arm once, quick and warm. "Go."

At first it's still a search.

The bar. The hall outside the ballroom. The lobby. The hotel bathroom corridor, where one woman is crying and Shane feels his muscles seize awkwardly.

Then he sees Scott Hunter near the elevators talking to two men in tuxedos and goes over.

"Hey, have you seen Rozanov?"

Hunter looks at him. "A while ago, yeah."

Shane's stomach drops an inch. "Where?"

Hunter shrugs one shoulder. "Leaving, I think."

"Leaving?"

"Yeah." Hunter frowns. "You didn't know?"

"What does that mean?"

Hunter lifts both hands slightly around his drink. "Nothing. Just thought you would."

Shane stares at him for half a second, then says, "Right," because anything else would require a level of explanation that is not remotely survivable in this hallway.

He texts as soon as he steps away.

Shane: Are you okay?

The message delivers immediately but he doesn't get a reply.

He waits through one elevator ride and half the hotel lobby.

Still nothing.

Rose finds him near the entrance ten minutes later, coat over one arm now, earrings gone, looking like the polished public version of herself has started loosening around the edges.

"No sign?"

Shane shakes his head.

She frowns. "That's weird."

"Yes."

"You text him?"

"Yes."

"No answer?"

"No."

Rose slips her coat on. "That is weird."

The repetition should not help. It does, slightly, because hearing it from someone else confirms that Shane is not being ridiculous. Or not uniquely ridiculous, anyway.

"I'm going to go," he says.

Rose looks at him. "Back to your room?"

And because she is Rose and Shane is tired and annoyed and not interested in pretending to be especially opaque tonight, he says, "No."

Her eyebrows lift.

Then, with almost admirable restraint, she does not say anything smug at all. "Okay."

"Can I get you a car?"

She snorts. "I am an adult woman, Shane."

"I know."

"I'll be fine."

He hesitates.

Rose softens. "Go."

So he does.

Boston at night in a suit feels faintly absurd, like he is playacting adulthood in a new city. The car ride is short and takes too long anyway. He checks his phone three times in the back seat and gets nothing but a text from JJ that says:

JJ: where did u vanish??????

Shane ignores that.

He gets out in front of Ilya's building with the collar of his coat turned up against the wind and tells himself, firmly and pointlessly, that this is a reasonable thing to do.

He is not stalking anyone. He is absolutely not overreacting.
He's just checking on someone who left abruptly and isn't answering his phone.

A perfectly normal thing.

The building is dark, so maybe Ilya isn't home, but Shane knocks anyway. When he doesn't get an answer, he winces and rings the doorbell, then again.

No answer.

He waits five minutes.

Then ten.

Then, because waiting in formalwear has begun to feel actively deranged, he steps back out into the cold and calls.

It rings.

And rings.

And then goes to voicemail.

Shane hangs up without leaving one.

Okay, now he's annoyed.

He calls again.

Straight to voicemail.

He stares at the phone, then at the dark windows him. The whole building looks sealed. Expensive. Untouched. Like no one inside it has ever once made a mess of his own life.

Shane texts: Let me know you got home okay at least?

And because that somehow still doesn't seem like enough, adds, after a second: Or if you want me to go?

Did something happen?

Did I do something?

He does not send.

That would be too much.

He stands there another few minutes anyway, hands in his coat pockets, staring at nothing useful while cars hiss by on wet pavement. The cold gets into his ears.

No reply. No light. No sign of movement.

Eventually, even Shane has to admit that there is no version of this where waiting longer on the sidewalk becomes less pathetic or more effective.

He gets back in the car and goes to hotel.

Sleep does not happen.

He lies in the dark with the tie finally off and the suit jacket over a chair and thinks through the evening in ugly little loops, looking for the point where it changed.

Nothing obvious presents itself.

Rose had been lovely. Ilya had seemed—Shane stops there again.

He had seemed fine, no?

At 2:17 a.m. he checks his phone again.

Nothing.

At 3:04, still nothing.

At 6:11, when the room has only just started to pale at the windows, his first clear thought is not anger at being ignored but something much less pleasant.

He sits up before he has fully decided to and reaches for the phone again.

Still nothing from Ilya.

The phone buzzes again.

Face-down on the couch, it sounds muffled and irritating, a trapped mechanical insect somewhere behind him.

Ilya doesn't move.

For one second, he lets himself pretend it's Shane again. Another text. Another small careful reach he is too raw and angry and ashamed to answer tonight.

The buzzing stops.

The apartment goes quiet.

Then it starts again.

He swears softly under his breath, crosses the room, and snatches the phone off the cushion, ready to snarl something mean and angry.

The screen lights his hand blue-white in the dark.

Alexei.

For one stupid, really stupid, suspended second, Ilya thinks: Shane found another number?

Then he answers, hears his brother breathe once on the other end of the line, and the whole shape of the night changes before a word is even said.

"Ilya."

Alexei almost never sounds uncertain. Cold, yes. Irritated, often. Smug, by default. But uncertain is rare enough that Ilya goes very still before his brother has even gotten to the point.

"What?"

A pause, and then, flatly, as if saying it that way might somehow make it less absurd, less final, less like one more family disaster he had both been prepared and unprepared for:

"Father died an hour ago."

The words hit him without meaning anything at first.

It's not that he doesn't understand them. He understands them immediately. Too immediately. It's meaning that lags behind, stumbling uselessly several steps back while the rest of him has already gone cold.

He says nothing.

Alexei takes that for permission to keep going.

"He stopped breathing in his sleep. The nurse found him. The doctor signed the papers already."

Still, Ilya says nothing.

There should, probably, be some feeling recognizable enough to name. Relief. Guilt. Satisfaction. Grief. Some clean emotional response suitable for a son receiving news of his father's death after years of dementia had already been eating the man in pieces.

Instead there is only a kind of stunned internal silence, as if his body has gone into lockdown to stop anything larger from getting in.

"When?" he asks finally, and is almost startled by how normal his own voice sounds.

"I said. An hour ago." Then, clipped and practical: "The burial is in three days. Book a flight tonight."

Ilya closes his eyes.

The dark apartment presses in around him. Shane's unanswered text still sits in his chest like a lit wick. Somewhere inside that, the image of Rose in Shane's arms still burns, though dimmer now, abruptly overrun by something older and heavier and much less romantic.

"Alright," he says.

"There is paperwork. Do not make this more difficult than it already is. I already spoke with a priest. You need to pay him when you arrive."

The order of it all is so familiar it almost makes Ilya laugh.

Instead he says nothing.

Years of history pile up in the silence. Their mother. Their father. The long humiliating decline of a man who had once filled every room by force and then dwindled into confusion and rage and blankness. Everything they have never once discussed correctly and never will.

Alexei hangs up.

The apartment is quiet again.

Ilya stands in the middle of it with the phone still at his ear long enough for the screen to go dark, and then lower it slowly and look at nothing.

Father is dead.

He tries the sentence on internally. It still does not fit.

Grigori Rozanov is dead.

That gets a little closer. Not warmth, nor grief, but there's a shape—something real enough to scrape against.

His father is dead and Ilya is standing in a dark apartment in Boston in a suit he wore to a gala and he's heartbroken about Shane Hollander.

The thought is so grotesque it nearly tips over into laughter.

Instead he drops into the nearest chair as if somebody cut a wire in him and sits there bent forward, forearms on his knees, the phone hanging loose in one hand.

Nothing arrives.

There are no tears, no dramatic shattering, no cinematic flood of old hurt breaking open under the news. It's really just shock, and the shock itself is surprising.

And under it, obligation, already moving.

Flight.

Passport.

Bag.

Call Svetlana.

Call the team.

Tell someone something.

There is a practical cruelty to death in bad families. Even grief, if it ever arrives, has to wait its turn behind logistics.

His phone is still unlocked.

Shane's message is there, bright and patient and terrible.

Jane: Are you okay?

Ilya stares at it until the words blur slightly.

The answer is suddenly so obviously no! that the question feels almost funny.

He types nothing.

He does not have the strength, all at once, to answer Shane about Rose and the gala and humiliation and now this. He cannot open that door too. He can barely stand up.

Instead he swipes the notification away, and makes himself get to his feet.

The first call is to Svetlana.

She answers on the second ring with, "If this is you bragging about your Jane at the gala—"

"Sveta."

Whatever she hears in his voice wipes the joke out of her instantly.

"What happened?"

He leans his free hand against the counter and says, "My father died."

Silence, followed by a very soft, "Oh."

He closes his eyes.

"Alexei called."

"When?"

"Just now." He swallows once. "I have to go."

