Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

Gen

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationships:

Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov & Ilya Rozanov, Alexei Rozanov & Alexei Rozanov's Daughter, Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Alexei Rozanov

Characters:

Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov, Alexei Rozanov's Daughter, Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander

Additional Tags:

Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Survivor Guilt, Grief/Mourning, Fatherhood, Brothers, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Epistolary, Reunions, Family Reunions, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Fuck Russia We're Getting Ilya His Brother Back

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-26 Words: 7,055 Chapters: 3/3

His Mother's Sons

Summary

On very bad nights, Lyosha lets himself look. He pulls up KHL scores, reads articles about Dynamo’s powerplay. After a while, he wanders into articles about ex-KHL players who play for the MLH now. He’s a Dynamo diehard, of course, and prefers the KHL, but he’s a casual Valery Garipov fan, and it would not be a surprise to anyone that he occasionally keeps tabs on how the Puffins are doing. It would not be a red flag, to anyone watching.

The Puffins are not doing so well, as it happens. Not like another team, that leads the league and dominates conversations, to the point that even articles about the Puffins can’t help talking about them. To the point that sometimes, sometimes, there are even stray pictures. Nothing that Lyosha will ever linger on. He is his father’s son. He lives in Moscow. He has a daughter who is fifteen.

Notes

Chapter 1

On very bad nights, Lyosha lets himself look.

The days are cold, stark. Lyosha moves through them with his shoulders back and his spine iron. There is no softness in Alexei Grigoryevich; he hears the whispers around corners, and they are careful in a way that Lyosha has created and encourages. He is dispassionately efficient, these days, with cold hard eyes and a silent mouth that promises a long reckoning. The new ones do not know a different man, and the old ones see him aging into a ghost they remember.

He sleeps little. He always has.

“Papa.”

It is genetic, perhaps. He looks away from the frosted window which his eyes have been resting on, to the doorway where she stands. One foot is scratching the back of her knee.

He sets his glass on the table. She comes and sits on his knee, folding herself down, her cold nose against his neck. He does not hold her, but his hand rests on the curve of her shoulder.

They do not usually talk, on nights when they cannot sleep. Lyosha does not know the shape of his daughter’s fears, if indeed any stalk her dreams. It may simply be chemical, hormonal, biological; Lyosha was never a good student, to know. She is fifteen. It is a difficult age.

Tonight, though, he can hear the restlessness of Masha’s breath, the half-caught irresolute noises of a suspect weighing whether it will be better or worse to confess.

Another father might hold his daughter tighter, or press his lips to her hair. Another father might ask her careful questions, or make her laugh by calling her a playful pet name. Another father would already know what was wrong.

Lyosha looks back at the window.

“Why are people mean?”

Her voice is small. The question is more existential than Lyosha feels equipped to answer, with his glass still half full and his mind unclouded.

He gives her what he can. “Because this world is cruel. And people are hurt.”

She makes a huffing sound that she got from her mother. “Just because people are hurt doesn’t mean they should hurt other people. Why can’t people be kind?”

Lyosha is a Moscow man, through and through. He has never left Russia; he did not, before, and now he does not know if he would be allowed, and does not intend to find out. His days are cold and hard, and he is the man he has clawed from the wreckage of a life. He thinks a world where people are kind is a fantasy, and not even a very good one. Kindness is weakness. He knows where it leads.

“If a burglar broke in, Sharik would try to lick his face. And Barsik would hiss, and claw him if he got close, and run away to hide. Who would be safer?”

She does not laugh, this quiet daughter of his, but he can feel her smile against his skin. He knows she is imagining Sharik licking a burglar’s face, to a comical expression of surprise.

He has brought in too many burglars, seen too many dead dogs. He is glad that Masha does not know that darkness yet, in the selfish corner of his black heart that would keep her young and her eyes undimmed.

“Barsik,” she says. “But Barsik only protects himself. He doesn’t hurt people for no reason.”

Lyosha keeps his eyes on the window. “There is always a reason.”

He considers asking. For the first time in a long time.

He was a terrible father when she was young. Coked out, wild, a gambler who threw away the money that could have built her a better future. Never present; either sunk in his vices, or across the city trying to keep a vicious demented old man alive and in one piece, his skin crawling with humiliation from the daily demeaning realities of caretaking, his fury a tenuously-muzzled tiger in his veins. Masha was a colicky baby and a petulant child, and his wife exhausted and strident. He does not know what a good father would have looked like in those days, but he knows he was the opposite.

