Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov & Irina Rozanova, Ilya Rozanov & Svetlana Vetrova, Anya | Ilya Rozanov's Dog & Ilya Rozanov, Galina Molchalina & Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Irina Rozanova, Svetlana Vetrova, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Anya | Ilya Rozanov's Dog, Galina Molchalina

Additional Tags:

Depression, Mental Health Issues, Suicide Attempt, Concussions, Post-Concussion Syndrome, Hurt/Comfort, Whump, Men Crying, Men Talking About Their Feelings, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, the first time i've ever used that tag wow, repeated head injuries are no joke, the spectre of CTE haunting pro sports, Depressed Ilya Rozanov, Autistic Shane Hollander, Good Friend Svetlana Vetrova, the love of a dog, set post the long game, POV Alternating, Angst with a Hopeful Ending

Language:

English

Series:

Part 2 of snowdrops

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-16 Words: 14,051 Chapters: 1/1

afraid, yes, but

Summary

This was what tended to scare Shane the most, when Ilya was unwell: the gradual loss of him, despite being physically there. He would go quiet, blank, slow to speak and slow to respond, nothing like the pulse of intense energy and liveliness that sparked in him at his baseline. Shane missed him, when he was away in that place. It was not a place Ilya could always describe, and it was not somewhere Shane could rescue him from, or even join him in for company. So Shane waited, every time, for him to come back. He always came back. That was the only relief in it.

Notes

This is a story about suicide and depression. It's about the dynamics of giving and receiving care in a long term relationship, the chronicity of chronic illness, and how one person's suffering is rarely theirs alone. It's also something I wrote to help me process a loss in my own life, which in retrospect is very obvious but took me halfway through writing it to realize. There is a hopeful ending but these guys are in the torture nexus for 90% of this fic, and I've tried not to overly sanitize the realities of what they're living through. Please mind the tags, choose carefully whether and when to read, and take good care of yourselves. Rated E just to be safe for a bit of sex and description of suicide. (Hover over Russian text for translation! Set after TLG and a bit canon divergent: they are in Ottawa playing together but not married. This is in the same universe as pt 1 but can be read alone.)

When it happened, Shane wasn't looking, a fact he would be grateful for till the day he died. He was on the bench, just off a line change, squirting water in his mouth and looking over at Hazy, who stopped in the middle of his chirp about Toronto's defense, his mouth slackening as he said, "Oh, fuck me," looking at the far side of the rink.

When Shane turned, there was blood on the ice. Ilya lay crumpled awkwardly on his front, stick splayed out next to him. He wasn't moving.

Shane had always been quick and efficient, a fast skater with good reflexes. The speed at which he threw himself over the boards and sprinted down the ice had nothing to do with hockey: in that moment he was feral, willing to dirty check anyone and anything in his way. He fell to his knees on the ice next to Ilya, who wasn't moving, who had blood dribbling out of his mouth. It was bright and smeared across the ice, marking the path where he went down and slid.

There was a hand on Shane's shoulder, then another and someone was turning him, manhandling him to face them. Wiebe. Saying words Shane couldn't string together. His ears rang.

"Hollander," Wiebe said, squeezing his trap between thumb and fingers, hard and ruthless. Wiebe was a good coach. He didn't use pain except in extraordinary circumstances. Shane's head cleared enough, anchored by the bright clear pinch to his shoulder.

"Hollander. He's breathing. Ambulance is coming. You need to go change and be ready. Do you understand me?"

The lifetime of yes, coach kicked in, thank god. Shane nodded and rose to skate away, to the boards, to the locker room so he could be ready. The blade of his left skate sliced through a tacky pool of blood congealing on the ice, and when he looked down he saw it, almost hidden: a tooth.

His mouth filled with sickly saliva, too hot too fast, and he held it as he clomped down the tunnel, held it till he stepped into the locker room and vomited into the trash can just inside the door, acid rotten on his tongue.

"Fuck," he whispered to himself, wiping tears from his eyes, spat again, and went to change. He ran on autopilot: blinked and he was taking the fastest shower of his life, blinked and he was in street clothes and sneakers again, blinked and he was jogging down the hallway, phone in his hand, slamming out the fire exit and looking around lost till he spotted the ambulance waiting, loading Ilya in. He got in and it was controlled chaos, two people working, handing each other things, talking in a language Shane couldn't comprehend even though it all sounded like English. Oxygen, IV bolus, GCS, avoiding hypotension; turning to Shane and asking him short focused questions. No, no allergies, he takes bupropion, no blood thinners, he doesn't smoke anymore, he's healthy, he's healthy.

What let Shane back into himself was Ilya's cold fingers on his, drawing his focus.

"Hey," Shane said, squeezing his fingers gently, warming them in his palms. Ilya had been lying still on the ice for too long and got cold. He hated being cold; he'd never complain outside their house because he liked to swan around being a mean Russian stereotype sometimes, but at home he always wore slippers and put his cold hands on Shane's back in bed and he loved the hottest days at the cottage, the ones Shane couldn't stand. Ilya blinked at him and then squeezed his eyes closed again and made a soft noise of pain. It broke Shane's heart. His heart was outside him, lying on the stretcher. Everything felt broken.

He didn't hear a siren. Was that good or bad? "What's happening?" Shane asked, louder than he needed to. He couldn't modulate it.

"We're going to Queensway Carleton. Be there in about five. His vital signs are stable, but he'll need some tests when we get there. We're monitoring him but what he really needs is just to get to the hospital, okay?"

Shane didn't look at whoever was talking, just nodded. He didn't let go of Ilya's hand until the ambulance shuddered to a stop and the doors opened, people in dull off-green scrubs and blue gloves waiting for them. He knew when to get out of the way and let the next line pick up the play, so he did, then hopped out after them and followed them into the fluorescent-lit foyer of the emerg.

One of the paramedics rattled off information loudly, sounding matter of fact and not at all afraid. "Thirty-three year old male, hockey player, got tripped during a game and went head first into the boards at high speed. Loss of consciousness for two minutes. No medical conditions. No anticoag on board. Next of kin here."

One of the women in scrubs looked at Shane and he recognized her vaguely from when one of the rookies fucked up his ankle a few months ago. She nodded.

"You witnessed the injury?"

"No, um, I didn't see it happen. Just saw him down on the ice."

"Okay. Was he unwell at all earlier in the day, or earlier in the game? Did he complain of being dizzy or having a headache?"

Shane shook his head. "He was fine. Normal."

"No substance use today?"

"He had one drink last night. Nothing today."

"Okay. Mr. Hollander, I need you to take a seat and wait here, all right?" She tilted her head toward her colleagues, one of whom was asking Ilya questions and shining a light into his eyes. "We're all fans. We'll take good care of your partner."

Right. Of course. They knew. He forgot, still, how public they were now.

She didn't wait for him to respond or acknowledge her, just turned away and started calling out questions. "Dr. Yu. Does he need a head CT?"

The young woman with the penlight moved her finger in front of Ilya's face, tracking his eyes. "Yes," she said, still watching him, "Witnessed LOC, retrograde amnesia, potentially dangerous mechanism of action. Meets CT rule criteria."

"Good. Mel, I want this expedited."

"Porter's already here."

They took Ilya away, then, the small crowd of people lagging behind the stretcher as it was wheeled away from where Shane sat hugging his bag on a plastic chair.

He took a breath, let it out. Took another. This was what Wiebe had prepared them for, back when he first got traded from the Voyageurs and he and Ilya were called into the coach's office for a Talk.

"You're unprecedented," Wiebe had told them, perched on the edge of his desk with his hands folded. "So we need a plan."

Shane had assumed he meant PR. Media strategy for all the questions they might foresee.

"The two of you together is a strength, and it's also a liability other teams will try to exploit. They'll target one of you for dirty plays to get under the other one's skin. You figure out now how you're going to handle it, you tell me, and you tell the team."

Shane had opened his mouth and Wiebe held up a hand. "Spare me the we're just like any other teammates shit. It's different watching your person get decked in the middle of a game. Figure it out now."

Shane closed his mouth. Nodded.