"Alright." Her voice shifts fast, into that steelier register he has heard her use with salesmen and bad men and dismissive doctors. "Okay. Tell me what you need."

The words nearly undo him, not because he knows the answer but because no one else would ask it that way. (Well, one person would, but he's not his anyway, so what does it matter?)

"I don't know yet," he says.

"That's fine. Do you have a flight?"

"No."

"Book it while I'm on the phone."

So he does.

Opens his laptop. Navigates to the airline site. Pulls his passport from the drawer by the hall. His hands working with eerie steadiness while his mind lags several steps behind, unable to fully connect this ugly practical flurry to the blunt fact sitting at the center of it.

Moscow. There's a flight in four hours.

He books it.

"Done," he says.

"Good." Svetlana is quiet for a second. "Do you want me to come over?"

He looks around the dark apartment. At the couch. The shoes still on his feet. The jacket still on his body. The whole room still holding the stale aftermath of a night that now feels like it happened to someone else.

"No," he says.

"You sure?"

No.

"Yes."

She exhales and lets him keep the lie."Call me from the airport."

"Okay."

"Ilyusha?"

He waits.

Her voice softens. "You don't have to feel anything specific tonight."

It's not comfort exactly. More like permission to stop trying to locate the correct response in a family that has never once offered him a correct way to feel.

"Okay," he says again, and this time it comes out rougher.

When he hangs up, the apartment is quiet for maybe ten seconds before it all starts again.

Team text first.

Short and impersonal: Family death. Need to leave tonight.

Another to management.

Then the suitcase.

He packs badly, which is how he knows somewhere in the back of his mind that this is serious. He usually packs with the economical precision of a man who has spent his whole adult life in hotels. Tonight he throws things in. Black sweater. Black shirt. Black coat. Toiletries. Chargers. The nice watch he hates and wears to funerals because that's what a summoned son does when returning to one's father's grave.

He changes out of the suit.

The tie comes off first, then the shirt, then the trousers in an ugly heap on the bedroom floor.

The sight of them there does something sharp and immediate to him, because suddenly the whole evening rushes back in around the edges of the death.

Rose in green silk.

Shane's arm around her waist.

His own idiotic hope, his own exit, his own silence.

And underneath that, quieter but somehow worse: Shane had texted. Shane had noticed. Shane had cared enough to ask.

Ilya kicks the heap away then sits down on the bed in a clean black T-shirt and stares at the phone now lying beside his passport.

He could answer.

He could type: my father died.

Three words. Three manageable words, objective, almost bloodless.

He picks the phone up.

Unlocks it.

Jane: Are you okay?

The cursor waits.

Ilya's thumbs hover over the keyboard then stop.

Because if he sends that, Shane becomes real again in tonight. Not just hurt and maybe misunderstanding and the convenient cruelty of the gala image, but Shane as he has actually been for the last month—trying, reaching, steady, bright-eyed over FaceTime, asking him to come to the cottage, texting him thoughts as if there might genuinely be a place for Ilya in the ordinary middle of his life.

And Ilya cannot bear that right now, not on top of this, not while the old country is already opening its mouth to swallow him whole and old wounds have ripped themselves open to bleed him dry.

So he locks the phone again and tosses it into the suitcase, even though that doesn't makes sense but he suddenly cannot stand to keep seeing it.

A car takes him to the airport less than an hour later.

Boston is black and wet at this time of night, all ugly light and empty intersections and the ugly shine of city roads after midnight. He sits in the back seat with his coat on and his suitcase beside him and watches his reflection stutter in and out of the window glass.

Father is dead. Hm.

Still nothing, or… not nothing.

Something harder to sort. A knot of old fear and irritation and guilt and a child's useless primitive grief, not for the man Grigori Rozanov became or always was, but for the simple impossible fact that there will now never be any later version of the story. No repair. No final reckoning. No sudden miraculous scene of paternal recognition in which his father looks at him and, against every available piece of evidence, decides to love him properly after all.

Not that Ilya had believed in that. He's not stupid.

But death closes even the stupid doors.

The airport is too bright for this night. Everything in it happens by muscle memory: Check-in. Passport. Security. Gate.

He buys coffee he doesn't want, so he doesn't drink it.

His phone stays buried in the bag until he is seated on the plane and then it stays buried in his pocket until the overhead bins are closed and there is nowhere left to move.

Only then does he take it out again.

Three more messages.

One from his coach.
Three from Marly.
One from Svetlana.
One from Shane.

His pulse misfires.

He opens that one first.

Jane: Let me know you got home okay at least?

He stares at it until boarding static crackles overhead and someone two rows back argues about carry-on space in a voice bright with the conviction that their inconvenience matters.

Shane had been waiting for an answer to one disaster while another, much older one, was already crashing into this forsaken night.

For a second he thinks, absurdly: what if I told him now?

Here, thirty thousand feet from courage, buckled into place, beyond undoing. How much worse can it get, really?

But the engine whines louder, the plane shudders once as it starts to push back, and the moment passes.

Ilya types only one message before switching to airplane mode.

Not to Shane, to Sveta.

Ilya: boarding

Then he puts the phone in his pocket again and closes his eyes as the plane begins to move.

Below him, somewhere in Boston, Shane Hollander is still a problem he does not know how to solve.

Ahead of him, Russia waits with a coffin and a brother and all the old versions of himself he had been hoping, for one beautiful stupid month, that he might have finally outskated.

He presses his head back against the seat and thinks, not for the first time in his life, that timing is a particularly vicious form of fate.

By the time the plane lifts off, he still has not answered Shane, and the worst part is that some small exhausted piece of him already misses him.

By the time Shane gets back to Montreal, the silence has started to feel personal in ways he does not enjoy examining.

It's not an open wound quite yet. Shane is still capable of functioning. He gets off the plane. He goes home. He unpacks. He gets up the next morning. He does video review. He laces his skates. He lives, apparently, in a world still willing to proceed without first settling the matter of why Ilya Rozanov walked out of a gala and then disappeared off the face of the earth.

Ilya has not answered.

Not the text from the gala. Not the one after. Not the next morning. Not the stupidly careful, deliberately undemanding one Shane sent from the airport before boarding the team flight home.

It has him unmoored, and the problem is that Shane has, over the last month, gotten used to a certain shape of things. Nothing large enough that someone else might notice it with a naked eye, but he'd gotten used to the patterns; the routine.

A late-night text from some hotel room somewhere with a joke too stupid to be worth sending to anyone else. The particular quiet relief of seeing Lily at the top of his phone. The even more specific relief of watching Ilya come back after drifting off somewhere, as if the room reorients itself every time he does.

Shane had not realized how quickly a person could become accustomed to being found.

Now he does.

So, now, he also knows how unpleasant it feels when that particular pattern breaks.

The Metros room before morning skate is loud in the usual ugly way, full of velcro ripping and loud chriping that, frankly, should be saved for opposing teams. Shane sits at his stall retaping his stick slower than necessary and checks his phone once more before forcing himself to put it facedown beside him.

In theory, he should be angry by now, but in reality, he's starting to feel so worried in a way that's beginning to feel like an illness.

And it doesn't help that the room around his has suddenly found a new point of interest in the shape of all that's plaguing his mind.

Rozanov didn't fly out with Boston.

That fact moves through the Metros in waves, growing louder and dumber each time it changes mouths. A chirp from one side of the room becomes speculation from the other. Someone says maybe he finally got suspended for sleeping with a married woman. Someone else wonders whether he fucked a teammates WAG and they're trying to keep it hush hush. There's laughter that's starting to grate on Shane, and he wants nothing more than to tell them all to shut the fuck up because Ilya is not like that.

He keeps his head down.

Usually, he lets this kind of thing burn itself out anyway. The room is the room. If he intervened every time one of his teammates said something stupid, he would never have time to do literally anything else.

JJ is halfway into his base layer when he says, louder than necessary, "No, seriously. I heard something."

That cuts through the noise in a different way that Shane looks up before he can stop himself.

JJ notices, because unfortunately JJ notices anything worth weaponizing for social use, and instantly looks more pleased to have an audience.

"One of the Bears guys knows someone on their staff," he says. "Apparently there was a death in the family."

The air in the room changes. Even here, even with men like these, death still has the power to drag the stupid out of the air for half a second.

Shane feels the whole internal shape of the last two days rearrange itself around the sentence.

A death in the family. Oh. Fuck.

"Shit," says one of the defensemen quietly.

"Yeah," JJ says, and his voice has gone flatter now. "So maybe don't be assholes about it."

That should have been enough. It would have been enough in a better room.

Comeau snorts from where he's lacing his skates and says, "Good. Hope he stays gone."

