Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, David Hollander & Shane Hollander & Yuna Hollander, Ilya Rozanov & Svetlana Vetrova

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, David Hollander, Svetlana Vetrova, Yuna Hollander

Additional Tags:

Airplane Crashes, Presumed Dead, Grief/Mourning, Blood and Injury, Whump, Hurt Ilya Rozanov, Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s01e06 The Cottage (Heated Rivalry), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, ilya's plane crashes on the way to the cottage, Temporary Character Death, Angst with a Happy Ending

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-27 Completed: 2026-05-19 Words: 20,841 Chapters: 8/8

one week, two hours, and six minutes

Summary

On June 17th, 2017, Ilya Rozanov is declared dead following the crash of Air Canada Flight 11040.

On June 24th, he comes back to life.

Shane spends the intervening week on a silent retreat, more or less.

Notes

Hello! It's me! New fandom, same temporary character death bullshit.

This fic is 90% complete and will update every Monday and Thursday.

To any of my Stranger Things readers, dw, I will get back to count to thirty et. al. I promise. Season 5 just really bummed me out, and I needed a break to write for a fandom with source material I actually enjoy :')

Chapter 1

Chapter Notes

Shane is waiting in a hotel parking lot three miles away from the airport when Ilya texts him. It had been the best option, they’d agreed. Ilya would collect his bags, call an Uber, get dropped off here like he’s a guest, and then they could drive up to the cottage safe in the knowledge that no one was wondering why Shane Hollander had picked Ilya Rozanov up from the Ottawa airport.

His phone dings. He snatches it up with a smile already stretching across his face, expecting an I’m here. On my way to you. Can’t wait. Can’t wait to—

That’s not what he gets.

I love you.

Shane sits there stupefied, staring at the words on his screen like they might resolve into something else. They don’t…that’s not something they say. It’s something he’s wanted to say, it’s something he’s choked back more times than he can count, it’s something that he’s toyed with the idea of saying this week, maybe, maybe. But they don’t say those words to each other, not yet. They certainly don’t text them.

He’s only just starting to feel a swoop of indignation, that Ilya thought he could—what, confess over text like a giggling middle-schooler—when he gets the next text.

I’m sorry.

Cottage would have been nice.

I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.

I love you so much.

He sits there for several long moments, a carefully curated playlist of Ilya’s favorite music filtering through the speakers, and tries to figure out what this means. There is something screaming inside him, some small, wailing piece of him that already knows.

That’s when the sirens start.

The first firetruck goes screaming by on the highway a few minutes later. Then a second, a third, or fourth. Two ambulances. Not for a house fire, Shane thinks numbly, this is for like, a high rise. A block of high rises. Or. Or. Oh God.

His hands are frozen around his phone, his eyes are frozen on Ilya’s words. He tells himself to move his thumbs. Text back. What the hell Ilya? What are you saying? What’s wrong? Are you not coming?

Instead, he navigates to the Ottawa subreddit. Please let there be a post about an apartment building burning down, please, please please—

 4 minutes ago: Holy shit, I think a plane just crashed outside my house.

There’s a video. A column of fire and smoke rising above the treetops of a small forest. It looks like the end of the world.

He navigates back to Ilya’s contact. Hits the call button. Listens to the phone ring and ring and ring.

“Hi, this is Ilya, I will never listen to your voicemail.”

Everything goes kind of fuzzy after that.

When he comes back to himself, he’s parked in the driveway outside the cottage with absolutely no memory of having driven there. That should terrify him, he knows, but he can’t be terrified of anything right now. If he lets terror in—if he lets anything in—he’s going to start thinking about Ilya. He’s going to picture Ilya hunched over in the brace position, typing I love you with shaking hands. He’s going to picture Ilya screaming, jerked around like a rag doll, burning, oh God, oh God, oh God.

His throat contracts, stomach heaving around nothing because he hasn’t eaten yet, because he was planning on making him and Ilya breakfast sandwiches when they got back to the cottage, egg whites and extra cheese, like Ilya waxed poetic about in that one interview with WGBH. He was planning on showing that he listened. That he knew him, even if it was in a bit of a stalkerish way.

And now—

He fumbles for his phone. No new notifications. No missed calls. No I made it out. I’m sorry for scaring you. Just the blank wall of his home screen. It stays blank as the sun rises higher in the sky, as his phone battery depletes and the car gets hotter and his shirt starts sticking to his back. He should move. Go inside. Eat something. Wait in an air conditioned room.

Ilya might have burned to death.

In the end, it’s his battery ticking over into the red that gets him out of the car. He can’t let it die. Can’t risk missing a phone call, if…God. If Ilya’s still alive. Cause that’s the only way he’ll get a phone call, is if Ilya’s alive and awake and able to tell someone to call him. Does Ilya even have his number memorized? He keeps his face buried in his phone as he stumbles to the front door, swiping over to his Instagram message requests. Looks through the sea of tiny brands looking to score an endorsement, Raiders fans sending him death threats, endless…compliments on his physique. Looks for a hi, it’s me, it’s Lily, I’m borrowing someone’s phone. I’m okay, I’m alive.

I’m alive.

Please.

There’s nothing. 

He plugs his phone in, turns his ringer on, and sinks onto the couch. He can almost see Ilya on the other side of it, face golden in the sunlight, comfortable and happy and part of Shane’s home. Maybe that’s what he’ll get tomorrow. Maybe Ilya’s in the hospital, sleeping off a concussion. Maybe he’ll call Shane in an hour, two, three. Fuck, maybe Shane should be calling around to every hospital in a fifty mile radius right now, looking for him, so he’ll be there when Ilya wakes up.

Except. Well. That would be a shitty gift, wouldn’t it? Hey, congrats on surviving a fucking plane crash. I just outed you to the world because I needed to make sure you were okay. Hope you’re alright with never going home again.

He won’t do that to Ilya, he decides, as the wind catches the tree branches outside, tossing the sunlight into fractured bursts of shadow. He’ll just…stay here. He’ll wait. And either he’ll get a call that Ilya is okay, or…

Or he won’t.

Or he’ll find out on the news like everyone else.

That thought is so unbearable that he falls away from it, for a bit. Falls out of his own head and into the feeling of the couch against his palms, the sun stretching over his legs, the clicking hum of the air conditioning as it cycles on and off. Eventually, the sunlight turns orange, then red. And then it is gone entirely, and he is sitting in a blue-dark room as the frogs start singing outside.

Ilya’s flight was supposed to land at 11:05 AM. It’s been…fuck, nine hours at least. He still hasn’t called. Maybe his phone is broken. Maybe he doesn’t have Shane’s number memorized. He knows it’s not normal, the way he’d stared and stared at Lily’s contact page until he knew the number as well as his own. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to erase it from his brain. It’s burrowed itself deep into his neurons, right next to the shape of Ilya’s smile.

His throat is tacky. There’s a headache creeping up from behind his eyes. He moves into the kitchen on autopilot, chugs two glasses of water and forces a protein bar between his teeth. It takes like insulation.

Back to the couch, a third glass of water in hand, two more protein bars shoved in his pocket. The headache settles in, reminding him that he hasn’t had any caffeine today. The thought of making coffee is too exhausting. Instead, he checks his phone, because maybe his ringer’s broken. Maybe he missed a call, and Ilya’s been sitting crankily in a hotel parking lot waiting for Shane to pick him up. Nothing. Just the time blaring up at him. 8:55 PM.

He forces himself to Google Ottawa plane crash. There are a dozen articles. Most of them have pictures. Videos. A plane in pieces, trees piercing the fuselage, firefighters struggling to contain the blaze as it eats its way through the forest. Body bags.

Air Canada Flight 11040 from Boston to Ottawa…

…final approach…suspected birdstrike…

…crashed in a difficult-to-access area…

…already being called one of the deadliest crashes in Canada’s history…

Investigators are anticipating over fifty casualties.

He swipes out of the article, the half-read words burning into his eyes. Searches Ilya Rozanov next, already dreading the thought of seeing his face side-by-side with the images of the burning plane. Star Raiders Player Dies Tragically in Plane Crash. We Have No Idea Why He Was Going to Ottawa, But Whoever Convinced Him to Basically Murdered Him.

There’s only the postgame interviews from Ilya’s last playoff match. He’s standing in the locker room, shirtless and sweaty and alive, grinning like a madman as the interviewer asks if the Raiders are losing their touch.

“No,” he says, his crucifix glinting in the light of a dozen flashbulbs. “We will get them next year. That is promise, from me to you.”

Next year. Next year. Next year.

Maybe it is a promise, Shane thinks, as the video ends and his phone screen dims. Maybe Ilya was reaching through the days and weeks to Shane, here and now, holding his hand and telling him that he’s okay. I’m alive. I’m happy. I’ll be playing hockey next year. He’s never known Ilya to break a promise, after all.

The night gathers. Shane’s phone stays loosely clasped in his hand. At some point, he drinks the third glass of water. At some point, he sleeps.

He’s standing in an airport, not the calm, private terminal that he normally flies out of, but the controlled chaos of a public gate. There are children laughing somewhere. There are people stretched out and sleeping on the floor. Someone is arguing with a gate agent.

Ilya is standing next to a wall of windows, looking out at the tarmac. I always like watching planes, he’d told Shane once. They go so fast. Faster than I could ever drive. He’d grinned, and wiggled his eyebrows. Maybe I get pilot’s license someday. Once I retire. Become Captain Rozanov. Sounds sexy, yes?

“Don’t get on the flight,” Shane tells him, catching his elbow. “Ilya, please. Please, listen to me.”

Ilya turns around, brow furrowed.

“Why?” he asks. “Don’t you want me to visit?”

The children start screaming.

He wakes with a gasp and a wild, jackknifing kick of his legs that nearly topples him off the couch. His phone goes flying, hitting the ground with a crack. It’s ringing.

It’s ringing.

He fumbles for it, heart somewhere in his throat. Unknown number. Oh fuck, it’s the hospital. Oh fuck, Ilya’s alive. Ilya’s conscious. Ilya remembered his phone number.

For a brief, shining moment, the panic falls away. For a brief, shining moment, he can go pick Ilya up from the hospital, and bring him here, and it will be like the last twelve hours never happened. For a brief, shining moment, he’ll be able to tell Ilya that he loves him.

Then, “Hello?”

It’s a woman’s voice on the other end. Raw like its owner has been screaming. Or sobbing. Lightly accented.

“Is this…is this Jane?” she asks. Shane stares at the other side of the couch. Ilya should be dozing there, knocking his feet against Shane’s.

“Yes,” he whispers.

“This is Svetlana,” she says. If she’s surprised that he’s a man, it doesn’t show. “I…I’m Ilya’s friend.”

Her voice breaks around his name.

“Yeah,” Shane says, drawing his knees up to his chest. If he presses himself in tight enough, maybe he can keep his heart where it belongs. “He talks about you all the time.”

A shuddering breath. He wonders if she’s curled up too. If she’s been able to stop herself from unraveling. It doesn’t sound like it.

“There’s been an accident,” she says. “I—I stole your number from Ilya a while ago. I was drunk, we were drunk, I thought…it’s stupid. Doesn’t matter. But I’m his emergency contact, and there’s been an accident, and I thought…I thought you should know…”

She’s quiet for a long time. They’re the only two people in the world. Two almost strangers a thousand miles away from each other, a phone call and a ghost between them.

And then she says it.

“Ilya’s dead.”

And that's how the world ends. That's how it caves in on him, the sky a crush of rubble. His fingertips are tingling. His breath is stale in his lungs. There is no air left, there will never be air again. Ilya is dead. Ilya is dead. Ilya is dead.

The love of his life is dead, and he hadn't known he was the love of his life. Shane hadn't told him. Ilya had died burning, love pouring out of him as he fell from the sky, and Shane had been too stupid and slow to text him back.

An awful choked noise tears itself out of his lungs. He squeezes his knees in tighter, phone pressed against his cheek. He's shaking apart, no matter how hard he clings to himself. Trembling harder than he had when he'd fallen through pond ice as a kid.

“I'm sorry,” Svetlana is saying, and “I'm flying back to Boston now,” and, “if you want to come to his funeral, I can—”

He hangs up.

Chapter End Notes

Yes, I am aware that 11040 would be an absolutely insane flight number. I didn't want to curse any real flights, okay?

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

Thank you all for the lovely response on chapter one! I saw a few people worried about how this will go -- don't worry, there is a happily-ever-after guaranteed <3

Ilya’s supposed to open the door.

That’s the role he’s been given. That’s what the flight attendant told him, when she’d unwound him from his miserable pretzel in seat 38C and led him to the exit row, depositing him in place of a faintly green man who was all too happy to abdicate responsibility and scuttle back to Ilya’s seat. If the plane crashes (which it won’t, because how fucking likely is a plane crash, really?) then Ilya has to open the door. He has to open the door and he has to inflate the stupid fucking slide, and he has to help the other passengers out. He’s the door captain.

It’s his job. 

