Chapter Text
Shane saw him across the room for the first time on a Thursday. Or maybe it was Wednesday. Time had become difficult to keep track of when there were no phones, no internet, no access to the outside world beyond the narrow windows in the common room that barely showed anything except grey sky.
It had been sometime during his first week there when the heavily accented voice first caught his attention. Loud, sharp, furious.
“Leave me the fuck alone!”
The volume of his voice made Shane shrink in his seat. For a moment, the entire room went still, tension settling over everyone like something physical.
Shane had looked up instinctively, his attention landing on a boy with dark blond hair and a face twisted in anger as he stormed into the common room followed by a nurse who kept a careful distance from him, trying to calm him down with the same practiced tone they all seemed to use there.
Shane had been staring longer than he realized, a bad habit that only intensified when he was startled or scared.
“Stop looking at me,” the boy suddenly said, his tone sharp and almost venomous.
The words hit harder than they should have, triggering something in Shane.
Pure fear.
Shane immediately looked away, heat rushing to his cheeks as anxiety curled in his stomach. He could feel it building quickly, the familiar warning signs arriving all at once.
The tingling in his fingers. The tightness in his chest. The awful sensation that the air around him had somehow become too thin.
He closed his eyes, trying to remember the breathing exercise that the therapist spent the past few days insisting he use whenever panic started creeping in.
In for four, out slowly.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Again. And again.
It didn’t help.
By the time the panic had fully taken hold, he was already halfway back to his room, vision blurred with tears he refused to acknowledge. He crawled under the blankets and curled into himself, willing his body to calm down.
His chest ached with the effort of trying to breathe normally, every inhale catching somewhere between his throat and lungs like his body had forgotten how to do something so basic.
Sleep had become his preferred coping mechanism lately. If he was unconscious, he didn’t have to think.
Didn’t have to feel.
Didn’t have to exist inside his own head for a while.
The second time he saw the boy was during group therapy.
Shane, the boy and six other teenagers sat in a circle with two nurses using that annoying calming tone, trying to get them to talk as if sharing their problems was somehow going to solve things that perhaps couldn’t be solved.
Shane was barely paying attention to the session, too focused on keeping his leg from bouncing and trying to not think about the fact that lunch would come afterward.
He hated lunch time.
Or any time that forced him sit in front of food while people watched.
Shane had barely touched any of their food since being admitted. He wasn’t planning on starting now.
He could feel his body stuck in a constant state of readiness, like it was always waiting for something bad to happen. The presence of so many people made him anxious. Almost claustrophobic. Like the room was too small despite how much empty space there actually was.
Only one person was participating in the therapy, a girl from the female wing.Shane didn’t know her name, but she talked enthusiastically and answered every question Hayden, one of the nurses, asked the group.
For most of the session, Shane kept his eyes on his hands, avoiding any kind of contact with anyone. He had learned quickly that if he made eye contact, people reacted to it. They asked questions. Tried to involve him.
Shane didn’t want to talk.
Talking meant explaining. Explaining meant making things real.
Something caught his attention and that’s when he saw him again.
He was on the other side of the circle, slouched low in his chair, long legs stretched out carelessly, staring out the window beside him as though he’d rather throw himself through it than participate.
That was when Shane learned his name.
Ilya.
Hayden had attempted to get his attention, trying to get some sort of response from him but he without success. Ilya ignored him completely.
That was also when Shane noticed the bandages around his wrists, bright white against pale skin, almost impossible to miss.
His gaze dropped before he could stop it, catching the pale skin of his forearms marked by scars. Some looked old and faded, thin pale lines that had long since healed. Others looked newer.
A strange heaviness settled in Shane’s chest.
He wondered what had happened to him. What had pushed him there. And maybe, in some uncomfortable way, he understood more than he wanted to.
There had been moments before all of this where Shane had thought about disappearing too. Not because he wanted to die.
Or at least, he didn’t think so.
It was more complicated than that.
More like wanting to die, he wished for everything to stop. He wanted his brain to go quiet for once. He wanted the constant fear, the obsessive thoughts, the panic, the pressure to simply stop long enough for him to breathe.
He wanted stop hearing the voices of his classmates in his head. He wanted to erase the memory of the video that his ex-boyfriend had shared with the entire school. He wanted to scrub the shame out of his skin until there was nothing left of it. He wanted to forget the disappointed looks from people who had once cared about him.
Existing had become exhausting.
Again, Shane had been staring for too long, lost in his thoughts enough that he didn’t notice Ilya was staring back. The coldness in his eyes made Shane shiver immediately, dropping his gaze back to his hands so quickly his neck ached.