The sentence barely finishes existing before Shane says, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

Somehow, a room of 23 men goes so silent, Shane can hear his own heartbeat.

Comeau looks up, more surprised than ashamed, which is somehow worse.

Shane is already on his feet.

He had not, consciously, decided to stand. His body got there first. Which is, in retrospect, maybe the most alarming part.

Comeau blinks at him. "What?"

Shane takes one step forward.

Someone's tape roll drops somewhere to his left and keeps rolling a little across the floor.

"You heard me," Shane says.

He doesn't raise his voice nor does he need to. That's the thing about being captain for years, about being the one who doesn't waste authority on nonsense: when he does spend it, everyone notices.

Comeau gives a short incredulous laugh, the kind men use when they are trying to figure out whether they're actually in trouble.

"I'm just saying—"

"No," Shane cuts in. "You're being a piece of shit."

Comeau straightens, skates half-done. "I didn't mean—"

"I don't care what you meant." Shane's voice stays flat, which is probably why it sounds angrier than if he'd snapped. "Someone in his family died."

Comeau glances around the room for backup, but everyone is shifting from one foot to the other, interested in anything else outwardly.

Shane keeps going.

"If you can't manage basic decency for five minutes, keep your mouth shut."

The silence after that is stunned.

Comeau mutters, "Fine, whatever," but the word lands weak and small and not remotely equal to the space he took up with the first one.

Shane holds his gaze for one more second, long enough to make it clear that fine is not remotely the point, then turns away before he says something worse.

His pulse is too high.

That annoys him too.

He sits back down and reaches for his stick again, though there is nothing left to tape.

The room stutters awkwardly back into motion around him. Someone changes the music. Someone asks about the new shower soap in a voice that sounds determinedly normal. Hockey rooms are, at heart, cowards when confronted with actual feeling.

Hayden crosses over and stops near Shane's stall.

"That was a lot," he says quietly.

Shane keeps his eyes on the tape in his hands. "He deserved it."

"Yeah," Hayden says. "He did."

Then, lower: "You okay?"

Shane almost laughs because apparently every question in his life has become that question, and he has yet to develop an answer that is either useful or true.

"No," he says before he can stop himself.

Hayden goes quiet while Shane stares at the blade of his stick and hears the word sitting between them with more honesty than he had intended to offer anyone in this room.

Then, because he cannot leave it there without feeling absurdly exposed, he adds, "Not really."

Hayden assesses him quietly, leaning one shoulder against the next stall.

"That sucks," he says.

Shane nods once.

It does, because now he knows enough for the worry to have shape but not enough to do anything useful with it. A death in the family. That means Ilya is in Russia, probably. Dealing with a funeral, wills, and somehow, all the ugly machinery of loss is suddenly explaining the silence and everything is worse for it because Shane has spent two days thinking the problem was him.

Now the problem is that something terrible happened and Ilya is gone and Shane has no place in that situation except the one he can make for himself from a distance.

Which is not enough.

Worse yet, Ilya hadn't even told him. Didn't think Shane should know, or would want to know. (Didn't think Shane could help?)

Shane reaches for his phone before he can think better of it.

Still nothing from Ilya, no sign that any of Shane's carefully measured messages have landed anywhere but the void.

He opens the thread anyway.

His own texts stare back at him in increasingly stripped-down order.

Ilya, just let me know you're safe.

Did something happen?

Call me when you see this

He doesn't remember sending the last one. Or rather, he remembers sending it; he does not remember deciding to.

His thumb hovers over the keyboard.

What do you write to someone whose father has just died when you don't know if they want you, or can stand you, or are even in a place to answer?

Nothing good presents itself.

That has not, traditionally, stopped him.

He types:

Shane: I heard about your father
Shane: I'm sorry
Shane: You don't have to answer
Shane: I'm here

He stares at it once.

Sends it.

And then, because apparently he is still enough of a romantic idiot to hope for impossible things inside fluorescent morning light and a room full of skates and tape and bad music, he waits half a second with the phone in his hand anyway.

"Five minutes!" one of the assistant coaches calls from the hall.

The room starts moving for real now. Helmets. Gloves. Bodies hauling themselves toward the day because that is what life does: it keeps asking for the next thing.

Shane leaves his phone in his stall and stands.

The bright stupid private ligthness of the last month, and all the little impossible ways Ilya had begun to fit himself into the shape of Shane's life, has not vanished.

But it has changed. Became a little heavier, maybe. More real. A lot less like a secret pleasure and more like something the world can actually hurt.

Shane follows the team out toward the ice with that knowledge sitting in him like a stone.

For once, he is so grateful to how Moscow receives him without ceremony and very little fanfare, even if he's been hailed their team's pride and joy had he not lost to fucking Latvia.

The airport is busy, the taxi line too long, the air outside sharp with cold and exhaust and that particular winter dampness that always makes the city smell faintly metallic, as if the whole place has been left too long and was beginning to oxidize. Ilya stands on the curb with his bag and his coat zipped to the throat and feels, with immediate bodily certainty, that he has made a mistake.

Not that coming back was ever optional, but being here definitely feels wrong in a way that makes his skin itch.

The driver does not talk. Thank God for small mercies. Moscow slides past the window in smeared gray ribbons of traffic and dirty snow and apartment blocks, familiar in the way fading bruises are familiar. Ilya had kept the apartment because of course he had. Rich men and damaged men are both very good at convincing themselves that maintaining a foothold somewhere means they still have choices.

When he lets himself in, the place smells closed-up and faintly stale, like air that has gone too long without being breathed by anyone who lives there on purpose. He drops his bag inside the door and stands for a second in the silence, looking at the neat furniture and the clean kitchen and the untouched surfaces.

His phone buzzes once in his pocket.

He doesn't take it out.

Instead he goes to the bathroom, washes his face in cold water, changes his shirt, and stares at himself in the mirror until his own reflection starts to look like a distant relative he was once warned about as a child.

Then he grabs his keys and goes back out.

The house he grew up in is still exactly where he left it, and it feels a lot smaller than the massive expanse that used to suffocate his lungs.

He lets himself in with the old key. That, more than anything, twists something unnamable in him. The fact that the key still works. That this place, which has spent years making itself less and less his, still opens to his hand on the first try like nothing has changed.

His first real thought is that it's too warm inside, like he's being embalmed. The hallway runner is the same. The umbrella stand is the same. A gilt-framed mirror still hangs crookedly near the front closet because his father had once slammed the door hard enough to rattle the wall and no one had ever bothered to fix it.

It's all intact, and he hates it, because his mother was erased here, layer by layer until she was gone altogether.

He closes the door softly behind him and stands in the hall listening—nothing.

No voices. No footsteps. No television muttering in another room. The house feels temporarily abandoned, paused between ownerships, and that makes it easier somehow. He had not wanted witnesses for this. Not Alexei. Certainly not Polina.

He takes off his gloves, slips them into his coat pocket, and walks slowly toward the back of the house.

The library is where he goes first. He doesn't expect anything, because he has learned, over years of losing things in increments, that expectation is a good way to make disappointment feel theatrical.

He is not here to be theatrical.

He is here because the man that used to sleep upstairs is dead and because he is not sure, with a clarity that feels almost physical, that he will ever willingly set foot in this house again.

If there is anything of hers left, he wants it now.

The library still smells like old paper and radiator heat and dust. Most of the room remains what his father had wanted it to be: polished shelves, handsome spines, the visual suggestion of seriousness. But a small part of it used to be hers. A chair by the window. A lamp too soft for Grigori's taste. Lower shelves where books had once gathered in crooked stacks because Irina had actually read them and never cared much about returning them properly.

The chair is gone.

So is the lamp.

The space where they should be is clean in the way absence is clean.

Ilya stands in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and feels the air thin a little in his chest, so he heaves a breath and goes in and starts looking.

At first he looks badly. Too fast, too angry, fingers skimming over spines, pulling books free and shoving them back, checking low shelves and side tables and drawers with a kind of contained urgency that would embarrass him if anyone were here to see it.

There is no reason there should be anything left.

Polina never liked traces of Irina in the house.
His father liked them even less.

But still, he would never forgive himself if he didn't check.

Behind two heavy volumes of military history, shoved almost sideways into the shelf as if hidden in haste and forgotten there, he finds a faded clothbound copy of Anna Karenina.

His hands are surprisingly steady as he pulls it free.

The cover is worn white at the corners. The spine is cracked. When he opens it, the pages give with that soft old-paper resistance that belongs to books actually handled by human hands. And there, in the margin halfway through the first chapter, in pencil gone pale with time, is his mother's handwriting.

Small, slanted, looping Cyrillic, so familiar that it knocks the breath out of him.

