Archive of Our Own

Ilya started the list when he was seven years old. Then, it was a single sheet of lined paper, the header Потрясающие вещи written in blue marker. Potryasayushchiye veshchi. Brilliant things. Wonderful things, amazing things. 

He started it the day he came home to a quiet house, quieter than usual. His mother did not come out to the living room to greet him or ask him how his day went. Instead, it was his father, fixing him with an unreadable look and saying quite plainly that his mother had done something very, very stupid.

Ilya wasn’t sure how he learned that his mother was sad. It wasn’t something you learned in an instant. It was more something that crept up on you. Something you just kind of suspected, knew, pretended to ignore—until something happened, until the other shoe dropped, and you were forced to face it.

Or, in his father and brother’s case, deny, deny, deny it was real at all.

His mother was in the hospital for about a week. During that time, Ilya came up with the idea for the list.

The first few entries, the first few Brilliant Things, were easy. Simple.

#1: Пломбир. [Ice cream.]
#2: Собаки. [Dogs.]
#3: Катание на коньках. [Ice skating.]
#4: Жёлтый цвет. [The color yellow.]
#5: Библиотекарь в школе. [The librarian at school.]

The list was, of course, in no particular order, because there was no definite way to say that something like the smell of pel’meni was objectively better than something like old people holding hands.

#26: Запах пельменей. [The smell of pel’meni.]
#27: Пожилые люди, держащиеся за руки. [Old people holding hands.]

The list would be of every single thing that made him happy. Maybe, if he collected enough proof, his mother would understand that yes, there are so many happy things in life. He kept an eye out for them that week.

#52: Чтение книг с фонариком. [Reading books with a flashlight.]

#108: Смотреть на очень классного игрока на льду. [Watching a really good player on the ice.]

#267: Вещи в полоску. [Things with stripes.]

#314: Песни на французском. [Songs in French.]

When his mother returned home, his list was about eight pages and three hundred and fourteen entries long, which was a whole lot for a seven-year-old. He left the stack of papers on her pillow.

He found it on his desk the next day, and she made no indication that she’d ever seen it.

- - -

Ilya didn’t remember the list again until her second attempt four years later.

The same slow creep and then sudden drop happened again. It took longer for her to come home this time. Ilya was older now, but not by all that much. He paced angrily throughout his room that night, just digging through things aimlessly. He wanted a book to read, to absorb his mind for just a while, but he couldn’t find one that he wanted to look at for longer than a few seconds without thinking of his mother doing something very, very stupid.

Instead he found the list. Sandwiched between two books.

He pulled it out, read it again.

Maybe his measly list of 314 wasn’t enough. Ice cream and old couples and French music just wasn’t enough to prove that the world is happy.

He sat down, pulled out a pencil, and wrote late into the night.

#315: Запах старых книг. [The smell of old books.]

#327: Персиковые деревья. [Peach trees.]

#380: Ездить в метро, когда там почти пусто. [Riding the metro when it’s almost empty.]

#404: Победа. [Winning.]

#456: Когда мама играет на старом пианино в гостиной. [When Mama plays the old piano in the living room.]

Ilya planned to hit one thousand and gift the list to his mother for her next birthday. He racked his brain for the best Brilliant Things he could think of.

He’d taken up the habit of going around the house writing them on slips of paper and sticking them where people could see them—on the fridge, between pages of books, on the inside of the vodka cabinet. Sometimes he’d walk up to his mother and just read them out loud. It took about three months before his father finally yelled at him enough for him to stop.

Still, Ilya kept writing. Brilliant Things came slower to him now than they had when he was seven, maybe because he wasn’t allowed to repeat and he didn’t know the words to describe some of the littler, more complicated things. He made it to five hundred.

#500: Слово «картошка». [The word “kartoshka”.]

But he ran out of time.

He found her, and he’d hate that he did for the rest of his life. Five hundred suddenly seemed like such an insignificant number in that moment when he found her, looking exactly like she could be asleep, her hand draped across the bed like she was reaching out for someone who wasn’t there. Five hundred seemed like so little when his father waved off his questions with the words “neschastnyy sluchay,” and a sharp flash of something tore through Ilya and he found himself thinking bitterly that he understood why his mother had been so sad. Clearly, though, he didn’t. Hadn’t. At least not enough. Because if he had understood her sadness, she would have understood his happiness. She would have read the list and found it enough. But Ilya and his five hundred Brilliant Things had been nothing to her, or at least not enough to be worth staying for.

#501: Шанс попрощаться. [The chance to say goodbye.]

- - -

The list was shoved away until Ilya was almost eighteen years old and angrier at the world than ever.

He was done. He was so done with his father denying and denying and forgetting and forgetting until Ilya wasn’t sure whether he knew what the truth even was anymore, whether it was due to the Alzheimer’s or his own repression, and he was done with his brother gaslighting him at every possible opportunity and refusing to help pick up even the tiniest bit of slack. Done with the both of them blaming Ilya for acting up just because he started dating around a bit in high school, but Ilya wasn’t the one in his family failing out of university and with a cocaine addiction at twenty-one years old, he was the one who was made to quit hockey at twelve because he “didn’t need any fucking distractions now,” even though he had straight A’s— but, okay! Irina Rozanova swallowed a bottle of pills by “accident”, Ilya was the one too distracted for school with his one single fucking extracurricular that was also his one single escape, Andrei was not a useless teenage cokehead turned useless adult cokehead, these were the truths that apparently existed in Grigori Rozanov’s mind.

Once more, he was flipping through his things, shoving books and clothes into bags and suitcases so he was ready to leave at a moment’s notice, ready to disappear the moment the last straw was placed, when he stumbled back upon his Potryasayushchiye veshchi. The same way he found the list last time, he found it again, only this time it was in a box filled with junk he’d accumulated in his teenage years. Under a pile of old worksheets and journals and long-expired candy bars and action figures and loose change and cigarettes and condoms and cough drops, there it was, the stack of papers. Five hundred and one entries.

And this time, he felt angry. The tears burned in his eyes and the inky words burned into his mind, and he tugged on his necklace until it was painfully digging into his neck. He had wanted to finish one thousand before her birthday, and he’d broken that promise to her.

She had been wrong, though. There were things in life worth living for. Ilya was seventeen years old and in just about a month he was to become and adult and ditch this place, hopefully forever, to go to university in the States, and he refused to believe that this was all there was to life, that this world that he lived in, in which he could only find five hundred and one things worth writing about, was all there was, that his mother had been right in thinking that she made the only choice she could.

He was going to reach one fucking thousand Brilliant Things before he left.

#502: Американское кино. [American cinema.]

#688: «Я сошла с ума» группы t.A.T.u. [t.A.T.u’s “All The Things She Said”.]

#714: Сигареты. [Cigarettes.]

He wondered what it would be like to finally leave home.

#745: Мечтать. [Dreaming.]

#761: Решить, что ты не слишком стар, чтобы лазать по деревьям. [Deciding you’re not too old to climb trees.]

#823: Купание голышом. [Skinny dipping.]

He had a countdown going. A little calendar in a notebook that he was crossing days off of. He kept it under his pillow.

#858: Считать дни до чего-то чудесного. [Counting down the days before something wonderful.]
#859: Прятать вещи под подушкой. [Hiding things under your pillow.]

Every day, he came up with just a few more. Whenever he thought of something, anything, he’d scribble it down. Entries became either the most trivial of things or things so specific to the particular state of mind he was in at the time of writing it, he wondered if he’d even understand it when rereading later.

#927: Пузырчатая плёнка. [Bubble wrap.]

#961: Тот самый момент тишины, который наступает непосредственно перед тем, как два человека открывают рты и начинают говорить одновременно. [The moment of silence right before two people open their mouths and start speaking at the same time.]

And, the night before he left, he woke up in the middle of the night to write down a few just before he forgot:

#994: Звон ключей. [Jangling keys.]
#995: Парикмахеры, которые укладывают волосы так, как ты хочешь. [Hairdressers that actually do your hair the way you want them to.]
#996: По-настоящему вкусные апельсины. [Really good oranges.]
#997: Спуск на велосипеде с горы. [Cycling downhill.]
#998: Собаки-терапевты. [Therapy dogs.]

When his alarm woke him the next morning, his anxiety and nerves and anticipation were through the roof. He shoved some final things into his bag, then reached for the list and the pen.

He glanced outside the window. The sky was the kind of grayish color it tends to be just before sunrise. He uncapped his pen and added one more thing.

#999: Солнечный свет. [Sunlight.]

Then, he folded up the list, stuffed it into a book—school-assigned from years ago, but still one of his favorites—and tucked it into his backpack.

- - -

Ilya had always had a soft spot for literature. Russian literature, but also foreign literature. French, British, American. The librarian at his school in Russia, a kind and wonderful woman who had loved to chat endlessly with Ilya, had always had the best recommendations. She knew about the list—hell, she was on the list. Brilliant Thing #5. She’d had this sock puppet, too, when he’d been in primary school, who loved to tell jokes, and who was seven-year-old Ilya’s Brilliant Thing #6 and also had great taste in books. As much as Ilya exemplified the underage-drinking, unsupervised-parties, irresponsible-sex teenage stereotype—and enjoyed it, for the record—he was surprisingly fond of reading.

Ilya wasn’t the best student his first year. Still filled with so much anger for the world, still desperately trying to make up for what he’d missed, he spent his first year building a name for himself, and that name was the campus playboy. The party animal, the womanizer—which, kind of rude and kind of biphobic, actually, Ilya slept with plenty of men, too—who somehow still had time to actually do pretty okay in his classes and be pretty popular socially.