He could feel the panic starting to creep in again.
The tingling returned to his fingertips. His breathing became shallower. His chest tightened in warning.
This time he couldn’t run back to his room.
The third time he saw Ilya was at lunch.
They had sat him in the same table, directly across from each other.
Shane looked at the tray of food that he had no intention of touching. It looked disgusting, a sad mix of overcooked vegetables, something that might have been chicken, and rice that had gone stiff sitting under the heat lamps. Even if he was starving, he would not eat it.
Not eating it was his only source of control.
He couldn’t control his mind, or the way his body reacted to any perceived aggression or threat, but he could control this.
He could say no.
Not eating.
He kept his eyes fixed on the tray, peeling the edge of a napkin apart beneath the table until it tore into uneven strips.
Ilya’s tray sat equally untouched.
For a moment, Shane allowed himself to look at the boy sitting across from him. It was the first time that he had seen him properly up close.
His eyes were unsettling in a way Shane couldn’t explain; cold, distant, and impossible to read. Somewhere between blue and green, they looked expressionless at first glance, but exhaustion sat heavily beneath them, making him seeim older than seventeen.
Dark circles shadowed the skin beneath his eyes. His complexion was pale enough that the bruised-looking shadows stood out sharply. Small moles scattered across his face, somehow softening the otherwise severe lines of his features.
He looked angry.
But he also looked exhausted.
Not the kind of exhaustion sleep could fix.
There was something deeper in the way he carried himself, something raw, like whatever had brought him to the ward had scraped him hollow from the inside out.
Like he had been surviving for so long he had forgotten how to do anything else.
Shane was staring again.
“Stop looking at me.”
The words were quieter this time, but no less sharp.
Shane startled so badly his chair scraped loudly against the floor, drawing several glances from nearby tables. Heat rushed to his face again immediately.
He was panicking again.
He felt it first in the tips of his fingers, that awful tingling sensation creeping beneath his skin like static.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, already pushing himself to his feet before his anxiety could fully humiliate him in front of everyone in the dining area.
One of the nurses intercepted him before he could make it more than a few steps away.
“Shane, you know that you need to eat.”
Yes.
Yes, he knew.
He knew that one of the conditions for discharge was being able to manage his anxiety without spiralling and eat normally again.
He kept spiralling. He kept not eating. He was nowhere near ready to leave.
“My stomach hurts,” he said quickly.
The lie came easier than it should have, thought it wasn’t entirely false. He had been using the same excuse for months. At lunch at school, at every dinner with his parents. At team outings after hockey games.
Anything to avoid eating.
Anything to avoid the guilt that came after.
The nurse studied him for a long moment, clearly unconvinced, but eventually sighed and let him go. Shane was only half lying, anyway. The medication had made nausea a frequent companion since he’d been admitted.
He made his way back to his room and slipped beneath the blankets without even bothering to take off his hoodie.
It was his favourite one.
Or at least, it had been before they removed the drawstrings for safety reasons, leaving the collar looking wrong and stretched in a way that made something in Shane ache every time he noticed it.
It still smelled faintly like home, though.
Laundry detergent.
His mother’s fabric softener.
Something familiar.
It was becoming a habit, hiding there beneath the blankets.
One that he wasn’t particularly proud of. Seventeen years old, hiding under hospital blankets like a frightened child.
But frightened children usually had someone to come soothe them. Shane only had himself.
He barely remembered how he had ended up here.
The days leading up to his breakdown existed only in fragments, disconnected memories his mind seemed reluctant to piece back together. Maybe it was the medication. Maybe it was his brain protecting itself.
Either way, most of it felt distant, blurred at the edges.
But some things remained.
The hallway at school.
Someone muttering faggot under their breath as he passed.
Another voice making some stupid joke about his eyes, asking if his parents had imported him directly from Japan. As if he hadn’t been born in Ottawa.
As if he wasn’t just as Canadian as everyone else in that school.
As if he hadn’t spent years playing hockey alongside half the boys who laughed.
It had started a few months earlier. Shane had finally accepted that he was gay. Or at least, he had finally allowed himself to say the word without feeling like it might destroy everything.
He had his first boyfriend.
Ryan.
At the time, Shane had thought Ryan was kind. Safe.
Ryan had been his first kiss, his first sexual experience, his first contact with what Shane had thought was love.
He had also been Shane’s first lesson in betrayal.
A video was all it took.
A video Shane hadn’t known existed.
A video taken without his consent.
