Chapter Text
The day after they bury his father, as Ilya is packing up the few belongings he wants to take with him when he leaves for good, someone knocks on the door of his apartment. He thinks about just ignoring it. Sveta is the only person he wants to see—or at least the only person in Russia he wants to see—and she never bothers to knock.
There it is again. Harder now. It's probably his brother.
Fuck it.
Ilya pulls the door open so hard it's a wonder he doesn't tear it off at the hinges.
"What the fuck do you want?" he demands harshly, or starts to, and then doesn't finish, because it's not Alexei standing there. It's Katya, his sister-in-law, holding a tatty cardboard box in one hand and his niece's small, precious hand in the other. She stares at him, lips pressed together and giving nothing away.
Alyona shrinks back behind her mother as Ilya snaps out the words, and Ilya is immediately crouching down, contrite.
He never wants to be the sort of man who would scare a child, much less this one. Her eyes are the lightest shade of hazel, like Ilya's and Alexei's. Like their mama's. She doesn't have the fair curls of Ilya's childhood, of Mama's adulthood, though. Alyona's hair is straight, and already darker than Ilya's is now.
Her face is on the way to being the same perfect oval as Mama's.
"Alyonushka, my favourite niece," Ilya says, voice as warm and gentle as he can make it. "I'm sorry I was loud. I thought you were someone else. Will you come in?"
Alyona nods once, very seriously, but she looks to Katya for confirmation before taking Ilya's out-stretched hand.
Katya nods her acquiescence and Ilya stands up again. "You'd better come in too," he tells his sister-in-law, turning to lead Alyona inside and not waiting to see if Katya follows.
She follows.
"To what do I owe the pleasure?" Ilya asks with a wintery smile before pouring Coke into a small glass for Alyona. It's the only remotely child-friendly drink he has to hand apart from water.
"I can't stay," Katya says, her lips immediately settling back into a thin line. It's not an answer, but then she sets the cardboard box down on the kitchen counter. "I came to give you this."
She removes the lid and fuck. Ilya was about to offer her tea, but now he needs something stronger, because that's Mama's scarf sitting on top of whatever else is in the box. The purple one. The happy one. The one she wore on good days. The one she wore less and less often until she only ever put on the slate grey one instead. Before she stopped leaving the house and no longer needed a scarf at all.
Ilya had thought his father had consigned the scarf to a bonfire with Mama's other things long ago. He had thought that the cross he wore around his neck, and Alyona and Alexei and Ilya himself, were the only remaining proof outside the cemetery that Mama had ever existed.
He feels Katya's eyes on him and knows he's been silent too long.
"Why?" he asks, short and sharp.
"Alexei says you're going to set up a trust for Alyonka. He's not happy about it."
Ilya huffs a humourless laugh. "I'm sure." He looks away, smiling down with genuine warmth at the child who will never know the grandmother who wore that purple scarf. "Come over here with your drink, Alyonushka," he says.
Katya watches as he settles Alyona on the couch and takes the time to coax a smile out of her. Katya doesn't comment. She also doesn't attempt to intervene but just lets him do whatever he will do.
When Ilya returns to the kitchen area, Katya says, with the same grim expression as before, "I am happy about it, the trust. Or not unhappy. I'm… relieved that my daughter will have a financial cushion when she's ready to decide what to do with her life."
"One her father cannot snort up his nose before she even starts school," Ilya says.
Their eyes meet. This much, at least, they agree on.
"She deserves better than I can give her," Katya says, not bitterly—though maybe, to North American ears, she would sound bitter. To Ilya, she simply sounds resigned, accepting that this is the hand that fate has dealt her.
There is something very Russian about such fatalism, of course, but… Resignation. Bowing to the hand of fate. Surrendering. It's something Ilya has fought against his whole life. He's forged his own path, made his own fortune, created his own victories.
He says nothing about any of that to Katya, though. It will make no difference.
"She does," he says simply.
"And Alexei does not deserve… Well. You should have what's in that box. Not him," she says.
"He's not going to be happy about that, either," Ilya says, with vast understatement.
"No," Katya agrees, and for the first and only time since she knocked on the door she smiles. Briefly. Unpleasantly. "But he won't know where it's gone or who took it. Most likely one of his junkie friends grabbed it, searching through the closet for something worth stealing to pay for their next hit."
"I didn't know Alexei hung out with junkies," Ilya says, eyebrows raised.
"He doesn't call them that, but it's what they are."
They consider each other a moment longer, the disillusioned wife and the self-outcast brother.
"Thank you," Ilya says, because it's something that he needs to say, even knowing that she didn't bring the box for him. Not really. Taking it is something she did to Alexei, to punish him.
