Chapter Text
The hotel room was quiet. They were sharing, officially, for the first time at a League event, because—fuck it. It was—it had been a long day.
Shane finished smoothing in his hand cream, last step of the night before bed. Ilya was still half-tuxedo’d, bowtie undone and draped over his neck, shirt unbuttoned, sitting at the little hotel desk in his boxers. He turned his head as Shane pulled back the duvet.
“You coming?” Shane asked, which usually was enough for a smirk at least, a Not yet, a Not before you do. But Ilya didn’t react, might not even have heard. Just kept looking.
They were both tired, anyway. Drained. All of the—they were probably always going to be a little bit… much. But maybe some of the—the crazy-horny, the can’t-think-can’t-stop-can’t—maybe some of that was the being nineteen, twenty, twenty-two. Maybe some of that was the secret. And maybe it was nice, too, to not need to fill each waking minute together, just so they could feed off those scraps, alone, for months.
But—“Hey,” said Shane. “You good?”
Ilya surfaced, twitched his lips up in a sideways smile. “Always.”
A snort. There he was. “Long day.”
“Like prize pig.”
Shane nodded. “Good for Hunter, though. At least they’re not backtracking on everything. And he had a good year.”
“Mm. Which makes this his… mm, second MVP in his six hundred thousand years on the ice?”
Shane felt his own face soften, felt the warmth filling up inside him and knew it showed in his eyes. God, he loved this idiot. “He really helped, tonight, though. A lot of official guests. They… It helped, to have him there.”
“Ah, yes. He is respectable gay. Proof you only sleep with the degenerate, not stand with them, yes?”
Like a soaking wet slap in the face, and Shane’s burgeoning warm softness went clammy and cold. Alright, yes, it was in a horrible way kind of true, but—but what the fuck, Ilya—
Ilya stood abruptly. “Ignore that, pozhaluysta. I am…”
“You’re a homebody, Ilya.” Shane tried to breeze past it, make it just another joke. “You haven’t been genuinely degenerate in years.”
Ilya breathed a laugh through his nose and said, “I’m going to piss.”
“Okay,” said Shane. Ilya stared at him a long, awkward moment, like he was waiting for Shane to say something more—have fun? good luck? I’ll still be here when you’re done?—and headed to the bathroom.
***
It was Dubov. Obviously, whatever was going on in Ilya’s head, Dubov was the reason. Shane had seen the enforcer sit next to Ilya, briefly, but he’d been pulled into a stupid conversation with Foundation donors and short of an actual scene—and god he hoped Ilya had the sense to avoid an actual scene—Shane’s grown-up partner could handle himself.
Preferred to, even, when it was Russia. Which… well. Yeah. Which sucked.
It had always been that way, though: it had been during a conversation with Rose a couple years ago that Shane realized every falling out he and Ilya’d had—every single one—at the heart of all of them, was Russia.
Vegas, eleven years ago. Vegas, seven years ago, Ilya’s first MVP. Before Sochi and then at Sochi, and then the stupid fucking tuna melt, with Ilya dancing around the questions he wanted to ask and his fucking brother and dad and hiding everything, and Shane didn’t know how to look, Shane didn’t have eyes—Shane had been so fucking dumb. So naïve, such a kid, for so long. Bet your parents are excited, and That’s nice, and You haven’t replied to my texts—and he couldn’t have known. Ilya wasn’t exactly letting him in. But—
He should have had a clue. He should have bothered to find out, to fucking ask someone. But he’d been in his head, terrified of saying the word gay, terrified of even thinking it, and it—
It hadn’t been relevant. He wasn’t—it wasn’t relevant. It was awful, of course, worldwide anti-LGBT sentiment was a—a bad thing, but Shane wasn’t any part of that acronym. So. It wasn’t relevant.
Not really, not to Shane.
And Shane had grown up knowing that his parents would be okay with… well. With anything that he turned out to be. Maybe not thrilled, maybe it wouldn’t be what they wanted for him, maybe they wouldn’t—
But he’d wanted to matter to Ilya, to be let in and know it, and so he’d done his awkward best to encourage opening up. And somehow, by accident, Shane’d managed to find the rawest parts of Ilya every single fucking time and drag sharp nails across them, and he hadn’t even known.