It’s…

The side of the plane is crumpled like a tin can. There are…branches? Metal? He doesn’t. There’s smoke. He can’t see. He can’t breathe. His leg is on fire, he might be on fire, and he has to open the fucking door. Someone is screaming. The air smells like—

He’s in hell, he thinks. Maybe if he opens the door, he can crawl his way out. Scrape his way up to the surface of the Earth and get a clean lungful of air. He just has to help. That’s his job. He needs to help.

He fumbles out of his seat belt with shaking fingers and goes crashing sideways somehow, his bruised ribs (cracked, now, probably) screaming out in protest as he collides with something hard. A seat, he thinks. The other side of the aisle? How…?

His brain can’t form a picture of what the plane must look like right now, other than on fire. That bit is colored in with neon markers. Circled. Underlined. It’s on fire. There are people screaming. His lungs are filled with smoke and if he doesn’t open the door he’s going to die. They’re all going to die.

He levers himself upward, choking back a scream of his own as something grinds horribly in his leg. His skin feels tight. He cranes his head around, squinting through the smoke and…

That’s his seat, up there. That’s the door he’s supposed to open. It’s caved in. The woman sitting next to it is slumped over a…oh god. There’s a tree branch in her chest. It’s glistening in the light of the flames. Oh god, oh god, oh god.

A noise that could only be described as a whimper forces its way out between his teeth and he screws his eyes shut, feeling his way through the smokey dark. Metal. Polyester. Metal, metal, metal. Something warm and wet that he is not thinking about. Something that gives under his palms.

The air gets clearer. Just a little. He sucks in a greedy breath of air and moves towards the freshness, the breeze. It’s stupid to keep his eyes shut, probably, but he can’t seem to make himself open them. He is a child on the floor next to his mother’s bed, and if he doesn’t open his eyes he won’t see her limp hand hanging over the side.

It’s fresher. It’s hotter too. His skin gets tighter. He can’t not scream.

Forward. Forward. Leaves crunch under his hands, twigs dig into his knees. Ilya Rozanov drags himself from the flaming wreck of the plane, and lets gravity drag him down a hill in a tumble of sparks. His leg hits…a rock, a tree, something, and a deeper darkness rushes up to greet him.

He comes back to himself quickly, he thinks. There are screams all around him. The smell of jet fuel cutting through humid greenness. Above him, smoke is blooming in the canopy. He couldn’t open the door, and people are dying.

“Okay,” he hisses to himself. “Fuck. Okay.”

He rolls over onto his knees, his stomach protesting violently. The right side of his body feels wrong, too hot and too cold all at once, tight and stretched-out, like his skin has shrunk in the wash. A dozen cuts and bruises scream out in concert—his shoulder, his face, his fucking stomach, he doesn’t think there’s a single part of him that isn’t hurt. His leg is…

He reaches out a trembling hand, finds a long branch.

“Okay.”

On your feet, Roz. 

He leverages himself to his feet slowly, agonizingly, breath hissing through his teeth in short gasps. His ribs are definitely broken, fuck. Fuck. He focuses on the sting of each breath, the tight balloon feeling of his lungs trying to expand. Maybe he can get his mind stuck on that pain, and keep it far, far away from his leg.

One hand on the stick. The other leaning against a tree. And then he’s half-hopping, half-dragging himself through the woods, trying to keep his bad leg off the ground as much as he can. He needs to bite down on his tongue every time he grabs a tree trunk with his right hand, and when he’s able to get his eyes to cooperate long enough to fucking look at it, it’s all red and blistered and…and he’s not thinking about just how much of his body feels like a burn. He’s not thinking about himself, just like he’s not thinking about the plane.

He needs to get help. For the people he left in the plane. Everything else can wait.

Forward. Downhill. Forward. Downhill. Everything is hazy, and he’s not sure if it’s because his eyes keep unfocusing or if the fire is spreading. If it’s chasing him. Trying to eat the rest of him.

“Help,” he croaks, and it’s useless, of course. There’s no one here to hear him scream, even if he could. He needs to get to a phone. Right? Call 911 or 999 or 112 or whatever the fuck it is in Canada, shit, fuck, why does he not know the emergency number in Canada?

Wait, does he have his phone? He leans his unburned (still bruised though, fucking ow) shoulder against a tree and fumbles in his pocket. His screaming fingers close around…car keys, house keys, useless, and then, thank God, his phone. He pulls it free with a sob, relief stinging like another broken rib in his chest. He can call someone. Someone will come, and open the door, and save everyone. He’ll be taken to a hospital and they’ll put a cast on his leg and fix his skin and Shane will bring him flowers. It’ll be okay.

The screen is gritty under his thumb. Cracked in so many places it’s practically dust. He presses the power button, then stares numbly at it for a moment. Tries to will it to life. It’s useless, of course. Why would his phone fucking work? Why would it survive when so many people are ash in the air around him?

“Fuck, stupid,” he hisses—in Russian, in English, he doesn’t know—and shoves it back into his pocket. He needs to stop crying. The tears are dripping into a cut, a burn, something on the right side of his face.

Deep breath. Grab the next tree. Keep going. Find someone.

The edges of his vision are getting dark. He tells himself it’s smoke. It has to be smoke. He cannot pass out.

Trees, trees, trees, and then, thank God, a house. A little two-story with a red roof and a pretty garden, flowers bobbing cheerfully in the breeze. There’s a patio. A sliding glass door. He’s stumbled into someone’s backyard, and they have to have a phone. They have to let him use it, he was just in a fucking plane crash, fuck, fuck, fuck.

He can feel the adrenaline bleeding out of him with every hop towards the door, like his body has registered the pretty flowers and neatly manicured lawn and decided ah yes, this is a safe place to faint. Nothing bad can happen here. Here there is no fire, here there is no death.

“Help,” he says again. He fumbles for the door handle, not bothering to knock. It slides open. He hops inside, shutting the door behind him on reflex more than anything else. His vision is a narrow point, a blob of light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. “Help. Phone. Help.”

He staggers forward. There’s a couch, he thinks. A big open room. Table. Chairs. To the left, a…counter? A sink? A fridge, he thinks that’s a fridge. People spend lots of time in their kitchens, right? Surely someone will find him here.

He’s going to faint. He’s going to fall over and that will not be good for his broken ribs and broken leg and broken whatever-the-fuck else. He fumbles for the maybe-counter, letting the walking stick tumble away. It clatters on the floor, probably, but he can’t hear anything over the ringing in his ears.

Get on the floor. Get on the floor right now.

He slides gracelessly down the side of the counter, legs spilling out in front of him. He lets his arms fall to the side. There’s a thin splotch of beige that he thinks might be the ceiling. It’s getting grayer and grayer.

He draws in as much air as he can, ignoring the howl of his ribs.

“Help me!” he screams, and then it all goes dark.

***

Shane can’t get off the couch.

It’s morning. It’s been morning for several hours now, he thinks. Maybe just minutes. He can’t seem to move his hand to check the time. Can’t seem to do anything but lie here and breathe. He can’t even make himself sleep. There is no escape from this feeling, no escape from breathing and staring at the ceiling and thinking about how much Ilya would have loved it here.

Ilya in the kitchen making them both lunch. Ilya floating in the lake. Ilya pinning Shane down on the vast, sunny expanse of his bed and kissing his way down his neck. Making himself home in every way that he can. Shane had pictured it so many times, ever since he’d started toying with the idea of getting to keep Ilya for a whole summer. Of getting to keep him, period.

He was stupid. He was so, so stupid.

How could he even think he could keep someone like Ilya? How could he ever think the world would allow it?

Ilya is dead. Ilya is dead. Ilya is dead.

Svetlana’s words echo in his ears, the sure, steady toll of a funeral bell. Ilya is dead. Shane will never see him again. Never hold him again. Never feel the rumble of his voice as they lie tangled together, never hear his laugh, never catch the half-cruel joy in his eyes as they meet for a faceoff.

Ilya isn’t Ilya anymore. Ilya is a pile of charred bones on a cold steel table. Maybe not even that. Maybe he’s just ash. The man Shane loved—loves, fuck, he fucking loves him so much his lungs ache with it—is gone.

He should be crying. He should’ve started wailing as soon as Svetlana told him. But the man he loves is dead, and his world has caved in, but his life hasn’t stopped like it’s supposed to. No one is coming to bring him casseroles, and hold his hand, and tell him that it’s alright for him to fall apart. No one is coming to tuck him into bed. He’s still expected to show up to pre-season training a few months from now. Still supposed to meet his parents for dinner in two weeks. To everyone else in his life, Shane Hollander is having a lovely fucking time meditating in the woods. And even when the news breaks that Ilya is dead, that’s not going to change.

Reporters are going to ask him about it. His mom is going to tut sadly about wasted potential. Hayden is going to wonder what the fuck Ilya was flying to Ottawa for. No one will think twice about talking about Ilya’s tragic death around him.

No one will know what he lost. So did he really lose anything at all?

It doesn’t feel real, when he looks at the future of his grief. It stretches out into the distance, racing for the horizon but never quite meeting it, vast and strange and fucking lonely. He’s lost the love of his life and his mom isn’t breaking down his door to make sure he’s okay. That isn’t how it’s supposed to work. That isn’t what grief is.

Ilya is dead.

He’s hungry, he must be. He hasn’t eaten anything but a protein bar in over a day. But when he thinks of eating another one, his stomach roils in protest. He needs real food, probably. A fucking…turkey sandwich or something. Anything.

Get up, he tells himself. Get up. No one is bringing you food, you need to make it yourself.

It takes him another hour to peel himself off the couch. Maybe two. The sun is noon-bright in the sky, flashing in blinding arcs across the lake. The trees are dancing wildly in the wind. It’s a gorgeous day. The world is gone, and it’s here, and it’s beautiful. Ilya has just dived beneath the water, and he’ll be coming up any second now, alive with the cold of it.

Shane turns away from the window. God, he’s fucking losing it.

He drags himself across the endless expanse of his living room, stumbles into the kitchen. His feet aren’t quite where they should be. When he fumbles for the handle of the fridge, his hands feel like they’re wrapped in three layers of gloves.

Okay. Turkey sandwich. Maybe just sliced turkey. And he can eat some bread separately.

He opens the fridge. It’s fully stocked. And like. He knew it was going to be fully stocked, somewhere in the back of his mind. He’d spent all day…Wednesday? Wednesday. Two days ago. He’d spent the whole day painstakingly crafting a grocery list for a week’s worth of meals for him and Ilya. Egg white breakfast sandwiches, burgers, the bolognese sauce his grandma had taught him to make when he still needed a stepstool to see over the stove. Things that said I know you, and I want you to know me, and let’s stay in summer for a while.

Eggs. Meat. Tomatoes, onions, spinach, cheese, fucking goddamn cherry coke. He’d been so fucking proud of himself. So excited to cook with Ilya. To cook for Ilya.

He stands there long enough for the fridge to start beeping at him, his hand going numb on the handle. Then he closes it and goes back to the couch.

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

Thanks again for all the comments on chapters 1+2! They really are the best motivation a writer could ask for :D

Now, back to the Pit of Despair (tm)

A day after the failed attempt at cooking himself lunch, Shane has eaten four protein bars and chugged entirely too much water. Part of him thinks that maybe it’ll start leaking from his eyes. Maybe he’ll start finally crying, and then the world and the grief that has smothered him will actually make some fucking sense.

Really, it just makes him have to piss a lot. Which means he needs to get up and move through all the rooms that he wanted to show Ilya, and that just makes everything even fuzzier and heavier and more not-real.

He should be at home now, probably. Curled up and crying on his childhood bed, far away from all reminders of cottage-Ilya. Ilya-that-never-was. His mom should be making him soup. His dad should be hugging him. Instead, he’s here, splayed out on the couch and staring at the blank face of the TV.

Should he watch a movie? Something bright and happy and full of color? Or something that will wrap clawed fingers around his heart and squeeze it into pulp? What is he supposed to do with himself? What do people do with themselves, two days after their…their Ilya dies in a fucking plane crash?

He feels like he should be Googling this. There’s a manual, probably, on how to do grief. Maybe if he follows it, the world will start again, and sweep him up inside it.

His phone buzzes. Svetlana, probably. She’d texted him a few times after he’d hung up on her. 

Landed in Boston. 

Going to his apartment. I’ll save some of his things for you. 

Please call me if you need anything.

Please call me even if you don’t, actually. I want to talk to someone who knew him.

He’ll take her up on it at some point, he thinks. When he’s actually able to form his lips into words. He doesn’t think he’ll be much help to her, shakily breathing on the other side of the phone. He’d probably just make her worry, and she doesn’t need to worry about him on top of everything else. God, she’s known Ilya since they were children.

Another buzz. Another. Another, another, another.

He fumbles for his phone because even though he can’t answer her, he probably owes it to her to read what she has to say. What if she needs help? With funeral arrangements, or with what to say to the press, or with league stuff?

It’s not Svetlana. It’s the team group chat.

J.J. Boiziau: Holy shit, have you guys seen this?