By the end of that year, though, he was bored. And fucking tired. Not of the sex, really, but of being stagnant. He wanted to explore. He wanted to find new things and discover more forever. He had made it to the States, made it out alive, he couldn’t settle for his big personal odyssey just being some sleeping around. And, honestly? He wanted to try. He didn’t want to be actually pretty okay. And he was starting to miss books.

In his second year Ilya picked up a course on Romanticism because of a very particular lecture series on the Victorian novella that was led by an author he really admired. The series, early in the year, ultimately led up to the novella The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The lecturer was starting her talk the way she famously did, holding the book aloft and reciting a precise, detailed, seemingly memorized summary of the book’s contents. Ilya was doodling aimless lines in his notebook with a pencil, barely absorbing bits and pieces of the synopsis when he heard it.

“The book was an immediate success,” she said, waving the book above her head, “and a cult rapidly grew up around it, resulting in numerous imitations as well as violent criticism and suppression on the grounds of its apparent support of suicide.”

Ilya’s head snapped up. The words translated slowly in his head, but that last one re-contextualized all the ones before it at record speed. Support of suicide? 

Something ugly and thorny and painful and almost angry shot through Ilya’s chest, and he couldn’t even begin to put a finger on why. But the lecturer had paused to take a breath, and his body moved faster than his mind as he, almost upon instinct, shot his hand in the air before she could move on.

“Sorry,” he said when she called on him, “But do you mean that… this book, it, ah… it cause...”

He was still learning English. He kind of hated how stupid his voice sounded to his own ears. But he pushed the question out anyway, as best as he could. It wasn’t particularly delicate, but he got the point out. “This book, it talks about suicide, and people… what, read it and… and also take their own lives?”

Yes, the answer was, ultimately. The lecturer said a lot of other things, a lot more, but there was a buzzing in Ilya’s ears and he couldn’t let the thought go. He was too distracted to translate anything she was saying anymore.

He shouldered his bag and left the lecture hall midway through.

- - -

Social contagion. Big words. Big concept.

Ilya set himself up in the library with a large stack of books on his right and an English-Russian dictionary on his left, and slowly worked his way through it all.

People are subtly influenced by each others’ actions. Or even books like Young Werther. Whenever a figure in the public eye commits suicide, the stats spike. Ilya couldn’t help it, morbid curiosity got the best of him and he dug deeper on the years of his mother’s attempts, wondering if he’d find any timelines lining up. Did she hear about the young playwright in 1999? The Olympic swimmer in 2002? The music icon in 2003?

Suicide is contagious, Ilya learned. The “Werther Effect”, named for that very same Goethe novella.

If it could be contagious, could it be hereditary?

He read about suicide for a long time. Hours upon hours. The Samaritans’ guidelines for media reports on suicide. Statistics about Marilyn Monroe’s death and the surge in attempts in the States. The Werther Effect.

All of this was giving Ilya a burning sort of hatred toward this stupid novella, and he hadn’t even read it yet.

He did eventually, alone in his room. He thought it was shit. A shit book with a shit impact on the dumb fucks who’d read it and thought it some trend to join, a bandwagon to jump on. It was stupid. The book was stupid. The dumbass protagonist was stupid. Ilya threw the book angrily against the wall and tried to go to sleep.

- - -

Ilya hated The Sorrows of Young Werther not only because of the whole copycat suicide thing but because he thought the whole premise was kind of dumb to begin with. He had no reason to connect to it. He didn’t really understand it, didn’t really care. He’d never been very interested in romance. He’d never been in love.

But apparently the library wasn’t done showing him things he’d never known before.

There was a dark-haired boy that always sat in the same seat at one of those long rectangular tables, the third one away from the door, facing the windows, in the leftmost corner. Ilya knew this because this boy was the only person he would always, without fail, see on every single trip to the library he took. He had started noticing him in the middle of October and hadn’t been able to look away since.

Ilya had never talked to this boy, but he knew that he was always there to read. A new book each time. Ilya always managed to find an excuse to pass by and peek at the cover or the title. Some plays, some classics, some with colorful modern paperback covers. Some French literature—he could read in fucking French!—and quite a lot of books on the history of hockey.

Ilya was unreasonably infatuated. The boy was, objectively, very hot. And Ilya clearly wasn’t the only one who thought this, because the seats around the boy were always, frustratingly, filled. Once or twice Ilya had seen people try to talk to him, maybe flirt with him, maybe pick him up, but as far as Ilya could tell no one had ever been successful this way. The boy would always smile politely and engage in conversation but ultimately his attention would be drawn back to his book and the unsuccessful soul would leave.

The closest Ilya had ever gotten to him was in November, when a seat at his table had been open. They’d sat on opposite corners, never exchanging a single word, but Ilya had been close enough to notice freckles spilled across the bridge of the boy’s nose, which definitely was not the focus of Ilya’s mind for the rest of the week.

Okay, fine, the rest of the month.

But Ilya wouldn’t even learn his name until after the winter break. It was one of those nicer, warmer days of the late winter. Later, Ilya would remember it forever. Now, Ilya was on his way to the library, distracted by some text, or some email, or some article, something on his phone screen that wasn’t nearly as important as what happened next.

He stopped walking abruptly. Then he slowly lowered his phone.

The boy was sitting on the steps outside of the library. Still with his backpack and glasses and stack of books. Just not in his usual indoor spot, the seats neighboring him crowded with students, and not bundled up in one of those thick sweaters. He was wearing a goddamn t-shirt.

His arms looked really nice. Surprisingly fit, considering Ilya had never seen him do anything besides read.

Shit. Ilya suddenly realized he was staring, then hastily stuffed his phone in his back pocket. He had a book tucked under his arm, one he had been planning to return early.

He didn’t know where the surge of otherworldly courage that led him to approach came from, but clearly he had some deity of bravery to thank, because next thing he knew, he was standing over the boy, who looked up at him with wide, questioning brown eyes through dark lashes and thick glasses.

“Hi,” Ilya said stupidly, because he was a lame fucking idiot.

The boy stared at him. He looked a little puzzled, probably because Ilya hadn’t bothered to elaborate on why the fuck he was just standing there past fucking “Hi”.

“Hi,” he echoed back.

Jesus fucking Christ.

“Could I, uh…” Ilya swallowed. His accent had never sounded stupider to his own ears than in that moment. “Could I sit here?”

The boy’s brow furrowed. Because Ilya had just asked for permission to sit on public property. But he nodded and scooted over, and Ilya sat.

Christ. Last year, Ilya had had the playboy title on lock. He could've picked up quite literally anybody he wanted. Now, one cute freckled library boy later, he couldn’t even come up with a coherent sentence.

“What’s your name?” he asked, because apparently now that he had started being the lamest motherfucker on Earth, there was no going back.

The boy slowly smiled at him. Holy shit, it was like looking at the fucking sun. “Shane. Hollander.”

Ilya nodded. “Hi. I’m, um. Ilya Rozanov.”

Shane Hollander’s pretty smile widened. “Yeah, I know.”

Ilya stared. “What?”

Shane laughed a little. It sounded nervous. Ilya was so fucked. “I’ve, um. Heard of you.” He looked away sheepishly. “And I see you at the library a lot. So.”

Ilya tried very hard not to combust at that. “Oh.” Heard of you. Like, heard people talk? Because Ilya was pretty sure people didn’t have very nice things to say about him. Maybe about his dick, definitely not him as a person. Fuck, now he was floundering for something, literally anything to say. “Uh— what are you reading?”

Shane looked surprised for a brief moment, and then he lifted his book so Ilya could see the cover. “Giovanni’s Room. It’s really good. I’m on my, like, third reread.” He nodded at the book under Ilya’s arm. “What are you reading?”

“Ah, um—“ Ilya glanced at it. “The Outsiders.”

Shane’s eyes brightened. “Oh, wow, I read that a while ago." Yes, Ilya knew this. It would probably be bad to mention that he was reading it because he'd seen Shane deeply invested in it about a month back. "How are you liking it?”

“Is good, yes.” Ilya took it and flipped it over in his hands. “Not too much hard English. Some words I need to get used to, the, um… how do you say, casual— slang?”

Shane nodded along. “Yeah, yeah, for sure.” His eyes were still fixed on the book. “Wow. I should really reread that.”

An idea struck Ilya. Maybe a shitty one, but he wanted to keep talking to Shane Hollander about his books or about anything, really. He wanted to see him again. He held out his book. “Hey, um. Maybe… you take this, you read it, and I could— I could read, um—“

“Giovanni’s Room,” Shane supplied.

“Ah— yes— and we could— maybe we meet up? Talk about them? Get, ah— get coffee or something?” Ilya rubbed the back of his neck. “And trade back?”

God, he fucking sucked at this. This was stupid. He needed to leave immediately and pitch himself off a cliff.

Shane, at least, didn’t look totally put out at the idea. In fact, his eyes were bright. Jesus, he had no business being that beautiful. “Wow, um. Okay. As long as— I mean, Giovanni’s Room is, like— it’s not that dense, but it’s— it’s harder than The Outsiders, for sure, so as long as you’re fine with that…”

Ilya nodded immediately, because of course, he’d have read the fucking Odyssey in English if it meant they could meet again. “Of course.” He tried for a confident smile. “I like the hard books. Need practice, you know?”

Shane nodded, and he took the book from Ilya’s hands, handing his own off in exchange. “Okay. Um… I can— I can give you my number, and we could schedule a time to meet next week, then?” Ilya nodded, probably too eagerly, as he pulled out his phone and opened his texts before handing it to Shane to enter his number. “When’s this due?” He held up the book.

“Two weeks,” Ilya said, then gestured questioningly to Shane’s book, which he now clutched in his hands like something precious.

“Oh, don’t worry about it, that’s my own copy.” Shane finished typing and handed Ilya’s phone back. He’d put in his full first and last name as his contact name and added a little smiley emoticon at the end. Fuck. When Ilya put his phone back, Shane offered a smile of his own. “So… next week?”

