Many thanks to vesna for her advice on Russian language and culture. Content notes at the bottom.

Ilya falls.

That’s all there is.

That’s not all there is, but Shane has that look in the emergency room which makes Ilya want to blush and complain about nothing. It’s the last day of formal training for any team in the NHL. It’s fine. He’s fine. But Shane yells. He shouts at the resident about broken bones and career-ending injuries and how they should take this seriously and even the team doctor sent him straight into the ER without checking and would someone, just—

“Don’t worry, you’ll be playing the piano in no time,” the doctor says, to Ilya, while Shane yells at her that Ilya is a pro hockey player and that’s a huge deal and what’s wrong with everyone here.

“I moved here three weeks ago from Glasgow, I don’t give a shit about your Disney on hockey whatever,” she says. “Your boyfriend is going to be fine.”

Shane tries to yell some more, then gives up. If a hospital’s records end up in public and everyone in the world hears the word boyfriend, so be it. He takes Ilya home.

This—this yelling at the doctor, Ilya’s broken foot—is a little while later. Long enough that they’re living in Ottawa, living together, kind of. Kind of: Ilya has a place in town but he never sleeps there. His non-hockey-loving neighbour thinks it’s a safe house for the Russian mob. Which is stupid and xenophobic, Shane says, but Ilya doesn’t mind because weirdly she likes Ilya anyway. Ruffles his hair and asks if he’s met any nice girls lately.

And it turns out there are a lot of things Ilya doesn’t mind. He doesn’t mind sort of living with Shane, walking down the street with him, being with him. You can’t play pro hockey forever. You can play hockey. You can go through the rhythm of it: helmet; pads; the thick socks with the cuffs; the honesty. You and the ice, the dance of it. It’s not your lover or your mother and it can beat you up just as much as it ever did. Ilya first skated on the pond by the family dacha, when he was a kid. The willow tips skimmed the winter frost. It will always be yours.

But there won’t always be 20,000 spectators hanging around for it. So Ilya doesn’t mind it. Living together, building things together. This gathering up and assembling, like Lego pieces, of a life that could someday be his.

That’s where he was on that last day of training, ready to gather up a life. Right now all he’s doing is gathering up his papers and elevating the broken ankle cast. Shane isn’t around; he’s busy all week on charitable endeavours, or other endeavours, unspecified; Ilya doesn’t really know where. Ilya himself is sitting at the kitchen table, an object he never thought he would personally own, and he’s filling out a form. Ilya speaks perfect English, except when he’s tired; he can type in English, when he has to; but other than little notes to Shane on the refrigerator and autographs, he doesn’t handwrite in English. Not often. A form like this—Application for Canadian citizenship: adults and children (initial checklist)—doesn’t come along very often.

It occurs to Ilya that kitchen table notwithstanding, he doesn’t belong here. His phone rings and he seizes the opportunity to be doing anything else.

“Ilya, honey,” says a woman’s voice, sounding like she’s in the grocery store or on the street and will disappear into radio static any moment. “What was your mom’s name?”

“Irina,” Ilya says, startled into a straight answer. He remembers Shane asking the same question, way back when. Apparently Yuna doesn’t know where the name of the charitable foundation came from. “Ah, why?”

“Oh….” Yuna is trailing off, disappearing in the hubbub. “Gotta go, honey. Bye!”

“Bye,” Ilya says. Feels stupid and alone. He throws the form to the ground and then of course he can’t pick it up.

It’s not the end of the world. It’s just a table and broken ankle and a form. Shane comes back from wherever he went, bringing takeout, soothing Ilya just by his presence. At least Ilya wants to be soothed, which is almost the same. They eat Korean food and later they fuck on the couch. Ilya loves that: not just that they can do it like this, without texting and scheduling and determining when it’s allowed to happen, as though they were a sad retired couple or a Moscow Metro train. Even their couch is ordinary. The apartment is pretty nice—how could it not be—but they’re like any random horny couple on their random green couch. So really everything’s good, and everything’s fine. Better than it has been for years. When they’re done Ilya wipes himself down and wipes Shane down, and Shane picks up all the scattered papers on the floor.

“Going well, huh,” he says, waving the citizenship application.