J.J. Boiziau: https://www.espn.com/mlh/story/_/id/481026804/raiders-ilya-rozanov-killed-plane-crash

J.J Boiziau: Rozanov’s fucking dead. Died in that plane crash two days ago

Hayden Pike: Jesus Christ. Oh my god, that’s awful

Hayden Pike: You’re friends with Carmichael right? How are the Raiders holding up, do they need anything?

J.J. Boiziau: Yeah, just messaged Carmy. Will lyk what he says

Gilbert Comeau: We’re helping the Raiders now?

J.J. Boiziau: Yeah, we’re helping the Raiders, their captain just died in a fucking plane crash, wtf is wrong with you.

Shane’s phone keeps buzzing in his hand, but he can’t read the words. He can guess at them, though. Condolences, confusion, shock. Some people berating Comeau, probably. Probably some people defending him. He can’t…

It’s real.

Ilya’s dead. The world knows it. And his teammates are talking about it in a group chat. No one has messaged him separately. Hayden isn’t breaking down his door. No one is coming to drag him out of the pit that he’s fallen into. Why the fuck would they?

He presses down on the power button until the buzzing stops, then throws his silent phone to the other side of the couch. Sorry Svetlana. He’ll check it later, make sure she doesn’t need anything later, just…just not now. Right now, he doesn’t need the constant blaring reminder of how alone he is.

He turns away from the TV screen, from the movies he should probably be watching to make himself feel something, and buries his face into the back of the couch. Breathes. Exists. Maybe he’s not following the grief manual, but this is all he can ask of himself right now.

Another day passes. He’s only got one protein bar left. He’s gonna need to find something else to eat that doesn’t make him want to hurl just by looking at it. Something that he didn’t buy for Ilya. There’s probably some canned food left over from last summer. Soup or something.

He’s about to get up and get it. Really, he is. He’s gathering up all his energy to swing his legs over the side of the couch when the door opens. For a brief, stupid moment he thinks that it must be Ilya. That Svetlana got it wrong. ESPN got it wrong. He’s crawled his way out of the wreckage and found his way to Shane’s door, even though Shane never gave him the address. He just knew. He knows so much about Shane, after all.

“Shane? Bud, you here?”

The fantasy shatters before it has time to fully form. But this is…this is okay, right? This is what he wanted. His dad is here. His dad had known somehow, known that he lost someone, known that he needed someone. He’d known to come interrupt Shane’s stupid fucking “silent retreat” and make everything okay.

The world exists beyond the borders of this couch, and someone is here to drag him up into it.

“Hey,” his dad says, walking into the living room. He’s sweaty, a bit sunburnt on his forehead. “Sorry, I know you didn’t want any visitors, but I left my phone charger here, and—Shane?”

He freezes a few steps from the doorway, hand outstretched, eyes flicking over Shane. Looking for his son and finding a black hole in his place. And he hadn’t expected this. Of course, he hadn’t expected this. He’s just here for his phone charger. The world is here and it doesn’t care that Shane is grieving.

Of course, of course, of course.

He doesn’t think he can blame his body, then, when it decides that now, finally, is the time to start sobbing. There’s nothing else to do with this feeling. It’s a reflex.

***

For a moment, when he wakes, Ilya thinks he’s back on the plane.

That’s the only explanation for the flames licking down his arms, the smoke burning in his throat, the sparks flashing behind his eyes. Everything hurts, so he must be on fire. He didn’t open the door, so someone has lifted him up and thrown him back in his coffin and said try again. Try again till you get it right.

But there is something wet-tacky and cold beneath him, and the world is bright with sun not flames, and there is an ugly beige popcorn ceiling swirling slowly above him. He swallows down his nausea, throat clicking, and blinks until it stops moving.

He remembers in pieces. The run through the woods. The backyard, the house, the kitchen whirling around him as he crumpled to the floor. Slowly, he tilts his head to the side. Counter. Cabinets. Fridge.

He’s still here. He’s still alive. Everything fucking hurts but he’s still alive.

“Hello?” he calls, mouth and throat sticky with blood. Nothing answers him but the soft hum of the fridge, a lone bird chattering away somewhere beyond the kitchen window.

“Hello?” he tries again, louder. “Anyone…anyone…please.”

Spinning, birdsong, grayness rushing in on the edges of his vision.

He blinks. It’s darker now. The bird has stopped singing. There’s a low rush of noise…crickets, maybe? Frogs? He clenches his hand into a fist, focuses on the single bright sting of pain as his burned skin squeezes against itself. Do not pass out. Do not fucking pass out again.

It’s been a day. Maybe more. His clothes are sticking painfully to the scabbing cuts on his stomach, and he thinks he might’ve pissed himself, and he’s so fucking thirsty. Shouldn’t he be in a hospital by now, IV fluids coursing through his veins? Shouldn’t he have a cop looming over his bed, asking him why he didn’t open the door? Surely he must be wanted for like…manslaughter. Something like that. He abandoned people, and he couldn’t find them help, and they died. That has to be a crime.

He closes his eyes. Takes a slow, shaky breath. Forces them back open when he feels weightlessness snatching at his limbs. Do not pass out. If you pass out, you’re going to die.

You need water.

No one is coming. He doesn’t know why, but it’s been a day, and no one is coming to call an ambulance. No one is coming to whisk him away to a hospital, and if he doesn’t get himself water, somehow, he’s going to die of thirst. He understands this with the quick rush of an encroaching flame. It’s an oddly calm thought. He thinks he might’ve left his panic behind in the forest.

He’s in someone’s kitchen. There has to be a sink somewhere above him.

He’s six years old and sprawled out on the ice, and his coach is staring down at him with the cold implacability of a glacier.

“Are you going to get up?” he asks, and Ilya knows if he doesn’t, he will never play hockey again.

Ilya grits his teeth and rolls himself over. He lets himself scream, as his leg is jostled, as the burns on his side are pulled into agony, as a thousand scabs strain and a hundred scabs break. Screaming is good. Screaming means someone might come help him.

He gets himself on his hands and knees, panting. A sheen of sweat covers his body, and tears prick at the corners of his eyes,  and he wishes he could shove it all back inside himself. He can’t afford to lose a single drop of water. Doesn’t his stupid skin understand that? Doesn’t his stupid heart?

“Okay. Okay, Rozanov. One, two, three.”

On three, he forces himself up onto his good leg, immediately tottering forward into the counter. The sound he makes when it hits his broken ribs cannot even be called a scream. Scream is too dignified. It’s a choked-out wail, the shameless shriek of an infant. Gray dots dance in front of his eyes, and he curls over the countertop and clings on for dear life.

Do not pass out, do not pass out, do not fucking pass out.

He mouths a prayer into the granite. It’s cool against his cracked lips. He wonders if his Mama is hovering over his shoulder. He wonders if she’s proud that he’s fighting for his life, or if he’s just making her sad. Maybe she just wants him to let go. To be done with it.

The sink is right next to him. Small miracles. He fumbles for the tap. Sticks his head directly under the resulting flow of water. It feels like fire on his burned skin. It tastes like life. He drinks as much as he can stomach before the gray dots start turning black, and then he shuts off the tap and lies back down on the floor.

Time passes like that for…he doesn’t know. Hours. Days. He faints, he wakes, he drags himself to his feet for water, he faints again. Sometimes there are birds, sometimes there are crickets, and sometimes there is nothing but the quiet press of midnight around him. The first time he wakes up in the middle of the night, he thinks he must be dead. He thinks that the afterlife is just his body screaming in the indifferent silence of his grave. He cries out for his mother until he sleeps, and when he wakes it is morning again, and he is alive.

He’s starving.

He realizes that a few days in, when he gets himself to his feet and finds that he’s far shakier than usual. It’s not just the pain. It’s not just the thirst. It’s hunger, spreading from his stomach to the rest of his body, weakening it further and further every time he falls asleep. He sways against the counter, staring at the fridge on the other side of the room. It might as well be on a different continent. He can barely get to his feet and shift his body a few feet to the sink. If he tries to get to the fridge…

He’ll fall. He’ll faint. He’ll use all his energy, and then he won’t be able to get back to the sink. And he’ll die of thirst far quicker than he’ll die of hunger.

How long does it take to starve to death? Three weeks, right? Surely someone will find him…before…

Before…

The fridge has a calendar on it.

He hasn’t noticed it until now, too focused on the tiny bubble of floor-counter-sink, the elements necessary to his minute-by-minute survival. But there is a calendar on the fridge, the month of June sketched across a whiteboard in cheerful red and green marker. The month’s name is bordered by an Italian flag on one side, a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs on the other.

Half of the month is dominated by a long line snaking through the weeks. It connects two dates, two events written in all caps and surrounded by more excited little doodles.

 June 15th: To Italy!

June 30th: Still in Italy, back 7/14!

He left for the cottage on June 17th. It can’t have been more than a handful of days since then. They won’t be back for weeks. No one is coming to this house for weeks. No one will find him for weeks.

Ilya stands stock still, clinging to the counter as spots fill his vision, and realizes all at once that he is going to die here.

Chapter 4

Chapter Notes

enter: David Hollander, stage left

Shane doesn’t cry.

David isn’t really sure where he gets it from. It’s not from him, that’s for sure. He’s got tears streaming down his face almost every time he hears any sort of live music. It’s not Yuna, either. Whenever they fight, she spends most of the conversation angrily wiping at her eyes, insisting that they keep going, that he ignores the fact that she’s sniffling every other word. But Shane…sometime around when he turned 12, he stopped crying. Even when he looks abjectly miserable, even when his eyes are glassy, that’s just not how his emotions manifest.

David had tried to tell him, over and over again, mostly on car rides home from tough losses, that it’s okay to cry. That it doesn’t make him any less of a man. Every time, Shane had just said “I know,” and then gone back to staring out the car window with shiny eyes and a dry face.

It’s from hockey, probably. A lot of things about Shane are from hockey. Most of them are good, but some of them had David wanting to pull him off the ice as a kid, break his sticks over his knee, throw his skates in a fire. The only thing that stopped him was the thought that, if he did, Shane would spend the rest of his life wearing that awful, tearless mask of misery. And David has only ever wanted to make him happy.

All this to say that David’s used to helping Shane when he’s upset. Used to pretending he doesn’t notice the not-tears, used to finding him a distraction, used to asking him later if he wants to talk about anything. Used to approaching sadness sideways, like Shane clearly wants to.

What he is not used to is this. What he is not used to is awful, gut-wrenching sobs tearing themselves out of Shane’s throat. What he is not used to is Shane hunched over himself, shaking like a leaf, hands pressed into his face. 

David is not proud to admit that he freezes for a moment. That his first reaction, seeing his son in this much pain, is complete and utter panic. He doesn’t know what to do. Shane never does this. He will tell Yuna this later, hiding his face against her collarbone, and she will tell him that his first reaction didn’t matter. Only his second reaction did.

Shane makes a noise like he’s dying, and David crosses the room in three seconds flat.

“Hey,” he says, reaching for him. “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.”

He drops onto the couch next to Shane, and wraps him in a hug, tugging him against his chest like Shane is six years old and sobbing over a skinned knee. Shane goes willingly, bonelessly, muffling a horrible wailing scream in David’s shirt. He’s trembling all over. David cups a hand over the back of his head, and rocks them back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay, it’s okay, you’ll be okay.”

Shane shakes his head. He smells awful, old sweat and unwashed clothes. His hair is greasy under David’s palm. How long has he been spiraling for? His “silent retreat” started four days ago, has he just been sitting here crying this entire time?

What the fuck happened?

“No,” Shane sobs. “No, no, no, no—”

The words dissolve into a keen of pain. David just keeps rocking them, and Shane just keeps wailing. And God, it can’t go on much longer. He’ll run out of tears, or energy, or both. He’ll be able to breathe, and he’ll be able to tell David what the hell did this to him, and then…and then David will make it better. That’s how it always went, before Shane turned 12. He can make anything better, can’t he?

Except Shane just keeps crying. And crying, and crying, and crying, like he’s been saving all his tears from the past thirteen years for something really worth it. Like he won’t stop crying until he’s flooded the house.

“Shane, bud, you need to breathe,” David tries. “You need to…deep breaths, c’mon.”

Shane takes a deep breath. It immediately stutters back out, his lungs hitching around a sob.

“Please,” David tries. Shane shakes his head.

“I—I—I’m sorry. M’sorry, I’m—”

“None of that. None of that, okay? You just focus on breathing.”

He soothes a hand down Shane’s back, eyes flicking around for something, anything, some clue for what might have caused this. There’s a dozen protein bar wrappers, a small army of water glasses. Shane’s phone.

“I’m gonna call your mom, okay?” he says, inching his fingers over to the phone. “Can you unlock your phone for me?”

“I—sure—fuck, it doesn’t matter anymore—”

David tries to tap on the screen, frowning when it stays black. Shit. If Shane’s phone is also dead, he’s going to have to charge either it or his own before he can call Yuna, which means letting go of Shane, and he can’t…he can’t do that right now, not when Shane’s hands are fisted in his shirt so tightly that he genuinely thinks it might tear.