He stares at it until he can't anymore and turns the page.

There's another note. Then another a little later, drier, sharper, exactly like her voice at its most amused.

A laugh gets out of him before he can stop it. It sounds wrong in this room, this house. Or maybe it's just right; thin and startled and too close to breaking into something else.

He lowers himself into a crouch without meaning to, one hand braced on his knee, the book open in the other. For a moment the whole scene around him disappears—the house, the death, the city, the years—and all that remains is the shape of her mind on paper. She's not even saying anything important. Underlining some line about love or consequence or vanity and writing some merciless little note in the margin as if the book had been having a conversation with her.

He closes it carefully and tucks it under his arm.

After that, the search is a little less frantic.

He checks the sideboard in the sitting room. The drawers of the console near the stairs. The old cedar chest in the downstairs hall where winter things used to be kept. Most of it is junk now—table linens, mismatched gloves, batteries too corroded to save, a stack of holiday cards from people no one had liked even when they were alive.

Then, beneath a pile of old placemats, he finds the scarf.

Blue wool. Narrow. Soft from wear, one edge coming loose where the stitching had frayed.

He lifts it with both hands.

For one absurd second he brings it toward his face like something in him still believes scent might survive decades. It smells like cedar and drawer and old house.

He wraps it once around his neck before he can think better of it.

The wool settles there with immediate familiarity, a weight so light it nearly hurts. He remembers her wearing it rinkside during his practices, cheering him on with a wide smile. He remembers burying his face in it once as a child after falling asleep on the couch, half awake and warm and certain the world could still be organized into categories like mother and home and safe.

That certainty had not lasted. The scarf had, apparently, out of spite or maybe little mercy.

The photographs take longer.

He finds them not in any album but in an old linen closet upstairs, shoved into a storage box with more dead batteries, instruction manuals, spare cords, and one cracked picture frame. It is such a stupid place to put photographs that at first he thinks he has found the wrong box entirely. Then he lifts a stack of receipts and there they are beneath, loose and bent and stuck together at the edges with age.

His knees give out in the hallway. The box settles between them. The scarf is still around his neck. The book rests under his arm like something rescued from a fire.

For a while he just looks.

His mother on the dacha steps with both boys, Alexei already trying to look older than he was, Ilya red-faced and furious about something outside the frame. Irina in a winter coat, laughing at whoever stood behind the camera, eyes squeezed half shut against snowlight. The three of them at a New Year's table before Polina, before the slow collapse, before Grigori's rages became something the whole house learned to live under.

Younger Ilya looks softer than he remembers. Open in a way that feels almost embarrassing now. All big eyes and sunburn and badly hidden feeling, the kind of child who had not yet learned that softness came with a cost.

He smiles a little despite himself.

Shane would have a field day with these.

That thought arrives so naturally it startles him.

Shane squinting at the picture in that concentrated way of his, examining it like evidence. Saying something dry and devastatingly specific in that way of his that makes Ilya's heart lurch. Asking, maybe, to keep one. Or wanting to see another. Wanting proof that Ilya had once been small enough to stand in his mother's shadow and make faces at cameras and burn in summer sun like any other child. Wanting more of Ilya, sharp edges and all.

Ilya wonders, briefly and with a softness he does not trust, whether Shane would show him pictures of himself in return.

A smaller Shane. Awkward maybe. Freckled, definitely. Some Canadian lake somewhere behind him. Shane in a life jacket too big for him and already somehow taking responsibility for everyone else on the dock.

The thought is so gentle it nearly does him more damage than anything else in the house.

He blinks hard and looks back down at the photographs.

There are more here than he can reasonably take. For one hot irrational second he wants all of them. Wants to strip the house clean. Wants to carry every surviving piece of his mother out in his arms and leave the rooms blank behind him.

Then the feeling passes, because he knows, with the same old reluctant generosity that keeps ruining his life in multiple countries, that Alexei was her son too even if he would never come looking.

So Ilya chooses his favorites in rush of selfishness. He slides them carefully into the inside pocket of his coat.

Then, at the bottom of the box, he finds the album.

It is falling apart. The spine is half detached. The plastic sleeves have clouded with age, and one whole corner is held together by tape that has browned into uselessness. It is ridiculous, really, that something this fragile has outlived both marriages and one suicide and one long degrading death.

He lifts it anyway and a few pages come loose in his hands.

"Christ," he mutters softly, and sits there with the album open across his lap, turning pages more carefully now.

Birthday candles. School uniforms. A summer at the sea he had not thought about in years. Irina with both boys asleep on her, head thrown back against the couch cushions, mouth open in exhausted laughter at whoever had the camera. That one hurts so suddenly he has to stop.

Fuck Alexei. He takes the album.

The book and album tucked under one arm. The scarf around his neck. The photos against his chest. It would all be absurd if it didn't feel so much like theft from the dead.

He stands and takes one last look down the hallway, but the house gives nothing back.

No revelation. No blessing. No sign that he has done the right thing. Only overheated air and the old wallpaper and silence.

Fine. He leaves anyway.

He stands on the front steps for a second longer than necessary, key still in his hand, scarf tucked close against his throat, and feels the small strange comfort of having taken something with him that that house can no longer swallow back.

His phone buzzes in his pocket.

He already knows who it is before he looks.

Jane: I heard about your father
Jane: I'm sorry
Jane: You don't have to answer
Jane: I'm here

The universe has a truly mean sense of timing. He wants, suddenly and with humiliating force, to show him all the pieces of Ilya. The proof that once, before all the damage settled in for good, he had simply been somebody's difficult beloved little boy.

He locks the phone without answering, even though he really wants to. Too much, even. But he's in the wrong city, at the wrong time, standing outside the house where every soft thing had eventually been used against someone.

He puts the phone back in his pocket and walks down the steps with the album beginning to shed little flakes of old glue against his coat.

Ahead of him, somewhere across the city, waits a burial and his brother and all the ugliness that follows a death in a family like this one.

But for one brief cold block of Moscow afternoon, Ilya carries his mother home in pieces and lets himself imagine, just for a second, what it might feel like to place those pieces in Shane Hollander's hands and have them held carefully there.

Shane Hollander is a master at compartmentalizing. He makes dinner because he does not know what else to do with his hands.

It's not even an interesting dinner, but it's just fuel for his body anyway. He doesn't need to enjoy it. Salmon, brown rice, broccoli. A little olive oil. Lemon. Salt measured with the same tired precision he uses for everything when his head gets too loud and he needs the world to return to units and times and surfaces he can control.

It would be almost funny, if anyone were here to laugh at him. Him, standing in his kitchen at eight-thirty on a Thursday, checking the oven timer and his phone btoh with equal intensity like either one might save him from himself.

The phone remains useless. He sets the knife down beside the cutting board and picks it up again anyway.

Still nothing.

That should not hurt as much as it does. They're not teens. Shane is not sixteen. He is a grown man, a captain, an adult with a life plan and a very respectable fish fillet in the oven.

Still, there's a humiliatingly specific kind of silence that only comes from one person not texting you back.

He puts the phone face-down on the counter and forces himself to plate the food.

His own place has never felt large, exactly, but tonight it feels arranged around absence. Too much space where there should, irrationally, maybe be someone leaning against the fridge saying something terrible about steamed broccoli.

He thinks of Ilya in Russia and has to stop moving for a second. It makes him frown though he can't name why. He stabs the broccoli harder than necessary and sits down.

The first bite tastes like duty. He eats three more before giving up and setting the fork down.

The phone sits on the table now, within reach but facedown still, as if keeping the screen hidden counts as restraint. Shane stares at it.

Calling would be too much, right?

No—maybe not too much exactly. Just intrusive, selfish. Calling would satisfy Shane's need to hear him, not necessarily help Ilya. And the whole point, Shane reminds himself for what feels like the thousandth time in the last two days, is that this is not about Shane.

He still picks the phone up.

Puts it down again.

Picks it up.

Opens the message thread.

Nothing.

His thumb hovers over Ilya's name.

He could call and say nothing complicated. Just check in. Just hear his voice. Just—

The screen lights up in his hand.

Lily calling.

For one wild second Shane just stares at it.

Then he answers so fast he nearly drops the phone.

"Ilya?" His heart is pounding way too hard for an athlete of his aptitude.

"Hi."

The voice on the other end is low and rough and wrong in a way that goes straight through Shane's ribs. It doesn't sound like he'd been crying—not even close. But the timbre of it is scraped down to something thin and exhausted, as if every unnecessary word has already been used up somewhere else.

Shane stands so quickly his chair legs drag against the floor.

"Hey," he says, already softer. "Hey."

