Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Troy Barrett, brief appearances by other centaurs and metros

Additional Tags:

Suicide Attempt, Recovery, Mental Health Issues, Depressed Ilya Rozanov, Angst, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Canon Compliant, in the ways that matter anyway, Dreams and Nightmares, Established Relationship, Time Skips

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-08-07 Completed: 2026-08-18 Words: 18,622 Chapters: 3/3

the dream where we grow old together

Summary

Ilya tries to kill himself. In the following weeks, they move forwards, as best as they can.

(12 glimpses at the never ending state of being in recovery.)

Notes

things to note before reading:
- there are explicit descriptions of a suicide attempt (done via self-inflicted cutting)
- this is mostly compliant with the long game, with the only exception being the suicide attempt and how that affects things, which means that the fanmail outing does happen in this
- there's a brief scene with the metros being canonically cruel about ilya and shane's relationship, but they take it a little farther here

i think that's all! can you believe this originally was a 5 nightmares and 1 dream come true fic. oh man. it ran away from me. but i hope you enjoy<3

Chapter 1: time as mourning

[THE VULTURE]

It has been exactly two weeks to the day since Ilya slit his wrist open with a razor blade, and in Shane’s dream that night, there is a bird.

The bird—a vulture, Shane is pretty sure—is sitting over the carcass of some long dead animal, its beak bloody. It drips red and thick onto a cracked and dried out earth. Shane watches, stares, and then the animal moves. Just the slightest bit, just enough to let Shane know that it isn’t rotting, it isn’t gone, it’s instead dying, slow and painful. The vulture makes a single, terrible screaming noise and in the dream, Shane feels himself flinch at the sound in a visceral, painful jerk.

When Shane steps forward, the vulture takes off. Wings beating, sending it high into the air in a large swooping motion. Shane ducks as it feels like the bird is about to dart towards him, the wingspan encompassing the entire sky and blotting out the sun like black ink bleeding through a paper-thin horizon.

And then it’s gone, circling high up above them. It’s just Shane and the dying prey animal in front of him. He looks at it, and it looks back at him. There is something so terribly sad in its eyes, so terribly sad that Shane wants to put it out of its pain, out of its misery. Finish the slow, slow death that’s already begun.

But he can’t bring himself to do it. He just watches and listens, his heart fucking breaking, as the animal lets out a small and pathetic keening noise, and then closes its eyes. Above them, the soaring vulture casts a shadow over the entire damn Earth.

[IN WHICH YOU DO NOT HAVE TO EXPLAIN]

Troy was the one who found him. This is something that Ilya both cannot forgive him for, and cannot ever apologize enough to him for. There is no world in which words can capture that guilt over being found, and there is no world in which language can ever communicate how sorry Ilya is to have been caught.

It’s: sorry that Troy had to see something so traumatic. It’s: sorry that he’ll never be able to unsee it. It’s also: sorry that it had to be Ilya who he saw so vulnerable. And: sorry that he now has to sit through the aftermath. Sorry that he’ll be asking the what if question for the rest of his life.

There is no one sentence that Ilya can ever tell Troy which will absolve either of them of all of those feelings. Ilya knows this well, because he knows that there’s nothing his mother could say to him that would ever make him feel okay again about finding her. He knows because he knows that the cycle just goes round and round and round and there’s never any escaping the guilt and the hurt and the fear.

Troy will never look at him the same again, Ilya knows. These days, he looks at Ilya like he’s searching for something. For an answer, maybe. Or for a question. Maybe for an explanation. Ilya probably owes him that much.

He thinks, sometimes, about what he might tell Troy, one day.

I was feeling lonely, possibly.

Definitely true, but not the full truth, probably. Not an explanation that could ever be good enough. Not that any explanation for what he did is ever going to be adequate. This is not an act that people who are not inside of his head will ever be able to understand his reasons for.

You came out to the whole world and you received so much love and so much kindness. Everything terrible you ever did was forgotten in that moment, and for a moment, every terrible thing you ever were, both on and off the ice, was forgiven. You came out to the whole world, and a stadium of people wove pride flags about it. You kissed your boyfriend in the locker room and our teammates cheered. 

You now have everything I have never even dared to dream about in my selfish, lonely heart. And watching someone else have it—watching it be possible—broke something in me that cannot be repaired.

All true, but not entirely fair. It’s not Troy’s fault that the world is cruel. It’s not Troy’s fault that the Centaurs’ Pride Night just happened to fall on a day when Ilya was already having a bad day in his head. It’s not Troy’s fault that Ilya fell in love in the worst possible conditions. It’s not really anything to do with him specifically, exactly.

It’s just that Ilya watched all of it—all of those fantasies that can’t be called fantasies because he can’t allow himself to want them—become real, become tangible, become something that could happen to someone as long as that someone isn’t him nor Shane, and it didn’t feel like a dream come true.

It rather felt like a taunt, almost. It felt like the world was dangling it all right in front of him, saying, It’s possible. It’s all possible. For Troy Barrett, for Scott Hunter. This is all real. But you will never earn it. You did something bad, long ago, and now you can never have this.

The truth is that watching all this made Ilya feel so fucking isolated in his head that he wondered if anyone in the world has ever been able to see him like this. Or, he wondered if anyone in the world has ever been able to be proud of him like this. In the moment when he skated onto the ice and all those pride flags went up—and, at the same time, when he knew how many of those fans holding them believe he’s likely passively homophobic just because he’s Russian—he felt so fucking hidden, and alone, and unknowable.

So the truth is that Ilya is lonely, and he is tired.

Which is also unfair, probably. He has a fiancé he loves and who loves him. He has a plan to come out one day, kind of. It’s a vague plan, and it’s not a very good one, and he’s not totally optimistic about it going well, but it exists. He has a team who supports him in ways Ilya didn’t know were possible for a hockey team to do. He has future in-laws who are kinder than he knew parents could be. He has so many good things in his life.

But still: he’s lonely, and he’s tired, and it’s not getting better. With that being true, and with it being true that he has so many beautiful things that he is not grateful enough for, this loneliness is probably never going to get better. It’s never going to get better, and Ilya is tired.

At some point, he stopped daydreaming about a world in which he gets to have that moment that Troy did. He nearly died in a plane crash, Shane proposed, and they changed their plan’s timeline somewhat, but Ilya isn’t stupid and he knows that nothing has made it any easier for the rest of the world to change their timeline on accepting something like their relationship. He isn’t stupid and he also knows that coming out isn’t going to solve all of his problems, or even all of the problems the two of them have together.

And so he started instead, at some point, daydreaming about what he’d say to the person who found him if he killed himself. If he could say one thing to that person, would he explain why he did it? Would he be able to find the words? Would he apologize? Would any apology ever be enough? If it were Shane, would Ilya say I love you or would he have to say And don’t you dare fucking come with me? 

It’s funny, though, because he spent all this time daydreaming about it, but then he didn’t leave a note. He didn’t leave a note for the person who found him, or for the team, or for Svetlana, or even for Shane.

He sent two concerning texts and then—he just did it. And let it happen. Decided people could make their own conclusions and it wasn’t really his problem. 

But then he had the audacity to stay alive. And now he has to think about what the fuck he’s supposed to say to the people who care that he survived.

[DROWNING IN THE BATHTUB]

For the Metros, March brings a string of home games that allows Shane to spend as much time as physically possible with Ilya. Ilya has made himself at home in Shane’s Montreal apartment, and the proximity all feels so perfectly right. But even as it feels right, even as it feels good, Shane can’t help but feel horrible about it too, because he knows that the only reason Ilya is able to be there is because he’s not playing right now.

The Ottawa Centaurs released a statement placing Ilya on injury reserve with no clear timeline on his return. Fans have been kind of rabid on Twitter, looking for any kind of information on what happened to him and why he can’t play and when he’s going to be back on the ice. Ilya himself refused to say anything publicly—it had been a whole argument with Farah that Shane wasn’t allowed to be in the room during.

He’s trying to let Ilya handle as much of this on his own as he wants to, but it’s kind of killing Shane that so much of this is just—just out of his hands. There’s so little either of them can do to prevent the demands for transparency into Ilya’s fucking mental health. There’s so little either of them can do to explain it all away so that fans will just respect it.

So Shane hates that the proximity they have now—the domesticity, the comfortable routine, the shared meals and sleeping in the same bed and showering together and stealing sweatshirts in the cooled down spring evenings—is a gift brought to them by something that still makes him want to completely break down some days. More days than not, really. He hates that he is so, so selfish, and he wants to keep this. He hates himself for it so much, but that doesn’t change the fact that he wants it.

He wants a life with Ilya, is the thing. He doesn’t want to have to wait for retirement to have earned that life. Haven’t they earned it already? Haven’t they done enough for this sport? Haven’t they fought their battles? Why can’t the rookies take on this war and why can’t Shane and Ilya just play now?

Shane is getting more and more scared that they’ll never be able to. The anxiety is rapidly increasing by the day—how long does this last? How long can it possibly? And what happens when it can’t anymore?

He isn’t totally sure what he’s imagining, when he imagines the moment when things fall apart again. It could look like Ilya walking away, finally fed up with the secrecy, with the unfairness of the life Shane offers him. It could look like everyone finding out their secret and getting kicked out of the league. It could look like Ilya losing his visa and getting sent back to Russia alone.

It could look like Shane’s dream, sometime in mid-March, the one that has started recurring in his sleep every few nights. It could look like Ilya with a razor blade and no one to stop him.

It’s raining in Montreal, the first time that Shane dreams of Ilya killing himself. In the dream, Ilya is in the bathroom where Troy said he found him, the one just off the master bedroom in Ilya’s home in Ottawa. He’s sitting in the bathtub in all of his clothes. The faucet is running at full, and there’s steam rising from the water that’s rapidly pooling around him. He has a stack of razor blades on the lip of the bathtub by his feet.

In real life, Shane does not know what Ilya looked like while he did any of this, and he doesn’t want to know. He thinks that knowing might break him for good, and he’s already feeling so fucking fragile. Ilya hasn’t told him any details about the moment and Shane hasn’t asked for them. Everything he knows comes from Troy Barrett’s report—something he had to fight to be given, a fight he only won when he came storming into the hospital and clung to Ilya and wouldn’t let go for days, making it blatantly obvious that he’s not going to be left out of a single second of the aftermath.

In the dream, though, Shane can see every minute flinch of Ilya’s expression as he picks up one of the blades. Shane is watching as if standing in the doorway of the bathroom, as if he had been there just looking at him and never once reaching out to stop him.

He wants to. He wants to reach out. He wants to run forward. He wants to tear the blade out of Ilya’s hand and throw it far fucking away. He wants to flush it down the toilet or let the garbage disposal break it into pieces. He doesn’t care about the plumbing or the mechanics, he just needs to get to Ilya.

But he can’t move. He can’t force himself to do it. He just stands in the doorway, watching in agony, screaming violently in his head but never once out loud, as Ilya drags the blade down his forearm. He does it in one long, smooth motion, but the cut isn’t straight. It’s curving and broken, deep in some places and barely breaking skin in others.

