Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Mid-December in Montreal, and the trees seem to ache with how much they miss their leaves. The snow crunching beneath Ilya’s every step reflects the nascent winter sun like a harsh mirror. When he sucks in a strained breath, the air is sharp.

Rue de la Montagne is home to shops, hotels, cafés, and apartments. As he steadily makes his way down the street, he passes by a number of tourists—always identifiable by the way they marvel at every little thing, as though chuffed by the idea of French signage—and locals alike, all bundled to varying degrees in defence against the cold. It’s about negative ten, but only the younger ones seem to understand this.

Past the skyscrapers and an interminably long intersection, he takes a swift left onto Avenue des Voyageurs de Montréal. Centre Bell looms before him, both innocuous and larger than life. In another world, it might be enough to give him pause, compel him to dissect the lingering attraction of his feet to the entrance of the building.

In this world, he ducks into Kettlemans. 

The heating vent greets him first with a blast of warm, if stale air, and he dutifully makes a show of stomping his feet on the black mats beneath him, as though the soaked fabric will do anything about the snow caked in his soles. In the summer, the dining area is open to the elements, and the sun paints the restaurant in burnt orange hues. Now, the room is lit by bright LEDs that leave him blinking rapidly.

Fortunately, the person he’s here for isn’t hard to find. Alight like a neon sign, her black coat and mood lend her a disgruntled atmosphere that serves as a useful repellent to every other customer. It’s not often that she makes the trip to Canada, but every time further defines the curl of her upper lip as a sneer.

“Sveta,” he says, winding his way around the strewn chairs and tables to meet her.

“Rozanov,” she responds, and turns her cheek expectantly. He obliges her with a chaste kiss, the pucker of his lips barely making a sound when he draws back. 

“I don’t understand your fascination with these most unglamorous places.” When she switches to their mother tongue, it almost comes as a shock to the system. “Overcharging me for a coffee that tastes like the ass of a dead cow.”

Wildly, and just for a fleeting moment, Ilya feels the urge to say something rude in the local slang he’s picked up since moving to the city. He forces his brain into working order and summons a faint smile.

“I thought you might appreciate a place closer to your hotel.”

She levels him with a look, a hint of a scowl pulling at her features, but otherwise doesn’t dignify him with an answer. Her hotel is the Ritz Carlton, up the street along de la Montagne and next to Tiffany’s on Sherbrooke. He’d thought to meet her there, at first, and take her to someplace where food is doled out in conservative portions for inordinate prices—but then that would risk her catching his conversation with the concierge, so. Here they are, some distance away.

Body language used to be enough for communication. As young children, they’d lead one another through play-acting and rough-housing and incoherent screams. As young adults, through meaningful and meaningless touches, trusting each other to know the difference. As people now, aged by decades and blessed to see the blemishes of it with every glance, the knowledge of their history only serves as a counterpoint to the reality of their estrangement.

“I’ll take you to St-Viateur next time, when I have fixed my life,” he promises. “We’ll head to Fairmount after, and we’ll decide which one is the best.”

Svetlana smiles, playing along. “You said this last time, and the time before.”

“Ah.” He mirrors her expression. “But I have never broken a promise, yes? So it is only a matter of fixing my life.”

This is a comfortable dance, artless in its execution but cherished all the same.

“My oldest friend,” she pronounces, crisp and damning. “I’m afraid we will never go anywhere.”

Ilya returns to the apartment in time for dinner, and the sun has already set. The open-plan is draped in gossamer shadows where light from the foyer hesitates to reach further. Beyond the cage of windows is the Montreal skyline, twinkling and tinged green from the TD building.

When he flicks on the lightswitch, dust motes seem to dance over the kitchen island. He makes a mental note to check the mailbox, but vaguely recalls having made the same observation every day for the past week at least, so he lets it slide for another night. Off come his shoes and coat, the latter of which he drapes over the back of the closest bar stool.

“What’s for dinner,” he mutters in English under his breath. At night, every noise seems amplified tenfold: the dishwasher opening, because using it as a drying rack is a habit that has long since been drilled into his hands, and the fridge closing. “Ilya, there’s still pasta leftover from yesterday.” 

With a clink and a clatter, the tupperware lands somewhere in the middle of the microwave, and one grating beep later, the machine hums to life. Ilya props his hip against the island and watches the timer tick down. He’s not even hungry, but then, he hasn’t eaten anything all day, and being at the apartment has the same effect as submerging himself underwater—all the world a muted blue.

“How was your day, Ilya,” he continues, still in his second language, absentmindedly drumming his fingers against cold marble. He thinks back to the last few hours. “Well, I managed to wake up before noon, but I stayed in bed until I needed to see Svetlana. I stopped by her hotel to give the concierge her parting gift, and then I saw her over coffee, and she is still angry with me. No surprises.”

The microwave beeps. He jams his thumb against the button to open the door harder than he should.

“How was yours?” 

The apartment echoes, empty.

He manages to pass the rest of the evening with a few too many cigarettes and more blue light than is considered healthy, and he crawls into bed at the socially acceptable time of 10pm. As he stumbles by the door to their bedroom, he taps the frame with his knuckles to wordlessly bid it goodnight, then heads into the next room. 

In his hand, his phone buzzes with notifications, some mix of unanswered emails and social media updates. And alerts.

Six hours ago, from the Chronicle Herald: Canadian hockey darling doppelgänger spotted in Dartmouth. 

If he were maybe ten years younger, he might have stayed up well into the night to follow up on the lead. Over a decade of methodically hoarding and sorting information can shave away at the fervour. But for a time, he’d felt like the point man of a criminal undertaking with his level of obsession. Having never pursued higher education either, the research felt like a crash course in itself: how to identify good sources, connect pieces of knowledge together, create a picture. Form an argument.

Deductive form, modus tollens. If he was out there, he’d let Ilya know, somehow. He hasn’t let Ilya know. Therefore, he is not out there. But he is everywhere, in the icy pavement and the sunset sky and every cell composing the makeup of Ilya’s mortal, aging body, and the mere idea that he does not walk the Earth is one that Ilya profoundly, violently rejects. Reductio ad absurdum. He must be alive. 

This article only barely passes his filters. It’s a short few sentences about how someone out East thought they saw their childhood hero in a Sobeys. How it must have been a trick of the light, and doesn’t every Asian look the same?

The accompanying photo is a blurry image of a man in a frozen food aisle; just another reminder that only a handful of people would be able to tell the difference, would be able to spot him out of a crowd without a second glance, and none of them are in the Maritimes. Ilya stares at his phone long after the screen dims into black mirror. 

He receives the expected text message from Svetlana in the early hours: a succinct, fuck you. 

It’s unknown whether she can see when he starts to blearily tap out a reply. There are so many things he could say. That’s not very fair, maybe, if he wants to be trite. My mother loved you so much, if he wants to be honest. She would have wanted you to have it anyway. The cross on his chest is a burden he bears of all the things left unlived and unsaid.

Missing from his shelf is a photo album from decades past. An otherwise innocuous gift, but for the fact that it’s a history of them, and he’s given it away for someone else to keep. Innocent, but for the note he included, saying they’d never be those children again.

“My oldest friend,” Ilya murmurs as he types, then deletes the draft and closes the app. He adds it to the list of things that won’t happen again, like going back and going anywhere.

“Let’s go somewhere,” he used to say to Ilya while carelessly throwing a coat over his shoulders. He’d do it every few months after approximately a week of yearning glances out the window, either over skylines or through impenetrable woods, and throw the keys to their Jeep at Ilya’s head.

They’d pack light, maybe an overnight bag to share. They’d let David and Yuna know they’d be off the grid for a day, or the weekend, and they’d pick a direction. They’d drive.

Driving is good, he would justify, after Ilya would complain about his legs cramping, because you can be present without anybody realizing you’re you. “Your biggest fan could be right behind you,” he would continue, at which point Ilya would affect a pout.

“I thought my biggest fan is sitting next to me,” he’d needle, and watch with no small amount of joy as tanned skin would flush with splotchy red. “You are sitting next to yours, after all.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” would be the usual admonishment, or variants thereof. Dutifully, Ilya would reach over, pry his hand off the wheel, and press a conciliatory kiss to the knuckles.

Predictably, Ilya takes the Porsche 911 out from under its protective cover before the sun is up and roars out of the garage. The streets are nearly deserted, but the traffic lights are as insufferable as ever, at least until he can finally get onto the highway. The only company around him is other assholes and travellers heading to the airport for early flights. He takes the curves of the road and imagines he can feel the G forces in his neck. Around him, dark outlines of trees stand silhouetted against the night sky, and for a moment, he remembers being in Belgium as part of a larger European trip: taking blind turns while deep in the Ardennes, diminishing himself to pure sensation as he goes around and around.

The tight compression of his body never subsides. It’s possible that every kilometre whittles further away at him—that eventually, there won’t be anything of him left to drive the car. Above, the fading moon hangs at the perfect angle to light the road, lending a dream-like quality to the white and yellow lines that demarcate the trajectory of his life.

He stops at a lookout on the side of the road and climbs onto the still-warm hood to watch the sun rise over barren crags and pavement. It’s not scenic by any measure, but the air stings his lungs when he breathes in, and he grasps the sensation, clumsily twining it around his fingers like a newborn babe.

Eventually, the wind stops being a grounding force and starts to buffet his face in a particularly irritating way. Between one blink and another, he’s back in the car, setting off for an apartment he used to call home.

Svetlana tries to call him, and he lets the call go to voicemail. There are even more emails in his inbox now, some last-minute, end-of-year matters he can’t put off anymore, so he slides his glasses onto his face and sits at the desk in his office-turned-bedroom. Operating the charity is old hat now, but there are still things he’s not allowed to delegate, for fear of losing the last bit of his sanity. 

Yuna understands; half the emails are from her and their shared secretary. Briefly, he wonders what they’re doing for the holidays; if they’ll invite him to another public vigil after the stunt he pulled last year. There’s still a newspaper clipping of it pinned to the corkboard in front of him, along with dead and loose ends.

Former hockey star freaks out at funeral. Toronto Sun. Some editor had added a speech bubble out of his furious mouth, scandalous yellow block text saying, HE’S NOT DEAD. The Photoshop job was singularly bad, and Ilya had laughed harder than he’d thought possible, so on the wall it went. The rest of the corkboard is not as amusing.

According to all known sources, former Montréal Voyageurs Captain Shane Hollander was last seen making his way up Mont Royal eight years ago, jogging on Chemin Olmsted in his signature Reeboks. When he never made it back for a meeting, increasingly frantic calls were made to his number, only to find it disconnected. When he never made it home, the police were put on the case.

Though he wore a smart watch that ostensibly could track his location and had his phone in his sac banane, neither device gave the investigation any leads. Search parties and animals combed the mountainside for his trail, only to find trees and rocks and dirt and hills upon hills of weathered graves.

“On ne sait pas,” the then-police chief had admitted, stuttering, flustered from frustration and months of fruitless efforts. They were doing their best, he’d tried to say, drowned out beneath the din of reporters asking where Canada’s star had disappeared to. Nobody knows, he’d insisted. What the fuck do you mean, nobody knows.

Ilya had spent the press conference with splinters beneath his skin and bruises under his eyes and gravel from Mont Royal slicing at his heart, every nick like a papercut, or like a stab wound, depending on the hour. He’d laid waste to their apartment and left it in a disarray to drink himself to sleep alone in bed, living like Shane Hollander might have, because Shane Hollander was many things, but practical and frugal were not words that would ever apply. Shane Hollander lived in excess, surrounded himself in it, felt it all, and still always wanted more. Shane Hollander was a hedonist packaged tightly within himself, carefully locked but for those who held the key. 

Shane Hollander, past tense. 

After every lead dried up, after Ilya’s media reputation had gone from suspect to public enemy to grieving significant other to failure number one, the authorities marked Shane Hollander’s disappearance as a cold case. The world, for its part, moved on.

“What you need,” Svetlana had suggested, after an unsatisfying coffee and as Ilya held the door open for her, “is a vacation.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d said so, but now that he’s officially in his late forties, he’s starting to feel time run against him, the counter above his head flashing red to a distant crowd. His father was only in his fifties when the symptoms started to show. His mother—well.

“Where?” 

Privately, his mind had crossed off every location he’d never be able to visit again without doing something inadvisable, like chasing after threads of nostalgia about a life he’ll never get back. He’d blinked at his childhood friend, unable to emote anything more than a blank stare.

“Anywhere but here.” She’d shrugged as they shuffled onto the sidewalk. “You don’t even like this country that much.”

No, he doesn’t. “I like the people.”

“You liked one person,” she’d corrected.

“And now, look, I am not wasting my life away,” he’d turned and held his arms out, as if to frame Centre Bell behind him. “I’m a philanthropist in this beautiful city.”

Slowly, he’d allowed his arms to drop. Svetlana’s expression was inscrutable, with her hands tucked in her pockets and away from discerning eyes.

“If I go away,” he’d pleaded, suddenly desperate to fill the gaps and rifts between them that formed the first time he ran across the world, “I don’t know how I’ll return.”

She’d known what he meant; they still knew each other well enough to say that much with confidence. Disappearing is the easiest part. But do I still have enough left of me to change, he’d asked, hoping body language would suffice one last time. Half of him had been torn out eight years prior; the rest, chipped away into pieces.

In response, she’d simply quirked her lips into a semblance of a grin.

“Do you remember being rookies together?” Both mischief and introspection had slotted perfectly into the way Shane Hollander held himself, a feat which would have been incongruent and bizarre on anybody else, but the two sentiments folded nicely into his deadpan delivery. They’d held this conversation over a homemade lunch of chicken sandwiches at their breakfast bar countertop in Ottawa, sometime towards the end. Even if neither of them had known it at the time.

“I remember,” Ilya had said. Then: “I remember beating you a lot.”

“Asshole,” Shane had rejoined automatically, though not without a wry flavour of fondness in his vowels. “My mom found the first pair of sneakers I got from Reebok in the garage the other day. Used to say they represented steps towards Asian acceptance, or something like that.”

Ilya, who possessed—and maintains—a great admiration for Yuna Hollander, had simply hummed in agreement. But Shane wasn’t finished, true to this as in every aspect of his magnificent life.

“It kinda got me, actually,” Shane had admitted, “that it’s been so long. I don’t even remember what it’s like to be a teenager.”

“Because you are old?” They could barely be considered in their late thirties. Ancient, of course, for athletes. Unfortunately, unlike many times previously, Shane had not risen to the bait, due to his perverse insistence on Having A Moment. 

“I don’t remember being a teenager,” he had emphasized, “but I remember being with you, and everything being new.”

Ilya had reached out to place his hand on Shane’s thigh, high enough so that his fingers could tease. He’d left crumbs on Shane’s pants. Those, he remembers most vividly of all.

At the end of the day, Ilya bids his colleagues happy holidays and promptly logs off. Yuna hadn’t bothered with an invitation, and he couldn't fault her at all. 

(He’d had a mild spark of hope when he received a text from her. Unfortunately, the first part said, Ilya, you know you’re always welcome home, but, and he didn’t read the rest.) 

“Where do you want to go on vacation,” he wonders out loud, setting his glasses on the table and rubbing at his eyes. Shane liked their cabin in the winter, a little paradise in the woods out of a snowglobe or a fairytale. With the lake frozen over, they’d had their own ODR, and they’d skate, joking about thin ice. “We could stay in again.”

When his vision comes back into focus, Shane’s unmoving, smiling face is beaming at him from a light year away. The photo was taken the summer before his disappearance and displays his beloved dimples in full, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes.

Let’s go somewhere.

Ilya absently fishes around the top drawer of his desk for a pen, but his fingers brush against a loonie. The golden coin is dull and dirty, having been dropped inside with miscellaneous objects and sundry at some point in the last few years. 

He flips it and looks down at the creature embossed on the surface. Stupid Canadian wolf bird, he’d once said, at a cottage in the woods from another life. The sun had been golden and the water had been cold, and he’d had too many burgers. Before let’s go somewhere was the phrase it was, and Shane had to be brave enough to ask, will you come. 

On his email app, he opens his automatic reply settings, muttering out loud as he types.

“Thank you for your email,” he says. His leg shakes rapidly under the table as the idea starts to form. A top begins to spin somewhere in the recesses of his consciousness.

Hockey darling doppelgänger spotted in Dartmouth. Let’s go somewhere. I’m afraid we’ll never go anywhere again.

And hell, why not? After all, having played in Boston for so long, he may as well see its sister city and the neighbouring provinces.

“I will be out of office until January and will respond as soon as I can,” he pokes the keys with no small amount of flourish. It’ll be low budget; not that he’s wanting for money, but he doesn’t need to draw attention to himself. He seems to lose his mind around this point every year anyway. Nobody wants to be around half a person. Nobody needs to know. Your biggest fan could be right behind you. 

It’s only a little hassle to rent a car—an unremarkable, outdated Toyota Camry, a far cry from his old collection of cars, of which has been diminished to just the Porsche—and then he’s back at the apartment, packing for an early morning departure.

Ages ago, Shane became obsessed with analog media and fretted over grand abstractions like obsolescence. He’d purchased a record player, repurposed an old Dell computer, and over the course of several months, carved out a small haven that wouldn’t have looked entirely out of place in the early 2000s.

“Had one of these when I was a kid,” he’d announced proudly, the first time he’d completed the set-up and waved Ilya in with a flourish. 

“A home office,” Ilya had observed.

“A Computer Room,” Shane had corrected, enunciating with great specificity and aplomb.

Notably, he’d burned eight playlists onto a set of CDs and tucked them neatly into a worn case. It became one of the survivors of their move to Ottawa, and then, post-retirement, the move to Montreal. Ilya fishes it out from the bottom of a shelf in the Computer Room and perfunctorily wipes off the dust. Seeing Shane’s imperfect shorthand on the discs has Ilya’s heart clenching.

After another relatively sleepless night, he’s ready to go at just after six in the morning. He dumps a duffel bag and a pack of Naya into the trunk, locks the apartment down, and promptly sets off for the highway again, music blaring loudly enough to substitute for caffeine.

The first disc, simply titled “01,” turns out to be all the songs Shane pretended not to know by the time he started playing hockey professionally.

Have you ever wanted to disappear, asks the speakers in the car, as the buildings fall away into the background, and the exits spread out further.

It only took two days before someone threw the first stone at the—admittedly—structurally unsound walls holding the public back from Ilya, following coverage of Shane’s disappearance. Eight years later, he can still hear it:

Were you and your husband fighting at all before he left?

Left, like he’d decided to uproot his life and abandon the open wound and still-damp soil to the elements. People knew Shane Hollander less than Ilya had thought. He didn’t realize that was possible. 

Later, the questions turned accusing. Pointed. Asinine things, like Where Were You? What were you doing at the time? Numbly, he’d told the police the truth, alone in a room with no windows, but comforted by the knowledge that Yuna and David were just outside. 

Where was he indeed. He’d been at home. With the dog, because she was sick. Making lunch and Shane’s annoyingly specific post-workout protein shake, because despite career-ending knee injuries, he insisted on keeping fit. Hiding lube beside the tray of utensils in the top kitchen drawer, just in case, because sometimes, his husband came back from runs, and his hands would find themselves magnetically attracted to Ilya’s waist, his lips to Ilya’s throat, the scent of sweat and arousal swirling lazily in the space between them.

No, they were happy. They were really happy together.

He takes the scenic route and heads north on the Trans-Canada. The interminable stretch of road is punctuated by moments of unfinished traffic and construction, and he navigates each with his fingers twitching around the steering wheel. Shane’s music is carefully curated, but that’s about where his enjoyment of it breaks off into mere tolerance. 

The second disc is purely canto and mandopop. Ilya likes ballads as much as the next person and equally scorns them when Eurovision makes waves each year. There exists, therefore, a limit. Besides which—

“You’re half Japanese,” Ilya exclaims to thin air, and also possibly to the Honda Odyssey in front of him. “You don’t even speak Chinese.”

Mandarin, corrects the Shane in his head that always seems to form his conscience. Cantonese. They’re different.

“Sure, fine.” He taps his free foot along.

Knowing Shane, the lyrics either resonated with him, each song chosen for how it contributes to the story the whole playlist tells, or he had no idea what anything meant and simply compiled the tracklist by sound. Unfortunately, it all sounds like pleasant gibberish to Ilya.

“The things I do for you,” he mutters, bearing it, “and you are not even here.”

The playlist is an hour long; he listens to it twice through before he realizes. When he blindly pokes the centre console for the eject disc button, he jolts in his seat from the sudden, violent buzz of his tires against the serrated shoulder of the road. The steering wheel tugs at his hands in an awful way. He makes the split-second decision to pull off entirely, leaning into the momentum and allowing it to carry him forward to a stop. 

He barely remembers to hit his emergency lights before allowing his head to thump against the wheel, squeezing his eyes shut.

Calm down, Shane entreats. You’re agitated.

Ilya lifts his head by an inch to let it fall again. “Yes, genius. I am fucking agitated.”

When the car remains blissfully silent, he leans back and cancels the emergency lights. Four hours isn’t the longest he’s ever driven in one go. Still, with the bleak weather and scant few cars on the road, even he isn’t reckless enough to push on without food and coffee. He fiddles with the GPS.

Quebec doesn’t have service stations like the ones in Ontario, but needs must. After following the next Tims / gas station exit and parking haphazardly, he makes the dash out of the car, through the cold, and to familiar shit-coloured doors that are distinctively Tim Hortons. 

Like most shops in the middle of nowhere, the place is almost deserted, save for a young family tucked away in the corner couches, and a couple on the other side of the dining area. Gratefully, he makes a beeline straight to the register.

“Bonjour,” says the teenager behind the counter, visibly bored to tears. She has bubblegum pink hair trapped in a hairnet, and her Tims uniform shirt is rumpled.

He returns the greeting distractedly, eyeing the display case for their Timbits selection. It’s paltry, to say the least; mostly birthday cake with some chocolate and honey glaze. Shaking his head, he turns his attention to the teenager again, who is squinting at him like his name is on the tip of her tongue. Or maybe like he’s a lunatic. The two expressions are incredibly similar.

“Un wrap-matin du travailleur, saucisse,” he blurts out, “et une moyenne vanille française.”

The teenager blinks at him for a moment longer, then inputs the order. Helpfully, the list shows up on the screen facing him. “C’est tout?”

“Ouais.”

“Par carte?”

Ilya nods curtly, flashing his phone. When she juts her chin out, the universal c’est à vous gesture, he taps it against the reader.

“Votre reçu, Monsieur Rozanov?”

He almost gets whiplash from how quickly he jerks up to meet the teenager’s unimpressed expression. A smirk pulls at the corners of her lips.

“You recognize me.” There’s a protocol to dealing with surprise fans, and it involves being bashful and modest and willing to be paraded around like a trophy to social media. Ilya has never exactly been interested in protocol, especially not after the last decade of media shitstorms. He allows his expression to shutter defensively.

“My friend, he is obsessed with you,” she muses, unfazed while she rips the receipt from its printer and hands it to him. “I will tell him you come?”