But the old man had died at last, leaving the hollow impotent anger behind, the anger of a man who had dreamed on bad nights of hastening his end, but had not had the courage. And then – and then had come that one endless day, four years ago, and Lyosha had quit his vices in an instant, and become his father’s son.

Now Masha is fifteen, and she is as safe as Lyosha can make her.

He has built himself into a man who can protect what is his, but he is better acquainted than most with the sharp blades of this world. He was fifteen, once.

There is a pain beneath his ribs. He needs to see a doctor sometime.

For a moment, he leans into the pain. He lets himself see, for an instant, a picture he saw during his last bad night. He has made himself into his father’s son, but it is not his father he reaches for, as his daughter sits on his lap and is miserable.

He sees the picture behind his eyes, and he leans down slightly, and presses his lips soundlessly to the top of her hair. “You can talk to me.” The words sound harsh in his mouth. “I am here.”

She is silent.

When Lyosha was fifteen, he hit a growth spurt. Overnight he began growing, filling out, eating everything he could find. And one day, he had become big enough, that when his father stopped hiding it from him, and Lyosha stepped in front of his mother, he could sometimes catch the fist before it fell.

But only sometimes. And he was not always there. And he knows that it made it worse.

“Sasha says that I’m a –”

He hears the end of the sentence through a roaring in his ears. It’s a common word. He hears it every day. He must have said it himself some million times.

He has never heard it in his daughter’s voice before. Never heard it directed at herself.

The pain beneath his ribs is back. His body is iron. “Why does Sasha say that?”

He was not a good father when Masha was young, but he remembers when Masha and Sasha were a matched pair. Her mother was influential, a good contact with important people. He had told his wife to encourage the friendship, and she had rolled her eyes and said that the girls were seven.

And then the endless day had come, and Lyosha had lost six months of his life becoming his father’s son all at once and by excruciatingly painful degrees, and by the time he could breathe again, Sasha’s mother had never brought her to their apartment again.

“Papa,” Masha says, and her voice is heavy, and her hand touches his hair, the way his mother used to do, when she brought him an ice pack afterwards.

He takes a breath, and it is more ragged than it should be. “It is… not contagious, Masha.”

“I know.”

Lyosha was fifteen, the first time his mother tried to leave them. He found her in time, called the ambulance himself. Someone else was at school and never knew, was told that she had dropped a plate and cut her hands and that the bandages were from that, but Lyosha had skipped school that day and come home early.

He wonders if he had fought harder, that next year, if she would have stayed. He wonders, if she had stayed, if someone else would have stayed. He wonders, if Masha would have an aunt with curly hair and cousins who were loud and full of laughter and wit and spunk. He wonders, if Masha would laugh with them.

“I know it’s not contagious,” Masha says. Her hand is still touching his hair. “How do you know if you are one, though?”

Lyosha does not move. He does not make any sound.

On very bad nights, Lyosha lets himself look. He pulls up KHL scores, reads articles about Dynamo’s powerplay. After a while, he wanders into articles about ex-KHL players who play for the MLH now. He’s a Dynamo diehard, of course, and prefers the KHL, but he’s a casual Valery Garipov fan, and it would not be a surprise to anyone that he occasionally keeps tabs on how the Puffins are doing. It would not be a red flag, to anyone watching.

The Puffins are not doing so well, as it happens. Not like another team, that leads the league and dominates conversations, to the point that even articles about the Puffins can’t help talking about them. To the point that sometimes, sometimes, there are even stray pictures. Nothing that Lyosha will ever linger on. He is his father’s son. He lives in Moscow. He has a daughter who is fifteen.

“I think,” he says. He stops. He swallows. His voice does not sound like his father’s.

“How did he know?” It is a breath against his neck.

When someone else was twelve, Lyosha’s mother left them.

When someone else was twelve, Lyosha took cocaine for the first time, drowning the next ten years of his life and deadening the jagged wire in his lungs. He stayed away from home as much as he could, sleeping wherever he could find a floor; home was a father with blood on his hands and the angel-curled ghost with haunted eyes who wore Lyosha’s mother’s face.