In the dream, Ilya swears under his breath. “Not straight. Not clean. Shane does not like not clean.”

In the dream, Shane opens his mouth and screams and screams and screams and Ilya cannot hear him. He gasps and screams and gnashes his teeth and foams at the mouth and imagines himself lunging forward to grab Ilya’s hand and stop him but he doesn’t make a sound and he doesn’t move. He’s just an observer in this. Ilya’s the one in control.

Sometimes Shane wonders if it—the cutting—is kind of like eating. He wonders if it is something that creates a sense of control, or a kind of mastery over your own body and muscles and life. He wonders, sometimes, if it’s something that Ilya did because he actually wanted to die, or because he just wanted to feel like he had the power to make that choice. Sometimes Shane wonders if, given one bad day, he’s just as close to slitting his own wrists as Ilya was only a few weeks ago.

In the dream, Shane screams again. He opens his mouth and gasps for air and doesn’t find it. His mouth feels stuffed with cotton, with gauze, with surgical bandages, and he’s choking on it all. Ilya is so close, within a few steps’ reach, and he’s cutting another long line down his forearm with the blade. His fingers are coated in his own blood, his veins are spilling out.

It’s as if Shane’s been tied to the ground with a ball and chain, it’s as if he’s lost all power over his muscles. Nothing in his body is listening to him. He’s screaming and he’s dripping at the mouth around all the cotton and gauze and none of it is enough to get Ilya’s attention, none of it is enough to get him to stop.

Then Ilya’s veins are curling upwards, out of his arms and towards the bathroom ceiling. They stretch out above his head in bloody tendrils of blue and red as Ilya’s body goes slack and he falls back against the bathtub. The tendrils of Ilya’s veins reach out for Shane like a dozen hands trying to drag him over. And the water—the fucking water is rising and rising and rising, finally spilling over the edge of the tub and flooding out into the bathroom.

The first spillage of bloody red bathwater hits Shane’s foot and he flinches so hard in real life that he wakes himself up.

And in Montreal, in his own apartment, in his bed—the rain is pounding against the rooftop. The moonlight slips through the window shades into strips of silver on the bedspread. Beside him, Ilya is breathing deeply and evenly in his sleep. He doesn’t stir at all as Shane’s entire heart pounds rapidly in the empty space between them where they cannot reach each other.

Shane rolls onto his back, breathing hard, feeling sweaty and clammy all over. He wants to cry. But he’s already cried so much about this, and he can tell that Ilya’s starting to get tired of it. He throws an arm over his eyes and squeezes them shut, trying to envelop himself in darkness. He focuses on the sound of Ilya’s breath, on the sound of his own heartbeat, and eventually his breathing slows.

When he opens his eyes again, he shifts to curl up around Ilya’s sleeping figure, carefully putting his arm over Ilya’s waist. In his sleep, Ilya tangles their fingers together and pulls him closer. His hands are so warm, and he’s here, and he’s alive, and Shane breathes again.

[THE FOWLER AND THE BIRDS]

Ilya has this fantasy in which he is left alone for maybe even just ten minutes. At this point, he’d take five. An amount of time that lasts longer than it takes to go to the bathroom with the door cracked open. That’s his greatest wish right now.

Unfortunately, after you try to kill yourself, things like privacy become privileges that you are not afforded instead of the givens that they once were. Ilya, who had gotten used to spending so much time alone that it was killing him, is feeling very nostalgic for those days. He knows it’s not fair to be annoyed at Shane for not wanting to leave him unsupervised, because Shane has every right to be afraid that Ilya will do something stupid, but it’s still frustrating.

The worst thing about failing to kill yourself, Ilya thinks, is that, in one swift fell move, you’ve broken the trust you had with every single person in your life. In just one night, with just one awful choice, suddenly everyone you know is watching you like a vulture, walking on glass, just waiting for you to fuck up again. They don’t always know that this is what they’re doing, but it is. It’s always what they’re doing.

He isn’t going to do it again, is the important thing. He hates that he’s suddenly so untrustworthy, considered so weak, thought of as such a risk factor. Because he’s not going to do it again, unless he can’t help it.

Maybe they shouldn’t leave him alone, actually.

Shane is on the road, though, off with the Metros for games in Florida and then in Jersey. Ilya had promised him that he would be okay alone, had promised that Shane wouldn’t come back home to find Ilya dead in his bathtub. But maybe he shouldn’t have used those words exactly, because that didn’t seem to make Shane feel any better about the situation.

Their compromise, between Ilya’s desire to be alone and Shane’s fear that he’s going to attempt again and that he’s going to succeed this time, is to have a rotation of people coming by but not staying too long. Just checking in. Troy will come babysit him—keep him company—the morning after Shane leaves. The day after, Jackie Pike will have lunch with him. The next day, Yuna and David will be bringing him a dinner of some sort, and they’ll eat, and then hopefully they’ll leave.

Ilya agrees somewhat reluctantly, but he doesn’t have any better ideas. Having people around makes Shane feel safer about Ilya’s safety, and Ilya has hurt him enough already that he has no desire to keep that reassurance away from him. So he says goodbye to Shane in the afternoon, kisses him at the door, deep and longing and wishing that Shane didn’t look back at him as if he’s lost something, and then sends him on his way.

“I love you,” Shane said quietly, just before leaving. “I’ll see you when I get back?”

It wasn’t a statement. No, it was very, very clearly a question. Like Shane wasn’t sure that Ilya wouldn’t simply cease to exist as soon as he turned his back. Like he was afraid that Ilya was going to run and leave a wreckage behind.

The other thing about failing to kill yourself is that, despite being alive, despite surviving, people are still mourning you. You are breathing and you are speaking and you are existing in their space, in their world, but people still look at you as if they’re grieving you. They look at you with pity, with hurt, with guilt, with a wish that either you had never done what you did or that they had simply never found out in the first place that such a thing happened.

So Ilya’s alive. He’s still here.

But Shane looks at him sometimes as if he’s seeing a corpse. As if Ilya is just a memory. Sometimes their eyes meet and Shane averts his gaze as if he’s thinking something that Ilya can never be allowed to know about. Ilya doesn’t ask what it is. He’s sure that he doesn’t want to know.

Others beside Shane do it too, and that hurts just as much. Troy looks at Ilya like he can’t see anything except for the bloody body on the bathroom floor. He looks at Ilya as if, instead of his friend and captain, he’s only seeing a dying man. He looks at Ilya as if there is no life there to see; he looks at Ilya like a non-believer might look at a ghost. 

And Svetlana, too—she’s stuck in Russia, dealing with things that she can’t step away from, and Ilya understands that perfectly well, but it’s the way she’s been talking to him on their several video calls that makes him angry. She’s never pulled her punches before, never let him wallow in his own pain, never treated him like he’s fragile. But now every word is carefully chosen, precise in its intention, never allowed to hit too close to the heart. Everything she says is deliberately calculated not to inflict further damage.

Because that’s what he is now. Damaged.

This is something that he carries in every part of his being. It is something he carries in his posture, in his stance, in his stride. It is something he carries in both the back of his head and at the forefront of every spoken interaction. It is something in his mind, and it is also something laid bare and open on the scar on his naked arm.

Which is to say that this is the first time that Troy has really seen Ilya after he’s been released from the hospital. He had sat at Ilya’s bedside from the moment he was caught until some time after Shane arrived, and he had come by to check in at Ilya’s house in Ottawa before Shane drove the two of them to Montreal. But that had been a brief moment, just a handoff of lasagna that Harris’ mother made him, because apparently everyone on the team and their fucking mother knows what he did.

Ilya lets Troy into the apartment on this first real meeting since, and for a moment, everything is fine. Ilya gives him a tour of Shane’s place, because he might as well, and then they settle in the living room with some video games. It’s supposed to be simple, supposed to be easy. It’s not supposed to feel like dying all over again.

Troy can’t seem to focus on what they’re playing. Ilya, notoriously terrible at video games, has beaten Troy in every round of Mario Kart so far. It would be uncharacteristic if Ilya didn’t know why he was so distracted.

After an hour of Ilya winning and Troy refusing to acknowledge the elephant in the room, Ilya groans and pauses the stupid game. He drops the controller on the coffee table and drags his hands over his face. “Fuck, Barrett. Just say whatever it is you’re thinking.”

“I’m not thinking anything,” Troy mutters. It’s the worst lie he’s ever told.

Ilya leans over, his elbows on his knees and forearms dropped out in front of him, head hanging slightly. He doesn’t look over, just keeps his eyes trained on his hands. “I’m not going to break if we talk about it. It’s fine.”

Troy is quiet for a long moment, and Ilya can feel his gaze boring into him. Then, “Fine. Why the fuck did you—”

He cuts himself off. There’s an awkward shuffling of fabric as Troy shifts on the couch.

Ilya lifts his head slightly, looking at Troy. Troy doesn’t look back at him. Ilya says, dryly, “You can call it what it is. Not saying the word suicide doesn’t change the fact that I tried to kill myself.”

Troy flinches. “Fine. But you’re avoiding the question.”

“Maybe.” Ilya looks away again, suddenly unable to stand the sight of this man who, by all rights and means, technically saved him. “I don’t know, Barrett. What do you want to hear? I don’t have a list. I don’t have thirteen cassettes or whatever the fuck.” He spreads his hands out in front of him. “I’m tired. I’m sad. I’m angry. I’m lonely. And I thought it was the better option at the moment.”

Troy is silent for a long, long moment. “It wasn’t.”

“I know.”

“It was awful.”

“I know.”

“I can’t ever do that again. You can’t ever do that again.”

“I know.”

Troy nods sharply. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Ilya murmurs. He looks at his hands, flexing his fingers and then curling them into fists. “I owe you an apology. You shouldn’t have had to find me.”

“What the fuck, Roz?” Troy’s voice is suddenly dark and frustrated, hurting like a blade against a whetstone. “You think that’s the part I’m angry about?”

Ilya shrugs a little helplessly. He looks at Troy for just a moment, and then back to his hands. He lets go of the tension in his fists. He breathes out. Relaxes his jaw.

“Jesus Christ,” Troy mutters. Then, louder, vehemently, “I’m not mad I found you. I’m so fucking glad I found you that—fuck, I don’t—it’s not finding you that I’m mad about. I’m mad at the fact that the only reason I found you was because I was trying to return a jacket you lent me and you happened to leave the front door cracked open. I’m mad that you didn’t call someone instead of doing the worst possible fucking thing you could have done. I’m mad that you still don’t seem to understand that there are people on your side.”

“Troy—”

“And I’m so fucking mad that it hurts, because I didn’t see it. I didn’t even fucking look for it because I was so caught up in my own shit. I should have known. Or someone else should have. Fucking anyone should have noticed. Someone should have—it was fucking luck that let me find you. And it never should have gotten that far. It never should have gotten that far because you are so loved, Ilya.”

When Troy stops, his breathing rough and uneven, Ilya blinks hard, glaring at his hands. Neither of them say anything for a long moment. There’s nothing good to say here, maybe.