He presses the power button just in case, relieved when it turns on. Why did Shane turn his phone off?

“What’s the code?” he asks.

Shane manages to pull himself together enough to rasp out “1410,” but that triggers another round of even harder sobbing, and the thought of calling Yuna is temporarily abandoned in favor of rubbing his hand in wide circles over Shane’s back. He briefly considers whether he should call 911 instead. Shane is breathing so hard and so unevenly that David’s worried he might faint. But he doesn’t, and he manages to drag himself back to normal levels of bone-rattling sobs after…five minutes? Ten?

“Calling Mom now,” David says, punching in the code. He pulls up the phone app, and…okay. Okay, there’s your clue, David. The list of recent calls.

50 minutes ago: 1 missed call from SV.

3 hours ago: 3 missed calls from Dad.

1 day ago: 1 missed call from Hayden Pike.

1 day ago: 2 missed calls from SV.

3 days ago: 3 missed calls from SV.

3 days ago: 1 call from SV. 2 minutes and 15 seconds.

3 days ago: 12 missed outgoing calls to Lily.

4 days ago: 1 call to Lily. 40 minutes and 50 seconds.

5 days ago: 1 call from Lily. 2 hours and 14 minutes.

Of all those calls, he only recognizes Hayden’s name and his own. And it seems like this SV was very desperate to reach Shane. And Shane was very desperate to reach…Lily. Whoever Lily is. Whoever SV is.

Detect later. Yuna now.

He tabs away from the recent calls to the starred contacts. Mom. Dad. Hayden Pike. Coach. Lily.

Who the hell is Lily?

He shakes his head and calls Yuna. Later. Yuna picks up after only a couple rings, thank God.

“Shane? I thought you were—”

“It’s me,” David says. “You need to come over to Shane’s cottage right now. Something’s…something’s really wrong. I don’t know what, he won’t stop crying.”

“Shane won’t stop crying?” There’s a rustling noise, the sound of quick footsteps. A door slams. “Okay. Jesus, okay, I’m heading over now.”

“Love you,” David says weakly. This, for some fucking reason, tears an awful scream out of Shane’s throat. Yuna’s breath stutters on the other end of the phone line.

“Fuck,” she says emphatically. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. As soon as I can, I’m out the door already, I…I love you too. And Shane.”

“See you soon,” David says, and hangs up. “Shh, shh, shh, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

Shane is fucking unreachable. None of David’s nonsense noises or useless platitudes are getting through to him anymore. He seems to be trying to curl into himself, to disappear even as he clings to David like he’s the edge of a crumbling cliff, and David has no idea how he managed to make it worse. Love you, maybe? Is this just a particularly awful breakup?

And look. Normally David would never go through his kid’s phone. Shane’s already had so much of his life snatched up and smeared across ads and tabloids and architecture documentaries. David doesn’t want to take any more of it for himself, not without permission. But Shane is a live wire right now, and David doesn’t know what to say, or what to avoid saying, and he…he needs to know. He needs to know so that he can help.

Shane’s calls to Lily weren’t going through. So maybe he texted her. He flips over to Shane’s texts.

Montreal Metros: 76 unread messages.

Dad: My phone’s about to die. Sorry to interrupt your retreat but…

Hayden Pike: Just calling to catch up, call me back whenever! Crazy…

SV: I found a photo of you guys. Can send it to you if you don’t have…

Mom: Hope your silent retreat is relaxing! Text me some bird photos :)

Lily: I love you so much.

Okay. That last one might explain some things. Heart in his throat, Shane sobbing in his arms, David clicks it. The last few messages in the thread fill the screen, and dread settles in David’s stomach like a writhing snake.

Lily: I love you.

Lily: I’m sorry.

Lily: Cottage would have been nice.

Lily: I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.

Lily: I love you so much.

This could still be a breakup, David tells himself, but it doesn’t look like it. He swallows back a mouthful of bile, and scrolls up.

Lily: Boarding now. Will call when I land

Me: ♥️ Send me your flight number so I can track you

Lily: Ah yes, you and your FlightAware. Mr Stalker.

Me: It’s so I can figure out when to leave to pick you up!

Lily: I know I know. Air Canada 11040.

Me: Thank you. Now I can stalk you properly

Lily: 😱🔪

David’s breath freezes in his lungs. Air Canada Flight 11040. The same Air Canada Flight 11040 that’s been blazing across every news channel for days on end. The same Air Canada Flight 11040 that had Yuna and him clasping hands on the couch in silent, teary horror. That had filled every newspaper and social media site with obituaries from people that they halfway-knew: a colleague's uncle, a waitress from that great Indian place downtown, Ilya fucking Rozanov. It had been a tragedy for the entire city of Ottawa, but they’d been lucky enough that it was a tragedy that only touched the periphery of their lives.

But now…

Oh. Oh Shane. 

He’d had someone. Someone that David had never known about. A woman that he’d wanted to bring to the cottage, bring into his life. And now she’s gone.

She’s gone. David will never get to meet the woman who used her last moments to tell his son that she loved him. He’ll never pass her the salt across the dinner table. He’ll never draw her into a game of Yahtzee. He’ll never get to watch her and Shane exist in the same space. See how she smiles at him.

He has no idea what she even looked like.

“I’m sorry,” he tells Shane, trying to keep the tears out of his voice. “I saw your texts with Lily, and...I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I didn’t get to meet her.”

Shane goes very, very still for a moment. Then he breathes out, slow and unsteady.

“Him,” he chokes into David’s shirt. He’s shaking apart in his arms. “You didn’t get to meet him.”

David closes his eyes. Nods his head. Okay. Okay, then.

“I’m sorry I never got to meet him,” he says. “I’m sure I would’ve loved him.”

“You would’ve,” Shane sobs, and neither of them say anything else for a long time.

***

Nausea has made a home in Ilya’s gut. He doesn’t know if it's the hunger, or the hot-sick feeling that has burrowed into his wounds and spread throughout his body, or if it’s simply fear. If it’s simply death curled on top of his chest, staring into his eyes and daring him to blink.

It hurts. It hurts and he’s sick and he wants his mom. He wants Shane. He wants the cottage, and summer sun, and the simplicity of love. He doesn’t want to die like this. He doesn’t want to die alone on a stranger’s floor. He doesn’t want to rot for weeks before someone finds him.

He doesn’t want to be a tragedy. 

Oh he survived the plane crash but picked the wrong house to break into. Family came back from Italy too late. Mice ate his eyes. No pretty body for a coffin. He never got to tell Hollander that he loved him out loud. So sad. So fucking sad.

He doesn’t let himself cry. Water. He needs the water to stay inside him. He might just be prolonging his own agonizing death, but he can’t make himself break this awful, instinctive cycle. Get off the floor, drink, faint. Get off the floor, drink, faint. He will die of hunger, or infection, or shock. But if nothing else, he will not die of thirst.

He needs to get out of this house.

He can’t get out of this house.

He needs to leave.

If he tries to leave and can’t…

The sink is his only lifeline.

He needs…

He…

He leans down to drink from the kitchen sink, and the spots are growing faster than they ever have before. The hot-sick feeling is rolling over him in waves, radiating from his stomach and leg and face. One sip of water, and two, and then his knees are buckling. He doesn’t feel himself hit the floor.

Chapter 5

Chapter Notes

When Shane was ten years old, he fell through the ice playing pond hockey with five of his friends.

It was, according to his parents, the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to either of them. They’d assumed that it was the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to him, too, and his mom had spent the next week all but smothering him in blankets, bringing him cookies and hot chocolate and hockey magazines, until he’d convinced her to let him go back to school.

Objectively, he knows that it must have been terrifying. He gets a little shiver in his heart whenever he thinks about it for too long, like his body carries an echo of the way he almost died. A little drop of freezing water, held safe in his core. But at the time it just…wasn’t? It wasn’t. He’d been five feet down in the icy black water, surrounded by a nothingness that would kill him, and the only emotion his mind could conjure up was profound loneliness.

And then three of his friends had gotten down on their bellies, and grabbed at his arms and coat and hair, and dragged him sputtering to the surface. And he wasn’t lonely anymore, and he wasn’t scared either, because the world was here and it fucking hurt.

He thinks his dad must’ve just pulled him out of the pond. Dragged him out of the deadly thing numbing his nerves and squeezing his lungs silent, and now his skin is on fire. Now his body is aware of what has happened.

It takes a few minutes to stop screaming, after his dad tells his mom that he loves her. The agony keeps battering at his rib cage, even after he manages to wrench himself silent. He never got to tell Ilya that he loved him. He never got to tell him. How was he able to sit here for three days, silent and alone? How was this pain not pouring endlessly out of him?

How will he ever be able to tuck it back inside himself and go on living?

He buries his face in his dad’s chest, whimpering pathetically. There’s a hand soothing over his back. A murmur in his ear. And then…

And then.

“I didn’t get to meet her,” Dad says, and he can’t. He can’t keep this a secret anymore. He can’t spend the rest of his life pretending he never loved Ilya. He’ll scream it from the rooftops. He’ll tell everyone he ever meets that he was hopelessly in love with Ilya Rozanov. Maybe if he says it often enough, loudly enough, Ilya will be able to hear it, wherever he is.

“Him,” he chokes. “You didn’t get to meet him.”

He’s being rocked back and forth. He’s being told that Ilya would have been loved. And then there’s a door creaking open somewhere, the scuffling noises of kicked-off shoes and thrown-aside keys.

“Oh sweetheart,” his mom is saying. The couch shifts beneath him, and a second pair of arms wrap around his back. It’s awkward, as far as group hugs go. Shane’s legs are starting to go numb where he’s sitting on them. He melts into it anyway, breathes in the fresh, clean-linen smell of his mom’s perfume.

“Shh,” she’s saying. “Shh, shh. It’s okay. Whatever it is, we can—it’ll be okay.”

“Yuna,” Dad says gently. She goes quiet. Shane bites his lip, feeling wildly grateful that he won’t have to listen to her try and make a game plan, to tell him that everything is fixable. Because this isn’t. Ilya is dead. He’s not coming back.

They sit there together for a long time. Eventually, Mom drops a kiss on Shane’s head, and tells him that she’s making tea. Maybe some lunch.

“No,” Shane croaks. He doesn’t recognize the sound of his own voice. “I…no. I bought it for him. I bought the tea for him, I bought all the food for him, and he’s not…he’s not gonna drink it, Mom. He’s not gonna eat it. It’s just gonna rot, and I can’t—”

“Okay,” Mom says. Her voice is shaking. “Okay. Is there…do you have anything you can eat?”

He gestures vaguely at the protein bar wrappers. Her breath hitches in her throat. Her arms tighten around him, fingers clutching at the back of his shirt.

“Well,” she says. “We’ll get you something else then.”

“I was going to make pasta for dinner tonight,” Dad says. “I could go home and grab the ingredients, bring them over here? Or you could come back to our—”

Shane shakes his head hard enough to twinge his neck. The thought of leaving this place—the place he was supposed to bring Ilya, the place where they were both supposed to be safe—it makes him want to vomit. Mom and Dad have brought the world in with them, yeah, but that’s different than going back out into it. How is he supposed to go back into a world without Ilya Rozanov? How is he supposed to stand under the sky that took him away?

He can’t. He can’t. He can’t.

“Alright,” Dad says easily. “I’ll bring it over here then.”

He gives Shane one last squeeze and gets to his feet. Mom doesn’t let go. She rubs her hand in wide circles over Shane’s back, humming something under her breath.

“Oh, baby,” she murmurs, once the sound of Dad’s car has faded from the driveway. “What happened? Who was supposed to eat the food?”

And he could be vague. He could tell her what he had told Dad—that there was a man that he had invited to the cottage, and that that man had…had died. Was dead. Had been killed in the plane crash. He could leave it at that. But llya’s name is burning on his lips, and Ilya’s face is burning in his brain. And he loves him. He loves him. Why did he ever think he could hide that he loves him?

“Ilya,” he says, forcing his broken voice to clear. He can’t mumble Ilya’s name. He can’t say it with anything but care. “I…I invited Ilya to stay with me for the summer.”

Mom goes very, very still.

“Ilya…Ilya Rozanov?” she asks, her voice cracking. She sounds like she doesn’t want to believe it. Like there might be some other Ilya in Shane’s life. An Ilya that hadn't just died in a plane crash.

“Yeah,” Shane says. “And don’t…don’t. Don’t tell me that I hate him, don’t say you couldn’t see us together, just don’t—”

“No, no, Shane, of course not,” she says, her hand resuming its circling. “I just…I’d hoped it was a breakup. I’d hoped it was just—oh, Shane. Shane, I’m so sorry.”

He nods. They breathe together for a long, long time. And then she is running her fingers through his greasy hair and suggesting, gentler than he’s ever heard her, that he might want to take a shower. And he’s suddenly aware that he hasn’t actually showered since the day before Ilya died. He wonders if that’s how he’ll measure everything now. Three and a half days ago, the love of his life died, and the day before that, Shane took a shower. Three hours before Ilya died, Shane put on the clothes that he’s wearing now.

