Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

July 4th, 2016 - 11:45 am

History mattered to art. Evolution and politics documented the grinding embodiment of humanity. There was something quietly fascinating about the fact that you could trace a piece of art back through centuries of collective human experience and find something that still had a breath of permanence at the centre of it.

It was quite beautiful, really.

The problem was that appreciating it required being around people who took it seriously.

By the third lecture, Ilya started debating if anthropology even existed because the people in his class weren’t any better than the chimps they were studying. He even heard someone claim evolution as a fantasy made up by “non-believers”.

Jeez.

It kept happening, week after week. People seemed to arrive to the class, not to learn, but to be confirmed in what they already believed. Which, as far as Ilya understood it, was more or less the opposite of what anthropology was supposed to be.

So he was late.

Again.

The dorm beds were partly to blame. They had the structural integrity of damp cardboard, which meant Ilya often woke up at one in the morning staring at the mildew spots spreading across the ceiling. A grey constellation left behind by whoever had the misfortune of living there before him. He’d wonder how long it’d take for the spores to quickly and quietly colonise his brain. Three months in and it probably already has.

That would explain the insomnia at least.

And now he’s ended up here. In the rain, hauling a two-kilogram logbook across campus like it was some kind of penance.

The logbook had been proposed by the professor on the very first day of term. A field journal, she'd called it. Part observation, part reflection, part whatever you want it to be. It counted for 27% of his grade, which Ilya had decided was either the most generous or most sadistic grading decision he'd ever encountered depending on the day.

Today it was sadistic.

He'd been working on it for weeks. Filling it with notes, sketches, ticket stubs, a pressed leaf he'd found on the path to the library that had seemed meaningful at the time. He'd even stitched a small piece of canvas onto one of the inner pages because it had felt right.

The rain was doing something awful to the cover.

Ilya ducked his head and walked faster, shifting the book under his arm and pressing it against his jacket. He was already seven minutes late. His bag strap was digging into his shoulder from the weight of his studio supplies underneath everything else. He hadn't slept properly in four days. He had another project due at the end of the week and hadn’t sourced half the materials yet and every time he thought about it his chest did something unpleasant.

He took a turn, maybe two left, three right. Ilya knew he was moving too fast, not paying enough attention.

So he should’ve expected the collision. A brief shoulder, a slip of grip, and the logbook gone from under his arm before he'd even registered losing it.

It hit the floor spine first and burst open like it had been waiting for an excuse to do so.

Ilya stood frozen for a half second before falling to his knees. The pressed leaf. The photograph. The small folded receipt he'd tucked between pages 34 and 35 for reasons he couldn't now justify. The piece of canvas he'd stitched onto the inner page at 2:00am because it had felt important. All of it was open and vulnerable on wet pavement, and the crowd wasn't stopping, the crowd was never going to stop. Someone's shoe came down on the corner of a page and kept moving while Ilya's hand shot out too late.

He was grabbing without thinking. Steadying himself as each page thrashed and scrunched in his arms. The rain was coming down steady and quiet and completely indifferent to him. The pavement was cold through his jeans. Rain tapped steadily against the back of his neck and ran down his collar and he ignored it because what else was he going to do? Somewhere in the back of his head a voice was doing the math on how many weeks of work were currently getting trampled and he told it, very firmly, to shut up.

The guy who'd bumped into him was still there. Red jacket, bright enough to be irritating. Just standing at the edge of his vision like he was waiting to be acknowledged.

Ilya didn't look up. He didn’t deserve his attention.

But even so, the guy eventually crouched down, reaching past Ilya to pluck a page from the very lip of a puddle.

A muffled ‘Sorry’ fell from the guy's lips.

Ilya's hand stilled for just a second.

"Fuck off.”

The guy didn't move right away. It was just the sound of rain and the crowd moving past them both. Ilya kept his eyes down and waited.

The thud of a bag being shouldered, heavier footsteps, and the red jacket bled into the crowd until it was gone.

Ilya picked up the last few pages. Pressed the logbook shut. The cover was already warped, pages thick with damp. He stood, shoved it under his arm, and kept moving.

September 7th, 2016 - 7:13am

“And can I have a name for that one?”

“Ilya.”

“Okay, just wait over there.”