Ilya murmurs, “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was my choice.”

“You really think that makes it better?”

“No,” Ilya says. He squeezes his eyes shut, and when he opens them, there are tears beading at his waterlines. “I know it doesn’t. But I needed to say it anyway.”

In his peripheral vision, Ilya sees Troy nod. He’s still holding the PlayStation controller, running his thumb along the buttons in a soothing motion while he keeps his eyes on the television screen where his character is bemoaning his loss.

“Okay.” Troy takes a heaving breath. “I’m only going to say this once, right? So fucking listen. You are possibly my best friend in the world. You were the first friend to see something worth caring about in me when I couldn’t see it in myself, both on the ice and off it. You changed my life completely by not putting up with my bullshit, not letting me get away with my spiraling, and accepting me for what I am instead of what I pretended to be.

“You took not just one team, but two different teams from being halfway to the grave to being real playoff contenders, and you did it by being a good fucking leader. And you do not get to fucking tell me now that that person is not someone who deserves to live his dream life.”

Ilya clenches his fists again, and he watches in the corner of his eye as Troy scrubs at his own face with one hand. Neither of them mention the tears. They just sit in the wake of Troy’s speech, letting the words sink in.

Finally, Ilya just whispers, “Thank you.”

He wonders, vaguely, what Troy would think if he knew what Ilya’s actual dream life looks like. He wonders what Troy would say if he knew—really, truly, knew; not just suspected or wondered—that the reason Shane Hollander is taking care of Ilya in Montreal right now is because they’re in love. Because they’re engaged.

He wonders, too, what would happen if he were to just say it. Just speak the dream out loud, maybe even into existence. He wonders if Troy would change his mind about everything he just said.

He probably wouldn’t. Ilya is pretty sure that he’s suspected for a while now about the real nature of Shane and Ilya’s relationship. He won’t be all that surprised when they eventually come out to their teammates, to the world.

It’ll be nice, maybe—to have someone who won’t be surprised. Someone who will just accept it for the fact that it is.

Eventually, Troy says, “Let’s play something else. Does Hollander have FIFA? I’m trying to get better at it so I can make Harris’ dad like me.”

“He probably already does, Sam likes everyone.” Ilya stands up to go hunt through Shane’s minimal video game collection anyway. “But we probably don’t have it. Shane only likes hockey related games.”

Troy snorts. “Well, I’ll kick your ass in any sport.”

“All the practice I have against Shane Hollander in every edition of the NHL games and you think I’m going to lose to you?” Ilya can’t help but feel his heart swell three sizes every time he allows himself to talk about Shane fondly instead of bitterly, or angrily, or jealously, like everyone in the world seems to think he should.

“There’s no way Hollander can be as good at real hockey as he is and be good at the video game,” Troy says. There’s half a laugh in his voice, and Ilya turns around and finds himself actually smiling back. It’s maybe the first time he’s done so all day.

Ilya shrugs, going back to the couch to sit down. He knocks their shoulders together slightly. “You’d be surprised. But he’s only the second best in the league and he’s second best at the game, too.”

“You’re so full of shit,” Troy tells him, rolling his eyes. “I know you think he hung the fucking stars. He’s the best player in the league and you know it.”

“Fuck you,” Ilya says, his words biting even as that same fondness blooms even brighter in his chest, and even as fear spikes through the brightness. Troy must know. He has to. But he’s not forcing Ilya to say it, and so they will pretend a little longer. This is the story of his life so far. 

Troy hums a non-committal sound. “Not my type.”

“Just play the game,” Ilya retorts, and that’s the end of that.

[SCENE IN OUR BEDROOM AT NIGHT]

Shane arrives back in Montreal late at night, when Ilya is already asleep.

He comes into the apartment as quietly as he can, dropping his bags at the door and toeing off his shoes quickly before he makes his way to the bedroom. He tells himself that he moves quickly because he’s tired, not because he’s so worried that Ilya isn’t going to be there, or worse. He tells himself that he moves so silently because he doesn’t want to wake Ilya if he’s sleeping, not because he’s scared of disturbing the ghosts that might be waiting for him. 

But Ilya is sleeping soundly when he gets into the bedroom, and Shane exhales deeply. He showers and changes into bedtime clothes just as quickly and quietly as he has done everything else, and manages not to wake Ilya when he joins him in bed.

Briefly, the horrifying image of Ilya sleeping so soundly in bed because he’s not breathing flashes through Shane’s head. His heartbeat speeds up until something seems to alert Ilya to his presence and he rolls over to throw an arm around Shane’s waist and tug him close. Again, another long exhale. Another night survived.

Shane falls asleep like that, with Ilya holding him close in his own sleep, and with all the ghosts in his head drifting away under the weight of Ilya’s arm. They’re here, they’re together; at this moment, they’re even okay.

That night, Shane dreams of birds. He dreams that he’s flying. He dreams of the flapping of wings, of the pulsing of a small heart, of the wind catching under him, of the alternating touch of the sunlight and the clouds on his back. He dreams of going higher and higher and higher and higher—

He dreams of falling. He dreams of an arrow hitting him in his chest, piercing straight through his heart. He dreams that he’s frantically beating his wings up and down and up and down, and that it’s getting him nowhere. He can feel the exhaustion taking hold, unable to keep fighting to stay in the air. He falls and falls.

In the dream, too, there is a hunter. He is on a barren hill with a bow and case of arrows in hand. He’s staring up at the sky, looking almost blankly at what he’s done. As Shane falls and falls, gets closer and closer to the hunter, the sky rushing past him, he begins to recognize the face that he’s looking at.

He doesn’t know who he expected to be standing there on the hill. But the hunter drops his bow and dumps the arrows to the ground where they start going cascading down the hill, and Shane sees only his own face. He sees himself standing there, opening his arms out to catch the bird that is Shane but must also not be Shane.

He hears his own voice as the hunter calls out, “Ilya—” 

And then, just before he falls into the arms of the hunter that is himself, Shane jolts awake.

Chapter 2: time feeds on carrion

[MOTHER, MOTHER, DO YOU SEE WHAT I’VE DONE?]

Shane is a masochist, in Ilya’s opinion, because he sleeps with his phone on full volume every night. Shane argues that it’s so that he wakes up if anyone needs him. Ilya does not think this is a good enough reason, but it’s recently been him needing Shane at odd hours so he supposes he doesn’t get the right to tell Shane how to deal with that.

Either way, Shane’s phone is at full volume at seven in the morning on a day off—the only day Shane is willing to stay in bed past eight; the only day Ilya gets to indulge in a slow, sleepy, carefree morning with him—so Yuna wakes them both up when she calls. Ilya knows that Yuna is aware of Shane’s phone volume situation, so he’s kind of pissed that she’s calling, until the first words out of her mouth are, “Don’t go online. You or Ilya. Neither of you go online.”

There are only a few reasons that Ilya can think of that would make her give them this warning. Ilya doesn’t want to be ignorant of any of those situations, because he knows that they’re all possible. So while Shane talks to Yuna, Ilya blatantly ignores her and opens Twitter.

The headline hits him the second that the app has loaded its home page. It’s the first Tweet he sees; from ESPN. Then one from SportsNet. Then from CBS Sports.

Ottawa Centaurs forward Ilya Rozanov attempted suicide, sources say. INSIDER REPORT: sources claim hockey star Ilya Rozanov attempted suicide several weeks ago. Ilya Rozanov’s recent absences linked to alleged suicide attempt. Ilya Rozanov “stable and at home” after suicide attempt. Where has Ilya Rozanov really been?

Ilya scrolls, numbly, through dozens of headlines about him. Through a flood of Tweets from fans, both concerned ones and hurt ones and angry ones.

Fucking selfish of him. Weak. Terrible role model. Wonder why he did it. Can’t believe this. Should respect his privacy. He needs to make a statement. Isn’t his whole thing that mental health organization? Why didn’t anyone see it coming? Wonder who found him. Who cares? This is what we call news these days? My bet’s on Boodram. How far do you think he got? How do you think he did it? It’s genetic, didn’t you know? Like mother, like son.

“I’m going to be sick,” Ilya chokes out, and then he’s practically falling out of bed and rushing to the bathroom. Behind him, he hears Shane curse and then he comes stumbling after him. Yuna, on the phone, is forgotten on the unmade bedspread.

Ilya kneels over the toilet and retches up water and spit, his eyes blurring with tears the longer that he sits there, hunched over and miserable. Shane kneels next to him, rubbing his back gently, murmuring things that Ilya isn’t really hearing right now.

When he finally feels done, he sits back on his heels and rubs at his eyes with the back of his hand. It just kind of blurs his vision more rather than clearing it. Shane hands him a folded piece of toilet paper and Ilya wipes his mouth with it.

“I’m sorry,” Ilya murmurs hoarsely. “I’m sorry.”

Shane shakes his head, his hand tightening where it grips Ilya’s shoulder. “No. Don’t say that.”

“I—”

“We’ve said our sorrys,” Shane says, voice soft. He kisses Ilya’s temple. “No use in more of them.”

Ilya nods sharply. He doesn’t say anything else. Maybe there’s nothing else to say.

Once teeth have been brushed, once they’ve showered together, slow and lazy, once Shane’s made them both his disgusting protein shakes, once they’re sitting at the kitchen table and being still and silent for the first time since that morning, the headlines settle in.

Okay. So everyone knows now, or thinks they know. They know enough. Everyone wants answers. Everyone wants a statement.

Everyone wants a statement, and Ilya kind of just wants to walk into the woods and never come back. He doesn’t want to think about any of this. He doesn’t want to deal with these people, these people who want their cut of his flesh, who want a piece of his awful still-beating heart. He doesn’t want to give away all of his secrets. He wants to sleep for a long, long time.

“You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to,” Shane is reminding him. “You can keep this all private if you want.”

Ilya stares blankly down at his protein shake. It’s green and disgusting but Shane made it for him and so he’ll drink it, because he loves him. “Maybe.”

“It’s none of their business.” Shane is looking at him closely, inspecting him, trying to unravel his thoughts much in the same way that the Internet is doing. Ilya hates him.

“Maybe.” Ilya doesn’t have any other words than non-committal agreement right now. Shane opens his mouth to speak again and Ilya drops his head back and groans. “Fuck, Shane, I don’t want to talk about this right now. I don’t want to deal with it.”

He presses his palms against his eyes, trying to stifle the sunlight, trying to fight off the oncoming daytime. 

He continues, “The entire world somehow knows I tried to kill myself and they all want me to tell them why even though I can barely tell you why and they all think they’re owed some kind of fucking answer because I happen to be good at a fucking game that they watch on TV. And the fact that they know at all means someone I trust told someone I don’t and I don’t even know where to fucking start with that—”

He cuts himself off, breathing hard, his hand frozen mid-gesture. Shane is sitting stock still in the chair across the table from him. He drops his hands to his lap and mutters, “Fuck. Sorry. Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.”