He smells fucking awful.

“Probably a good idea,” he mutters, and she’s leading him to the bathroom, and rustling through his dresser for clean clothes, and his dad is coming through the door with bags of pasta ingredients. He blinks and he is clean, blinks again and he is full, blinks again and he is curled on his side in his bed, his mom drawing the blankets over him like he is a child again.

“Get some sleep,” she says, putting a mug of tea on his bedside table. Chamomile and honey, dug up from their cabinets. Not something he bought for Ilya. Safe.

She doesn’t say that she loves him. He doesn’t think that he could handle anyone telling him that they love him. Not when he’ll spend the rest of his life wondering what those words would’ve sounded like in Ilya’s voice.

Did he press his phone against his lips, after he sent those messages? Did he say the words out loud before the fire took him?

Shane drifts off trying to remember the exact shape of Ilya’s accent.

He startles from sleep sometime after the frogs go quiet for the night. Moonlight dances across the soft valleys of his bedsheets, and the mattress is so comfortable, and for a moment he forgets where he is. And then he remembers that he’s been dragged from the animal-den misery of the couch, cleaned and fed and banished to his soft, airy bedroom. He curls his fingers into the sheets and resists the urge to go crawling back into the living room.

Something rustles. Something clangs. There’s a gentle, insistent beep.

He swings his legs over the side of the bed and slips from the room, moving lightfooted as he did when he was a teenager and trying not to wake his parents with his midnight sandwich cravings.

The main living space is right outside his bedroom, so it’s not like his sneakiness would’ve stopped his mom from seeing him, if she looked. But she doesn’t look. She is absorbed in her task, bathed in the soft orange glow of the fridge as she methodically pulls every piece of food from its shelves and throws them into a garbage bag.

Her eyes are rimmed red. Her hands are shaking. She throws out a package of turkey, a bag of apples, three pounds of ground beef. This is the difference, probably, the fundamental difference between Shane and his mother. His grief froze him to the couch for three days. Hers has her cleaning out the fridge at four in the morning.

He closes the bedroom door as quietly as he can, and falls asleep to the sound of her opening up the cupboards.

***

There is a waterfall rushing somewhere. An endless deluge of water, and if he can only reach it he can soothe the desert of his throat. He can save himself. 

Everything is fuzzy, the world pulsing around him like the walls of a giant heart. He’s lying on his front, his nose a throb of fresh pain, his ribs and leg the piercing shriek of a siren. He grits his teeth against the tile. There’s blood in his mouth. He swallows it down. It doesn’t really help the thirst.

Get up. Get up. Get up.

He tries to drag himself onto his hands and knees, but his arms tremble like the legs of a newborn colt, and he only just manages to turn his head in time to not break his nose further as he goes crashing down again. He lies on the floor, panting. The sink rushes on above him.

It’s so close.

It’s so close, but it might as well be as far away as the fridge, as a hospital, as Shane and his cottage and safety. He tries to get up again and again, but his arms just refuse to take his weight. The hunger, the infection, the thousand wounds all steadily leaking away his blood—it’s too much. His body has had enough of him. Enough of life. It has decided on the quickest death available to it.

Three weeks to die of starvation. Only three days to die of thirst.

He will die at the foot of a sink, water gushing merrily above him. His throat will get sorer and sorer, and he will get weaker and weaker, and the headache throbbing behind his eyes will grow into the agony of a gunshot wound. Maybe he will hallucinate. Maybe he’ll start having seizures. It’ll hurt. It’s going to hurt so fucking much.

Three days doesn’t seem that short, when he thinks about how agonizing those days will be. Three days seems impossibly short, when he compares those days to the years that had stretched out in front of him before he got on the plane.

He wants to live. He realizes that with an intensity that knocks the breath out of him. He wants to live. He wants it more than he’s ever wanted anything. He wants to live even if it never stops hurting. He’d feel just like this for years if he had to.

He bites down on his tongue, stretches his arms out, and starts to inch himself forward. Wriggling like a worm, like a soldier on his belly in the mud, he hauls himself out of the kitchen. It takes an hour, at least. Darkness claws at the corner of his eyes, and he thinks he might actually black out once or twice. But he keeps going. Inch by inch, he rounds the counter and pulls himself back into the living room.

One minute. He can give himself one minute to rest. He tilts his head to the side, taking in the room. There’s the sliding glass door he came in from. It opens up to the backyard, the forest. He doesn’t remember if there were houses on either side of this one, if there were other backyards with playing children or grilling neighbors who might spot him passed out in the grass. If not, he’ll just die under the sky instead of under the kitchen lights. An upgrade, yes. But he doesn’t want a better place to die, he wants to fucking live.

So. The front door. Get to the front door. Get to the stoop. Hope to God someone sees him from the road.

There’s a long hallway stretching out from the living room, its walls lined with pictures of someone else’s children. Great. Another piece of motivation. Make it outside, and then you will not traumatize little Timmy when he comes home from his Italian vacation. You will not make him like you, staring down at a corpse with no understanding of how it got there. You will not haunt a child’s memories forever.

Left arm forward. Pull. Right arm forward. Ignore the burns. Pull. Repeat, repeat, repeat. He keeps his head down so he can’t see how far the door is. Pull. Pull. Pull. It lasts forever. It lasts so long he thinks he must have died, that this is his afterlife. His ghost vainly going through the motions to try and save himself.

And then his fingers bump into the doorframe. 

Thank you, he thinks to his Mama, to God, to his own stubborn body. Thank you.

He shoves himself up onto his elbows, stares at the impossible height of the doorknob.

“Just once,” he tells his arms. “Just once and then you never have to work again. Please.”

He levers himself just a fraction higher. Reaches up with his bad, burnt arm, forcing his left shoulder to hold the entire weight of his torso. It starts shaking almost immediately, and he grits his teeth and stretches further. Enough to twist the lock open. Enough to wrap his fingers around the handle.

Enough to pull the door towards himself. The hinges creak, and sunlight comes flooding in. It’s agony on his burnt skin. It’s the best thing he’s ever felt. The shaking in his shoulder is vibrating down his body, into his brain, and somewhere there is rushing water. Somewhere there is birdsong.

He drags himself out onto the stoop. It’s a beautiful day. He hopes Shane is on a porch somewhere, watching the sunshine ripple off the lake.

Somewhere, there’s the slam of a car door.

Somewhere there are running footsteps.

Somewhere, there is a shouting voice and hands on Ilya’s shoulders and another person here, with him, pulling him back into the world.

Chapter End Notes

fun fact: i actually got down on my stomach to see if you could open a door from an army-crawl position. the answer is yes, fortunately for ilya. #research #realism

Chapter 6

Chapter Notes

time for the longest chapter yet! I get the chance to talk about Boston and just go nuts, I guess

Beeping.

Painfully bright light.

Something rubs hard against his chest. He groans, tries to shift his arms to swat it away.

Someone is asking him a question. Someone is asking him a question. Someone is asking him a question.

What are they asking him?

Everything feels far away. Separated from him by a curtain of pain and nausea. He’s out of the kitchen, he thinks. He’s out of the plane, he’s pretty sure. Maybe this is what comes after. Maybe this is his mother, trying to wake him to the rest of eternity. That thought is more painful than he thought it would be. What good is eternity, if he’ll need to wait sixty more years to see Shane’s smile?

Something bites into his face.

Someone is holding his hand.

“20, 19, 18—”

Numbers. He understands numbers. They’re one of the first things he learned how to say in English.

“17, 16—”

Everything stops before he can figure out what they’re counting.

The world comes back before he can miss it. Beeping. Whooshing. Something rubbing his chest. Question. Question. Question. There’s something in his throat. He gags around it, reaching for it, but then his hands are soothed back to his sides, and there’s something tough and wide and painfully long being dragged out of his trachea. He coughs wildly, arching upwards, and maybe this is hell, actually. Maybe the priests were right. Maybe this is what he gets for loving Shane.

He thinks he can take it, as long as it’s not what Shane gets for loving him.

The world flickers in and out and in again. Hands keep touching him, moving him, patting his cheeks and rubbing his chest. There is another terrible cycle of counting, nothing, coming back to a tube in his throat. This time, his skin feels rawer when he wakes. Less tight.

Something squeezes his arm, hard. Then there’s something wet against his lips. He sticks out his tongue, chasing it.

“...with us?”

He blinks, trying to bring the person—demon?—into focus. A woman, frizzy blonde hair and soft brown eyes. She’s wearing purple scrubs and a lanyard that’s covered with pins of the Snow White dwarves. A blood pressure cuff dangles from one hand, and a small sponge is clasped in the other.

Not hell, then. A hospital.

He made it to a hospital.

“Hey, hey,” the woman is saying. She’s getting blurry. “Hey, it’s okay, you’re okay. Are you in pain?”

He shakes his head. He knows that he’s hurt, in an abstract, floaty kind of way. Remembers the agony of the woods, of the kitchen floor, of dragging his ruined skin across a stranger’s hallway. But it’s layered under memory and some really, really strong painkillers, and right now he just feels heavy. Exhausted. Like the time he’d let Marly talk him into running a half marathon to raise money for some cancer charity.

“Okay, that’s good,” she says. “Let us know if that changes. Can you tell me your name?”

He swallows. His throat is on fire.

“Ilya,” he croaks. “Rozanov.”

Her eyes go wide.

***

No one tells the sheer amount of logistics involved, when your best friend dies and leaves you as the executor of his estate. When Ilya had first brought up the idea, he’d been shivering from the cold, curled up against her on the couch of his Moscow apartment. Grigori had just been buried. Alexei had just called her a whore. Ilya had just spent three hours wandering the streets and come home with a dead phone and faintly blue lips. 

Svetlana isn’t quite sure which of these events precipitated the ask. If it was contemplation of his own mortality, or just a deep hatred of his brother. It had felt like too tender of a wound to poke at, at the moment. She’d pressed her lips against Ilya’s head, and said of course when he asked if she would take everything, if he died. His money, and his house, and the endless awful decisions of death.

She’d figured she would know later. Someday, years down the line, when death felt like a faraway nightmare, she could lean against him in an alleyway outside a club, and pass him a cigarette, and ask so why exactly am I getting all your shit when lung cancer inevitably kills you?

Now, it’s just one more thing she will never know about him. One more piece of Ilya that she will never get.

She sits down at the edge of his bed, puts her head between her knees, and tells herself to breathe. She’s been doing that a lot lately, choking through a breathing exercise as a new bit of grief sinks itself into her diaphragm. Every time she thinks about Ilya’s smile, or his hands, or the way his voice went when he saw a cute animal. Every time she wonders what he and Irina are up to, now. Has he forgiven her? Has she forgiven him?

Through Ilya’s bedroom door, there’s the clattering of pots and pans, the low murmur of voices. His teammates have spent the past five days clustered around her like lost ducklings. What can we do? What can we do? Anything we can do to help? And she’d had nothing for them, because they couldn’t call around to every dentist in Moscow and Boston to see if they’d ever treated Ilya. They couldn’t call Alexei and beg and bribe and threaten him for a DNA sample. They couldn’t call, and call, and call, and hope that it was enough to give Ilya his own coffin, his own place in the Earth.

They couldn’t help pick out his bones from the rubble, and that was the biggest, ugliest, most complicated bit of logistics she had to deal with. But then Alexei had finally, reluctantly, shipped a cheek swab over to the air crash investigators, and she’d found the dentist that had done Ilya’s last crown, and Cliff Marleau had finally offered an actual suggestion in a chorus of vagaries.

“Do you need help packing up Roz’s house?” he’d asked, and she does, actually, because every time she’s reminded of Ilya she needs to sit down and breathe slowly for five minutes. It would take her a year to pack up this house by herself. Maybe longer.

So that’s how she wound up with most of the Boston Raiders moving through Ilya’s house like a strike force, armed with boxes and markers and packing tape. Half of them are in the gym, the other half in the kitchen. The only ones not here are off doing other things. Vic and Johansson are at Johansson’s place cooking them all dinner for later (and breakfast, probably, and lunch, and the dinner after that). Feller and Dubek are out with Feller’s stylist, buying everyone suits for the funeral. They’re lifting the weight off of her, piece by piece, and she is not herself enough to be grateful.

She just slunk into Ilya’s bedroom with a box, claiming it as her own domain. This was where she’d found the photo, after all, tucked carefully between the pages of a battered day planner on Ilya’s bedside table. It was smudged, a little blurry—printed at home instead of a shop, she guessed. She’d pictured Ilya at Staples, buying a packet of glossy printer paper because he’d needed to keep this photo, and he couldn’t let some guy at a print shop see it. She’d pictured him tracing his fingers over it. She’d pictured him stashing it away.

She’d gotten unfathomably drunk off of Ilya’s good vodka—her good vodka now, she supposed. It all belonged to her. She’d stared down at the photo of Ilya and Shane fucking Hollander, curled together in bed, shirtless and grinning. She’d looked at the soft, loving expression on her best friend’s face, and mourned that she never got to tease him over his fucking obsession with his boyfriend’s yoga documentaries.

