Please assume if Ilya and Svetlana are talking without others around it is in Russian. I do not know Russian and will not pretend to ever.

Title is from "The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness" by The National.

Svetlana remembers her early years a little too well. The stares her mother got in public, the sideways glances her father got when he took her on a walk, the way sometimes her mother held her hand a little too tight on the street or hugged her a little too hard when they got home.

She thinks both her parents wish it had taken her longer to realize why.

She remembers the arguments, too, remembers Ilya and his quiet almost smile as he held out his hand during a party when both of their fathers were doing whatever they wanted and had, for at least a little, forgotten they even had children. (Not Ilya’s mother. Sveta saw her glancing back from whatever was being yelled at her to see where Ilya was. Not Sveta’s mother either, her shoulders tight and high, uncomfortable in her dress but unwavering. Mothers didn’t have the luxury of forgetting.)

She took Ilya’s hand back then and he took hers and they never let go. Not in the graveyard while he stared stone faced into a place she couldn’t see, not in the alley after a loss when his breath beat against her neck in a panic he wouldn’t let himself show any other way, not when he came to school with bruises that weren’t from a game, not when he folded into a pile in a corner for a moment to shudder himself back into the person everyone else wanted him to be.

Sveta can’t do that. She can’t be the person people want her to be. She only knows how to be her, and her is not what most people actually want for very long. Too bold, too confident, too loud, too – well. It takes her time to turn that into a strength instead of a weakness.

“Sasha is cute,” she says, years later, watching Ilya stretch himself across his bed after a game that wasn’t bad but not good either. She knows how to diagram those things and likes to, catalogues the moves and penalties and checks and scoffs at the misuse of a power play - not like Sasha, who rolls his eyes and ignores the games and slouches with his dick on display a little too flagrantly. She’s fond of him, but he’s mostly looks and very little brain.

Ilya stiffens, stares at the ceiling instead of meeting her eyes.

“Relax,” she says, and sits next to him, holds out the vodka. He takes it, and he isn’t trembling but she can see the effort it is taking for him not to. That hurts a little. He knows her well enough to know exactly what she meant, shouldn’t he also know she won’t ever use it against him? But then, anyone knowing this is one person too many. “Ilya,” she says, a hand to his cheek gently, “It’s fine. I don’t care.” And she doesn’t, truly, it’s just sex. She’s looked at a girl and wanted to trace the edge of her lips and find out exactly how soft they are more than once. She just doesn’t follow through on it.

“Okay,” he says, and his shoulders slack a little and he takes a long swallow before putting the bottle down on the side table, looks at her with more uncertainty than she thinks she’s ever seen in him and she wishes she could laugh it away but can’t, kisses him instead, tastes the vodka on his lips and climbs across his lap and presses against him like absolution as his eyes close and his hands come up to grasp her.

“Really?” he whispers against her neck, not ready to meet her eyes yet. “You don’t care?”

“Just fuck me already.”

He does, and he does it well, revels in her skin and mouth and cunt, puts the right pressure against her clit that means she comes, sprawls against her afterwards like an old familiar song they wrote together years ago and will keep singing together forever. They don’t discuss it with words again for many years.

+

Her mother means Svetlana has citizenship in America and also a solid grasp on English, though she always defaults to Russian with Ilya. Her mother smiles when Svetlana visits, cooks her favorite food and hugs her without reserve. She got her teaching certificates back after the divorce and move (home she’d said), is always talking about her students.

“I’m watching the game tonight,” Svetlana says, “Ilya is playing Montreal. Do you want to watch?” Mom raises an eyebrow, amused but not pushing. “Or I can go home.”

Home, an empty penthouse and a laptop she promises herself she won’t look at out of business hours but always does anyways even if she doesn’t really need to. She doesn’t even really need the job. But she works the way she does everything else, caring too much and too little at the same time.

“I haven’t watched too much hockey yet, somehow,” Mom says as she flicks the TV on. The screen isn’t awful, but it’s terrible quality compared to what Sveta is used to. She always wants to offer to get her a better one and knows it will be firmly yet politely turned down.

Her mother doesn’t need to teach anymore than Sveta needs a job. She does it the same way she keeps this small apartment and the not terrible but not good TV, a stubborn testament to her own two feet and choices.

Svetlana inherited quite a few things from her parents.