Ilya wants to say it’s going fantastically, thank you, and isn’t it nice to be fancy and not a fucking immigrant, but he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “I asked Svetlana. But she is American. It is a different form.”

He knows he sounds like an idiot. But the form makes him feel that way, like an idiot from another country. Place of birth. Place of grandparents’ birth. They all came from another country. He doesn’t belong here.

Shane looks helpless. “Like… there must be people who can help.”

There must be. Lawyers, maybe. Public advocates. But if it gets out that Ilya Rozanov is applying for citizenship… well. It shouldn’t. They have a plan for full disclosure and it doesn’t start like this. llya gets up on his crutches and dumps the papers back on the table. “Enough of all that,” he says. “Why would your mother call me and ask my mother’s name?”

Shane blinks. “Maybe she figured out the name of the charity?”

Maybe she did, and she just wanted to be sure. Irina’s Foundation, a name written a dozen times on a different set of forms, now almost completely incorporated under federal law. Ilya shakes his head. That wouldn’t be a sudden, urgent question, asked in the midst of something else.

“Who were you out with today?” he asks, because he doesn’t know. Unfamiliar skate guards have been discarded by the door. But Shane has his head in the refrigerator, looking for pudding. Ilya doesn’t ask again.

The angry Glaswegian ER resident was very stern about it. Wait a week, she said, before you go outside on your crutches; be sure to take someone with you. Ilya tries alone anyway, on a smoggy hot morning with the apartment in gloom. And at first, it’s okay. The neighbour who thinks he’s a mobster helps him into the elevator and clucks and chatters all of that time. Ilya thinks maybe no-one’s a mobster, maybe this is just a mother and somewhere there’s a curly-headed son who never calls. Out in the strange half-heated morning, so¬meone has hung a Canadian flag from a streetlamp. It flaps, side to side, listless, the slap of fabric the only sound.

Ilya stands there for a while, amid heat haze and unfamiliar leaves. It’s as though something is about to happen, something should happen—like the culmination of a plan years in the making, like him being something publicly to Shane. But nothing does. Nothing will. Upstairs the citizenship application is face down on the carpet. Ilya feels as fragile as bone.

Still. Shane isn’t here. No one here is anyone’s mother. He can find his own way back inside.

The apartment is hot and empty, and filled with silence. Shane shows up in the mid-afternoon, chattering about nothing except where he’s been. He seems flushed, as though he’s been doing hard exercise. Ilya watches him cross the floor and feels like his own mouth is heavy with stones. Shane, that idiotskaya khuyovaya application. Shane doesn’t know what that means. Shane I don’t belong here.

He doesn’t say it. Later on he makes dinner, because he might as well. I don’t belong here as he stirs pelmeni and broth. This apartment has a big, airy kitchen, which Ilya’s family apartment in Moscow could fit into wholesale and still leave space for the granite countertops. Shane was surprised he could cook; Ilya reminded him he was once a kid a long way from home. When he’s ladling out the soup it all almost spills out. I want to stay but I can’t. He lays out the food and doesn’t say anything at all.

They eat in front of the TV. Shane flicks through channels, then stops at something in crisp black and white.

“My parents watched this show a lot when I was a kid,” he says, and glances over at Ilya for a moment, like he’s embarrassed. “You ever saw it?”

Ilya shakes his head. On the screen two white men walk down a Western street: one tall, handsome, probably American; another slight and wiry, with soft, light-coloured hair. “Illya,” Shane says, still embarrassed. “That’s, uh, Illya. Him.”

He points. The blond one, brushing down his suit, smiling at the other.

“It’s like this, uh, Cold War thing?” Shane is still embarrassed. “Illya was the cute one, everyone’s favourite, that’s what my mom says. He was Russian, born in the Soviet Union.”

“The Soviet Union,” Ilya repeats, not sure what to make of it. “I was born there, too.”

Perhaps Shane is out skating with some friend of his. He’s always been better than Ilya at friends. But Ilya doesn’t miss hockey. Imagine the sharp, crisp, snow of a blade, T stop or snowplough—but he can’t imagine it. The apartment still feels empty, too hot, so he tries to fill it with noise, stupid action movies or the pop music of his youth. You’re young even now, laughs Svetlana, somewhere; but Ilya never knew much of the Russia of his youth. He was somewhere else.