Ilya nodded faintly. “Next week,” he promised, before standing up from the steps. “See you.”

He walked slowly away from the library, slowly back the way he came, honestly a bit dazed. Holy fucking shit, he had just done that. He had learned the library boy’s name, held a full conversation with him, and now he had his number, a novel, and a fucking date.

“Shane Hollander,” Ilya murmured under his breath when he was in the relative privacy of his own dorm building, just to test the name on his tongue, and then he laughed. He felt kind of lightheaded. Already too far down the dumbass hopeless romantic path to back out now, he sank down onto his bed and laughed to himself as he replayed their conversation in detail in his head. The glasses, the freckles up close, the smile, the bright eyes, the little frown, every single thing he'd said…

And then he opened up Giovanni’s Room, laid back on his bed, and started to read.

- - -

Somehow, miraculously, this book exchange idea that Ilya stumbled into by chance one random winter day became a… a thing. A tradition, of sorts.

After the first coffee-maybe-date discussion, Shane sheepishly pulled out another book and admitted that this was fun, he wanted to do it again. Ilya really hoped he wasn’t wearing a disgustingly besotted face when he accepted this book and pulled out one of his own, that he thankfully already had on him because he’d been not-so-secretly hoping they could do this again, too, and now he was infinitely grateful that Shane had asked first.

They met up every week, trading books and analyses, and sometimes—oftentimes—they would even talk about themselves and their lives and not about the books at all. Not a single time did Ilya feel less like he was being actively electrocuted.

Ilya learned things about Shane Hollander that he tried (and failed, obviously) not to obsessively file away in his mind. Little things, like he also played hockey (now the history books made sense), he had a soft spot for French farce, he grew up in Canada, he majored in Sports Med, he was extremely specific with his coffee order and would not touch anything else, and he was gay.

That last one wasn’t such a little thing, actually, and Shane had blurted it out in the most tense and anxious way possible and with his face flushed and half-hidden by his book—because apparently, it was Shane Hollander’s life purpose to make Ilya spontaneously combust from cuteness—during a discussion of Maurice.

Speaking of Maurice, Shane had been giving Ilya a lot of queer fiction, actually, so if Ilya was going to have a problem with it this would have been a weird time to draw that line. But no matter, Ilya was busy trying to handle it as best as he could—oh-so-carefully walking the line of not making it stiff and awkward and coming off as a total homophobic prick while also pushing down the strong urge not to just grab Shane and kiss him right then and there now that he knew he liked men—and he had no idea whether he succeeded or not because he tripped over a lot of words, but Shane didn’t immediately pack up his books and leave. So maybe there was some hope.

They traded books for two months. Eight weeks. Eight books from Shane, eight books to Shane, eight weeks with nights spent reading and days spent dreaming about ridiculous scenarios that ranged from horny to disgustingly sappy.

Each book Ilya received had Shane’s full name written neatly in the top right corner of the title page in dark black ink. Ilya tried not to feel insane or like a teenage girl mooning over her crush as he ran his fingers over the slight indents in the page in the dark of the night, having just read the entire book by flashlight in one sitting. He loved staring at Shane’s name in his books. Loved memorizing the little quirks in his handwriting, the swoop of the S, how he wrote the top half bigger than the bottom half; the careful, uniform height of all the a’s and e’s and o’s; the particular way he wrote his double Ls, the bottom of the first L connected to the top of the second with the second one longer than the first.

Maybe he was acting just a little bit obsessed. Was it too early to say he might be head-over-heels in love? Definitely too early. And yet.

- - -

“It’s a really interesting read.”

Shane was holding the book out to Ilya. They were just meeting briefly where their paths converged near the library before their respective next classes, because they were both too busy for coffee that week. Shane’s cheeks were flushed pink in the cold, painting his freckles all rosy, and he looked so earnest and a little shy, which was why it took a moment for Ilya to process what he said next.

“There’s something really interesting in the book that I want you to read.” Shane offered a small smile, his eyes wide and shining with intent, and Ilya slowly took the book back, mind moving too slowly to really process the words and why Shane was emphasizing them like that. And then Shane was breathing out an apologetic goodbye and disappearing to head off to class.

Ilya frowned down at the book in his hands. It was a book he’d read in his secondary school English curriculum, one of his favorites from when he was young. This copy was extra thick, because it was printed in both English and Russian, and very well-worn, because Ilya had read it several times, flipping back and forth between the first half and the second to compare until he could read the foreign words without the help of the translation.

Which was why it was strange that Shane wanted him to read it. Ilya had lent it to him. He obviously had read it. A lot. Not much recently, but enough that he knew the plot like the back of his hand.

But he was going to be late to class, so he didn’t think too hard into it. He was probably just reading too much into phrasing, and all Shane meant was that he’d really enjoyed the book and hoped Ilya would reread it.

It didn’t occur to him that maybe this was code for something until later that week. He reached for the book on his nightstand and was just contemplating if Shane had maybe left him annotations when he opened it and a thick bundle of folded lined paper fell out.

Ilya froze immediately.

Holy. Shit.

He slowly bent down to pick up the paper, hands shaking, and stood as he unfolded it.

At the top, in the kind of handwriting that indicated a small child trying to write as neatly as possible, in blue marker: Потрясающие вещи. Wonderful things. Amazing things. Brilliant things.

And then twenty-something full fucking pages of writing.

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Not the list. Anything but the list.

Ilya felt frozen in place as his eyes ran over the Things on the first page.

Ice cream. Dogs. Ice skating. The color yellow. The librarian at school.

Fuck.

Out of context the list made absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever! No sense at all, just a childish and naive spewing of random little things that Ilya had found brilliant starting from over thirteen years ago.

There’s something really interesting in the book that I want you to read.

There’d been a twinkle in Shane’s eye when he’d said that. Ilya hadn’t thought too hard about it, but maybe he should have. Maybe Shane found it amusing. Maybe that adorable smile had been Shane laughing at Ilya. Fuck. Fuck.

Ilya began pacing frantically. He tried very hard not to punch a wall as he reasoned with himself.

The list was in Russian. Maybe Shane hadn’t understood it at all. To him, it would just be gibberish. Some numbers. But fuck, why would Shane have said anything about it, made that kind of hint, if he hadn’t figured out what it said? Maybe he ran it through a translator. He was such an endlessly curious person, of course he would, just to see what it said. Harmless. Fuck.

Why the fuck hadn’t Ilya flipped through the book for anything embarrassing before giving it out to someone he was a little bit unhealthily obsessed with even if they had barely known each other for two months?

Tears of mortification burned in Ilya’s eyes. A wave of unreasonably intense anger ripped through him, and suddenly he very much wanted to just tear the whole list in half.

His hands were clenching around the edges of the paper, worn soft after all these years.

And then he stopped.

There were words, unfamiliar words, English words. At the bottom of the last page.

When Ilya had been just under eighteen years old, throwing his things into his bags and ready to leave his home and never come back, finding this list under a box of teenage knick-knacks, he had made it his goal to hit one thousand. He never had. He’d made it to Brilliant Thing #999. Solnechnyy svet. Sunlight.

But the list now went into the thousands. Six new entries that he didn’t remember ever putting down.

#1000: When someone lends you books.

Holy shit.

The words were in English. Ilya’s previous entries were all in various colors of crayon, pencil, pen, varied levels of neatness, even the handwriting changed, as time skipped between chunks of entries, entire years between some of them.

#1001: When someone actually reads the books you give them.

But always in Cyrillic, never in English.

Ilya slowly sat back down on the edge of the bed, head spinning as he stared at the neat letters in dark black ink. His thumb brushed against the double Ls in the word actually.

Holy shit.

#1002: When you learn something about someone that surprises you but which makes complete sense.

Shane was smart. He was so fucking smart, could he tell what Ilya was thinking, read between the lines and into the decade of entries, see right through him? What did he think of Ilya now, if he knew?

Ilya tried so hard not to blink his tears onto the page and ruin the ink as he read the next three Things.

#1003: Realizing that, for the first time in your life, someone is occupying your every waking thought, making it hard to eat or sleep or concentrate, and that they feel familiar to you even though they’re brand new.
#1004: Finding an opportunity to say this in a way which doesn’t involve being in the same room at the same time, as you’re terrified of rejection and you’re scared that if you don’t say something now, it’ll never happen.
#1005: Writing about yourself in the second person.

Ilya snorted wetly at that last one, then bent over and broke down right there, alone in his room on a Friday night, head between his knees, just sobbing over a stupid packet of stupid lined paper filled with one thousand and five stupid, beautiful joys in life.

He had no idea how long he sat there crying. Crying and rereading the words over and over and over again.

Occupying your every waking thought. God, Shane Hollander.

Ilya wanted to text him right away, ask him do you really mean all of this, do you, tell me you do, but it was fucking one in the morning and he didn’t know what to say, exactly, and whatever he came up with in this state at this time would probably be terrible and ineloquent and probably come out all wrong.

He needed time, to figure out what to do, what to say. Once he could breathe again and wipe away his tears without more welling up and flowing down, he pulled out a pen and picked up where Shane had left off.

#1006: Surprises.
#1007: Understanding what everyone in pop music is talking about.
#1008: Being so happy you want to dance.
#1009: Dancing.
#1010: Reading something that says what you feel exactly but that you didn’t know how to say yourself.

His English wasn’t as eloquent as Shane’s, but a manic sort of laugh bubbled out of him anyway as he just kept finding things to scribble down. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this happy in his life.

#1221: Secrets you can hear from the hotel room next door.

An hour became two, became three, four, and he was staying up until dawn just writing. He didn’t know what kind of weird fucking daze hit him, what possessed him to come up with and write down literal hundreds of Brilliant Things.