Ryan still denied sharing it, but at this point, it hardly mattered anymore. The moment that everyone at school saw Shane Hollander on his knees with a dick in his mouth, he became the target.
The jokes started first.
Then the whispers.
Then the looks.
Then the cruelty escalated.
Teenagers had a particular talent for finding exactly where someone was already hurting and pressing as hard as they could.
He tried to ignore it. Or at least pretended to. He had gotten good at pretending.
Even at home.
His parents had supported him. They had been furious on his behalf, protective in the way parents were supposed to be. They hadn’t rejected him. They hadn’t looked at him differently.
That somehow made the shame worse.
Because they still loved him, and Shane couldn’t stop wondering if they should be disappointed anyway.
The humiliation of something so intimate becoming public had begun consuming him slowly, day by day, until it touched everything.
The day of his breakdown had already started badly.
Coach pulled him aside after practice to comment on his recent performance. Shane had known exactly what he was going to say before the conversation even started. He had felt it himself every time his legs dragged across the ice, every missed pass, every hesitation, every mistake that would have been unthinkable a few months earlier.
He was distracted.
The whispers in the locker room. The comments muttered just loudly enough to hear. The ones everyone else conveniently ignored. Each one landed like an arrow.
He tried to ignore it.
And then… lunch happened.
Someone had left a sandwich in his locker.
And in the middle of it, a bloody tampon.
His locker had been completely decorated with used feminine products, smeared with a red substance that Shane desperately wanted to believe was just ink.
On top of the sandwich a single note: Eat this, princess.
Shane remembered staring at the words for far too long, his eyes fixed on the messy handwriting as something inside him quietly began to crack.
It hadn’t been just the note.
It had been everything piling up for weeks, maybe months, pressing against him until there was no room left to breathe.
After that, everything came in flashes.
Fragments.
His breathing turning shallow and uneven, each inhale feeling thinner than the last.
Someone touching his shoulder. He had jerked away so violently it probably startled whoever had been trying to help.
He heard the other students laughing at him. Voices getting louder and louder around him, overlapping until individual words no longer made sense. Too many people talking at once.
Too many eyes on him.
Too many hands.
Too many people.
The walls had seemed to close in around him.
He remembered screaming. Crying. Trying desperately to get away from everyone and everything. He remembered hitting someone in his attempt to escape the hell that he was living in.
And then… the hospital.
The memories there were blurred and unreliable.
A nurse trying to hold his wrist still. Someone telling him to calm down. Another voice calling him uncooperative like he was being difficult on purpose instead of falling apart.
They had given him medication.
Antipsychotics, he had later been told.
Enough to sedate him.
Enough to make the edges of that night disappear.
Uncooperative.
That was the word they had used to describe the state in which he arrived at the emergency room.
As if panic could be reasoned with
As if terror was something he had chosen.
That is all he remembers.
Next thing he knew, he was in an involuntary inpatient psychiatric ward for adolescents. It had been a week, maybe a bit more since then.
A loud crash somewhere down the hall snapped him out of his memories so abruptly his whole body jerked.
Raise voices followed immediately after.
Shane sat up beneath his blankets, his heart beginning to race again as the shouting grew louder. At first, he couldn’t make out what was being said, only the unmistakable sound of anger bouncing off the sterile hospital walls.
“Don’t fucking touch my things!”
Shane froze. He recognized the voice instantly.
Ilya.
Another voice answered, lower and harder to make out, followed by the sound something else hitting the floor.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Get away from me!”
A nurse’s voice cut through the argument, trying to de-escalating the situation. The nurse’s voice sounded calm, firm and controlled. The same tone he heard from every nurse working on the floor.
“Ilya, step back. I don’t want to send you back to the seclusion room again.” Shane heard the nurse say.
Shane’s stomach dropped.
Again?
“Tell him to stay the fuck away from me then.” Ilya’s voice sounded filled with anger, but he was no longer completely out of control.
Shane swallowed hard, pulling the blankets tighter around himself as though they could somehow protect him from the shouting outside. The commotion continued for another minute, sharp and chaotic, until more staff voices joined in.
Eventually, the noise dulled into muffled arguing and footsteps moving farther away.
A knock at the open door of his room made him jump.
He was still completely hidden under his blanket, not remotely ready to face the world again.
He heard one of the nurses stepped inside. Then a hand touching his shoulder through the blanket.
The contact made him flinch immediately, his body instinctively trying to pull away before his brain caught up.
“Shane?”
It was Hayden, one of the nurses Shane actually liked.