On autopilot, he takes the receipt, stuffing it into his front pocket. “If you let me use the washroom here, yes.”

“Code 2-1-2-0,” she agrees, then peers over his shoulder. “Prochain?”

Taking the out as it’s offered, he wordlessly skirts around the counter and down the nondescript hall to find the toilets. It smells like bleach, which makes him wince.

Shane quips, rather merrily, It’s better than the alternative. 

Ilya doesn’t bother with acknowledgement.

When he eventually washes his hands, he looks up consideringly at his reflection. Not so much has changed: his blond hair has darkened with time and is flecked with grey, perhaps. While he’s fit, he’s lost most of the bulky muscle his profession demanded. There are crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. He’s dressed less fashionably in a plain quarter-zip and old jeans beneath a heavy winter coat, having chosen comfort over looks. Recognizably Ilya Rozanov—but he wonders if that still means anything. 

Frowning, he grabs some paper towels to dry his hands and avoids his own eyes when he leaves.

“—saucisse,” a voice is calling out when he emerges. “Wrap-matin—”

“Yes,” he waves, half-jogging to collect his order. The teenager appears again, placing his drink on the countertop.

“I know it’s a big request,” she says, hesitant. “But my friend, he works five minutes away. Souvenir boutique on the main road, once you turn left out the driveway. Very obvious.”

“Ah.” Ilya takes the cup. “This is a plot to kidnap me?”

Her cheeks flush pink. “He wishes for a picture and autograph. I can tell him fuck off.”

A picture, which will probably be disseminated to the masses on social media, leaving the more tech-savvy ones to sleuth out his route, and the more conspiracy-inclined ones to start spouting bullshit. His stomach sinks a little at the thought.

“Tell him, hm.” On the other hand, what else is he spending his money on, if not a stupid vacation and stupid souvenirs about it? “I visit. But no pictures.”

The teenager’s face breaks out into a grin. It makes her younger, and maybe explains why her default expression the last ten or so minutes has been surly.

“Of course. Merci, Monsieur.”

With food and drink in hand, Ilya takes a seat where it’s warmest—along the wall and its radiators, away from the windows. Shane’s guilty pleasure order, and Ilya’s shameless to-go breakfast when he’s running late. Sometimes, he thinks they might as well be one person on an even keel rather than two separate people, forced to balance each other out.

Not too far off, Roz. Shane taunts, and it only serves to keep Ilya’s head on his shoulders. The real Shane would take issue with the very premise and force Ilya to sit through more or less eloquent reasoning, punctuated with passionate bursts about Why They Work.

The ghost in his head is only that: a ghost.

Ilya was never afraid to call his husband a masochist when the situation suited, especially after he learned the word.

“Look at Toronto if you want city,” he’d argued, admittedly a little exasperated. Retirement had barely begun, the summer sun hanging lazily in the sky over the cottage, and already, Shane was thinking about future investments. “Big money. CN Tower. Montreal is nothing.”

Shane had craned his neck to squint at him in a particularly Hollander-esque way before returning his attention back to his laptop, which had balanced precariously on his good knee. The screen had been split between the internet and an email chain with—presumably—his old real estate agent.

Beside him, Ilya had been sprawled out on the rest of the couch with his head on Shane’s shoulder, simply watching. He’d tried again. “Montreal did not treat you deservingly.”

To which Shane had blandly replied: “Montreal doesn’t hold grudges like that.”

“Ilya Rozanov does.”

“I also grew up there, you know,” Shane counters. “I probably spent just as much time there as I did in Ottawa.” 

This, most assuredly, was a blatant lie. Yuna had explicitly informed him over several glasses of wine that, while they were hesitant about the Ontario post-secondary school application disadvantage, they were more hesitant about Quebec’s CEGEP system, and so they’d kept their boy in Ottawa. Ilya had sat through one too many explanations of Shane’s other potential paths to genius and brilliance over old photo albums, such as, if he wanted to go back to Quebec, we thought law at McGill would be appropriate for a brain of his calibre, or McMaster artsci is so unique, he would have fit right in and gone to med school after, and God forbid, she had joked, though it had flown over Ilya’s head, he run away to Dalhousie, could you imagine? At which point Ilya had chuckled obligingly, and very honestly answered in the negative, because he did not know what a Dalhousie was.

“You don’t need more passive investments,” Ilya had said, pressing his nose into the curve of Shane’s jaw. “Are you getting off on this? I can blow you right now, fix the problem.”

Shane had absently pet at his hair with one hand, leaving the other to continue scrolling.

“Think of CRA,” Ilya had murmured, and propped himself up to nip at Shane’s earlobe. “Provincial tax.”

Even as Shane’s hand skidded across the keyboard, he’d managed to remain relatively calm.

“My lawyer says,” he’d started, with the knowing tone in his voice that used to signal an incoming chirp, and Ilya had flailed accordingly in place, wrangled the laptop away in a hasty attempt to prevent the biggest bullshit from being spoken into existence. “In Quebec, property is a real right—!”

They’d end up moving to Montreal a year later for various reasons that Ilya was happy to let boil down to a single one, at least for himself: he’d follow Shane anywhere.

Later that day, sweatier and satisfied and tangled on the floor, Shane had whispered something largely indecipherable about home and history. Ilya had patted the nearest available surface in acknowledgement, which was, of course, Shane’s ass, and purred as sunbeams warmed their skin.

After a quick smoke in the brittle cold, he gets back in his car and immediately fumbles with the heat knobs. Quebec’s default temperature seems to be either negative 20 or over 30 celsius, with no happy medium that isn’t also cold, muggy, or dégueulasse. 

When cantopop floods the speakers of the car again, he also digs for the next CD. 

“Please don’t be ballads,” he squints, popping 02 out and carefully sliding it back into its place. He waits for the first song of the new disc to play, and when melancholic jazz pop slinks through, he puts his head in his hands.

“Why did I marry you,” he groans. “Oh my God, Shane.”

Inhaling, he allows Kelly Clarkson to belt about the trouble with love, and puts the car in drive. Before long, the main road is lined up before him in all its relative emptiness, and wow, but the teenager wasn’t kidding. Ilya should have asked for her name. 

Boutique Souvenirs stands lonely and sad next to a Thai Express and several other buildings on a thin strip. It looks like it’s two seconds away from going out of business, but he can imagine kids working minimum wage along the entire road, servicing the occasional lost soul with gas, food, and trinkets. 

He parks like an asshole, i.e., at an angle and absolutely stepping on the next yellow line, because that way, the parking lot looks a little less empty, and because entering the driveway meant navigating a weird chicane, and he is, fundamentally, still an asshole. The car locks with a merry click.

When he pulls the door of the shop open, it’s to the telltale jangle of a windchime and the sight of organized chaos. Overstocked shelves line the walls, and racks of clothing sit along the floor, close to bursting. Two rotating stands of magnets, postcards, and stickers look close to toppling over.

Beside him, emerging from behind the front counter, a voice breathes: “Ostie de—”

And Ilya feels all the air slip out of his lungs.

Obviously, because the shop is empty, and he didn’t see another living being at first, the singular shock of being jumpscared by an initially disembodied male voice is something he can be forgiven for. Clearly, he didn’t look at this kid—and either Ilya is really fucking old now, or teenagers look increasingly like young children—and think, for the briefest of milliseconds, that he was looking at his missing husband’s freckles. Evidently, patently ridiculous.

Not to say that the kid doesn’t share some visual similarities. The aforementioned freckles are splashed across a flatter nose, higher cheekbones. The kid is lanky, and not packed with more muscle than he knows what to do with. His eyes are light brown, and his hair is jet black.

“You are Ilya Rozanov,” he squeaks, barely comprehensible through his accent. “I thought Marie was joking.”

Marie, the friendly neighbourhood Tims employee who almost led Ilya to his death by heart attack. Jesus Christ.

With the adrenaline subsiding, he finds it in himself to extend his arms playfully. Exhaling, he agrees: “In the flesh.”

The kid leans over the counter and sticks his hand out. There’s awe in his eyes, the kind Ilya hasn’t seen for years. Fuck, but he almost misses being famous.

“I am Henry,” or maybe it’s Henri. Ilya shakes his hand. “Henry Dagenais-Chang. Mr. Rozanov, I am a huge fan of your husband.”

The shift is so jarringly sudden that Ilya instinctively wrenches his hand away. All at once, the bland smile he’d pasted on his face feels brittle and insincere.

Luckily, Henry-or-Henri doesn’t notice, as he lets go easily and continues to blab. His big doe eyes are wide and uncomfortably starstruck. He talks about Shane Hollander like he’s dead.

When Ilya first started out in the States, his PR manager told him to let the fans do the talking; that often, they’d been waiting for an opportunity to say something that meant a lot to them, and that they’d developed a one-sided relationship in which they believed he would be the right audience. Whether it was how he’d helped them in some way, or whether they were proud of him, he should react accordingly and move on. Contrary to widely-held belief, Ilya was pretty good with fans already, but he knew to nod glibly and look appreciative of the advice. 

Still.

“Do you play?” He barks, cutting Henry-possibly-Henri off from his spiel about childhood heroes.

If it’s possible, the kid’s eyes get even wider. “I—hockey?” 

“Hockey, yes.” What else is there?

“I did in the past,” comes the answer, embarrassment marked by a sudden and blotchy flush under stupidly familiar freckles. Ilya is going to lose his fucking mind. “I watch, now.”

“Skate again,” encourages Ilya, gruffly. Words are failing him, and his accent peeks through his vowels like they haven’t since he was still learning the basics. “I will write this for you also.”

“Write—yes. Yes! Thank you, Mr. Rozanov,” Henry/Henri exclaims, immediately turning to cast around for a writing implement and an appropriately portable surface. The second his eyes are elsewhere, Ilya manages to relax slightly. He props his hip against the counter.

From behind it, the kid produces a permanent marker, a postcard, and a white hoodie, extra large. The hoodie has a watercolour print of the town on it and text beneath proclaiming, Ville de Rivière-du-Loup.

“The sweater is for you,” Henry-probably-Henri declares, pushing the items forward. The grin on his face threatens to split it in two. “No photos, yes? But you will have our town.”

Obligingly, Ilya picks up the marker and slides the postcard closer. 

“To…”

“Henry, with i-grec.”

Not Henri, then.

“To Henry. Thank you for the sweater. Play hockey again.” Ilya scrawls his signature at the bottom of the card and sets the marker on the table. Henry gently picks the postcard up by its edges, staring down like he’s just been handed the Holy Grail.

“Is this a dream?” Blinking up, Henry once again fixes his gaze on Ilya’s face. “What are you doing here, Mr. Rozanov?”

The honest answer crawls out of his throat before a false one can take its place, and before his brain can kick into high gear knowing that the internet exists, and this interaction will be documented and disseminated before he leaves the parking lot.

“I’m passing through on my way to Halifax.”

“Nova Scotia! For business?” Henry is almost bouncing in place. What a strange child. “My grandparents, they live in Truro.”

Ilya has no idea what Truro is, but he assumes it’s a town in the province. At this point, more honesty won’t hurt—if this gets out, then so be it. Sue him for wanting to get away from the more populated parts of Canada.

“For leisure,” he corrects. “I have never been.”

Henry beams at him. “You will love it. You are staying downtown? I can recommend hockey pubs.”

Which is sweet, really. But even if the world is hockey, the last thing Ilya wants to do is walk into a public bar and watch a game. Hockey was his tempestuous wife before he had a tempestuous husband, the muse he’d cheat on with other vices, like fast cars and sex. He’s not a disciple; not like that.

“I do not know where I’m staying yet,” he admits, sidestepping the verbal land mine.

This, if anything, seems to excite the kid more. 

“You must see if there are rooms at the Spring Garden Inn.” Henry sets the postcard down and pats his pockets for his phone, before tapping rapidly on the screen. He holds up the device not a moment later.

“Spring Garden Inn Bed and Breakfast,” Ilya reads aloud. It certainly doesn’t look like any of the expensive hotels he spent his career sleeping in and around. From the small photos on screen, it looks almost more like a refurnished home. But according to the number of reviews and ratings, it’s more than adequate. “I will think about it. Do they allow smoking?”

Henry pulls the phone away, though he keeps it in his palm, not so subtly thumbing the sides. 

“I don’t know; we sold the business to a family friend a few years ago,” he explains. “You still smoke, Mr. Rozanov?”

Ilya manages a faint smile. Despite what he told the media, “I never really stopped.”

Then, because the kid’s face is falling, like the thought of a childhood hero having some perceived moral flaw is ruining his image of an infallible hockey legend, he adds:

“Your hero, he’s mine too. Barely touched my lighter with him around.”

“But it was hard to quit?”

You have got to quit, Shane had said before the longest break Ilya had taken from cigarettes to date. The real kicker was that the anger was gone from the lines of his face; in its place was resignation. And in the face of that, Ilya had thrown his half-full pack in the bin and held his husband close, thinking about death and forgiveness.

“Was quite funny,” Ilya allows his smile to widen, diverting, “I would tell him, ‘Fuck you, I want a fag,’ and he would say, ‘Buddy, there’s already two in the room.’”

The burst of shocked laughter that leaves Henry’s mouth is a sound of pure delight. Ilya looks down at the hoodie on the counter and takes it.

“Safe travels, Mr. Rozanov,” nods Henry, likely sensing that Ilya is getting towards the end of his rope. “Thank you for coming.”

“Thank you for the hoodie,” he returns. When he pushes the front door open, the windchimes rattle once more, and the sound carries him back to the Camry.

Married life meant that their separate wardrobes had merged into one palatial walk-in closet in their Ottawa home. Typical of Shane’s proclivity for organized systems, he’d grouped clothing together not by whether it first belonged to him or Ilya, but by type, occasion, and colour. When they played for the Centaurs, this had been a point of mild contention—especially as it was hard to tell whose suit belonged to whom from the rack alone, sometimes, and while they were similar in bulk, there existed a treasured and notable height difference.

The mix-ups were more than tolerable otherwise. Ilya would swan down to the kitchen in the morning to see Shane wearing his sweaters or sweatpants, and the sight would get him so fucking horny he’d start the day with a certifiably nutritious breakfast of Shane’s pussy, after which Shane would shove Ilya’s cock down his throat and do wonderful, wonderful things. Rinse and repeat forever.

The stupid souvenir hoodie would be a great gag gift that they could trade and discard, later, in favour of more beloved or memorable items of clothing. Remember that one time you left me alone for eight years? I ran away from your ghost and all I got was this sweater. 

One closet, one marriage, one life. Isn’t that what he fucking vowed.

On a whim, and because the previous route on the GPS simply led to some point in Halifax, he looks up directions to the Spring Garden Inn Bed and Breakfast. The final location looks like it’s somewhere in the downtown core, and he doesn’t really have a plan besides getting away from Montreal, so it’s as good a destination as any. He buckles his seatbelt like the boring and law-abiding citizen he is and navigates the chicane out of the parking lot, ignoring the GPS’ robotic instructions. 

Despite the tiredness that usually accompanies meeting people who know him, he feels surprisingly buoyed, and maybe even comforted by the idea that he can still get through human interactions without crashing and burning into disaster. He used to enjoy small talk with strangers and fleeting conversations with fans. The media storm around Shane’s disappearance shouldn’t have set him back as far as it did.

But on his chest, his mother’s cross is a comforting weight and excuse. He’d worked it out in therapy ages ago, his predisposition to depression, and she’s soothed over every one of his jagged edges since. Thank you, Mama, for the gift of numbness. 

Maybe it’s easier to get lost when the company you keep is dead. Or not dead, but still missing. He takes a turn back onto the highway, dropping his foot onto the accelerator and relishing in the weight of it beneath him.

Ilya has been in Halifax for five minutes, driving for 12 hours all told, and the spinning wheel of death they call the Armdale Rotary has him wishing he went West instead. Or followed the right instructions on the GPS in the first place, which would have been easy, if Nova Scotia’s highways and roads made sense.

He makes it through by the skin of his teeth and manages the correct exit to take him downtown. The road leads him along the water and up a small hill. Outside the windows and under the stars, the Arm glitters.

It’s a straight shot to the Commons, which feels like an anticlimactic end to his journey after the initial hassle of even getting into the city. But he’s less than ten minutes away from the Inn, and so help him God, he will find somewhere with a bed to crash for the night.

As he crawls forward with the evening traffic, he notes that there isn’t a skyscraper in sight. Halifax is small in size and structure, and it’s so charmingly worn in that Ilya can imagine generations of families growing up on its streets.

“Would you like it here?” He asks the air. About three hours ago, he started listening to FM radio, and an ad for Canadian Tire plays quietly around him. 

Calm and quaint, observes the Shane in his head. What’s not to like?

Ilya exhales and tilts his head back, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. His ass is numb.

“It’s tiny.” According to the map, he could reach the main part of downtown Halifax in less than five minutes, and from there, its famous harbour. Everything is within ten kilometres.

Easy to explore. 

What an optimist, when he wants to be. The real Shane is a worrier to such a degree that he often plays the part of the unlikeable pessimist. The real Shane would—oh, stifle his complaints about being stuck in a car for so long. He’d start getting snappy after six or so hours. He’d ask after the gas more often than he’d need to. 

The light turns green, and Ilya follows the car in front of him. Canada’s Ocean Playground, reads the bottom of its licence plate.

The real Shane would hold his hand and fall asleep in an awkward position, and he’d wake up after twenty minutes with a crick in his neck. He’d pretend not to be grouchy about it, until such a time as the crick subsided, but he’d make a small show of stretching. Ilya would happily oblige with a one-handed massage at the nape of his neck.

He’s spent so long missing the real Shane that it doesn’t even hurt to imagine him anymore. There only remains a mildly nauseating feeling, a lurching of his stomach, the sense that something is terribly and fundamentally wrong with the world. It’s the same sensation that accompanies his regular prayers to his mother.

“I wish you were here,” he says. 

You’re listening to one-oh-one point three: the Bounce, the radio replies.

Were they the happiest couple in the world? No, of course not. They had their gripes with one another, same as any other couple. They loved each other, and that was the most important thing.

Ilya had expressed iterations of the same sentiment over and over again, each answer more worn than the last.

To the police: We were perfectly fine. The only thing he ever complained about was his knee and my laundry.

To the press: I love him. I pray every day and night that he’s found.

To Yuna and David: I think he was restless and wanted a schedule again, but he was still happy. He’d never have disappeared on his own.

To Anya’s grave: Why did you leave me behind, too?

The Spring Garden Inn Bed and Breakfast is located on the corner of a side street, and next to it is a small lot, already full of cars. Thankfully, the side street has overnight parking, and Ilya manages to parallel park the tiny Camry without irreparably fucking it, or any surrounding car, up. 

Not that his driving skills have ever been called into question. But it’s been a long day on the road with minimal breaks.

He pops the trunk open and takes a bottle of water alongside his duffle bag, then shuts it and locks the car. Though the temperature is milder here than in Montreal, his breath still comes out in smoke-like puffs, and he doesn’t take his time crossing the street or hauling himself up the stone steps.

The foyer inside is lit warmly and decorated with various signs, the most obvious and relevant of which is CHECK IN ←, taped to the railing of the stairs and pointing down the hall. His footsteps are accompanied by creaks of wood when he ventures in further. He’d passed by the door to a dining room, and beyond it, a kitchen, when he hears papers shuffling.

“Michael, is that you?” A voice calls from inside the room towards the back, followed by light steps, and inevitably, a woman’s head. The rest of her body follows as she leans out with a jaunty wave, which seems inadvisable given her apparent age, but is welcoming nonetheless. “Oh, a guest—do come in, dear.”

“Hello,” he says, when he steps awkwardly in front of the cluttered desk. The woman must be in her seventies or eighties, and every instinct compels him to help her with whatever she might need. But she’s dressed in loose athletic clothing, and she moves like she knows it.

“Welcome, darling,” she shakes the mouse. It's a terribly old computer, but it lights up responsively. “Do you have a reservation?”

“Ah,” he stalls. The truth is a little insane. Yes, hi, I’m a celebrity and heard about your establishment when I signed an autograph for somebody who is a family friend of yours. “No, I was going to ask if you had any rooms available.”

She looks unfazed, focusing on the monitor. “No reservation, no problem.” After a few clicks, she turns her attention back to Ilya. “How long are you hoping to stay?”

Great question, says Shane, dry as winter. Nice foresight, Roz.

“Three nights,” he blurts, picking the first number that comes to mind. Then cringes. This close to Christmas, it’s unlikely anybody will have a stretch that long. “Or shorter is okay, too.”

The woman hums her acknowledgement and clicks around some more. Russians do not blush, but Ilya feels the kind of embarrassment that accompanies deference, and it may or may not be a close thing.

“Well, sweetheart, I’ve got two options for you: If you need a bigger bed, you can stay in a first room for two nights and a different room for your last night, or if you’re okay with a twin, I can fit you in a smaller room for the full three.” She peers at him expectedly.

Blinking, he runs the proposal back in his head. He must take a little too long to respond, because her features soften with sympathy.

“I can go through it again,” she suggests.

“No, I,” he looks over her shoulder at the rack of brochures and advertisements for Halifax tourism. “I’m okay with a smaller room. Whatever rate, I will pay.”

When she smiles, she almost reminds him of Yuna. 

“That’s the idea, hon.” She laughs at her own joke, and Ilya finds himself grinning helplessly along. “Let’s get you booked.”

The check-in process is more efficient than he thought it would be; soon after, he’s survived a round of small talk about where he’s from and what he’s doing in Halifax, his credit card is on file, and a set of keys sits in his palm. He dutifully tucks the latter in his pocket.

“Breakfast is from 6:30 to 9:30,” he’s informed, and, “If you need anything, don’t be afraid to ask for Irene, or Mrs. Kerrigan. That’s me.”

Meteors could hit the Earth, and still, Ilya would be unmoved. He stares at her, her dark skin and her silver hair, and the loose shirt over loose yoga pants. What a coincidence. But not really, of course. So many people in the world were named after the goddess of peace. It’s more simply—unexpected. He wasn’t ready.

“Irene,” he repeats, swallowing. There must be something in his face other than complete and utter lunacy, because her eyebrows furrow in mild concern.

Still, she jokes: “Got it in one.”

“You share a name with my mother.” 

Oh, but he hadn’t meant to say that. He’d meant to say great, thanks, goodnight, and maybe crawl up to his yet-unseen room to put the cross between his teeth and pray for sanity.

Thankfully, Mrs. Kerrigan lights up, all concern dissolving from her face. 

“Another Irene! Don’t hear too many of those.”

Ilya tries not to wince. In for a penny, or whatever this infernal language insists is an idiom.

“Close,” he admits, looking down at the desk top. “Irina.”

“Awh,” she coos. “She back home, then?”

The chain around his neck feels, quite suddenly, noticeably heavier. It’s one thing to talk about his mother; it’s another to talk about her death.

“She’s in Moscow.” Which could go either way as home or not home, considering that his accent has smoothed into something ambiguous over the years. What’s the best word? “Resting.”

Mrs. Kerrigan inhales audibly, and her expression is kind when he glances up at her again.