“Are you two still?” Mom pauses, raises her eyebrows a little and when Sveta rolls her eyes she rolls hers back, laughs a little. “As long as you’re happy, baby.”

Happy is a word Svetlana doesn’t really know how to work with, so she doesn’t. Being happy is easy, like breathing, yes? Happy is here, watching her mother check her phone while the pre game commentary starts, happy is Ilya in her lap even if he’s miles away in his head, happy is closing a deal that means she’s actually good at this job and not just a nepo hire, happy is a night out with a good drink or seven and a dress that means she can take almost anyone home with very little effort.

Happy is something she keeps trying to grasp and sometimes thinks she hasn’t learned how to just yet.

“He’s a friend, mom,” she says and sighs at the immediate eyebrow raise. “Sometimes with benefits, yes, but a friend.”

Her mom makes a face that is a combination of judgmental and fine, I'll back off.

Ilya goes to the face off, bites off something to Hollander with the grin that’s gotten him hit more times than she can count and taps his stick on the ice, demanding, making himself bigger like he always does with cameras on him.

“Your dad always thought,” her mom starts, forgetting she’d decided to back off, and Sveta shoots her a look that shuts her up. “Right, right. He’s not wrong about everything though, you know.”

He isn’t. He’s just wrong about this.

Ilya wins the face off and scores a little later, perfectly executed. Her dad is going to regret the day he made that bet with her.

+

Svetlana is not unhappy, though. She doesn’t want more from Ilya. Ilya gives her what he can and how he can, and she doesn’t know if she would understand how to take more even if he knew how to give it. What they have is comfortable, familiar, like the coat she bought for a Moscow winter at fourteen right as she stopped growing and still sits just a little too large over her shoulders, home in black wool with a seam that has started to come apart and she’ll have to take to the tailor eventually.

The thing is Svetlana thinks she is supposed to want more, and that thought unsettles her sometimes. Alexandria flashes her engagement ring and Svetlana is happy for her but doesn’t feel the longing jealousy she can read on Caroline’s face and doesn’t understand it.

Ilya and Svetlana is a clear cut equation in her head, one that goes the same way the Admirals’ run this year will – promising in some ways and very fun but not something that ends in a trophy or a ring or the lights of the arena.

And the thing is sometimes her mom makes a face or her father hints a little too bluntly and she knows it disappoints them, but it’s never disappointed her.

So when Jane becomes a constant satellite Ilya orbits it doesn’t make Svetlana jealous. Jane makes her confused. She had always thought Ilya was like her, happy with the fun and the clubs and the dancing and the hockey dissections and an enjoyable fuck and maybe a hangover breakfast the next morning if one of them had bothered to stick around. Whatever is happening with “Jane” is different than what they’ve had all these years, what has always been enough for Sveta and she had always thought was enough for Ilya too.

It makes her feel lonely, a little, which isn’t jealousy exactly. Or if it is, it's jealousy of Ilya and the way his smile tilts in a ragged almost terrified curl when he thinks no one is watching him check his phone and how even when he tries to drag it away with his thumb it doesn’t quite leave. It’s jealousy, a little, that she’s known him so long and so well and didn’t know this side of him and doesn’t understand what’s slowly bleeding him out.

If she feels anything towards Jane, it’s anger when Ilya stops checking his phone every thirty seconds and becomes quiet marble again like in the years after the graveyard, when his jaw clenches and doesn’t unclench for months and the only notification on his lockscreen is Alexei, Alexei, Alexei, an endless metronome of demand.

+

Svetlana loves her father, even when he’s puffing his chest up like a peacock and acting like an authority on hockey when she actually keeps a closer eye on it than he does these days, but especially when he acknowledges she’s right about that and lets himself show he’s proud of her.

She loves her mother, the argument it takes to get her to let Sveta replace her curtains and how one of the few things she actually spends her exorbitant divorce settlement on is making sure Sveta’s favorite tea is always in her cupboard straight from Russia and how she only rolls her eyes some when Sveta asks to put hockey on and is quietly crocheting a replacement blanket for the one Sveta has been wearing down since she was born.

She loves her friends, is maid of honor at Alexandria’s wedding and lets Caroline cry on her shoulder for a few minutes in a hallway because Caroline had been hoping she’d have a ring by now too, dances herself giddy at the bachelorette and is absolutely terrible at actually reading the chapters before book club but makes up for it by being a champion speed reader and the bearer of excellent alcohol and food.