Kids’ TV, then. Some strange person has uploaded it, hours of it, Soviet puppets on YouTube, dancing. Goodnight, they say; goodnight, little ones. Goodnight, Ilya says, because everything hurts and he still can’t fill out the form. Even if he went back to Russia now he wouldn’t know how to fill out a form. He never applied for a driving licence or to marry his boyfriend. They don’t make Soviet TV any more. You can’t unswallow a bottle of pills.

There are pills. Painkillers for his broken ankle, from the mad Scottish woman in the ER. Ilya imagines them on the shelf in the bathroom, tries to get up. Swears. Says idiotskaya, application form, Shane. Shane has texted because he can’t make it for dinner. Tries to get up again. Ilya is afraid, suddenly. One crutch down, trembling, on the floor, while the weight of everything presses down. If he falls--

Goodnight.

“You hurry up and get dressed, I’ll wait here,” Yuna says. She has a key. Ilya and Shane are insane people and they let her have a key. “When you’re done we’ll go out.”

“Cannot,” Ilya says, gesturing at his bandaged foot. He’s still on the floor. “Cannot go out.”

“What, of course you can,” says Yuna, a woman who doesn’t schedule self-doubt after twelve. “I’ll help you into the car. Come on now.”

Ilya gets dressed. There seems no other option. In the car Yuna doesn’t say where they’re going but looks at him sidelong in the mirror. “You look like hell,” she says. “Which is a shame when you’re such a good looking kid. Listen, I was gonna call back, ask if it’s Irina with two Is.”

“It is in the name of the foundation,” Ilya says, stilted. He’s not in pain. Yuna gave him painkillers. He doesn’t know what’s happening.

“Well, yeah, I know that now.” Yuna is driving with purpose, like this is only the first stage of the plan. “Don’t worry, I checked with the accessibility coordinator. You’re gonna be absolutely fine.”

Accessibility coordinator of what, Ilya asks inwardly, but he’s given up. He’ll find out.

The lights of the city are fading out. Ilya has a sense that they’re passing over a chasm, in transit to a greater dark. It takes him a moment to realise it’s the Champlain Bridge. Light returns as Yuna negotiates a curve down towards the water. The remains of Ilya’s rational brain think this must be Bate Island, where he’s been a couple of times on summer days; it’s somewhere to picnic away from prying eyes, and for a handjob under a picnic blanket, if they’re careful.

“Nearly there,” Yuna says, parking at the end of a row of cars. “Out, Ilya. We don’t want it to get dark.”

In all this time and all these lives, Ilya has never tired of this: this long, wondrous northern twilight. They walk past a busy low-slung building full of talk and laughter, with people dancing beyond the window glass. Ilya sees a holy altar, bright with offerings, not like the ones he once knew. Yuna leads the way along a winding path into the trees and gradually the noise dissipates behind them. Others are coming this way along with them, or returning from somewhere. Ilya recognises the Japanese costumes, the yugata. He stumps along with his crutch and Yuna catches his elbow whenever it seems like he’s about to fall. Eventually, they come to the water’s edge, to the shallows. The coming darkness is filled with a thousand brilliant light. Ilya peers out at the soft stars on dim water and finds it almost too beautiful to look.

“What is this for?” He knows it sounds harsh, that he always sounds harsh. “All this… light.”

“Obon.” Yuna squeezes his shoulders. “How we mark the dead. I brought Shane for it, when he was younger. For the festival, for the dancing. But he wasn’t like you.”

Ilya knows what that means. Shane was then, is still an innocent; he knows nothing of grief. “What do we do?” he asks. “For Obon.”

He's tasting the word, trying to get it right.

“We’ll light lanterns,” Yuna says briskly. “For my mom, and for yours. And on the way back past the community centre we’ll place her name tablet on the altar.”

“You needed my mother’s name,” Ilya says. It’s accusing, though he doesn’t want it to be. “Irina, with two Is.”