Tonight, like every time, he’d let Ilya handle everything alone. And so here Shane sat, like every time, wondering what he’d missed.
***
Ilya emerged from the bathroom shirtless and minty-smelling; padded around the end of the bed, flopped down on the other side. Shane paused in his book, shifted his grip to avoid losing the page. Pushed his glasses up his nose with his thumb.
Just, like—to check. It was a pretty good system: Ilya usually, ahm. Liked Shane’s glasses.
Ilya didn’t notice the motion, or didn’t care. He wasn’t looking at Shane, just upwards.
Okay, then. “Was it Dubov?” Shane asked.
Ilya nodded.
“Want to talk about it?” Safer, Shane had learned. With his knack for finding Ilya’s sore spots, better not to try—
Ilya shook his head.
Shane went back to his book.
He’d made it through twelve more pages of Soviet bickering before Ilya said, “He went to Moscow during playoffs.”
Shane said, “Makes sense, I guess. Guaranteed time off for the Quakes.”
Ilya snorted. Then: “He was wooed.” A fun word; he was getting a lot of new vocab out of romance novels.
Not a fun image, though. “What?”
“People asked him to come to parties. Dubov. To gossip about me.”
Wouldn’t be Shane’s first choice, but maybe the man sounded smarter in Russian.
“Specifically,” Ilya said, toying with the syllables, still eyeing the ceiling like he could find some meaning there. “Alexei asked him to a party.”
Shane thought that over and turned to his nightstand. Bookmark in the book, glasses in their case. Turned back, now wholly focused.
“What ist word,” Ilya slurred, “in English, like, ah, directed? But—pulled strings, bigger than directing, you can—you say orkestra?”
Shane, putting it together, supplied, “Orches…trated?”
“Da, that. Alexei orchestrated Dubov going to a party so he could pass a message for me, his worthless brother.” Ilya rolled up to sitting, drawing in his knees, still not making eye contact. Shane, under the duvet, felt trapped and dumb. “He gave me the message.”
Shane hated Alexei Rozanov in a way he hardly hated anyone. Pure, righteous, and justified. “I’m sorry, Ilya.”
“He said I am worthless pedik,” Ilya said, blandly, into his knees, like he’d grown up with that from childhood and had only just started believing that it wasn’t fair. “He said—Dubov said that Alexei said lots of things. He’s forgotten most of them, the old tree.”
Shane put old tree aside, deciding it was one of Ilya’s impenetrable epithets. “Lots of things,” he repeated.
“Told me to imagine them,” Ilya nodded. “Orchestrated very well, I didn’t know Alexei was so clever. What’s it, How I Hacked My Way Into Her Heart, A Steganography Love Story.”
Beat. Wait. What? Reverse. Try again.
“Was very terrible, but full of computer words. Steg-a-noh-graphee. Words in words. Is same word in Russian, nearly, but new for me.”
“Your—Alexei,” Shane ventured. (Your brother was too much of a bruise to press on.) “You mean he and Dubov—who forgot most of the message?—smuggled a… some kind of… coded message across international borders and into the MLH Awards Reception for you? Which Dubov crashed, you know. Well, he traded for an invitation.”
“Oh? Very secret agent. Not surprised.”
“Ilya.”
“Yes. I mean that.”
Okay. Your Moscow-police older brother, and we’re using the word ‘police’ euphemistically here, sent a fucking giant enforcer with a secret message to deliver in a public place and now you’re staring blankly into thin air—
“Katerina moved,” Ilya said, out of nowhere at all. “She and Nadya moved to Latvia. Divorced, we should—well. I should contact them. Make sure the money came too.”
“What?”
“Maya zolov—my ex-sister-in-law has moved, Hollander. Permanently, I think. To the EU.”
Shane’s brain was still carefully reversing around corners. But the EU was better, right?—
“And Alexei got promoted, and—” Ilya puffed out a big breath. “And he said.”
Shane took the opportunity afforded by the long pause to extract himself from the covers. He shifted down the bed towards Ilya, put a comforting hand on his bare back.
Ilya startled. His eyes, when he turned to look at Shane, were rimmed with red.
“What did he say?”