Ilya can get behind that.
"We need to be going," Katya says, and then she's marching across the room to her daughter on the couch. She doesn't wait for Alyona to finish her drink. She doesn't wait to find out if Ilya has anything more to say. It's time to go before any more words have the chance to fall from her lips, or secrets from her hands.
Ilya stops them at the door, crouches down again to bid his niece goodbye. Who knows when he will see her again? Or if. He hugs her, blinking back a stray tear—just one!—when she raises her little arms to hug him back.
Then they're gone and Ilya is left alone with the box.
He doesn't look at it. He fetches the vodka he didn't offer to Katya from the refrigerator, pours himself a shot, knocks it back.
It's eleven in the morning, and not too early for vodka only because in Russia it's never too early for vodka.
It's 4:00am in New York. Too early to call Shane, or too late, depending on which end of the day you look at it from. He sends a text, short and quick, before he can think better of it.
And then he sends another, because he's still thinking about the first one.
He makes himself set his phone down on the kitchen counter before he types anything really embarrassing.
The box is still on the kitchen counter, the lid beside it, with the purple scarf peeking out of the top. Ilya grabs it before he can think better of that, and pulls the whole thing out in one go. It spills over the side of the box, the end sliding along the counter and onto the floor. Ilya had forgotten that it's so long. He hadn't forgotten the subtle pattern of lilac flowers woven into the wool, or how soft it feels as he lays his palm against it.
A memory of his father assails him, voice loud behind a closed door, and Ilya-the-child creeping closer to listen through the keyhole. Only painted whores wear clothes so revealing, in colours intended to draw the eye of men other than their husband! Father had raged. Ilya had not heard the word—«шлюхаwhore»—before, but even then he knew it could never apply to his beautiful Mama. Another straw on the pile of growing hatred—too simple a word—for his father that would eventually break that particular camel's back.
He wonders, now, whether the muted purple had been Mama's preference, or simply the closest thing to her true choice that she could get away with.
The scarf smells a little musty, when he gathers the end up and brings it to his nose to breathe it in. It doesn't smell like it should. But then, it's been more than a dozen years. More than thirteen years. It's been longer than the whole time that he had with Mama. Ilya was a child when she left, not even a teenager.
Would she know him, if she saw him as he is now? Would she like what she saw?
He lays the scarf to one side, folding it loosely, and reaches down into the box. The next thing his fingers touch is a teacup, with two matching saucers underneath, one with a hairline crack all the way across. They're old-fashioned, older than Mama, probably, decorated with full, dark red roses painted on the sides of the cup, rosebuds on the saucers, and gold around the rims. The gold has worn away in places, and the roses are more faded than Ilya remembers, mute testimony to the passage of years. He thinks there was a whole set once, but these are probably all that's left. A smash sounds in his memory, discordant and violent. Not all of these cups were lost to accident, to delicate porcelain slipping through clumsy fingers. With effort, he makes himself think only of Mama, boiling the water in the kettle then brewing the tea in the big brown teapot—he wonders where that went, it's not in the box—before pouring it into her favourite cup with the red roses. He remembers her sipping the tea and smiling at him over the rim of her teacup as steam rose from it in a whorl. She always took her tea black and unsweetened, but somehow it was never hot enough to burn her lips.
The sob surprises him, wrenched from his chest and out into the empty room with no warning. He blinks, and realises that a couple of teardrops have caught on his eyelashes. Reaching up he finds that, yes, his cheeks are wet. Okay, so that was probably the warning.
He takes several tissues from the box at the end of the counter, wipes his eyes, blows his nose—once, hard—and keeps going.
He sets the teacup and saucers down carefully on top of the scarf and looks into the box. There's only two more things. It's not much to show for someone's life, even a life cut short halfway, but it's still so much more than Ilya ever dared to look for.
He pulls out the book. He knows it well. Anna Karenina, Mama's favourite, her personal copy with the tear at the top righthand corner of the dust jacket. Ilya opens the book, turning over to the title page—and he laughs out loud when he sees what is written there.
"Mama!" he exclaims, and for the first time in forever her name on his lips is accompanied by a grin.
«Ночной ДозорNight Watch» it says. Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. Ilya hasn't read it, but of course he's seen the movie based on it. Everyone saw that movie. It had had a really cool poster that Ilya had desperately wanted for his bedroom wall, but of course Papa would never have allowed it. It's the most popular Russian movie that Ilya can remember, probably the most popular Russian movie ever, full of vampires and action and special effects. And Mama had read the book beneath the cover—literally—of Tolstoy.