“We can find out who sold the story somehow,” Shane says quietly, because of course he latched onto the most actionable item in the list of things that are horrible right now. “If you want to. But I’m willing to bet it was someone who saw you or attended you in the hospital. Not a friend. Not a teammate. A stranger who happens to know your name and face.”

Ilya swallows hard. “Maybe.”

“And I—” Shane stops. His grip around his protein shake tightens as he squeezes his eyes shut briefly, then opens them wide to look at Ilya with so much fucking grief that it makes Ilya feel dead. “I don’t mean to pressure you into…into telling me. Telling me, um. Why. You don’t have to tell—if you don’t want to. I know this is…hard. To explain. I just—I wanted you to know that I can listen if that’s what you want. Fuck, Ilya, I’d do anything if it meant you talked to me instead of—”

He cuts himself off again, but the unspoken words are already hanging in the air from their own little nooses. I’d do anything if it meant you talked to me, Shane is saying, instead of killing yourself.

All these weeks, all the good moments, all the bad ones, all the ones with cracked doors and a locked safe’s worth of SSRIs and a shared bed and no privacy, all the moments they’ve shared and the ones they haven’t talked about—and Shane still can’t say it. Not in any way that matters. He still can’t fathom Ilya doing what he did.

Maybe that’s for the best, really, Ilya thinks. But it’s also incredibly frustrating.

“Okay,” Ilya says quietly. There’s nothing else he can think of that would fit here.

Shane looks like he might cry again, and Ilya is so tired of people crying over him. Shane quickly schools his face into something blank, something determined to be fine with this. It works well enough, but they still both know it’s just a front. “Okay.”

“I’ll make a statement tomorrow, maybe.”

“Okay,” Shane says easily. “Do you want help?”

“I’ll call Farah.” Ilya shrugs. “You can proofread if you want.”

Shane nods. “Okay. I can do that.”

“And um. We can talk. Tomorrow, maybe. If you want to.”

Shane’s brow wrinkles adorably. “About?”

Like the coward that he is, Ilya can’t meet his eyes. “About why.”

A beat. Shane is looking at him so carefully, like he’s trying to read Ilya’s mind but he’s coming up with a blank. “Okay. If you’re ready,” he says, and Ilya just nods.

[THE SEVENTH MAGPIE]

But tomorrow does not come, not really.

Tomorrow brings: nine in the morning, barely awake; Hayden, in the living room, pale-faced and pacing and murmuring apologies like prayers. It brings: Ilya, forgiving him maybe because he just can’t be bothered to hold grudges or be mad at anyone right now. It brings: Shane, sitting down heavily on the couch with his head in his hands and all his thoughts swarming. It brings: Ilya making headlines for the second day in a row, for a very, very different reason. It brings: a FanMail video posted for the world to see; over a decade of secret-keeping tossed to the wind just like that.

Just like that.

This is how it ends, then. Not with a bang, but the single click of a video posted to Twitter.

The next week would be considered hell, if Shane hadn’t already walked through it when Ilya was bleeding out in the hospital. If that hadn’t happened right before this, maybe things would feel different. Maybe it would hurt more, or maybe it would make him fall apart faster, or maybe it would all just feel to be at a much bigger scale than it does right now.

But as it is, Shane is—he’s coping. There are bigger problems in the world than a career in hockey.

There is the sight of his fiancé in a hospital bed with bandages up and down his forearm because he tried to slit his wrist open and die. There is the sight of Troy Barrett looking ashen and sick and horrified, hours and hours later, entirely alone in the hospital room because he had no idea who the fuck should be contacted. There is the fact that no one in the world knew that Shane should have been the first one there.

So as it is, he’s…he’s coping.

When he walks back into the Montreal locker room, no one seems to know what the fuck to say to him. His coach and Commissioner Crowell make the decision to bench him. He leaves, jaw clenched and eyes burning but no tears there to fall.

On his way out, he looks around the locker room, around at his team, and he feels—he feels empty. It should feel so much worse than this, shouldn’t it? It should feel like dying? But—more than anything, he just feels blank.

“Okay,” Shane says, spreading his arms like an opening to fire. “Now you know. It’s been going on for years and it’s never stopped me from contributing to this team. We won the fucking cup last year.”

“It’s fucked up.” Comeau is livid, his words spit out with violence.

“You think I don’t know that?” Shane asks. He’s so tired. “That’s why I’ve been hiding it for so long.”

Or, what’s actually fucked up is that no one is on his side here. What’s fucked up is that he couldn’t celebrate his engagement with the people he spends every day with. What’s fucked up is that Ilya almost died and Shane would’ve found out from a headline if Troy Barrett hadn’t had the instinct to grab Ilya’s phone and the decency to answer Shane’s nineteenth call in the span of an hour. What’s fucked up is that, after all this time devoted to keeping their secret, it’s been revealed like this and no one in this room is asking if Shane’s okay.

“Is Coach sending you home?” J.J. asks. “Then fuck off and go home.”

Shane isn’t going to cry. He’s not going to cry, because he knew this was going to happen. He knew exactly how this scene was going to play out, and so he’s not going to cry now that it’s playing out as anticipated. He’s going to stand here with his back straight and his jaw clenched and his chin up and making eye contact with every damn one of them.

“I know that everyone is fucking weirded out right now,” Hayden says, words hard and firm. “But try to remember who the fuck this is. Shane is our fucking captain. Our leader.”

“He’s a fucking liar.” J.J. is angry, sharp at every edge in a way that he’s never been with Shane before.

Comeau’s mouth twists into something ugly. “We all would’ve been better off if Rozanov died, but he couldn’t even do that right and now our captain’s a fucking f—”

Shane lunges towards him, something awful already snarling on his tongue, fists already flying towards Comeau, how fucking dare he, but Hayden grabs him before he can get anywhere. Hayden wraps both hands around Shane’s middle, restraining him tightly until Shane goes slack in his arms. None of the tension leaves his jaw. His hands stay clenched into his fists.

“He’s our fucking friend,” Hayden snaps. “So maybe everyone feels weird right now, I get it. It’s Rozanov. But don’t any of you have any goddamn empathy? All this shit, and you’re still going to be bitter about fucking what? Some chirps on the ice? Losing games? In five years, you’re going to have to live with how shitty you were to Shane when he needed his fucking boys the most. And you’re going to regret every fucking thing you’ve said here.”

Shane takes a deep breath, wrenching himself out of Hayden’s loosened grip. Hayden stumbles back. They can’t talk about this anymore or Shane is going to do something none of them can take back. “Fuck. I’m leaving. If anyone wants to talk to me, you have my number.” He turns to J.J. specifically. “You know where I live.”

With that, Shane leaves.

He doesn’t expect much out of the offer. He doesn’t actually believe any of them are going to reach out to him. They’ve made up their minds already, and they all know that. He’s not going to pretend.

He basically collapses into Ilya’s arms when he gets home. He lets Ilya hold him while he just cries. Cries for Ilya, cries for what he tried to do, cries for himself, cries for what he couldn’t save Ilya from, cries for them both, cries for all of the things that are so far out of their control now.

He cries for the autonomy that they’ve lost; the power they no longer have regarding their own secrets. He cries for the future that’s suddenly spiraling out of control in an entirely different way than it had been spiraling before. He cries so selfishly for his own grief, and he cries so wretchedly for his grief about Ilya.

He knows that he’s been treating Ilya as if he’s fragile. Shane is well aware of this—every time he looks at Ilya, he just gets this horrible sick vision of the world in which Ilya succeeded in his attempt. He can’t fucking deal with any of this, not like how Ilya needs him to.

But right now—right now, Ilya just holds him. Ilya just holds him tight and Shane lets himself be held.

“I love you,” Shane whispers hoarsely, when he’s done with his tears. “Whatever comes next with hockey, and everything else, okay? I love you, and I’m glad you’re here.”

“I love you too, sweetheart,” Ilya murmurs. He kisses the crown of Shane’s head, then rests his forehead there. Shane closes his eyes.

Shane swallows hard. Keeps his eyes closed when he asks, “Are you doing okay? With…all this? Are you…”

Ilya is quiet for a long moment. “I’m not going to kill myself over it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Shane tenses, and doesn’t respond, and that’s probably answer enough. Ilya continues. “I wasn’t—Shane, it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t us. And I can’t—I can’t fucking take it back, okay, I know that, but I—you don’t have to worry so much. I’m—I’m dealing. And this is—all of this is, is horrible, but it’s not—it’s not going to kill me. And I’m so fucking sorry that you’re so scared all of the time, because I know it’s my fault—”

“Ilya—”

“No,” Ilya cuts in, stopping him. Shane tries to pull himself away so he can look at Ilya’s face but Ilya holds him tighter. His voice is rough, wrecked with guilt and grief alike, when he continues,  “No, is my fault, Shane, you don’t have to lie about it, okay. I did what I did. And that is—I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.” 

Shane shakes his head, managing to pull himself away. They’re tangled together on the couch, and he turns around so that he can throw a leg over Ilya’s thighs, settle in his lap, and then cup his face in his hands. 

“I forgive you,” he whispers. It’s what Ilya needs to hear, he thinks. He kisses Ilya’s forehead, his temple, his cheek. “I forgive you, okay? You don’t need to apologize anymore. We’re okay. I’m here. You with me?”

Ilya nods. Once, twice, then rapidly again. “With you, Hollander.”

“Okay,” Shane murmurs. He kisses Ilya gently, slowly, softly. Like a dream. “I’ve got you.”

“I’ve got you,” Ilya echoes softly. He closes his eyes and Shane kisses him again, then rests their foreheads against each other. “I’ve got you, too.”

[FIGHT OR FLIGHT OR FREEZE]

Ilya recently has been dreaming of the ice. He’s been dreaming of getting onto skates and just going. He’s been dreaming of getting onto the rink and skating as fast as he fucking can, so fast that no one and nothing can ever catch up with him.

He’s been dreaming of playing with Shane instead of against him, passing the puck back and forth together. Not shooting at the goal, not racing, not being competitive in any way—just passing the puck back and forth. Looking at each other and grinning and feeling so fucking alive, in a way that nothing else can make him feel.

He’s been dreaming of games, too. Of playing with his team. His guys—from both Ottawa and Boston. The ones who had sent supportive messages after his attempt and the ones who sent him to Montreal with enough food to last them weeks, just in case they were too caught up in recovery to deal with cooking. The ones who reached out to make sure they’re okay after the video went up, the ones who have been fighting back against the cruelest fans on Twitter.

He’s been dreaming of living life again. Not the life he used to have. A different one. A new one. One where he’s actually alive, and not just pretending to be.

So he’s been dreaming of hockey again. And in the dream, he and Shane are just playing a game. Not the game. Not competing. They’re just playing. Like they’re kids again, practicing the fundamentals, before everything got so fucking complicated.

They obviously didn’t know each other during those times. They probably wouldn’t have even been friends if they had known each other in their youngest years. But Ilya has still been dreaming about it recently.