“I’m sorry, hon.”

“No,” he falters, feeling heat rise to his cheeks again. “No, it’s fine, it’s been—a very long time.”

She hums in acknowledgement, but just when she opens her mouth to speak, a man starts shouting from the front entrance.

“Grandma? I’m—!” His voice is accompanied by high-pitched squeals. “No! Girls! Down!”

Footsteps thunder closer, and Ilya watches as a man, probably ten or so years younger than him, walks in. Two little girls bundled in thick winter jackets and snowpants tumble in after him, then make a beeline for Mrs. Kerrigan.

“Grandma!” The smaller one squeals. She makes it sound like, gam-ma. 

Ilya knows when it’s his cue to leave. He smiles at her and waves awkwardly at the children.

“Thank you, Mrs. Kerrigan. I’ll just—”

“Oh, wait,” she laughs, having picked up the other sister. “Wait, meet my grandson.”

There is nothing less that he wants to do right now. Still, he forces the smile to stay on his face, hoping he doesn’t look completely fucking deranged.

“Elijah,” offers the man, with an outstretched hand to shake.

“Ilya,” he returns, and accepts the handshake.

“I know,” says Elijah, and something in Ilya droops completely at the idea of stepping into his role for the third time today. He retrieves his hand and sticks it in his pocket, idly thumbing the jagged edges of the room key.

“Mr. Rozanov is here on vacation for a few days with no itinerary,” says Mrs. Kerrigan. The child in her arms squirms and is promptly released to join her sister on the floor. “Why don’t you show him around?”

“Now?” Ilya can’t help but ask, alarmed. He hopes he doesn’t come off as petulant as he feels.

Elijah shoots a look at his grandmother, who levels him with a raised eyebrow. It’s not unlike a tennis match. Then, he turns back to Ilya, almost baleful. 

“Only if you like,” he concedes. A sly grin slowly pulls at his features. “I know a good sports pub or two nearby.”

Mrs. Kerrigan makes shooing motions at both of them. “Oh, do!”

Left without any real choice, lest he come off as a complete asshole to people who don’t deserve his ire, he stifles a sigh. The night is still young, and for as drained as he is, he doesn’t think he’d be able to sleep if he tried, not without burning some of the restlessness away.

“I could maybe do with dinner.” Blinking, he remembers that he’s had his duffel bag over his shoulder the whole time. “But let me put my stuff down.”

He finds his room at the top of the stairs. It’s neat, if tiny. On the bed is a stack of towels, complimentary toiletries, and of all things, a book that isn’t the Bible, but he doesn’t have time to examine it further. He dumps his bag on top of the dresser, places the water down as well, and rummages through the bag for an old Centaurs toque to shove over his head. It’s Shane’s, helpfully demonstrated by the red number 24 embroidered on the side, but it’s covert otherwise.

If we ever meet, says the Shane in his head, you are not allowed to force me outside for drinks ever again.

Which, funnily enough, boots him out of his previous reluctance. He’s Ilya, and sometimes Rozanov, and these days, horrifyingly, Mr. Rozanov, but he’s also still Ilya fucking Rozanov. The people of Halifax should be so happy to see him.

When he makes his way back downstairs, toque on his head, it’s with a grim determination to not present as a sad, pathetic mess. Elijah nods at him and kisses Mrs. Kerrigan on the cheek, then his daughters. Say buh-bye to daddy. No, he’ll be back home soon. 

He drives them down by the waterfront, though not without first apologizing profusely for the mess at the back of his car, on account of having two, quote, hyperactive divas. 

“I leave them with my grandmother a couple nights a week at her insistence,” he’d explained, perfunctorily tossing bags from the passenger seat to the back so Ilya could sit, “and usually work the front desk. Win-win.”

Despite the cold weather, the downtown core is bubbling with activity, and after dangerously squeezing into a parking spot—why is the city so fucking steep—Ilya follows Elijah along a cobblestone street.

“Convention centre here still sticks out like a sore fucking thumb,” Elijah points to the glass monstrosity blocking out the sky, “but this is a pretty hot couple blocks, Argyle and Grafton Street.”

With the toque shoved over his curls, Ilya feels marginally less recognizable, and therefore more comfortable as he takes in the various artisan shops, pubs, and public artwork. After crossing the street, they swing into Durty Nelly’s.

“You lived in Boston,” smiles Elijah, holding the door open, “you must know all about the Irish and the East Coast.”

He smirks, even though the answer is admittedly a no, because every time it came up, there’d be far too many people in each story to keep track of, and metric tonnes of personal family history to boot. Not to say he isn’t familiar with the general circumstances. “Tell me about it.”

“Hah!” 

Alcohol, his father had once pronounced, in that stiff and imposing manner he referred to as kindness, was a ruler against which one could measure a man. Drink too much, and this is a sign of obliviousness; a demonstrable lack of self-awareness and control. Drink too little, and this is a sign of feminine prudence, unbefitting men of their status. The right man—and here, he’d clearly referred to a man of the Rozanov lineage—the proper man was unafraid of alcohol and aware of his vices, never made weak by them. 

A real man, he’d posit, was everything at once: loose but disciplined, intelligent but not condescending, comfortable in his superiority but cognizant that there is always room to improve.

Ilya would sit through these lectures with an expressionless mask fixed on his face. His flesh would turn to porcelain, and he would nod in all the right places, as though to internalize the lessons that were being imparted.

Your duty is to accrue power and continue the Rozanov family. Your duty is to consolidate support. Your duty is to be behind the closed doors that make this country possible. 

Yes, after hockey. After. After.

But like a parasite burrowed deeply in the recesses of Ilya’s consciousness, these ideas had taken on a rather monstrous life of their own, and mutilated themselves through various memories following Grigori’s death into something almost palatable. Duty to family. Duty to friends. Duty to community.

Ilya had explained the weight of his duties to all the Centaurs at their commiseration get-together following a particularly devastating loss against New York, and before Shane had joined them. He’d been weak, hedonistic. Fatalistic. If a Rozanov was not winning, et cetera.

“Americans do not know duty,” he’d slurred, with an arm around Zane Boodram, facing a mildly-disturbed bartender. Demonstrably self-oblivious. “Only duty is to capital. King Wall Street.”

“Okay, Soviet Russia,” Bood had patted him on the shoulder, “I think that’s enough now.”

And Ilya had tried again, suddenly desperate for this group of human beings to understand that he’d do anything to make them winners. “Everything unreal. Nothing doing. Wait.”

“Deep sympathy, man,” Wyatt Hayes had nodded distractedly, sitting on Bood’s other side. He’d recently been traded, and the team was only really familiar with his status as a Huge Fucking Nerd. 

“What the fuck are you talking about,” Bood had exclaimed.

Through the haze of inebriation, Ilya had felt, with no small lack of clarity or awareness about his then-current circumstances—which were, to be explicit, dogshit, if he was losing to Scott fucking Hunter—that ultimately, there was a very distinguished line of responsibilities recognized between people who had grown up with good parents, and people who hadn’t. 

“Listen.” Later in the night, and after another round of shots, Wyatt had gesticulated wildly with a french fry pinched between his finger and thumb. “I’m saying, familial responsibility is arbitrarily self-imposed, not entirely non-existent.”

“Responsibility to the home,” Ilya had replied, probably in Russian, “is a fucking imperative, you North fucking American fucking idiot.” 

Otherwise, how else could he go on living? His father was wrong about a lot of things, and dead to boot. Ilya had shit to do that couldn’t be quantified by alcohol content and political clout: a responsibility to the Hollanders to do well by them. Grigori’s inability to recognize this and act accordingly with his own family was an objective moral failing, and therefore, most importantly, not Ilya’s personal fucking fault.

He’d woken up the morning after feeling as though some small creature had died in his mouth overnight, and found himself sprawled atop the covers of an unfamiliar bed. Upon closer observation, it was his own hotel room, and taped to his forehead was a barely legible—also, really rather mortifying—note scribbled on hotel stationery: 

we ♡ you

- cens 4ever

With no idea what could have prompted such a ghastly phenomenon, Ilya had followed his stomach and gingerly lurched into the washroom, promptly forgetting all about it.

Dinner is hearty, and the beer is good, and though he caught a few surreptitious phone cameras, nobody fucking bothered him. That’s the most important thing. Ilya spills out of the entryway feeling warmer than he has in a while.

“Do you know best part about being hockey legend,” he tells Elijah, English relaxing into more familiar vowels and consonants. “I will tell you. Is that people are too fucking scared to say hi. Is beauty.”

“Jesus, Rozanov,” Elijah snorts. “We gotta take a lap.”

“A victory lap,” Ilya agrees.

They don’t do anything of the sort. Instead, as they head further down the hill to the waterfront, the levity from the pub seems to dissipate into the night air, replacing itself with a steadier sort of contemplation. The waterfront is peaceful, punctuated by gales of laughter from the shops and restaurants dotting the boardwalk. When people pass by, chatting, they do so in hushed tones.

He and Elijah walk in silence. Ilya, because he doesn’t want to risk giving into the atmosphere and confessing all his secrets to a stranger, and Elijah, for some apparent reason that has a stormcloud all but brewing over his head.

“There used to be a boat here,” Elijah suddenly gestures to an empty dock next to the Dartmouth ferry, “called Theodore Tugboat. It got moved to Hamilton while you were playing for the Centaurs, and then folks over there sank it.” This statement is accompanied by a self-deprecating grin. “Not that you should care, I guess.”

“No, no,” Ilya waves magnanimously. “Tell me about history.”

“Maybe,” is all he gets in response. 

Despite himself, Ilya wants to know. This is the heart of Ryan Price’s city, privy to almost everything that defined him. Even if they were never the closest of friends, he’d seen that wistful smile on Price’s face when he talked about the Atlantic: like it was a home, or a terrible secret.

They wander through a pavilion that smells like the sea, and emerge on the other side to see a towering hotel. This side of the boardwalk is even emptier, and aside from the fairy lights dotting the outside of another restaurant, the only whimsy in sight is a statue of a cow. God, Halifax is boring. 

The wind is stronger past Cows, and the scenery looks like something out of a dream: a snow-topped wooden boardwalk above blood-dark water, with giant rocks leading down to the edge of the tide.

“Purdy’s Wharf,” Elijah says, like that explains everything. At Ilya’s undoubtedly blank expression, he cocks his head at the buildings in front of them. “And the casino’s over there.”

Work and gambling and nothing else in sight but a loading dock on the Dartmouth side, across the water. Halifax isn’t just boring, it’s depressing.

Ilya turns to the other man with mild revulsion. “You grew up here?” 

Elijah keeps looking out ahead towards the silhouette of a bridge in the distance. With nothing better to do, Ilya follows him to the furthest dock, where they stand and face the naval base. It’s even colder out here, and almost entirely void of substance, save for the planks beneath their feet.

“Do you see the furthest bridge, over there?” Suddenly, Elijah gestures to the view. “Not the obvious bridge. It’s just a sliver in the back, from here.”

Ilya squints, but in the darkness, and without knowing what to look for, he can’t see shit.

“Sorry,” he shrugs. Not for the first time, he wonders what he’s doing.

“It’s called the Mackay Bridge,” says Elijah.

It’s called the Mackay Bridge, or the new bridge, though it’s only younger by about fifteen years, in comparison to the visible one. In the 60s, back when Grandma was a little girl, the city came in the night with bulldozers and machines to the community beneath it. They said, this is city land, and we’ve got a right to build a bridge here. They’d been treating us like shit since time immemorial—studying infectious diseases beside us, dumping all the white people’s trash. You know. No water. 

They wrecked the church. They took everybody, crying and screaming, shoving folks in filthy garbage trucks with their worldly belongings, and they ditched us anywhere they could. Dartmouth, Hammonds Plains, whatever. Said, we’ll expropriate your land. We’ll raze it to the ground. 

So when Grandma fell in love with a white man, she didn’t know what to do. Run away? But Michael loved her more than the world. He’d been chasing her forever, see, and nobody could keep them apart. He left his own family behind to be with her. Then they had a baby, and his name was Michael as well. 

According to everybody, Michael Jr. was sweet. Captain of the soccer team, popular in class, friendly with strangers. Grandma always says, he was funny and handsome, and sad sometimes, but optimistic for other people. It was a minor scandal when he knocked up his high school sweetheart—and rightfully so, because she left us alone after I was born. 

But that was alright. I had my dad; I had Grandma. Then I turned twelve, and a drunk driver decided I didn’t need a dad anymore.

“So, yeah.” Moodily, Elijah looks away from the bridges, and turns to face the other side of the harbour. “Didn’t want to, but yeah, I grew up here.”

Ilya can’t recall a moment where he felt more like an asshole; this may take the prize. Jesus fucking Christ.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats, sincere this time. It wavers in the air before crashing to pieces on the ground, incomparably insignificant and unhelpful.

With a rueful huff, Elijah jerks his thumb in the direction they came.

“I mean,” he says, “it was a long time ago, anyway. Let’s get you to the Inn.”

Discomfort prickles at the nape of Ilya’s neck, and remains there as they begin the journey back to the car. If only Grigori had left them alone after Ilya’s birth. Maybe his mother would—well.

“Was he a good father?” 

He regrets the question as soon as it leaves his mouth. Whether or not he was good, he was dead. 

But Elijah seems to consider it, his chin tilting up as he glances at the night sky. Like this, he’s a shade under the cover of darkness, with the Atlantic looming as a tangible presence behind him. 

Ilya thinks he gets it, suddenly, the thing that draws people to this place and pins them down. Family history in the water. Everybody’s story kept safe under the waves. Price on a plane, clinging to a worn copy of Anne of Green Gables, as though he could take the swells with him while 36 000 feet in the air. There’s a sort of immortality to it.

Finally, past Cows again, Elijah answers: 

“No.” His face screws tight, like he’s searching for clarity. Then, he relaxes, managing a small smile. “I have good memories, but no.”

Ilya fixes his sight on the ground. 

If he was brave enough, he’d admit the same thing. But he’s a coward when it comes to this, and it’s too much a shift of his world axis. To say Irina was anything less than perfect would shatter some last illusion around his childhood. He has so few things kept safe from Moscow already.

“Grandma, though,” Elijah adds, a little distantly, “She hasn’t been the same since he died, you know?”

Blinking, Ilya recalls the first thing that she’d ever said to him.

“She called me Michael,” he admits, “before I checked in.”

This earns him a tug on his sleeve and an alarmed look. Elijah’s voice is gravely serious when he speaks again.

“Please don’t feed into her delusions,” he instructs. “If she goes away, just wait until she comes back.”

Stung, and mildly surprised at the feeling, Ilya steps away.

“I wouldn't," he mutters. How much of his worse reputation still follows him around, all these years later? 

Just like that, the last traces of his good mood vanish, and exhaustion makes itself tangible again in his joints. The alcohol had been a bad idea; it makes him more sluggish, compounds the effects of having spent the day in a small, moving vehicle.

To his credit, Elijah must sense the shift in atmosphere, because after a curt nod, he walks a half-pace faster, all the way back to the car.

When they return to the Inn, Ilya barely gets a chance to thank the other man for the ride before he’s halfway out the driver’s seat, and then there’s chaos as his children greet him in the foyer.

“How was dinner, hon?” Mrs. Kerrigan wants to know, after Elijah and his daughters have trundled up the stairs. Ilya is two steps up himself already, more than done with the day and out of energy to converse, but he slowly lowers himself to the main landing.

“Ah,” he forces a chuckle, “filling. I will probably need to run tomorrow, or something, just to burn it off.”

Unfortunately, Mrs. Kerrigan seems to be a devotee from the same school as Shane Hollander’s Inability To Pick Up Jokes, because she claps her hands together and brightens considerably. God, he just wants to sleep.

“There’s Point Pleasant Park if you’re looking for a scenic trail,” she says, then glances down at his boots. Timberland. “Wearing those, though?”

He hadn’t packed any other outdoor shoes, because he hadn’t ever planned on going on a run.

“They’ll do,” he sighs. 

She tsks at him. Tsks, like he’s an errant child.

“Nonsense—you look about the same size as my son. He won’t mind if I lend you his sneakers.”

Which, what.

“Oh—no,” Ilya backpedals. “It’s okay. Really. It’ll be a walk.” Elijah’s warning flashes almost comically through his mind. Does she still think Michael is alive enough to mind?

“No, no,” she insists, shaking her head and gesturing vaguely. “Don’t worry about it. They’re mint condition, haven’t been worn in a while.”

The words are a small relief, but something shifts uncomfortably in him, nonetheless. They must be decades old, this dead man’s shoes.

His unease must show on his face, because she hums to fill the space between them, visibly uncertain.

“Well,” she says, diplomatically, “no need to make a decision now. I’ll leave them by your door, if you want.”

Perfect. “Yes,” he agrees, taking the out as it’s offered. “That would be great, sorry. Thank you.”

The answer seems to appease her—she smiles at him again. “Of course, darlin’.” And, with that, she finally, finally bids him goodnight. Because he’s not that much of an asshole, he contains his relief until he reaches the second floor, saving it for after he fits the key in the lock.

He flicks on the light when he enters his room, and quite suddenly finds himself completely at a loss. 

Exhaustion still has the edges of his vision fading, but he’s struck by the sense that he should—do something. Tell somebody that he’s okay, he made it safely. No, he should take off his coat and shoes, first.

The shoes come off. The floor is cold, a confusing sensation that wars with his fried brain. Belatedly, he remembers his slides in his duffel bag. After shrugging off his coat and shirt over the back of the vanity chair, he gingerly fishes them out from their plastic bag and lets them fall to the floor. They’re his favourite, the tacky bedazzled ones with fur lining that Shane loved to tease him about.

“Fucking—fine,” he mutters, picking up the jacket and shirt from the chair and hanging them up. Then, for good measure, after grabbing his toothbrush, floss, and travel toothpaste, he adjusts his bag so that it sits parallel with the edge of the dresser. Its contents are safely inside instead of spilling out. “Happy?”

Though nobody answers him, he does, admittedly, feel mildly more organized, and less like he’s two seconds away from tearing his skin off. He brushes his teeth and flosses haphazardly, swiping the string aggressively between his remaining real teeth and implants. He washes his face with warm water and soap, and even manages moisturizer before he stumbles out of the washroom, ready to pass out. Showering will be a morning problem, after his run.

Clumsily, he moves the towels and toiletries to the top of the dresser. After a pause, he also picks up the book.

Never Let Me Go. Kazuo Ishiguro. On the cover is an abandoned boat. When he turns it over to the back cover, he reads about some Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy in Hailsham. The premise rings a faint bell. He frowns as he puts the book down on the nightstand.

He turns on the night light, turns off the overhead light, and kicks off his jeans, uncaring of where they land. For that blessed, beautiful moment before unconsciousness, when he crawls beneath the cool covers and arranges his limbs to fit on the bed, his insomnia is nowhere to be found.

It must have been early in their tryst, before they’d fallen in love. If Ilya had to point out an exact time he’d fallen, he wouldn’t have been able to do so, but this was categorically in the before, because he distinctly recalls thinking Hollander had violated some unsaid rule about secret affairs. 

That is to say, Never Let Me Go was a movie too, with a star-studded cast, and it had been playing on the hotel television after Shane slammed a button on the remote to get rid of their earlier game’s highlights and commentary. The movie would have been absolutely depressing to fuck to, if either of them had been paying attention to it while they were fucking.

But no. Afterwards, Ilya had dozed on the bed, sweaty and satisfied, and Shane had been the one to turn his attention to whatever was on screen, like something had caught his eye and he couldn’t put it down. Something about horrific ethics, about never being able to leave the path that was laid out for you. About lost childhood debris and all the people you loved being swept to a wasteland. He doesn’t know whose room they were in, but he can recall the way Shane focused on those ending scenes with startling clarity.

Ilya had been reminded of a short story he’d read in the New Yorker—an old issue used in one of his English lessons—and one particular phrase he’d liked enough to write on the side of his stall in the Garden: All that you love will be carried away. 

Privately, he’d liked the idea of it. That maybe one day, he could look out across a fence made of barbed wire, finally accepting of his black hole of a future in Russia. And maybe he could stare at the litter and plastic and sundry, and see his mother in the distance, waving.

It’s not even 6 AM by the time his body boots him from slumber, and the reason is clearly the fact that his feet are fucking freezing. They hang off the edge of the mattress unless he curls on his side, but curling on his side makes his other limbs cramp, and the blanket isn’t quite long enough to cover both his shoulders and feet comfortably.

Before long, his brain is a hive of activity again, and going back to sleep is itself a distant dream.

His phone, when he checks it, is at a solid 5%. If he could get rid of all the notifications flooding his screen as well, he would. But they’ve been a nuisance since the first day he acquired one, so he ignores them and searches for a map instead.

Point Pleasant Park. It’s a warmer day today.

It’s just a ten-minute drive, Shane scolds him. Get up, come on.

Exhaling, Ilya rubs at his face. 

Get up, lazyhead.

“Shut up! Fine,” he whispers furiously to the air, and kicks the covers off. He wants a shower, and coffee, and food that doesn’t hurt his stomach, but if Shane fucking Hollander wants him to freeze his dick off in the middle of nowhere, that is his fucking loss.

He doesn’t take Michael’s sneakers. Instead, after perfunctorily brushing his teeth, he pulls on his only pair of sweatpants and the hoodie from Rivière-du-Loup, pockets his room key, and sticks with his boots. Then, like a thief in the night, he sneaks down the staircase as quietly as he can, leaves the Inn, and follows the GPS’ directions to the nearest entrance for Point Pleasant Park.

Mrs. Kerrigan was right; it’s scenic. He takes off, following the wide gravel path, and it feels like running in place in an endless corridor of deep wood. Considering how steep the downtown core is, he’s not surprised at the constant elevation changes—he simply braces himself when climbing uphill, and relishes the downhills. It’s not as though he’s pushing hard. The boots make it impossible.

Some vague part of him does note, however, that all the trees only take their shape once they’ve shot high into the air, with the rest of the trunk remaining bare. There are other areas too, where it seems as though the greenery has simply failed to take hold. Fallen, strangely naked conifers litter the more distant foliage.

Post-apocalyptic, says Shane, enunciating the words. Yes, that’s it. 

After coming down another hill, the trees open up to a large field, exposing the open ocean beyond. Ilya jogs onto the grass, panting, and belatedly wishing he’d thought to bring a water bottle.

The area is empty. Though it remains mostly dark, there’s a sharp and eerie anticipation in the air, like the sun is threatening to break through its confines at the edge of the world. He’ll welcome it: there are few things more unsettling than the Atlantic at night. Despite this—drawn in by its endless maw, perhaps—he ventures closer to the water.

Instead of sand, giant rocks line the coast, and they glimmer onyx in faint light. They seem worn from countless feet mapping their terrain. Ilya follows the desire path, unable to resist the hypnotizing pulse of swells in the distance, the increasingly poignant whispers of the waves.

You’re gonna break your neck.

“No, I won’t.”

Daylight rises beyond him, though it lacks any warmth. The rocks beneath him remain black; the horizon, a cool grey. He picks his way diagonally across the beach, coming to rest on the last large boulder before the tide. 