“I don’t know,” Lyosha says, and it is nothing but the truth, those years a blur.

“How did you know about Mama?”

“That’s different.” His wife is gone two years from breast cancer. She was not a bad woman. He had never spoken to her of the years before they met.

“Not so very.”

He married her because Masha was coming, and because her brother had connections. Neither of them had ever been under any illusions. There had been nothing soft there.

Nothing like the stray picture on an article about the Puffins, noting that their game next week against another team will be missing two of the other team’s star players due to personal leave. Nothing like the light in someone else’s eyes, the undimmed radiant smile that is Lyosha’s mother’s, even with a healing split lip. Nothing like the way someone else looks at someone pressing a kiss to a baby’s hair.

Lyosha stares at the window. It is blurry.

Masha says, “How did he know –”

“It’s not safe to ask these kinds of questions, little hare.”

His neck is wet where Masha’s face is pressed against it. “I am safe with you, Papa.”

Lyosha has made himself his father’s son for the sake of that sentence. For the sake of his daughter’s innocent, happy face, on that endless day four years ago where he put himself between it and the fist. For her, he gave something up forever that was already lost to him; something that - against all odds, in the face of all evidence - had turned out to still be precious to him after all.

For her, he pulls open the wound.

“He knew because he loved him,” he whispers, a breath too soft for any watchers.

Lyosha was never his mother’s favorite. He thinks he was too much his father’s son, even as a boy. But he feels closer to her, for a moment, feels recklessly brave.

“I’m scared,” Masha says.

His arms are around her. “Sasha will not hurt you. Laugh in her face.”

He lets himself remember a golden boy who found that weapon, in the time before. Who honed it into lethality, and buried his softness deep. Whose eyes were broken for years, behind the laughter, until another boy gathered him into his arms and helped him heal.

He wishes with a sudden fierceness that he did not have to give his daughter weapons.

He is already calculating what chess pieces he might use to convince Sasha’s mother that her daughter does not want to antagonize Alexei Grigoryevich’s daughter.

“Papa,” his daughter whispers, safe in his arms, “what if she’s not wrong?”

Lyosha is afraid.

Lyosha is only a man. Not a good man. Not a good father. Not a good son.

Lyosha has always been afraid.

He remembers the last time he was not afraid. He was wrestling on the floor. He was sixteen and wiry. The body wrestling with him was twelve, and laughing, and not afraid to bite and pull hair. His mother was sitting in this chair. She had been looking out this window, at the park across the street, but when they had started wrestling she had turned away, turned towards them; and then she was laughing, full and free.

“Then she is not wrong,” he says, and his arms are tight enough that Masha must be squished. “But don’t tell her that.”

“I’m not stupid,” Masha says, with offended indignance.

Lyosha holds his daughter close, and thinks about fear, and love, and a descending fist. He thinks about his father’s legacy that he wears like a shield. He thinks about laughter, and the jagged wire under his ribs. He thinks about the screams that echo in his ears on the bad nights, and send him to stare at a frosted window in the dark.

Lyosha should have been the one to find her. He was not her favorite son. He was sixteen, nearly a man. He had been trying to protect her for a year, had known in a way that someone else had not. It would have been better.

Instead, the screams. Instead, holding someone pinned in his arms so they could take his mother away, listening to the wild hopeless sobs of a broken heart, afraid that the fist might turn on them both. Instead, watching the light go out in someone’s eyes.

(He had stayed out drinking with friends instead of coming home on time. It had meant that someone else had come home from practice first. She would have never forgiven him. He has never forgiven himself.)

“I think you should visit Boston this summer,” he says, here in the darkness. “An old family friend lives there. You could stay with her. It’s good for young people to travel.”

Masha stirs. “Boston?”

“And there is a trust for you,” he says. He keeps his voice light. He does not think there are bugs in his apartment. He is not important; he is his father’s son; he says the words they expect to hear; it has been a long time now. But the fear is hard to shake. “When you’re eighteen. You should think about studying somewhere. Maybe here at MSU, if that’s what you want. But with the trust, you could go anywhere.”

Masha says, “Papa.”

He closes his eyes and rests his cheek on her hair. “You have your grandmother’s smile,” he says. “I’m afraid you look like me, mostly. But you have her smile.”