#1410: Moments that may or may not change your life forever.

He wanted to get to two thousand. He wanted to write until the sun came up, or until his hand cramped so hard he could never write with it again, whichever one came first. More importantly, he wanted to find Shane Hollander sitting in the library and kiss him square on the mouth for the world to see.

#1857: Planning a declaration of love.

He needed a dictionary, the rate he was going, to somehow wrangle his delirious and sleep-deprived and lovesick and euphoric thoughts into something at all coherent.

#1919: The word “condolences”.

He wrote for so long he fucking doubled his list. Fuck, it had been a year and a half of his new life, he had so much more brilliance to add.

#2000: Coffee.

His alarm rang just after he hit his second thousand. He laughed out loud, then just kept going.

#2001: Shows that match the books they’re adapted from perfectly.

#2005: Vinyl records.

#2009: Meet-cutes.

Ilya wrote down one more—#2013: Conversations that are about both nothing and everything—before he finally managed to get himself to stop.

His hand was probably going to fall off and die. He’d written over a thousand Brilliant Things. The thick packet had doubled in size. Maybe Shane could help him convert it into a digital document, at this point; it would be a whole of a lot easier to take care of than a packet of poorly-stapled binder paper.

Ilya snapped up straight in his seat. Shane. He quickly flipped back the pages, searching for #1000-#1005, as if he could have imagined them, as if they could suddenly be gone.

#1003: Realizing that, for the first time in your life, someone is occupying your every waking thought, making it hard to eat or sleep or concentrate, and that they feel familiar to you even though they’re brand new.

Fuck, Ilya had to somehow follow that up?

- - -

Shane had suggested their next meeting place be his dorm room. So Ilya was standing his door, with a copy of his next book tucked into his bag, the list clutched between both hands, and a vague semblance of a plan that fell away to scattered and incoherent and ridiculously enamored threads of thought when Shane answered the door, caught sight of the list, and immediately blushed a light pink.

“Oh,” Shane said, and he avoided Ilya’s gaze as he slowly pulled the door open, gesturing wordlessly for Ilya to come inside. “You, um. You saw that.”

“Could say the same thing about you.” Ilya followed him in and took off his shoes, and Shane led him to sit around a small coffee table. “Find mysterious writing in Cyrillic and just had to translate and see what it says, yes?”

Shane’s blush darkened. “I just—“

“Mm, was curious?” Ilya grinned. His nerves were still on edge, but, as always, there was something relieving about poking fun at Shane that just made everything feel better. Brilliant Thing #2014, he thought, Making fun of Shane Hollander. “Good boy Shane Hollander snooping through private documents?”

“I w— I was not snooping—“ Shane protested. “I— Private documents? It was loose binder paper!”

Ilya laughed. He hadn’t gotten any sleep, and the floaty mania from a few hours ago was still fading, and all he could think to do was laugh. Shane scoffed at him, but he was smiling, and when Ilya finally stopped laughing, he was quiet for a moment before he quietly said, “So you, um. You read what I… added?”

Ilya nodded slowly. “Yes. And then I, um… add a few more.” He flipped to Brilliant Thing #1000, and then through to the end.

Shane raised his eyebrows, eyes flicking over the pages and pages that were added overnight. “A few.”

Ilya grinned. He couldn’t help it, he grinned wide and felt purely fucking giddy. “A few. You know, easier to notice beautiful things when beautiful boy says he can’t stop thinking about you, yes?”

Shane’s next blush was deliciously adorable and he broke eye contact again to mutter, “Shut up.”

#2015, he itched to write, Shane Hollander’s blush when he is embarrassed.

“Is true, then?” Ilya said, voice softer.

“Of course it’s true,” Shane snapped without a moment’s pause.

Ilya’s heart leapt into his throat. “How… long?”

Shane stared pointedly at the list and not at Ilya’s face. “Um. Hard to say? Crazy enough that I started seeing Ilya fucking Rozanov of all people all the time at the library. And, y’know, I’d never, like, seen you before this year. And last year I thought it was fucking insane that one person could go around fucking that many people, and then I saw you and I was like yeah, no, makes sense.”

Ilya laughed with surprise at the forthrightness. “Really?”

“Shut up,” Shane said, again. He closed his eyes and his next words came rapidly, spilling out in stammers like he just needed to get them out before he lost the guts. “So. Yeah. And then I saw you all the time, and I just… I don’t know. I didn’t want to jinx it, so I just… kept going to the library, kept sitting there, and literally every single fucking time you would approach me”—and Ilya remembered the little pretend trips he’d taken just to get a glimpse at what Shane was reading—“and every single time I thought I was going crazy because I really thought you were going to— to walk up to me and talk to me or something, but then you’d just walk past, and— and nothing would happen. But I kept going there anyway. And then— and then one random day, I was like, the weather is kind of nice, and the sitting inside all the fucking time isn’t working, maybe I should just sit outside, and— and then you— and you actually fucking spoke to me? And I gave you my number— fuck, man, I don’t even know what fucking possessed me— oh my god.” Shane scrubbed a hand over his face.

Ilya was delighted. All this time, thinking he was doing some one-sided obsessive staring, and here was Shane admitting he’d been even more insane than Ilya. “Holy shit, Hollander, you had a crush on me.”

Shane groaned loudly and buried his face in his arms. “Fuck, I never should have said a word. I never should have done this. I shouldn’t have talked to you.”

“Noo,” Ilya whined, dragging out the vowel. His face hurt from grinning. “What? Look how much fun we are having!”

“I’m starting to really regret fucking spilling my whole heart out to you, if this is what I’m getting in return,” Shane said, voice muffled.

Ilya let his jaw drop, faux-offended. “What you’re getting in return?” he demanded. “You are spilling heart out to me? What about me? You read my list!”

Shane lifted his head to shoot him a glare. “Well, yeah, but— I mean— I added— clearly, you’re not that— and—“ He struggled for a few seconds, before bursting out, “you haven’t even said— I don’t even know that you like me back!”

Ilya stared at him for a few seconds in stunned disbelief. “Shane,” he said incredulously.

“What?”

“Shane.”

“What?!”

“You are an idiot.”

“What?” Shane frowned, looking genuinely and earnestly confused and even a little bit hurt. “Why?”

“Shane!” Ilya tried not to laugh. “You add six things to my stupid list to prove world is happy and I am so stupidly happy that I find one fucking thousand more things to add! And you think I come here after that just to say oh, sorry, I don’t feel the same way?”

“I— I don’t know!” Shane spluttered. “I thought— you could just be here to make fun of me.”

And he was so cute all defensive that Ilya couldn’t help pausing there, tilting his head as if truly considering it. “Okay. True. Very fun. Number two thousand and fourteen, Making fun of Shane Hollander,” he recited. Then he schooled his face to be more serious. “But no. I like you. I am flirting with you.”

Shane sucked in a breath, looking shocked. “Oh. I— I like you too.”

It probably wasn’t physically possible for Ilya to smile even wider. He was suddenly very aware that the air practically buzzing with a tension that begged to be broken. Shane’s arms were still folded on the table, his elbow just barely touching Ilya’s wrist, and all Ilya could think about was that single point of contact.

“Shane?”

“Mm?” For the first time since he’d opened his room door, Shane did not dodge eye contact. His eyes were locked onto Ilya’s. An electric charge was running up Ilya’s spine. He couldn’t remember the last time Shane held his gaze like this.

Would now be a bad time for a shitty-ass line? Too late, his mouth was already going for it. “Would you… do me a favor?”

Shane frowned slightly, so Ilya quickly continued, “I would like to add one thing to the list. But I have not tried it yet.”

“Um. What’s that?” Shane wasn’t looking Ilya in the eye anymore, and Ilya could have been imagining it, but it felt like Shane’s gaze was now fixed on his mouth.

Ilya leaned forward and grinned mischievously. “Kissing Shane Hollander,” he said bluntly.

Shane smiled. It was soft and sweet and also more than a little bit shit-eating. “I mean, I know a few people you can talk to about that, if you want to know if it’s worth adding, but they’re mostly women from before I found out I was gay, so I don’t know that you’ll get very positive reviews—“

“Oh my god, Shane,” Ilya interrupted, “shut the fuck up.” 

And they were reaching for each other in a tangle of limbs, and Ilya kissed Shane absolutely terribly because he was smiling too much, and he couldn’t even bring himself to care.

- - -

#2014: Making fun of Shane Hollander.
#2015: Shane Hollander’s blush when he is embarrassed.
#2016: Kissing Shane Hollander.

Shane scoffed at the entries when Ilya read them to him out loud, before grabbing him and pulling him in for another kiss. And then, Ilya made it his new life goal to find more and more Things. At least one a day, to tell Shane, to gift to him.

#2389: Badgers.

Pages and pages and pages of Brilliant Things.

#4997: Gifts you actually want and didn’t ask for.

Everywhere he looked, now, he would find them. It was fucking insane. And fucking beautiful.

#8124: Looking at someone and realizing, suddenly, how ridiculously fucking happy you are.

So fucking beautiful. This was what he’d dreamed of finding when he started the list almost thirteen years ago. He now had thousands upon thousands of entries. They couldn’t even fit on a proper packet anymore, because he’d come up with them spontaneously, sometimes, somewhere he just had to write it down before he forgot, and so they’d end up on napkins or shirt sleeves or envelopes or receipts, stuffed into pockets to be stored in a cardboard box.

Ilya spent much of the summer with Shane that year. It was amazing and wonderful and he came up with Things in waves, dozens at a time.

#9993. Dreams of flying.
#9994. Friendly cats.
#9995. Falling in love.
#9996. Sex.
#9997. Being cooked for.
#9998. Watching someone watching your favorite film.
#9999. Staying up all night talking.
#10000. Waking up late with someone you love.