"Okay. Now, if one of you gets injured during a game, bad enough you have to get taken offsite for medical clearance, the other one is going with you. I don't want you to have to make that decision in the moment, or feel torn about what you're supposed to do. I'm taking the choice out of your hands. Understood?"

Shane remembered looking at Ilya, bewildered. "Yes, coach," he said, Ilya echoing.

"Are you married?" he'd asked then. "Common law?" They shook their heads, and Wiebe had sighed. "You've got some homework, boys. Closest relative makes healthcare decisions for you if you can't. If you're not legal, it ain't you, and it'll come down to a parent or sibling or cousin. If you want it to be each other, talk to your lawyer and get the paperwork done."

"Oh." Ilya had the faraway, stony look in his eyes he got when he was reminded of the existence of his brother.

Wiebe looked at them both. His face softened, almost fond. "My father in law is in and out of the hospital and my wife and I had to learn it the hard way. Just want you to be prepared."

"Thanks, coach," Shane said, and Wiebe nodded.

"Any questions? No?" He'd grinned. "Then get the fuck out of my office and get on the ice. Welcome to the Cens, Hollander."

They'd been living together long enough that they were safely common-law, all the immigration paperwork filed, but copies of the power of attorney documents still lived in a box in Shane's closet and in PDF copy on his phone and Ilya's. Just in case. You never knew.

Shane pulled it up on his phone just to remind himself it was still there, that no one could prevent him from being the one to take care of Ilya if he needed it. He closed the document again without reading it, his leg bouncing. Thumbed open his texts, scrolled past the team group chat and replied to the two he could handle.

The metal taste of blood melted onto his tongue, and he realized he'd been chewing his lip. He turned off the screen of his phone, and sat back to wait, powerless.

Ilya got discharged the next day, which David said aloud was much too soon and Shane privately agreed with, but he also recognized the futility of fighting for a young, healthy man with a concussion requiring no active treatment but rest and graded return to activity to stay in the hospital, when the emergency room hallways were lined with people waiting for beds to open up. So Shane shouldered his bag and took Ilya's hand, carefully walking to the elevators and then handing Ilya his sunglasses before they went outside.

"Snow is so bright," Ilya muttered grumpily, and Shane squeezed his hand. He remembered the first few days after his last concussion, how light felt violently bright and every sound was a knife to the skull.

"I know. Home soon. It'll be dark, and quiet, and you know Anya is the best nurse."

"Mmm, I know." She had been helpful for both of them in turn over the past years, first Ilya with his knee strain and then Shane with the stress fracture in his foot that took ages to heal. It was a little harder to spiral into feeling sorry for yourself all the time when there was a little creature who still needed you to take care of her, and she was good company, not too prone to barking or knocking shit over the way she had been as a puppy.

"Need anything on the way? Groceries?" Yuna asked as she put the car in drive, looking at Shane in the rearview.

"I think we just need to go home."

Ilya nodded slowly, and then leaned over, arranging himself so he rested on Shane's shoulder. Shane kissed the top of his head and took his hand. It was warm, now.

-

The first few days passed in a blur of headache and nausea and deep, deep fatigue. Ilya had done this before, was familiar with the MLH protocol and the ebb and flow of his fragile brain's sensitivity. He forgot what day of the week it was twice, and snapped at Shane for no reason in response to being offered breakfast. When he tried to apologize, Shane had just smiled at him and waved it off. You have concussion brain. Shit gets weird.

He'd done this before. They both had. It would be okay; it would pass. He slept fitfully, and napped during the day. He worked hard not to worry about the pace of recovery, or what it meant that he had gotten dizzy and then started to cry on the first gentle attempt back at the stationary bike at the 48 hour mark. Concussion brain. There was nothing to be done.

He was out for playoffs, and he had until the fall to bounce back to training, which was months and months. No problem.

"Mom will come by to check on you," Shane told him as he packed his carry-on. It had been a week, and Ilya had shifted from insomnia to sleeping twelve hours a night. The team doctor told him it was fine. The brain needs rest for recovery.

"She does not need to do this." Ilya knew it was fruitless to protest, but a very small part of him still felt the need to shield himself. Shane gave him a look.

"I know. She knows. She's going to anyway, because she loves you."

"You can just install a - what is?" Finding words in English was hard. He gestured at the ceiling. "Thing for watching owls?"

Shane looked baffled for a moment, then laughed, so lovely. "Oh, a wildlife camera to livestream you from here?"

"Yes, this. You can monitor on road trip. Like baby owls you are obsessed with." Shane politely did not point out that Ilya was even more into watching the livestream of the owl sanctuary in Montana before bed than he was.

"That would be nice."

All Shane's socks were lined up the way he liked them, and he closed and zipped the case. Ilya didn't want him to stay behind, definitely didn't want the team to lose both their star players going into conference finals, and they'd always agreed if one of them was injured the other would still play. He still wanted Shane to offer. He'd say no.

"I don't want to go without you. I'll miss you," Shane told him, which was also good and less fucked-up codependent. Ilya had always needed him too much.

"Play well for me, Лучик," Ilya said, tilting his head up for a kiss and holding back the wince at how the movement twinged his neck. Shane's mouth was soft and good and familiar on his, and that moment was okay, despite everything that wasn't.

In the morning, Ilya kissed him goodbye and let Anya out into the backyard. When she was done pissing and running around and yipping at squirrels, she trotted back inside and plopped down on her bed, curled into the cinnamon roll shape she preferred for naps. Ilya took his cue from her and went back to bed, too.

It was hard to get up again. He didn't try to push it; fatigue was part of the healing process. It was just so fucking hard to get up. The dog walker came and went, came and went, and Ilya floated in and out of dozing. At one point he put on ESPN in the background with the TV brightness turned down to 1% just for something to listen to, but then fell asleep to that, too. It was easier than trying to follow along with the stories about people who were actually playing.

He dragged himself up around 9pm and went to find Anya for her bedtime roam in the backyard. She looked at him with curiosity, pausing on the threshold.

"Go, my love. Go on."

She waited, shifting from paw to paw and nosing at his leg until he bent and petted her, scratching behind her ears the way she liked. Satisfied, she ran off into the dark.

By the time she came back in, Ilya was ready for bed. He couldn't quite make sense of it: he hadn't exerted himself at all, and he'd never needed this much sleep after a concussion before.

The next morning was -

Not good.

The leaden pull to stay in bed had been a warning sign, Ilya realized, of what was coming, though he hadn't known how to read it. He was used to the rhythm of his moods as the seasons changed. In winter, he slowly sank lower and lower as the season wore on into overtime, fading into feeling only the bad end of his emotional spectrum until spring came and freed him. There would usually be a parallel moment in the summer, when the season ended and whatever he'd been ignoring for weeks or months came back to bite him and take him down with it. It was usually gradual, and predictable, if not preventable.

It did not usually happen like this, quick and obvious, taking him over in plain sight. He had no resistance to this, no strategy to fight it. The void yawned in front of him, vast and endless, stretching to the horizon. It was awful. Ilya felt very small, hovering in its gravitational pull.

He lay in bed, face squashed half into the pillow, and thought about it. Maybe his brain was broken permanently and he would not get better this time. Then, a second thought surfaced from the depths: he didn't really deserve to get better. It sank back into him like ink in water, spreading quickly.

It took an hour of telling himself to get the fuck up and then Anya adding her voice for Ilya to drag himself out of bed. She was very good at watching him and whining in a particular way that expressed how sad and neglected she was, waiting a half hour longer than usual to eat her bespoke gourmet organic dog food and run around the expansive backyard of her mansion.

"You are so ridiculous. Dramatic child, who raised you?" he asked her as they went down the stairs and into the kitchen, knowing full well she had imprinted on him first and foremost.