She actually does love her job, even when she knows she’s being used for her name and her sex appeal, but the thing is she is very good at both the sex appeal and knowing exactly how far to drive the knife on the contract and she gets to go home happy with both.

She loves Sasha even though he remains an absolute idiot who has impossible luck to not have been murdered in a night club yet.

She loves Ilya, like a handprint in her heart he put in wet cement before it dried that can’t be removed without being dug out of the earth.

She watches the All-Stars game at home alone, Raiders jersey on for luck, superstitious like every good hockey fan, and Ilya launches himself at Hollander after one of the cleanest goals Sveta has ever watched, smiles at him like he hung the sun and moon and stars and maybe also invented the concepts for them in the first place. Svetlana laughs because the last pieces of the puzzle slot into place.

Jane is ducking his head away from it a little but can’t help but look back and these cameras are too damn far away but whenever Ilya finally tells her the whole truth Sveta is going to play this clip for him on loop without mercy.

So it’s worse even then she knew it would be when she picks up the phone a few weeks later thinking how she can work in “but Jane is in town, right” without it being too much and hears only stillness, a shuddered breath that refuses to come back into Ilya’s lungs.

“Ilyushka,” she says, already searching for shoes. “Something’s wrong?”

“Father,” Ilya chokes out and she can hear him clamping his jaw shut after that one word, back to steel.

“You’re at the arena still?" He couldn’t have left yet even with the way he’d dodged press - she’d been unimpressed by that before she knew why. He doesn’t answer, but she feels the exhale of his nod. “All right. I’m on my way. I’ll send a couple texts, we’ll have tickets on the next flight home by the time I get there.”

Home, even if it’s never been welcoming or kind to either of them, even if she thinks both of them would take navigating a Boston cobblestone that goes across a roller coaster worth of hills over the eyes watching them on a street in Moscow.

Ilya exhales again, breath ragged in a way she can feel against her neck even this many miles and years away.

“Thank you, Sveta.” Dull and quiet and far away.

“Twenty minutes. Take a shower, show my car some respect.”

He almost laughs at that but it just comes out as a faint wheeze.

“Does Coach know? I can talk to him when I get there.”

“He knows,” Ilya says, all too perfectly blank, and that pushes her foot down on the gas a little more.

“Fifteen minutes,” she promises. “Shower.”

Svetlana is hardly an unknown figure to anyone here at this point so she’s allowed to the door of the locker rooms, especially since staff clearly already know there are some sort of special circumstances happening. She texts confirmation of information for the tickets to her travel agent as she waits. Marleau is the first one to poke his head out, mouth twisting a little in commiseration as he does.

“He’s still in the showers. Should I go tell him his ride’s here?”

“He knows I should be here by now, but maybe remind him. They called him during a game?”

Marleau’s face twists harder and darker at that and he spits out something in Russian Svetlana had not realized he’d picked up from one of them or both, accent utterly awful but the invective still recognizable, and then pauses and adds, a little apologetic, “Yeah. I mean, at the end of it at least, but I don’t think they cared about that.” Marleau doesn’t know everything, but he knows enough, is a good friend.

“It was a good win, Marly,” Svetlana says, and Marleau nods and disappears back into the abyss of the team room. He doesn’t even mention Ilya’s hat trick, and that silence says too much.

Ilya had played like a demon, had smiled on the ice with his whole face like he hadn’t since months before the All-Stars and now he steps out of the locker room with his eyes blank again.

“We have to stop by your place to get your passport,” she says and he nods, boneless, like he’s just a mannequin being maneuvered around.

Svetlana wishes she didn’t recognize the shape of it quite so well.

She arranges him onto the plane, tucks a blanket around him because his leg won’t stop vibrating, knows it isn’t the cold but doesn’t know what else to do for it.

“Does Jane know?” she asks as they wait at the gate during the layover and his eyes flicker to her in a fear so reminiscent of when they were younger and much stupider that she reaches for him immediately, shushes him and grips his fingers so tight and so fierce there can be no mistaking what she means. “Only if you want. I just thought it might help.”

This time Ilya’s eyes stay fixed on hers, still almost blank, but at least he nods.

“Not yet,” he says. “When we’re there.”

“Are we doing entirely too much coffee or entirely too much vodka or both while we wait?” she follows up, and he glances at the ceiling and then back at her and it still isn’t a smile but there is some small relief.