Ten thousand Brilliant Things. He hit the milestone in a quiet affair, a lazy Friday morning with Shane asleep on his chest, and Things number nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine and ten thousand were scribbled hastily, as best he could with Shane basically pinning his arm down, with the pen and notepad he kept on the nightstand now, for those frequent days he woke up with Things on the tip of his tongue, coming to him in dreams.

He smiled at the two, thinking about how he’d rip out the page and put it in the box with the others, later.

Then he kissed the top of Shane’s head. “Time to wake up, zvezdochka.”

Shane’s eyes opened slowly. #5162: The look on someone’s face when they’re half asleep. “G’morning,” he slurred.

- - -

Irina used to go through lows and highs.

Not near the end, but in the beginning. Early on. Ilya had to rack his brains to remember the days, but there was no doubt they had been there—days filled with laughter and delicious food and plenty of piano music from the living room when his mother was on one of her ups. Later on, he had learned to be more scared of the happiness than the sadness. Because whenever there had been days so good they shined, whenever she’d smile so hard she glowed and take Ilya and his brother out for trips through town for pastries and play songs into the night, the drop would follow, and follow hard.

#456: Когда мама играет на старом пианино в гостиной. [When Mama plays the old piano in the living room.]

Feeling this happy was very new to Ilya. He had never before considered what it would be like to go through the highs and lows, because before it was pretty much always lows. Now that he was floating on air, he often wondered, distantly, what it would take for him to drop back down again. Surely not much. He would just fall, just like that.

Ilya had read a lot. He knew that children with depressed parents often had a fucked up reaction to stress—higher sensitivity, quicker temper, shorter fuse—because growing up in that kind of environment would quite literally change a child’s brain chemistry. But Ilya was more scared of the contagion thing. The stupid fucking Werther thing. The hereditary thing. The fact that this new knowledge of what it feels like to get as high as he did only made it more dangerous to fall from here, and that he’d hit the same low she did, and then it would be the end.

Even with a ten-thousand-entry list of counterarguments, some days, the days that scared Ilya the most, he would wake feeling like he could still perfectly understand exactly why someone would no longer want to continue living.

For winter break of their junior year, Shane took Ilya to his cottage in Ottawa.

#13245: Kayaking.

And, later, to meet his parents.

#13313: Homemade pasta.

They were lovely. So lovely. Fantastic, amazing, wonderful, and it was awful and brilliant all at once.

#13536: Cookies and cream.
#13537: Jigsaw puzzles.

They told stories and sang songs. They didn’t play the piano, but their voices rang through the room in such a familiar way. Comforting, yet Ilya couldn’t help but remember the highs dipping into lows.

Ilya was only a little relieved when they finally said goodbye to Yuna and David and it was just the two of them again. He’d loved them, of course, but he missed not feeling wistful every single time someone did something perfectly wonderful and loving, which was pretty much every five minutes.

He also missed having sex, which Shane insisted couldn’t happen for the week that they were in his parents’ home, which was fair, but still very frustrating, so there was that, too.

They made a little fire pit their first night back. Ilya had teased Shane about the concept, but now that they were actually sitting in front of the flickering flames, with sweaters and hot cider, it was nice. They chatted in low, soft voices, teased, laughed, kissed. The air buzzed with the fire’s popping and their conversation and the calls of wildlife, stupid Canadian birds included. Ilya ended up resting his head in Shane’s lap while gentle fingers combed through his curls.

Shane’s free hand eventually trailed down Ilya’s chest slowly, his touch feather-light, before pausing over Ilya’s clavicle. He gave something a light tap, and Ilya felt the slightest pressure of metal pressing into his skin.

Shane knew his crucifix necklace well. He’d pulled on it in bed multiple times. He’d asked about it before.

“Are you religious? Or do you just wear this?”

And he knew who it had belonged to.

Ilya knew there was a question on the tip of Shane’s tongue, but he was in no hurry to hear it. He waited patiently for Shane to ask first.

He had never told Shane why he made the list. He knew Shane had little pieces of the truth, was smart enough to do the math with some of the entries.

#501: Шанс попрощаться. [The chance to say goodbye.]

Smart enough to notice the tiniest comments Ilya dropped about his father and brother and Russia. The gaps in conversations, the things he never spoke about, the things he skated around.

Tonight, Ilya was too tired to dodge. But still, he waited for Shane to ask first.

“I’ve just been thinking, all week,” Shane murmured, “I feel… bad.”

Ilya’s brow furrowed. He didn’t know if Shane could see or not. “Why?”

“I don’t know. My parents are… I love them. They’re so great.” Shane paused, but Ilya knew he wouldn't leave it at that. Even if Ilya kind of wished he would. “I’ve just been wishing you had that, too.”

“My mother was great,” Ilya said without thinking. Why wasn’t he thinking?

Shane hesitated, but Ilya’s never known him to drop something unless directly told to in his life. “How did she die?”

Ilya didn’t want to pussyfoot around it anymore, but some defenses were still hard to drop. “An accident,” he said bitterly, remembering his father’s words. Then, realizing Shane would not understand his humorless little joke, he tacked on, “She accidentally swallowed a whole bottle of pills. Oops.”

Shane tensed beneath him. “Oh.” Hadn’t Shane suspected? Didn’t he notice the days when waking was hard for Ilya? Or was he too polite to put two and two together? Maybe he was acting for Ilya’s benefit, though Ilya didn’t think so. Maybe what Ilya thought exuded from his every thought and word and action wasn’t as obvious as he thought it was. “Ilya, I’m…”

So sorry.

I’m so sorry.

Ilya let his eyes slip shut. Actually, he didn’t hear the words as often as one would assume he might, in his situation. For one, it wasn’t exactly something he went around telling people, not even the few friends he had in the States. For another, most people usually didn’t say it with their mouths, only their eyes. But Shane was not most people, and he hated when people talked with just their eyes. He liked to fill in all the blanks.

“…so sorry.”

Ilya sighed. “Is okay. Was a long time ago.”

“How long?”

Ilya hummed, pretending he had to think about it. “Seven, almost eight years.” He felt Shane squeeze his arm gently, and he opened his eyes again. “She was not weak.” Suddenly, he needed Shane to know. He needed to clarify. “She was wonderful. But she was so sad. She couldn’t see anything brilliant in the world, and I could not understand why. I wanted to prove it to her. That she was wrong and she just wasn’t looking. She wouldn’t look.”

That was unfair to her, though. He knew that now that he was older. It wasn’t that she wouldn’t look. More that she couldn’t see.

“So, the list,” Shane said. Filling in the unsaid words.

“Yes.”

A beat of silence. Ilya fixed his eyes on the crackling bonfire.

Then he felt gentle lips press against his temple. “Thank you for telling me,” Shane whispered.

Despite himself, Ilya smiled.

#13839: Bonfires.
#13840: Fucking loons.
#13841: When it gets so late all your secrets spill out like sand.

- - -

Shane was the one to encourage him to keep the list up, constantly, for years. He was perceptive. Sometimes, when he caught Ilya slipping, he’d give a little reminder, ask a little something, like, “Have you done the list today?”

#123321: Palindromes.

(Shane had been surprised that Ilya knew this word, and more surprised to learn that the word is essentially the same in Russian and English. Thus:

#123322: Cognates.)

They had friends that knew about the list. Sometimes they’d add to it. Suggest their own. Different colors and writing mediums and handwritings joined Shane’s and Ilya’s. Some wrote in different languages.

A lot of the basic, generic ones had been filled already, encouraging people to get very specific.

#253263: The feeling of calm which follows the realization that, although you may be in a regrettable situation, there's nothing you can do about it.

#340019: Needing a specific object in a specific moment and knowing exactly where to find it.

#543810: The odd, irresistible desire to explore ruins or abandoned, crumbling places.

#660219: When conversations play out exactly how you imagined them.

#777777: The prospect of dressing up as a Mexican wrestler. Not the action of dressing up as a Mexican wrestler, but the prospect of it.

A year out of uni, Shane proposed. Filled Ilya’s house with those electric candles and got on one knee. It was beautiful. Ilya cried very hard.

#799973: LED candles.

Ilya did the dumb stopping-to-tie-his-shoelace thing for his proposal. They were at the lake near Shane’s cottage, and Shane was walking ahead, explaining some landscaping he’d had done, and when he turned around, Ilya was holding a ring. Somehow it actually worked, which made Shane laugh himself silly.

#800121: When pranks that have been done a million times by a million people still work.

They got married in the summer, invited tons of friends, and Shane’s parents gave the most beautiful fucking speeches Ilya had ever heard. While they milled about chatting with people during the reception, Ilya realized how much the list had truly changed the way he saw simple things. Maybe it was crazy, the way he could come up with numbers just looking at people socialize.

#1009: Dancing.

#2390: People who can’t sing but either don't know or don't care.

#688: «Я сошла с ума» группы t.A.T.u. [t.A.T.u’s “All The Things She Said”.]

#32: Очень высокие торты. [Really tall cakes.]

#541: Алкоголь. [Alcohol.]

#45: Объятия. [Hugging.]

#1410: Moments that may or may not change your life forever.

- - -

Guilt and disgust crept through Ilya’s body as he watched Shane stare at him with stunned… anger? Realization? Hurt? Something bad. Something very, very bad.

Ilya was still panting. The room was ringing a little, or maybe that was in Ilya’s ears, from the yelling.

Ilya and Shane were competitive freaks in every aspect of their relationship, so arguments were not uncommon.

Fights were.

And all Shane had done was suggest cautiously, kindly, as tenderly and sensitively as humanly possible, that Ilya should see someone. As in, a professional. As in a therapist. And Ilya had responded by lashing out.