Shane would be gone four days and four nights. They had a plan, for when Ilya felt like this, and it could be adapted for Shane being gone. Ilya hated the plan, firstly because of needing it at all, and secondly because it required him to confess his sins to all the extremely earnest people around him who would then look sad at him and tell him they wanted to help. He was not actually an idiot, despite being an impulsive shit and dropping the articles in his English sentences, so he accepted it, but part of him missed the days when he could be wasted in the back of a club with Sveta and make a joke about putting a bullet in his head, and she would cackle and tell him to go fuck himself, and that was the end of it. He wasn't allowed to make jokes like that now. They upset Shane so visibly that Ilya didn't even really want to; Shane didn't get it, anyway. He couldn't. Ilya was glad that he couldn't, and it also pissed him off.

Ilya fed Anya, and halfheartedly fed himself because that was part of the plan, sleeping and eating and bathing and all the endless montonous tasks of maintaining the life he hadn't even asked for. He ate a fried egg and pushed the remnants around the plate, then made an espresso and sat on the couch.

He could easily pass hours just sitting and staring off into space, thinking about the poor choices he'd made in his life. There was no shortage of them to mull over. Anya hopped up beside him and laid her head in his lap, peering up at him, and he petted her soft, floppy ears while counting back the number of concussions he'd had in his life and how many of them were his fault for taking a risk or starting shit on the ice. The answer was too many, and almost all of them. He mostly tried to avoid thinking or even learning too much about CTE because it was viscerally horrifying, and he also already had a ticking time bomb in his head so what was the use? But he thought about it now. Imagined the viscous jelly mold of his brain riddled with holes, going rotten inside his skull. It would come for him in ten or twenty years, and it wouldn't even really be him because he would be fucking demented and have no idea what was going on; really it would come for Shane and Sveta and whatever other friends he had left by then, maybe Yuna and David if they were still healthy enough themselves to be parents rather than frail elders. He wiped his nose and realized he had started to cry without noticing. Anya licked his hand.

The sun moved in the sky, the sunbeam that lit the kitchen floor moving tile by tile, and finally after a long while Ilya made himself get up. It was late enough in the afternoon that he could safely call Dr. Alvi's office and just leave a message asking to move up his next appointment without having to talk to anyone. Yuna was a witch, as David always said affectionately, and had a mysteriously broad network of contacts she could ask for things, so she had asked an old friend from McGill who went to medical school and practiced in Ottawa who she would recommend. Dr. Alvi was very good. She was practical, and blunt, and a little too invested in assigning diagnostic labels for Ilya's liking, but it was fairly easy to ignore the alphabet soup of MDD-ADHD-CPTSD-ABCD and just ask her to fix his fucked-up brain, please. She did her best.

This was all part of the plan, too. Everyone said it was just like having a physio and a trainer and a nutritionist, the team of professionals he employed to keep his body in peak condition, but for his brain. Ilya could acknowledge that logically this was true, and he echoed it for Shane's sake to make sure he didn't quit his own therapy. He still kept the numbers for his psychiatrist and therapist saved under vague contact names and did not tell anyone who didn't absolutely need to know. He was seeing Galina weekly anyway, had for years, and that part of the plan did not require any action.

The hardest part of the plan was really the edict not to lie that lay at its core. Ilya was a gifted liar, always had been. He performed, he dissembled, he distracted. This was how he remained safe.

When the text came, he took a moment, then one more. Then one more. Here and now, he thought, here and now. Different now.

Unsurprisingly, Shane stopped replying and called him instead.

"Do not panic, Лучик," Ilya said before Shane could get anything out. "I have been here before, I am okay. Just telling you."

"Okay." Shane sighed. He would panic, certainly, but hopefully Ilya had headed off the worst of it. "Okay. I just wanted to hear your voice. And it's probably better for your head than looking at the phone screen."

"Yes, probably." Ilya closed his eyes and leaned back on the couch, the gravitational centre of his day like the bed had been yesterday. "Tell me about the game. Tell me about bad breakfast. Is nice to be distracted."

Shane talked for a while about boring, mundane things and Ilya was at first grateful just to listen and make listening-noises every now and again.

Yuna had texted a couple of times and had told him she would drop by tomorrow, the halfway point of Shane's trip, but he hadn't actually talked to another person in almost two full days and he found within a few minutes that his capacity for it was gone. These were the ways his mind surprised him, at times: he could hide how he struggled even from himself, until he was called upon to perform a normal function that was suddenly out of his reach. He felt slow, dumb, trying to catch up to a conversation that had no substance to it anyway.

"Thank you," he told Shane. He could not keep it up longer. "I am going to bed soon."

"Oh, okay. Will you…um, call me if you want to or you need to, anytime, okay?"

Ilya wouldn't.

"I will. I love you."

"Love you. Goodnight."

-

After the Centaurs' last away game against Toronto, his mom picked him up from the airport. Not Ilya.

"Hey, mom," he said, hugging her and lifting the trunk to put his bag in the back. He couldn't wait to get home, see Ilya, and do laundry. He'd need to google how to clean the inside of a suitcase, too, the way this one held onto sweat smells.

"Hi, honey."

They pulled away from arrivals and out onto the highway.

"How's your foot?"

The spot where he'd had the fracture two seasons ago had started to ache the past few months, and he'd had PT take a look after game three.

"It's okay. Better today. I'm on ice and anti-inflammatories and it didn't hurt to skate on tonight."

"That's good."

Her voice sounded weird.

"What's up with you?"

Yuna paused. Her hands tightened on the wheel. "Well, honey, to be honest, I'm worried about Ilya."

"You are?"

Shane felt a sinking, clawing mix of guilt and fear. Was there something more happening than Ilya had told him? Had he missed something?

"Yes, but he made me promise not to mention it to you until after you'd finished playing. He said he didn't want to distract you."

"Mom."

"I know. He was very insistent. And he wasn't entirely wrong, it would have distracted you."

"Yeah, because it's important!"

"I agree. I agree!" She finally looked at him, a quick glance. "But Shane, honey, your dad and I have been doing as much as he'll let us. I've been checking on him, and he agreed to come stay with us when you travel again next week."

He crossed his arms and chewed the inside of his lip.

"What's going on?"

Yuna pressed her lips together. She looked sad.

"He seems really down. Maybe worse than he usually gets, but you'd know better than we would. I don't know if he's really eating much, and he certainly isn't leaving the house or talking to anyone except the mandated concussion follow-ups. He wouldn't tell me how those were going, he said he'd just talk to you when you were home and I didn't want to push."

Shane let out the breath he'd been holding. Okay. This wasn't good, but it also wasn't unfamiliar. It was potentially a worse variant on what they'd dealt with before. And they had help.

"Okay. Thank you for trying."

"Of course. I've told him about a dozen times how much we love him but I don't know if it's sinking in right now."

"Right, yeah."

Shane looked out the window, and allowed himself one minute of feeling fucking sad and frustrated and terrible that this was what they had to deal with. What he had to deal with. His own therapist - and Ilya himself - kept reminding him about having boundaries and taking care of himself too and allowing himself to have whatever emotions came up about Ilya's brain being chronically kind of fucked, even if they felt bad and he judged them as selfish. And he did feel selfish, he felt fucking awful for it, for how angry he got sometimes. Not usually at Ilya, though at times the intensity of Ilya's pain made him shortsighted and he spoke as though he was the only one of them who carried trauma. As though Shane had not lived his entire life bearing the weight of being gay and autistic and Asian in every space he moved through: what Rose referred to jokingly as being a triple threat and Shane thought of as the reasons he had been a magnet for bullies until he was so unmatchably good at hockey he could use it as a shield. He certainly got angry at Ilya's family. Mostly he got angry at the conditions Ilya's mind created, the relentlessness of it, and the necessity to put his own emotions aside when something was more urgently wrong.

Minutes passed, and Shane looked away from the window. Eventually they pulled into his driveway. The light was on in the bedroom window.

"I love you, honey," Yuna said, and squeezed his hand. "Tell Ilya we love him too and we'll see him soon, okay?"

"I will. Love you."

He took a moment before going inside, still excited to see Ilya after days apart but nervous, too, about what he would find.

What he found was Ilya in bed at ten PM, curled around Anya. He lifted his head at Shane's footsteps. Even now, after years spent together and apart and together again, seeing him when he came home gave Shane a private thrill. His hair was messy and angelic in the lamplight. He looked at Shane and held out a hand, and Shane went to him. He always would.