Closing his eyes, he breathes in the smell of brine and cold. His nose is numb. After rubbing sensation into it with stiff fingers, he opens his eyes, and that’s when he sees it.

There’s a woman standing above the water, a few metres out from the edge of the rocks. Her evening dress and ghostly blonde hair are a whirl of fabric and white in the wind, and when she looks over her shoulder, she wears a familiar smile. It’s like looking into the colourless sun: in a word, blinding.

The boulder seems to crumble beneath Ilya’s feet. Stumbling, he reaches for her, and only just finds his balance before he falls into the shallows.

“Mama?” 

Even as he says it, his mouth dries. He must be drunk, still. No, God, he must be dreaming.

The woman laughs, kneeling where she stands. Hovering above the choppy waves, which whisper even louder by the shore.

“Ilyushenka,” she coos, and reaches out for a child who isn’t there. “There is nothing to fear, you see? Everything is sand in the sea breeze.”

The fog parts; the hallucination shimmers.

A memory. 

What a wretched, cursed thing. Ilya’s heart is in his throat, arrested by the image.

It’s no wonder she looks so pristine. Though his mother was always beautiful, she seemed incessantly plagued by the vagaries of life, as though she’d drawn a poor lot and didn’t know she always possessed the ability to play her cards correctly. Her passiveness made her restless, rendered her unable to run her hands through Ilya’s hair ever again. All that you love will be carried away.

Oh, Ilya. Shane’s voice echoes the same affection as the memory, and he can hear it like if he reached, he could touch, and never allow their bodies to separate again. Look at me, hey?

He doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t move back.

“I miss you,” he tries nonetheless, even though the truth is a wretched and wicked thing, inevitable in its trajectory and devastating on impact. She can’t hear him. He’s known it, always, in some small part of him. He simply never wanted to see.

Irina Rozanova, past tense. Shane Hollander—

He must look and sound like he’s lost his mind. Maybe he has. He lost half of it in the shitstorm a decade ago, and he’s been losing all the rest since, allowing it to fly into the wind that strokes his mother’s pale cheek.

Oh, but Mama, he gave up his hands and lost his head, so the heart has nothing to mediate. Mama, it’s reduced to a muscle that beats by rote, that beats because it can’t do otherwise. Mama, wake up, wake up. Wake up.

Her knee twists limply in the air, the rest of her body wrapped in white. Or maybe it’s his hand that hangs while his nightdress threatens to swallow him entirely.

There, on the empty stretch of black rocks, with the Atlantic Ocean blanketed by fog before him and all the charred remains of the past scattered behind, Ilya finally releases a scream.

“I just feel like,” Shane had exhaled in one great rush, “everyone is looking, all the time. Like, this is what became of that former NHL player.”

It’d been late evening, less than a week after their move to Montreal, and they’d been enjoying the nascent Spring air with a glass of wine between them on the rooftop of their new building, overlooking the city. Or, rather, looking up, because despite being a skyscraper, their place was still shorter than the cityscape further up the hill.

Under the indigo night and its emerging stars, Ilya had fixed his gaze on the obnoxiously green tinge marring part of the skyline. He’d gotten a tour of the popular spots the day before; Shane had held his hand and tugged him down René-Levesque on the way to Chinatown and Old Port beyond, and he’d realized the light-cum-toxic-sludge emanated from the TD building. Like Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated, from the Teletoon show.

“What became of him?” Ilya had asked, and ripped his gaze from the clouds to Shane’s frowning profile. “Besides having sex with gorgeous husband, and donating all money to charity, and teaching children how to play hockey, and having more sex.”

There had still been boxes everywhere in the apartment, but they’d fucked on maybe every available surface. Ilya had been reluctant to comment, because Shane had been suspiciously closed-off about the entire matter of their moving, but there’d been a notably crazed way with which he threw himself into pleasure, in those days. He’d sucked and ridden Ilya’s cock like he’d been starved for it, like he hadn’t had it in months when it’d only been mere hours.

Shane had shouldered him lightly, then taken the glass out of Ilya’s hand for a sip. “Maybe I need a new hobby,” he’d said, flat and glum.

The last hobby—recreational tennis, back in Ottawa—had gone quite poorly, exacerbating Shane’s bad knee when he got too competitive about it. 

“I hear good things about knitting,” Ilya had replied, dryly, but only so Shane wouldn’t see how serious he’d been. 

“I’d sit around all day,” Shane had muttered, “or drown in yarn, and then where would we be? You’d need to rescue me from the yarn.”

In the end, Shane had taken to running—not as a means to another end, but as a journey in itself. Ilya would come sometimes, but mostly, he’d busy himself with other things. Looking into the adoption process, for one. Settling into yet another new city away from friends and family, for another. 

So Shane had run, like if he made it far enough away, he’d never need to come back.

Ilya returns to the Spring Garden Inn in a daze, unsure of how he managed to retrace his steps and drive without killing somebody. But he fits the Camry into the spot he vacated earlier, and he makes it inside with all limbs intact.

Now that the day has properly started, other guests mill about. Ilya nods as he waits for a couple to descend the stairs before heading up himself. Below, there’s an amicable murmur from the dining area, as well as the telltale sound of the morning news. The noises fade to almost nothing when he shuts his room door behind him.

Strangely, he has the sensation of being two people crammed into one. The first is convinced that, between one provincial border and the next, he entered into a bizarre and alternate universe; a gathering of ghostly figures, visible and not, each hellbent on reminding him of who he lost. The second is—calm, and firmly rooted in reality. Five things you can see, Galina would prompt, especially during harder sessions.

Five, the Halifax Commons outside the window. Four, the blankets on the bed, still a mountain of fabric. Three, his bag on the dresser and the yet-unpacked toiletries therein. Two, the door to the bathroom. One, his reflection in the mirror. 

With a wince, he peels his clothing off and makes a mental note to ask about laundry. He’d packed light, and absolutely hadn’t accounted for profuse sweating. The resulting heap lands on the counter, growing piece by piece until he stands, naked.

It’s not the first time he’s thought it, but Christ, nobody ever told him just how much he’d shrink after retirement. Where he was once sleek, he’s now lanky, and remnants of old injuries litter his body like a map. His worries have left bite marks. Recognizably Ilya Rozanov, but only just.

If Shane could see him—

Well, he wouldn’t be in this position at all, if Shane could see him. He’d be sunning himself on a warm and sandy beach, or in a log cabin getting ready to ski, and Shane would never be more than an arm’s length away. 

The water pressure is fine when he steps under the shower spray, and it’s blessedly hot. He tilts his head back and closes his eyes, greedily allowing the warmth to run over him and thoroughly soak his curls, before going about the routine of actually cleaning himself. 

This is the present: the heat on his skin, the steam in his lungs, the smell of fruits and summer florals. It may never be enough, but for the foreseeable future, it must be.

“9:20, Mr. Rozanov, you’re cutting it close,” greets Mrs. Kerrigan over her shoulder, when he finally makes his way downstairs again. She sits at the main dining table, a stylishly big and heavy-looking piece tucked along the side of the room, across from a family of four, who glance up at his arrival before continuing their previous conversation.

After his shower, he’d lain back down to gather his wits about him, and promptly ended up dozing. But such was the point of vacation that he hadn’t felt terrible upon waking again—only at a loss for how to spend his time.

“Sorry,” he bleats, and maneuvers around the maze of tables and limbs to reach the spread of breakfast foods on the kitchen island. On one side, scrambled eggs and sausages sit on a hot plate next to a tray of assorted muffins and croissants, which themselves are bordered by loaves of bread. On the other is a stack of plates and bowls, a tray of utensils, a pot of oatmeal, and mini cereal boxes. The kitchen counter is home to the line of beverages and condiments; a sign on the cupboard above the coffee urn reads, CUPS. He hadn’t even realized he was ravenous.

“Take your time, hon,” she comments as he passes by with a full plate and utensils. He’d been making his way toward a smaller table on the other side of the room, next to a wall bursting with photographs, but the family across from her is clearly taking their leave. He pivots now and sits himself beside her. His plate lands next to her closed book: The Blue Tattoo.

“Good morning,” he remembers to say. The words slip clumsily off his tongue. His English teacher in Boston would have given him a stern look over her reading glasses and said, elocution, Mr. Rozanov. 

But Mrs. Kerrigan just returns the phrase like nothing is out of the ordinary. Belatedly, he realizes, nothing is; it’s another morning at the Spring Garden Inn Bed and Breakfast for everybody else. Who would have been so reckless as to wander into the woods before light?

“I went to Point Pleasant Park,” he tells her as he picks up the fork. Then, remembering the sneakers that are still lined up outside his door: “Thank you for offering your son’s shoes, but I didn’t need them in the end.”

“You went already?” She raises her eyebrows, and otherwise doesn’t press him. “Must have been quiet.”

He slowly chews on a bite of egg, then swallows. “It was very beautiful.”

And hadn’t it been—the morning fog over the air. The wind whipping at his cheeks, making him feel alive. His mother in her nightdress, smiling.

“It’s a strange little forest, certainly.” Mrs. Kerrigan looks down at the book. “And fairly well known in our history, too.” 

At what must be his stare of blank confusion, she releases a huff of laughter.

“My boy told me who you were, you know,” she grins, secretive. “You lived in Boston all those years, and you don’t know about the Halifax Explosion?”

“Oh,” says Ilya, for lack of anything more clever to reply in embarrassment. Of course he knows. Every time he walked by the Common near the winter holidays, he’d see the Christmas tree from Nova Scotia. 

World War I. Boston helped Halifax recover from the biggest explosion in the world before Hiroshima. 

He halfheartedly protests. “Yes, I’ve heard of it.”

“Stories passed on by word of mouth have warped the history somewhat,” Mrs. Kerrigan goes on to explain anyway, relaxing in her seat. “Lotta kids think the explosion happened closer to the park, and that’s why all the trees look like that. No, it’s like that ‘cause of Juan.”

“One—?”

“Hurricane Juan,” she clarifies. “2003. Nasty, nasty piece of work. That’s the year Elijah was born, you know.”

Funny. His tongue turns to ash in his mouth. That’s the year Irina died. 

Quietly, he swallows and sets the fork down, appetite snuffed out in the space of a word.

“Still, Point Pleasant was a recovery site for the injured.” She places her hand over the book and taps her index finger, once. “Plenty of memorials there, now.”

He jerks his chin at it. “Is that a history book?”

With a hum, Mrs. Kerrigan turns the book so he can better see the cover. There’s a man running alongside the wreckage and destruction around him, looking out to the side; the sea, maybe, or an unknowable horror.

“Historical fiction,” she corrects breezily, “but a pretty thorough account. The Everetts—” and here, she gestures at the other end of the table, previously occupied by the family from earlier “—were just returning it before they checked out.”

So the book in his room hadn’t been a mistake, or terrifyingly, an act of providence. He exhales his relief.

“I was going to say,” he props an elbow on the table and leans against his hand, facing her. “I thought the person before me left a book behind.”

“Nope.” Glibly, she pops the P. “It’s what we do here. New guest, new surprise. Of course,” the addition comes with a conspiratorial lowering of her voice, “if you want another book, our library is at the front desk.”

He blinks and tries not to fidget in his seat. “Thanks.”

“You don’t like reading,” she concludes. It might be a question, but it isn’t delivered like one.

If he said, I do, would it sound convincing?

The thing is: He read voraciously when he was younger, enjoyed literature classes and creative writing. He was more open about it before his mother—well. And then after, sometimes, it seemed as though the infinite spectrum of his grief had already been documented by countless others before him. When he wasn’t training, fucking, or drinking, he’d dig for those glimmers of knowledge, of solidarity; for dead prose and poets to reach out across time and space and say, a motherless child can still be forgiven. 

The thing is, he reads like Shane used to run, like if he can cover enough ground, he’ll finally become unstuck. If he ever takes up writing again, it may damn him irrevocably.

He settles on, “I save reading for sunny days,” which is a partial truth. When the sun hits its apex in the sky, words remain words instead of worlds that lie in wait to sweep him away from reality. If he keeps one foot buried in the soil beneath him, he’ll be grounded enough to withstand tsunamis.

She squints at him, but evidently lets the matter rest. He glances down at the plate in front of him, barely eaten and probably cold, by now.

Belatedly, a thought occurs to him. “Mrs. Kerrigan,” he remembers to ask. “Do you have a laundry machine I can use?”

After helping her clear the dining hall, he heads back up to his room, where he stands inside the entryway, adrift once more. On the nightstand a few paces in front of him, Never Let Me Go sits silently, like a taunting reminder of halcyon days.

Maybe he’ll go to PEI and see everything to do with Anne of Green Gables, and maybe he’ll call Price about it. Maybe he’ll go back to the waterfront and find a quiet coffeeshop to read in, and look up every few pages to remind himself that he’s still on land, for now.

On the nightstand, his phone—which had been charging while he was downstairs—lights up with more notifications. The sight makes him explosively and irrationally angry; if people could just leave him be for one fucking second, that would make his stupidly directionless day—

But all the fight leaves him when he sees the text messages and emails on his screen. And the alerts, still, because he’d fought to believe for so long that Shane was alive. It’s as though every time the device is in his hand, it drains a little more of his vitality. 

Clearing all the notifications, he navigates to the web to type in something ridiculous, like, things to do in Halifax, when the browser opens up to his last-visited page.

Canadian hockey darling doppelgänger spotted in Dartmouth.

The headline that began it all. God, he’d forgotten in the haze. Or perhaps it was that last conversation with his oldest friend that led him here. Regardless, he sucks in a breath as he realizes what he needs to do to finally put Shane Hollander to rest.

He can imagine it already. He’ll walk the aisles, snaking slowly, inspecting the products on the shelves like Montreal doesn’t sell the same overproduced garbage. He’ll comb through every inch of normalcy and accept that he could search the entire world. He could fly to Tampa, where the line between the living and the dead has dissolved into fine threads, or steal into Moscow, penitent on his hands and knees, and lay prostrate at his mother’s grave in the night. She would remain bones in a cheap casket. And Shane—

It’s no time at all before he has the location of the grocery store figured out, as well as the address memorized to add to the GPS. He grabs the copy of Never Let Me Go beside him and opens to a random page, then sticks the device in as a bookmark, somewhere between let him think the absolute worst and they were suffering a fate they thoroughly deserved. 

The spine folds awkwardly to accommodate the intrusion on its otherwise measured binding. He places it back down on the night stand. The device will be a weight in his pocket, a reminder that he has obligations, and leaving it behind as he did this morning will give him breathing room. 

With a suitably determined air, he shrugs his coat on, double checks that the room keys are in his pocket, and makes his way for the outdoors.

Here’s a bit of trivia: When he first moved to Canada, he quickly became aware of the Loblaws monopoly. After moving to Montreal and experiencing Provigo, he’d assumed every province had its own Loblaws-owned chain. He is, therefore, surprised to learn that Sobeys is its own grocery store giant in Nova Scotia, and separate from the likes of Atlantic Superstore.

Regardless, a supermarket is a supermarket, and he hooks a basket under his elbow before he can dwell further on it. Personal mission or not, and objective lunacy or not, he can still get snacks for the road.

He circles around the produce section aimlessly, then trots over to the back, following the loop through meat and dairy. The photo from the article displayed the doppelgänger in the frozen food aisle, which will be the last aisle he snakes through. 

Despite himself, he keeps a peripheral eye on the strangers around him as he begins the journey through the organics aisle. If he hopes against hope that he’ll turn a corner and see a familiar face, that’s his prerogative. 

Bottled water to pet food. The sight of squeaky toys compels a pang through his chest.

Laundry detergent to cleaning supplies.

Chips and chocolate to pop.

Crackers and granola bars. There are too many choices; he drops the first box he can reach in the basket.

Canned vegetables—

“Oh.”

and soup—

“It’s you.”

Following the 2027 All-Stars game in New York, Scott Hunter’s wayward gang of marginalized players and allies had tumbled into the Kingfisher—which Ilya would have found obnoxious and gauche if he wasn’t a part of the aforementioned gang because, duh, that’s your bar that you own—where they’d proceeded to get decisively and thoroughly drunk.

It’d been karaoke night, which hadn’t helped the noise levels or the sheer raucousness with which every player composed themselves. 

“And that’s the classic story,” Harris had slurred at some point, gesturing animatedly with his hands while holding court at the bar, “of boy meets boy in Saskatchewan.”

“Oh, Harris.” Shane’s nervous laugh had the group in fits. Ilya, for his part, had hidden his smile behind a polite sip of his drink. 

“Did somebody say,” Hayden Fucking Pike had boomed, gratingly, pushing his way into the circle, before belting, “SAS-KATCHE-WAAAAAAAAAN.”

It’d been a phenomenon of the strangest degree: The Canadians in the group, minus Shane and Ilya, joined at various parts of the word before breaking into deranged giggles. Troy, Harris’ worse half and usually a sad sort of drunk, started miming karate chops. 

Ilya had tried to catch his husband’s eye, but for once, Shane had been wholly distracted by their friends, an unguarded smile on his flushed and freckled face.

“Kyle, Kyle,” Harris had exclaimed, hollering over his shoulder, “Kyle, we’re going next!” 

“There’s a fucking line,” Kyle had rejoined, but hadn’t made any move to stop the group from stumbling to the microphone, where Kip’s friends were shouting along to the Spice Girls.

After a brief tussle, J.J. had won out, holding the device up triumphantly and scrambling onto the low tables the Kingfisher had arranged as a makeshift stage. 

“TOKÉBAKICITTE IN THIS BITCH,” he’d yelled, and the squealing feedback from the microphone had Ilya wincing. “VIIIIIVE LE QUÉBEC.” 

The response, of course, had been confused but supportive, and utterly deafening cheers. As the other Canadians scrambled onto the stage, Ilya finally managed to capture Shane’s attention.

“What the fuck,” he’d asked. It was a rare moment that Ilya Rozanov was not in on the joke, as it were.

“This is culture,” Shane had calmly quipped, belying his inebriation. “Listen, listen: un beau matin.”

His French—usually quite pleasant to the ear—had taken on a country sort of twang, and Ilya had watched with no small amount of horror as the boys on stage held each other by the shoulders, rocking back and forth, singing the same thing. 

Very seriously, later, Shane had turned to Ilya again. He’d swayed on his feet. “If you ever leave me, I’ll—!”

But on the floor, Hayden and J.J. had kneeled suddenly in the middle of the semi-circle, tearing at their chests and drowning out the last of the thought. Depuis qu'elle est partie—

In his memories, the lyrics float by like a dream; too-loud lights and too-bright screams of laughter coalescing into a devastating, sensory punch. Faces darken into mere blurs and shadows. He focuses on the movement of Shane’s lips and can never make out the words. What he’d do if Ilya ever disappeared is lost to time and alcohol, and inapplicable besides, because Ilya planned to stay by Shane’s side for the rest of his life.

“And if you ever leave me,” he remembers replying, half-joking: “I’ll never fucking forgive you.”

What the Shane in his memories will never know is how Ilya’s rage tangled with his grief until the two were nigh inseparable, when the hypothetical came to pass. This was perhaps due to the ultimate and inevitable nature of his mother’s death in comparison to Shane’s disappearance—the open-endedness proving a trial too great to compartmentalize in the throes of Ilya’s rapidly deteriorating mental wellbeing.

His unbridled fury at the circumstances following the last search party on Mont Royal had seeped through the cracks, enough that people started to wonder if Shane’s missing nature really had been a benign mystery, married as he was to a being who seemed possessed by something ungainly and crude, and even malicious.

He’d tried to disappear too, once, tracing over the known route. If I ever left you, Shane, what would you do? Come back from the abyss to take your revenge. He’d torn off into the woods where his husband was last seen, scrabbled down the snow-laden face, and scraped his skin on brambles and branches. He’d shouted it all in English and Russian and French. What would you do? Come back. Come back.

The questions, of course, had hit Farah shortly thereafter. Did you drag him to Montreal? Did you make him leave Ottawa behind? Did you kill your husband? 

Did you kill your husband?

No, no.

But for a time, he thought he did. He dreamed about the top of the trail for months, placed himself and Shane by a glowing cross, imagined what it would be like to simply—push, and allow everything he thought he never deserved anyway to come crumbling down around him. When the days and nights ceased to delineate themselves from one another, imagination became reality until he was trapped within the four walls of his own guest bedroom. Unable to utter a word. Unable to wake up.

Would Shane have run half so far if he’d known that there was still a future? Did the practice of looking into children, sculpting a family of their own, terrify him so much? Where had Ilya crossed the line? For it was clear upon reflection, that tormented activity he’d partake in under the cover of smoke and alcohol and darkness, he’d crossed it irretrievably.

No, he didn’t kill his husband; but he might as well have, and isn’t that worse?

It’s you.

Ilya spins around and blindly manages to keep the contents of the shelf beside him from crashing to the ground. He can’t take his eyes off the ghost. There was a ghost behind him—for how long? The whole time?

And it must be a ghost, surely. For so long, he never believed in them, and now this haunting insists on taking the form of the two people he loves most in the world, all in the pursuit of some unknown purpose. A ghost would also appear pale and sunken, dressed in an oversized grandpa jacket and khakis. A ghost would also be—afraid, maybe, of the living.

“You’re Ilya Rozanov,” it notes, and tilts its head to the side, as though to comprehend Ilya better. But the ghost of Shane Hollander wouldn’t make so elementary a mistake as to mispronounce his name, not after having it in his mouth for almost as long as he’d been alive.

Doppelgänger, indeed.

The freckles are exact. And the stranger’s eyes are the same: glimmering onyx, black rocks on the beach, warm and wet with tears and ocean brine—

“I am dreaming,” he says, scarcely able to breathe. 

The stranger offers him a closed-lip smile. “Me too, maybe.”

It’s the timbre of his voice that draws Ilya out of his stupor. God, but he sounds like he could be Shane too, if his affect was flatter. If his hair was a little shorter, if he looked—

—almost ten years younger, maybe—

“I’m sorry.” Ilya shakes his head quickly. His pulse roars in his ears. “You look like somebody I used to know.”

For some reason, this upsets the stranger, who gazes at him anew and stricken, and looks so precisely like Shane used to after a bad game that every nerve ending along Ilya’s body flares alight.

Not a ghost. Not a doppelgänger. 

No, but no, Ilya should know, Ilya would know. Ilya would know better than anybody else in the world. His soul is screaming, stuck on a beach, trapped in the mountains, desperately tearing out of his body. 

“Oh my God.” He exhales. “Shane.”

The stranger turns away, and oh, it’s clearer with every passing second, the cut of his sideburns, the shape of his ears poking out from under his hair. Oh, God.

“I go by Arthur,” corrects the stranger. “But—yes. Shane. It’s complicated.”

Arthur? Who—? “What—?”

Arthur-who-is-actually-Shane speaks at the same time. “Are you—?”

Ilya shuts his mouth so hard, it feels as though all his implants will snap out of his gums. His palms are clammy. He’s never been closer to a heart attack.