He takes a breath, and listens to the echo of laughing wrestlers, instead of the screams.

“And I don’t think I ever told you about this … friend I had, once upon a time. When I was a boy.”

“Was the friend nice?”

Lyosha smiles. He doesn’t open his eyes. “No,” he says. “He was a fucking menace. He would never stop teasing you, and he was a very bad winner - he was good at everything, and he gloated nonstop and rubbed it in your face. He never shut up, ever, ever, and he shamelessly stole all my snacks. He was loud, and obnoxious, and fearless.” He rubs her elbow with his thumb.

Masha’s head rests on his shoulder. “I want to hear all your stories about him, Papa, before summer. And…” She hesitates. “Maybe you could come to Boston too?”

“No, I have my work. But you will have a wonderful time.” He is caught in the bear-trap, unable to gnaw his foot out, but she is not. Not his daughter. She will be free.

Oh. He feels a shiver prickle across his skin, as if the jagged wire that has been his constant companion for twenty-two long years has finally loosened.

I am your son too, Mama.

Alexei Grigoryevich does not cry. He did not two years ago, when he buried his wife. He did not four years ago, when he denounced a piece of himself to protect his daughter. He did not eight years ago, when his mother’s murderer was buried.

Well. Perhaps he did, a little, back then. He remembers the feeling of tears pricking at his eyes. But not for his father. For someone else, as they stood breathing hard, staring at the alien men they had become, across the gulf of hard years and heartbreak and the memory of laughter.

He does not cry now. But it may be a near thing.

“Maybe,” Masha says, here in his mother’s chair, “you could write a letter to your friend. Who knows, I might run into him some day.” She keeps her voice light too. She is his daughter.

“Maybe,” Lyosha says.

Tomorrow he will walk the cold halls, with his father’s legacy cloaked around his shoulders again. He will use it to cow Sasha’s mother into bringing her daughter in line. He will reach out to Sveta, who texts him once a year on Masha’s birthday; he has always known what that means. He will dip into his savings and buy a plane ticket to Boston.

He will teach his daughter the weapons she needs. He will tell her stories about his friend, and about her grandmother. He will rip his own heart out and lay it beating on the table, so that when she is free and he is alone, he will know that she knows that he loves her.

And maybe – maybe. Maybe he will write a letter.

Not to the rich, successful, wildly happy superstar whose life is so perfect it makes Lyosha’s stomach clench with jealousy. Not to the man who sent Lyosha money to pour away like water into his vices, but abandoned him to take care of his dying, hated father alone. Not to the stranger who punched Lyosha in the face, while leaving an escape route for his daughter.

To the golden, laughing, terrible little brother, wrestling on the floor. To the heartbroken child screaming upstairs, as Lyosha ran up them faster than he ever had before. To the proud new father, beaming at his daughter cradled in his husband’s arms.

To Ilya.

Chapter 2

Chapter Summary

Lyosha writes a letter.

Ilya,

I am sending you the most precious star in the universe. She will tell you why. She is the only good thing I have ever done.

I don’t think you will believe any apologies I have. I wouldn’t, in your place. So they are not for you, they are for me. I have spent four years afraid to say your name even in my own head. If only once, in memory of a chattering little shithead, I will try.

Of course I am sorry for the unimportant shit, like spending your money on expensive ways to buy myself some hours of forgetting, or calling you names that your husband would punch me for. I don’t think you care about either of those things.

What I am actually sorry for –

I am sorry that I didn’t stop him. I did try. I don’t know if you know that. We tried very hard not to let you see it. I was getting bigger but he was still bigger than me. And I was thinking on too small a scale. I was trying to stop the days, but she was staring down the years. Now that I am almost forty, and not sixteen, I know that I should have put a final period on it. I should have opened the bear trap and set her free. Even if I was caught – and if I had had the skills then that I do now, I wouldn’t have been – you two would have been free, and that would have been enough.

I am sorry that I went out drinking that day with my friends. It should have been me. I know she thought it would be me. I will not forgive myself, ever, that it was you.

I am sorry that I did not stay for you, after. You needed me, and I did not stay. I was a coward and I was weak. It was my job to be strong for you, and I could not look at you because all I saw was her, and I could not get you away from him, and I could not be there with him. I should have been stronger. You were just a kid, and you were as broken as me. I should have been stronger. You put yourself back together better than I did, and you were just a kid.