"Hello, my love," Ilya said as Shane settled in, mostly on top of him.

"приветик, я скучал по тебе," Shane replied, careful on the vowels. Ilya hummed with satisfaction.

Shane held so many little keys to Ilya's heart, now, and he loved to use them: saying things in Russian during normal conversations, bringing him coffee in bed, taking Anya out when it was especially cold and rainy, making out with him on the dock in the summer under the blazing sun. He loved that it was within his control to give these small things that made Ilya a little happier, even if so much else wasn't.

"You're not good, eh?" Shane said. There was no point dancing around it or waiting.

"No, not really. My head is very bad this week. I think concussion maybe triggered this? I don't know."

Shane kissed his cheek and nuzzled into him, closer.

"Yeah, that can happen. Mom's worried."

"I do not want anyone to worry. Is okay, I will deal with it."

Shane rolled his eyes, hidden by the angle of Ilya's face leaned on his head.

"I know you don't want us to worry. We will anyway. Comes with the territory of being loved."

Ilya groaned, but it was halfhearted, and he didn't say anything more, no other attempts to joke or deflect his way out of it. This was what tended to scare Shane the most, when Ilya was unwell: the gradual loss of him, despite being physically there. He would go quiet, blank, slow to speak and slow to respond, nothing like the pulse of intense energy and liveliness that sparked in him at his baseline. Shane missed him, when he was away in that place. It was not a place Ilya could always describe, and it was not somewhere Shane could rescue him from, or even join him in for company. So Shane waited, every time, for him to come back. He always came back. That was the only relief in it.

Shane put his hand flat on Ilya's chest, over his heart, thumb against the skin-warm metal of the cross. "What do you need, baby?" he murmured.

"Nothing much. Just you here helps."

"Okay, well, I just got off a plane so I'm going to shower. I think you should join me, because I like seeing you naked and you also kinda smell like you've been in bed for multiple days."

That got a little snort of a laugh. It helped.

"Have you eaten?"

"Yuna brought dinner before she went to airport."

Okay. Basic bodily needs met, that was always the foundation.

"Come on. Shower, we'll change the sheets, then we'll get back in bed. I missed sleeping with you."

Ilya nodded. "Okay." Slowly, he sat up and turned to sit on the edge of the bed, his back to Shane. He didn't look back, and his voice sounded much too small for him when he said "Thank you."

They didn't fuck in the shower, or once they were back in bed. They didn't always, especially when Ilya wasn't doing well. He had explained to Shane that some part of him still wanted to, but it felt faraway, hard to keep hold of and feel as clearly as he usually did. They just held each other, and slept, and that was perfect, too. Shane really didn't sleep as well without him anymore.

In the morning, Shane woke up hard and rolled over to push himself up against Ilya's back, curling around him and slowly rolling his hips. Ilya woke as Shane kissed the back of his neck.

"Mmm, good morning," he said, his voice morning-raspy, reaching back to grab Shane's thigh and dig his fingers in possessively.

"Morning," Shane breathed, grinding against the generous curve of Ilya's ass and kissing his shoulder, giving it a little teeth. He put his arm around Ilya, meaning to grope his pecs and maybe get a hand on the dick he'd been missing since Ilya was injured. They were both adept at waiting for sex, trained into it as they'd been by necessity over the years, but Shane didn't have to like it.

Instead, Ilya turned over and pinned Shane to the bed. There were dark circles under his eyes. He looked thinner in the face than he'd been a week ago.

"Dr. Alvi put me on new medication. Side effect is dick doesn't work very well for now."

Shane made a face, both for Ilya's sake and his own. "Oh. Is that a side effect that stays? Or just when you start taking it?"

Ilya shrugged. "Probably just for now. We will see. But let me take care of you, yes?"

"Are you sure?"

The roll of Ilya's eyes was comforting in its familiar prickliness. "Yes, Hollander, I am sure I want to suck my hot boyfriend's cock after he is away for days."

"Okay, fine, fine."

"Fine, he says, fine, fine." Ilya shook his head mockingly, then gave Shane a small smile and dipped his head, licking from root to tip and then sinking down, mouth open and wet and lovely.

It felt normal. It was such a relief for it feel normal that Shane was halfway to coming before Ilya had done anything at all. It didn't take long, but Ilya didn't seem to mind, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and slapping Shane's thigh appreciatively before shimmying up to lie back down.

"Love you," Shane told him, body loose and satisfied, and let his eyes close again.

The next few days were almost normal. Close enough that Shane felt a little ridiculous for how on edge he was, especially given that Ilya kept telling him to fucking relax and not panic, he would be okay.

But it wasn't quite normal, and Shane kept tripping over the small gap between what he was used to with Ilya and what there was now. It was the way he kept catching Ilya staring off into space, then realizing Shane was watching him. It was the mismatch between Ilya's voice and his eyes, which seemed dull and flat and tired no matter what he was saying or doing. It was the brief, vague, dismissive accounts of his various appointments that Shane had to dig and dig and dig for. As far as he could tell, the post-concussion check-ins were going badly, and Ilya did not want to talk about it.

Shane was afraid sometimes that he did not strike the right balance between pressing Ilya to talk and letting Ilya decide that for himself. He was afraid about this often, more so when Ilya was unwell and Shane didn't quite know how much to trust what seemed to be happening on the exterior. He knew Ilya could hide; he had been the thing Ilya hid for over a decade.

In some moments he imagined it: the stricken, angry look that would cross Ilya's face if Shane simply said I think you're lying to me. But he wasn't sure enough to do it, and he didn't want to push. And a small part of him was resentful that he had to work this hard to figure it out, that there was this minefield between them he had to step so carefully in.

The afternoon he had to leave again for conference finals, Ilya was odd. Not overtly sad or upset, just clingy in a way he would usually never allow himself to be. He trailed after Shane as they went around the house gathering up belongings to pack, like Anya trotting at their heels when they went for a run together. Shane didn't mind it; he would take the closeness while he could.

"You're going to stay with my folks, right?" Shane asked, for the third time. Ilya embraced him from behind and hooked his chin over Shane's shoulder.

"Yes, Лучик. I will go in the morning. David has elaborate breakfast plan he will not tell me."

"Okay." Shane turned, his arms around Ilya's neck. "And you're good here tonight?"

Shane had gotten very good at reading Ilya's little expressions and tells over the years, but in this moment his face wasn't quite readable. In the absence of any real indication otherwise, Shane thought, he had to simply believe what Ilya said. It would have to be enough.

"I am," Ilya said, and kissed him.

-

Shane took a cab to the airport, and Ilya waited until it had pulled out of the driveway and was fully out of sight before he sank down, sitting on the floor below the living room window. He closed his eyes and just breathed for a moment, feeling he could almost fall asleep right there sitting upright. It was exhausting to keep up the appearance of being okay, particularly around Shane, who knew Ilya as well as he could stand to be known by anyone.

He had lied. He had been lying all week. Shane would be angry, when he realized. But he was also patient and kind, much more so than Ilya had ever deserved, and he would forgive it eventually.

Ilya had not followed the plan. He had made another one.

"Come, my love," he called to Anya, and let her out into the backyard, letting her run and romp at her leisure. He let the setting sun coolly kiss his skin, and turned his face toward the wind, just to feel it on his face and in his hair.

When Anya was finally ready to come indoors, he closed and locked the door behind her, drawing the curtains. They had a scuffed, hand-me-down wooden baby gate from Jacki that they sometimes used to keep Anya safe in one area of the house when a door was open, and Ilya set it up, corralling her in the kitchen where her food and water and bed were all in close proximity.

"споки-ноки, я тебя люблю," he told her, scratching her ears, and then turned away. She barked. He went upstairs.

Ilya knew that he had thought about dying before, had even considered it seriously on a few occasions. When he tried to remember those times, the memories felt shallow and pale. It hadn't felt like this. He was consumed by it, now: the need to disappear, to take himself off the plate of others who had more than enough to handle already. He had begun to feel mostly dead already in the past week; drying up and blowing away on the outside, rotting on the inside, ready to return to the earth to nourish something better that might exist after him. The staircase felt endless to his heavy limbs. He fought through it, moving himself forward to where he could finally stop and rest. Finally stop kicking and let the ocean of monotonous pain close over his head and sink him to the bottom.