“If you have the time,” says Shane—Shane Hollander, present tense, alive, alive—and he glances up again, meeting Ilya’s eyes. “Maybe we should talk.”

Ilya isn’t entirely sure how he gets outside. Perhaps he’d left the box of chocolate bars on the closest shelf, and then the basket—somewhere. But Shane had been the Orpheus to his Euridice, only looking back once on the way out of the supermarket before they stepped through the sliding doors and into the brisk, winter air. No forces of hell ever dragged him away; no conceivable force could.

“Shit,” Shane mutters, scanning over the parking lot. “You drove here, huh?”

Oh. The Sobeys isn’t a convenient walking distance from anywhere, and it seems as though everybody drives to reach their various destinations around town.

“So did you,” Ilya guesses. But this is a non-issue. “Show me your car—you drive, and I’ll follow you.”

Shane drives a sensibly boring Hyundai SUV with a worn-looking licence plate. Quickly, Ilya takes note of the three letters, just in case they get separated in the midst of other sensibly boring cars.

“I rented a Camry,” he admits, waiting for the teasing to begin.

Instead, Shane just nods, and presses his lips in a thin line.

“I’ll wait near the entrance there.” He jerks his chin at the smaller road leading onto the main street. “And if this is a dream, wake me the fuck up.”

Ilya exhales a laugh that he quickly reins in, moving out of the way with what he knows must look like a crazed nod. If he starts laughing now, he’s going to start screaming, or maybe crying, either in jubilation or abject terror.

He starts the Camry in record time and pulls out of the lot, rolling to a stop behind Shane’s car. With two honks, and also a thumbs up for good measure, they start the drive to wherever the fuck they’re going.

Like he’s back on the ice once more, Ilya fixes his gaze on Shane’s car and dutifully drives behind him. They wind past intersections, around rotaries, and eventually turn at a sign for the Bedford Ravines. It’s not a close trip, even for the size of the municipality.

After a few more snaking turns, he parks in front of a nondescript house. It looks like a sister to the other houses in the neighbourhood: suburban and comfortably large from the outside, a cute garage with a basketball net fixed above it, and a neatly-kept lawn. Completely unremarkable.

Shane is locking the Hyundai in the driveway when Ilya steps out of his own car.

“That was a journey,” he comments, avoiding the grass and following Shane up the pavement to the porch.

“Force of habit,” Shane answers as he unlocks the front door. 

The house is as nondescript on the inside as it is from the street. Ilya takes his boots off once he enters. From the entry foyer is a staircase to the second floor. A living and dining room sweeps along the right side of the house, though most of it is hidden behind a wall. At the end of the hall is the kitchen. 

It’s dimly lit for the blinds covering the windows, which, oddly, eases the knot in Ilya’s chest.

“Do you want something to drink?” Shane pulls two glasses out of the dishwasher. “These are clean, I promise.”

“I know.” For as long as they’ve known each other, Shane has preferred to wash dishes by hand and use the dishwasher as a drying rack. But at the odd and unreadable look that crosses Shane’s face, Ilya coughs. “Water would be great, thank you.”

He stands in a silence he’s not sure how to break, or whether he should break, uneasily wringing his hands. Across the room, Shane pours two glasses of water out of a carafe, then turns.

“Sit with me?” He jerks his head at the entrance to the dining room. Wordlessly, Ilya goes to him.

They sit diagonal to each other, separated by the corner of the table. It’s a dark ebony, and water droplets seem to fade into the wood, barely illuminated. 

A face-off. They’re both, it seems, waiting for a puck that will never drop.

But Ilya didn’t spend his career crushing spirits and dreams to stall at this—on the verge of everything he’d spent the last eight years fantasizing about.

“You’re Shane Hollander,” he says. 

As if to confirm, Shane nods once, features tight.

“And you go by Arthur.”

Another nod.

Ilya can’t stand this. “You’ve been missing for almost ten years.”

And—Shane grins wide, just for a moment, though it has no mirth to it. “Yeah, well. I’ve been here.”

For the first time, Ilya considers that he might be in danger, following a stranger to a house in an endless suburbia. His whereabouts are unknown to everyone else who might care about him. But this is Shane, who could only ever hurt him when he wasn’t trying.

He needs to know:

“What happened, eight years ago?”

Shane’s smile takes on a new edge, illuminated in barely-there slashes beneath the weak light. 

“You’ll never believe me.” 

Ilya drinks it in, along with every other change he can spot, now that he’s allowed to look. The slight crinkle at the outer corners of Shane’s eyes. Previously smooth skin made rough with exposure to the sun and speckled with stubble. Familiar shoulders fixed in an unfamiliar way, looser and rounded inward, amicable where they were once intimidatingly strong. He’s staring, but that’s nothing new. 

“Tell,” Ilya clears his throat. “Tell me anyway.”

So Shane does.

“On the way up Mont Royal, I fainted at a less-frequented part of the trail,” he starts. 

Where there are inscriptions along stone edges, like surplomber les saillies veines nouées, and the view is a steep drop. As luck would have it, he didn't suffer any lasting injuries, but he was so grateful to have woken up to the sight of people. 

Two people. An aging Asian couple who were in Montreal on vacation, enjoying a walk on their last day in the city, who had happened to see him fall and were prepared to take care of him. Or so he thought. They’d kept asking if he was sure. After shakily sitting up, they’d said:

“Are you sure? You come with us?”

Which, in hindsight, must have been, Arthur, will you come with us.

But, delirious, he’d said yes. He didn’t know he couldn’t remember anything until they asked for his memories. His phone had been smashed to pieces in the fall, and his watch was dead with no way to charge without a special cord, and he’d needed to get to a hospital to check his head.

He didn't mean to fall asleep in their car. But the next thing he knew, he was at a Tims parking lot in Lévis, and the wife was speaking gently to him, trying to wake him up from the back seat.

And maybe it was the head injury, but he’d found himself surprised at the lack of urgency within himself to get help. He’d felt like a blank slate. He didn’t know who he was. He was half-convinced everything was either a dream or the afterlife—nothing would have survived such a fall unscathed. And if his purgatory was a road trip across Atlantic Canada with this couple, well, he’d gladly take it over hellfire and brimstone.

What had happened prior to his discovery was something he learned about later, in bits and pieces. Arthur Park—the real one—had been involved in a car accident in 2015. He’d been driving drunk and ran a red at top speed. Two people died: Arthur himself, as well as an employee at a hotel downtown who’d been on his way home. Another three people were injured.

But the car he’d driven hadn’t been his own; it’d been the fruit of a robbery earlier that night, and the licence plate had been discarded. He had no identifying information on him, and the crash had mutilated his body beyond recognition. 

Really, the Parks only suspected. What proof did they have, but that their wayward son had never come home? 

The resemblance, when they started to show Shane his childhood photos and memories, was truly uncanny, despite their ethnic differences. It was as though the Arthur they knew before the crash had resurrected. And Shane—

Shane had tried to remember. He had no reason to believe he wasn’t the same man in the photos. He slipped into their lives as the prodigal son, finally returned. 

They were patient with him, and even earnestly confused when he didn’t know any Korean. But he could read kanji, and he could speak French where Arthur knew neither. As he recovered, memories started to resurface that didn’t align with the Arthur he’d been learning about. Flashes of moments about hockey, and Ottawa, and Montreal. He remembered—Ilya, your—

“—crooked smile,” he murmurs, wondering. “I kept looking for it everywhere.”

All the air in Ilya’s lungs has been wrenched out. Shane was right: It’s too fantastical to believe, it doesn’t make sense, and yet. 

And yet.

“You took on a dead man’s identity.” Desperately, Ilya tries to trace the events in his head. “And you did not get found out?” 

He can see already how people would mistake Shane for someone else. The old Shane carried himself with a completely different air, and looked younger, besides. But the paperwork, he imagines—what about everything else?

At this, Shane’s mouth simply curls into a rueful smile. “The Parks paid off Arthur’s debts and kept his life together, hoping he’d come home.”

The words aren’t said like they’re meant to cut as deeply as they do. But Shane doesn’t know that in their Montreal apartment, the bed still hasn’t been made, nor has the rest of the room been touched. The mound of fabric is the only proof that Shane kicked the blankets off that morning before lazily sprawling atop Ilya’s body. 

Suddenly, sitting in one place is suffocating. Ilya stands and braces himself against the table, dizzy and weak, breathing in through his nose and trying to count.

Shane stands too and places a tentative hand between his shoulders.

“Hey.” He rubs up and down, stiff but endearing. “Don’t cry.”

“I’m not,” Ilya shudders, blinking rapidly. “Fuck.”

The hand on his back disappears momentarily, but returns after sliding a tissue box in front of him. The gesture is so awkward and so classically Shane that Ilya can’t help but release a gulping, sobbing laugh.

“Sorry.” He collapses back in the chair. Standing had been such a stupid idea. With a grunt, he swipes at his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I—why didn’t you try to find your real parents?” 

Why didn’t you try to find me, is perhaps the real question he’d like to ask, but he’s not sure he wants to know.

Shane sits back down as well.

“You should understand,” he parses, carefully, “that I didn’t remember my real name for years, and by then, I could barely separate Arthur from me. And by the time I did remember, I couldn’t leave the Parks behind.”

“Why,” but Ilya already knows. His Shane has lived all his life with the biggest heart, with a deeply-entrenched sense of loyalty that not even a fall off Mont Royal can shake. 

The anxious shrug he receives says he’s right. “They needed me.”

“I needed you.” 

No, but he didn’t mean to say so soon. It’s a ragged and raw sentiment dragged from the depths of his soul, still raw and fleshlike and hurting. He releases his nose and catches Shane’s eyes. 

“Oh, Rozanov.” 

And Shane looks so fucking sad, it’s not right, Ilya needs to fix this as soon as possible, fix them— 

“Could you do it, if this were you?”

“Come home?”

“Kill a child,” Shane hisses, lunging close. “They already lost their son once. I couldn’t bear to kill him again.”

The photos on the fireplace mantelpiece across from them display a happy family. Smiling faces in front of dazzling sights, blurry grins around restaurant tables. A yearbook headshot from Arthur’s childhood, when he was gap-toothed and still innocent. Could he do it?

“Fuck,” repeats Ilya, emphatically. He leans forward, burying his head in his hands.

“Yeah,” Shane agrees. He settles back in his seat. “Yeah.”

There are still so many things he wants to know. Questions that he would have written down and methodically listed, had he known that this would ever happen. As it is, he’s stuck on the physicality of stepping into a dead man’s shoes.

A drunk driver decided I didn’t need a dad anymore.

Into the comforting, reflectionless skin of his palms, Ilya asks: “So where are they now? The Parks.”

When he doesn’t hear anything for a while, he straightens up, hands dropping to his lap. Shane is staring at the mantelpiece—at the story of the Park family throughout the years.

“They’re dead,” he answers, almost absently. “As of last year. They left everything to me: the family business, the house. The car.”

Last year? But then—

“Why didn’t you come back after?”

At this, Shane winces.

“I didn’t know who you were.”

Boy meets boy in Saskatchewan might have been a nice way of putting it. In truth, when Ilya met Shane, he’d been vaguely put off by the man—a kid back then, really—telling him not to smoke.

Who the hell do you think you are, he would have said, had he the vocabulary for it. 

Or maybe, do you know that when you’re irritated, your nose scrunches like a kitten. 

But memory is a fallible thing, because he’s also sure his teenage self would have wanted to say—

Mama, I’m never going to forget him as long as I live. 

“So,” Ilya swallows, suddenly cold. “You completely forgot about me.”

“Not in so many words,” Shane explains, halting and shy. 

There was a constant absence that took Ilya’s distinct shape, even if he had no real way of knowing. It was like the feeling of a missing tooth, and of constantly tonguing over the gap, rubbing the gums raw. 

Later, as he began to remember fragments of his old life, he still couldn’t put his finger on what Ilya was to him, or what they’d gone through. And he grew on his own, though cognizant of the ever-present void beside him, allowing the pieces to fall into place as they would.

Something along the lines of that.

Shane looks over the rim of his glass at Ilya, eyes contemplative. Surprisingly, guilt doesn't seem to emanate from him in tangible waves like it used to, doesn’t crash against Ilya’s jagged shores.

“I think,” he says, putting down the drink, “a part of me must have realized that if I’d remembered you, I would have stopped at nothing to get back to you.”

Ilya bristles, but if their marriage taught him anything, it’s that he needs to rein in his tongue if he wants Shane to talk. The self-deprecating grin sent his way without eye contact acknowledges the silent protest, anyhow.

“By the time I figured out who we used to be, it was already too late, and I—well.” Shane trails his index finger through the condensation on the glass, still refusing to look up. “I didn't know how to go back.”

“A plane ticket,” Ilya snipes, unable to hold his incredulity.

“And then what?” Shane’s gaze fixes itself somewhere over Ilya’s left shoulder. “I tell you my story, and we pick up where we left off?”

Yes, Ilya wants to say, more emphatically than anything he’s said before. Then they’re staring at each other, and Shane’s expression is inscrutable.

Yes lingers on his tongue, dissolving with every tick of the watch on his wrist. I would take one look at you and usher you inside. I would hold you and refuse to let you out of my sight.

But Shane has never reacted well to love that smothers; has never wanted anyone to add safety wheels or padding to the sharp corners of his life. He only likes to cede control when he still has the power to consolidate it whenever he pleases. Sooner rather than later, the attention would begin to grate, or they’d inevitably stumble across a missing memory, and then what?

“Yes,” Ilya says, even though the hypothetical has his stomach rolling uncomfortably. They’d work through it together. As long as they were together, nothing else would fucking matter.

“No,” Shane disagrees with a slight shake of his head, his voice flat but not unkind. “Both you and I already found our way in separate lives by then. We’d have been different people regardless.”

“So you didn't even want to try if it wouldn't be the same?” Stupid perfectionists and their stupid, self-sabotaging—

“I didn't want to try and find out that I need to live without you.”

“That doesn't make sense.”

Another stare-off. At Ilya’s pointed silence, he shifts in his seat.

“The—way I saw it,” he speaks slowly, glances away, as though carefully selecting his words, “we could try again, and if things went wrong, I’d need to figure out how to be a person without you at all.”

With a tired smile, he looks back. “Or I’d keep us in stasis, where you’d still be someone to me, even if you weren't there.” 

Ilya tries to move and finds that he can't. He’s fixed in place, in stasis, as was so aptly put. 

“That’s.” He clears his throat, flexing his jaw. “That’s fucking stupid, Hollander.”

The smile drops. “Thanks.”

“No,” Ilya tries again. “Who are we without each other? What is the Earth without the sun?” 

Shane makes a quiet, injured sound, and his impassive expression turns pinched. 

Suddenly, Ilya can't fucking breathe for the pure fury that flares up in his chest and spreads its wings through his veins. His joints crack when he stands again, blood rushing.

All this time, stolen from him because of cowardice. Because Shane couldn't trust himself, so he didn't know if he could trust Ilya. Because he didn't want to take the risk and try.

“I will visit tomorrow morning,” he grunts out, leaving the untouched water where it is. “Don't show me out.”

He makes it to the front door and stoops to slide his boots on when Shane appears again. But instead of an apology, or another explanation, or anything else Ilya might like to hear, he sighs.

“I need to go back to the shop tomorrow.” His voice gives nothing away. “Park’s Antiques, off the highway. We open at nine.”

Ilya looks at him: at his weary posture, at his tired face. His dark eyes, which are shuttered and unrevealing. Resignation writes itself into his outline, as though rejection had only ever been a matter of time. 

If you ever leave me, I’ll—what, Shane? What will you do?

Unable to speak, Ilya simply nods, pulls the door open, and leaves.

When he gets back to the Inn, he makes a beeline for the front desk, where Elijah is sitting and on his phone, clearly bored. He glances up when Ilya stomps in, though, and raises his eyebrows.

“Everything all right, Rozanov?” 

“Is your grandmother around?” Ilya paces in front of the desk. He needs to talk to somebody. He needs to do something with all this fear and resentment and hope in his chest, but talking to Elijah will be like talking to a mirror, and he needs—

He needs—

“She’s taking a break.” Elijah’s voice is colder than the air outside. “Can I help you with anything else tonight?”

Exhaling, Ilya stops. The no is on the tip of his tongue, but then, tonight will be two of three nights, and if Shane is here, if Shane is alive, and Shane is alive—

“Can I extend my stay? Three nights to a week,” he blurts out. “If there’s availability.”

Elijah’s expression takes on a dark tinge, his lips pursing. 

“Please.” Ilya will debase himself, will self-flagellate with a whip at the earliest convenience, will shave his head and wander into the woods naked if it means he can drag out the time.

“Grandma’s sick,” says Elijah, slowly. “Keeps talking to me about ‘that sweet Mr. Rozanov’ like you’re her son. I don’t want you putting your baggage on her.”

Immediately, Ilya promises: “I won’t.”

Elijah doesn’t believe him. This much is undoubtedly clear.

“I won’t,” he emphasizes. “I’ll stay out of the way. I just need to be in town for longer, for—things.”

When the other man only looks at the screen of the monitor with an air of disinterest, Ilya pushes away from the desk. He’ll find another hotel, he’ll spend all the money in the world. He runs a hand through his curls, which feel matted and tangled, and then over his face, which is scratchy with stubble and tangibly sallow.

“I can give you until the 24th,” Elijah says, averting his eyes. “No later.”

Ilya spins in place. 

“Yes,” he breathes. “Thank you.”

When Elijah finishes clicking around, he turns his gaze back to Ilya, and there’s something—pitying, in it. 

“Don’t thank me,” he looks down again. “Get out of this city as fast as you can, Rozanov. It’s a tar pit.”

At breakfast, Ilya gives Mrs. Kerrigan a wide berth and resolutely avoids Elijah’s discerning eye.

He’d tucked Never Let Me Go under his arm before exiting the room—phone left behind on the nightstand—and ventured downstairs with the goal of using it as a distraction. Anxiety and restlessness have spoiled his appetite once again, but his jitters have since left him exhausted, and if he wants to get through this day, he needs to eat.

With two slices of toast on his plate, he opens the book to the beginning and starts reading, all while keeping an absent eye on the clock in the room. He’s burning time, really, eyes flitting over the pages without registering the words. 

Well, no, that’s not quite true. His wayward glances at the time are increasingly spread out. 7:30, 7:33, 7:48. The toast disappears. There’s jam smeared at the corner of his mouth.

What was important to us, he reads, was that when we lost something precious, and we’d looked and looked and still couldn’t find it, then we didn’t have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.

The murmur of conversations around him fades to a barely noticeable hum. 

He remembers now, like brushing dust off an old treasure. That night with the movie playing. How Shane had swallowed when the screaming started, and how his brow had furrowed, disturbed by some then-indescribable emotion evoked by the scene. How Kathy had embraced Tommy, and how they’d knelt on the dirt road, blinded by headlights, weeping. Shane had known loss at that point, yes, but not the irreversible kind. Not the kind that denotes itself as pending, as though the movement of blood through the heart could be wholly irrelevant to the vitality of the soul it nurtures. All that you love will be carried away.

If it wouldn’t have made him more boring than Shane and also embarrassingly Russian, he might have referenced The Brothers Karamazov. Но есть горе и надорванное: оно пробьется раз слезами, there is a grief that breaks out—but, well. Dostoyevsky always felt a little too close to home for any real comfort.

His musings are interrupted by the clink of a coffee mug on the table. He startles at Mrs. Kerrigan whistling by, then at the steaming cup of black coffee in front of him. The mug is hockey themed, with an upside-down stick serving as the handle. After a surreptitious glance at Elijah—whose attention is fixed on his daughters—he cranes his neck to catch her eye, and nods his thanks.

When the hour has passed and he can make it to Shane’s shop at a reasonable quarter past nine, he cleans up after himself and brushes the crumbs from his jeans. For some reason, the visual stays.

Park’s Antiques, a ten-minute walk from Shane’s house, is as cluttered on the inside as it looks from the outside. Yellowing wallpaper, bleached from the sun, seems to curl where it meets the corners of the shop. The windows have thin bars over them. Items are strewn around in organized chaos: old TVs against a wall, DVDs in a bin, clothes in the back. Handwritten signs everywhere.

At the counter is Shane, fiddling with a Leica. He looks up when Ilya enters and visibly wavers between taking off his glasses or keeping them on. After an awkward twitch of his free hand, he brushes his bangs out of his face and sets the camera down on the countertop, all casual.

“Cozy in here,” Ilya comments, stepping around a box of footballs, both American and not. He wanders deeper into the store; it’s not so big that he can’t easily keep up a conversation.

“It’s a mess,” Shane replies with the air of somebody who uses the phrase often. 

He’s not exactly sure what he’s looking for, or even if he’s looking for anything, until he finds the Parks’ bargain books. They’re organized by spine cover from widest to thinnest, and all in a random assortment of languages and genres. The Norfolk of books, if lost books needed to wash up somewhere.

“I thought about things,” Ilya announces. He runs a finger absently over the spines of the top shelf, noting the thin layer of dust. “And I’m sorry for leaving the way I did.”

“Hah,” comes the puff of Shane’s laughter. The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson, reads the spine beneath Ilya’s fingertip. “If it still means anything, I’m sorry too.”

Ilya stares unseeingly at the shelves. Words, even pretty ones, will never be able to paper over the damage. Still—

“Thanks.” 

He does a loop around the shelves, passing by a cabinet of fine china and a collection of rugs, before finally mustering the courage to meet the other man at the front.

“You told me how you got here,” he says. He thinks about the idea of never letting someone go. “What do you plan to do next?”

Shane’s expression is an indiscernible thing, blank in a way that he could never manage in the past. Whatever he saw in the Parks’ memories, whoever he learned to become, they’re simultaneously at home and foreign on Shane’s face. Natural through rebirth. Alien, because he came back from the dead in pieces.

“I don’t know.” The statement is accompanied by a half-shrug, more a jerk of the shoulders than anything. “I’ve lived this life for so long, I don’t know what it would be like to step into another again.”

Ilya leans against the counter, careful not to rattle the glass. “Tell me.”

“What?”

“This life,” he clarifies. “Tell me about it.”

Shane falters with his mouth halfway to a retort, probably something along the lines of, what kind of life have you been living, hypocrite. But he places his hands flat on the countertop instead, and looks down.

“I own a pawn shop that’s failing.” His lashes flutter as he closes his eyes, almost meditative. “But it’s mine, and if I play it right, I have all the money I need to run it until I die.

“I do a lot of film photography. I process them on my own with the stuff in here, and I keep every photo, even the bad ones, because every picture is a memory.

“I inherited a nice house, and a good car, and a quiet life. Every day can stay the same. 

“I never,” he opens his eyes, “need to think about Shane Hollander.”

Ilya takes a moment to consider these things. It’s the most boring life he can imagine; but also the safest, and most anonymous. Shane would, of course, gravitate to such a lifestyle, even without knowing exactly why.

“What about Ilya Rozanov?”

Here, Shane’s mask of inscrutability cracks. What pours out is mournful and starving. His gaze flits down to Ilya’s lips, then back up. Then down.