Then she’d texted Jane.

 I found a photo of you guys. Can send it to you if you don’t have it. It’s a good one. You look like you’re in love.

He hadn’t responded. He hasn’t responded to any of her texts. It’s fine, probably. She doesn’t know who to call if it’s not fine, and she has too much else to sort through, so. It’s fine, for now.

Anyway. Anyway. If Ilya had hidden away more evidence of his relationship, it’ll be here. She can spare all the Raiders an awkward conversation about their dead captain’s sexuality, and she can spare herself the broken knuckles if any of them are awful about it.

So now, here she is. She’d managed to put five of Ilya’s shirts in the box before she found a Red Sox t-shirt she’d bought him to commemorate his first season in Boston. They’d caught a Patriot’s Day game together, shivering in the cold April air, eating some truly disgusting hot dogs, and listening to the crowd scream a song that neither of them knew. 

“I think I love this city,” he’d said.

“I think I love it too,” she’d said, and started making plans to move.

So. Bed. Breathing. Not hyperventilating. Realizing that she’ll never go to a stupid Red Sox game with Ilya ever again. She’ll never stumble drunk out of Fenway Park and drag Ilya to Tasty Burger, pulling down his baseball cap like it’ll make him any less recognizable. She’ll never crowd with Ilya and Vic around Cliff as he explains how to keep score on a piece of paper. She’ll never piss herself laughing, watching Ilya try to sneak past the feral geese in the Fens.

She’s lost all of that.

She’ll probably never go to a baseball game ever again. She won’t be able to set foot in Fenway without remembering the joy on Ilya’s face, the time he reached out and plucked a homerun ball out of the air.

How much of Boston will be tainted like that? How much of her new home will she lose? The Esplanade, the 24-hour donut shop in Southie, that insanely good Peruvian place in Somerville? The entirety of Brighton, surely, and the West End. How many places hold Ilya in their walls? Can she burn him out of any of them? She’ll be in New York in a year, she thinks, if she can’t.

Her phone rings.

She ignores it at first. Focuses on the slow drag of her breath, and Ilya’s comforter against her legs, and on pushing her favorite places out of her brain so that she doesn’t associate them with Ilya forever. But then it goes silent, and then it starts ringing again, and it might be the funeral home, or the lawyer that she’s hired to help her with Ilya’s assets, or even Shane Hollander finally calling her back.

So she pulls it out of her pocket.

Marlene (Air Canada)

Oh.

It’s the woman who had told her that Ilya was dead. Who had given her all the numbers she would need to call to get his remains back—because he wasn’t even a body, he was just remains now. There was nothing whole past row 29, and Ilya had been sitting in the very back of the plane for reasons that Svetlana couldn’t fucking comprehend. He’d flown first class on every flight since he’d been drafted, and this was the one where he decided to slum it?

Svetlana swallows back the bile, staring down at Marlene’s name long enough for it to disappear. Thirty seconds pass, and then her phone starts ringing again.

It must be urgent. But what could possibly be urgent? She’d done her job. She’d delivered the worst news of Svetlana’s life with grace and aplomb. What else could she have to tell her? Oh, yes, by the way, we’ve just learned that your mother was also on the plane, and she is also dead.

She hits accept. Raises her phone to her ear. Breathes.

“Ms. Vetrova?”

“Yes,” she says. It’s rude. She doesn’t care.

“This is Marlene Robin from Air Canada? We spoke—”

“I remember you.”

“Of course.” She clears her throat nervously. Papers shuffle on the other end of the phone.

“Why are you calling me?” Svetlana says. “I thought the TSB was handling—handling Ilya.”

Ilya’s remains. Ilya’s bones. Figuring out, if they could, exactly how Ilya had died. If his neck had broken on impact or if he’d burned to death.

“Yes. Well. It’s not every day I get to make a call like this, Ms. Vetrova, but it is my absolute…my absolute privilege to inform you that the TSB made an error in their initial assessment of the scene.”

Svetlana blinks. Stares at Ilya’s dresser, at the photo of him as a little kid, standing besuited and serious-faced between his parents. She wants to reach through time and pinch his cheeks. She wants to hug her best friend.

“...an error?” she asks slowly.

“Yes,” Marlene says, and then. And then.

“I just got a phone call from The Ottawa Hospital. They informed me that Ilya Rozanov was brought in on Monday evening, and is currently recovering in their ICU. He’s stable. He’s alive, Ms. Vetrova, and the doctors are confident that they can keep him that way.”

The bed drops out from underneath her. For the second time in a week, her world rewrites itself.

“Alive?” she chokes. “But…but you said…you said that everyone was in their seats, you said—”

She’d begged, on the phone with Marlene last week. Begged, and pleaded, and bargained. You said you couldn’t identify his body. You said you can’t without a DNA sample. Maybe he was in the bathroom, maybe—

But the flight had been on its final descent. The seat belt sign had been on for fifteen minutes at that point, and the surviving flight attendant had testified that everyone had been in compliance with it. Ilya had been in seat 38C when seat 38C was obliterated along with the back half of the plane. He was dead. Marlene had said that over and over, had stayed on the phone with Svetlana for nearly half an hour, until she had accepted it.

“We don’t yet know how he made it off the aircraft,” Marlene says, her voice as soft and gentle as it had been the first time she’d said Ilya Rozanov was killed in the crash. “He’s been in and out of consciousness, these past three days. He only just woke up enough to give the doctors his name. Our best guess is that he switched seats with someone at some point before or during the flight. Maybe helping a couple sit together.”

“And you’re sure—you’re sure it’s him in the hospital? It’s not…it’s not some crazy fan, or—”

“I asked the medical staff the same thing. I wanted to be sure, before informing you. They stated that he had a Russian accent, resembled photos of Mr. Rozanov, and he was wearing a Orthodox cross around his neck, which I remember you asking me about.”

Asking was putting it…delicately. She’d been near-hysterics at that point, begging for that cross back if she couldn’t have Ilya. Marlene had promised to call her if they’d found it, and underneath those words, Svetlana could hear all the words she wasn’t saying. That the cross had probably melted along with Ilya’s flesh. That it was probably gone.

“So…”

“It’s him,” Marlene says, and Svetlana can hear the smile in her voice. “He’s alive.”

“He’s alive,” Svetlana repeats, and then she’s getting off the bed, and flinging open the bedroom door, and sprinting into the kitchen where six hockey players are boxing up Ilya’s wine glasses. They turn to her with startled, wary looks on their faces, and she realizes that she is laughing. She realizes that she is sobbing.

“He’s alive,” she gasps, holding up her phone like a trophy. “He’s alive. Air Canada just called me, the investigators fucked up…he’s alive.”

Cliff sways heavily into the counter, knees shaking. Svetlana had not gone to her own house after she landed in Logan, fresh off a twelve hour flight, laden with two suitcases and Ilya’s death. She’d gone to Cliff’s. She’d hammered on his door until he opened it, bleary-eyed and confused, and she’d told him. Right then and there on his doorstep, she’d told him that Ilya was dead, because his coach would find out soon, and then the media, and she wouldn’t let Cliff hear about this from anyone but her.

He’d clung to the doorframe like it was the only thing keeping him from fainting. All the color had gone out of his face, and it had stayed gone. For a week it had stayed gone, except for the dark circles under his eyes, except for the splotches of red on his nose and cheeks when he occasionally excused himself to go sob in the bathroom.

It’s coming back now. Svetlana watches as ten years fall off of Cliff’s shoulders, as the warmth comes rushing back into his skin. Hammersmith leans into Cliff’s side, clapping a hand on his back, as Svetlana fumbles to put her phone on speaker.

“Marlene, you are on the phone with…eh, around half of the Boston Raiders,” she says. “Tell them what you just told me.”

“Hello boys,” Marlene says, and there’s a laugh in her voice.

“Please tell me that Svetlana hasn’t gone crazy with grief,” Hammersmith says, but there’s a smile on his face. Relief.

“I can confirm that she has not,” Marlene says. “I am honored to tell all of you that Ilya Rozanov is indeed alive and recovering in Ottawa.”

Five days ago, the people of Boston had put together an impromptu memorial outside of TD Garden, fans spilling out onto Causeway Street, Rozanov blazed across thousands of backs. She’d hung up the phone after yet another unsuccessful call with Alexei, and stood in the crowd, and stared at Ilya’s face on a hundred posters. She’d seen her own tears on a hundred different cheeks, and wanted more than anything to show all of it to Ilya. Look. Look how much you are loved.

Now, she’ll be able to. As soon as the city finds out he’s alive, there will be a party rowdy enough to shut down North Station for two fucking days. The memorial will look like a polite gathering at a friend’s house. When Ilya comes home, they’ll probably throw him a parade. Marty Walsh will declare an official Ilya Rozanov Day.

He’s going to be so fucking smug about it.

Cliff puts his head in his hands. His shoulders are shaking.

“Thank you,” Svetlana tells Marlene. “Thank you so, so much.”

“My pleasure, Ms. Vetrova,” says Marlene. “I’ve passed your number along to The Ottawa Hospital. I’m sure they’ll be in touch with you shortly about visiting him.”

She’ll be able to see Ilya. She’ll be able to touch him. Ten minutes ago, she would’ve counted herself lucky to get a single fragment of his skull.

Three of the Raiders have their arms around her. She hangs up the phone. Somewhere, Ilya is breathing. She will not lose any part of her home.

“Alright,” Hammersmith says. “You and Cliff are driving up to fucking Ottawa.”

She should suggest flying. It would get her there sooner. But she’d spent the entire flight from Russia white-knuckling her armrests, convinced she was about to fall out of the sky. And even knowing that Ilya was alive, that Ilya had not in fact been immolated in a plane crash…

He was still in a fucking plane crash.

“The rest of us are gonna unpack Roz’s house,” Hammersmith continues. “He doesn’t deserve to come back to all of his shit in boxes. Plus, I don’t think the doctors would appreciate an entire hockey team barging into his room.”

“Probably not,” Svetlana laughs wetly. “Thanks, Hammersmith.”

“I’ll call Feller,” someone says. “Tell him to not drop 50 grand on suits.”

“I’ll go get the guys out of the gym.”

People are moving. People are helping. They didn’t leave her to carry the grief alone, and they’re not leaving her with this either. The sudden reversal of grief. The abrupt jamming of her heart back into her chest.

“Someone should call Jane,” Cliff says. He still hasn’t moved his hands away from his face. They’re all very politely pretending he’s not crying.

“I’ve got it,” Svetlana says, and this must be what Marlene felt as she dialed Svetlana’s number. There is so much lightness in her, so much relief, and now she gets to pass it to someone else. Now she gets to pass it to Shane Hollander of all people.

What a gift.

Chapter End Notes

If you need an extra dose of angst, I just wrote a one-shot in which things go horribly wrong after Trip Gate.

Also, I have a tumblr! Come chat :D

Chapter 7

Chapter Notes

uh...hi? Where did you all come from?!

No but seriously, the response on chapter six has absolutely blown me away, thank you so much for all your kind comments! You're the nicest bunch of strangers a writer could ask for <3

And now...Shane!

It’s been a week.

Almost exactly. The date and time of the crash are burned deep into Shane’s skull, the new calendar by which his life is measured by. Thursday, June 17th, 2017, 10:58 AM. Now, the stove clock proudly proclaims the time to be 1:04 PM. Thursday, June 22nd. Ilya has officially been dead for over a week. One week, two hours, and six minutes, to be precise.

Mom is making coffee, in some vain attempt to stop him from crawling back into bed. He props his chin up on his hand and watches her, half sprawled across the kitchen counter. This might actually be the first time he’s ever sat on this barstool.

It’s been good, having her and Dad around. Probably. He thinks. He’s been eating actual meals, showering every day, sleeping in his own bed instead of wallowing on the couch. They’d coaxed him into card games, into watching movies, into anything that would get him out of his own head. These are all things that are objectively good for him.

He feels their eyes on the back of his neck, the first time he forces himself out onto the deck with a cup of coffee. He hears them talking quietly in the guest room, hears his own name murmured with all the gravity of a priest presiding over a funeral. He thinks the taste of chamomille-and-honey might be permanently embedded into his taste buds, Mom never letting him go more than two hours without pressing a mug of tea in his hands.

It’s good.

It makes him feel like an ant in some great, glass-walled farm.

It’s good. He needs them. If they weren’t here, he’d still be sitting on the couch. He would’ve run out of protein bars, tried to eat some of the food he bought Ilya, and puked all over the kitchen floor.

So he doesn’t ask Mom when she and Dad are planning on leaving. He doesn’t tell her that he needs space. He just sits at the counter in the house that Ilya will never see and watches as she makes him coffee.

“So,” she says, her voice loud in the quiet morning air. “I was thinking of going for a walk this morning. There’s a trail that goes around most of the lake, right?”