“I would have made an offering for her, even if I hadn’t brought you,” Yuna says. Ilya doesn’t know what to say to that, and she makes a big, expansive gesture. “Ilya, if your mom were still with us I’d have called her that day Shane brought you home. I would have asked her, did you know what our boys are up to? What goddamn secrets they kept from us? You wanna kick his ass or should I?”

Ilya can’t help the wave of warmth that passes through him. “My mother did not speak English,” he says, stiffly.

“Yeah?” Yuna looks at him sidelong through the dimness. “I’m thinking, if your mom stayed with us, and every sports anchor in the Western world was raving about her kid, but she couldn’t check it out for herself? You don’t think she’d be signed up in a minute for English classes at the YMCA? I know you don’t have the YMCA in Russia.”

“Not same,” Ilya says. “But we do.”

He wonders if Yuna knows how his mother died, but then he remembers the charitable foundation. Of course she knows. He can’t speak again for a while, so he holds still, balanced on his crutch. People are drummming, talking softly, lighting lanterns and setting them out on the water. After a while he and Yuna do the same: for Irina, and all the family dead. Ilya thinks he should say no to a tablet on the altar, even that he should say no to all this. But he can imagine it: telling his mother about the lights, about Japan which Russia almost touches. When they’re done he’s very tired.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Ilya,” Yuna says, as they head back through the trees. Ilya has not, in such a long time, heard that said.

“In a while there’s gonna be dancing,” she adds. "But if you don’t want to handle a whole crowd, we don’t have to.”

Ilya can’t say in words that a big crowd of noisy people will kill him, so he points at his injured foot. “I cannot dance,” he pronounces, and Yuna ruffles his hair.

“Sure, honey,” she says. “Time to go.”

It is. They keep their silence, all their way back. Ilya thinks about that stillness full of lights. When they get back to the apartment she gestures for him to stay for a minute. “Tell Shane about your painkillers and have him give to you,” she says. “And get a good night’s sleep. I want to see you at ten o’clock with all your papers. Don’t forget your passport.

“What?” Ilya says.

“Shane said you were having trouble with your citizenship application.” Yuna turns the key in the ignition. “It’s thirty years since I did it but that’s okay, we’re gonna drop in on some people I know. Did you know lawyers have to keep everything confidential no matter what? I swear to God, you two have been hit too many times in the head.”

Ilya looks over at the Japanese woman who came from halfway across the world, who brought her lanterns and her dead, and thinks: here was someone’s mother, all along.

In the apartment, Shane listens to Ilya’s account of the evening in stillness, with soft eyes. Silence follows the story, the beautiful space cooled by evening. “Are you done for the day,” Shane says carefully, “or could you stand to go out again?”

Ilya considers. “With you,” he says finally, “I go anywhere.”

Shane helps him downstairs, but it’s getting easier to be helped. Just like before, Ilya can’t guess where they’re going. It’s just the city, a slide of city blocks and suburbs before finally, a long, low building with a familiar profile though Ilya has never been here before. Shane gives him a hand out the passenger door, though Ilya can manage to stump along on his own as long as he knows Shane is there. They go inside and Ilya laughs for the first time in a long time.

“Why, Hollander,” Ilya says, as Shane pays for both of them, “why would you bring me to an ice rink?”

An ordinary suburban one, with the kids running around on their guards, the adults taking off their pads after practice. That gang of little girls in fancy tutus could be the remains of a birthday party. Ilya likes that idea, of flying over the ice in a sparkly tutu. It’s late, and they’re all leaving.

But Shane is still marching forwards, and for the first time Ilya suspects shenanigans. Skulduggery, a word he read in a book once. A public ice rink will overrun its schedule for no man, but if that man is Shane Hollander then Ilya is less sure. He follows Shane to the edge of a rink that is almost, but not quite empty. The front of the bleachers has more than enough space for Ilya to stretch out full length with his crutch. Shane lets him, leaning over to lace up his skates.

“Just stay here a minute,” Shane says quietly, when he’s finished. He kisses Ilya, in front of the that rink that is almost but not quite empty, and steps out on the ice.

Ilya thinks, dreamily: wait, those are not your skates. And then, with a whisper of amusement: wait, that is not my boyfriend. Shane Hollander, who once cuddled the Stanley Cup in his bathtub, is looking at his feet with worried care and attention. If Ilya yelled out his name suddenly he’d topple and fall.