Burnt sugar and roasted coffee toasted whatever consciousness Ilya had. Svetlana didn’t seem to be phased. He didn’t know how she did it. His head was still pounding. His head still throbbed, each pulse a sharp poke, as if a tiny zombie were gnawing at his brain for breakfast.

“What’s the bet they get your name wrong again?”

Ilya was lucky enough to have his autumn break match with the Svetlana's.

“Ilya is not that hard to spell.”

It had been a long time since he spoke proper Russian in godforsaken Ottawa. He had joined the Russian Society during orientation, hoping to find someone who spoke it well. Instead, he met people still learning, or with just a hint of heritage. None of them spoke like him. He missed the ease of conversation, of slipping words out without stopping to worry if some English idiom would betray him.

“I missed you,"Ilya brushed a solemn hand across his hair. "But you didn’t have to wake me up at 6:00am.”

“Who else is going to be my tour guide?”

For Svetlana’s first proper experience of Ottawa, Ilya took her to a frat party.

The party had spilled out of the apartment sometime around midnight.

Someone had dragged speakers into the living room and turned the volume up high enough that the floorboards hummed faintly underfoot. The kitchen lights were too bright for the hour, illuminating a battlefield of half-empty bottles, plastic cups, and a cutting board someone had abandoned halfway through slicing limes. The air smelled like citrus, cheap beer, and the lingering smoke from someone’s attempt at a balcony cigarette rotation.

People moved constantly. A slow current of bodies drifting between the kitchen, the living room, and the narrow hallway where someone had decided it was acceptable to sit on the floor and argue about films none of them had actually seen.

Ilya slipped easily through the crowd like he’d been doing it his entire life.

He appeared a few minutes later with two drinks balanced between his fingers and a third tucked under his arm.

“I found something that claims to be vodka,” he announced, handing one to Svetlana.

She eyed the cup suspiciously.

“Claims?”

“I didn’t witness the pouring process.”

Svetlana's face did something unfavourable before she sculled the shot. "How have you lived here for a year? This tastes like shit." She put the cup down on the kitchen island and looked around for something to chase it with.

Ilya shrugged. "Better than Moscow."

He could've stayed. That was the thing no one said out loud but that sat in every conversation about it. He could've stayed but he hadn't. He'd chosen this instead. Flat, polite, relentlessly civil Ottawa, where the most chaotic thing that happened on a Tuesday was a goose deciding it owned an intersection. He had a scholarship to thank for that, or maybe to blame. He wasn't always sure which.

Svetlana wandered over to the fridge acting as if she owned it. "You know, I missed you… We all really do."

Ilya’s voice hitched.

She turned around, leaning back against the counter. "You were good, Ilya. I just-" She stopped. "I don't know if leaving was the right thing."

She wasn't wrong to say it. That was the worst part. His friends were still there, playing hockey every Friday night at the rink off Tverskaya. He had been good. Really good. Fast on his skates, sharp with the puck and he was the kind of player who could make a play that left the crowd quiet for a moment before someone cheered. And then he’d left. Walked away from the game, the familiar chaos of teammates arguing over line-ups and goals. He wondered if anyone even noticed, if his absence had been a hollow echo in the rhythm of their practices, or if the group had simply closed around it like water filling a space he no longer occupied.

"Sveta." His voice came out flatter than he intended. He stared down at the island. His head was pounding and he hadn't even had a proper drink yet.

The music from the kitchen blurred at the edges, and suddenly he was somewhere else. In Moscow, the light flooded through the kitchen window, the smell of boiled cabbage in the hallway that would make him grimace, the faint hum of his mother humming something he couldn’t place, somewhere between a lullaby and a song she’d always hum when she was trying not to cry.

He hadn’t allowed himself to think of her like this since he left. Since he’d boarded that plane and tried to leave everything behind.

But with Svetlana here, everything came rushing back at once. The sharp cold of her absence, the hollow echo of the spaces she had once filled, the way the apartment in Moscow had smelled when she’d laughed in the kitchen and he’d tried to match her light with his own.

His fingers pressed harder against the counter, knuckles whitening. For a brief second, he imagined stepping into the quiet streets outside and letting himself dissolve into the cold and disappear. To stop feeling like a shadow of what he used to be, of what he could never reclaim.