“Mmhmm,” Shane says, bracing himself for the next sentence. She and Dad started this up two days ago, right after he went out on the deck for the first time. At least three times a day, one of them will make a casual, coaxing suggestion of leaving the house. He hasn’t snapped at them yet. He doesn’t really have the energy to.

“Well, you know I don’t like to walk without company,” she says, which is a blatant lie. Mom’s solitary walks have been a staple in their household since he was a little kid, stolen moments in which she could clear her head. She calls them her secret weapon. 

He gives her a flat stare. She sighs.

“I don’t want to walk without company right now,” she amends.

“So have Dad walk with you,” Shane mumbles.

She gives him a flat stare right back. They have an unspoken pact, his parents, to not leave him alone.

“Really,” he says, tracing his finger over the patterns in the counter. “You should…I don’t wanna keep you cooped up here. I’ll be fine.”

She scoffs.

“I was fine for three days before you showed up. I’ll be fine for three hours.”

Her face twists. She picks up the coffee pot, like it will hide the fact her hands are shaking.

“I’m sorry. I’m…I’m sorry for a lot of things, Shane, but I’m sorriest for leaving you alone like that.”

“S’not your fault. You didn’t know.”

“No,” she says, breath heavy in her lungs. “I didn’t. You didn’t…I did something that made you not feel safe telling me. I put so much pressure on you to be the person I knew you could be, and somewhere along the line I forgot to tell you to be you. The most basic thing a mother is supposed to tell her child.”

She swipes angrily at her face with one hand, pouring a mug of coffee with the other. He should reassure her, probably. Tell her that the pressure wasn’t her fault, that his fear wasn’t her fault.

But that would be a lie. On some small level, that would be a lie. And he is so tired of lying to her.

“And because of that, I didn’t know that you lost someone you loved. I left you alone in that.”

She reaches across the counter and rests her hand over Shane’s arm.

“Please don’t make me leave you alone now. Please.”

He swallows. Nods.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, I’ll…I’ll come for a walk with you.”

Of course, his phone chooses that moment to light up. He glances down at it. SV is calling. He really should answer Svetlana, one of these days. Later. He’s already agreed to go for a walk, and that’ll take approximately 150% of his energy for the day. 

He stabs the decline button and watches the phone go dark. Mom hums.

“Who was that?” she asks, as she finishes stirring a glug of oatmilk into Shane’s coffee and slides it over to him.

“Ilya’s friend,” he mumbles, wrapping his hands around the mug.

The phone lights up again. SV is calling.

“Maybe you should…”

“Later,” Shane says, pressing decline again. “Where were you thinking of—”

The phone lights up again. A text this time.

SV: I know you’re declining my calls. They’re going to voicemail too quickly.

SV: Please pick up, something important happened and I really don’t want to tell you over text.

Something important? What important thing could Svetlana possibly have to tell him over the phone? Fuck, is Ilya’s funeral tomorrow? Did Ilya leave him something in his will? Did a nosy teammate find Ilya’s secret diary, full of lewd details of their eight-year-long something and leak it to the press?

Probably not that last one. Still, the panic is closing over him like a wave. Ilya is dead. What else could this awful week possibly have for him?

The phone lights up again. SV is calling.

He picks up.

“Hi, Jane,” she says. There are voices in the background of the call, men calling to each other, a burst of laughter. Is she at a party? Fuck, is she at a memorial, did she just…did she just decide not to invite him to Ilya’s funeral? Did she try and he just didn’t pick up?

“Hi,” he says, curling in on himself. Nothing she says can be worse than the last phone call. He survived that. He can survive whatever this is.

“So I just got off the phone with Air Canada,” Svetlana says. Her voice is wet, but louder than last time. Almost manic. “They—you’ll never believe me, Jane, but they fucked up the investigation. They just assumed that Ilya was sitting in his assigned seat, but he’d moved before the flight took off, and…and they found him. They just found him.”

“What?”

“They found Ilya. He’s alive.”

He’s dreaming. 

He has to be. He’s fast asleep in his big empty bed, and his brain decided that he needed a reprieve from the grief drowning him, so it concocted a pretty little fantasy. A perfect world in which he gets everything he ever wanted. It’s too stupid to realize that waking up will break him.

There’s a surefire way to wake up from a dream. He found it when he was thirteen and beset by a recurring nightmare of finding himself standing in the middle of the hockey rink, naked and barefoot and holding a pool noodle instead of a hockey stick. He squeezes his eyes shut, tight enough that red swirls start bursting over his vision, and balls his free hand into a fist. He takes a long, deep breath, and as he lets it out, he flicks open his eyes and his hand.

He should be in bed. He should be curled up on his side, dry mouthed and sweaty, and Ilya should still be dead.

Instead, he’s greeted with the sight of his mom staring at him, her hands hovering over the countertop, her forehead creased into a dent.

“Honey?” she asks. “Is everything—?”

“Jane?” Svetlana says in his ear. “Jane, are you still there?”

“Mmhmm,” Shane says raggedly. He closes his eyes again, breathes, opens them. Still not a dream. “Sorry I think I…I think I blacked out or. Or something. Can you repeat that?”

“Ilya’s alive,” Svetlana says, and some of the mania is gone from her voice. It’s gentled into a tone that Shane would use to soothe a frightened animal.  “The crash investigators made a mistake and declared him dead too early. He was found on Monday and brought to The Ottawa Hospital.”

“He…Monday? And they only just told you now?”

Three days. Three extra days of grief, of moving around his own house like a ghost, of feeling more and more certain that he won’t just be able to go back into the world—back to hockey—without everyone knowing that something is deeply, irrevocably wrong with him. Three days that he could’ve been at Ilya’s side, holding his hand, comforting him.

Three days he could’ve had with Ilya.

Because Ilya’s alive.

Holy shit, Ilya’s alive.

“They didn’t recognize him,” Svetlana says. “He didn’t have his ID, and he was…he was unconscious, I guess. Injured. I don’t know how badly, the hospital hasn’t called me yet, but—but I’ll be there soon. Seven hours, eight max.”

They didn’t recognize him. They didn’t fucking recognize one of the most famous hockey players in the world. So either no one at the fucking Ottawa Hospital follows hockey or…or he’s really, really hurt.

“I’m just outside of Ottawa,” he says, shoving down the tiny, panicking voice cataloguing the thousand different ways in which Ilya might be horrifically maimed. “I can be there…I can be there in two hours, max, if you can get me on the visitor’s list? Fuck, is that something you can do?” 

“I’m his medical proxy,” Svetlana says. “So yes, probably. I hope so. If not…he’s awake, at least a bit. He gave them his name, so…fuck, he can probably tell them to let you in himself.”

“Okay,” Shane says. He squeezes his eyes shut one last time, just in case.

When he opens them he’s still here. The world is just a bit blurrier.

It’s not a dream. It’s not a dream. Ilya’s alive. Ilya’s alive and hurt, Ilya’s alive and he might never be the same again, but Ilya’s alive.

Shane can tell him that he loves him.

A sob slips out of his lips without permission, and Mom is moving around the counter and wrapping her arms around him. He wonders if he’ll ever be able to pack this version of him—this weepy, fragile, soft thing—back inside his chest. Maybe he will never cry again, after he kisses Ilya. Maybe he will be able to tug the pieces of his armor back together.

Maybe he won’t. Maybe this will be the injury the plane crash leaves him with. Ilya’s face is twisted into something unrecognizable, so it only makes sense that Shane’s heart has mirrored it.

“It’s gonna be okay, Jane,” Svetlana says. There are shuffling sounds from the other side of the line. A door opening and closing. The rustle of clothes. “I…I’m gonna pack a bag for Ilya and then I’m gonna start driving, okay? Do you have someone with you, someone that can get you to the hospital?”

“Yeah,” Shane says. “Yeah, my mom’s here.”

“Good,” she says. “I’m glad. She seems…hm. Very powerful. Good at her job. Ilyusha would never say, but he is jealous of you, I think.”

“Maybe she can get him a Rolex deal,” Shane laughs wetly. God. God. That’s something that might actually happen, now. Ilya has a future. They have a future, together.

“Maybe I will ask her if she knows any brands looking for models,” Svetlana says. “I would be good at it, I think.”

Another laugh. There is a relief to it. If someone had asked him yesterday, he’d have said that he didn’t think he would ever laugh again.

“I’m excited to meet her, Jane,” she says. “And you. Em…you should know that one of Ilya’s teammates is coming up with me. I…I think he would like to meet you too, if that’s something that you and Ilya would want.”

“Maybe,” Shane says. The thought of leaving Ilya’s bedside, of sneaking away to let a teammate take his place, makes him want to hurl his coffee mug at the wall. But Ilya’s hurt. Ilya’s…Ilya’s fucking traumatized, probably, and Shane is not going to out him to the Raiders if he can avoid it. Shane isn’t going to take something else from him. So if Ilya wants him to leave, he’ll suck it up and leave.

He thinks he would do just about anything for Ilya right now. If Ilya needed a heart transplant, he’d find some way of putting himself under the knife.

“Okay,” Svetlana says. “Alright. I’m going to hang up so I can pack now properly, okay?”

“Okay,” Shane parrots. “I’ll see you at the hospital.”

“Bye, Jane.”

He lowers the phone with a shaking hand. He’s shaking all over, he realizes numbly. He’s shaking all over and he needs to stop shaking so that he can get up and go to the hospital.

“Shane?” Mom asks. Her hands rub down his back. “Shane, what’s going on?”

“Ilya’s alive,” he says. The words are honey on his tongue. He could repeat them forever and never get sick of the way they feel in his mouth. “Mom…Ilya’s alive. He’s in the hospital, Air Canada or the TSB or someone messed up and said he was dead, but—but he’s not dead. Oh God, Ilya’s not dead.”

She presses her lips to the crown of his head. Holds him. For a moment, he's worried she'll think he's had a mental break.

“Thank God,” she says. “Oh, Shane, baby, I can’t…I was so…thank God.”

She takes a shuddering breath against his hair.

“So,” she says, all business. “We’re going to the hospital?”

“Yeah,” Shane laughs, feeling profoundly grateful for her. “Yeah, we’re going to the hospital. You can…fuck, you can meet Ilya.”

His parents can meet Ilya. His mom can scrutinize his brand deals, and his dad can show off his vodka collection, and they can both welcome Ilya to their table, to their home, to their lives. He pictures it, pictures Ilya sundrenched and smiling and reaching across the table for the salt, and needs to hide his face in his hands and breathe until the tears dry up.

“I can’t wait,” Mom says, and he can hear her grinning.

Chapter End Notes

for the record, I did research it, and the major trauma hospital in Ottawa is in fact called The Ottawa Hospital. I know, it sounds fake to me too.

Chapter 8

Chapter Notes

surprise! I'm going on vacation and don't wanna have to remember to post the last chapter on time, so you get it super early. Enjoy! :D

The drive to The Ottawa Hospital passes in a horrible mockery of his childhood roadtrips, Dad’s hands steady on the wheel, Shane folded up in the backseat, Mom twisting around in the passenger seat to make sure he’s okay. He stares out the window and watches the mile markers pass and thinks Ilya is alive over and over. Testing the feeling of the thought in his skull. Tests the image of Ilya curled up in his bed, splayed out on the dock, grinning and golden under the risking sun.

Tests the image of Ilya hurt. Ilya missing a leg, Ilya with half of his memories gone, Ilya with a face scarred beyond recognition. Ilya needing help and trusting Shane to give it. It’s a terrible, warm thing to hold in his head.

Highways turn into city streets. They pass what looks like a memorial piled on the sidewalk outside a restaurant, teddy bears and flowers and burned-out candles. Shane’s lungs turn inside out. He wonders how many memorials like this line the streets of Boston. He wonders if they’ll all be swept away, when the news breaks that Ilya is alive.

He thinks of all the people who added to this memorial, all the hands that laid the flowers, all the trembling fingers that lit the candles. He thinks of them learning of Ilya’s miraculous survival on the news. He thinks of them sitting in that miracle, and knowing that their daughter or brother or friend did not get a miracle of their own.

Mom makes a soft noise in the back of her throat. Dad steps on the gas. The memorial passes in a haze of melted wax.

Traffic lights. Winding turns. The shop where he’d bought his first hockey stick. The ice cream shop he used to go to after practice. He can smell the waffle cones from here. It's his hometown, and the first time he brought Ilya here, it tried to kill him.

And then they’re turning into the wide stretch of asphalt that is The Ottawa Hospital visitor’s parking lot, and every maudlin thought is pushed out of Shane’s brain by the sound of his own heartbeat. He’s unbuckling his seat belt before Dad has even found a parking spot.

“Lemme out,” he’s saying, and then he’s shoving open the door, and then he’s sprinting faster than he’s ever sprinted in his life. There are thirty seconds left in the third period, the Metros are down a point, and Shane Hollander is on a breakaway. 

He doesn’t really remember what he says or does after that. There’s a sympathetic woman behind a desk, a nametag being pressed into his hands, a room number, an elevator, the smell of antiseptic and latex all around him. He squeezes his eyes shut as the elevator dings upward, takes a deep breath. Ilya, says his heart. Ilya, Ilya, Ilya.