I am not sorry that I was a shitty son when he was dying. I know that your feelings for him are more complicated than mine. He always valued you more, even when he was shitting on you. He remembered you and asked for you until nearly the end, a year longer than me. You were the only one of us that he cared about, I think. I don’t know if that was for you yourself, or because he could brag about you to everyone. But he did remember you, even when he didn’t remember you played hockey. Only you.

I am sorry for the funeral. I didn’t care about losing him, but it made me remember. I wasn’t sleeping. I hear your screams many nights, and it was every night that week. And I was scared. I was very addicted to drugs and couldn’t imagine living without them, but you were the one with the money for them, and no reason to keep giving it to me. I don’t know what my plan was. I was very stupid.

(I did cut back after that. With him dead, it was a little easier. Thank you for not sending more money. I would probably be dead by now if you had.)

I am sorry for denouncing you, but I know you will understand that one. You have a daughter now. I saw a picture. She is beautiful. I don’t know her name. I know you would do anything to keep her safe.

I am sorry that I will never see you again. That’s a sorry for me, not you – I know you don’t want to see me again anyway. Even if you did (Masha says I could visit and we could meet in secret), I have lived here too long and I am afraid. I see watchers everywhere. If we met, I would probably never be able to sleep again, just waiting to be hauled away for questioning like last time. I don’t think I’d make it through a second time.

I am sorry that I will never meet your Shane. I see the way you look at him. He must be a very special person. And I am not talking about hockey. I thought Russians were obsessed with hockey. Canadians are more so. It is ridiculous how easy it is to read about the two of you in side comments on articles about the Puffins. It sounds like he is even better than you. I realized talking to Masha that I have never known a you who has ever been bettered by anyone. It is probably good for you.

Anyway. Not hockey. I know that you are fighting the same fight as she did. They mock you to me for it, and I think, I am proud that my brother says it. Because I know the cost to say it. And I know that if she had heard people saying it, it might have helped.

Last. Two years ago, when Katya died, I was cleaning out her room. Oh, I don’t know if you know, we sold your apartment and we live in the old one. It would have been healthier to sell this one, but the luxury apartment a MLH star bought was worth more. I only used a little of the money for drugs. Most of it we tied up so I couldn’t spend it, so we could give Masha a good life even though a policeman’s salary isn’t much. I am only stupid most of the time.

Katya’s room was the painting room when we were kids. It was always your favorite. The light was good, and you used to sit there for hours just watching her paint. Five, six years old and you wouldn’t move a muscle. I don’t know if you remember.

I found a secret panel in the back of the closet.

There wasn’t much in there. But we thought he destroyed everything, so anything is better.

I am sorry, that I didn’t find a way to reach out before now. I should have.

I am sending the original photo. I made a copy for me. I think you are five? I remember how proud she was of you, and how fast you fell on your ass at first. I don’t remember how she bribed me to hold your hand and tow you around like that. I didn’t remember how big her smile was, when we were that young. I do remember that an hour after the picture, you were skating like it had been years. It was fucking annoying.

I am also sending you the painting. It’s the only one. I almost didn’t send it, because if there is anything that is true about me, it is that I am a selfish man. You have everything, and I have an apartment with ghosts and the echoes of screams. Why should you have this too? But it has hung on my wall for two years now, and I have photos of it. It should live where it will be loved. It should live with her granddaughters. She would have loved them.

Take care of my Masha, Ilya. I know she is coming back to me after the summer, until she is eighteen. But I won’t write again. I know I am already pushing my luck to write once. So for the future –

She is kind and funny, and her heart is as big as the sky. She likes to be quiet and sit in the window seat and draw. I don’t really understand what she draws but it is beautiful. She grieves Katya and I am at work too much. It is hard for me to be the father she needs. We did not have a good guide. I try to be more like Mama, but you are the one who is Mama.

She sings a lot. She can’t sing. She likes flowers and together we have managed not to kill the dill in our windowbox. We have a dog, Sharik, who is the stupidest dog known to mankind and will give you a bath with his tongue eighteen times a day. And a cat, Barsik, who will probably murder us all in our sleep one of these nights. Masha carries him around like a baby and gets mauled for it.