Ilya leans even further over the counter, into Shane’s space, so close that if he strained a bit, or if Shane craned his neck, they’d—

“Please don’t look at me like that,” Shane backs away. He reaches for the camera beside him again, running his fingers over the knobs like a safety blanket. He’s flushed red. What a gift it is, to know that he can still make Shane Hollander blush with just a glance.

“Like what, мой помидор?” 

The old endearment slips out of him unbidden. At the lack of recognition on display, however, something shifts incrementally in Ilya’s chest, like a stone knocked loose. 

Shane worries his bottom lip between his teeth. “Like you want to kiss me. You don’t even know me.”

Out of principle, Ilya returns properly to his side of the counter, but he still needs Shane to know: “There isn’t a universe where I don’t want to kiss you.”

“Jesus,” Shane huffs. He’s even ruddier than before, blotchy with it now, and so familiar that every part of Ilya aches at the sight. From the broad shoulders under his grandpa jacket to the slim hips beneath his jeans, to the weak knee behind the counter, God above, it’s Shane Hollander. Alive and present. Breathing the same air.

“Do you get many customers throughout the day?” Ilya thinks to ask. It certainly doesn’t look it, but one never knows. He’ll stand here and remind Shane of who he is until nightfall, and then he’ll take him out for dinner, and by the end of the day, they’ll figure out how to communicate again.

“One every couple days.” Shane flashes a self-deprecating smile. 

“Ah,” Ilya tries for a light laugh and grins back. “So I’m your quota for the next day.”

The self-deprecation quickly crosses the line into indiscernibility once more. Shane’s voice is soft when he exhales: “Yeah.”

It must be bizarre for Shane to have his estranged husband in front of him, heart thudding out of his chest and eyes fixed on every freckled feature. It’s bizarre for Ilya, who had only just accepted that his husband was dead. He’s burning up with the desire to know.

Are we still husbands? 

Will you come back to Montreal with me?

Do you still—

“Let me show you my favourite place.” Shane suddenly stands and makes his way around the counter. Ilya helplessly follows his movement. “It’s about an hour from here, if that’s all right.”

“Sure,” Ilya blinks. “The shop?”

“Forget the shop,” Shane flips the sign on the front door from open to closed. The Leica, Ilya notes, is left behind. Halfway outside, Shane turns back. “Are you coming?”

They pile into the Camry and drive towards Dartmouth, where Ilya drops a few coins into the plastic funnel at the bridge. The radio fills the space between them, with Ilya focusing on the drive, and Shane focusing on nothing at all.

Eventually, they get far enough from the city that the world is an open stretch of highway and trees, and then they go further. Ilya tears past the speed limit, just to test whether Shane will clutch at his seatbelt and call him a fucking idiot—but he remains impassive, distantly fixed on the scenery outside his window whenever Ilya sneaks a glance.

They drive, and drive, and follow the GPS’ automated directions, and continue driving with the sun high in the sky above them. Once they exit the highway, Ilya straightens up in his seat, almost nervous about the erratically winding streets and blinding elevation changes. If he took so and so corner at such and such speed and another car appeared from the opposite side—

But that doesn’t happen, and they make it to a sandy beach. From inside the parked car, Ilya can already see the difference between this stretch of coast and the harbour—the way the waves roar instead of whisper, the visible definition of the swells beyond, the chunks of snow and ice scattered across the terrain.

“It’s called Martinique Beach,” Shane rasps, then clears his throat. “I like it best when it rains, but this is still good.”

“When it rains?”

He gets a wistful smile in response. It jabs him in his chest, because it’s Price’s smile too, it’s Fabian’s. It’s everybody’s smile from Nova Scotia when they think about the sea. He half-wonders, with no small amount of trepidation, if he’ll develop it too.

“When it rains,” confirms Shane, “it’s like the Atlantic puts you between its teeth. It could crush you anytime.”

With that pleasant image in mind, Ilya savours the last bit of warmth in the car and opens the door. Immediately, he’s buffeted by the wind, but when he straightens, it seems to settle. There’s nobody else here, but he locks the doors anyway.

Silently—if only because moving air through his mouth would hurt his throat the way it stings his nose, now—he picks his way after Shane down the boardwalk to the icy sand. Shane, because there must be something wrong with him, pulls his boots off and leaves them on the last plank of the boardwalk. Ilya, because there must be something seriously wrong with him, does the same.

They wander further along the beach, pulled in by the ocean’s gaping maw, unable to look away. Where the rocky ice gives way to finer sand, and where the water finds its limits, they pause.

“You once told me,” Shane starts, then pauses, running his tongue along his teeth. His toes wiggle in the sand. “It’s still fuzzy. You once told me that when your dad was sick, sometimes you’d wonder if the man you once knew ever even existed. Did you tell me that?”

Ilya casts his mind back. It sounds like something he might have confessed. He’s told Shane all his deepest and most horribly human secrets. So. “Yes.”

Nodding almost distractedly, Shane takes a few steps forward so that his ankles are submerged in the water. If the cold bothers him, he only shows it with a quiet inhale.

“I think people are made up of memories,” he says, not looking back at Ilya. “How we know we’re us, and how we know other people are them, and how other people know they’re other people.”

There’s something mournful and ugly beneath his absent tone, a resentment tempered by time. But what does Ilya know? His gut twists uncomfortably, and he swallows, tipping his head back to stare at the endless sky.

“So I think I did die that day, a little, because I lost so many,” continues Shane, “and I didn’t want to see us turn into—oh, I don’t know.”

Ilya closes his eyes. “What?”

When Shane doesn’t respond, Ilya looks forward again and closes the distance, stepping into the water and gasping at the cold. He wades in until he stands in front of the other man, ice and water lapping at his shins.

“Turn into what?”

Shane still won’t look him in the eyes, his gaze on the fading footprints beside him.

“Caretaker and sick person, I guess,” he admits, quietly. “You hear about it all the time. Caretakers get exhausted, even when they still care about the sick person. Especially when it’s a forever thing. I didn’t”—he sniffs, eyes briefly flitting to Ilya’s outline and away again, as if burned—“this really fucking sucks to say aloud.”

“It really fucking sucks to hear,” Ilya rejoins, mimicking the cadence of his voice. Then, softer: “You thought I would get tired of you?”

“Even if you didn’t want to.” Shane clears his throat. “Anyway. It doesn’t matter now.”

“Fuck you.”

Ilya doesn’t know what he’s doing until he’s done it: stepped forward, fighting against the tug of the water, and pulled Shane in with one hand curling at the back of his neck, the other sliding up to cradle his cheek as their lips finally meet again, eight years and one month later.

Shane makes an injured sound at the back of his throat, and Ilya swallows it down greedily. He feels Shane’s hands running down his arms, his back, clutching at him, desperate. Shane’s mouth is spit-slick and parts so easily, welcoming Ilya back into the space they carved out for themselves in the world before circumstance took it all away.

“Ilya,” Shane breathes.

“Say it again.” Ilya can’t help himself, kissing up the line of Shane’s jaw to his ear, tasting salt and warmth. “Say my name.”

“Ilya,” and this time, Shane’s tone is frantic. He twists and mouths at Ilya’s chin, the corner of his mouth, coaxing them back. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he murmurs between kisses. “Ilya.”

Ilya’s fingers are tangled in Shane’s hair and warmed by the heat of his body. He never wants to let go, but he needs to make sure that Shane knows—

“I would’ve gladly taken care of you.” They’re both panting, foreheads against each other and eyes closed. “I would’ve loved you no matter what.”

The words seem to change something within Shane, snap a resolution into place, or maybe break it into pieces. He stiffens beneath Ilya’s touch, though he doesn’t move away.

“Любовь моя,” Ilya whispers, small sips at Shane’s lips doing nothing to quench the unslakable thirst that has followed him ever since they were teenagers fucking around. “Любимый.”

“My love,” Shane translates, but his hands have fallen away to his sides, and his eyes stay closed when Ilya leans back. “I didn’t—you know? I just—I only.”

Slowly, Ilya releases his hold, disbelieving as he lingers, then allows his own arms to drop. He crosses them against his chest, suddenly freezing. “You didn’t know I—?”

“No, don’t be stupid.” The look Shane flashes his way is admonishing and finally, finally so alive, so reminiscent of his old self that Ilya’s breath disappears from his body. Though the hard lines around his mouth relax, something darker remains in his gaze, that same inscrutable depth that’s developed in their separation. 

“You were depressed,” says Shane, exhaling. “I think I was too, maybe.”

Ilya doesn't realize how tightly his hands have been clenched into fists until the grinding of bones and tendons into one another starts to hurt. 

“We were happy,” he grits out, forcing his palms to relax. Seawater foams around his legs and washes away. Weren’t they? Weren’t they everything? Electric in bed, able to talk for hours, fitting around and into each other, taking the world for themselves.

“Well,” but Shane takes a small step back towards the sand, leaving Ilya unmoored in the shallows. He watches as Shane takes a steadying breath, shoulders raising with the movement, and protests die on his tongue. “I look back and I think—retirement was so grey. Everything was numb, and my knee fucking hurt, and the only colour was when I made you laugh, or smile, or kiss me out of the blue. 

“And all the times you tore yourself up—we sewed each other back again, all the same places, every time stitching us into one person. We must have, even if I can’t remember. I know because I loved you more than anything else in the world,” he finishes quietly, a gradual diminuendo as he loses steam. “Maybe I needed to remember how to love other things, is all.”

The sand beneath Ilya’s feet feels like it’s crumbling beneath the pressure of the ocean. The gentle swells turn threatening, almost violent in how forcefully they pull Ilya back, as though to return him to the water after spending so long defying its gravity.

This is Shane, without a doubt, but this can’t be Shane. He was right at first glance in Dartmouth. This is another spectre, or maybe he’s a spectator, observing the torn picture of their relationship without the memories that made it glossy, wondering if he has the full idea of everything that composed their chemistry, knowing he doesn’t. Drawing conclusions anyway, because there’s nothing else he can do.

The reality of it is ugly, and Ilya stumbles backwards through the vertigo, into the embrace of the sea. To his credit, Shane’s countenance is wretched and knowing.

“Is he in there,” Ilya rasps, uncaring of the question’s cruelty as he regains his footing, “or is it only you?”

“Who,” asks Shane. But the way he crumples in on himself makes it clear that he knows.

Still, Ilya shouts. “My Shane. My husband, my fucking life. Is he there, or is it all gone?”

Shane winces. He looks away again, like answers might be found in the snow or the ice. Ilya wants to take everything back immediately, but he also wants to know, and the desire fills him with a terrible, monstrous hope. He stays silent as Shane visibly collects his thoughts.

“What do you want to hear?” His voice cracks in perfect harmony with the fractures around Ilya’s heart. “I can pretend for the rest of our lives. He loves you enough. He’s me.”

So is the haunting in my head. So is the wind when I’m alone on the highway. So is the silence in the early morning on Mont Royal, between the crosses, every row. Every fragment of Shane’s beautiful soul is everywhere if Ilya only looks.

Then he catches up to the other part.

“You’d pretend,” reiterates Ilya, slowly, “for me, but not for you?”

Shane turns and walks out of the water entirely, and distress is written in every line of his body. His fists clench and unclench by his sides, and Ilya only watches his back, shivering, slowly sinking.

“No,” he says. “No, I don't think that's possible. There's too many—there’s no glue strong enough for that. To hold me together.”

“To hold you together.”

“Yes. No. I’m doing it on my own, already. Can't you see?” Shane turns around, imploring, stepping forward but stopping at the line of the tide. “All this time you weren't here, I needed to stand on my own. I’ve done it.”

“So you don't need me at all.” That much was—apparent already. But it still makes Ilya’s skin crawl, makes him want to tear out of the water and run, drive out of the town and the province and maybe head to the West, where he’ll find another version of Shane Hollander who never forgot him. 

He stays where he is.

“No,” Shane is wound tight, almost vibrating with it, and his eyes are intense. “I want you, though.”

Then stop leaving me, Ilya wants to shout. Pull me out of the water. Let’s go back. Kiss me again. Ilya trudges forward, coming to a stop before Shane once more. 

Fine. He’s not in his twenties anymore. He’ll drag his own body back to shore, where Shane is wrecked and waiting and wanting. 

“Do you remember being rookies together?”

If the unmoving shock of Shane’s shoulders is indicative of anything, it’s an answer in the negative, unfazed by the non sequitur. Big surprise.

“I remember some parts,” he admits, haltingly. “Again. Not a lot.”

“We’ve had this conversation before. You said the same thing,” Ilya tells him. There’s not so much worth remembering anyway. Backchecks and scuffed boards, furtive hands always reaching, reaching, never quite making contact, slick warmth with ragged edges, everything underscored by feral violence and barely-concealed envy. Rookie season. Summer before.

“I don’t recall.”

Ilya shakes his head. “Don’t need to. We’re having it now.”

“Is that your plan?” With a short puff of laughter, Shane relaxes slightly. “To re-do all our conversations?”

And there, in the twitch of Shane’s mouth, at the corners of lips that are starting to bruise from how roughly he'd been kissing them earlier, Ilya makes a decision.

“The plan is, I am too fucking old,” he says, stepping onto the dry sand and into Shane’s space, “to think about the past all the time. You say we’re memories. This is true. But we’re also here.” To punctuate the sentiment, he pokes Shane’s chest, right over his heart. “And here, in the present.”

Shane meets him halfway, arms coming up to circle his waist. Ilya cradles his face and kisses his lips, his nose, his freckles, his lips again.

Eight years he’s spent orbiting the inevitable, waiting for closure or death, paralyzed by the inability to ever go back, chased by ghosts and lingerings. If Shane put them on ice, then Ilya kept the machine running, always dropping their temperature uselessly to try and preserve something that could never be contained, living as half of a whole.

If you ever leave me, I’ll—space, space. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” gasps Shane, but he melts into the next kiss. They’ve always been terrible at talking; this is how they communicate best. The urgency is palpable, as is the relief. When they first got married, Ilya wanted the world to know that Shane made him better. Now, the sea breeze over the Atlantic suffices as a witness to this new vow: He’ll never be half a person again.

“Come back to Montreal with me,” Ilya says before he can chicken out, later, sliding into the passenger seat of the Camry. There, he’s said it. Distantly, he notes that they’re both covered in sand and salt and snow, and the rental people will probably charge him a small fortune for the inevitable cleaning service. 

Shane closes the door of the driver’s seat with a loud thud. Once the keys are in the ignition, he immediately dives for the temperature controls. 

His hair is matted and windswept. When he raises his eyebrows at Ilya, he looks less like a stranger.

“Back,” he repeats, like he’s tasting the word for the first time.

“Our home in Montreal. Or we can go back to Ottawa. Whatever you want.”

It’s with a hesitant air that Shane rubs his hands together, like he’s stalling. And Ilya—

Ilya is fucking exhausted, and he feels like he only just ran a marathon, trying to restart his heart in his chest. He can sense Shane’s anxiety jumping into light speed, see the words swirling around his pretty head trying to form into something that sounds like, that’s a bad idea. 

Even though it’s not. Shane will be able to live as himself again, and not this caricature of an identity he’s fashioned out of headaches. Who is Arthur Park but a mask, a hood, and sunglasses?

“Or let’s go somewhere. Together.” He sounds like he’s begging to his own ears, like the ocean could still sweep him away, but if he can’t take Shane home, then he’ll follow. For now. “Could be fun to take a break.”

Shane’s features twist. There are so many new mannerisms that Ilya will need to learn. He hopes he’ll be given the time.

After a weighted squint, Shane sighs and drops his hands on the wheel. “Any place in mind?”

Ilya waves his hand at the GPS. “Anywhere. Never been to Nova Scotia before this.”

Obligingly, Shane turns it on and taps the screen, zooming out. His tongue starts to poke out behind his teeth in thought. Ilya ducks forward to kiss him again.

Shane’s subsequent smile is an unconscious reflex, there and free before he claws it back into a semblance of neutrality, clearly still thrown by the prospect of returning back to civilization. Ilya hurts all over. 

“Let’s do Cape Breton.” To his credit, however, he makes a visible effort to keep his tone light. “Does Alexander Graham Bell sound familiar?”

Not at all, for Ilya. Then again, Canada is five famous companies, and Bell is unfortunately a household name because of the worst team in the league. Not to mention his own residence.

“As in, Centre Bell,” he guesses, and observes as Shane brightens the way he used to do when Canadian trivia would be the topic of interest. Some things may change irrevocably, but not, apparently, this.

“Yes,” says Shane, putting the car in reverse and looking over his shoulder. Relief seems to settle over his features. “And as another example among many of Boston being a Canadian city in spirit, Bell as a company was a Bostonian-Ontarian thing before the Canadian division became a government project.”

Ilya replies, “Fascinating,” and relaxes into the seat as they begin the drive back to Bedford. He shamelessly stares and relishes in Shane’s voice filling the car—earnest and real, so unlike the taunting in his own head. 

Midway through an explanation of Canada’s telecommunications regime, Ilya reaches out to take one of Shane’s hands off the wheel, and leans in to kiss the knuckles, conciliatory. Shane keeps his eyes on the road and laces their fingers together.

They don’t go further than kisses. Ilya walks Shane to his porch, pecks him on the cheek, and trots back to the Camry when Shane bids him goodnight, followed by a decidedly dismissive click of the lock behind the door.

Having decided to meet the day after, however, Ilya finds himself relatively relaxed about the entire affair. The ever-persistent tug of miserable, life-draining depression has relaxed its hold for the moment, and he barely makes a sound up the old staircase of the Spring Garden Inn to reach his room, such is the manner in which buoyancy lifts his troubles from his feet.

On his bed is another worn book. The note attached to the cover is signed, Mrs. K. Specifically: For the next sunny day. Keep it. Mrs. K. 

Prying off the note reveals a ripped cover of a man smoking while staring off into some unknown distance. He’s propped up against a railing, one hand absently on his hip. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Penguin Modern Classics. Ilya gently opens the book, only to find a list of names scrawled over faded stamp ink on the inside cover. Halifax Grammar School. Do Not Remove From Library. 

Too late, he thinks, and places it back on the bed while he busies himself with getting settled. The copy of Never Let Me Go, apparently, has disappeared into the ether. Maybe it’s a rule at the Inn—only one book at a time. He’s glad to be rid of it; it evoked too many upsetting memories.

But Gatsby?

American literature was something he’d rather disdained when he moved to Boston. The entire idea of the American dream hadn’t called to him so much as gave him a rope with which to pull himself away from the vines tying his feet to the exterior walls of his father’s office, and he’d clung to the excuse in front of the media. No, he didn’t have much of an interest in any perceived or real masturbatory celebration of an imaginary nation.

I like Vonnegut, Shane once informed him defensively when he’d said as much, while they were packing his bookshelf full of texts about the history of hockey, hockey players’ biographies, and literary classics with stylish covers. The latter, of course, had previously been selected by his interior designer, who believed they would add a certain level of sophistication to his former living room space and maybe even become a source of education, if Shane was not actually a hockey addict who had no patience for pretentiousness. 

Thus, the only Vonnegut he could have referred to was Slaughterhouse-Five, unless he’d managed the time to find and read Vonnegut’s other works. Ilya read it on the drive to Montreal in the passenger seat of their rented U-Haul, and had it open during their late dinner, and finished it with a post-coital Shane curled into his side. 

Poo-tee-weet, he’d mouthed, setting the novel aside and unashamedly hugging Shane closer. If everything that will be has already been decided, if free will is non-existent, he’d thought, he would make the most of the present. He’d even understood Shane’s affection for the story in a gallows humour kind of way, considering the mess of his career with the Voyageurs.

And then Shane disappeared, and so it goes repeated in static bursts of consciousness, circling the drain of his mind until it dropped into some unknowable void. It’s funny how he makes and breaks the same promises to himself. Quit smoking. Live in the now.

Freshly showered and wide awake despite the late hour, he leaves the night light on and crawls under the covers before reaching for the book again. He knows the premise; he’d not infrequently been compared to the titular character, back in his partying prime. 

If nothing else, it’ll take his mind off Shane’s reluctance to return home.

“‘Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her,’” he murmurs, and thinks—not for the first time—it’s going to be a long, lonely night.

Come Saturday morning, Ilya totters up Shane’s driveway, and very politely does not honk to announce his arrival. He clambers out of the car and braves the stiff wind to ring the doorbell. When he hears footsteps, but still no sign of the door opening, he adjusts his scarf over his chin, and resigns himself to staring at the porch.

“Coming,” he hears Shane shout from inside. Shortly thereafter, a loud clatter, followed by muffled swearing.

“You are preparing for war, what?” Ilya greets when the door finally opens, and a harried-looking Shane Hollander glares at him with a duffle bag slung over his shoulder.

“I knocked the coat rack over,” Shane mutters, stepping onto the porch and shutting the door firmly behind him. He fumbles with the key using gloved fingers, but eventually locks the house and confirms its security. The Leica bounces against his chest.

A slow smile pulls at the corners of Ilya’s mouth. “You were impatient to see me. I understand.”

“All right,” says Shane, making his way to the Camry and calling over his shoulder, “it’s silent time now.”

The warmth from the drive up still lingers, so it’s not terrible for Ilya to take off his own gloves when he gets back in the driver’s seat and makes the car purr to life. Immediately, music starts playing, mid-song where he’d cut it off after parking. Thankfully, disc 06 seems to be inoffensive French and Quebecois pop, so Shane doesn’t have the same reaction he might at, for example, heartbreak jazz on the speakers, but it’s a little embarrassing nonetheless.

“This song is so old,” Shane smiles, eyes flicking down to the disc case in the now-open centre console. “Oh my God.” 

With all the excitement of a child on Boxing Day, Shane grabs the case and unzips it, still-gloved fingers almost imperceptibly trembling.

“This is—Ilya.” Shane asks, peering at the open CD case in his lap, “Why are you listening to my mom’s music?”

Ilya freezes with his hands halfway to the steering wheel. Yuna’s music?

“Your,” he chokes out, disbelieving. “Those are your CDs.”

The other man blinks at him, his head tilted to the side like the situation will make more sense at a 45 degree angle.

“Yeah,” says Shane, elongating the word, “but I made them to save my mom’s old iTunes library.”

Though he finds motor control once more, Ilya can’t hold in the strangled laugh that escapes him.

“This whole time.”

“Did you—?”

“Yes,” Ilya’s skin prickles with uncomfortable heat, even as his laboured breaths slip into increasingly deranged laughter. “Yes, you—Shane.”

Beside him, Shane snorts between giggles, fingers trembling around the case. “Sorry, oh my God. Sorry—!” is all the warning Ilya gets before he’s assaulted with full-bellied peals of laughter. 

“What the fuck, Hollander,” Ilya gasps, flailing a hand in Shane’s general direction. “I thought—!”

“I’m sorry,” Shane’s howling abates, though his smile is wide and gorgeous. “Oh, wow.”

Unthinkingly, Ilya reaches out to touch the corner of his grin. His dimples. When the pad of his thumb makes contact, Shane’s breathing hitches, and the smile falls away. Notably, however, he makes no move to dislodge Ilya’s hand.