When they finally get the clearance to join their teams again—turns out that they haven’t been throwing games and cheating, officially—Ilya is cleared to play by the medical staff too, and the playoffs are about to start. Ilya returns to the Ottawa Centaurs locker room like he’s returning home after years and years at war. He returns to the locker room like he’s coming back into a part of himself that had been long lost.

“Roz!” Boodram calls out loudly, in that booming, welcoming voice of his. Immediately, the conversation goes silent as everyone in the room turns to look at him.

Ilya offers him a somewhat hesitant smile. “Hi. You all probably have questions.”

“None that you have to answer if you don’t want to,” Troy says quickly, and loudly, making it very, very clear to everyone in the room that he’s not going to be letting bullshit slide about any of the news that has been breaking about Ilya recently.

Ilya gives him a slightly more confident smile. His hands in his sweatshirt pockets loosen from their fists. “Right now, I will answer three questions only. So be smart.”

The first question comes from Young. He asks hesitantly, as if unsure of his right to know. “Cap, is it…is it true?”

Ilya looks over at him, raising his eyebrows. “You know how many headlines I’ve read about myself in the past week? Be more specific.” 

“Um.” Young looks like he’s not sure what exactly he’s asking, like he’s not sure he wants the answer. “Um. About you and Hollander? Are you really dating?”

“Engaged, actually,” Ilya says, his lips curling into a grin. He pulls the chain around his neck out from underneath his shirt, where the ring hangs next to his mother’s cross. He holds it out slightly so that Young can look. “But yes. We are together.”

Young looks a little like he’s going to pass out. “Holy shit. Congratulations. Holy shit.”

“Yes.” Ilya laughs, small and private. “Holy shit.” 

Behind Young, Luca is clearly listening intently to the conversation. He turns fully towards Ilya after a moment of silence that Young clearly doesn’t know how to fill. “Is he—um. Okay? And are you? This was probably a nightmare, right?”

Ilya blinks. He hadn’t expected that. He knew his team was going to be good about his being bisexual, but he didn’t—he didn’t expect kindness. He didn’t expect grace. He says, softly, “Yeah. It’s been…a long few weeks of nightmares. But we’ll wake up soon.”

Luca nods sharply, and then turns back to his own locker. He moves precisely, wasting no movement as he gets his gear together and goes through his pre-practice routine. He reminds Ilya a lot of a young Shane. He’s told Luca this, of course, multiple times, but the comment just seemed to make Luca hyperventilate, so Ilya stopped saying that. Another thing that reminded him of Shane.

The last question comes from Hayes. It’s clearly one that’s been discussed between him and some of the other Centaurs vets who have known Ilya a long time, all of them trying to collaborate on how to best use their last question.

Ilya has just finished tying his skates when he looks up at the rest of the team all staring at him. He looks between all of them, waiting expectantly.

Then Hayes asks, lightly, as if the question is nothing at all, “What can we do to help?”

Ilya blinks. “What?”

“What can we do to help?” Hayes asks again.

“Like,” Dykstra starts, “we can help you with meal prep? You probably haven’t gone grocery shopping in a while, since you’ve been staying in Montreal, right? Or maybe help clean your house, or something? If that will make things feel more…put together?”

Boodram adds, “Or if there’s a way we can help when you have to do media? Take questions for you, or redirect conversations? Or, if you ever need company on a bad night, at least one of us is always awake.”

“Just whatever stuff,” Chouinard picks up. “Whatever makes this easier. If there’s anything that we can do.”

Troy looks at Ilya a little sadly. “We’ve been kind of going insane here, not being able to see you, or do anything for you.”

“I—” Ilya stops, suddenly feeling as if he’s choking on all his words. “Um. I don’t know. I’m okay.”

“That feels patently false, given everything,” LaPointe says, and it doesn’t sound mean or cruel, just matter of fact. Just one more truth of the world. It’s grounding, somewhat.

Ilya takes a shaky breath. “Um. Winning against Montreal and making it to the next round of playoffs would be a good start, yes?”

Hayes narrows his eyes at him, clearly unhappy with the answer, but they all let him get away with it anyway. Chouinard says, “We can do that much, Roz,” and there’s a kind of stomping or cheering or just Ilya’s heartbeat pounding in his throat.

“Let’s get to practice then—”

“Wait, one more question, Ilya.”

Ilya sighs, overselling the dramatics of it. “I said three only, Bood. You do not get an exception by being alternate.”

“It’s an important one,” Boodram says, rolling his eyes amidst the scattered laughs.

It all feels so beautifully familiar and Ilya loves his team so much. He says, “Fine, fine. But only because the questions have been nice. Don’t ruin it now.”

Boodram laughs out loud. Then he says, “Okay. The question, then: when’s Hollander coming to a BBQ with us?”

[PULLING THE WEAPON FROM THE WOUND]

In April, in the days prior to the first round of the playoffs, Shane visits Ilya in Ottawa. He doesn’t really have a good excuse for it other than that he wants to. Being around his teammates has been awful, despite Shane being unbenched and despite the official announcement that no tampering between Metros and Centaurs has happened, and so Shane just needs to get out for a weekend. They have a three day break before the first round begins, and so Shane makes the drive to Ottawa.

He and Ilya have already agreed not to see each other during the playoffs, where they’ll be playing against each other, so this will be their last visit for a while. They’ll be limited to texts and stolen glances on the ice. Right now, they can’t risk being seen together. This was mostly a boundary set by Ilya, who was worried about the Metros, and Shane had agreed only somewhat hesitantly.

When Shane gets to Ottawa, Ilya is asleep on the couch in the living room. After letting himself into the house and dropping his shoes and bag at the front door, Shane allows himself to settle on top of Ilya and bury his face against Ilya’s collarbone. Ilya stirs only slightly—just enough to see that it’s Shane lying with him, and just enough to curl his arms around Shane’s back and pull him tight.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Ilya murmurs, his voice rough with sleep. “Sorry. I tried to wait for you.”

Shane hums, closing his eyes. He feels like he could fall asleep like this, though he knows he’d hate himself for it in the morning. “It’s okay. It’s late.”

“What time is it?” Ilya asks. Shane attempts a vague shrugging motion, but it’s limited by Ilya’s arms around him. Ilya hums, then shifts to rest his cheek against the top of Shane’s head. “We should go to the bedroom.”

“You’re going to have to ask nicer than that if you want to get into my pants,” Shane mumbles, the words barely decipherable between exhaustion and the way he’s pressing his lips against Ilya’s neck.

Ilya snorts. “Please can we go to the bedroom so that we can go to sleep like adults and so that my neck doesn’t ache tomorrow morning?”

Shane manages to get out some kind of agreement, and then he’s sitting up. Ilya manages to move out from beneath him and stand up first, then he easily gathers Shane into his arms to carry him to the bedroom. It startles a laugh out of Shane, who kisses Ilya’s neck as he lets himself get carried upstairs.

“Keep doing that and I’ll drop you,” Ilya says, but he’s laughing and Shane feels no more in danger than he did before. He kisses Ilya again. “Hollander, I swear.”

“Okay, okay.” Shane laughs as Ilya dumps him onto the bed, falling back onto the mattress and closing his eyes with a heaving sigh. “Fuck, I’m tired.”

“I told you it was better to make the drive in the morning.”

Shane opens his eyes, forcing himself to sit up. “I wanted to see you as soon as I could.”

Ilya makes a noncommittal sound that could be an agreement, but might not be. Shane watches him carefully as Ilya grabs the pajamas Shane keeps here and tosses them in Shane’s direction. Shane has always loved having drawers of clothes here—there’s something about it that makes their relationship feel so real. So permanent. He’s a part of Ilya’s home, unignorably, and so he’s a part of Ilya’s life, a part of his heart.

“Let me brush my teeth then we can go to bed,” Shane tells him, after he’s dressed and then kissed Ilya on the cheek.

Ilya, already having been ready for bed and now already under the sheets and lying down with his eyes fluttering shut, just mumbles something under his breath that Shane doesn’t catch. Shane laughs, breathy and quiet, and then turns to the master bedroom’s bathroom.

He stops just short of the door. He stares into the room.

It looks like it’s always looked. The shower curtain is still blue, with a subtle, darker blue pattern of diamonds on it. The bathmat is the same white it’s always been. The sink is clean; two toothbrushes and two tubes of toothpaste, different brands, sit in a little ceramic cup by the faucet. A bottle of hand soap on the other side. All the drawers under the sink are shut, though Shane knows how each of them are laid out: hair products in the top drawer, first aid in the second drawer, spare bottles of shampoo and boxes of soap in the bottom drawer.

Everything is the same. Everything is exactly the fucking same, but Shane feels sick.

He feels completely frozen in place; he can’t do anything but look around the room. He can’t make himself go inside.

In the dreams of Ilya committing suicide, Ilya is in the bathtub and Shane is in the doorway. In the dreams, the bath is running. In the dreams, the blood stains the water. In the dreams, the water overflows. In the dreams, Ilya doesn’t see him and Shane can’t reach him. In the dreams, the bathroom looks exactly as it does now.

Shane swallows hard. He can’t go in. He can’t make himself.

This is where Ilya had—had almost—and if Troy Barrett hadn’t—if—and Ilya almost—

“Shane?” Ilya asks, his voice a low, soft rumble. “You okay?”

Ilya is here. Ilya is alive. Ilya is breathing. Ilya is not in this bathtub and he is not slitting his wrists. Ilya is okay. Fuck. Fuck.

“I’m fine,” Shane chokes out.

He doesn’t look behind him, doesn’t want to tell Ilya what he’s thinking right now. They’ve been doing so well at this, at pretending that everything’s going to be okay eventually. But it doesn’t feel like Shane, at least, is ever going to be okay again. He can’t even walk into this fucking bathroom without feeling a terror and grief that’s tangible and paralyzing.

There’s some rustling of sheets, then the soft noise of Ilya’s footsteps, and then Ilya’s bare arms are wrapping around Shane’s waist. Shane tenses at the sudden touch, and then forces himself to relax again. This is Ilya. Ilya who is here and alive and breathing, and who is not slitting his wrists open right now. Ilya who did not succeed at his attempt to—

“What are you thinking, sweetheart?”

Shane closes his eyes and takes a very measured, careful breath. “I haven’t, um. I haven’t been back here since…”

It clicks in only a moment. Ilya presses his forehead against the nape of Shane’s neck. “Ah. I see.”

“Sorry, I shouldn’t—” Shane’s voice breaks, and Ilya tightens his hold around his waist. Like he’s scared that Shane is going to run, or maybe like Shane’s going to turn around and see him. “I should just. I should just brush my teeth.”

Neither of them move. Ilya is quiet for a long moment. Shane doesn’t have anything better to say, so he keeps his eyes closed and grounds himself in Ilya’s warmth. He tries to count his breaths until Ilya is ready to talk. He’s at twenty-five inhales and twenty-six exhales before Ilya speaks again.

“It is just a bathroom,” Ilya says quietly. “It is just a room. What happened is not the room’s fault, yes? It is just mine?”