He had tried not to think about it around Shane. He wanted to enjoy their days together and leave Shane with nice memories, and it felt rude to imagine killing himself while his boyfriend made them both eggs and toast. He thought about it at night while Shane slept soundly, probably dreaming of nice things. The last night before Shane left again, Ilya had gone out to the porch and smoked half a pack of cigarettes while he wrote several drafts of a letter. It was all cliche shit: I'm sorry, I love you, it's not your fault. He could not say it any better, though, because he was sorry to do it, knowing Shane would hurt because of it; he did love Shane, more than he'd known he had the capacity for; and it wasn't his fault. There it was, plain and simple. He had written it in Russian, in the Cyrillic alphabet, and that at least made it feel a little more unique. It felt good to write like that again, after so long.

He could not escape the inevitable fact of someone finding him, likely David, but he would attempt to cushion the blow. Ilya wrote neatly on a post-it - Please do not come in, nothing you can do. Call non-emergency line - and stuck it to the outside of the bedroom door, closing it behind him.

His meds were kept in the second drawer of the en-suite bathroom sink. He hadn't lied about the new medication, but he had only picked up the prescription, not taken any. He had also stopped his other meds over a week ago, and saved those, too. He had looked up the drug interactions and toxicity measures, translating the bits he was unsure about, and he felt confident that altogether, this would be enough.

Ilya looked at himself in the mirror, and saw Irina. He did not really believe in an afterlife, not in the concrete heaven-and-hell way the church had taught him, but he hoped he might become part of something else, and be part of it with her.

He sighed. Nothing left to do now but do it. His hands shook as he opened the pill bottle. It was interesting how fiercely the body clung to life, how loudly his hindbrain was screaming in his head to stop him. He was just a man, the product of millions of years of evolution, the end result of which was a brain whose emotions and higher order functions could override even the most fundamental imperative: to live.

Ilya pondered this as he tipped a handful of orange capsules into his hand, popped them in his mouth, and drank from the glass of water next to him till they were gone.

He touched the cross that hung around his neck, sitting just atop where an ache gathered behind his sternum. It was harder work than he had anticipated to swallow the sheer volume of pills. But he would do it, a few at a time, letting his body adjust. He started to pour out the capsules onto the counter, meaning to divide them into rough piles so he could see how many handfuls he had left to go before he could lie down and let the medicine do its work.

A crash sounded from downstairs, and then loud, frantic barking.

"Fuck me," Ilya muttered, dropping the plastic bottle in the sink with a clatter. The barking turned to a muffled whining and yipping, Anya's claws tapping on the hardwood floors as she ran, sounding louder and closer. He could hear her slam into the bedroom door and of course it popped open, the doorknob was fucked and had been since they moved in. Shane kept saying he would watch a YouTube video about how to fix it and do it himself, and never had. She stuck her head into the bathroom, and her tail started to wag furiously and beat a rhythm against the doorway when she saw Ilya there.

Proudly, she dropped a broken piece of wood on the floor at his feet, sopping in dog saliva. She'd broken out of her little cage to find him.

"Oh," he said. A flood of guilt began to rise. Time slowed down.

He had thought the decision was final, but something in him shook loose, beckoned by this innocent creature he suddenly couldn't bear to fail. A part of him that had been loudly overridden the past couple of weeks and shoved down, small and silent. It objected, and made its way to the forefront. Just for a moment. Just enough.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck." Ilya whispered to himself, his mind racing and stuck and slow all at once. The only thing he could think to do was drop to the floor in front of the toilet and stick two fingers as far back in his throat as he could, then a little further. He hadn't had to do this in years, not since Marly's birthday that one time when he ate a weed brownie, then an hour later ate another one before realizing he was already catastrophically high and could not survive a second.

It hurt. His body resisted this, too. He gagged and tried again, and finally doubled over, coughing up vomit that was studded with orange capsules, still whole. He made himself throw up a couple more times for good measure, until it looked like approximately a handful of pills in the bowl and there was nothing left to come up.

He flushed and spat into the swirling water, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Anya sat next to him and looked perplexed, then licked his face.

Ilya's legs felt shaky as he stood, and Anya pressed against him, steady and adoring as always. When he looked in the mirror again, his reflection seemed different, though barely any time had passed. His eyes were bloodshot. And though he still saw Irina there, it was not with the sheen of uncomplicated beauty that her memory normally held. There was ugliness, too.

Ilya stumbled out into the bedroom and lay down, Anya hopping up next to him. He felt like he had narrowly escaped falling off a cliff, though he had been the one dangling himself over the edge in the first place. What was he supposed to do now? He had tried to sever himself from life, and it had found enough of a way to pull him back, unwilling to let him go. The door to that choice seemed to have suddenly closed behind him.

"Fuck," he said again, to no one. He covered his face with his hands and laid there, silent, for a long time.

At some point he started to come back to himself, more solid than he'd felt in a few days, and the fifteen minutes he'd spent in the bathroom felt like a lucid dream, both real and imagined. Had he done that? He had done that, planned, deliberate, and well thought-out. It was not what he would choose if he was in his right mind. He had tried to choose it anyway.

Ilya rolled onto his side and picked up his phone from the table next to the bed. There were a few text alerts from Shane, letting him know they had landed and that he was at the hotel now, getting ready for bed. The last one said sleep well, already miss you 💜

He unlocked the screen and scrolled through his contacts till he found sveta🔥👅💅🏼 and hit call before he'd really thought about it.

She picked up on the third ring.

"Ilyusha!"

"Hi."

There was a beat of silence.

"Are you okay?"

He swallowed. "Sveta. I did something bad."

"Okay. Bad how?"

"I, ah." He sniffed, gritted his teeth. It didn't matter, he was crying anyway. "I took a bunch of pills. Tried to overdose." He hated how small and shaky his voice sounded.

"Oh, Ilyusha, you fucking idiot."

Ilya was surprised into a laugh in the midst of his tears. He missed her terribly.

"Yes."

"How much? Do you need hospital?"

"No, no, I did not take much. One handful then I threw up, very fast."

Her sigh was warm and exasperated over the phone, across the border. "Okay. I am glad you did not do more. Don't fucking try anything while I am on the phone with you, yes? I will be very angry."

"Not planning anything else."

"Good. Okay. I love you so much. You are so dumb."

Ilya laugh-cried again, wiping his nose on his hand. "I know. I love you too."

"Where are you? Is anyone with you?"

"At home. Shane left for conference finals in Detroit this afternoon. I am supposed to go stay with Yuna and David tomorrow till he comes home, but alone tonight."

"Tomorrow you go to your wholesome in-laws and let them hover and pat your head and feed you and love you. Tonight, we can handle, yes?"

Ilya closed his eyes, so relieved, so grateful. "Yes. Thank you."

She bossed him through flushing all the remaining medication he'd stockpiled, then through making a sandwich, which he ate in the dark at the kitchen island with her voice and the glowing phone screen the only lights.

"Did you know someone on instagram makes hockey players out of little bunny dolls?" she asked as he worked on the sandwich dutifully. "The ones of you and Shane are so cute. Disgusting. You would cry happy tears. I will send to you."

He went back to bed and listened to her tell him about work drama and her current dick roster. They got through most of an episode of Bridgerton on facetime together, and eventually, Ilya started to doze.

"Thank you," he had the presence of mind to say again before he fell asleep. "You are so good to me."

"I do what I can. You must be good to yourself, too," she told him, a little scolding. "Go to sleep."

In the morning, he checked his call log. She hadn't hung up till dawn.

Ilya took Anya and went over to his wholesome in-laws' home, where David made him waffles with fresh strawberries and very good coffee, and Yuna hugged him for a long, long time.