Shane looked a whole number of things, now. One being confused. Ilya felt another stab of shame through his heart. He always tried to be as direct to his husband as possible—Shane tended to panic when things escalated too quickly or too unpredictably in a direction he wasn’t expecting. And now, he had no idea why Ilya had just yelled. In anger, in fear, in defensiveness.

“Sorry,” Ilya whispered, slowly sitting back down next to him on the couch.

Shane had stayed seated, but he’d jumped about a foot away. Ilya noticed the way he was now gripping the armrest.

Sorry didn’t feel like enough. Ilya knew that he should probably explain himself, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to.

He knew what depression was. Of course he fucking knew, it had leaked throughout the household and crept up on him until it had all exploded when he’d been twelve. He’d spent a day and a half reading about The Sorrows of Young Werther in a university library. He knew, he knew, he fucking knew, and he knew that he was fine, because if he weren’t fine, he would not understand so clearly and logically how stupid suicide was as a concept, not be so sure of how idiotic the cult-like Werther fan mania had been, not be so angry at his mother for doing what she did and leaving him behind, not have a fucking list of reasons to stay alive and reasons to be fucking happy that was approaching a million entries. He was fine.

The soft and pained look Shane got in his eyes when Ilya tried to explain this only made him madder, and when Shane finally dropped the subject—not an easy feat for Shane Hollander, which was usually worth a teasing “Mr. Investigator” from Ilya, but not today—Ilya suspected that it was just so he could find another time to bring it up in a different approach. Still, Ilya was relieved.

- - -

Shane kept urging him to continue the list. Reminders. He used to do these reminders all the time before they got married, and back then they had felt like a kind of inside joke between them, a small, grounding point of comfort, even something flirty and gentle. Now they felt a little like housework. A little like a prescription.

#826978:

Exercise. Eat well. Take your meds. Swallow your pills. Add an entry to the list.

#826978:

Did you add to the list today? Don’t forget, Ilya. Don’t forget to add to the list.

#826978:

Ilya stared blankly at the number.

He’d been stuck on Brilliant Thing #826978 for a year. It was hard to notice new things.

Just one hundred and seventy-three thousand and twenty-two short of a million, but a million was crazy. A million was so much. So much, and if there truly were that many Brilliant Things in the world, surely it would be impossible to feel like this. If there were one million Brilliant Things, feeling this sad all the time would just be stupid. Ridiculous. Neblagodarnyy.

The list ended with eight hundred and twenty-six thousand, nine hundred and seventy-seven items. One hundred and seventy-three thousand and twenty-two short of a million. It was finished. There was nothing else to find.

Ilya shoved the list, thick stacks of papers and slips and scraps and junk and all, into several boxes—the first one had become too small to hold everything years ago—and threw it all away.

- - -

Ilya had read a play, once, in those library visits years ago, about a boy with a depressed mother, who pushed away the person he loved, became morose and difficult to live with. He thought vaguely of this play while Shane packed his suitcase.

He was not going away. Ilya knew this. He knew this, Shane had said exactly that so many times. “I’m not going away,” he’d promised, but in the same way the list had sometimes seemed easy to see through, had sometimes seemed like just words on paper with nothing behind them, this felt empty, too. Ilya wondered if he really did know, deep down.

He was just on a trip for work. Six months. They’d talked about this, been talking about this, for about a year now. Ilya could tell that Shane was trying not to show how worried he was. Could sense that Shane didn’t fully trust him on his own.

That thought always made him laugh darkly when he was alone. Some people had to worry about infidelity when they left their partners for long periods of time. Shane Hollander had to worry about his husband emptying the medicine cabinet.

Or getting drunk in the bath.

Or trapping himself in the car with the exhaust fumes.

- - -

Ilya must have been better at hiding than he thought. He knew that if Shane had even the faintest idea what happened in Ilya’s head, he would have never left. Would have never even considered leaving. Actually, he’d probably never let Ilya leave the house, leave his sight, again. Ilya’s not sure if that thought brings him comfort or only more emptiness.

For the first week, Ilya wondered often, while he wandered the empty house aimlessly, if he’d always been like this. If he’d always been sad or if he was once happy.

He could tell the question would burn into him until he did something about it, but he didn’t really know what he could do about it until a strange and random idea occurred to him. One that was absolutely ridiculous, but wouldn’t leave him. So, about halfway into the second week, he called his school librarian from Russia. Brilliant Thing #5. He found her number through the school’s staff directory archives, and called it.

They hadn’t known each other that well, of course, but she was probably the one who had known Ilya as a child best. The only one alive that had really known child Ilya at all, to be honest.

He hadn’t expected for her to pick up, but she did. He was even more surprised to learn that she remembered him. Him and his list. Which he didn’t have anymore, but he didn’t tell her that.

She even let him talk to her sock puppet, who told him a joke. A bad one, but he laughed, softly.

After a half hour of asking what he was like as a child, wondering out loud if he had been happy, he—with the help of the librarian’s gentle coaxing—decided that maybe it wasn’t the state of being happy that changed. It was finding it. And he had been much, much better at finding it when he was younger.

It felt good to get his feelings out in Russian. He hadn’t been able to spill like that in his native tongue in years.

It was starting to get very late when he finally said, apologetically, “Thank you. I’m so sorry I called so late out of the blue. I won’t again. Good night.”

And she, surprising him a third time, said softly, “You can always call again, moy dorogoy.”

Ilya tried very hard not to sound like he was crying. He probably failed, but he managed to choke out another “thank you” before hanging up.

- - -

Ilya went to a support group.

Therapy would have to come later. He could talk with Shane about it, again, once he returned in the fall. He could imagine it, now, Shane’s soft, beautiful smile, relieved at his reconsideration, the way he’d say of course, let’s talk about it, I’ve done some research—because, of course he had, it was Shane Hollander, Ilya knew he’d done research and was just sitting on it, waiting for Ilya to be ready—let’s get through this together.

But Shane was not there, not right now. And Ilya needed to talk to someone. So, support group it was.

Expressing himself in English had gotten incrementally easier over the years, but he still found himself tripping over words when he was nervous, unsure of what to say. He just let the thoughts flow out as best they could. A stream of consciousness.

“My mother, when I was young, she was… very sad. Depressed. I could sense it. But I could not really understand why. I think I was better at it, when I was small. Being happy. I am not very good at it now.

“I have this list. Or, I used to, I do not have it anymore. But I made a list of... potryasayushchiye veshchi. Wonderful things. All things in the world that are beautiful. Brilliant. I made it to give to her, as a present, but she, ah, didn’t… didn’t make it.

“But I continued it. I don’t know for who. For me, I guess. I got to eight hundred twenty-six thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven.” He could roll the number off his tongue easily. “I think it helped, maybe. It didn’t help her, but it helped me.”

Tears came to his eyes, then.

On the way back home, Ilya let his own words—ones that he’d said out loud and ones that he’d only thought—circle his mind.

For a long time I thought I could not possibly be like her if I could see and understand all of these things, this list, if I can look at what she did and think it is a bad idea. But sometimes… sometimes, recently, I can… understand her, kind of. Understand why it would not be enough. So… I think maybe I am like her. Actually, I’m sure I am like her.

But I don’t want to be like her. Not in that way. I don’t want to do to my husband what she did to me.

He hated that thought. Hated picturing Shane’s face twisted with anguish, tears on his face where there should only be freckles. And blushes. And reading glasses.

He also hated being reminded of social contagion. If he… would Shane…?

Picturing that made Ilya gasp so hard he had to try not to swerve off the side of the road.

Ilya resolutely swore, out loud, to whatever god was listening, to his mother’s spirit, to whatever angel or ghost or divinity was protecting Shane, that he would not be the one to cause either of those images. If not for any of the eight hundred thousand Things, Ilya would hang on for Shane Hollander.

He tried not to imagine his mother making that same promise about her family. About her sons, about Ilya.

- - -

When Ilya had mentioned throwing away the list to the group, he had felt a deep stab of regret. It didn’t help that several people had gasped as if they themselves were in pain hearing about it. It was the first time he’d ever consciously realized how much he regretted throwing it away.

The hatred—of his past self, for ever thinking the list could end and that it could just be… thrown away, taken away from a future version of himself that might need it, just like that—sat cold and quiet at the bottom of his stomach for days on end. Never at the forefront of his mind, but he couldn’t forget about it. He’d go about his day and every tiny thing would remind him of an entry on the list, and he’d be mad at himself all over again.

He didn’t realize how intense the grief was until he gasped awake in a cold sweat one morning in September, choking on his own breath, tears streaming down his face, missing the list so hard he was sobbing.

He barely managed to stumble out of bed. He’d stopped crying by the time he made it to the kitchen, but there was a tightness he couldn’t get rid of in his chest.

He opened the freezer to look for something to microwave for breakfast, only for his eyes to fall on a package of plombir.

Пломбир. A Russian ice cream that Shane had found at a small local grocery store and always kept the fridge stocked with because he knew it from the list. Brilliant Thing #1.

Ilya realized with sudden and distinct clarity that he could not breathe.

Tears rushed to his eyes instantly and blurred his vision. Ilya swiped uselessly at the freezer door to close it because Shane would be so upset if he left the door open and let everything spoil. He missed, though, and instead stumbled, caught himself on the door, and slid, trembling, to the ground, bruising his knees as he landed against the tile.

Air. He needed air. He was gasping sharply but it didn’t feel like his mind was getting any clearer at all. He could feel himself shaking. He couldn’t see anything, but he could feel the coldness of the open freezer.

Fuck. He felt absolutely terrified of something he couldn’t even place. Fuck, fuck, he couldn’t breathe. He felt like he was choking.