“Ilya—”

“Really,” Ilya says, stopping him, “is just a room. You don’t have to be—upset. About the room. Something happened here, but that does not mean here is a bad place to be.”

Shane nods jerkily. “I know.”

He doesn’t sound like he knows, and they’re both very aware of it. But Ilya doesn’t call him out on that; he just waits for Shane to gather the rest of his thoughts.

Something terrible happened in this room. Something—a fear that almost became reality—happened in this room and Shane is probably going to have it in the back of his mind for the rest of his life. Something awful happened here, and Shane has been having nightmares about it for weeks. This room, and the things that haunt it.

But it’s also just a room. It’s just a room, and it’s a memory. It’s not reality. It’s not Ilya, dead in the bathtub. It’s not Ilya, wrists cut open. It’s not Ilya, dead dead dead.

Reality is Ilya wrapped around him so tightly. Reality is Ilya is warm against his back. Reality is the tickle of Ilya’s breath down Shane’s spine. Reality is Shane interlocking his fingers between Ilya’s hands clasped on his stomach. Reality is Ilya, still alive and still in love with him.

“You, um.” Shane stops. Takes a shaky breath. The room seems to be staring back at him, at his fear, but at the end of the day, it’s just a room. “Same rules as in Montreal. Don’t lock any doors.”

Ilya is quiet for a moment. Then, “Okay. Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Fine.” Ilya lifts his head from the back of Shane’s neck only to press a kiss to the spot just below his ear. Then he drops his head against Shane’s shoulder. He mutters, “Barrett took the locks off most doors already anyway.”

“Okay,” Shane whispers. “Thank you.”

Ilya hums. “Can you finish getting ready for bed now? Or do you need me to stand there with you?”

It sounds like a half sarcastic and half genuine question. Shane can’t really tell. He isn’t sure if he’s admitting to this level of clinginess or if he maybe just wants to test the genuineness of Ilya’s offer when he says, “Stay. Please.”

“Okay,” Ilya says quietly. He lets go of Shane’s waist, then puts a hand on the small of his back to push Shane into the bathroom.

Steeling himself for nothing to happen, Shane steps inside. He makes his way to the sink. He wonders if Ilya is having any kind of similar experience to him, if the memories come back to him the way the dreams are coming to Shane right now. He wets the toothbrush. He thinks about Troy Barrett opening the door to find Ilya—

He puts toothpaste on the brush. He runs it under water. He thinks about Ilya with his head tipped back against the wall as the bathwater rises around him, spilling over the tub’s edges. He puts the toothbrush in his mouth and tries not to gag.

In the mirror, Ilya is leaning against the wall behind Shane, his arms crossed. He’s blinking very slowly. He’s clearly tired, but Shane needs to see him, even if just in the mirror. He needs to look at the man he loves, the man he almost lost. He feels like he might go insane, might lose his mind and start tearing down cities, if he doesn’t have tangible, real proof that Ilya is okay—this is a feeling that he’s become very, very familiar with in the past few weeks.

“Brush your teeth,” Ilya says quietly, and Shane realizes that he’s frozen in place. “I am still here.”

Shane tears his eyes away from Ilya in the mirror, and focuses back on brushing. He tries not to feel so selfish about this, and he tries not to feel so desperately fucking scared. He fails at both things. He spits out the toothpaste; runs the brush under the water.

Rinsing out his mouth is a simple process. It also feels like it takes a hundred steps and a hundred years. When he straightens up again to dry his mouth, Ilya’s eyes are still tracking his every movement carefully.

When Shane is done, he turns around and Ilya drops his crossed arms and holds them open for Shane to fall into. This is something he’s done more than a thousand times, both before the attempt and since the attempt. This is familiar, charted territory. Shane has a mental map of the space between them, and he can draw out all the routes they’ve used to reach each other.

But before he can move, his eyes catch on Ilya’s wrist. He hasn’t been wearing short sleeves very often recently, preferring instead to cover his arms with sweatshirts and sweaters. It makes him look soft and cozy, in Shane’s eyes, and also allows him to hide the scar on his forearm.

Shane hasn’t spent much time looking at it. He hasn’t been able to bear the idea of it, much less the real sight of it. Maybe that’s why Ilya wants to cover it up so religiously.

Ilya sees him looking. Of course he sees. He’s always been so attuned to Shane’s every movement, to Shane’s every thought. So of course he sees it when Shane sees the scar, and of course he sees the look on Shane’s face, and Shane doesn’t know what expression he’s making but it’s probably not a happy one.

“I can put a sweatshirt on,” Ilya says. When he says it, he sounds so small, so defeated and it breaks Shane’s entire heart. “Shane.”

“No,” Shane says, a beat too late. “No, it’s—it’s fine. It’s a warm night, you’ll be more comfortable without one.”

Ilya licks his lips, looking at Shane very intently. Shane has no fucking idea what Ilya’s finding in his expression, because he himself has no fucking idea what he’s feeling.

“I don’t want—” Ilya stops. Thinks for another second. “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m not,” Shane says, maybe a little more harshly than he needed to. Ilya’s jaw tightens visibly, and Shane exhales, trying to let go of some of the tension in his own body. “Can I, um. See? Touch? I need—I want—just—can I?”

Ilya’s eyes flick down to his arm at his side. His hand is in a loose fist. Even from far away, in the bright lights of the bathroom Shane can see that the scar is angry and ugly, a single jagged cut down the line of the vein on his forearm.

Carefully, slowly, Ilya twists his arm so that the scar is out of view, hidden by his waist. He doesn’t look at Shane when he says, “No.”

Shane blinks hard. “Okay.”

“We can sleep now,” Ilya says, probably trying to sound decisive but mostly just sounding avoidant. “You are done?”

“I’m done.” Shane doesn’t feel done with anything. He feels adrift. Unmoored. Lost in the deep end of an ocean he can’t name and can’t swim in.

Ilya turns away and goes back to bed. Shane follows. They don’t talk as they fall back under the sheets and Shane curls into Ilya’s side. Ilya holds him with the scarred arm, but Shane doesn’t push to see or touch. 

Finally, blanketed and hidden by the dark of the hour, Ilya whispers to a barely-awake Shane, “I am sad sometimes.” 

It takes everything in Shane not to tense up, not to roll over to look at him. But something in the roughness of Ilya’s voice says he doesn’t want to be seen right now. He just needs to say what he needs to say. 

“I am sad sometimes,” Ilya repeats, sighing out the words more than saying them. “And I get lonely, and tired, and angry, and all these things that I don’t know who to hate for, except me. And I did something stupid because of it.” 

Shane swallows, his eyes wide open in the dark. He doesn’t know if Ilya is even aware that he’s awake; he’s not sure that Ilya would ever confess to any of this if he knew that Shane was listening.

“I love you,” Ilya says, the Russian phrase so familiar by now that Shane can translate it without thinking too hard. Then he turns to English again, so surely he knows Shane is hearing this. “I don’t want you to think I don’t, just because I did the awful thing.” 

Ilya exhales slowly, his breath tickling the back of Shane’s neck. His arm tightens around Shane’s waist, and he continues. “I am not always happy, or okay. It’s not your fault, or my fault. It just is something real. Not always something you can fix. Or something I can fix. Is just…real.” 

Shane closes his eyes. These are things he knows to be true, things he has known to be true from the start of this nightmare. But that doesn’t make them any easier to hear. He wants to be able to fix this pain in Ilya, he wants to be able to take it all away from him. But that’s not how this works. An open wound does not stop being painful just because you cauterize the bleeding. 

“The awful thing will maybe always be with you. And with me, I guess. I saw your face in the mirror tonight. It will maybe not be possible for you to forget it. But it is still worth living even with the nightmares, yes?” 

Yes, Shane wants to burst out. The word is so vehement, so loud and passionate and real on his tongue that he feels as if he is breaking open with it. 

“Being sad and tired like this,” Ilya murmurs, “is a kind of weight, I think. And I cannot always carry it right. So sometimes being safe while holding it up is harder than not. And sometimes you can help, Shane, and sometimes you can’t. It is not all so easy as that. And the awful thing I did—I cannot promise I will not want to do it again. So I won’t promise that.” 

Shane opens his eyes again, staring out into the dark and wishing desperately that he could turn around and face Ilya. Touch his face, pull him into a kiss, tell him he’s loved. But he doesn’t move. He doesn’t want Ilya to stop talking. 

“But I saw you in the mirror,” Ilya continues. “And how you wanted to touch, and see, and—and I didn’t let you tonight. But maybe one day I will. Because I think maybe that you really do want to see me. Even when I’m sad and tired in ways that can’t be fixed. I don’t think I knew that before. 

“So I cannot promise not to be sad again, and not to be…unsafe. I cannot promise the awful thing will not always be with us in the bathroom. But I can promise to tell you when it’s there in my head, and to talk to you when I should probably be leaving all the doors unlocked. I don’t know if that’s enough. But it is a start, yes?” 

It’s a start, Shane thinks. A small sob escapes his throat, wrenched forward by Ilya’s words. He can’t stop it, but he catches his breath in his throat before he can cry again.  

“I know you’re awake,” Ilya says, and there’s a small, wet laugh in his words.

“Sorry,” Shane whispers. Then, after a breath, “And it is a start, Ilya. It’s a really, really good start. Okay?” 

Ilya is quiet for a moment. Just for a heartbeat before he murmurs, “Okay, Shane.” 

Shane nods, even though Ilya can’t see him. He steadies his breath again, and neither of them say anything more. For now, the room is dark and they’re both warm and—and it has to be enough. This has to be enough.

Chapter 3: time is a bird taking to the sky

[WITH HEARTBEAT AFTER HEARTBEAT, WE GROW OLD]

It is June, and here is a list of things that Ilya knows: he is thirty years old as of today, and he never really intended to get this far, but he’s here anyway; he is thirty and he now has things he never even dared to think about a decade ago, and something about this settles strangely in his chest; he is thirty, and his formerly shit team has gracefully bowed out of the playoffs and afterwards Ilya spiraled only a reasonable amount, and Shane Hollander was somehow the one to hold him.

The sun is about to sink—he has a perfect view of it from where he sits on the front porch with an unlit cigarette in hand and a blanket around his shoulders—and he really should start thinking about going back inside, but he can’t bring himself to move. He is thirty years old today and his thoughts about that are all jumbled up and caught inside a net of confusion and apprehension and fear, and so he just needs to sit here for a while. For a long time, maybe.

He told Shane he didn’t really want to do anything to celebrate his birthday, which is true, but Shane had been a little sad about the idea of just letting the date pass. Ilya hadn’t wanted to make a big deal out of it—out of thirty years—but he figures Shane probably just wants to celebrate the fact that he’s alive at all. Which is fair, Ilya thinks vaguely, but that doesn’t make him want to celebrate it.

Ilya tilts his head up to the sky, closing his eyes. Behind his closed eyelids and even at this time of day, he can still feel the burn of the sun. It’s still summer-warm despite the dusk, and the world spins on with his eyes closed.