She looks like me, which is not ideal. I am sorry for my genes. Maybe you can help her find a better haircut. Before the denouncement, I used to see more about you, and you seemed to have better style than me. I think she might like to dye it.

I just want her to be happy and safe. That is all I care about. I don’t give a single solitary fuck about myself any more, and I haven’t for a long time. All I want is for her to be free.

I know that he burned the letter before we could read it. He had no right. It was ours. But I think that if we had read it, that is what it would have said.

She was so proud of you, Ilya. When my selfish ass bothered to come to a game, she would talk to me the whole time about you. I think she would have been excited even if you were bad. But you weren’t bad, of course.

My earliest memory is her rocking you to sleep, singing you a lullaby. My best memories of her is you making her smile. My last good memory is of us wrestling on the floor, you biting and pulling my hair (because you were a little shit, always), and her laughing at us like she was a kid herself.

I am sorry that I said all that. But I want you to hear it. And I want you to know that I know it.

I have been writing this letter for a week and Masha leaves tomorrow. If there is anything else I have forgotten to apologize for, know that I am sorry. For all of it. Life is shit and I am shit, and I wish that it could have been different.

I am scared for her. I am fucking terrified. But of all the people in this world, you are the only person who I trust to keep her safe. Not even myself. And I think you have a much better chance of helping her find happiness and freedom.

Be safe, little brother. Be happy. Be obnoxiously, ridiculously, decadently happy with your perfect husband and your beautiful daughter and your overpowered hockey team and your fucking obscene number of trophies. Fuck you.

Take care of my little girl.

- Lyosha

Chapter 3

Chapter Summary

Lyosha makes a trip.

He is a broad man, with leashed power coiled underneath his skin. Lyosha has seen the videos of him unleashed on the ice. North Americans love violence as much as Russians do.

The last time Lyosha saw him, that fist had collided with his face.

“Hello,” Lyosha says, the word landing awkwardly between them. “Hello, Ilya.”

He has not said his brother’s name out loud since the denouncement.

Ilya’s face is closed. Lyosha knows that these days it is usually open. He has seen the happiness shining out of it in countless pictures and videos. But it is too much to hope that it would be open today, meeting a shithead fuckup brother you told to never speak to you again, who has denounced you and your “lifestyle” to an entire fucked-up country.

He is seeing Ilya with his own eyes. That is enough.

Ilya moves. He walks towards Lyosha like a hungry tiger.

Lyosha raises his chin and does not back up. He’s been punched before. Ilya’s owed a few.

He is not expecting to be brought firmly into Ilya’s arms and pressed there.

“Hello,” Ilya says, his voice reverberating in Lyosha’s ear.

Lyosha closes his eyes and clings on for a moment.

Then they are stepping apart. Ilya’s face is still guarded, but his eyes are alive. “This is Shane,” he says, tipping his head towards the man he left at the door.

Lyosha steps forward and extends his hand. “Thank you for loving Ilya,” he says, in careful, practiced English.

Ilya’s husband blinks at him, but shakes his hand.

“Who are you, and what the fuck have you done to my brother,” Ilya says, rapidfire.

Lyosha bites back a grin despite his nerves, and Shane’s head snaps around as he hisses, “Ilya.”

Oh, he speaks Russian? Lyosha’s shoulders go down a little in relief. “I expected him to punch me,” Lyosha tells him.

Shane’s eyebrows draw together, and Lyosha’s beginning to think that maybe he just responded to Ilya’s tone, but then he says, “Does he normally punch you?” He has a heavy accent, but Lyosha’s just glad to not have to fumble with English or have Ilya translate. Another thing his annoyingly perfect brother has mastered already.

“Sometimes he bites,” he says. His voice is only a little shaky, as he performs casualness.

Ilya rolls his eyes. “That was when we were kids.”

“Masha and Sveta will be here soon,” Shane says. “I thought you might like to meet us first, before they got here.”

Lyosha has missed Masha terribly, these three months. He still can’t believe he’s here, that he let Sveta persuade him that she could arrange a secret meeting in Montreal that no watcher would see. But he has felt cracked open like an eggshell without Masha this summer, and the memories haven’t left him alone. He was easy pickings for Sveta’s stubbornness, with the formless hunger deep in the pit of his stomach.