Several common methods of suicide involved suffocation, Ilya thought vaguely, still fighting for oxygen with tears streaming down his face. It’s impossible to die from simply holding your breath, because the body instinctively forces you to take an in-breath. Biology wants you to survive even when neurology doesn’t. 

Sometimes, though, people found ways to outsmart that biological function.

There was a ringing building in his ears. Okay, his sight was gone, his hearing was gone, his breathing was gone, everything felt too bright and too sharp and too cold and too tight, if he could just shut this fucking freezer…

Fuck. The list. The stupid fucking list. Why did Ilya throw it away? Why the fuck did he throw it away? Even if he had reached the end, even if he couldn’t come up with anything to add, how could he have been so fucking selfish as to fucking—

He continued to gasp for breath. Fuck, fuck, fuck, he was so fucked, could he die from this? Could he die from hating himself so much he couldn’t fucking breathe?

He could barely feel the ground below him, but it was there. Hard and cold. Usually the floor in front of a refrigerator was warm. That was weird. Right, Ilya hadn’t closed the damn door. How long has it been since then? Wouldn’t the fridge have started beeping by now, the little alarm that rings out when someone leaves the door open? Maybe it was beeping. Maybe it was beeping and Ilya couldn’t hear it through the static in his ears.

He focused on the floor. The floor was real, it was there, it was stiff and solid and it was proof that Ilya was still alive. He was still alive because he needed to stay alive because he had so many reasons to, so many, eight… eight hundred fucking thousand… he had a whole list, a list that he fucking threw away like it was nothing—

“—lya? Ilya! Fuck, can you hear me, Ilya?”

The floor, the hard tile floor, fuck he was scared, fuck, he could die right now and he’d thrown the list of Brilliant Things away—

“Ilya. Listen to me. Can you hear me? Can you breathe with me?”

He curled up, against the floor. He didn’t understand. The words, he— he didn’t understand. “Po—“ he tried to rasp out. “Pomogi— mne.”

He couldn’t translate right now. Fuck, he hadn’t found English this difficult to translate in years—

“Ilyushenka,” the voice tried this time. “Pozhaluysta.”

Please.

Ilya gasped with the sharp relief of comprehension.

“Ty slyshish' menya?” Can you hear me?

He channeled all his energy into nodding jerkily. “Da,” he whispered.

“Okay. Okay. Can you— Mozhesh' podyshat' so mnoy?” Can you breathe with me?

The Russian was hesitant, Ilya noted dazedly. The sounds were a little awkward. Ilya got the gist, though. He nodded again, and tried to listen through the buzzing for the breathing.

It was steady. A slow, simple rhythm that someone tapped out onto Ilya’s arm. Ilya followed along, distantly tried to remember what these were called. Something Shane had taught him a long time ago.

In, two, three, four. The voice switched from breathing deliberately to counting softly. Hold, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four.

Ilya’s body finally, finally breathed in when he told it to breathe in. He wanted to exhale or even laugh in relief, but he forced himself to follow the count.

Box breathing! That’s what it was called. If Ilya survived this, he’d make a new list, and box breathing would be the first thing on it.

He realized he could recognize that the voice was counting in Russian, but saying the commands—in, hold, out, hold—in English. There was a hand on his wrist, still tapping out the rhythm. And another hand at the base of his head, fingers tangled into his curls.

“Good. Good job,” the voice paused its counting to whisper. “Good job. I love you. You're doing great, I love you. Ya tebya lyublyu.”

Shane Hollander’s tongue was still clumsy around that last syllable after all these years, but he’d improved a lot at his Russian. So much it surprised Ilya. He must have been secretly practicing.

“Moy lyubimyy,” Ilya finally managed weakly, and now he could see it clearly, Shane’s tearstained face breaking into a radiant smile. “Hello. You are back.”

He was back. Appeared back in their house after months just when Ilya needed him like his fucking guardian angel.

The freezer door was shut now. Ilya wanted to laugh at this, that even while helping him through a panic attack, Shane thought to close it. But he didn’t feel much like laughing.

“I am sorry,” Ilya murmured. He realized now that he was fully sprawled on the ground in Shane’s lap. He curled up closer and breathed Shane in. “I’m so sorry.”

“What?” Shane sounded baffled. “What the fuck are you sorry about?”

“I am so sorry,” Ilya repeated. “I— I threw away the list.”

He couldn’t get past that. He couldn’t bring himself to clarify what he meant, because just saying that made him want to start sobbing until he was dry of tears.

But Shane didn’t ask him to clarify. “Oh. Oh, Ilyusha—“

“I hate it,” Ilya said, and he pulled himself up so he could hug Shane and bury his face in Shane’s shoulder. “I hate it, I hate that I threw it away, I hate it, and it’s gone, and I’m sorry—“

“Ilya.” He felt Shane grab his wrist and squeeze it. “Ilya, don’t be sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I left you, I don’t know why I didn’t— didn’t ask my parents to check in with you, or something, and— and the list isn’t gone, sweetheart.”

“No,” Ilya protested, because now he remembered, he never told Shane he was throwing it away, and now his heart broke all over again because he didn’t want to break the news this way, but— “It’s gone, last year, I took the boxes and I— I threw them—“

“Ilya, the list isn’t gone,” Shane repeated with so much certainty. His hand was rubbing slow circles into Ilya’s back, and it was so soothing that Ilya had to make a conscious effort to focus on his next words. “I found the boxes. It’s fine. I saved them. They’re in the basement right now.”

Ilya was silent for all of ten seconds, and then he pulled back from the hug. “What?”

Shane’s mouth quirked as if he were going to smile. “You weren’t being as slick as you thought you were. I saw you, and I saved the list, but… I thought you would be mad at me. So I didn’t tell you about it.” He shook his head, now frowning. “That was stupid, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He’d saved it.

All this time, Ilya had been sitting around feeling cold and empty and undone, thinking he’d gotten rid of the list forever, and Shane had saved it.

God, he loved this man.

“Fuck,” Ilya breathed, and then he grabbed Shane and hugged him again. “Fuck, Shane, you— I love you. I love you so much. Fuck.” He was fully sobbing now. Probably ruining Shane’s sweatshirt.

Shane rubbed his back slowly. “I love you too,” he murmured. “The list is fine. It’s down there, it’s all there, I put it in order for you and everything. It’s there whenever you need it. I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“No.” Ilya squeezed so hard Shane grunted a little, but then squeezed back. “No, it— I would have— I would have tried to get rid of it again, I think, if you told me then. Thank you. Thank you so much, I love you so much, I love you.”

That was all Ilya could think to say. He couldn’t find it in him to do anything at that moment except sit there on the kitchen floor with his husband, whispering over and over again how much he loved him. He’d saved the list. And he was here, and back home, and Ilya was alive. He was alive.

#826978: Box breathing.

- - -

“I thought maybe, one day, she would realize. If I found enough,” Ilya murmured. If I was enough, he had almost said, before stopping himself.

They were in bed, facing each other. Shane already knew why Ilya made the list. He’d already told him, years ago, in front of a bonfire. But Ilya really needed to talk about it. Put it into words that he knew better, now.

He talked about making the list. He talked about being too late. He talked about trying to reach one thousand before leaving Russia. He talked about reading The Sorrows of Young Werther. He talked about the idea of suicide being contagious. He talked about forgetting about the list because of the cute boy in the library. He talked about finding it again because of that same cute boy. About ups and downs, wondering who he was writing this for if not his mother, if maybe he had to prove something to himself, too. About the days when the words became see-through and nothing. About calling his librarian and her sock puppet and wondering if he had been happy. About the support group, about therapy, maybe. Maybe a Russian therapist, so he could let the words slip out in his native tongue.

Here, he was stopped by Shane profusely apologizing that he wasn’t learning Russian fast enough, which was such a ridiculous statement that Ilya was immediately distracted from his whole tragic retelling of his life story and made to shut him up with a kiss.

“You fucking helped me out of a panic attack in Russian, what the fuck?” Ilya demanded when he pulled away, leaving Shane looking a little breathless. “You are perfect.”

And Shane blushed and rolled his eyes and told him to continue talking.

Ilya explained how he felt his life was kind of defined by the list now. He saw everything nice in terms of items on the list. And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. It certainly drew his attention to the nicer things. Maybe he really did have the list and his seven-year-old self to thank for being alive today.

The list hadn’t stopped her. Hadn’t saved her. Of course it hadn’t.

Because they were Ilya’s Brilliant Things. He’d found them. He’d found them and remembered them and liked them enough to write them down. If someone had just given him a list of things telling him to love his life, he probably would have given it back wordlessly, too. Ilya wishes his list could have done something for her, but it just couldn’t possibly have meant the same thing to her as it did to him.

Once Ilya ran out of thoughts to mumble out and fell silent, Shane scooted over, close enough to brush the backs of his knuckles against Ilya’s cheekbone. Ilya let his eyes flutter shut at the soft touch. He kept them closed when Shane pressed a long, slow kiss to his mouth, too.

When Shane pulled back, Ilya looped his arms around his neck, and said, “I want to see it. The list.” It had been a whole year.

Shane nodded, kissed him again, then helped him out of bed and led him to the basement. He lifted an old tablecloth, and there it was. Several familiar-looking cardboard boxes, stacked high with papers that were much neater than Ilya remembered leaving them. Ilya wondered why he’d never noticed them there, just inconspicuously sitting in the corner of the basement. He supposed he never really spent much time in the basement, anyway. And he hated this tablecloth.

Shane stood back and watched, at first, as Ilya shuffled through the boxes and messed up his precious organization by picking up stacks of them at a time to read. As Ilya went on, though, Shane came to join him, kneeling next to him, rubbing his shoulder, quietly asking him to translate some of the earlier entries.