He can hear Ilya breathing. Something in the background too—traffic, maybe, muted through glass.

Shane leaves the kitchen table where it is and walks, without deciding to, into the living room. He sits on the edge of the couch because standing suddenly feels too exposed.

"I wasn't sure you'd answer if I called," he says, and immediately wishes he hadn't made it about himself even that much.

But Ilya doesn't seem to mind.

"I am not sure I would have either."

"Are you alone?"

"Of course."

"At your place there?"

A pause. "Mm."

Good. Or not good. Better than not knowing.

"Have you eaten?"

That gets him the faintest huff of breath that might once have become a laugh.

"You sound like a grandmother."

"I'm serious."

"So am I."

Shane closes his eyes briefly.

"So, have you?" he asks again.

"A little."

That is not an answer Shane loves, but it is enough to tell him Ilya heard the question the way it was meant.

"Did you sleep?"

"Not really."

The word lands closed-off, and Shane can hear immediately that whatever happened there still has too much blood in it to touch directly. Shane rubs a hand over the back of his neck and stares at the dark windows across the room. His own reflection looks strange there—too tense, too careful, like a man trying not to spook something already wounded.

He opens his mouth anyway. "How are you holding up?"

The silence that follows is immediate and bleak enough that Shane winces.

"Sorry," he says. "That's a stupid question."

"No, is okay," Ilya says after a second, voice low and tired. "Just not one with a good answer."

Shane leans forward, elbows on his knees, phone pressed a little closer to his ear like that could somehow bridge any part of the distance, and he thinks, very suddenly and with an amount of force that startles him, that he wants Ilya back. It's not even just because he misses him, though he does, so much more than is reasonable.

But he wants him within reach, somewhere Shane can put his hands on him and make him sit down and eat something and maybe, impossibly, hold some of the hurt away from him for a while.

Oh, fuck.

Because Shane had known he loved Ilya. He had known that for a while now, in the quiet stubborn way he knows things once they settle in him. What he had not realized, apparently, was how deep it went. How much of it lived in his body now as want and protectiveness and that terrible impossible urge to bring Ilya home to a place where none of this could touch him.

He swallows once.

"When do you come back?" he asks.

The silence that follows is softer this time and yet no less easy.

"A few days," Ilya says finally.

Shane nods even though he can't see it.

"Okay."

Then, Ilya says: "I found photos."

"Yeah?"

"Of when I was little."

Something in the way Ilya says it, not embarrassed exactly, but exposed in a way makes Shane's chest tighten.

"I'd like to see them," he says.

There is a beat of silence then Ilya lets out the faintest breath.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," Shane says, lower now. "If you want."

Another pause.

"I thought about that," Ilya says.

Shane goes still.

"At the house," Ilya adds, voice roughening around the edges. "I found them and I—" He stops. Starts again. "I thought maybe you'd want to see."

Shane's whole chest feels suddenly too full. He does not know what to do with that except hold it very carefully and answer it like it deserves.

"I do," he says.

Ilya makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh and isn't anything else Shane can name without wanting too much from it.

There's a minute of silence that would make Shane wonder if Ilya had hung up had he not been able to hear his breath on the other end.

"Blyat. Vse vremya malo."

"What does that mean?" Shane prods gently.

Silence stretches long enough that Shane almost backtracks, but then Ilya says, "It means…" He exhales. "It means it is never enough."

Something cold moves through Shane.

"For all of them." Ilya's voice has gone very low now, the words slipping out as if he's too tired to stop them. "More money. More everything. More forgiveness. More understanding. More son than I know how to be. More brother. More of me, and bloshe, bloshe, bloshe, more, more, Ilya."

All at once the whole vista of it plays out across Shane's mind: Ilya, halfway across the world, being pulled at from every side by people who only know how to take, while Shane sits here with salmon and broccoli and a clean kitchen and nothing useful to offer but his own voice.

"Ilya," is all he says.

On the other end of the line, Ilya makes a small sound that might be acknowledgment, might be apology, might just be exhaustion.

"I'm tired."

"Yeah," he says softly. "I know."

For a while after that, neither of them says much. Shane asks smaller questions. Maybe it's selfish, but he wants to kep Ilya on the line a little longer, so he asks about the time there. Whether Ilya has to be anywhere tomorrow. Whether he has someone bringing food, which gets him called insane in a tone so drained it has to qualify as affectionate. Ilya answers more than he usually would, even though it's in short sentences but it's like whatever is holding him together tonight has decided Shane can help carry one side of it.

And Shane, because this is the sort of love he has to offer, lets himself become practical.

"Did you unpack?"

"No."

"Okay."

"That sounded like a judgmental okay."

"It was neutral."

"Right, okay."

"Put your charger where you can find it later."

"Jesus Christ, Hollander."

"I'm serious. You'll thank me later!"

It makes Ilya huff out what can only be described as a laugh and Shane's heart soars.

"Shane."

That gets unravels him all at once: the way Ilya says it like he has come all the way across the world just to set it down in Shane's hands.

"Yeah?"

"That night—"

Shane straightens.

"Ilya—"

"No, just—" He stops. The breath on the other end shakes a little. "At the gala, I thought—"

Shane cuts in gently.

"Hey."

Silence.

"Not now," Shane says.

He keeps his voice as steady as he can. "We'll talk about it when you get back."

On the other end, Ilya breathes once.

"I don't—"

"I know."

Another breath.

"I want to do that in person," Shane says. "Okay?"

The silence that follows is long enough that Shane feels every second of it in his hands, and after a long enough pause to hurt, Ilya says, "Okay."

The word goes right through him, because it is agreement, yes, but more than that it's trust. It's Ilya not forcing himself to solve the wrong problem in the wrong city on the wrong night. It is Shane being allowed, somehow, to hold the line of this until they can meet on the other side of it.

He lowers his head and presses his free hand against his mouth for a second before saying, "Okay."

After that, neither of them hangs up.

That, more than anything else, is the romance of it.

Shane moves back to the kitchen eventually, phone at his ear, and reheats the salmon while Ilya says nothing for long stretches of time and then, suddenly, small things. About the heating in Moscow and the cold in Boston. About nothing and everything.

Shane listens.

Sometimes he answers.
Sometimes he just stays.

At one point he says, "Eat something before you sleep."

And Ilya, sounding half-asleep now and very far away, murmurs, "You are very bossy, captain."

"Yes."

"Terrible quality in a man."

"Well, you love it."

The words are out before Shane can stop them. The silence after is so immediate and total he actually squeezs his eyes shut.

Well.

Excellent work.

Then Ilya makes the softest sound Shane has ever heard from him that's not quite a laugh nor quite pain. Worse: something warmer.

"Da," he says.

Shane leans his hip against the kitchen counter and stares at the dark window over the sink, his own reflection faint and strange in the glass. He doesn't need to know Russian to know that one.

"Yeah," he says softly.

He doesn't trust himself with anything bigger than that.

For a second neither of them speaks.

Then Ilya sighs, low and frayed at the edges, and Shane can hear the smile in it even from here.

By the time the call finally ends, it's late enough that the buzzing in his mind softened around the edges. Shane does not remember half his dinner. He only knows he ate it because the plate is empty when he sets it in the sink.

He looks at his phone once more before bed.

No new messages, obviously. The call is enough. More than enough.

Still.

His thumb hovers over the screen, then drops.

When he lies down in the dark, the first real ease he has felt in days moves through him, thin and fragile and not remotely the same thing as peace.

Ilya called him. Ilya called him.

And, sure, maybe that is not enough to build a future on, but it's enough, tonight, to sleep with.

It turns out that a week is actually an ample amount of time to become clinically unwell about a handful of text messages. How does Ilya know that?

Well, the messages were offensively simple.

Jane: I'm in Providence tomorrow for a shoot
Jane: Can you meet me after?
Jane: We should talk in person

Ilya had agreed at 11:14 p.m. and regreted it by 11:15.

That, at least, feels like a manageable emotional rhythm. It's familiar and safe in its own stupid way. He knows how to regret things. He has built half a life out of regretting things while continuing to do them anyway.

He's back in Boston. He's still on bereavement leave, though he's not exactly sure what he's bereaving. It would be a great time to meet Shane Hollander. He knows what messages like "meet me in this hotel room" means.

But it's that last text that's throwing him off. We should talk in person.

Obviously, from Shane's side, all of this is straightforward now. They had the phone call. Ilya called him, half-dead from grief and exhaustion, and Shane had done what he always does because he's a good person: listened, steadied, stayed. Since then he has texted exactly the way he always texts, which means, presumably, that in Shane's mind nothing requires saying. Even if Ilya did lay himself bare (emotionally this time) and all but professed his undying love.