Who were you, Mama? he thinks and intends to say out loud, but when he opens his mouth, "I love you, Mama," comes out instead.
Ilya buries his head in his hands, draws in a deep breath and just stands there for a moment. Then he exhales so hard that his whole head shudders. It takes him another moment before he can look at anything, but he does it. He's done more difficult things. Probably.
He leaves the book with the scarf and the remnants of the tea set, and takes the last item out of the box. It's a cassette tape, but smaller than the ones that Mama used to listen to sometimes, in the afternoons before his father arrived home. The label doesn't have a title or a track list printed on it, either. Instead, someone has scrawled 'September 2003' on it in blue ink.
Four months before Mama died.
Ilya's stomach clenches as he realises what he's looking at. It's a tape from the answering machine that used to sit in the living room next to the landline. Ilya and Alexei were never allowed cell phones growing up, and Mama never had one either. Instead of a personal message bank, they'd all shared the answering machine, its tapes filling up with messages from anyone who might have reason to call: school friends, school, hockey coaches, hockey scouts, Mama's best—maybe only—friend Sofia, his father…
Ilya hurls the cassette back into the box, where it lands with a clatter. He bites his trembling lip, and wishes, uselessly, that Shane could be here, to hold Ilya close and let him hide his face against Shane's solid, comforting shoulder. Just for a single moment of weakness. That would be enough. And then Ilya could lift his head and dry his eyes and be as strong as he needs to be, as strong as he must be.
He pours himself another shot of vodka and downs it even quicker than the last one.
What happened in September the year that Ilya turned twelve? What's significant about it? Ilya started grade six that month but otherwise he can't think of a single thing. It was just one more month in the endless… Well. Other people might talk about the endless summer of their childhood, but Ilya's was never that. But even so, that September was just one more month of many, when he still lived in the illusion that nothing important would ever change at home.
What else was going on here then? He reaches for his phone, googles 'Russia 2003'—and nearly drops it when it begins to ring.
Jane flashes up on the screen.
Ilya picks it up maybe faster than he's ever answered any call in his life.
"Shane," he says into the phone. "Why are you calling me now?"
"Because you asked me to?" Ilya can see the slight crease between Shane's brows as he frowns.
"Yes, but you should not be up for at least another hour."
"I couldn't sleep. Is everything okay?"
"No, of course not," Ilya says, because his father is dead and his brother is a vile stranger, and almost all that remains of the person his mother was is sitting on the counter in front of him. "But if you mean, is it any worse? No. It is not worse. Just different."
"What happened? Do you want to talk about it?" Shane asks quietly.
Those are two much better questions, even if Ilya could deflect either of them, or both, with ease. But this is Shane, the man he spilled out his heart to just yesterday. He did it in Russian, like a coward, but just the fact of it, of letting those words out of his head and into the world, has changed things between them, so:
"I… am not sure where to start," Ilya says, and that much, at least, is the truth.
"You can tell me in Russian again, if you like," Shane says, reading his mind, apparently.
"Я тебя люблюI love you," Ilya dares, trying to sound casual but his tone hopelessly fond. More than that. So much more. "But no. The… bones of it are not complicated."
"Bare bones?" Shane suggests.
"Thank you, yes. The bare bones of it are not complicated. It is just everything else to do with it that is."
"Just that, huh?" Shane says, and Ilya can hear the small, affectionate smile in his voice, in the same way that he knew Shane was frowning a moment ago.
Ilya so badly wants to lunge down the phone and kiss him, but the distance between Moscow's morning and North America's night has never felt farther.
"So, tell me the bare bones, if you want," Shane continues.
Ilya sits down heavily on one of the bar stools by the kitchen island and stares at the phone for a moment before returning it to his ear and saying, "My sister-in-law gave me a box, one that my brother kept in the bedroom closet. It contains some things that belonged to my mother."
"Does your brother know she gave you those things?"
"No."
The silence lengthens between them. It's not tense. Shane is waiting. He knows that the unsaid words are Ilya's, not his.
"Why can't you sleep?" Ilya asks at last.
"What?"
"You said you couldn't sleep. Before. Surely you're not afraid of the old man."
"I'm not afraid of anyone," Shane says, the familiar bite of irritation clear in his voice. "Of course we're going to beat the Admirals tonight."
"Oh, of course. Just like you did last time the Metros played in New York."
"I was out on IR last time."
"Really? If you say so. I only keep track of the good teams."
"Asshole."
Ilya grins, but it fades quickly from his lips. "There's a tape," he says, before he can stop himself.
"Game tape?" Shane asks, and then in mounting panic as another thought occurs to him, "Or… Ilya. What are you saying?"