“Too much vodka, but not so much we miss the flight,” he says, and lets her tug him up and escort him to one of the bars.

+

“I’m sorry I didn’t realize,” she says as they pack up anything in Ilya’s apartment he doesn’t want Alexei to have, handing him a book to add to a box they’ll put in her place until he decides he wants it in Boston.

He doesn’t frown, just takes it and aligns it neatly, doesn’t quite look at her. Dostoevsky, his mother’s favorite.

“I’m sorry I lied so long,” he says, and she takes his hand and he takes hers back, meets her eyes square and fair.

“No,” she says. “Don’t do that.” He makes a face for a moment and she brushes it smooth with a thumb on his cheek. “We just love a different way, yes? Or – or you just have more types of love than I do.”

For once Ilya is actually properly baffled by her, and maybe this is the wrong time to do it but that is also a little fun.

Too much or too little and never knowing which.

“Ilya,” she says. “I don’t love like that, the way you check your phone, and it’s fine. I love.”

She stops, rolls her eyes the same way her mother rolls hers when Sveta says “I’m watching the game” and Caroline rolls her eyes when Sveta reads chapters even as they discuss them and then she looks at him again and smiles, clicks her tongue like calling a cat.

“I love like this,” she says, picks up another book and slots it carefully into the box. “He won’t touch anything you don’t want him to.”

And Ilya sees her, and something in him breaks and lands in her arms.

“It’s fine,” she says, and means it with every complicated checkered part of her heart.

“I’m sorry too,” he says, and they land on some couch Ilya bought and has almost never used and is entirely too stiff, clinging to each other as if they’re both still children at a party that ended twenty years ago, as if Ilya had just broken her first boyfriend’s nose without a second thought, as if they were still just sitting on a stairwell overhearing things it would take them years to understand.

+

“I am going to miss the fucking,” she whispers into his ear on the flight back, the flight that is taking them home, or at least the closest thing to it they’ve found.

Ilya is wrung dry and exhausted and only exhales, squeezes her hand.

“That’s never what I needed you for,” he says, and he doesn’t let go.

“I know,” she says, and she doesn’t let go either. “But we were both very good at it.”

And Ilya does laugh, now, smiles properly for the first time in days, and that’s what she’s always needed him for. The smile at the edge of the world that tells you it’s going to be okay no matter how cold it is.

+

Svetlana might not be happy the way the world tells her she should be, but she is happy. She lifts her glass to the Irina Foundation and kicks Ilya under the table with a smile at Shane. Eyes someone in a dress with no back at all and files the smile she gets back away for a little later because she gives it at most thirty minutes before she simply can’t stand being at this table with them and the way they look at each other. (How have they not been completely caught yet?)

“People are taking pictures,” she says, and Ilya turns and smiles at her and slides his eyes over to the bar and back, knocks one foot into hers for a moment and she is one thousand percent certain moves it on top of Shane’s foot immediately after. They are fully playing footsie under the table across from her. This is mortifying to even be next to.

“Yes, what a terrible night you’re having,” he says with the grin that makes his fans swoon and everyone else want to punch him in an alley and leaves her wanting to show him the odds on whether he gets the Cup this year.

“Hollander, you have work to do on your power play advantage, but nice to meet you,” she says, and Shane looks at Ilya as if betrayed as she gets up and Ilya takes her hand for just a moment.

Sveta squeezes it back and smiles, places a kiss on his cheek which is both for them and for anyone who might still be taking pictures, but her hand lingers in his until she nods and he nods back.

“Be safe,” she says, shaking her dress out of the disarray of having tried to be even a little comfortable on a bar booth. “I won’t.”

“Sveta,” he says, still the kid on a stairway who has always seen just a little too much, and she smiles.

“I’m wearing heels,” she says, and he rolls his eyes and she rolls hers back. He leans his face into the brush of her thumb on his cheek, his knee resting against Shane’s under the table, and then she taps Shane’s nose once as goodbye.

“Check for the foundation tomorrow," she says for the people paying too much attention, and slides onto a stool somehow more uncomfortable than the bench, glances across to an answering smile as she holds up a finger and says, “should I make it two?”

It is a very fruitful night.

Beta by ineptshieldmaid, who I stubbornly ignored a few times because unfortunately I'm simply Like That. All errors should be attributed to me.