He had stared at the messages for almost a full minute before typing back:

Ilya: okay

Shane's reply comes quickly, which is somehow worse.

Shane: 3 p.m.
Shane: I'll text you the hotel

It was all very ominous.

Ilya throws the phone face-down onto his bed and lies there staring at the ceiling of his Boston apartment trying to determine whether he can fake his own death on short notice.

The answer is probably yes in theory, but too much paperwork in practice. Sveta might be down to help, provided he doesn't tell her why he wants to do that, because she'll just jab him in the ribs with those pointy elbows if he does and say he's being so dramatic.

By morning, he has built and discarded at least six different interpretations of what tomorrow means, all of them bad.

Possibility one: Shane is going to clear up the misunderstanding about Rose, which would be nice, except only in the way a doctor clarifying that the saw is sterile is nice before amputation.

Possibility two: Shane is going to say he cares about Ilya very much but has realized that whatever this is cannot continue in its current form, which is such a specifically Hollander sentence that Ilya almost has to sit down while imagining it.

Possibility three: Shane is going to be kind.

This is, by far, the worst possibility.

Cruelty Ilya can manage, but kindness? Kindness is how the knife gets all the way in.

He sleeps badly, which is unsurprising. He wakes too early, which is awful. He spends an hour standing in front of his closet in a towel having what can only be described as a private hostage negotiation with himself about what to wear.

Too polished suggests vanity.
Too casual suggests false confidence.
Too bleak suggests he expects to be dumped, which unfortunately he does.

In the end he settles on dark jeans, a navy sweater, and a coat that makes him look expensive enough to preserve some dignity if he dies in public.

He drives out just after noon because Boston traffic is awful and because arriving exactly on time would imply he cares too much (which he does, but Shane doesn't need to know more of that).

Early spring New England looks exhausted. The sky is low and gray, the trees still stripped down to their meanest lines, the snow at the side of the road old and dirty and reluctant to leave. Every single thing he passes seems built from the same collection of chain pharmacies, gas stations, and little pockets of dead grass waiting for spring to do the impossible.

It suits his mood perfectly.

Even worse, traffic is manageable, which is so insulting. He would prefer external obstacles. A pileup. An omen. Divine intervention. Something with enough force to keep him from doing what he is, against all instinct for self-preservation, continuing to do: drive towards his execution.

If they had met the next day, Ilya could have blamed momentum. Grief. Adrenaline. Lack of sleep. But a week gives a decent man time to think. Time to choose his words. Time to decide exactly how much mercy to apply.

He had basically confessed.

That's the issue here. He had, during a late-night phone call from Russia while wrapped in his mother's scarf and half-feral from grief and unresolved everything, effectively admitted that yes, in fact, he does love Shane's bossy, beautiful, terrifyingly competent ass.

And Shane had not said it back.

This, Ilya thinks as he changes lanes with all the restrain he has not to just crash his car to get out of this, seems important.

Not conclusive, maybe. But important.

Because yes, Shane had been warm. Shane had been steady. Shane had been better than Ilya had any right to expect. He was there in that awful beautiful Hollander way that makes care seemed like something Ilya deserves. He had stayed on the line. He had said I'm here and meant it in the dangerous way he means everything once he stops pretending he doesn't.

But he had not said it back.

No me too.
No same here.
Not even a panicked Canadian variation on the theme.

Which, to be fair, could more or less be Shane's love language even when he is in love. Unfortunately, it's probably also Shane's decent-person language, his leadership language, his general-purpose caretaking dialect. The difference between I am in love with you and I am a fundamentally responsible man with a pathological inability to ignore another person's suffering can become depressingly subtle if one is Russian and prone to despair.

He exits too early once because he is busy imagining three different versions of Shane ending things and misses the sign. At least he won't be early.

That improves nothing.

When the hotel text comes in, he is stopped at a light behind a truck advertising industrial solvents.

Shane: Room 3081
Shane: Text me when you get in

That's it.

Ilya laughs once in the car, a short ugly sound that startles even him.

"How did I fall in love with someone who texts like a bank manager? What the fuck, Rozanov?" he says to the windshield.

The light changes.

He keeps driving.

By the time he reaches Providence, his stomach has become a separate hostile entity. He parks in the hotel garage and sits there with both hands on the steering wheel and the engine off, staring at the concrete wall in front of him.

This is where, if he had any respect for his dignity, he would turn around.

He would look at the message, laugh bitterly, throw the phone onto the passenger seat, and drive back to Boston with the radio too loud and the windows cracked and whatever remains of his pride intact.

Instead he puts the car in park properly, checks his face in the mirror, hates what he sees there, checks it again, and gets out.

The hotel lobby is polished and anonymous in the way all expensive hotels are, trying very hard to have no personality that might offend money. Soft lighting. Too much marble. At the desk, a woman in an immaculate blazer smiles at him with the flat-eyed efficiency, but he only nods, projects confidence, and walks past to the elevators then takes the stairs because he would prefer to arrive marginally out of breath and therefore justified in looking a little unwell.

By the time he reaches the thirtieth floor, his mission has definitely been accomplished.

Room 3081 sits near the end of the hall behind a tasteful arrangement of modern lighting and silence expensive enough to be oppressive. Ilya stands there for one second too long, staring at the number on the door like it might rearrange itself into something less ominous if given the chance, but because he is weak, because he is in love, because hope is a disease and he has never developed immunity, he knocks and waits like a man at the site of his own execution and still, somehow, wanting to be kissed first.

For one terrible second, nothing happens.

Then the latch clicks, the door opens, and there is Shane.

Shane Hollander in dark sweats and a black sweater, sleeves shoved up to his forearms, hair a little messed like he's been pushing a hand through it too often. He looks tired. He also looks so absurdly, painfully good that Ilya almost resents him on principle.

So of course the first thing out of his mouth is, "Wow. Your real estate fetish extends to hotel rooms too?"

Shane does not laugh.

He does, however, look at Ilya.

One fast, searching sweep over his face, his coat, the shadows under his eyes, the set of his mouth. As if Shane has been holding some awful private tension in his body for a week and has only now gotten visual proof that Ilya is upright, breathing, physically here.

The joke dies quietly in the space between them.

And then, before Ilya can prepare for whatever careful terrible thing comes next, Shane steps back, catches him lightly by the sleeve, and pulls him inside.

The door shuts behind them with a soft decisive click.

Only then does Shane put his arms around him.

One second Ilya is standing just inside the suite, trying to bluff his way through his own demise, and the next Shane is there—warm and solid and real, one arm around his back, the other high across his shoulders, pulling him in with the kind of certainty Ilya has spent the whole drive trying not to hope for.

The force of it knocks all the air out of him.

Shane hugs like he does most things: completely. All that contained, disciplined steadiness turned physical. He smells like clean skin and expensive soap and something faintly warm and familiar underneath that is just Shane, and Ilya, who had spent the last week preparing himself for kindness in the shape of a knife, feels unbidden tears spring so fast to his eyes it actually embarrasses him.

Oh.

Oh, this is worse. Fuck you, Hollander.

Ilya goes rigid for one stupid startled second, then melts anyway, because apparently his dignity has finally packed up and gone back to Boston without him.

His hands, traitorous things, come up on their own. One catches briefly in the fabric at Shane's side. The other presses against his back. Not holding hard, exactly. Just enough to admit that this is happening. That he is here. That Shane is, impossibly, here too.

When Shane finally speaks, his voice is low and rougher than usual.

"Hi."

Which is such an absurd thing to say when they are already standing wrapped around each other just beyond the door of a hotel suite in Providence that Ilya almost wants to bite him.

Instead he says, because he has to say something before the tears become a situation, "That's new."

Shane huffs a breath that might once have been the beginning of a laugh, but he doesn't let go immediately. His hand shifts once at the back of Ilya's neck, not soothing exactly, just there, like he had been wanting to touch him for days and had finally run out of patience with not doing it.

When he finally draws back, it is only far enough to look at him properly.

"You look tired," Shane says.

Ilya shrugs and looks past him. The suite opens onto a tidy little entryway, then a living area with absurdly large windows and a dining table already set with room service under silver covers. It almost makes him laugh with how Shane it all is.

"You set up lunch?"

Shane's mouth tightens slightly, as if bracing for mockery. "I thought you might not have eaten."

"You are going soft on me, Hollander."

Something in Shane's face softens then, but only for a second. "Come sit down."

And because apparently hope is still alive enough to be annoying, Ilya follows him farther into the room with his pulse still in the wrong place.

The first thing Shane notices, once he makes himself let go, is that Ilya is thinner.