"No, nothing like that. Not us." Ilya shakes his head. "An actual cassette tape. A small one from an answering machine. It was in the box."
"Oh," Shane says, and Ilya hears him exhale. "I'm guessing the answering machine isn't in there."
"No."
"But you could get one, couldn't you? If you wanted? Or a player for a tape that size? There must be some secondhand ones out there somewhere."
Ilya blinks. "Maybe," he says. And then. "I don't know if I want to find a way to play it. I don't know if I want to hear… whatever it is."
"It's up to you, but you told me about the tape, out of everything that was in that box." Shane doesn't say any more than that. He doesn't have to.
"You still haven't told me why you cannot sleep," Ilya says, because the best defence is a good offence, in life as in hockey.
"I don't know. I just can't," Shane says.
Ilya is pretty sure that Shane is lying. He wants to make some comment about Shane's sleeping habits but they've never shared a bed long enough for Ilya to be privileged with that sort of knowledge. He could tell Shane to jerk off and think of Ilya's big hard cock deep inside him while he does it, Just to relax yourself, Hollander, as Shane goes bright red and splutters about sharing a room with Pike.
But that would all be in the aid of further deflection—and why is Ilya doing that, anyway, when he was the one who asked Shane to call? After yesterday, when Ilya told the truth.
So instead he says, "You should try to get back to sleep," just as Shane asks, "What's she like?"
The question is so apparently random that Ilya almost asks who he's talking about.
Ah. Katya.
"Katya is a woman who has the misfortune to be married to my brother." Once, Ilya would have left it at that, or not even offered that much of an explanation. But once Ilya would not have asked Shane to call. Once. Before yesterday. A thousand years ago. In a foreign country that no longer exists. Another time and place. They are not there, and never will be again, no matter what may happen in the future. But now they are here, together in a way that even an ocean and a half dozen time zones cannot separate, so he adds, "She is always angry with him, with her life, but she will not leave him. She does not have the strength. It is easier to stay and be resentful, and say everything she does is for my niece, Alyona. I said I will set up a trust for Alyona, so Katya maybe resents me a little less right now, and she brings me the box. To reward me, a little, but mostly to get back at Alexei, I think."
"And is it a reward? Like, something you- No. Sorry. You don't have to answer that. Forget I asked."
"Is okay," Ilya says with a deep sigh. "I am… Glad is not a strong enough word, and too simple. I did not think… ебать!Fuck! Enough. This needs Russian, but you need sleep."
"Tell me another time. In Russian. If you want," Shane says.
"Maybe," Ilya says. "But for now I have things that I must do, and you have sleep to catch up on."
"Yes, Mom," Shane says, somehow managing to audibly roll his eyes.
"No, you should call me Father if you wish to play those sorts of games." And yes, maybe making a joke like that the day after his father's funeral is not in the best taste, but the whole point of a funeral is that the dead are no longer around to hear. It's something for the living—and Shane is, always, what makes Ilya feel most alive.
"Fuck you."
"Not yet. But soon. Next week, in Montreal. На следующей неделе в Монреале, Любимый, когда я смогу обнять и поцеловать тебя, а также заняться с тобой сексом." Next week, in Montreal, my love, when I can hold you and kiss you as well as fuck you.
"Next week, in Montreal," Shane echoes, and Ilya very carefully does not think what it would be like to hear Shane say the rest of it, in any language. "Good night, Ilya."
"Good night, Shane," Ilya says into the grey Russian morning.
Then Shane is gone, and Ilya is alone with a silent phone in his hand and an almost empty box on the counter in front of him.
He fishes out the tape. So small and… безобидный innocuous. What is the word in English? Google translate says 'innocuous'. Good enough. But who knows what lies beneath that innocuous surface? There is only one way to find out.
Ilya opens the eBay app on his phone and almost immediately closes it again.
He wriggles his shoulders, trying to loosen up in body if not in mind. He can feel that spot, right between his shoulder blades, where the team physical therapist says he carries extra tension. Right now, it feels like he's being watched, like a pair of eyes is boring into his back, cutting through flesh and sinew and bone, laying him bare and seeing everything, even while the walls close in around him, not leaving any space to breathe.
Ilya needs to get out, and he needs to exercise. He's hardly worked out in days, and his body is feeling the lack of it. A run should clear his head, even if it has to be through Moscow's streets.
Yes, a run should fix everything.
He doesn't know why he even bothers lying to himself.
~*~
Ilya stares down at the grave. It should not be a surprise that his feet have brought him here. Well, his feet and then the Yandex taxi he called when he admitted which direction he was running in.