When he had been sitting on the bathroom floor with a razor blade in hand only a few months ago, Ilya had thought about this, kind of. He thought about how close he was to thirty years old, about how he’s had so much life that has been so hard to get through. He thought about how he’s had happy, genuine moments; he thought about how they were not enough to fix his head. He thought about how Shane, not yet thirty years old, would have so much time left to recover and move on.

He thought, too, about the sun. It was dark outside already when he closed all the blinds in the house—he usually likes keeping them all pulled up and open, which is probably part of why Barrett was worried and came inside looking for him—but the bathroom light is this awful fluorescent that he’s always meant to change but never gotten around to. So it was bright inside in a way that felt almost sterile, almost threatening.

He could see his movements in slow motion as he made them; every shift in position happened as if his mind were a split second behind the choice to move. Moving the hand holding the blade felt a little like watching someone else’s hand move.

He was numb, distant, disconnected from every movement, but only until the blade was cutting into skin. When the slit of pain burst from his vein, when the blood started beading up behind the line of the razor, he felt every fucking heartbeat of it. The pain wasn’t instantaneous, not totally, but it came quick, and suddenly Ilya was wide fucking awake and so, so conscious of what he had done.

But the worst part, though; the part that he has yet to tell anyone just with the sheer shame of it: Ilya doesn’t think he actually wanted to die.

And yes, he slit his wrist open to kill himself. He cut into his body to create a wound that he knew would bleed him dry. He intended to make another one; he would have, should no one have caught him in the act. He opened up a vein with the vague idea that it would end things, and he knows that he probably would have succeeded in a world where he was loved just a little less.

Everyone has been talking around the reality, reluctant to acknowledge it and refusing to put real words to what he had done, but Ilya knows. Ilya knows the depth of it, the visceral hurt in it, the anger and the pain and the nameless, indescribable emotion—the one that takes over your whole being, flooding through every empty space in your body until it’s suddenly the only thing you can think and feel.

Talking around what he did and how he did it doesn’t change the fact that he did it. It doesn’t change the nauseating thought of the act. It doesn’t change the awfulness of it. It doesn’t change the reality of it: the horror, the disgust, the messiness, the discomfort, the guilt, the abject nightmare come crawling out from under the bed at night. It doesn’t change Ilya’s hurt and it doesn’t change anyone else’s hurt.

The truth, though—despite all of this, despite the fact that he thinks he could have succeeded if things were just a little different, despite the fact that he chose to try at all, despite the fact that he can acknowledge the horror in what he did—if Ilya is being honest, he would have to admit that maybe he didn’t really want to die at all. Maybe he wanted to get caught, get stopped, get saved. Maybe he wanted someone to come to him before he could bleed out.

He did, after all, do it with a blade and an unlocked door. These are the most unreliable ways to die.

He also—the thing is that he did it in the middle of the season, which would have fucked a lot of people over in some ways, but it is also the likeliest point in time when someone would miss him. It is the likeliest point in time when someone would come looking for him if he were unresponsive.

Most importantly: he did it with a contingency plan in place. He did it with a blade and a wrist, which is unreliable, which allows for a window of time to be found. He did it at a time when someone would notice him gone. And he did it knowing a stretch of easy, missable home games was coming up for both him and Shane, and he did it knowing that the Centaurs were in a good place, finally gelling as a team without him. 

Even fucking worse, he did it knowing that Troy had his stupid fucking jacket and would intend to return it sooner rather than later.

Or, in other words, he did it in a way that would allow him to be found, and then would minimize disruption of life in case of failure.

Which is to say: he expected to fail. He expected to keep living.

He expected to keep living. He just needed—wanted—just. There was a buzzing and a pulsing underneath his skin that itched and wouldn’t fucking go away, and there was a static white noise in his head that wouldn’t shut the fuck up. There was a persistent, nagging thought that this would make it all stop, make it all slow down.

There was something in him that watched the Centaurs’ Pride Night and felt so hopeless, so alone, so lost—there was something in him that did not have the strength to keep going along the path he was on anymore. There was something in him that just didn’t have the will to fight. He didn’t want to fight with Shane about their plan, he didn’t want to fight with Crowell, he didn’t want to fight the good fight against homophobia in the sport with Scott Hunter. He wanted it all to just—stop. No.

No.

That’s not right, not really.

He wanted the world to pause for a moment, just until he could get his bearings. He wanted to rest in his fiancé’s arms; he wanted to hold and be held. He wanted everything to be easier, in whatever way it could be. He wanted to stop feeling so fucking alone, and so fucking tired. He wanted to stop the vague wondering about what it might feel like to kill himself—he wanted to just do it, and get it over with, because he just couldn’t help thinking so damn much about the world in which he is not fighting.

He wanted so many things that he could not have. He wanted to hold Shane Hollander’s hand without being afraid that it’s going to ruin everything. He wanted his team to know him. He wanted the lingering memory of his father’s voice to fade into background noise. He wanted his mother to kiss the top of his head and promise that he’ll feel better soon.

Fuck. Oh, he wanted to drink up the liquid sky and the molten sun. He wanted the entire night sky’s map of stars to blink freely, wide open in his chest instead of condensed into his lungs like a singular big bang waiting to happen. He wanted the pulsing in his veins to run with the pulse of skates against ice, the pulse of winning, the pulse of being worth something.

There were so many things he wanted, in that moment with the bathroom and the razor blade and his wrist. But—he doesn’t think he actually wanted to die.

He wanted things he thought he could never have. Sometimes dying felt like one of those things, and he just once needed to reach out and take it. Sometimes, too, living felt like one of those things; like something that’s always just at the tips of his fingers but he can never wrap his fist around it and, even if he could, he could never hold on and keep it.

He wanted to cut into himself and tear out the part of him that’s broken. He wanted to reach into his chest and pull free the depression that lives in him. He wanted to grip his bloody hands around organs and veins and intestines and he wanted it all to be out of him, as if maybe a hollow body would leave somewhere for all his hurt to go. He wanted to get out of his head, out of his skin, out of his body.

He didn’t want to die. He wanted sunsets, and Shane, and hockey, and unlit cigarettes. He wanted to live.

But now that he has survived—what the fuck is he supposed to do with any of that? He still intended to die, despite this revelation. He was supposed to get out of all of this. He doesn’t really know what this is, but he doesn’t know what to do with anything anymore, not really.

He intended to die, and he doesn’t know what to do with this new revelation: he intended it, but he didn’t actually want it. He wanted life, more than anything. A different one than what he had; but a life all the same.

It’s not dying that he was seeking out that night. He just couldn’t come up with any other way to live. He couldn’t come up with any other answer. There are, after all, no good answers to the questions he was asking himself. There is no solution to this: to being human, and being sad, and being lonely. There is only living through it, and sometimes that’s more difficult than not. Something that’s just as unrewarding as it is rewarding.

How can you continue to live in your own head when you feel as if you exist only when people are looking at you? How can you continue the fight to exist when no one has ever seen you and still wanted to love you out loud, unashamed? How can you keep going on, keep holding on, when this broken, sad thing in you will never be fixed, no matter how many dreams come true?

And maybe there is no fixing it—no matter what dreams exist, this sadness in him will always linger, pulsing like a heartbeat and swelling like the rising tide and then receding again. Maybe there is no way to exist without being seen, and maybe there’s no way to be seen without also baring his naked heart and hoping people will love the scars, and sometimes being wrong.

Maybe there is no one unquestionable, inarguable reason to keep living when you feel as if you cannot. Maybe there’s no real way to just talk yourself into being happy. But you live anyway.

You live anyway, even unhappy, even alone, even tired. You sit on the front porch and you watch the sunset. You hold an unlit cigarette between your fingers. You feel every spectrum of regret and guilt and hope and pain and fear and loneliness and love. You pull a blanket tighter about your shoulders, and that’s that. Your heart beats again. And again. And again.

So. Here: Ilya Rozanov is alive. He’s thirty years old today. 

He doesn’t think he’s any happier today than he had been months ago, or in the years before that. He doesn’t think any of his problems have really been fixed—not by his relationship being public, not by taking his team back from the dead, not with Shane transferring to be with him. He doesn’t think any of that has healed him. Not in any tangible, solid manner, anyway. 

But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the point isn’t one ending where he’s completely happy and nothing ever goes wrong and there is no hurt anymore. Maybe the point isn’t one bright light at the end of the tunnel, but the light that peaks through the holes in the darkness. Maybe the point is finding the tiny pinpricks of happiness within all this. 

Okay. Yeah. So he almost didn’t make it this far. He almost didn’t see this age. He almost made Shane celebrate his own thirtieth without him. He almost missed out on seeing this sunset. He gave up on a future he couldn’t fathom being like this—a future where he’s thirty years old, and Shane is just inside making dinner for both of them, and the sun is setting so beautifully. 

Thirty years of sunsets. Thirty years of sunrises. How many suns does that total out to? And how many more will be left for him to see? How many did he almost lose because he thought only being happy was the point?

There’s no point in counting them, he supposes. There’s no point in wondering. All there is left to do now, really, is let his heart keep beating. All there is left to do now is to grow old.

[THE TIME WHERE SOMEONE LOVES YOU]

“Hey.” 

Shane looks up from the book he had been reading on the couch, offering Ilya a small smile when he sits down next to him. They’re back at the cottage for the summer, after an ending to the season that Shane still isn’t sure he knows how to accept. 

The Metros feel distant here, as if he and Ilya are so secluded in this little home of theirs that even hockey can’t reach them. The season’s ending feels as if a strange fever dream, one that Shane can ignore for a little longer. One that Shane can pretend isn’t real, and didn’t hurt. 

There are many things, these days, that he’s pretending aren’t real, and don’t hurt.

“Hey,” Shane says, bumping his forehead against Ilya’s shoulder. “I thought you were napping.”

Ilya hums. “I was. Bad dreams.”

“Want to talk about it?”

Ilya hesitates as Shane looks at him, trying not to come across as expectant while also being curious. Ilya has always had vivid dreams in a way Shane doesn’t—or, in a way Shane didn’t have until recently. Ilya says that it’s a side effect of his medication, but Shane thinks that maybe that’s just how his brain has always been wired, because he remembers how restless Ilya had been in his sleep even before these particular pills.

Ilya heaves a long sigh. He shifts to lay down on the couch, tapping at Shane’s book to ask him to put it away before resting his head on Shane’s thighs. Shane sets the book to his other side, using his freed hand to tangle his fingers in Ilya’s hair and tug gently in an encouragement to talk. Just a simple, I’m here. I’m listening. His other hand settles on Ilya’s waist.

For another moment, Ilya doesn’t speak and Shane isn’t sure if he understood, or if he maybe he just doesn’t want to share. Then Ilya covers Shane’s hand with his own, tugging him to press their clasped fingers over his heart.

“I dreamt up two birds,” Ilya says quietly. Shane frowns, not yet sure why that seems to have messed him up so much, and waits patiently. Ilya continues. “I dreamt up these birds, and they were flying upwards. As far as they could go, and I knew somehow that they were trying to fly into the sun. They were trying to break out of the sky, because the Earth below them was too cold to live in. But they didn’t seem to know that they can’t breathe when it gets too high up.” 

