Chapter Text
Ilya drank the shitty champagne and tried not to think about the last time he’d felt this particular mix of victory and wanting to be somewhere else. Around him, the Centaurs were in a party mood. Ilya grinned, but the smile lacked feeling, and it soon faded from his face. He looked out of the window, which showed nothing but white clouds.
A win in Raleigh. His name on the score sheet twice. After losing in Buffalo, then losing at home twice, a win. It was just one win, but the cabin felt electric, as if they were on the verge of something. They had been playing better, something starting to click. On the plane, music was thumping from someone’s portable speaker, Bood chanting something, one of the rookies already half-asleep with his mouth open and a beer balanced on his chest. Normal. Good, even. Ilya should have been in the thick of it, hyping everyone up about the new year and demanding better music, but his body had carried him to the window seat instead, and now he was stuck there, watching his own breath fog the glass.
His phone sat heavy in his palm. The screen glowed with Shane’s text, sent four hours ago and still burning a hole through Ilya’s chest:
I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. I know you’ve already chosen me, in every way that matters. I’ve been so selfish. Please call me when you land.
Simple. Careful. So fucking Shane it made Ilya’s teeth hurt.
He’d read it twenty times. Hadn’t answered. The fight replayed behind his eyes like a brutal highlight reel: Christmas, Ilya’s home in Ottawa, the argument about Bood’s party turning into something bigger, a late night fight that spun out of control, Shane’s face dismissive and angry, flinging out the words:
“Fuck you. Sorry I still want to win cups instead of smoking weed with my teammates between losses.”
Ilya had pushed, wanting so badly for Shane to say the words Of course I would choose you.
Instead he had fired the question back at Ilya. “Would you choose me?”
“Go home.” Ilya had said quietly.
Ilya hadn’t even looked to see if Shane had listened. He’d walked up the stairs without turning around. But a moment later, he heard the door click shut with a soft finality.
They had not spoken since. Not really. Shane had texted him the next day, I’m sorry. Call me when you want to talk. Please. Ilya had not replied. There had been silence for a week. Today, another text from Shane before they left for the airport. Shane had probably been checking the score from the Carolina game, maybe knowing the Centaurs had won and Ilya might be in a good mood. Always Shane, working the angles. His text, I know you’ve already chosen me, in every way that matters.
Ilya drained the champagne. It was flat now, warm from his grip. Outside, the clouds had thinned, and he could see the distant glint of water—the Gulf, maybe. Tampa wasn’t far. Not long now—solid ground under him, Shane’s voice in his ear, and they’d figure it out. Ilya knew Shane loved him, and he loved Shane. He just missed him so fucking much all the time, and he needed Shane to know that, and for Shane to assure him that of course, he would choose him—Ilya just had to work out what he was going to say. It was hard, on the phone, in English. But Ilya could not wait for the next time he saw Shane in person. He had to speak to him.
His thumb hovered over the screen. One message. He could type okay or love you or we’ll talk and send it spinning into the ether ready to ping as soon as they landed, but something held him back. Pride, maybe. Or the ugly, childish part of him that wanted Shane to hurt a little longer, to sit with the silence the way Ilya had sat with it after Shane had said those hurtful words. No, he just didn’t have the words yet. That was what it was. The phone went back in his pocket.
The overhead light flickered.
Once. Then again, longer this time, the cabin dimming for three full seconds before blazing back. Ilya frowned. The plane shuddered. The music cut out mid-chorus. Someone laughed, high and nervous.
Someone else: “What the fuck?”
The plane dropped.
The floor fell away beneath them, and Ilya’s stomach lurched into his throat as the cabin tilted sharply left. His champagne cup slid off the tray and rolled down the aisle. Someone screamed—a short, punched-out sound that got swallowed by the sudden roar of the engines. Maybe he was the one who screamed.
The engines. Fucking hell, the engines.
Now everyone was screaming. The plane was screaming. A high, metallic shriek that Ilya felt in his molars, in the bones of his skull, and beneath it something deeper and wrong, a grinding shudder that traveled up through the seats and into his spine. The plane jolted again, hard right, a stack of playing cards flying across the aisle. The overhead bins rattled open, bags tumbling into laps and onto the floor.