He couldn't bring himself to tell them. He knew they would get upset in an intense, parental way; they'd cry and tell him they loved him and Yuna would make a ten-step action plan, and he felt overwhelmed and riddled with shame just thinking about it. Later, maybe, when it was less fresh, and he could tell the story beginning to end. Once there was a neat, happy ending to give them. Nor could he tell Shane - not until finals were over, because he would abandon play and come home immediately to be with him. Ilya wanted that very badly, but it would be another layer of selfishness he couldn't justify. Shane loved hockey more than Ilya ever had, and it would break Shane's heart to leave his team like that. One of them should get to remain intact for now, at least.

He also knew better than to tell Dr. Alvi just yet, both because she had the legal power to put him in the hospital and because he was oddly worried she would feel bad that he had tried to kill himself with pills she gave him. The team doctor got a highly sanitized version of events, but even that was enough for him to look worried and type a full paragraph in the appointment note template that Ilya knew usually contained a sentence at most. Apparently mood episodes were a known consequence of concussions, especially for someone who was already vulnerable, a descriptor Ilya was not interested in.

So he stayed with Yuna and David, doing his best to allow their fretting, and he texted Sveta every day when she demanded proof of continued life. And he told Galina.

"Oh. Ilya," she said when he got past the initial pleasantries of the appointment and told her the truth.

She blew out a long breath, sagging a little in her chair. Her eyes were shiny with tears, which surprised Ilya. He had figured she would take it in stride, that she had been through this before and would remain as solid and unflappable as always.

"I'm sorry," he said automatically.

She dabbed her eyes with a tissue and smiled softly at him. "You don't have to apologize. How does it feel for you to be here now, sharing this with me?"

"Um, it is strange. I did not plan how to tell anyone, because I did not plan to be here still."

"Yes, that must be an odd feeling."

"I am embarrassed, maybe. I wish I had not done it at all, or I had gone through with it, but now nothing is different except I have to talk about this and upset people."

"Hmm. How do you imagine it will go to tell other people?"

He slumped back in the familiar armchair. She had almost as many stupid little throw pillows as Shane had had back in his condo in Montreal.

"Probably bad. I called Svetlana right after and she was good, I knew she would be, but other people…they are not used to this. They will be afraid and sad and angry and it is my fault. I did this. But I also do not want to deal with it."

"That makes sense. You wanted to stop feeling so overwhelmed and in pain, and now you still feel bad and you have to cope with another hurdle on top of it."

"Yes." He looked at her. She looked at him. Her expression was warm, like a hug.

"And…" she started, the way she usually did when she knew she had something insightful to drop on him. "It means something that you are here, sitting in my office, telling me about it, and that you went to stay with family, and that you told Svetlana and you're thinking about telling other people, too."

"Uh huh. What does this mean."

"Maybe it means that even though it will be hard and painful, you're not quite as determined to die as you were a few days ago. What do you think?"

Ilya had been working mainly with the strategy of staying as distracted as possible since he went to stay with the Hollanders. Between spending time with them, sleeping, going to checkups, and making sure Anya didn't break anything irreplaceable, he had prevented himself from thinking about it really at all. He hadn't talked to Shane on the phone, either, because he knew he would not be able to hide as well as he had before. He still felt cracked open and raw.

Ilya tentatively allowed himself to think about it, there in the little office full of plants where he did feel safe, mostly. More than almost anywhere else. He thought about wanting to die, and he also thought about how it felt to wake up sandwiched between Shane and Anya, both of them warm and steady. He thought about Sveta staying on the phone all night, and how David and Yuna so easily welcomed him tagging along in their daily lives, folding him carefully into the space only Shane had occupied before. They did not ask anything of him, but simply reminded him he had a place in the world. If he wanted it.

"Still feel like shit. But I think I have changed my mind, for now."

"We can work with that," Galina said, and Ilya realized he believed her.

-

The Centaurs were eliminated from the Eastern Conference finals in the third week of May, and Shane couldn't bring himself to feel too bad about how relieved he was. Even the most blockheaded of the guys knew something was going on. He hadn't been playing as well as usual; he couldn't play at his real peak without Ilya on the ice with him, but besides that, he was distracted. Something was wrong at home, but he had no idea what, and all he had to go on were the crumbs of Ilya's texts and his mom's somewhat more fulsome updates. Ilya kept making flimsy fucking excuses not to pick up the phone, and Mom just kept saying vague things about how she and Dad were enjoying the quality time with Ilya and he would update Shane once they were both home. It would piss him off more if it didn't mostly scare him.

Shane was banned to a window seat alone on the plane, partially because the guys were decent and knew he needed space, mostly because he kept fidgeting and bouncing his leg so hard he'd immediately trash any card game he was dealt into. Finally, finally, they landed in Ottawa, and he breathed out about ten percent of the tension that had collected in his body while he was gone. Now he was home, and he didn't have to leave again or be distracted by strategy and training. The season was done; the rest of life began.

Ilya waited at the curb outside arrivals, Anya hanging out the back window with her tongue lolling happily.

"Hey, kiddo." Shane greeted her with a head rub after he tossed his bag in the trunk, then got into the passenger side.

"Hi," he said, and kissed Ilya. He lingered, pressing their foreheads together, relieved to see Ilya there solid and present.

Eventually he sat back, giving Ilya space to drive.

"So? What's going on?"

Ilya stared straight ahead at the road. "I will update you when we are home, yes?"

"Okay." He didn't want to wait, but he could be patient if he had to be, so he put a hand on Ilya's thigh and looked out the window, watching the highways of Ottawa roll by.

By the time he and Ilya were settled at home and sitting side by side on the wide couch, Shane's patience had run dry. The nervous tremor in his leg was back, and he kept having to remind himself to take full breaths in, not the anxious little sips of air that would keep his nervous system on edge. Something was wrong, but the specifics were a mystery. Ilya looked more uncomfortable than Shane had maybe ever seen him.

"I did something that will make you very upset," Ilya said, his tone wooden. He didn't look at Shane, but kept his gaze down, at where Shane's hand was in his on his lap.

"What?"

"I will tell you, and you will be upset, but I cannot take care of you like I want to. I am sorry, I wish I could. Right now I cannot."

The muscles around Shane's spine tightened, his shoulder blades stiff with anxiety. His mind flitted from thought to thought, all of them confused and unlikely. Had Ilya cheated? Did he find out he had a kid from a one night stand? Had he crashed his stupid sports car and hurt someone?

"Ilya, you're scaring me. What's going on?" Ilya's hand was sweating in his. Shane gripped it tighter.

"I'm sorry," Ilya said again. "Fuck. I, um. I lied to you. When you left, I said I would be okay alone that night."

"What happened?"

Ilya didn't say anything for a minute. When he spoke again, his voice was thick, shaking. "I had a plan. To die. I tried to overdose."

Shane tried to speak. Nothing came out.

"But I did not go all the way through with it. I am okay. Yuna and David do not know, I did not want to upset them so much. I talked to Sveta, and Galina, and now you."

This was the bad thing, the thing that would upset him. That Ilya couldn't help him with, because Ilya was already barely surviving. Shane bolted to his feet and managed to get enough air in and out of his lungs to say, "Um, I'll be right back. I need a minute or, um. Maybe a few minutes? Don't leave. Please don't go anywhere. Okay."

He started walking away mid-sentence, blindly wandering down the hall to the first room he could find with a door to close behind him. It was a guest room. Ilya had tried to kill himself. Shane shut the door and sat on the edge of the bed. Ilya had decided to die and planned ahead and told Shane he was fine and all the while had intended to die while Shane was playing fucking hockey. He dug his nails into the soft bedspread. Ilya had tried to die, and Shane wouldn't have even been the one to find him.

His chest locked up all at once, and he bent double, heaving, gasping for air through what felt like a pinhole. Grabbed a pillow to muffle the ugly air-hunger sounds. Eventually they morphed into sobs, deep and panicked. He needed Ilya so badly, he always had, even in the years when he couldn't bear to acknowledge it. Who would they be now, if there was ever only one of them without the other? It wouldn't make sense. It would have left him a half-person, something ripped apart and bleeding everywhere.