“I wish I could tell her.” He whispers against Ilya’s thumb. “Or see her face when you tell her.”

“You can.”

“What,” Shane turns his head, and Ilya drops his hand back onto his lap. “Knock on her door, waltz in, like—hey, mom. I’m home.”

It’s almost like a slap to the face. The walls go up, and Ilya allows his expression to shutter. After a weighted beat, he shifts into reverse.

He backs out of Shane’s driveway while he mulls over the idea, and what to say in response. He could double down—at which point Shane would do the same, because that old stubbornness isn’t a personality trait that can easily disappear. But he thinks about Yuna and David in their too-big house, both unable to shake the cobwebs that have blanketed them over the years, slowly suffocating under the weight. 

When he puts the car in drive again, he clears his throat.

“It could be a start.”

“It couldn’t.” Shane immediately dismisses. “Everything I remember is just—pressure, pressure, more pressure.”

Ilya takes a turn onto the main road and keeps his voice as neutral as he can. “I think your parents would understand.”

“I’d never be forgiven.”

“You don’t know that.” Stifling a sigh, Ilya glances over his shoulder and switches lanes. “Eight years is a long time.”

Beside him, Shane looks out the window. Flatly, he says, “You don’t understand Asian parents.”

And that seals it; Ilya’s temper flicks on as the car’s blinkers click off.

“I don’t?” He barks. “I am Russian. Born and raised. Where were you, Shane Hollander?”

“I’m Japanese,” Shane fires back, whipping back around. The small sedan feels immeasurably smaller, and it isn’t helped by traffic as they roll to a halt. “It doesn’t go away just because I was born here.”

Yuna Hollander would never have left you out in the winter night as punishment because you lost a game. Yuna Hollander wouldn’t have left you to the wolves when you dared to be a failure. Yuna Hollander may have disciplined you, but she never put you in the emergency room.

He could say these things. But a very, very long time ago, Ilya made a vow to never dangle his childhood like a noose in front of anybody but himself. He grips the steering wheel tightly and hits the gas with more force than is necessary.

After a few blocks, Shane speaks again, and his voice is low and muted in the fabric of his pullover.

“I’m sorry. I know you—your parents are off limits. That was childish of me. I’m sorry.”

Ilya focuses on the road and not on the emptiness beside him, around him, the absence that takes a form in itself and calls him Ilyushenka. He’s nearly fifty years old, for fuck’s sake.

“I know your mother would not give a flying fuck,” he says instead, hoarse with fatigue from a wound that will never close for as long as he lives, “as long as her baby comes home.” 

They listen to bubbly French pop in silence until the disc loops, at which point Shane traces over the discs in their plastic slips and pulls out 03. Having somebody in the passenger seat is excellent for reasons like this.

“You remember what is on these discs,” Ilya comments over the music, “but you don’t remember winning the Stanley Cup. Any of them?”

Nova Scotia’s highways are small, winding, and lacking in cars. If he weren’t driving, he’d probably lose his mind over the monotony, or maybe he’d close his eyes and allow someone else to take him from one place to another. Wouldn’t it be nice to give someone else control, for someone to tell him what to do, or what he needs to do so that eternity will spill out as it was predetermined to. 

Shane hums noncommittally. When he doesn’t respond further, Ilya glances over at him, then turns his attention back to the road. The other man is staring unseeingly out the window again, a glazed look in his eyes.

Ilya cannot imagine not knowing what it felt like to hold the trophy in his hands, to raise it above his head and shout his elation to the rafters. The sensation of it is vivid, all the more so for the memories of each circumstance. With the Bears was vindication and pride, the sense that he’d finally taken the trajectory of his life into his own hands. With the Centaurs, his heart had almost burst with the knowledge that he was in his rightful place, a piece of a larger puzzle slotted perfectly together, Shane beside him.

“It’s like,” Shane says, suddenly, “watching footage of something you think you remember, and not being able to tell if what you remember is what you saw, or the recording from someone else’s point of view.

“I watched interviews and read articles, but it feels so—removed.” He says the last word with a tinge of melancholy, but otherwise, his voice gives nothing away.

Ilya tries to picture it. All the bullshit they went through, being married, being outed, playing together in Ottawa, winning together, all of it from the lens of a camera. Can someone relearn themselves through the eyes of others?

“Shane Hollander without hockey,” he muses, really considering it for the first time since they reunited. To live not only without memories of their relationship, but the sport they loved together. There must be some immutable truth to Shane’s being that isn’t informed by his obsession or career; the current Shane is living proof. But it’s like looking at an underdeveloped film, all the details hazy and desaturated. 

“Before you ask,” Shane preempts, “Yes, I have gone skating since, and yes, it felt as natural as breathing.”

“Have you played?”

In his periphery, Ilya catches Shane shaking his head minutely.

“I didn’t want—like with you. I didn’t want to learn that I couldn’t do what I’d apparently been doing my whole life anymore.”

There’s still too much to unpack in the sentiment for Ilya to feel comfortable arguing in the middle of nowhere on the way to Cape Fucking Breton, so he simply purses his lips. Did hockey make Shane Hollander brave, or did their high profile existence force bravery out of him? Ilya is unfamiliar with the defeat on display, or maybe the sheer unwillingness to have even tried. 

He thinks of the discs again, and of putting stock in things that weren’t ever there.

“It’s been really lonely.” Shane adds, tone indecipherable. The road is a convenient excuse not to look beside him, because if he takes his eyes away to glance at Shane, he’ll crash the car. 

More likely than not, this version of Shane is well aware of his cowardice, and of how he’s bowed, yellow-bellied, to the quiet storm of his new life. He doesn’t live like a man with pride in himself and his achievements, but he does live peacefully. He even said as much. Something in Ilya’s chest twists at the thought.

They stop in Antigonish for breakfast with about an hour and a half left until they get to Baddeck, traffic willing. It’s a quaint town, almost reminiscent of rural Quebec. 

“What is this name,” Ilya pronounces carefully, once they’ve sat down with coffees and chocolatines at the first decent-looking café they find. “Anti-gonish?” 

The café is charmingly cozy, with throw pillows on worn loveseats and the inviting smell of cinnamon in the air. It isn’t too crowded, and people seem to be minding their own business, so Ilya is thankful for the privacy. 

“Antigonish,” corrects Shane, though his nose scrunches thoughtfully. “Pretty sure it’s Mi’kmaq, but I don’t know what it means.”

Ilya doesn’t avert his gaze when they make eye contact over the table, and instead watches as Shane takes a bite of the chocolatine. It was clear before, with his new and relaxed demeanour, but he eats like he doesn’t care about the sugar content. This too is a subtle, jarring difference. 

“For the name, it’s very white,” observes Ilya, aloud, and like an epiphany, it feels as though he’s finally put his finger on the discomfort that seems to cling to Shane’s new skin in layers of stubborn cobwebs. Not that Halifax didn’t have its fair share of visible minorities, but even in comparison to Montreal, the culture seems distinctly homogenous. 

Shane doesn’t—flinch, necessarily, but Ilya notes an air of unease.

“Almost all of Canada is like that,” he says, with a careful sip of coffee. “I don’t know too much, but this country did pretty terrible things.”

“Colonialism.” Ilya notes, dryly. He’d been given the general rundown of Canada’s sins when he moved, and when he studied for his citizenship test, but he’s read a lot in the time since, too. Canada is a land of immigrants, has been from its inception. It’s a wonder that they’re not more accepting of them.

Unpleasant memories around the fallout with Montreal flash before his eyes, unbidden. He drinks his own coffee, almost scalding his tongue in the process, but revelling in the immediacy of the sensation. It tastes like burnt rubber. It’s perfect. It makes him want a cigarette.

“If I told you I needed five minutes to smoke,” he asks, “what would you say?”

Shane looks up from his drink with incredulity sketched all over his face. “Smoking’s bad for you, what the fuck?”

“Yes,” Ilya agrees.

Something else enters Shane’s expression, another new thing he must have picked up in their years apart. It’s a tightening of his jaw, a slight squint. 

“I won’t forgive you if you die by lung cancer.” Shane’s coffee lands back on the table with a quiet rattle. “That’s a stupid way to go.”

Even as Ilya sets his own drink down and reaches into his pocket to palm his lighter, he replies: “I know.”

Shane’s only visible disapproval is the way he cracks the window open when they start driving again. They’d contemplated spending another hour in the town and exploring, but after searching online for things to do, they’d both agreed to move on.

For the next leg, Shane pops 03 out of the CD player and replaces it with 07. It’s solo piano music.

“I don’t remember when I quit, exactly,” Shane explains, and wiggles his fingers in the air with a nonchalant affect. “But I think my mom had dreams of the repertoire I could’ve played.”

They were lofty dreams indeed, selections from Liszt’s Transcendental Études and Rachmaninoff’s Preludes and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Glenn Gould performing the latter, because of course, he was the pride and joy of Canada, and Yuna might have thought her son could be the same. 

Ilya himself recalls chafing against the instruction he’d received in classical piano, enough to quit as soon as he’d proved he belonged in the rink instead, and not pouring his heart out into ivory keys. There was too much of himself in it; he couldn’t bear the thought of performing.

“Imagine,” he says, picturing it in his mind’s eye, “Shane Hollander, Tchaikovsky Competition winner.” Shane always looked good in suits. He’d have looked devastating, photographed with a sleek Yamaha behind him, strong hands on display.

“Far cry from hockey,” Shane chuckles, and just like that, the tension in the car is broken. They listen in comfortable silence, all the way to Baddeck.

To Ilya’s great surprise, they are not the only ones at the site when they roll to a stop, neatly slotting themselves between a minivan and an SUV in a somewhat full parking lot.

“Winter break,” is all Shane hypothesizes when Ilya shoots him a look. “Lots of families go on trips up here.”

Ilya’s joints pop as he unfolds himself from the Camry. Closing his eyes, he rolls his shoulders back and slowly tilts his head from side to side, relishing the stretch. He opens his eyes to Shane staring blatantly at him from across the roof of the car.

“Boring,” Ilya lets the old insult drip off his tongue and takes no small pleasure in seeing Shane’s gaze darken. “Lead the way, Hollander.” 

It’s a short hop to the main doors, and when they enter, the first thing they see is a plane hanging from the ceiling. The front desk is occupied by two guides in uniform, locked in some riveting conversation with a phone propped up between them. At the sight of Ilya and Shane, one of them squeaks and swipes the phone away to drop it in her pocket.

“Hi,” says the other one, warily, and having crossed the distance, Ilya can read her nametag: Penelope. “Welcome to the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site.”

Ilya makes sure to inject warmth into his tone, distantly cognizant of his perpetual frown. “Hello. Thanks.”

It seems to do the trick, or maybe it’s the faint smile Shane gives her. Regardless, Penelope stops looking quite so guarded. “Adult admission fee is ten bucks; will it be just the two of you today?”

“Yes—yeah.” He digs his wallet out of his coat pocket and fishes out the correct amount in cash while she inputs the order on the monitor. As always, the faint scent of maple syrup wafts up from the bills, there and gone as soon as the money finds its way in the till.

“Excellent, thanks.” With a flourish, she holds up a stamp. “Hold out your hands?”

They’re stamped accordingly with smudgy orange ink and informed that washrooms are around the corner, before the hall of exhibits down the ramp. Which is great, because nature is calling Ilya’s name.

Compared to several days ago, he thinks there might be a bit more life in his skin when he passes by his reflection again. The Shane Hollander effect, bringing him up towards the sun. Or maybe a consequence of feeling purposeful again. He almost hopes it’s more of the latter than the former.

Then he pauses. 

Purposeful is the wrong word for it, this new and budding feeling that he still has enough of him left to change, or that he has enough of him determined to change. Perhaps the word is resolute. Or maybe, even, brave.

“Do you need to go?” He asks later, when he swings out of the door and sees Shane on the other side. He flaps his hands to air-dry them. 

“Nah,” Shane says easily, adjusting the Leica around his neck. “Let’s see some history.”

Considering all the fuss about the telephone, they don’t actually see all that much of it, or at least not in the opening halls. Instead, there are oceans of text about how Bell was a versatile inventor with a passion for flight and other miscellaneous things. Ilya was right, outside: this place is a fucking bore.

But he skims the text and keeps an eye on Shane, who seems to be enjoying himself, taking pictures of the ceilings and displays at artful angles.

“What?” Shane’s stance takes on a defensive quality when he notices Ilya watching. “I like to learn about people.”

It’s such a bullshit answer that Ilya simply lets it pass over his higher cognitive processes. Water off a duck’s back.

“I like looking at you,” he shrugs instead. 

At that, Shane’s face goes a deep pink, slowly and then suddenly as he sharply turns away. It is, quite frankly, ridiculous that a man he has spent literal decades loving, and who has loved him for decades also, is embarrassed by the idea that his affection could manifest as something so innocuous. Shane is beautiful; Ilya will always think so.

He desultorily picks his way across the displays, meandering to keep at Shane’s typical and slow pace. As on the ice, as on land.

“Do you notice anything strange about Mr. Bell’s office?” He hears as they wander closer to a small group of tourists, led by a smiling guide. He stands almost a head above most of the people in the crowd, but he still cranes his neck to look at the preserved office space in front of them. 

“It’s unnaturally clean,” he offers quietly to Shane, who is doing the same thing beside him.

“There’s no telephone,” Shane whispers back. Ilya blinks as they shuffle around to the other side of the glass, and indeed, there’s no iteration of the device in sight. Strange indeed, for the inventor of it.

“—isn’t that interesting?” The guide glances at them as they return to their former spots, and Ilya gives a curt nod before trotting over to another wall of text, hoping that somebody on the tour will ask why. When they drift away to the next room, he turns to Shane.

“Do you know why?”

Shane frowns. “Must have missed it. I don’t know.”

“Maybe it was before invention.” Ilya makes a quick circle around the display for an explanation or clue, but there’s none to be found on the topic. 

“Maybe it’ll remain one of life’s great mysteries,” muses Shane, mirth colouring his delivery. “C’mon, let’s see the rest.”

They read about Bell’s family and the years he spent in Baddeck. A few rooms over, the ceilings arch up, and Ilya looks up to see another old plane made of wood and fabric. From massive kites to other flying machines, the dream of aviation is all around them. 

“Don’t move.”

Ilya freezes in place, half-peering over his shoulder at Shane, who’s squinting through the Leica’s viewfinder.

“That’ll turn out nicely,” he says, letting the camera hang around his neck again. “You look like you’re about to fly.”

It’s hard not to get swept up in the fantasy of it himself. He knows what it’s like to pursue something with passion and single-mindedness, consumed by the greedy demand of the work, like if he could only do more, he’d finally conquer. Kites roll along the beach in grainy footage that plays on loop; planes land in the sand, kicking it up into the wind. Sand in the sea breeze. Isn’t it funny how his mother is everywhere, after all this time, even when he’s not looking.

They leave the site armed with a postcard and commemorative penny, which has been elongated and flattened to feature the Silver Dart. It finds its way into Shane’s pocket. Ilya is fucking starving.

“Come, husband,” he announces, already halfway to the car. “You will drive us to late lunch, and we will find a place to sleep for the night.”

To his chagrin, Shane takes his sweet time climbing into the driver’s seat and adjusting the height and distance of it from the wheel. Ilya watches from the passenger seat, feeling an imminent stomach growl and hoping that the other man’s previous adventures in Cape Breton mean he knows where to go next.

Bach melts over the speakers, something light and fast-paced.

“I’m still your husband, then?” Shane asks the question almost idly while he fiddles with the GPS.

Ilya breathes through the sudden racing of his heart. “You have no memories of the wedding,” he guesses, half-joking. “No matter—it was all over the news.”

The GPS sets its route with a telltale chime, and the impersonal female voice drones out directions to leave the parking lot.

Shaking his head minutely, Shane kicks the car into drive.

“I do, actually,” he says, and he sounds a little distant. “I remember our backyard. The garden being beautiful. The service. The sunlight on your hair.”

Every word makes Ilya a little hungrier, but not for food. He grasps onto the image of being thirty and closes his eyes. 

“Our vows?”

When he gets no response, he opens his eyes. Shane’s attention is on the road, and there’s an unhappy slant to the line of his mouth.

“That’s a no, then.”

They continue down the road in relative quiet. Glenn Gould plays something somber and technical and dry. Ilya has lost count of the variations.

Shane clears his throat, and there’s a furrow to his brow, like he’s getting ready to fight.

“I dream about it a lot,” he says, flat and factual. “I see everything, like your mouth moving, but it feels like we’re trapped in syrup, because I can’t hear anything. And I wanted to—” he clears his throat again, coughs “—I keep chasing the sound of your voice.”

“Shane.” 

“I always want to know what you say, and I get so close it’s almost like I’ll feel it in your breath, but then I wake up.”

“Fuck, Hollander,” Ilya says, turning to look at the landscape as it sails by.

“It’s good to know that I remain your husband,” Shane murmurs, and his voice is almost drowned out by the piano. “Because I’m still not convinced this isn't entirely a dream, and I’m going fucking crazy.”

Would it be so terrible if it were? Part of Ilya wants to know, because at least they’d be dreaming together. They could dream within a dream, find a way to live forever in it, make up for all the lost time. If it were a dream, they could return together with no consequences, and Yuna and David would welcome them with frail, open arms, and the press wouldn’t say a thing. 

But dreams never match up to expectations. Things don’t feel right. Details never come together the way they do in reality. Mostly, Ilya wants to emerge from limbo and find himself firmly grounded again, running hockey camps and making every NHL Commissioner feel the teeth of progress dig into their heels.

“If you were dreaming,” Ilya turns his attention back to Shane’s hands, which grip the wheel with white-knuckles, “why would it matter to you?”

Shane releases a harsh exhale. “Fucking—of course it’d matter to me. I’d want to wake up, especially if this isn’t real.”

Ah. Therein lies the crux of their divergence.

“I do not think we are dreaming,” he makes sure to preface. Listlessly, he taps his fingers against the door. “But if we were, these experiences would still be real enough.”

“No,” Shane insists. “No, because in a dream, you can drive forever, you can move from place to place, and it still wouldn’t be you at the wheel. We can hold hands while we drive and never let go. We can stare out the windows at a world moving around us while we sit entirely still.”

Ever the harbinger of change in Ilya’s life. For somebody who’s so torn between staying and coming back, Shane is miraculously consistent about wanting control.

“Time passes anyway,” he posits, halfheartedly. “Control or not. This is not enough for you?”

Shane’s stiff and stubborn silence is all the answer Ilya needs.

They reach Sydney a little over two hours later, parking the Camry in a lot facing the water. Beside them, the red bricks of the hotel Shane ostensibly booked a room at the night before reflect the setting winter sun, casting the waterfront in a rare, warm hue. 

“We should be able to check in now,” Shane remarks, peering at his phone. It strikes Ilya, suddenly, that they don’t have each other’s numbers. Also, that the old Shane preferred the analog method of checking his wristwatch for the time. The late-lunch-slash-early-dinner they had at Swiss Chalet sits heavily in his stomach.

“Let’s,” he agrees anyway, bracing himself for the cold before he opens the door. To his surprise, it’s not terrible. Y fait frette, is what the Quebecois might say. 

On the other side, Shane stretches his arms above his head. Ilya imagines he’d see a sliver of skin where the fabric rides up. The old Shane would have saved the stretch until he was at Ilya’s side, then danced away, like he wasn’t asking to be ravished then and there. God, Ilya misses him so fucking much, every breath is like glass in his lungs. 

Does it fucking kill you too, Shane had asked him once. He’d answered in the negative at the time, but that was then. You, he wants to say now, grabbing their bags from the trunk, you’re fucking killing me now.

“Come on,” Shane jerks his head to the hotel entrance once the trunk is shut and the car is locked. 

They check in under Park, Arthur, two queen-sized beds. Complimentary breakfast. It’s a little like watching a nature documentary; Shane has a different driver’s licence, a different credit card. He used to have opinions on Scotiabank, vastly preferring BMO instead for his banking needs, but the little slip of plastic between his fingers is a bright red. 

Like a room of mirrors in a circus, if Ilya tilts his head one way or another, he’ll see the venn diagram of the two men, where they separate and intersect. Arthur stands loose, all easy contrapposto, seemingly a maritimer to his bones. Shane used to hold himself with his shoulders rigid and his back straight, as though he could avoid the injuries of age and his inevitable shrinking. They’re both, of course, boring as fuck, and so devastatingly beautiful that Ilya feels dirty for even wanting to touch.

But memories of the two of them in countless hotel rooms, flitting in and out of each other’s lives, fucking and fighting and flirting—getting into an elevator with Shane now has his blood running hot. He can’t remember the last time he even wanted sex.

“Four-ten,” Shane mutters, walking a half pace ahead and scanning the doors. “Four twelve, four-fourteen.” Out of his coat pocket, he takes out the slip of paper holding their key cards, and hands one to Ilya. “Don’t lose that.”

“I’m not a child,” Ilya retorts, like a child. “You don’t lose that.”

Shane rolls his eyes as he opens the door and pushes inside. The room is decent, painted in warm hues. The first light switch turns on the overhead light in the washroom, and the second turns on the lamps along the dresser and desk. It’s a nice enough space that Ilya can tell this is a Shane preference, and not an Arthur one. 

The thought makes him sufficiently brave, waiting for the other man to put his bag down and turn around before he steps into his space.

His first thought, upon kissing Shane again without the wind howling in their ears, is that Shane tastes like the decadent chocolate fudge brownie they’d shared for dessert, during which both of their efforts only resulted in maybe a third of the treat being demolished. Athletes and their stupid, lifelong intolerances.

But Ilya suddenly can’t get enough of the sugar. He licks into Shane’s mouth with his hands tangled in soft black hair once more, and he releases a helpless moan that, unnervingly, almost sounds like a sob. Shane swallows the sound and slips his hands inside Ilya’s jacket to tug his t-shirt out of his jeans. They don’t even have their shoes off yet.

“Jesus,” gasps Shane, when Ilya abandons his lips to suck a line of kisses down his jaw, his neck. “Jesus Christ.”

“Not quite,” Ilya answers. His mouth refuses to stray more than a centimetre away from Shane’s skin. He smells almost woodsy, like he never got the dirt of Mont Royal out from under his skin.

Shane’s eyelashes flutter, right before Ilya claims his mouth again. 

“I dreamed of this too,” he says between kisses, and clutches at Ilya’s waist. “I’d come in my pants at night like a fucking teenager, Ilya—”

Ilya’s fingers slip blindly on Shane’s button down. He wants the fabric off, he wants to pin Shane down on the bed and fuck him until he remembers his wedding vows, make love to him so he’ll always know the precise way their bodies intersect. 

But even as the mind forgets, the body must remember, because Shane’s already found the erogenous areas of Ilya’s torso, knows that when he presses his thumbs against the side of Ilya’s nipples just so, Ilya will pant like an unceasingly loyal mutt.

“Two seconds,” Shane bites out, clearly frustrated, his cock stiff where it’s pressed against Ilya’s thigh through the fabric. “Two seconds, take off your fucking shoes and pants, you fucking animal.”