Ilya doesn’t do that. He watches Shane skate to the centre of the rink, gear himself up to something, and then—Ilya doesn’t know the English for it. There were girls on the dacha pond who could do that. Back at the beginning of everything, they would poise their bodies like that, launch onto one foot and spin. Beautiful, fast, like a spinning top or the world.

Shane can’t do it as well as they could. He wobbles and just about lands the dismount, skates a recovery arc, does a waltz jump and then another spin. It’s a routine, Ilya realises in wonder. It’s a carefully learned, carefully practised routine, that Shane has carefully learned and practised; that he’s been coming to the rink for, that maybe he’s even taken classes for. It ends with a turn on the spot and Shane skates back up to the bleachers. “Hey,” he says, still quiet, but everything about his body language asks did you like it? Did you like me?

Ilya adores him. He grabs Shane’s hand and uses it to pull himself to standing.“So you’re a figure skater now,” he says, and as it dawns on him: “This is where you’ve been all week.”

“It was kind of…” Shane hesitates. “A class. A crash course.”

“And no one recognised you?” Ilya asks. “At an ice rink?”

“I used my mom’s last name.” Shane looks embarrassed. “And people don’t think it’s Shane Hollander if they just saw him fall flat on his ass on the ice.”

Ilya nods. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted to…” Shane isn’t looking at him, his eyes on a distant Zamboni. “Show you. Surprise you.”

Ilya loves him so much that tears spring to his eyes. “I’m surprised,” he says. He hasn’t said how much he liked it so he does that, a few times. “And you look… not beautiful, yet,” he adds thoughtfully. “But like you could be.”

Shane stares at him, his face soft. “I’m sorry I left you at home all week. I planned this before you broke your foot.”

“That’s okay,” Ilya says. It’s not, not really; he did so badly, alone, and if Shane didn’t know it would happen then Shane needs to learn that it can. Yuna certainly seems to be worried that it can. Ilya doesn’t think he really does have his mother’s tendency, that he need take that degree of care; but he needs to take some care. It’s so easy to lose oneself so far from home.

But they don’t need to get into all of that tonight. “Why did you do it?” he asks Shane, after a minute. “Why figure skating?”

Shane shrugs. “I… oh, I don’t know. My career’s nearly over. Like, you know that, everyone knows it, but it’s still true. And I’m not sad about it,” he adds, forestalling whatever Ilya was about to say. “I’ve had an amazing career. And even if I hadn’t, my career brought me you.”

How does he just say things like that, Ilya wonders. Just come out and say them.

“But I gotta be someone else, soon,” Shane says helplessly. “I’m trying to get to know him. That guy, who I’m gonna be.”

“He is a good guy,” Ilya says, instantly. “That guy.”

Shane smiles, a big beautiful smile. “I hope so. You okay? Not getting cold?”

This man is as bad as his mother, Ilya decides. “I am not okay,” he says. “My new guy who I will be soon will not be Russian. Not a citizen. It makes a difference although people will try to tell you it does not. And I do not know how I can practise being him.”

Yuna will help him with it, Ilya knows; so will Svetlana. They know about being someone from somewhere else. But in the end it will just be another icy pond he must embark upon alone, with courage and trepidation.

“Ilyusha,” Shane says. “Will you come with me this time?”

Ilya nods, not really understanding. Shane kneels in front of him and places Ilya’s feet gently into skates. Crappy rentals; one of them to be laced up properly and the other not. Shane tucks away the loose ends and checks that Ilya’s healing foot isn’t being hurt.

It is a little, and this is a terrible idea. But Ilya wants to do it. With Shane beside him, holding him up, he takes one step on the ice, and then another. It feels beaten-up, strange beneath his feet; like something hard, bitter, new.

Content note: discussion of Irina's suicide and of suicide generally, not graphic.

Obon is a Japanese festival that falls in August, full of parties and dancing, with offerings for the dead. I don't know much about Japan, but I know more about Japan than I do hockey or Russia. Apologies.

And my beloved, Illya Kuryakin! I refuse to believe this is the only HR story with him in.