It's not the large, expensive cemetery he stood in just yesterday, the one where Papa now lies entombed beside Ilya's grandparents. This is a small cemetery, tucked out of the way far from Moscow's busiest streets and most famous sights. It's out of sight and out of mind of everyone save those who live nearby or who have a family member laid to rest there.
"Are you at rest, Mama?" Ilya asks. "I hope so." He steps forward to lay the flowers he has brought beneath the simple headstone carved with Mama's name and her dates of birth and death. It says nothing of who she loved or who loved her, or who she was beyond the span of years she spent in the living world. There's not even a cross as a marker of her faith.
"I brought you irises this time. I hope that's okay. The lilacs aren't in bloom yet." He leans down to pull a weed out where it is starting to encroach over Mama's space. "Did you really like lilacs? I assumed you did because the purple scarf was your favourite. But maybe not. Maybe that was as much colour as you were allowed. Or as much colour as you could bear. I don't know. Was that Papa, or was that you?" He tosses the weed off into the grass. That question will remain unanswered. There's no one left who can answer it, but then, there hasn't been for a while. Not since before Papa started calling Ilya in America and asking him to get bread on his way home, probably.
"It is enough to know that the scarf was your favourite." It will have to be. "I have it now and I will keep it safe. Always." He sits down on the narrow strip of grass between Mama's grave and the one next to her, arms around his knees. "Would you have preferred roses, red ones like on your teacup maybe? I'd promise to bring them next time, but Mama… I don't know when next time will be, or if there will be a next time. I'm not coming back to Russia in the summer. There's nothing left here for me except you, and you don't answer my questions."
That almost sounds like a complaint, but Ilya can't allow himself to complain. Not about Mama, or to her. Not when she can't answer back.
Is that irony?
He jumps to his feet and paces restlessly back along the paved path that brought him here, past grave after grave, marble chip headstones on all of them, just like Mama's. Did the monumental mason have some sort of special offer going that year? Buy twelve, get one free, maybe?
Ilya likes that idea. At least, he likes it better than the other explanation, that it was the cheapest option available.
Papa will have polished granite, of course. Only the best, like everything else Ilya has paid for. Papa, who must have chosen the cheap and nasty marble chip for Mama.
Mama should have polished granite, too. And a headstone that identifies her properly: wife and beloved mother. Ilya could do that. He could give her a new headstone, shiny and elegant and the least that she deserves. Who else has the right to take charge of Mama's resting place? Who is going to object if he does? Papa is gone, and Alexei won't care. Not if maintaining it is going to cost money. He'll leave it to Ilya to bankroll, just like everything else to do with their parents.
Christ. His family is somehow even more broken now than it has ever been, full of ghosts and resentment and greedy, clawing hands. There is no room for kindness or mercy, or even simple human warmth. Not since Mama. Ilya can't wait to get out of Moscow, to get right out of Russia and leave it and Alexei forever without a backward glance.
Right now, though, he's looking forward, looking at Mama's grave again because the path has looped around and brought him back, as he knew it would.
He can't leave without bidding Mama a proper goodbye. He stands by her feet, looking across at that insult of a headstone, and a memory springs to mind, one more recent than anything in the box that Katya gave him. One from his first year in Boston. A memory of breaking into the Granary Burying Ground after dark and stumbling through it on a dare. Of the beam from the tiny flashlight he kept on his keyring lighting up the slate headstones. Of his drunken fascination with the macabre, centuries-old carvings of skulls and wings above the name and dates of each long-departed Bostonian.
"Would you like a slate headstone, Mama?" he asks. "Would you like one with a skull and a pair of wings?" The Mama he remembers would never have chosen such a thing, but the Mama he remembers had read Anna Karenina, not Night Watch.
Maybe that Mama, the one he never knew, would see the man her child has grown up to be and see him clearly.
"Mama, there is someone I love," he blurts out. "I'm in love. I don't know what to do about it."
Mama gives no answer. The wind picks up in the trees that border the cemetery. All around Ilya, the dead are silent.
He stands there a while longer before finally saying, "Goodbye, Mama," and this time, when he walks away, he takes the straight and unwavering path that leads back to the world outside the cemetery.
He's almost made it to the entrance when his phone buzzes.
Ilya doesn't quite smile, but his heart lightens, a little. At least one of his questions has been answered today.
He calls a Yandex, and, when it picks him up outside the cemetery gates, Irina's son gets in. He makes easy conversation with the driver, cracks a joke, offers an autograph, and plays the part of Ilya Rozanov as all the world knows him, all the while steadied by the silent weight of Shane's truth, a single line of text on the phone in his pocket.