The captain’s voice came through the speakers, stretched thin with effort. Ilya’s panicked brain struggled to translate it quickly enough, only catching the words “engine” and “emergency landing…water.”
Chaos. Teammates scrambling for seatbelts, curses flying in three languages. Ilya clutching the armrests with white knuckles. A cold spike through Ilya’s chest. This was real. This was happening.
Ilya closed his eyes and gripped harder. Someone was shouting something about a fire.
I’m going to die.
I will never see Shane again.
I will never tell him I’m sorry.
I will never tell him I love him again.
They was supposed to be forever.
Ilya’s hands shook as he took his phone out of his pocket. He couldn’t let Go Home be the last words he said to Shane. He typed out words with thumbs that wouldn’t steady. Tears blurred his eyes and he brushed them away furiously.
I love you. I am only thinking about you right now. Send.
Whatever happens, I am with you. Safe in your heart. I believe it. Send.
Outside, the clouds were gone. Water below, dark and rushing up.
Not enough. Never enough time to say how much of his life had belonged to Shane, how empty the years before him had been, how terrified he had been of Shane not choosing him—
He started another text. Shane you are the—
The plane jolted again, throwing Ilya’s phone from his hands, and he stared at it where it fell, in the aisle, out of arms reach. The screen went dark, a black mirror where Shane’s name had been, and all Ilya could think was: he won’t know. He won’t know how much. He’ll think I didn’t try. He’ll think I chose silence at the end, the same way I chose it for everything else. Ilya closed his eyes and let the tears flow freely down his face.
Shane.
The engines howled. Ilya could feel them fighting, and a new sound: a low, rhythmic thudding from somewhere behind the bulkhead. Like something mechanical coming apart piece by piece. The smell of smoke and something chemical Ilya didn’t know. A wall of sound that drowned out everything—the engines, the screaming, the desperate prayers.
The impact came from below.
Ilya’s body thrown forward and his head connected with something in front.
The world folded inward.
Darkness.
The last thing he registered was the cold and his fingers twitching against the armrest, searching for something to hold onto, finding nothing.
The darkness took him whole.
There was a table. That was all. A simple wooden table set in the center of a room, illuminated in a room so dark it was impossible to see anything else. He could see no doors, no windows, no edges to define where the room began and ended.
Ilya stood beside the table, feeling the room shift in and out of his conscious. Constantly moving like something trying to settle into a shape.
He couldn’t remember arriving here. Or standing up.
He felt weightless, untethered.
Ilya looked at his hand, floating up away from his body like it had come detached. He reached out and managed to touch the table’s surface. It felt warm beneath his fingertips, smooth and worn, like something that had been touched by many other hands, over too many years to measure. The table felt real. It was the only thing that felt real right now. Around him the room seemed to be breathing in and out in slow, patient waves.
The plane. He remembered something. The terror. The chaos and the smell and the noise.
The room was the reverse of the plane. There was an absence of sound, total silence pressing against him. He opened his mouth to speak, to call out—but nothing would come. He waited. He didn’t know what he was waiting for, but he knew something would come. Or he would go.
Then—a voice.
It was faint at first and Ilya thought he might have imagined it. But it strengthened, approaching and winding around him, encircling his body. He didn’t so much hear it as feel it as though it were part of him. Ilya’s knees nearly buckled.
“Ilyushka.”
Mama. Her voice exactly as he remembered it, warm and low. But there was something new woven through it now—a ragged edge, a sorrow so deep it seemed bottomless.
“Ilyushka, I’m sorry.” Each word landed like a stone. “I’m so sorry you died like that. It was painful. I know it was painful.”
Ilya’s hand gripped the edge of the table.
“You’re safe now,” his mother said. Her voice trembled. “You can come with me. It’s quiet here. No more pain. No more fighting. Just rest, solnyshko. Just rest.”