“Yes,” he says. “Thank you.”

“I read your letter,” Shane says. There is no apology in his eyes, just steadiness.

Lyosha swallows and tries to not feel betrayed. He flayed himself open with that letter. It took him a week, and he’d had to get himself a little drunk for it. For all the talk of toska and the Russian soul, feelings are not something that Russia encourages men to express out loud. He got through it by seeing it as a goodbye, as the final words he would never be able to actually say.

And a man he does not know read it.

“It was for Ilya,” Lyosha says, at last. “And he is yours. So… I understand.”

Shane is watching him. The policeman in Lyosha notes the way Shane is assessing. “I think you need therapy. Pretty badly.”

Ilya laughs. It isn't a laugh Lyosha has heard from him before; it is a man’s laugh, not a child’s, deeply amused. “Shane. You cannot tell a Russian man he needs therapy.”

Lyosha knows he winced. He controls it. “I don’t think so,” he says, politely. “Thank you. But I am trying not to drink as much these days.”

Shane’s eyebrows furrow at the non-sequitur.

“Vodka is therapy for Russians,” Lyosha explains. “Or cocaine. But I don’t do that now.”

Ilya does not laugh again, but he does smile.

Shane frowns. “That is very stereotypical.”

“I am Canadian now,” Ilya offers. “So therapy for ex-Russians can just be therapy.” He waits a moment. “Or sucking cock.”

Lyosha knows what he is doing. But Lyosha has known Ilya fucks boys for years now, and suspected it before that. He already got over it. Ilya won’t provoke him into discomfort. “That's probably cheaper than therapy. And more fun.”

Ilya nods emphatically.

Shane pinches the bridge of his nose between his fingers.

“Thank you,” Lyosha tells him. “For meeting me. And thank you for being his.”

He has been hugged by his brother, and met his brother’s husband. His daughter will be here soon, after three months apart. His heart is full. He will get on the flight back with a weight lifted from his shoulders for the first time in a long time. It is enough.

Shane sighs. “The thing is,” he says. “We’re not letting you go back.”

Lyosha looks at him. He looks at Ilya. He looks at Shane again. “Uh,” he says, politely. “Your Russian is very good, Shane, but I’m not sure what you were trying to say there.”

“We’re kidnapping you,” Ilya says. “Defecting you.”

Lyosha backs up and sits down on the hotel couch.

A moment later, Ilya is dropping down next to him. “Lyosha,” he says.

Lyosha can’t remember the last time Ilya used his name. After their mother died, he started saying Alexei, horribly formal and wrong. “What,” he says.

Ilya waits until he looks up and makes eye contact. “Did you really think,” he says softly, “that I was ever going to let Masha go back into danger?”

Lyosha feels like he can’t breathe. “I knew you might not,” he says, his voice hoarse. “I knew when I sent her that I might never see her again.”

“Well,” Ilya says. His eyes are their mother’s eyes, and Lyosha spent so long not able to look at him without wanting to drown himself in vodka and drugs. “It turns out that despite being a fucking shithead in many ways, you have raised a daughter who loves you, and doesn’t want you to die alone and crying in a cold miserable homophobic shitty country.”

Lyosha shuts his eyes.

“And,” Ilya says. His voice is still careful, still too formal, but the warmth in it is coaxing a spark to light, somewhere deep in Lyosha’s dark corners. “Your obnoxiously perfect rich brother hasn’t had to fund your cocaine habit for a few years now, so he has a few extra toonies rolling around.”

“He means,” Shane says, “that there are visas for entrepreneurs. They might be ending this year, so we have to move fast. But you’re not going back to Russia.”

Lyosha can’t breathe. He seriously can’t breathe. He did not hope. This was not a manipulation on his part. He wouldn’t have dared to dream. He can’t think.

A forehead tips down against his own, grounding.

“What if I fuck up?” he whispers, and fuck, he can hear the wateriness.

“I’ve fucked up loads of times,” Ilya says. “It’s not the end of the world. It’s only the end if you give up.”

He opens his eyes. “I’m not giving up. I wouldn’t do that to Masha.”