And then Svetlana nudged his shoulder. "I didn't mean to-"

It wasn’t Svetlana’s fault. Ilya knew that much. He ran a hand over his face, exhaling sharply. "It's fine. Really."

But the memory lingered. Tangled with the vodka and noise and city that wasn’t home.

“Lily!”

It was the fourth time Ilya had been mistaken for Lily.

“They’re not even that similar,” he muttered to Svetlana as he pushed through the small line toward the counter, dodging a guy in red with a laptop balancing precariously on the edge of a table and a woman muttering into her phone.

“Jane!”

He finally clasped the light-blue cardboard cup, warmth seeping through the paper sleeve. Too hot, just barely tolerable. Steam rose in lazy spirals, curling into the smell of roasted beans and sugar lingering in the air.

“Zachery!”

He made his way back to Svetlana, careful not to bump into anyone else. At a corner table, a man laughed at something on his laptop, a stack of notebooks teetering beside him. Another girl flipped through a worn copy of a classic novel, ignoring the world entirely.

“So,” Ilya said, setting the cup down between them, “what do you think about visiting the State bank?”

“Is that seriously the only interesting thing here?” Svetlana asked, leaning back in her chair.

Ilya shrugged, a smirk tugging at his lips. He lifted the cup for a cautious sip. The warmth was familiar but the taste was off. Someone laced his black coffee with something… floral?

He turned the cup around, scanning the name scrawled in messy marker.

Jane.

Jane has bad taste, Ilya thought.

He kept drinking anyway.

November 11th, 2016 - 3:36pm

The college library had a particular kind of quiet.

Not silence. Never silence. Just the steady murmur of people pretending to be quieter than they were, the soft drag of chairs against the floor and the occasional cough from someone three tables away who immediately looked guilty about having lungs.

It was the kind of quiet that made it difficult to do anything but work.

At least, that was the idea.

Ilya didn't come here because he liked it. He came here because he had to. Left alone in his dorm, he'd find a hundred better things to do than write an essay on whatever vague, overcomplicated prompt his sustainability class had assigned this week. Something about environmental narratives that meant nothing to him at eight in the morning and even less at midnight. The words sat in his document like they were embarrassed to be there.

Here, though, surrounded by people who looked like they had their lives together, it was easier to pretend.

Or at least harder to slack off without feeling stupid about it.

It meant he could sit there and pretend he was being productive while actually sketching for three hours straight without hating himself for it.

So Ilya pushed through the glass doors and made his way upstairs, already half-thinking about the page he'd left unfinished the night before. The stairwell smelled like old paper and someone's forgotten takeaway. The carpet, a shade of institutional grey-green that had presumably once had a name, absorbed his footsteps without comment.

There it was.

The corner by the tall windows, the late afternoon light spilling across the surface in a pale strip.

идеальный.

Except someone was already there.

Ilya slowed, just slightly.

A bright blue backpack hung off the chair, loud against the otherwise dull room. The guy sitting there didn’t look up, focused on his work like the rest of the library didn’t exist.

So Ilya kept walking.

It wasn’t his table. It just would’ve been convenient.

He ended up near the stairwell, where people whispered like they wanted to be heard and the lighting made everything look slightly unwashed. Ilya sat down, opened his laptop, and stared at the blinking cursor for a while.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard. They pressed and typed and found themselves dulling on the 'e' and 'j' keys. He typed a sentence. Deleted it. Typed another. He clawed at his hair, pulling at the dead ends like that would somehow dislodge a coherent thought. Nothing stuck. But he kept typing away, pretending to be doing something productive.

So after a while he stopped trying and, annoyingly, kept glancing back toward the window.

The guy hadn't moved.

Ilya left promptly after.

The next day, it was the same.

Ilya didn't mean to check. He just did.

Same table. Same guy. Same stupidly good lighting being wasted on someone who clearly didn't appreciate it. Someone who, as far as Ilya could tell, had not once looked up to register that the afternoon was doing something genuinely nice outside those windows.

Ilya paused a second longer this time. There were glasses on the table now, left open beside a stack of books. The guy leaned back slightly, pinching the bridge of his nose with a snarl littering his face.

Good.

At least he was suffering a little.