The doors of the ICU. A hand on his shoulder, directing him towards Ilya’s room. His knuckles white against the handle of a door.

He swallows his heart and pushes it open.

And he’s there.

Ilya’s there.

Half of his face is covered in bandages, as is his right arm. The skin that Shane can see is horribly pale, his cheeks and eyes sunken, his lips cracked and dry. There are more tubes and wires connected to him than Shane could guess at the uses for. He looks so sick. He looks almost as sick as a person could get before they die.

But his eyes flick to the door when Shane comes in, and…

And…

God, he didn’t think he’d ever get to see that again. 

That slow softening of Ilya’s eyes. The way his entire body relaxes. The smile creeping across his lips, small and gentle and just for Shane.  He didn’t think anyone would look at him like that ever again, because surely Ilya was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of love. Surely he couldn’t get so lucky twice.

“Hey,” Ilya whispers. His voice is a ruin. Creaky and metallic, and Shane doesn’t know if it’s from screaming or thirst or smoke inhalation, but he hates it. He wants to wrap Ilya in his arms and hold him until he stops sounding like that. 

“Hey,” Shane whispers back. He stumbles across the room and drops heavily into the chair at Ilya’s bedside. “God. Hello.”

“You’re here,” Ilya says. He lifts his good hand from the mattress. It trembles in the air and Shane wastes no time catching it between his own. He ducks his head, pressing his lips to Ilya’s knuckles. There are tiny scrapes on his skin. Shane pictures him trapped in the belly of a burning plane, desperately trying to claw his way out, and has to swallow down a sob.

“I’m here,” he says. “Of course I’m here. Where else would I be?”

Ilya stares at him for a long moment, his brow furrowed. Shane wants to press his fingers there, to soothe away the wrinkles, but that would require letting go of Ilya’s hand. So he just drops a second kiss to his knuckles, another to the back of his hand. He’s warm. Too warm, probably. Probably one of the many bags attached to him is full of antibiotics, helping fight off whatever infection has taken roots under his bandages.

But until two hours ago, Ilya was a pile of cold ash. Shane will spend the rest of his life reaching for his warmth.

“Thought you wouldn’t want the risk,” Ilya croaks at last. And that does it. That’s enough. Shane breaks. Shane buckles over Ilya’s hand like someone has socked him in the stomach, and does not quite manage to stifle a terrible keening sound behind his teeth.

“Fuck,” he sobs. “I don’t care. I don’t care, Ilya, and I’m so sorry if you do, but I couldn’t stay away. You…I thought you were dead. For a week I thought you were dead. I couldn’t not be here with you.”

“Shane,” Ilya says, and he sounds like his heart is breaking. 

“I’m sorry,” Shane says into Ilya’s wrist. “Sorry, you survived a fucking plane crash, you should be the one crying—”

“I am,” Ilya almost laughs. “I am. Believe me.”

His hand twitches in Shane’s grip. 

“Come here, Hollander,” he says. “Come. Put your head down, that’s it.”

Shane follows Ilya’s weak tugging, lets Ilya guide his head down to the crook of his left shoulder. He doesn’t smell like himself. The spice of his cologne, the eucalyptus undertones of his deodorant, the piney gel that he crunches through his curls, they’ve all been buried over with hospital, hospital, and more hospital.

He needs to ask Ilya for a list of products, and then he needs to hire a courier to bring them here. Ilya will feel better if he smells like himself. Probably.

Shane will feel better, at least.

“I can go,” Shane mumbles into Ilya’s collarbone. He would rather rip his own eyes out, but he figures he should offer. “If you want to keep it…contained. I can go before your teammates start showing up, at least. A few people already know, though. Svetlana, and my parents—”

“Good,” Ilya interrupts. His fingers drift up to tangle in Shane’s hair. If Shane closes his eyes, and ignores the godawful hospital smell, he can almost pretend that they’re in bed together. “Am glad you were not alone. I—”

He takes a shuddering, shallow breath.

“I was alone. In a house. Crawled there after the crash, looking for help, and…and there was no one. For four days, I was there, they tell me. Was the scariest thing in my life.”

“God,” Shane says, and does not tell Ilya that he was alone in his grief for three days. Later. They have time to talk. They have time for anything they want, now. “That sounds terrifying.”

“Yes. It was.” Ilya’s hands keep moving through Shane’s hair. Over and over. “Makes other things seem less scary, yes?”

“Yes.”

Shane lifts his head and looks Ilya full in the face. His eyes are wide, spilling over with tears. Shane thumbs them away, then does it again, and again, relishing the feeling of Ilya’s cheek under his hand. He does his best to hold him like something precious.

“I love you too, for the record,” he says. “I’m so happy I get to tell you that.”

Ilya’s face crumples.

“Fuck, Hollander,” he sobs, squeezing his eyes shut, and Shane leans down to plant an awkward kiss on the side of his lips that isn’t slathered with burn cream.

“God, I love you so much,” he says, their tears mingling on Ilya’s face. “I love you so much I thought it would kill me.”

“It won’t,” Ilya says. His hand is still fisted in Shane’s hair. “It won’t kill either of us.”

Shane isn’t quite sure about that. Because this is it. Looking down at Ilya, crying, snotty, burn-covered, horribly sick Ilya, Shane knows that this is it. This is the love of his life. No one else will do. No one else will ever compare. If Ilya had died, some part of Shane—the most important part of Shane, the thing that made him him—would have died right alongside him. He would’ve stepped back onto the ice, and every single Metro would’ve known they were playing alongside a corpse.

“Marry me,” he says.

Ilya’s breath stutters in his lungs. His eyes go wide. 

“I…Hollander, what? I am sorry, I think I might be hallucinating.”

It’s not exactly the reaction Shane was hoping for, but he’s nothing if not committed once he has his sights set on something. And as soon as the question passed his lips, he had his sights set on this. He’s going to marry this man.

“You’re it for me,” Shane says. “I knew that as soon as I lost you. I don’t want…fuck, I’m sorry, I know we’re not even dating, I know this is so fucking impulsive, but I don’t want to wait anymore.”

Ilya’s fingers slip to the nape of Shane’s neck and pinch into the hair there. He sniffles.

“I love you. But I’m not going to say yes,” he says. “Not right now.”

“Okay,” Shane says, in what he hopes is a calm voice. He’s already crying, so it won’t be obvious that his heart is breaking.

“Shane, no. I’m not going to say yes because I do not want to get engaged in a hospital bed. But…ask me again later. A month, maybe. Ask me at your cottage.”

“And you’ll say yes?”

“That will spoil surprise.”

His fingers squeeze harder.

“But I know you are bad with surprises, so yes. I’m not saying yes now, but I will say yes later. Okay?”

“Okay,” Shane laughs wetly, and leans down to kiss him again. He gets a lifetime of this. He gets a lifetime of Ilya in his arms, Ilya sighing against his lips, Ilya and Ilya and Ilya.

“Oh.”

He sits back, turning to face the door as Ilya’s hand falls from his hair. His mom and dad are lingering there, both of them looking faintly beside themselves. Mom has a hand over her mouth, and Dad’s hand is clasped over her shoulder.

“Ah,” Ilya says. “Hello, Hollanders. This is not, ah, how I wanted to meet you.”

Dad recovers first. “I’m just glad to hear you wanted to meet us at all.”

“Was hoping to secure invite to Hollander family dinner,” Ilya says very seriously. “Shane says you are a very good cook.”

Shane has said no such thing. Shane hasn’t really ever said anything about his family to Ilya. But his dad beams, and his mom immediately starts bombarding Ilya with questions about his recovery—does he know when he’ll be out of the hospital? Will he need regular outpatient appointments? Does he want to stay with Shane, or does he need to be closer to the city center, because if it’s the latter, their main home is a twenty minute drive from the hospital—and something warm settles in his chest.

This is not how he would have chosen to introduce his parents to his almost-fiance. But as they talk, his mom’s eyes keep falling on where their hands are clasped together, and there is something like relief in her expression. The tension trains from her shoulders, and she starts nodding approvingly whenever Ilya says anything, and Shane thinks it’s no wonder. She can tell how much he loves me.

All this time, all the gentle, nagging offers of setting him up with Swedish princesses, and that’s all she wanted. Someone to love him. Someone that he loves.

His parents stay for another hour or two, and Shane gamely restrains himself from telling them that he and Ilya are sort-of engaged (even though he wants to scream it from the rooftops. He thinks he should be given a trophy for patience and fortitude). Eventually, they excuse themselves, Mom squeezing Shane’s shoulder before they go.

“Remember, we’re twenty minutes away if you need us,” she says, with the voice of a woman who’s about to spend the next eight hours researching burn recovery and complex tibia fractures. With breaks, of course, to rewrite Ilya’s entire marketing strategy.

“I know,” Shane says. “Thank you both. For everything.”

For finding him. For scraping him off the couch and gently, relentlessly pushing him back into the shape of a human being. For bringing him to Ilya, and not saying one startled word about the fact that it was Ilya.

“I would say anytime,” Mom says. “But no more near death experiences, please. From either of you.”

“Seconded,” David says from his spot near Ilya’s shoulder. He’s clutching a shopping list like it’s a precious document—specs for a new phone, Ilya’s favorite sweater brand, the gross caramel latte flavored protein shakes that he’s obsessed with, a pulpy Russian-language detective novel that he’ll probably have to order off of Amazon. He’s spent the past twenty minutes convincing Ilya to add things to it.

“Do not worry,” Ilya says. His eyelids are starting to droop. “Will never fly again. They’ll have to order a special limousine to chauffeur me around to games.”

That won’t work, Shane knows. Somehow, someday, Ilya is going to need to get on a plane again if he wants to play hockey. The thought does something very uncomfortable to his stomach. But for now, they all laugh at the mental image of Ilya taking a limousine from Boston to LA, and Shane escorts his parents to the door.

His mom gives him a massive hug at the threshold.

“I’m so proud of you,” she says. “And I am so, so relieved that it ended this way.”

“Yeah,” Shane says, hugging her back. She knows. She knows that he was dead as long as Ilya was. “Me too.”

When Shane finishes his goodbyes and makes his way back to Ilya’s bedside, it’s to find him completely passed out, mouth wide open, face relaxed in sleep. Shane settles back into the chair. He wonders how many mornings he’ll get like this, waking up early and watching Ilya’s eyes twitch back and forth under their lids. He hopes it’s too many to count.

Ilya’s chest rises and falls. Ilya’s heart beeps away on the monitor. Ilya is here and alive and dreaming.

Someday soon, he’ll be able to call Ilya his husband.

He sits there for hours, smiling at the nurses as they come in and fiddle with the bags pouring into Ilya’s veins, not caring if anyone sees him. It’ll be hard, he knows. Being married. Being out. There’s the league. There’s Russia. There’s the cold, uncaring face of the universe that sometimes slaps planes out of the sky.

But there’s them. There’s Ilya, alive. At the end of the day, he thinks that’ll beat out anything else.

Six hours later, the door bursts open. Behind it is a man and a woman. Cliff Marleau and Svetlana, presumably. Both of them are red-eyed and swaying on their feet. Svetlana is carrying a half-empty iced coffee the size of her head. Marleau’s shoes are untied.

“Ilyusha,” Svetlana says.

Ilya’s eyes flutter open, and he grins widely at them.

“Marly! Sveta!” he says, waving a hand in their direction. “Come meet my fiance.”

Shane thinks his heart might be trying to crawl out from underneath his ribcage. Surely it needs to go somewhere, to move, to get all this love out of it before it bursts.

“Technically we aren’t engaged yet,” he says.

Marleau’s jaw drops. Shane didn’t know that happened outside of cartoons. Svetlana laughs, stumbling over to Shane’s side and flinging her arm around his shoulders.

“Shane Hollander,” she says. “Glad to be meeting you in a hospital and not a funeral home.”

“Yeah,” he says, leaning back. Marleau is mute with shock, making a series of complicated hand gestures at Ilya, trying to convey bafflement and support and…Shane’s pretty sure that’s supposed to represent a hand job. Ilya is grinning wider and wider, and Shane thinks this is going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.

“I love you all,” Ilya says, as Marleau finally gives up on miming and settles for hugging the left side of his body like an oversized koala.

“We love you too, man,” Marleau croaks.

“More than you know,” Svetlana says.

“Love you,” Shane breathes, and these words, too, will taste like honey forever. “Love you. Love you.”

Chapter End Notes

and then Shane moves to Boston and the Bruins Raiders win the Stanley Cup forever and ever. This is a wonderful ending for everybody, most importantly me, your local Boston sports fan

I hope you all enjoyed! This was a really fun fic to write, these characters are delightful to make miserable get in the heads of! I have a few other ideas that I've been kicking around, so if hostage situations, deserted island survival, or Shane finding out he was kidnapped via a 23AndMe test sounds like it'd be up your alley, pull up a chair and stay awhile. Feel free to come yell at me on tumblr!