He sobbed until his throat was raw and tender. Time passed, probably. Hopefully he wasn't being too loud, but when he tried to be quiet it hurt more. He clung to the pillow, hating how it felt wet and cool on his skin as he soaked the fabric with tears but unable to move or let it go. He stayed there, until little by little, the haze of fearful static began to abate enough that he could think again.

Then all at once the need to be next to Ilya returned. He couldn't stand another minute alone.

Shane walked back out to the living room, wiping his eyes, and Ilya startled at the footsteps. He still couldn't look at Shane, but it was obvious he'd been crying, too.

"Sorry, I just kind of…freaked out."

Ilya nodded. "I know."

Usually Ilya would have been there with him. More realistically, he would have noticed Shane was uncomfortable before Shane himself was even fully aware of it, and would have checked in with him, averting the entire meltdown. He hadn't actually panicked like that in years; there had been no reason to. But Ilya taking care of him like that was for mundane scenarios, like when his skin was tacky and sweaty after a workout and he couldn't stand to eat the thing he'd planned to eat because the texture was wrong and he felt like a hangry toddler. There was no way to avert this, nothing Ilya could do to cushion the blow.

Shane went to him, back on the couch and swinging a leg over Ilya's body so he could sit in Ilya's lap where he belonged. They fit together, his arms around Ilya's broad, strong shoulders and a hand in his curls; Ilya holding him close and firm by his hips and resting his face against Shane's chest, so sweet.

"I love you. I love you so much," Shane whispered, and Ilya nodded against him. "Baby, I can't lose you." His voice cracked, splintered. Shards everywhere. "I can't, I can't, I can't lose you, please, baby," he said frantically, like a compulsion, like a prayer. Tears kept coming, and Ilya cried on his shirt and sobbed that he was sorry, he was so sorry, and the two of them sat there for a long time, holding on desperately, trading their broken jagged-edged pieces back and forth, back and forth.

They fucked on the couch like that, mostly clothed, messy and desperate and sad. It felt more essential than enjoyable, Shane thought as he flexed his quads and rode Ilya's cock. There was pleasure, always, but there was more pain in it now. Ilya sank in deep and Shane wanted to keep him there, chain them together. He didn't want either of them to come because then it would be over and he would be separate from Ilya again, and then how would he know Ilya was safe?

Shane was used to crying during sex, but that was because he felt overwhelmingly embarrassed, or he was overstimulated and his body was trying to decide whether to give in or resist, or just that he felt so loved he didn't have room for it in his body. Not now. It was only grief, plain and terrible, and he came with a ragged sob, Ilya following moments after.

Shane did not ask for details until they were in bed, much later, lying in the dark together.

"Why the fuck didn't you call me?" was the first thing he said, and then immediately felt embarrassed. What a fucking stupid, awful thing to be jealous over.

"It was late. You had a game. I did not want to distract you."

"That's - oh my God, Ilya, I want you to distract me when it's something that's more important. You are more important!"

Ilya kissed his neck and Shane felt the small smile against his skin.

"Okay, okay. Next time, I will - "

White-hot rage struck Shane through and through, shoving himself away from Ilya and out of bed.

"Don't you dare," he started, fucking crying again, Jesus Christ, "Do not make this a fucking joke," and left the room. He didn't slam the door; they didn't do things like that. But he left.

He got two thirds of the way down the hallway before the fear dropped into him, cold and overwhelming.

He went back. Opened the door again. The room was dark, but there was enough moonlight to see Ilya outlined against the headboard.

"I'm scared not to be in the same room as you. I'm scared of what you'll do." His voice sounded like a child's.

"I'm sorry," Ilya said for the hundredth time. "Come back. I will not joke, this is stupid of me. I do not want you to be afraid."

"Yeah, well, I'm fucking anxious all the time anyway so I dunno what to tell you," Shane said, crawling back into bed, angry and shaking, wrapping himself around Ilya so tight it couldn't be comfortable. He didn't give a fuck.

-

Neither of them had anywhere to be until their planned cottage trip in June, so they stayed home, not really talking about it, bouncing off the walls and each other. Ilya slept for a few hours at a time, woken by nightmares about finding his mother dead in their Ottawa bathroom or finding himself dead in his mother's bed in Moscow or, worst of all, Shane slitting his own throat, watching Ilya watch him choke and drown. Ilya would get up and go to the bathroom to splash his face with ice-cold water and Shane would wake up with him gone, then hover nervously outside the door till Ilya emerged again, unharmed.

It was a strange and confusing dynamic to have, Ilya thought. He had the advantage of being inside his own head, so he had felt the seismic rise of his depression, lived through the worst of it, and was now feeling the slow ebb of it starting to pass, despite the dreams. He was back on his meds, including the new ones this time, and his concussion symptoms were slowly improving. He knew for a fact that the worst of it was over, and that he was not in any imminent danger of attempting again.

"But Shane can't know any of that," Galina told him at their next session, sympathetically. "He has to rely on what he can see, and what you tell him."

"And he does not believe what I tell him."

"Have you talked about that?"

Ilya shook his head. The space between them still felt so fragile. He knew that Shane was scared, angry, probably a hundred other things, but he had kept it inside after their first day back together. He probably thought he was holding it together and being strong for Ilya, but he just looked tired. Ilya didn't want to make it worse. He couldn't think of any way to make it better.

"You might have to, eventually."

Maybe. Ilya shrugged. They had successfully not talked about things for years on end. She should not underestimate them.

The next day, though, Ilya came down to the kitchen to find Shane weighing egg whites on a kitchen scale, then re-weighing them twice more before pouring them into the pan on the stove. He had been worse the last week or so, snapping at Ilya about how much quinoa constituted a serving and looking visibly close to tears when Ilya had eaten an avocado he didn't know Shane was planning to use in a post-workout smoothie.

"You okay?" Ilya asked without thinking, and regretted it. Obviously not. Shane's shoulders tightened slightly toward his ears, and he stirred the sad eggs.

"Yeah, fine."

Ilya let it go. He opened the cupboard where his pill organizer was and tipped out the morning handful, a jumble of shapes and sizes, something for anxiety and something for depression and an omega-3 and vitamin D and, and, and. Shane's shoulders rose a little more when Ilya tossed them back and swigged orange juice out of the carton to swallow them.

"Are you sure I shouldn't hold on to your meds for you?" Shane asked. He'd asked before.

"Yes, I'm sure." Ilya rolled his eyes. "You are not fucking hospital nurse taking care of me."

"Fine! Jesus, fuck me for caring."

"I do not need you to care like that."

Shane looked at him, his jaw working, teeth gritted. He didn't say anything, just swallowed and looked back at the stupid eggs that were already overcooked. Ilya couldn't stand it.

"What, Hollander? Fucking spit it out."

Shane shook his head. It made Ilya want to shake him until he said something, did something. Anything.

"You are angry. I am not a fucking idiot." He heard himself getting louder. "Tell me! Just get it over with."

"Oh, fuck you," Shane said, finally, dropping the spatula on the counter and turning. Thank God. "You wanna get it over with? So we can just go on like this never happened?" His eyes were already wet. He cried when he got too angry.

Shane pointed at him. "You - you fucking lied to me! You lied right to my fucking face, over and over, every time I tried to figure out what was going on with you. How can I trust you now? And, fuck, Ilya, do you have any idea what it would have done to me if you died? I know you have some idea."

He crossed his arms, looking down. "And I know it's not fucking about me, and you're the one who was in all this pain and had a fucking near-death experience and that's traumatic, and I shouldn't be angry at you, and - and I've been trying not to be. But I can't, and I'm sorry."

Shane looked up then, and Ilya wanted to throw himself at Shane's feet.

"Is not only about me. Is about you, too. You have right to be angry."

That alone, being given permission, seemed to ease some of the tension in Shane's body. He swallowed, and nodded, his voice quieter when he spoke again.

"It's not just that, it's - I'm pissed that you lied, but also that I couldn't tell." The tears were starting to spill over now, and Shane wiped his face hard with the heel of his hand. "And I'm terrified, like, all the time now. I'm scared that you'll try again and I won't know. And, and maybe, if I could anticipate it, if I can do something right, I could stop it."