The nickname unspooled something in Ilya’s chest that had been wound tight for years. He leaned toward the sound, arm outstretched, fingers splayed as if he could catch the words and hold them. The room didn’t seem dark any more. It was light, as bright as the sun, the walls leaning in to him like cupped hands closing around him, as he leaned in toward his mother.
He could go to her. However far away she was, whatever this place was, he could follow her voice and be done with it. No more hurt, no more plane crash. No more fights with Shane that left bruises deeper than any check against the boards. No more waking up at three in the morning thinking about going back to Moscow and the certainty that he was, and always would be, alone.
His hand trembled in the empty air, reaching.
“Mama.”
And then.
Then.
“—ILYA. Ilya. No no no.”
—another voice tore through the light. The room returned to darkness.
Not Mama’s voice. This one was not gentle, not offering rest. This voice was raw, shredded, a sound ripped from the depths of a body that had been torn apart and put back together with nothing but grief. Shane. Shane screaming his name with a violence that cracked the silence like it was glass.
“Please—no—Ilya—I can’t I can’t—PLEASE.” The words fractured, the voice collapsing into sobs so visceral Ilya could feel them in his core.
Shane was crying, coming apart somewhere, and the sound of it was worse than any physical pain Ilya had ever known.
“Ilya—no no no—please come back—I need you Ilya—”
Ilya’s hands faltered, where he had been reaching for his mother, fell useless at his sides. He felt tears streaming down his face.
“Mama, I can’t. I won’t leave him. I love him so much.”
His mother’s voice came again, soft as ever. “I know, Ilyushka. I know you do.”
“Then let me go to him.”
Her voice trembled. “The pain of going back is worse than leaving—worse than anything you can imagine. I can’t watch you suffer that. Let it be over, solnyshko. Let me keep you safe, just this once. I don’t want you to hurt any more. You don’t know what you’re choosing.”
And there it was, that terrible question, arrived at last—what would he choose? The question they had thrown at each other across the kitchen, and left lying on the floor. Would you choose me? He hadn’t answered then. He answered now.
“I choose him.” His voice steadied. “I’d choose the pain a thousand times over, if it takes me back to him. I’m sorry, Mama. I love you. I’ll love you every day, wherever I am, until I see you again. But I have to go back.”
For a long moment there was nothing. Then she spoke again, and the sorrow in her voice had gentled into something like pride. The sound of a mother who’d always known her son would choose love—and wouldn’t have wanted him any other way.
“Ilyushka.” The word was thinner now, stretched across a distance that was growing by the second. “It’s all right. You can go to him. You should go to him.”
“Mama—”
“I love you. I’ve always been with you, and I will be here when you are ready. Go.”
Her voice dissolved into the fabric of the room and only the darkness remained.
And Shane—Shane crying, Shane begging, Shane’s voice breaking over his name again and again.
Ilya bowed his head to the table. He pressed into it, letting the solidity anchor him. Eighteen years since his mother had left his life. Twelve years since Shane had entered it. Twelve years. One life pulling him toward peace, the other toward a grief so vast it threatened to swallow him.
“Shane, moya lyubov. I will not leave you. I promise.” he whispered.
The words echoed. The room seemed to absorb it, the walls pulsing faintly, and for a moment Ilya thought he felt something shift—a distant pressure, a pulling sensation that started at the base of his skull and travelled down his spine. Pain flickered at the edges of his awareness. It felt sharp, real, alive.
He pressed his palm flat against the table and pushed himself upright.
“I will not leave,” he said again, and this time the words were not a whisper but a vow, thrown into the void with everything he had. “You hold on. You fucking hold on, Shane Hollander, because I am coming back to you.”
The room began to fracture around him, dissolving and overwhelming him with unbearable sensations. The cold, the sounds, the smell of the burning plane. His body was remembering piece by piece, each part unimaginable pain, dragging him him backward out of the room. The table disappeared, removing the last solid, real thing from the room, and his hands scrambled for something to hold on to.
Ilya Rosanov knew one thing. He would not let go. He would go through the pain, the terror, all over again a thousand times. But he would not let go. That was the thing he held on to—the absolute, unshakable certainty that he would not let go.