“He is hypocrite,” said Ilya, shaking his head. “He is asshole, he is mean, he enforces laws for some and not others—he is not good man. He was leech, and bad father, and drug-addict thug, and he has embraced it more now, he has authority now.”
“Ilyusha.” A murmur.
“He is hypocrite.”
“What did he say?”
“He—and Maxim Fyodorovich—it wasn’t words. It was—he said it in the words, yes?”
“Steganography,” agreed Shane.
“He said—he said my mother would be proud of me.”
Shane’s breath caught and he closed his mouth. He felt a sting of his own tears, sudden and sharp, off-guard, and blinked them away. Ilya was shaking his head.
“I found her.” he said. “Lyosha found me. He—he knew what—who to call, where to… He was seventeen. She was, to me, she was—she is—the perfect mama. Always. I was twelve. She was… sad, and beautiful. But… but Lyosha was seventeen, and I think sometimes that maybe, he remembers… someone else.”
Shane’s hand, moving on its own, was rubbing circles into Ilya’s back.
“Sometimes she was… angry, maybe. Because she was depressed, I think; because Papa didn’t know what to do, because she couldn't give what he wanted, and he couldn’t help, and that made him angry too, and then she was angry with him—you, worry? she said once, and she was laughing, and he was cruel, and—they weren’t… I thought, for a long time, I dreamt it.
“She was still the best mama,” he added. “Always. But maybe when you’re twelve it’s different. Maybe when you’re seventeen and you find… That was the last time.” A half smile. “That was the last time he acted like my brother.”
Shane pressed his forehead into Ilya’s shoulder; he didn’t have anything to say. He couldn’t—what could he—
“And now he sees the Foundation,” Ilya added, “and he knows what, what we are to each other, and he says still, she would be proud of me. He knows, and he says it, Shanyushka, and he is a hypocrite and yet he protected me for ever. Alexei didn’t out us, Shane. He didn’t—he would have lost nothing, anytime the last four years; he knew about me, knew enough, and all he did was say, Ugh! the West when they asked him about it point-blank.”
He was protecting himself, Shane thought. But—
“And maybe,” said Ilya, “maybe it was family honor, more than me. Maybe. But now he gives a message to the ancient tree, and says—he says goodbye, by this, and he says that Mama would be honored, and he did not need to say it and he didn’t know if Dubov would do it right and still he—and I have not thought of him, Hollander, in years. When we were outed, when everything—months, I did nothing, and I—he—”
Shane kissed his skin without moving his head, just pressed forward. Ilya leaned into the contact.
“I hate him,” Ilya said. “And I miss him, Shane.”
Shane slid back up the bed, pulling Ilya along, readjusting him, until Ilya’s head was resting under Shane’s chin, ear to heart, curls to lips.
“And I think,” Ilya said, “no, I know, he is terrible person. But maybe… if my brother were international hockey star, and clubbing in Monaco and falling in love with pretty boys in Regina while I was left…” He tossed his head gently against Shane’s chest. “Maybe, if I had been seventeen before Mama died, maybe I would only be terrible too.”
Shane knew he had to say something. The what eluded him, but Ilya had settled, torqued himself into something contained and bounded by Shane’s arms, and it was more important to be right this time than to be fast. And Shane’s track record with talking-about-Russia was not strong.
“I think,” he said eventually, “I think it’s okay to miss your brother. Even though he isn’t… great.” He breathed in, slow, and out; watched Ilya’s head rise and fall with the motion. “I think it’s okay to wish things had been different. That you’d had more time together, or—” That he’d deserved you more, he didn’t say. “I’m… glad, I guess, that he figured out some way to tell you all that.”
Ilya hummed a shaky laugh and reached up a hand, catching Shane’s. “My wise teapot,” he murmured. “My pretty one.”
Shane huffed the laugh back at him. “Yeah, yeah, ya tozhe tebya…” The lyublyu he whispered, barely a breath, because he didn’t have to say it any louder. Because Ilya knew.
“He might be a horrible person,” Shane added, after a bit. “I mean. He is. But he—but him protecting you. And who he used to be. Or… might have been. That… counts for something. That can count.”
Ilya’s thumb was idly stroking the back of Shane’s hand. He said, carefully, “Okay.”