Shane's hands were shaking. He shoved them in his pockets. Ilya moved instinctively to hold him, even though the thing he was trying to protect Shane from lived inside him.

"You know me so much, was hard to hide. But you could not tell because I did not want you to, yes? This was not your fault, солнышко." He hugged Shane close and thought for a moment about what to say, how to be honest while taking some of the immense weight of responsibility from Shane's shoulders.

"When I was maybe eight or nine, my parents had big argument, yes? They yelled at each other for very long time, and I could hear most of it. Near the end my mother said she was going to hang herself, and then my father would be rid of her finally."

Shane tensed with surprise. "What?"

"Listen. She went to her bedroom and locked the door. I did not have key and I knew my father would be even more angry if I was out of bed, so I just laid there listening, and I was so scared. I did not sleep all night. In the morning, she came to wake me up and made breakfast and everything was fine, like nothing happened. Then when I was twelve, she had normal day, was in good mood. She came home from dinner party and kissed me goodnight, told me we would go skating on Saturday. I found her dead next morning."

"Oh, Ilya," Shane whispered.

Ilya took a step back to look at Shane. "I tell you because there is no way to know. You cannot read mind, you cannot stop it. Even doctors cannot predict, Dr. Alvi tells me this. You are so good at working hard and seeing pattern and solving problem but you cannot fix this."

The grief that passed over Shane's face was familiar to Ilya; it was rooted deep in him, too.

"It's not fair."

Ilya petted Shane's cheekbone with his thumb, a familiar resting spot. "I know. Just is."

"Then what do I do?" Shane asked.

Ilya shrugged. "What you always do. You are good to me, and you love me, and you are there when I need. Everything else - I have to do. I have to say what is happening, tell the truth, all of this. Is not your job. Not your responsibility. Okay?"

Shane looked sad, so sad, but he took it in. He nodded, slowly. "And it wasn't yours, either. Right?"

Ilya bit his lip, sudden tears blinding him.

"Yes. I know this now."

Shane pulled him close again, wrapping him up in a hug, solid and muscular and strong. Safe. "I love you so much."

"я тебя люблю." Ilya kissed the side of his head. He was tired of crying. "Your poor eggs are very burned."

He was relieved to feel Shane laugh a little. "Fuck. I was really hungry."

"Sit, I make you new ones."

Shane sat, and let him.

Up at the cottage, surrounded by trees and loud birds and the quiet water, Ilya felt almost back to normal. And lying in the hammock, relaxed and easy, he found he had the time and space to think.

He had never thought much about his life after hockey. In his younger years, he wasn't sure he would have one, and there seemed to be no point in planning ahead when the present was annoying and demanding enough. Since moving to Ottawa it had crossed his mind more, but there was always something more urgent to attend to.

Hockey had been his ticket out: of his family, of Russia, of the small and cramped life his father had kept in mind for him as a backup. But he was out, now. Safe on the shore here, Canadian passport in hand, welcomed into a family that was not his by blood but actually wanted him in a way he'd never experienced. What was hockey for him now?

He swung gently in the hammock, looking up at the bright June sky. Hockey was a joy he shared with Shane. It was a game he liked and was good at, surrounded by an apparatus of power that had kept them caged in various ways for years. And most frighteningly, it was a variable he couldn't predict.

There wasn't really much question, when it came down to the decision. It was just when, and how.

The moment came when they were watching some stupid HGTV show about whether things were cake or not. There wasn't any particular reason; Ilya just felt settled, and once that had happened with a decision he made, he couldn't hold it in for long. He picked up the remote and muted it, turning to Shane but not quite looking him in the eye.

"Would you," he started, and stopped. He knew the answer. He knew it would be alright. It was still terrifying, for some reason. "Would you still love me, if I didn't play hockey anymore?"

Ilya sighed, collapsing in on himself with relief that he finally got it out, and then started to cry.

Shane immediately held Ilya closer, put a hand in his curls and kissed his forehead.

"Of course I would. Of course I will. Always, baby."

Ilya leaned into him, solid and warm and good. His Shane.

"You do not sound surprised." He sniffed.

He felt Shane shrug against him. "I guess I'm not, really? We'll both have to stop eventually. We can't play forever, and we're older than the average age of retirement already."

"Yes, but you are thinking about it?"

"Louisa kind of makes me?" Shane admitted with a soft laugh. "I hate it but it's probably good. I'd be way more fucked up about it otherwise. She's always talking about how retirement is so hard on professional athletes and it's better if you have a plan for it."

Ilya sat back a bit and looked at him, taking his hand.

"I am in good shape. I could play another five years of good hockey, maybe. Win another Cup, I don't know. But it is risk. I could go five years no injury, or I could get another concussion at first practice back." He took a breath, looking down at their fingers together, at the little scar on Shane's thumb from a skate blade when he was a kid. "Each time is worse. Each time is more risk of CTE later, or something bad now. More depression. I cannot take these chances."

Shane squeezed his hand. "I hate the idea of not playing with you. But I don't want to risk that, either."

"I know. I want to play, and be on team with you. But I want to have this more." He gestured between them, and broadly, at their space, the home they'd made. "This life, yes? With you. I want to keep it safe."

The way Shane looked at him then was an expression Ilya hadn't seen in a while. His eyes were bright with tears but he looked so happy, so relieved, the shadow of tense worry gone from where it had haunted his face for weeks on end.

"I like hearing you say that."

That evening, Ilya took his time with Shane's body, feeling a sense of reverence. This was the man who loved him even though it had been too often hard and painful, for both of them. These were his hands, his lips, his thighs. This was his skin, warm and soft and freckled. This was the way he tasted, the way he felt inside on Ilya's fingertips, hot and tight and wanting. Ilya loved him, there in their bed in the quiet cottage, with his whole body. With everything he had.

"Pleasepleaseplease Ilya fuck oh my god, like that please yes," Shane babbled, loose and cock-drunk the way Ilya delighted in making him, and Ilya fucked him a little harder, shoving his face into the sheets and holding him down by the back of the neck. Shane came in floods less than a minute later, shaking through it, grinding himself back against Ilya like he couldn't get enough, deep enough, close enough. Ilya knew the feeling. He bit Shane's trap hard enough to bruise when he came, digging his teeth in and filling Shane up and leaving traces of himself everywhere, as though anyone could look at them and not see already.

After they'd showered and changed the sheets, Shane fell asleep, puffing gently with each exhale. Ilya lay there for a while. It was comfortable and warm, but he was wasn't sleepy, not quite yet.

Ilya got up quietly, threw on shorts and a t-shirt and padded outside barefoot. The wood of the deck was still warm under his toes from the day. He didn't have any cigarettes with him, which was on purpose. Vaping looked fucking stupid so he would have cigarettes or nicotine gum or nothing, but he still kept a lighter on him most of the time out of habit. Someone might need it, if not him.

An idea occurred to him. He went inside again, silent as he could, creeping through the cottage to his backpack and then outside again. The moon shone half-full on the edge of the lake, and he walked down to the shore where there was a spot he could sit on dry land with his toes in the cold water. He loved this place; not the way Shane loved it, with a lifetime of happy childhood attached, but in his own way. This was the place where he had walked out to the edge of something terrifying and Shane had joined him. Had said I love you, too and this is Ilya, I love him and we just want a future, and then built a future and a present with him, a little at a time. Many things felt possible in this place. Almost anything.

Ilya took the folded paper and the lighter from his pocket. The ink had smudged a bit on the Cyrillic letters but it was still legible. He didn't read it again. It had been addressed to Shane, but also written to him from a part of Ilya that wasn't so loud anymore, not now. It said things that Ilya could tell Shane himself. They had time.

He flicked the lighter and held the flame to the corner of the pages till they set alight. They burned so quickly. In moments the flame had consumed the paper, and Ilya tossed it into the water just before it burned the tips of his fingers. Under the light of the moon, he could make out the ashes floating for a moment, then dissolving, carried down and gone in the gentle motion of the water.

He sat for a few minutes longer, looking out at the water and up at the stars. Then, when he was ready, he went inside to bed.

Snowdrops
Louise Glück

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring—

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

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