Shane knows the exact line of his body by now, knows where his coat sits on his shoulders, how his sweater ought to pull across his chest, what tired looks like on him versus what not-eating looks like. This is the second one.

The second thing he notices is that Ilya is trying very hard to be funny.

That, in itself, would not usually mean anything. Ilya is funny the way other people breathe. But this is a particular kind of funny: overbright, a little too quick, all edges and no ease. Every joke arriving half a second too fast, like it's being thrown into the room ahead of something worse.

Shane has also seen enough of that version of him to know it means trouble.

He leads him farther into the suite anyway, not touching him now only because he is fairly sure if he puts a hand on him again too soon, he may not stop. The room service cart waits by the table between the windows, silver domes in place, a breadbasket covered with linen, water already poured. Overkill, probably, but Shane had not known what Ilya would eat if anything and had decided, when in doubt, to order a range.

Ilya slips his coat off, draping it over the back of a chair with the exact careless precision of someone too tightly wound to be actually careless. Shane takes his own seat slowly, watching him over the table.

Up close, in full light, the exhaustion is worse.

There are shadows under Ilya's eyes Shane doesn't like. Something off in the set of his shoulders. He looks like he is holding himself together at the seams and resenting the need.

"Sit down," Shane says.

Ilya does, though not in any relaxed way.

That should have tipped Shane off sooner than it does.

He uncovers the plates. Grilled chicken for himself. Steak smothered in butter for Ilya. Potatoes. Green beans. Bread. Soup he had ordered mostly because he wondered if Ilya would eat more if there is something warm in front of him.

Ilya looks from the food to Shane.

"This is too much."

"No, it isn't."

"For lunch in a hotel room? It's absolutely too much."

"You haven't eaten properly."

"That's not true."

Shane raises a brow.

Ilya sighs. "That's not mostlytrue."

Better.

Shane pushes the breadbasket toward him.

"Eat something."

Ilya looks at the basket, then at Shane. "You really are leaning into the dictatorship thing."

"You can leave if you want."

The words are meant lightly enough, or at least neutrally, but something in Ilya's face changes so fast Shane feels it like a physical jolt. Actual fear, there and gone so quickly Shane might have doubted it if he hadn't been staring straight at him.

Ilya reaches for the bread too fast, like movement can cover what just happened.

"Okey," he says. "I came all this way. Let me at least help you with some of this before you get rid of me."

Shane goes still.

For one second, the whole room narrows around that sentence.

Ilya, meanwhile, appears not to notice what he has just handed over. He tears off a piece of bread and looks out the window as if the outside has suddenly become a source of fascination.

Shane sets his fork down.

"What?"

Ilya glances back at him. "What what?"

"You think I asked you here to… get rid you?"

Ilya's eyes flick away first.

Then back.

Then away again.

"Well," he says, with a careful offhand tone, "we should talk in person is not traditionally a phrase associated with wonderful new beginnings."

Shane stares at him.

Something has gone wrong here in a way so specific and so absurd that for a second his brain refuses to process it cleanly.

He had known Ilya was wound tight. He had known the week had been bad, that Russia had been bad, that grief had probably rearranged every internal surface into something sharp. He had expected fragility, maybe anger, maybe exhaustion, maybe one of those strangely calm conversations that are really just collapse in disguise.

He had not expected this? He had not expected Ilya to come all the way to Providence thinking Shane was about to end things.

And underneath that realization, colder and stranger, comes the next one:

Ilya still doesn't know. Not in the plain irreversible way Shane has apparently failed to communicate, despite months of what had seemed to him like increasingly blatant evidence.

Shane hears himself say, slowly, "You think that's what this is."

It is not a question either.

Ilya laughs once, softly. It sounds awful.

"Shane."

Again, like the name ought to explain everything. Maybe it does.

Because Shane can see it now, suddenly, all of it laid out in miserable neat lines: every single place where Ilya's brain would have taken Shane's care and translated it downward. Every time Shane had assumed his actions were obvious. Every time he had thought, well, of course he knows. Every time he had let practicality stand in for clarity because practicality is safer and easier and comes more naturally to him than the terrible nakedness of saying things outright.

Jesus Christ.

Ilya tears off another piece of bread with exact, tidy violence.

"You don't have to do it gently," he says.

Shane blinks. "Do what?"

Ilya looks up then, really looks at him, and the expression on his face is so tired and defensive and resigned all at once that Shane feels something in his own chest go hot with dismay.

"This," Ilya says, gesturing vaguely between them with the piece of bread like it is Exhibit A in the case against hope. "Whatever this is. The conversation. You are acting like you are about to tell me someone has six months to live."

"Stop."

The word comes out sharper than Shane intends.

Ilya's mouth closes.

Shane exhales once through his nose and drags a hand over his face, not because he is annoyed, exactly, but because the sheer scale of the misunderstanding is making it difficult not to stand up and pace.

He settles for leaning back in his chair and looking at Ilya as steadily as he can.

"I asked you here," he says, "because we needed to talk in person."

"Yes," Ilya says, with bleak patience.

Shane actually laughs then, once, out of pure disbelief.

That startles Ilya more visibly than anything else has so far.

"You think I— what? Agreed to a shoot in Providence of all places, asked you join me, set up lunch to… get rid of you?"

Ilya's eyes narrow.

"When you put it like that, you sound insane."

"I am not the one who thought this was a break-up lunch."

Then, despite everything, one corner of Ilya's mouth twitches, only a little. Really, barely even there. But still, it's enough to keep Shane from climbing over the table and shaking him.

Instead he says, more quietly now, "I asked you here because I wanted to see you."

Ilya looks at him and says nothing.

So Shane keeps going, because apparently they are here now, apparently the universe has finally cornered him into plain speech, and apparently this idiot across from him has been prepared to walk into a hotel suite for his own heartbreak rather than simply ask one clarifying question.

"I wanted to see you," Shane repeats. "Because you were in Russia and your father died and you sounded exhausted and I couldn't do anything from Montreal except text you and wait. And because I missed you."

Ilya freezes, and still says nothing. The air in the room feels different all at once. He is staring down at the torn piece of bread in his hand as if it contains classified information.

Shane watches him for another second, then says, more carefully, "What exactly did you think was happening?"

A humorless little laugh escapes Ilya before he can stop it.

"Honestly?"

"Yes."

Ilya sets the bread down.

For a second he seems to search the tablecloth for the least humiliating version available and fail to find one.

He looks up and says, all exhausted abrupt honesty, "I thought you were going to tell me you were with Rose and then be kind to me about the rest."

Shane stares at him.

Then, because apparently his life is absurd and because some part of him remains capable of functioning only through incredulous specificity, he says, "The rest."

Ilya gives him a pleading, flat look. "Don't make me say it."

Now Shane does understand.

Not every piece of it, maybe, not yet, but enough. Enough to know that Ilya saw him with Rose and built an ending out of it. Enough to know that the call from Russia and the yes and the week of silence have all been sitting on top of that wrong foundation. Enough to know, most disastrously of all, that despite everything Shane has done lately, despite texts and flowers and calls and asking him to the cottage and every other act of devotion Shane had apparently considered self-evident, Ilya still thinks there is a realistic possibility that Shane is about to… let him down gently?

Something fierce and unhappy moves through Shane at that.

Not anger at Ilya.

At himself, maybe.
At the whole stupid architecture of their lives.
At every time he has chosen implication because saying things out loud felt too exposing and too late and maybe unnecessary.

Apparently not unnecessary.

Apparently desperately necessary.

Ilya misreads Shane's silence instantly, because of course he does.

His face shutters a little. The humor goes. He looks suddenly much older than he should.

Then he says, wanting it over with now, voice low and frayed at the edges, "Just do it already, Shane, yes?"

Shane blinks. "Huh?"

Ilya exhales, and when he looks back up there is something almost pleading in the exhaustion on his face.

"You're done," he says. "So be done."

And there it is: the confirmation, bright and awful and undeniable.

He really doesn't know.

Shane sits there looking at him across the white tablecloth and silver room service covers and feels the whole shape of the next ten minutes rearrange itself in his head.

This is not a misunderstanding he can solve with steadiness or implication or by being near him long enough for the truth to become obvious.

This requires language.

Actual language.

Which, frankly, feels unfair.

He leans forward slowly, forearms on the table, and says, very clearly, "Ilya. I am not done. I—Jesus—I don't ever want to to be done."

Ilya blinks. "What about Rose?"

Shane feels like he's going insane, so he's definitely a little hysterical when he says, "What about Rose?"

"You… you were holding each other. At the gala."

"She tripped."

A beat.

"What?"