#8: Холодный сок. [Cold juice.]
#13839: Bonfires.
#27: Пожилые люди, держащиеся за руки. [Old people holding hands.]
#1019: The novel Giovanni’s Room.
#482930: The fact that Earth, Texas is the only place on Earth called Earth.
#123322: Cognates.
#116: Хрустящие листья. [Crunchy leaves.]
#3808: When people make songs to help them learn things.
#1012: Freckles.
#90336: When your sleeves cover your hands just a little bit.
#11: Люди падают. [People falling over.]
#552100: Helium balloons that are a few days old so they don’t float to the ceiling but don’t sink to the ground either, having lost just enough helium to float exactly where you left it.
#820: Крутые зажигалки. [Cool lighters.]
…

Eventually, Ilya put down his pile and turned so that he could bury his face into Shane’s neck, breathe—in, out, softly—then tilt his head to kiss his throat gently.

It was a bit of a wonder that he could still make Shane’s breath catch after all these years. “What are you thinking?” Shane whispered.

“That I love you.” Ilya’s voice was gravelly. “And that you are an amazing and perfect man.”

Shane laughed. “Old news,” he teased gently. “What are you thinking for real?”

Ilya pulled back. “That there are so many things. So many.” And I kind of want to cry just from reading them.

He hadn’t thought he’d ever see the list again. And there were so many entries that he’d never gone back and read and would have forgotten about. But each time he read one, he could, miraculously, remember the thought that had led him to write it down.

Come to think of it, in all the years of keeping the list, he’d never really gone through them before. Never just… sat down, and read them for the sake of reading them. Sometimes he’d go back and search for one, to show someone or to see if the new one he’d thought of was a repeat of one he already had. But never a period of time set aside to just… read. But that was what the list was meant for, wasn’t it? To be read? So whoever read it could be reminded of each entry?

Not for the first time, he wondered if his mother had ever read the first draft of the list he had left on her pillow. If reading the three hundred or so items then could have been at all comparable to sitting here reading it now, pulling entries from boxes at random, emotion overwhelming him at each one.

“I was thinking that we should type up the list, also,” Ilya said as he brushed hair away from Shane’s forehead. “Easier to share with people. And to keep track. Harder to throw it away, like stupid me from last year, yes?”

“It would be a lot of work,” Shane murmured. “It’s a lot of stuff. It was hard enough putting it in order, and, uh…”

He picked up the handful of paper scraps Ilya had dug out, and then let them all drop, scattered, to the ground again, wordlessly making his point.

“I will do it.” Ilya kissed the top of Shane’s head, and then reached up to cup his face, brushing his cheekbone with his thumb thoughtfully. “Will probably take weeks. Start from the very beginning, go slow. I think it will be nice. I can remember each of them again.”

“Okay.” Shane leaned into his touch. “Do you want me to help you?”

Ilya smiled. “Yes, I will probably need motivation, da? Will be lots of long, sleepless nights…” He let his voice drop somewhere suggestive, which only earned him a small shove to the arm. He laughed and kissed every inch of Shane’s face he could find until Shane was laughing, too.

- - -

Typing up the list would be his own mission, he ultimately decided. Shane helped just by being nearby, in the bed, by Ilya’s side, doing work or reading silently or falling asleep to the quiet sound of clicking keys while Ilya worked, reading slips of paper by the light of his laptop screen. He started from the very beginning.

#1: Пломбир. [Ice cream.]

It was several weeks of late nights until he got to the end…

#826977: Popping off the little metal tabs that open soda cans.

…and picked up where he left off.

#826978: Box breathing.

And he continued on. He only had one hundred seventy-three thousand and twenty-one left to go until a million, after all.

Shane helped him list more.

“You know,” he murmured sleepily, cuddling up to Ilya’s arm as he typed, “Rose told me the other day that Beyoncé is related to the composer Gustav Mahler, and I thought of your list, because that’s honestly pretty brilliant.”

#900182: The fact that Beyoncé is Gustav Mahler’s eighth cousin, four times removed.

“Do you think I should complete the list at one million?” Ilya asked as he wrote that one down.

Shane let out a low hum. His eyes were shut and Ilya was pretty sure he wasn’t fully awake. “Do you think you should end the list?”

Ilya stared at his screen. One million lines averaged about twenty-five thousand pages, according to the internet. He was at around twenty thousand at the moment.

“I do not think the list could ever actually end,” Ilya finally said, slowly, trying to express what he was thinking exactly as he meant it as best he could. “And adding things is good, is nice. I think adding things saved my life.”

He glanced quickly at Shane. Sometimes saying things like that, implying things like that, would get Shane to tense or tear up. It didn’t send him into a panic anymore, but it had a few times before.

Shane just nodded cautiously, now, his eyes drifting open again. “But…?”

Ilya reached over to comb a hand through his hair. “But I think it would be good, for me. To feel it is finished. To mark that I am done and let go, if that makes sense.” He flexed his fingers over the keys. “And not always be thinking about adding to it. I think it will be nice to notice things just to notice them. And the list will still exist. I can look at it, still.”

“Ok-ay,” Shane said, the syllables coming out adorably broken in his sleep-muddled voice. “One million, then.”

“One million,” Ilya agreed.

- - -

“Mischievous doesn’t have that many i’s.” Shane poked a finger at Ilya’s screen.

Ilya sighed as he corrected the typo. “You are supposed to be helping me find new things, not correcting my bad English.”

“Brilliant Thing number something-something ninety-seven: correcting other people’s spelling,” Shane suggested childishly.

#999996: The little things that make a mischievous smile different from a smirk.
#999997: Correcting other people’s spelling.

“Maybe we should print it out when we’re done. Hang it up somewhere. Like a trophy wall, but for Brilliant Things.”

“Shane, it is twenty-something thousand pages,” Ilya scoffed. “It is already breaking your storage space. We would explode every printer. We would not have room on the walls.”

#999998: Inappropriate songs played at emotional moments.

Shane continued to lean into Ilya’s personal space, half-finished book in his hands clearly left forgotten. “It could just be our wallpaper.”

“Do you think your real estate fetish could handle that?” Ilya mused.

“I do not have a real estate fetish.”

“Mm, debatable.”

“You can’t just say debatable to everything,” Shane complained.

“Yes, I can. It’s literally here.” He scrolled back up to #999982: Winning arguments by saying “debatable”.

Shane gave Ilya his angry-kitten scowl, then went back to trying to wrap every limb around Ilya like an octopus in probably the most inhuman and uncomfortable way possible.

#999999: Completing a task.

“Wow,” Shane said. “Meta.” He ran a hand through Ilya’s hair. “What’s big number one million?”

Ilya stared at the screen, then closed his eyes, thinking. Brilliant Thing #1000000.

It went against one of the few rules Ilya had come up with for the list back when he was younger—that the Things were to be presented in no particular order—for the millionth Thing to be anything particularly significant just because it was the millionth. But trying to come up with anything purposefully mundane went against another rule—the one that said that Brilliant Things had to come naturally and be truly and genuinely wonderful and life-affirming. It was quite the paradox.

He could feel the warm weight of Shane’s arms and legs wrapped around him, Shane’s chin resting on his shoulder and watching his screen as well. Better not to overthink it, then. He opened his eyes, then began to type, feeling intensely aware of Shane’s eyes fixated on the words that flowed out.

#1000000: Opening a good book for the very first time, before you know the content or the characters, before knowing anything about the writer, so that every word will be new to you, and you are filled with anticipation. When you flip open the front cover to the first page, when the hardcover cracks or the paperback creases, when you thumb through the pages for the first time, immediately filing away the size and typeface of the text, how much room for notes there are in the margins, the material and thickness of the pages, until the newness goes away and the world around you fades and you can finally sit or lie down and sink into the words. The moment right before you are suspended outside of time and space, right before you disappear into a different world.

He stopped there. If he kept writing, he’d actually cry the tears that were threatening to flood his eyes, and that would just be an overreaction—

Shane kissed him on the temple, and, oh, too late, the tears were flowing. Damn it.

“Ya tebya lyublyu,” Shane murmured reverently in Russian. And then, voice breaking a little, so he sounded as shaken as Ilya felt: “Fuck, Ilya. Holy shit.”

For a few seconds, Ilya felt frozen, staring at his millionth entry. He had one million Brilliant Things. Fuck. Fuck, he was getting so fucking emotional over some text, over a Google Docs file that was about thirty times the length of the Iliad. He wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. He finally let out a long and sharp exhale, something between a disbelieving laugh and a relieved sigh.

Shane’s grip tightened around him, and then he was reaching to gently shut the laptop and leaning up to press kiss after kiss after kiss to the side of Ilya’s head. He pushed the computer away and climbed into Ilya’s lap and kissed just under Ilya’s eye, where his skin was definitely wet and and salty with tears, and it wasn’t until Shane whispered “ya tebya lyublyu” again that Ilya heard the shake in his breath and realized that Shane was crying too.

The room was quiet, as Ilya pulled his husband flush against him and breathed him in. Months of work—well, years, actually, decades, just over two decades of potryasayushchiye veshchi—sat burning up his laptop just a foot away, and in that moment they were just two people sitting and crying silently against each other, so in awe they were unable to say anything other than I love you in hushed tones. I love you, I love you, I love you. Emotional and overwhelmed over this list. That Ilya had proven something. Something, to someone, and maybe that someone was only him and maybe that something was only that there was life and it was to be lived, but Ilya still found himself hoping that his mother was somehow with him and watching this. I did it, do you see that? You see? I did it.

Did what, exactly? Made the list? Survived? Lived? Gone on? Fallen in love, lost everything, found it again, found himself? All of it?

He'd done it. All of it. God, he'd done it.

Ilya's arms tightened around his husband as he relaxed completely into a bone-deep kind of warmth. He'd done it all. He was here. And the world was brilliant.