Ilya moved on, settling himself against the staircase again. He had 1600 words to go, the elevator was dinging like it had somewhere important to be, and someone three seats down was eating a meal that smelled aggressively of garlic. The ventilation hummed. The fluorescent light above him flickered once, thought about it, and stayed on.

By the third day, it was starting to get irritating.

Not because of the guy.

Not really.

But because it kept happening. Same time. Same seat. Same setup, like some kind of routine Ilya hadn't agreed to but was now being forced to work around. The library had forty-something tables and this person had apparently decided to make one of them a permanent installation.

He didn't even bother slowing down this time. Just glanced once to confirm.

Still there.

Ilya exhaled through his nose and headed for the stairwell.

The seat was just as bad as he remembered. Worse, maybe. He lasted half an hour before giving up entirely, closing his laptop with more force than necessary. The woman beside him glanced over. He didn't apologise.

This was stupid.

So on Monday, he came earlier. Forty minutes earlier, which was not something he would be telling anyone about. He didn't need the seat. It wasn't even that good of a seat, objectively. It was a table near a window in a library full of tables near windows. He could find somewhere better.

He was still thinking this when he came around the corner of the historical shelf and found the table empty.

For a moment he just stood there, blinking at it like it was a gift he hadn't decided whether to trust yet. The afternoon sun fell across the surface in a long, clean stripe. Warm. Useful. The outlet worked. The chair didn't wobble. There was no constant elevator dings, no ambient chewing, no fluorescent flicker in his periphery.

Ilya dropped his bag onto the table before anyone else could claim it.

победа.

He settled in quickly, spreading out his laptop, sketchbook and pencils with quiet satisfaction. The light was good. Like genuinely good. It was the kind that made the grain of the wooden desk visible, that turned the dust in the air into something almost intentional. He could see the courtyard below from here, students crossing between buildings, someone's scarf losing a brief argument with the wind.

For the first hour, everything felt right.

But sometime after that, the feeling crept in.

Subtle at first. A strange sense of displacement, like walking into a room where the furniture had been shifted two inches in every direction. Nothing wrong. Just not quite right.

Someone passed behind him and paused for half a second longer than necessary. Another student slowed as they walked by, glancing at the table before moving on.

He didn't look up. The spot was his now.

So on Monday he arrived at 2:30pm again, eager to claim the spot. He came around the corner of the periodical shelf, and stopped.

The chair had a jacket draped over the back of it. On the desk was a closed textbook, a pencil case and a plastic water bottle. The guy was nowhere in sight.

Ilya looked at the setup for a moment, then twisted around to survey the rest of the library. Full. Every other table claimed by bags and laptops and the particular territorial stillness of students who had been there since morning.

Ну его нахуй.

He moved the textbook to the edge of the desk, sat down, and opened his laptop.

He'd been there about ten minutes when someone stopped beside him. He looked up. The guy was standing there holding a cup of tea wearing an expression that was several things at once. None of them were good.

"That's my seat," he said.

"I didn't see anyone sitting here," Ilya said.

The guy's eyes sailed to his jacket on the chair, the textbook that had been relocated and finally, back to the man that caused the uproar.

"I left my stuff."

"Oh,” Ilya glanced at the textbook. “I thought that was trash."

A short silence. "It's a seventy dollar textbook."

"It was face down on the desk.”

The guy opened his mouth. Closed it. Then he pulled out the chair next to Ilya and sat down. The guy placed his tea at the top right corner of the desk. Dragged his textbook back from Ilya's side of the table with two fingers, and opened it without comment. Putting his headphones on.

Fine.

Apparently they were sharing.

It was only then, in the full light of the window, that Ilya actually looked at him properly. The red jacket on the back of the chair.

Oh.

He let it sit for a while. Though, he couldn’t help gliding his eyes over the bold gold lettering of the jacket. Looking closer, it was a varsity jacket of the college. HOLLANDER was spelt out in bold gold letters.

Huh.

The guy had his headphones on and was doing a pen tapping thing. Tck, tck, tap, tck. Completely unbothered, like he hadn't just strong-armed his way back into his own seat while someone else was already sitting in it.

After about twenty minutes Ilya said, without looking up, "You knocked into me."