“Poor birds,” Shane says, keeping voice soft.

Ilya nods a little. Shane looks down at him just in time to see him close his eyes. “And they just kept going. Eventually it was too high up and the air was too thin and the sun was too hot and they both just…began to fall. Tumbling around and around each other, all the way down.” He wakes his free hand vaguely through the air. “I woke up right before the first one hit the ground.”

“That sounds like a sad one.”

“Maybe.” Ilya swallows visibly. “Mostly I remember feeling relieved. Because the birds weren’t cold anymore. They had felt the sun, and they knew that they were alive for a moment, even if the moment ended.”

“Ah,” Shane says. He doesn’t think he understands at all, but deconstructing dreams has never been something he’s taken interest in. He’s never had reason to care, and he’s never really had a reason to begin to care.

Ilya exhales heavily. “I don’t think it means anything.”

“No?”

“No,” Ilya says, though he doesn’t sound like he believes it. “Was just a dream.”

Shane, gently toying with Ilya’s hair, pauses in his ministrations. Within seconds, Ilya is making a sad little whining noise, nudging at Shane’s arm with his head, eyes still closed. Shane laughs breathily, and resumes the calming tug of curls. 

“It was just a dream,” Shane echoes. “But it was still sad.”

“Well—” Ilya says it matter-of-fact and blunt; no trace of depression and no hint of real hurt— “was sad, a little. But the birds felt the sun, even if it was just for a few minutes. That matters, yes?”

Shane nods, feeling a little disjointed and lost within the allegedly connecting dots of this conversation. “Yes. It matters.”

“Yes,” Ilya says. There’s something very final in the way he says it. “And I was thinking, after I woke up. About how you’re joining my team.”

“Okay.” Shane has no idea where he’s going with this.

Ilya sighs, then rolls onto his back. He keeps Shane’s hand clutched close to his heart and he keeps his eyes closed. “I like hockey. Not like how you love it, but—I do like hockey.”

He pauses, waiting. Shane says, “Right,” and still has no idea what’s going on in Ilya’s head that’s connecting all these dots.

“But the moment I have loved hockey the most, in all these years, was when we were doing warmups for the All-Star Game in 2017.” Ilya opens his eyes, looking very carefully up at Shane. “We weren’t—technically—anything yet. But for a moment, we were on the same team. And we were just messing around on the ice. And it was easy, and simple, and it was like we were the only people on the ice. It was just us and the puck and the game. That was when I loved hockey the most. And I loved you, too.”

Shane blinks hard, then looks down at Ilya to meet his gaze. “I remember that.”

“The dream is just a dream and it doesn’t mean anything,” Ilya says, voice firm. “But if it did mean something, I think I would like for it to mean that no matter what happens next—playing on the same team together and being the married couple in the league—even if the world ends, at least we will have done it, yes? And we will have done it together?”

“Ilya,” Shane whispers, the word barely a breath on his lips.

He doesn’t know how to answer any of that. How do you tell someone that you don’t care if the world ends as long as they’re the person sitting next to you on the porch when it does? How do you tell someone that the sun could burn out but you wouldn’t even feel it if they were there to keep you warm? How do you tell someone that the world could burn down and as long as they’re holding your hand, you might not even understand it to be the end?

“Ilya Rozanov, if the world ends,” Shane says, very carefully, “and if we lose hockey and we lose our teams and we lose our careers, I will still choose to do the rest of life with you, and I’d choose all of this again and again. If the world ends, if we fly too close to the sun and start falling back to the ground, I’d rather be falling with you than flying with anyone else at a normal altitude. Okay?”

Ilya closes his eyes again, taking a shaky breath. “Three months ago I tried to kill myself. I was…I was feeling very alone. Even though…and then I lived. I lived, and you were still here. It was ugly and frustrating and scary and hard to be around me, but you took me into your house and didn’t let me lock doors and you kept loving me.”

“Obviously,” Shane tells him, almost offended by the accusation that isn’t really there. “Ilya, I love you. I love you and I’ll choose you when it’s simple to do, and I’ll also choose you when it’s ugly and frustrating and scary and hard.”

On Shane’s lap, Ilya nods shortly. “I know.”

“Ilya—” and maybe Shane should have said this a long time ago, maybe he should have made this confession from the start, but— “I’m going to tell you a secret, okay?”

Ilya opens his eyes, brow wrinkled as he looks up at Shane. “Okay.”

“I spent almost a decade doing anything I could to run away from all the things you make me feel, right?”

Ilya nods again—they both knew this part already—and Shane continues.

“But when I finally let myself…feel what I feel, even though I didn’t really have words for it, even though I still don’t always, I realized that I feel so much more alive—so much more me—when I love you, whether or not it’s hard or ugly or hurts. And it is hard sometimes, yeah, sure. But I wasted so much time wishing things could be simpler that I missed out on years of being real. So—yeah. I’m here. I’ll keep loving you with all the doors unlocked and without any sharp objects in the house. I’m not running from you, Rozanov, and don’t you dare forget that. You’re stuck with me.” 

Ilya stares up at him for a long moment, long enough that Shane shifts uncomfortably as he replays his own speech in his head and wonders if it was a terrible thing to say, if he’s just making things worse with every passing word.

Then Ilya says, his voice somewhat wrecked with unshed tears, “Okay, Shane. I will not forget.”

“Okay, Ilya,” Shane murmurs. He tugs gently at a curl of hair. “I love you.”

Ilya takes a heavy breath, then exhales very slowly. “I love you too.” 

[and then the dawn arrived. the sun was beautiful and the sky was beautiful and you were at my side and we might both be okay one day soon.]

The night after their wedding, they don’t go to sleep. They’re still bubbling over with joy, with adoration, with something so ecstatic that it can’t be bottled up and named in one word. There’s no room left in them for being tired.

They’ve spent so much time denying themselves what they want, and now they have the rest of their lives to be together. To indulge in these moments: laughing during sex and smiling more than kissing; touching everywhere hands can reach, everywhere lips could possibly be welcome; hurling the couch’s throw pillows at each other after teasing comments; collapsing into one another because there is nowhere else they would rather be.

They are thirty years old. They still have the privilege of so much time. Ilya isn’t going to waste a single second of it.

So they don’t sleep. Tonight, sleep feels unnecessary. Tonight, they jump into the lake naked in the 2am-dark and they splash each other with water until they’re laughing so hard that surely even the very distant neighbors can hear and they climb out of the water just for Ilya to kiss every inch of skin on Shane’s body and then fuck him on the dock. Tonight, they get a headstart on the rest of their lives.

And Ilya loves him. Through it all—from Regina to Sochi to Vegas to Boston to Montreal to Ottawa to this exact moment—Ilya loves him.

After their escapades on the dock, Shane drags Ilya back inside for a real shower. They clean each other with gentle, unhurried motions; the days of limited time and running from pillow talk are long since behind them. Shane lathers shampoo through Ilya’s hair and washes it out with a tender care that Ilya isn’t sure he’s ever known before him.

Ilya lets him take the washcloth to wipe down his arm. Spots of dirt had gotten over the healed scar, and he tries so hard not to tremble when Shane rinses him off with a soft touch. He tries, and he’s sure that he fails because he can’t even fucking look when Shane focuses his attention to the spot. He tilts his head up to the ceiling instead, blinking hard and hoping any tears can be passed off as the shower.

To his credit, Shane doesn’t really attend to the spot with any more thoroughness or devotion than he does any other part of Ilya’s body. He doesn’t treat the spot as something fragile or abnormal or scary or ugly—he treats the scar like it’s just one more stretch of skin on the body of the man he loves. Which is all that it is, but Ilya, guiltily, hadn’t expected Shane to be able to compartmentalize in the way that allows him to act like that. But the only sign that Shane understands what he’s looking at is that his jaw tenses just slightly.

When Shane’s done rinsing the soap off of Ilya, Ilya kisses him deeply. They stand under the shower water for a long, long time, just pressed together. Shane’s eyes are half-closed and Ilya isn’t sure if that’s arousal or tiredness. Ilya himself isn’t particularly tired, but he doesn’t necessarily need sex either.

After the shower, Shane makes them both tea, and Ilya pulls them out to the back porch. It’s nearing four in the morning. Draping a blanket over their laps, Ilya presses himself right up next to Shane and allows himself to just breathe for a moment. Allows himself to recognize heartbeat after heartbeat.

For the next few hours, they just sit and enjoy each other’s presence. Ilya toys with the ring on his finger and Shane taps his fingernails absentmindedly against his mug of tea, long gone cold. At some point, Shane rests his head on Ilya’s shoulder and starts falling into a dreamlike state. He’s not asleep, but he’s drifting. Ilya lets him. He needs the rest, and this is plenty comfortable anyway.

Ilya’s hand is wrapped around Shane’s waist, and he keeps a close, firm touch pressed to the bare skin under the hem of his shirt. Shane sighs heavily every now and then, and Ilya presses a kiss to the crown of his head every time.

Like this, the dawn comes.

Like this, the world begins anew.

Like this, there are no shadows and there are no nightmares and there are no monsters under the bed. Here and now, they just hold each other, pressed close and closer, and there is nothing to be afraid of.

Oh, there is light everywhere and there are the first birds of the morning circling overhead and the cicadas are singing their song of summer. There is daylight flooding over the horizon, a watercolor painting dripping upwards to the great arch of the sky. There is pink and orange and yellow and red and a light airy blue. There is light and light and light and light.

Ilya kisses the top of Shane’s head and prods him gently. “It’s sunrise.”

Shane mumbles something unintelligible, but he still opens his eyes even if he doesn’t lift his head. A small smile blooms on his lips and Ilya can’t help himself, so he shifts slightly away from Shane so that he can kiss him. Shane is smiling more than he is kissing back, but Ilya’s never minded that.

When Ilya pulls back—one kiss, two kisses, three, again, just once more—Shane is nearly laughing, and Ilya feels absolutely breathless with it, with how beautiful Shane is.

“Good morning,” Shane says. He kisses Ilya again; just the lightest of pecks. “I like you. I’m happy you’re here with me.”

Ilya can’t stop himself from smiling, but he also doesn’t want to. “Good morning. I love you too, Shane Hollander.”

“Hollander-Rozanov,” Shane corrects; easily, as if it’s already second nature to say it. Shane leans back against Ilya to rest against him again, and Ilya echoes his words like they're a miracle.

Ilya looks at him, and then back at the horizon. He can’t feel anything but warmth. The sun and Shane and sky and Shane. He can’t feel anything but love.

And the hurt will come back one day, Ilya knows, because that’s the way it goes. That’s the cycle. And the cycle is painful; it’s hard to see past sometimes. But right now—dawn and sky and birdsong and hope—right now matters, too. Just as much as the dark, just as much as the hurt. 

Shane lifts their intertwined fingers to kiss the back of Ilya’s hand, and—and yeah. Right now matters, too.