"She tripped," Shane repeats, already irritated by the memory. "On the carpet. I caught her before she fell."

Ilya stares at him.

"Shane."

"I'm serious."

"You had your arm around her waist."

"Yes." Shane can hear his own voice getting flatter with emphasis. "Because she was falling."

"You were bending over her."

"She nearly ate the floor in heels."

Rose's hand at his wrist. Shane bending over her. The whole stupid image flashes back through him now with fresh absurdity. He can see exactly how it looked from a distance and hates that it took him this long to understand why Ilya had vanished so completely after.

"I was asking if she was okay," Shane says. "Then I sat her down."

Ilya looks away first.

Color rises slowly, faintly, up the side of his neck.

"Oh," he says.

That one word contains enough mortification to feed a village.

Shane should probably feel bad for him. Instead what he feels, mostly, is relief so sharp it comes out sounding like annoyance.

"I cannot believe you really thought," he says, "that I asked you to come to here so I could explain that I'm secretly in love with Rose Landry."

Ilya's eyes cut back to him.

"When you say it like that, you sound ridiculous."

"I'm not the ridiculous one here."

"That feels up for debate."

Shane actually laughs.

He doesn't mean to. It just gets out of him, short and disbelieving and full of a tension he has apparently been holding in his shoulders for over a week. Across from him, Ilya visibly flinches at the sound, then looks offended by the fact that Shane is laughing at all.

And then, because the universe is not content to let him suffer alone, one corner of Ilya's mouth twitches too. Shane had missed that face so badly it almost hurts.

Ilya picks up his water glass. Does not drink from it. Sets it back down. Fatigue clings to him like rain. There are shadows under his eyes, the week in Russia still visible in the set of his mouth. Despite the absurdity of the misunderstanding, despite how almost funny it is in pieces, he had still lived inside it while grieving and flying and burying his father and coming back to Boston and agreeing to drive here anyway.

"You should have asked me," he says quietly.

Ilya's gaze drops to the table.

"Yes," he says after a second.

"I would have told you."

"I know."

The reply comes too fast, in the way people say when they truly did not know.

"You know," he repeats.

Ilya presses his lips together.

Shane watches him for another second, then another, and says, more quietly now, "Then what?"

When Ilya finally answers, his voice has dropped low and gone thin around the edges, as if every word now is being paid for individually.

"You are kind, Shane," he says. "You are good. You feel responsible for people. You show up. You take care of things." His mouth twists slightly. "And then Russia happened. And you called. And you were…" He stops, searching for the word and seeming to hate all the available ones. "You."

Shane says nothing, because what can he say to that except yes, unfortunately, he had been himself.

"And I said too much," Ilya says.

"No."

That gets his eyes up.

"You didn't."

For one second neither of them looks away.

Then Ilya says, quieter still, "You didn't say it back."

Shane feels the full, ridiculous, terrible scope of the problem become visible all at once.

"I thought," Ilya says, the words rougher now, harder to get out, "that if you wanted to, you would have."

Shane takes a deep breath and closes his eyes for one second. Then opens them again and says, with careful disbelief, "Ilya. I asked you to the cottage."

"I know."

"I sent you flowers."

"Yes."

"I called you in Russia."

"Yes."

"I have been trying to see you since before you left."

Ilya's face changes, only a little.

"I know," he says again, but weaker now, like the word is finally beginning to fail him.

Shane leans forward.

"No," he says. "You clearly don't." Then Shane says, with more calm than he feels, "I didn't say it on the phone because your father had just died."

Ilya blinks.

Shane keeps going before he can get lost in that expression.

"You were exhausted. You were in Russia. You were grieving, whether you wanted to call it that or not. You sounded…" He stops, jaw tightening briefly. "You sounded wrecked. And I wasn't going to make that call about me."

Ilya is staring at him now with a kind of stunned concentration that would almost be funny if Shane's heart were not trying to beat its way out through his ribs.

"So no," Shane says, quieter now. "I didn't say it then."

A beat.

"But, fuck, I'm saying it now."

Nothing in the room moves. (Nothing in the whole world, probably.)

Ilya goes absolutely still.

And Shane, because apparently he has now committed to the most unbearable emotional honesty of his life and would like very much not to die halfway through it, says the thing plain.

"I love you."

There. It's out.

Across the table, Ilya just looks at him. He doesn't joke. He doesn't do anything, actaully. He's not even visibly breathing, which Shane does not love.

So he keeps going, because if he stops now he may never recover.

"I have for a while," he says. "And I thought—"

His mouth twists.

"Apparently I thought I was being obvious."

That finally does it. Something breaks across Ilya's face—not laughter, not tears, a third stranger thing and less guarded than either. His eyes go bright so fast Shane feels it like a blow.

"Oh," Ilya says. Then, more wrecked now, "Oh, you idiot."

Shane exhales a laugh he did not know he was holding in.

"That seems unfair."

"You are unbelievable."

"So are you."

Ilya stands up too quickly, chair scraping back across the carpet with a harsh little sound, and for one idiotic second Shane thinks he might leave. That all this has somehow gone wrong again in a new and more spectacular way.

Instead Ilya comes around the table fast.

By the time Shane gets halfway to his feet, Ilya is there, one hand fisting in the shoulder of his sweater, the other catching his jaw, and then he is being kissed.

Shane makes a sound against his mouth he would deny under oath.

He gets one hand to Ilya's waist and the other around his back and stands fully, knocking his own chair crooked in the process, because if this is happening he is not doing it halfway.

Ilya kisses like he is both furious and relieved, which feels correct. Shane kisses him back with all the restraint he has been hoarding for months finally giving up and going somewhere more useful.

When they break apart, it is only because breathing has once again become a practical concern.

Ilya stays close, too close for doubt now. Close enough that Shane can see the wet brightness still clinging at the corners of his eyes, the flush high in his cheeks, the disbelief not fully gone from his face.

"You love me," Ilya says.

"Yes."

Shane means to say more. Something reassuring. Something about how obviously, how for a while now, how he is sorry if—

Ilya kisses him again before he can, softer this time, and when he pulls back his forehead rests briefly against Shane's.

"Jesus Christ," he mutters.

"Yeah, I know."

"No." A breath that might once have been a laugh leaves Ilya. "I really thought you were going to end this. That you never wanted to see me again."

Shane's hand tightens reflexively at his waist. He knows, in the same brutal instant, how much damage they have both done by trying to communicate around the thing instead of through it.

Something in Shane tightens hard at that. He slides his hand higher against Ilya's back and says, with all the steadiness he has, "I'm not done."

"Okay," Ilya says, and nods once. "Me neither."

They stand there for another second, maybe two, close enough that Shane can still feel the last of Ilya's tension slowly unwinding under his hands. The room service is cooling on the table behind them. Somewhere down the hall, a door shuts.

Then Ilya draws back just enough to look at him, mouth still close, eyes tired and bright and a little wrecked.

There's a hesitation there Shane doesn't like.

"What?" he says.

Ilya's mouth twitches.

"So," he says, trying for casual and not quite getting there, "am I still invited to the cottage?"

Oh, this man is going to be the death of him. Shane looks at him for one beat, incredulous, then he slaps a hand lightly against Ilya's shoulder.

"Obviously."

Ilya blinks.

"Obviously?" he repeats.

"Yes." Shane gives his shoulder another small shove. "Jesus Christ, Ilya."

That gets a real laugh out of him at last—tired and frayed at the edges, but real. It does something dangerous and lovely to Shane's insides.

"Yes," Shane says, quieter now. "You're still invited."

Ilya's expression shifts at that, softens enough to make him look suddenly younger, and so openly relieved that Shane has to fight the urge to pull him back in and not let go for a while.

"Okay," Ilya says.

This time the word is small and certain and warm.

And before he can say anything else, before he can second-guess the look on Ilya's face or the week that led them here or any of the stupid careful instincts that have already made this harder than it needed to be, Shane reaches up, cups the side of his jaw, and kisses him.

Ilya makes a small sound against his mouth and leans into it immediately, like this was what he had been braced for all along without letting himself hope it would actually happen. Shane keeps one hand at his jaw and the other warm at his waist and kisses him the way he has wanted to for days now—like he has time, like he is allowed, like this is no longer something they have to snatch in pieces.

When he pulls back, it is only far enough to look at him.

Ilya's eyes are bright. His mouth is a little swollen. He looks tired and kissed and, for the first time since he walked through the door, not like a man waiting for the floor to open under him.

Shane brushes his thumb once across his cheekbone.

Then Ilya smiles at him—small, a little shaky, completely unguarded—and Shane thinks, with sudden painful certainty, that he would drive twice as far for that smile.