The tapping stopped. He pulled off the headphones like Ilya was a bigger bother than he actually was. "What?"

"A while ago. Outside the social science building." Ilya nodded at the jacket. "You were wearing that."

A thought bubbled popped out of the man's head. "I don't remember that."

"You ruined my project."

"That probably wasn’t me."

"I told you to fuck off."

"That was you?"

"That was me," Ilya confirmed, and turned back to his laptop.

The guy sat with that for a second. Then he put his headphone back on, which Ilya felt was a reasonable response.

Forty minutes passed. The pen tapping had resumed. Tck, tck, tap, tck.

"So this is your spot?" Ilya said.

One headphone came off. The guy's frown suggested he had been hoping the conversation was over. "Yes."

"Every day?"

"Yes."

"And you got here early today specifically."

The guy said nothing, which was basically a yes.

"Because of me."

"I got here early because I had work to do."

"Right." Ilya nodded slowly. "And the jacket on the chair?"

"I always do that."

"You've never done that before today."

The guy's pen stilled. His jaw shifted slightly. "I come here to study," he said, with the measured tone of someone being very reasonable and wanting credit for it. "I'm not trying to make this into something."

"I am not either," Ilya said. "I am just talking."

"You're being annoying."

"I'm making conversation."

"Those are the same thing."

Ilya considered that. "Fair," he said, and went back to his laptop.

The guy stared at him for a moment like he was waiting for a punchline that wasn't coming. Then the headphones went back on.

Ilya worked in silence for another ten minutes before he said, at a perfectly normal volume, "Your pen tapping is actually kind of soothing. Once you get used to it."

The tapping stopped immediately.

Ilya kept his eyes on his screen. Across the table he could feel the guy sitting very still, deciding whether to respond. The silence stretched out long enough to be its own kind of answer.
Then, very deliberately, the guy set his pen down and did not pick it up again.

Ilya packed up to leave an hour later. He stood, slung his bag over his shoulder, and glanced over at the guy who had his head down and was very pointedly not looking at him.

"Same time tomorrow?" Ilya said.

The guy said nothing.

January 30th, 2017 - 12:30pm

Rose was making her rounds between canvases, laptop open, tapping in marks as she sauntered through the studio with the unhurried authority of someone who had nowhere more important to be and knew it. Ilya watched her from his easel without meaning to. He wasn't inexperienced with charcoal but it had never felt like his. Pencils did. Paint did. Charcoal was a language he'd learned out of necessity and never quite stopped translating.

His mother loved paints.

Oil especially. She dabbled in water colour and let it go with a quiet irritation she’d never shown to Ilya. The colours bled, she said. You couldn't stop them. Every canvas ended with that blurred murkiness where one thing dissolved into another without asking. However, oil was different. Oil stayed where you put it. You could build it up, drag it thin, leave it textured or smooth it flat. Either way, it held the shape of whatever you'd decided and didn't soften the edges without permission.

He used to pick at his nails after their sessions together, risking a hangnail for the satisfaction of peeling dried colour from his skin. Red had always been his favourite. The most vibrant. The one that lasted longest. There was something about the faint resistance of it. The way it clung before it gave. It felt like being held and nothing else he'd found had come close.

He stared down at his charcoal stained hands when Rose reached the front of the room.

"Okay guys, we have to move onto our next workshop. And yes, this is marked."

The room responded immediately and at volume.

"I know, I know. I'm sorry for always being down your necks about it but I'm getting paid to do it, so fuck y'all." She scrolled through something on her laptop. "So, the schedule says nude studies, but the model dropped out last minute."

The class was the opposite of rejoicing.

"Yeah, I know. Boo-hoo." Rose's was less than sympathetic. "Apparently he got hit by an e-scooter on his way here."

The groans shifted register immediately. Scattered 'oh nos', a few genuine gasps.

"But," Rose continued, unbothered, "I do have a really good replacement that I hope you guys like.”

In the corner of the room, a man stood up.

He had both hands in his jacket pockets. He raised one of them in a half-wave, hand still mostly pocketed. It was perhaps the least committal greeting Ilya had ever witnessed from a person who was supposedly volunteering their time.

Ilya's eye snagged on his jacket.

His red jacket.

сука бладь.