Hayden always seemed to be in a good mood, warm in a way that sometimes felt almost contagious, but then Shane’s brain reminded him that he was being paid to be nice. That none of it was genuine.
Slowly, Shane lowered the blanket and pushed himself upright, rubbing at his face quickly in case he looked as bad as he felt.
“Yeah?” His voice sounded rough. He barely noticed anymore when he cried.
Ever since the video leaked, tears had become such a regular occurrence that he no longer reacted much to the wetness on his face or the rawness in his throat afterward.
“You’ll have a new roommate,” Hayden said.
Shane blinked at him, confused.
“My what?” He had hoped that he would be alone for at least a little longer.
His previous roommate had been discharged the previous day and had mostly kept to himself, which Shane appreciated.
No awkward conversations, no pressure to interact. No feeling like someone was constantly watching him fall apart.
“We need the bed, so you’ll have a new roommate.” She explained, using that same infuriatingly calm tone staff always seemed to default to.
The idea of a new roommate landed heavily in Shane’s stomach.
The thought alone made his chest tighten.
“Who is it?” he asked, trying and failing to keep the anxiety out of his voice.
Maybe it wasn’t someone bad. Maybe it was one of the quieter kids. Someone that kept to themselves and who wouldn’t look at him.
Wouldn’t talk to him.
Wouldn’t notice him falling apart.
Maybe, for once, he would be lucky.
Hayden hesitated. Briefly and barely noticeable.
But Shane noticed.
“Ilya.”
The name landed like ice water down his spine.
Shane stared at him with a blank expression, but inside, panic was already beginning to stir.
Ilya had triggered two panic attacks in less than two days. Not intentionally.
All because Shane stared too much and Ilya clearly hated being looked at.
“…The one who was just screaming?” Shane asked, even though he already knew the answer.
Hayden’s expression shifted into something that was clearly supposed to be reassuring.
It failed.
“Yes, there was an incident with his current roommate,” he explained. “We think a room change is the best solution.”
We think.
Not we know. Not this will help.
Just hope disguise as professional certainty.
Shane just stared at him. It wasn’t like had a say in who was or wasn’t his roommate.
He could already feel his pulse beginning to climb, the familiar and horrible sensation of panic crawling beneath his skin. “This is temporary, right?” he asked, hating how small his voice suddenly sounded.
The look on the nurse was all the answer he needed. It was not temporary.
Shane swallowed hard, his breathing becoming noticeably more difficult with every passing second. He wanted to say no, wanted to tell him that he couldn’t do this. That Ilya had already scared him.
Instead, he stayed quiet. Because what else was he supposed to say?
He had already lost the right to decide where he slept, what he ate, when he could leave, what medication they gave him, and whether strangers were allowed to touch him when he panicked.
No one had asked whether he wanted to be admitted either.
As though the universe wanted to make the situation worse immediately, raised voices echoed from the hallway again, closer this time.
Then footsteps. Heavy, quick, irritated.
Shane’s stomach dropped. His fingers were already starting to tingle.
Then Ilya appeared in the doorway. And for a moment, Shane forgot how to breathe.
Ilya looked even worse up close. His jaw was clenched so tightly it looked painful, tension radiating off him in sharp waves. His pale face was flushed with fury, blond hair slightly dishevelled like he’d been dragging his hands through it. Loose curls fell messily toward his eyes, making him look even more unapproachable.
The bandages around his wrist stood out starkly against the sleeves shoved carelessly up his forearms.
But it was his expression that made Shane’s pulse spike.
He looked furious. His eyes were cold, sharp. His face showed the kind of anger that had gone past shouting and settled into something quieter and meaner.
His blue-green eyes flicked around the room before landing on Shane. They made eye contact, and Shane felt terrified as if he was reliving the weeks of bullying and abuse from his classmates.
Recognition was immediate, and whatever irritation already sat on Ilya’s face darkened visibly.
“Oh,” Ilya said flatly, his accent heavier with annoyance. “It’s you.”
Shane had never wanted to disappear more.
He didn’t answer.
“Ilya, this is Shane.” Hayden said, sounding almost as though he expected some kind of civil introduction.
Shane did no such thing.
Instead, he pulled the blanket back over himself and curled inward, shutting his eyes tightly as though that might somehow make any of this disappear.
Sleep.
If he could just sleep, he wouldn’t have to think about the coldness in Ilya’s eyes.
Wouldn’t have to think about the fact that this angry, unstable stranger was now sleeping only a few feet away.
Wouldn’t have to think about how completely, utterly out of control he felt.