“Yes,” Ilya says. His eyes are their mother’s. His eyes are no longer a twelve-year-old’s, broken and empty, screaming and sobbing in Lyosha’s arms, but the echo remains.

“Ilya,” Lyosha says, and it comes out choked.

Ilya sits back. Without looking, he extends his hand out over the arm of the couch, and Shane takes it. “I agree with my husband, though,” he says, and puts on his shithead smile. “Therapy. And not the vodka or sex kind.”

Lyosha nods.

“And English lessons,” Ilya says. “I warn you in advance that it is a criminally frustrating language.”

“I know a lot about criminals,” Lyosha says. “Not a lot about anything else.”

Shane sits on the arm of the couch. Their hands are intertwined. Not a desperate clutch, just the simple affection of an old married couple.

“Time to learn new things, then,” Ilya says. “You last learned a new thing about forty years ago, yes?”

Lyosha is not forty yet, although it's coming soon. “Your husband is a bully, Shane.”

“My husband is an asshole,” Shane says, and strokes his thumb across the back of Ilya’s knuckles.

Ilya’s face was closed and still, but there is a cracked door in it now. Something in Lyosha’s lungs feels different. His own face is probably doing something embarrassing.

“You said you wished it could be different,” Ilya says, quietly. “I also have wished it could be different. So we will make it different.” He hesitates. “I don’t know that I trust you yet. Not completely. But I don’t think you trust yourself yet either.”

“No,” Lyosha says.

Ilya raises a shoulder, slightly. “Sveta and her girlfriend live here, in Montreal. We found an apartment with Masha, for the two of you. We already got an immigration lawyer and we can file the paperwork this week.” His free hand is clutched on his knee. “Ottawa is only two hours away. You can visit. We can … make it different, at our own speed.”

Lyosha does not say anything. He has no more words. There have been so many nightmares, that he doesn't know how to feel now. He thinks he will break into fifty pieces, if Ilya suddenly reveals that this is all a joke. As surely he must be about to do. Good things do not happen to Alexei Grigoryevich. He is not a good man.

He's dimly aware that Shane is saying something, but it’s in English, and Lyosha’s English is pretty much limited to swear words and instructions for drunk American tourists.

Ilya’s hand is on his shoulder, careful but heavy. “Lyosha. Look at me.”

Lyosha drags his eyes up.

The cracked door in Ilya’s face is open more now. He looks very young. “I would not lie about this. I will keep you safe.”

If you walked into Lyosha’s police station and asked anyone, they would tell you that Alexei Grigoryevich is a hard man, a cold man, his father’s son, who hates his pervert brother and whose only friend is a bottle of vodka.

Lyosha breaks, all of a sudden and all at once, twenty-two years after the screams.

He is in his little brother’s arms, and he is sobbing on his shoulder, and the world does not end, and his pride does not matter, and his mother is dead, and his daughter is safe, and his little brother is safe, and Lyosha is going to live.

~

Masha has two piercings in her eyebrow, and the kind of haircut that Lyosha only knows names for that would make Canadians punch him. She is grinning wider than he has ever seen. “Uncle Shane says he’ll teach me how to skate today.”

Lyosha is drinking his third glass of water. Shane insisted. “You’ve been here three months, and your uncles haven’t taught you yet?”

“Well,” Masha says, as if it’s obvious, “we haven’t been in public yet. Not until we got you out. Operation Save Papa From The Monsters.”

Sveta is talking to Shane and Ilya by the window. The hotel room feels very crowded.

“Do you like it here?” Lyosha asks.

Masha smiles. “I want to be Aunt Sveta when I grow up. And Uncle Ilya is funny. But Uncle Shane is funnier.”

“This is lies,” Ilya says, from the window. “Shane is boring.”

They are not all the way fixed yet. Twenty-two years do not vanish overnight.

But his daughter is cuddling into the crook of his arm, and his brother’s face is as soft as their mother’s, and Lyosha is overflowing in a ridiculous and annoying way. Since when is he wet. He is not a wet person.

“You are not getting me on the ice,” he says to Masha, and strokes her hair. “But I will watch you fall on your ass.”

She giggles. Ilya smiles, faint but real.

Lyosha closes his eyes against the pricking of tears and listens to the echo of laughter, fading away like a benediction.

Then he gets up from the couch, takes Masha’s hand, and steps into their future.

~