“He’s not gonna be naked unfortunately, but I’ll be contorting him in whichever way you guys want so make the most of it!”

Rose was already gesturing toward the podium, fully committed, not inviting discussion. The man stepped up onto the platform with his hands still in his pockets. "Go on. Introduce yourself."

“Uh… Hi. I’m Shane.”

Scattered ‘hey’s and ‘hi’s fluttered through the class. Someone near the back said ‘hey’ back with genuine warmth, which Ilya felt was an overreaction.

“Because he is my boyfriend, whoever makes him look the hottest gets bonus marks.”

A few laughs burst throughout the classroom.

"Anyway, suggestions?" Rose asked.

Hands flew up immediately. Rose pointed at someone, nodded at the suggestion, and turned to relay the geometry of it to Shane with the brisk efficiency of a person who had taken a ceramics model and decided to make the most of the clay. Shane arranged himself into the position slowly: one knee raised, weight back on both palms, head turned at a three-quarter angle, gaze aimed at some neutral point past the left side of the room.

Ilya picked up his pencil.

Fine.

He would draw the guy. It was an assignment. He was a professional and he could draw anyone. He had drawn a bowl of fruit for three hours once without complaint. He could draw Shane for forty minutes.

He started with the shoulders. The larger architecture first, which was how he always worked. The line of them pulled back and down by the weight resting through the arms. The torso opened slightly with the lean.

Then it snagged.

There was a stiffness through Shane's back. It wasn’t bad posture, but the particular stiffness of someone holding a position through continuous mild effort, maintaining each element separately rather than letting the whole thing settle. His fingers were pressing into the platform harder than necessary. His jaw had the faint set of concentration, which Ilya's eye caught onto and his hand drew before he'd consciously decided to.

He looked down at the mark on the page. Then back up.

He moved on.

The neck was long. Catching the studio light cleanly along one side before dropping into shadow at the collar. Then the jaw in three-quarter view, which was doing something that was, objectively and against Ilya's wishes, architecturally interesting.

Then he got to the face, which was the part he'd been mildly dreading, because faces were where observational drawing got complicated. The temptation was always to read them rather than record them, and with someone he didn't particularly like the temptation was to read them uncharitably, which made for bad work. He needed to be clinical about this.

The brow first. It was slightly contracted, not a frown, just the ghost of one. The residue of someone whose mind was somewhere considerably more comfortable than here. The eyes, downcast, fixed on the middle distance with an over deliberateness that gave the game away a little. The mouth was neutral but not relaxed.

He drew the tension at the brow. The careful set of the mouth. The way the jaw line sharpened fractionally when Shane was working to maintain something, which he was, visibly, if you were looking.

Ilya was looking.

He was annoyed about how much he was looking.

The pencil kept moving and at some point, his thinking dropped out and it was just the page and the figure and the space between them closing. The studio noise fell back. The scratch of charcoal from the easel to his left, Rose's footsteps circling the room, the ambient murmur of twenty people concentrating.

He came back to himself sometime into the second pose and looked down at what he'd made.

He turned back a page.

Then another.

He looked at them with disgust.

The proportions were right. Genuinely right, annoyingly right. The weight was correctly distributed and the gesture convincing. The line quality was loose in the way his work only got when he'd stopped thinking about it. The margins had accumulated without his noticing: the hand twice, the jaw in a slightly different light, a small study of the way the jacket collar sat against the back of the neck that he had absolutely no memory of deciding to draw.

He turned his pencil over and used the eraser on a line that didn't need it.

At the front of the room Shane held his second pose. Something Rose had constructed with cheerful disregard for his comfort, one arm raised and crossed behind his head, weight shifted. He was managing the stillness better now. The expression had evened out. Almost. The brow still had that small thing going on. Ilya drew it again in the margin, just the brow and the line of the eye, with the irritable efficiency of someone taking notes on a problem they hadn't agreed to find interesting.

Rose stopped behind him. The small exhale of someone pleasantly surprised. Then her footsteps moved on.

Ilya kept his eyes on the page.

It was the most focused he'd been all semester, which was genuinely annoying, because it was Shane. The same library asshole. The same guy who ruined his chances of getting a high distinction on an easy first year course.

And yet, there was nothing Ilya could do with that information except turn to a fresh page and keep drawing.