And yes, he’s right, Ilya’s no better than one. Fuck, but he loves the dehumanization, the degradation, there must be enough of Shane left to know what gets him hard and what gets him off. It’s been so long. So, so long.

They step back only long enough to strip quickly down to their boxers and kick off their shoes. Ilya waits a half second more, just in case Shane needs to fold his clothes like he always does, but it seems as though Arthur is content to let them hit the dresser and the back of the chair. 

“There’s lube in my bag,” Shane murmurs, gentle hands on Ilya’s bare shoulders now. He presses the sweetest kisses against Ilya’s lips, “and I’m clean, I’ve been true, even though—”

Ilya clutches at him with renewed fervour, pushing Shane up against the nearest wall and aligning their bodies together. Even though I forgot about you, or however that sentence could end. Ilya is going to fuck him through the mattress. He’s already close to coming, and all they’ve done is rub against each other.

“Do you,” he nips at Shane’s earlobe, “do you remember what we do? In bed?”

Shane’s reply is muzzy and buried in Ilya’s jugular. “Sex?”

It makes Ilya laugh. It makes him shake. 

“Your words,” he says, with another bite, another roll of the flesh over his tongue. 

“Oh,” Shane exhales. When Ilya leans back to face him, his pupils are blown wide. “Do—what do we—how—?”

“I tell you what to do, I make you submit,” Ilya explains, punctuating the sentiment with a jerk of his hips. He’s so fucking hard it almost hurts. Against Shane’s lips, he adds, “and you tell me I’m a sick fuck for wanting my husband so bad.”

“God,” breathes Shane. Already, he looks like he’s starting to space out.

“One is stop, entirely.” Ilya moves his hands to Shane’s hips to steady them both, because he needs to make sure this much is clear. “Two is, you need me to slow down. Three, keep going. I will ask you for numbers. Do you understand?”

There’s a challenge in Shane’s expression now, something about the way he bites his bottom lip. “Yes.”

No time like the present. “Number.”

“Three,” Shane responds like it’s automatic. A glimmer of recognition seems to cross his mind, like a shadow of something just out of reach. “If I say Yahtzee, I want out.”

“Fuck,” Ilya murmurs. The word is a punch to his gut, instinctive. Maybe he will, actually, fuck Shane until he remembers everything, until he’s Shane again and not Arthur, and not Shane-Arthur either. “Fuck, Hollander.”

Shane rolls their hips together again, slow and teasing. “Do you want me bad enough?”

Yes. All the time.

“Get on your knees,” Ilya demands, manhandling Shane and spinning them around so his own back is against the wall. Before Shane can catch his breath, Ilya pushes him down by his shoulders. Unbalanced, Shane knocks his head against Ilya’s hip, nose pressing into the edge of the V. Ilya cards a hand roughly through his hair, making sure to grip painfully before pulling.

Shane’s throat bobs as he swallows, looking up at Ilya with eyes darker than the crystalline light of the snow outside.

“Number.”

“Three.”

Ilya could come just at the sight of this again. “Hands behind your back. Show me how much you want me through my boxers. Then, if you’re good—” and he doesn’t miss the way the word makes Shane shudder “—I’ll let you suck me off.”

Immediately, Shane holds his hands behind his back and pushes forward to bury his face in the fabric, mouthing at Ilya’s cock. Ilya keeps his hand in Shane’s hair as a grounding weight. Shane’s breath is hot and wet, and it feels so fucking good, and in no time, his underwear is soaked.

“You’re drooling,” he observes, struggling to keep his breaths even and unfazed. Shane is flushed, freckles standing in sharp contrast on his skin, and his eyes are half-lidded. Still, there’s a little meanness when he drags his tongue along the length, making sure his bottom teeth scrape.

“You,” slurs Shane, “are the one who likes it.”

And he continues to suck through the cotton, instead of pulling the fabric down. Ilya could scream.

“I do like it,” he says, casual, if a little hoarse. “Some of my favourite memories are of him sucking me and drooling like a dog about it. Do I make him hungry, still?”

When Shane doesn’t answer, lost in the momentum of suckling at the tip through the fabric, Ilya pulls his head back by his hair again.

“I asked you a question.”

Shane flushes, somehow, even redder.

“You mean,” he mumbles, “do I want to fucking devour you the way you want to devour him?” Pushing against Ilya’s hand, he returns to his ministrations, this time ducking further, tonguing at Ilya’s balls—

“Yes.”

Shane’s mouth is a lurid smear when he surfaces again, brought out by another tug of his hair.

“I would’ve thought that was obvious.” This time, when he tries to lean forward again, Ilya resists.

“Eight years I have wanted his mouth on me again.” Hysteria begins to bubble beneath the surface of his skin, making him feel even warmer, the sensation prickling down his entire nervous system. “What makes you think you deserve it?”

Shane’s upper lip curls into a sneer, real and heated and cruel. 

“He’s me.”

When he shoves forward once more, Ilya doesn’t stop him; he instead uses his free hand to help pull his boxers down when Shane snags his teeth in the waistband and tugs. With Ilya’s cock freed from its confines, Shane wastes no time and takes him into his mouth like he’s parched, starving. Devouring.

Ilya’s eyes slip closed against his will. He fights to keep them open, to stare at the way Shane gags on his cock, hands behind his back, humping the air in time with the messy bobs of his head, as though he can imagine a friction that will satisfy him. His tongue is slick and loud and everywhere, down his length, rolling his balls, in his slit, and it’s all so, so wet.

“I’m going to come down your throat,” he warns, though it registers as a desperate whine. “Use your fingers, show me your number.”

Behind his back, Shane’s fingers spasm where they’re clutched together, before he holds out three.

“Fuck.”

Ilya comes so hard, his vision whites out. He can feel Shane swallowing around him, sucking him dry, keeping him encased in heat. His sweaty skin sticks to the wall.

Gently, when he recovers fine motor control, he tugs on Shane’s hair again. 

“Get on the bed,” he pets at Shane’s scalp now, soothing. “On your back. Let me take care of you.”

It takes another minute, but Shane eventually crawls up onto the bed, mouth a mess and boxers soaked with precum. Ilya slips them off with some murmured encouragements, then spreads Shane’s thighs open, adjusting them to his aesthetic liking: wide, careful with the bad knee, showcasing how swollen Shane’s balls are, and how his cock lolls against his stomach, smearing wetness.

“Stay,” he orders, pressing a kiss to the head. When Shane moans his acknowledgement—fevered, impatient—Ilya crawls off the bed to get the lube out of Shane’s bag. Naturally, of course, it’s in the side pocket but tucked in the corner, because some things never change.

Returning to the bed, Ilya collapses between Shane’s legs and maps a trail of kisses down his thighs. He’s wanted this for so fucking long, he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

“I’m going to eat your pussy now,” he announces, patting blindly for the lube he only just got out. When his fingers close around it, he continues: “Number?”

“Ngh,” Shane’s thigh muscles shake visibly with the effort of not closing them around Ilya’s head. “Two. Not—just don’t go too fast.”

“Okay,” he agrees easily, bending to suck Shane’s balls into his mouth. He can do slow. He can do this all fucking night and never get tired. Not when Shane makes noises like he’s never heard of discretion, not when he’s clutching at the pillow beneath his head like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to reality. 

Ilya starts with kitten licks, and it’s not too long before he has Shane’s legs hooked over his shoulders as he tongue-fucks the rim.

“God,” Shane gasps. Only the whites of his eyes are showing, and his mouth is slack, breathing noisily. “Oh my God.”

Taking it as a compliment, Ilya pulls away slightly and surges up to swallow Shane’s cock, relishing as it bumps into the soft palate at the back of his mouth. He bobs once, twice, then pulls off before Shane can do anything more than squirm.

“Fucker,” he curses, “you selfish piece of shit.”

It’s music to Ilya’s ears.

“Can you take my fingers?” He wants to know, turning to suck a bruise into the softness of Shane’s inner thigh. 

“Yes, three,” comes the response, which is so excellent for Ilya. “Three, before I break your neck, Jesus Christ.”

He laughs as he untangles himself from Shane’s legs and gets his knees under him. Unclenching his hand from around the lube, he manages to pop the bottle open and drizzle the liquid over his fingers. It’s suitably lukewarm instead of freezing.

Then, because Shane is staring at him with an expression he’s never catalogued before, he climbs up the bed to kiss it off his face. He’s greedy with it while he reaches down and slips a finger inside. And Shane—

Shane opens up so fucking beautifully for him, mouth pressing against his, hips angling upwards so Ilya can slide in further, so he can work him open to take two fingers, so he can reach the spot that makes Shane tremble. With the heel of his palm, he puts pressure on the base of Shane’s aching cock, giving him something to grind against.

At some point, Shane’s mouth goes slack again, and it’s just Ilya stealing kisses from his lips. That’s fine; he’ll be a thief, the Eames to Shane’s Arthur. Taking time and affection from a man who’s his husband in body but not in mind, not entirely.

With a sharp cry, Shane comes all over his stomach. Ilya looks down to see it spurt from his twitching cock, and the sight makes him want to get hard all over again. But he’s not as young as he used to be; his own cock stays limp against his thigh.

Slowly, carefully, mindfully, Ilya drags his hand away. Shane tightens around his first knuckle, just before he makes it out entirely, and he ducks to capture Shane’s lips between his own. A wretched sort of want bursts through his chest cavity.

“Wow,” says Shane, not too long after. He sounds dazed. “I don’t think I can move.”

And Ilya—laughs. Laughs, and laughs, relieved, knowing that this must be real. His love has the energy of a supernova, unfathomable. It carries him up and off the bed into the washroom, where he runs warm water over a small towel. When he returns, Shane hasn’t shifted anything except his head, and only, apparently, has done so to regard Ilya with a blank expression.

Ignoring it, Ilya applies the washcloth to Shane’s skin. Much as he adores sex itself, this is something he came to appreciate headily with Shane: the raw and stinging vulnerability of allowing somebody to take care of you.

“You’re not a sick freak,” Shane mumbles, barely audible. “You’re just fuckin’ bossy.”

Ilya takes his time cleaning between Shane’s legs. 

“If I want to melt into you, crawl inside your veins and collapse us together,” he says, calmly, “so that you will never be anything that isn’t me or made by me, that is a sick fuck.”

Shane’s nose crinkles. If it just so happens that his intensely thoughtful face makes him look mildly constipated, Ilya loves him all the more for it.

“It depends, though.” Shane rolls onto his side with a grunt, then reaches out to tug Ilya back down to the bed by the bicep. Ilya, for his part, complies by sitting on the edge, and lets the towel fall to the floor. “If I’m still me, and you’re still you, at the end of it all.” 

Ilya doesn’t know how to answer. 

Then, Shane nods once, sharply, as though he’s made up his mind.

“Tell me about our sex life,” he demands. “Was it always—a domination thing?”

This startles Ilya into another bout of laughter, though far more subdued. Distantly, he notes that he’s fucking dying for a cigarette.

“You don’t remember?”

Shane’s expression shifts slightly, like a flicker, a change of the light.

“Tell me anyway.”

So Ilya tells him anyway.

“Not always,” he starts. Tentatively, he brushes Shane’s bangs out of his face. Then keeps his hand there, slowly combing Shane’s hair back. “But often. We both had particular tastes. I think it was the hockey. You liked being slapped around. I liked slapping you around.”

Shane brings a fist to his mouth, but nothing can hide the rising blush in his perfect cheeks.

“You liked being used,” continues Ilya, “and I was happy to use you. You had this—fantasy, I think, that you really enjoyed, and we’d roleplay it sometimes. Where I’d take you without your say so.”

“Fantasy?” 

“I think that’s the word, yes.”

The squeak that Shane lets out behind his fingers is embarrassingly cute. Ilya would almost feel bad, but for the flush in his own face that is absolutely from their previous exertion, and not the act of telling his husband he likes it rough.

“God,” mutters the other man, “I sound like a porn addict.”

Ilya hums in disagreement. “I think it was more a matter of trust.”

This time, when Shane reaches again, Ilya lies down beside him and tangles their legs together, pulling him into his arms.

“As part of our vows, you know.” Idly, he thumbs over Shane’s hip. “I promised to love you forever.”

Shane cups Ilya’s jaw in his palm, and Ilya turns to kiss his wrist, feel that pulse point fluttering beneath his skin. When they make eye contact again, Shane’s expression crumples.

“Now tell me our story,” he whispers. “Tell me like it’s—scar tissue.”

“Our story?” Ilya brings his hand up from Shane’s waist to his face, slowly tracing the constellation of freckles down his nose. “Our story is an open cut. Necrotic. Liable to kill.”

Shane’s puff of laughter cuts through the tension, and he smiles at Ilya, eyes wet. “We’re still alive. So tell me.”

Ilya kisses him first. The angle is awkward, but it’s sweet and chaste and everything their first encounters weren’t.

“I met you in Saskatchewan, and yes, I know the song by Les Trois Accords,” he says.

The first thing you said to me was to stop smoking. And you introduced yourself like we hadn’t watched each other on the ice, right before our game. But that’s all I needed to know about you. I didn’t particularly want or need your kindness. You were so confident—

“No,” Shane interrupts. “Tell me our story.”

He is so beautiful like this, with his strange long hair and his constant air of mystery, like he’s a puzzle Ilya will never be able to piece together. The Shane in his memories didn’t know how to tell a lie, and became flustered when things in his life spun out of reach. The Shane in his memories is a warped thing, a gradient of the objective truth. 

“At the top of Mont Royal,” Ilya starts once more:

At the top of the mountain, the sky is the most vibrant blue there is. I met you there the day after a game, once. We raced up wooden steps like children. You were the city personified, and I’d fallen in love with you, and with your cracked sidewalks, and with your blooming summers.  

I think you loved me back. My meanstreak, my big mouth. I was a spider lily in the night, littered over gravestones, and you were the sunrise. I’d look up and see all your wishes as airplanes in the sky. 

In the dark, we’d drift apart, and in the morning, I’d reach for your light. We’d bracket our secrets in the space between us, flower to the sun. My genesis, my love.

Then one day, the sun forgot to rise again. The moon lingered, uncertain, as did the stars, who teetered on the edge of the horizon. It must have been an accident; only, the sun never got out of bed. 

Wake up and come home, said the stars. Come home so the flowers can have colour again. 

They get dressed and take an evening stroll along the boardwalk, listening as water laps quietly against the rocks. Sydney is even smaller than Halifax, and if Shane wasn’t a steady presence beside him, Ilya would be bored to fucking tears.

He smokes as he walks, ignoring the pointed looks of disapproval leveled his way by Shane. When they come to the edge of the small trail, they turn to retrace their steps.

“I know you want me to come back,” Shane eventually sighs. He kicks at a pebble, and they both watch it roll away. “It’s not really my parents, or anything, either. I just—!”

For the first time since they reunited, Shane is full of unbridled and directionless fury. He shouts once, loud, wordless, hands tucked in the pockets of his old man coat. He kicks at nothing, at imagined stones on the ground, as though clearing them from his path will open the doors of opportunity again. Like they haven’t been open the whole time.

Ilya takes another drag and watches. If he moves into Shane’s space, he suspects he’ll get his fake teeth knocked out for his efforts.

“I can’t go forward,” comes the bitter snarl. Shane is talking to the water. “I can’t take it all back. I loop the same day over, and over, and everything still keeps fucking changing.”

Oh, but that’s something Ilya is intimately familiar with.

“What is the point,” he asks, and doesn’t mean to sound as cold as he does, but he observes the way Shane tenses up anyway, gearing for a fight. “What is the point of keeping things the same?”

When the other man doesn’t respond, Ilya tries his luck and steps closer. 

“You want to cede control?” Shane’s jaw clenches at his approach. “I will take control. You want to come back, I will move the world. You want to be on your own, then любовь моя, I will leave you be, but I will not let you go easily.”

“Would you hate me if I chose the last?”

Ilya doesn’t even hesitate. “Yes.”

Then, at the gutpunched look on Shane’s face, he softens his tone.

“But I could not hate you as much as you would hate yourself.”

“Fuck,” Shane mutters, stepping to the side and continuing along the walkway. Ilya trails along, as always, a dog back on its leash. “Fuck!”

Around them, the night is calm and unsurprisingly empty, with more sane people having stayed indoors, likely meeting with friends or enjoying their family obligations for the holidays. If he thinks back far enough, he’ll remember all the Christmas holidays from his childhood, instead of the self-pitying and alcohol-laden hibernation he’s endured the last decade. Every year seemed to pass by faster than the last, all the time blurring together until he was suddenly older and wearier. He wonders if it’d been the same for Shane, or if he’d played his role as Arthur Park only too well.

“All right.” Suddenly, Shane whirls around, stopping Ilya with a finger over his sternum. “If I asked you to stay here, would you?”

“In Sydney,” he stalls, glib.

Shane doesn’t let him look away. “In Halifax. Just you and me. You could leave everything else behind.”

Gently, Ilya takes Shane’s hand, prying the accusing digit from his chest and twining their fingers together. When he was younger and more impulsive, he might have leapt into an emphatic yes, and burned every bridge behind him. The circumstances around their engagement and marriage are proof enough of that.

He’s lived on the other side of a disappearance, though. He’s experienced firsthand the kind of hurricane that happens, the way people’s roots threaten to surrender to the wind and rain. Twice, he’s known the devastation, and only once has he ever had the chance for closure.

The truth is: if he could remain Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander’s husband, he would. 

But that’s not what Shane is asking.

“I told you once,” Ilya reminds him, “that my mother would have loved you the way I love you.”

Shane’s mouth twists.

“What I never told you,” he continues, and all the world is a muted, underwater scene, “is that my brother found me first, because his bedroom was beside hers. 

“I had been screaming, he later told me; screaming like I had seen the abyss. So I said to him, ‘Andrei, I have. It is at the bottom of an empty bottle of codeine.’ And the abyss has seen me all this time since.”

“Why—?”

“You are Shane Hollander,” Ilya squeezes his hand tighter, “and you are still on the other side of that bottle.”

Shock etches itself into Shane’s features, uncertain and so beloved it makes Ilya sick. 

Gesturing with his free hand, the one holding his half-burned cigarette, he waves smoke in the air and breathes it in tandem with the sea breeze. “This is sand. Limbo.”

“Stasis,” tries Shane, weakly. He looks everywhere but Ilya’s face, but he holds onto his hand like a lifeline.

It’s barely 9 PM, but Ilya will be chasing sleep for the rest of his life, and he’s so fucking tired of the cold, he’ll take an anonymous hotel room over it. Miraculously, deliriously—and proving Svetlana right, that vacations do, somehow, help—he also wants to go home. 

He wants to return to their shitty Montreal apartment that they lived in together for a year, that he kept as a living tomb, and he wants to open the door to their old bedroom and do laundry. He wants to dust the shelves and find a place for The Great Gatsby. He wants to open their million windows to let the air in. He’s in Sydney fucking Cape Breton, Nova fucking Scotia, realizing that the home he’d been chasing obsessively was with him all along. 

“Tomorrow,” he announces, leaving no room for argument, “we are going to sightsee as planned. Think on this, and we will talk on the drive back to Halifax.”

Shane still won’t meet his eyes, but he manages a small smile nonetheless. “Yes, sir.”

In the morning, as the sun starts to shine through the blinds, Ilya makes good on his promise to fuck Shane through the mattress. Shane clutches at his shoulders, his ribs, ankles locked behind Ilya’s back, and when he comes, it’s with a sob. Ilya follows not long after, pressing in as deep as he can, possessive. 

They grab a light breakfast before they check out, and they hit the road early, heading for gas, then the Cabot Trail. It’s probably suicidal considering the wet weather conditions, but God, the view is incomparable. Thin mist blankets the ocean and the woods, revealing the sights ever so gradually. 

“Like Silent Hill,” Shane grumbles at the wheel, but Ilya doesn’t listen. Near the Cape Smokey Trailhead, sweating into the Rivière-du-loup hoodie and looking high out over the Atlantic, he stands unsteadily atop the hood of the Camry. Sunbeams break through the clouds, making the remaining snow around them glitter. When winter settles, the days will be endless night, but for now, he is on the edge of the new year, painted golden, and he is a new goddamn person.

“MERRY FUCKING CHRISTMAS!” He shouts at the top of his lungs, then lets out a carefree whoop. He listens as the sound carries down the valley, and imagines it gets absorbed in the water below. From there, it’ll dissolve and disseminate, keeping imprints of his existence in it for all of time to come.

“You’re fucking nuts,” Shane calls from beside him. He’s safely on the ground, and his camera is out.

Ilya tsks. “No pictures! You burn this in your memory, right now.”

Shane falters, lowering the camera from his face. “I could forget again.”

Which is patently ridiculous. Even when he forgot everything, he still remembered the shape of Ilya beside him, all the pieces of his life forming an outline around his absence. Ilya points at him.

“Then take a photo with your brain. We will always have been here.” 

Success: Shane lets the camera rest against his stomach, one hand holding it steady, and the other hand on his hip, exasperated. 

Ilya feels like a strong wind could knock him off the car, and he’d go flying for real; spread his wings, allow the vagaries of life to take him to new places so that he can play the hand he’s been dealt and win, and win, and win. Turning to the water, he spreads his arms and shouts again:

“And a HAPPY FUCKING NEW YEAR!”

They stop in Grand Étang for food at the only co-op in the plain, and they eat another late lunch of protein bars and dry, pre-made sandwiches in the backseat of the Camry. Just for a change. And to avoid les suêtes. Ilya scarfs everything down, while Shane takes it at a more modest pace, looking thoughtful. 

“I just remembered,” he says, and Ilya’s heart stops momentarily, “a song from when I was a kid.”

“Excellent,” Ilya comments, wiping his hands on his pants, and he means it. Any recovery is good. “So I will have a meal and a show.”

“Asshole,” comes the rejoinder. Then, because he’s also fucking lost it, he half-sings, half recites: “Louis la grenouille est dans l’étang.”

It’s not unlike watching a train get derailed. Ilya is so horribly endeared.

“Saute, saute,” Shane closes his eyes, a smile threatening to break out, “tout le temps.” The smile wins out.

“So you remember your French,” concludes Ilya. He’s curious, because it only came up once, and God knows there’s been other and more pressing things he’s wanted answers to. “Do you remember your Russian?”

Unfortunately, it’s clearly the wrong thing to say. Shane’s expression shutters, and he looks down at his lap. But Ilya wouldn’t be himself if he didn’t know when to push.

“This is a yes?”

“I only know one phrase.”

Before he disappeared, Shane had been able to carry basic conversations, and could comprehend far more than he let on. 

“Скажи мне.” Tell me.

“Я тебя люблю.” 

The words aren’t as certain as they once were, but they’re coming out of his mouth. They haven’t been spoken to Ilya in. Fuck. Too long. He bridges the gap between them before Shane can say anything else, grabbing his chin roughly and pushing their mouths together. Crumbs fall onto the upholstery.

Shane acquiesces so easily, immediately melting into the kiss. There, in the back of a sedan in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, Cape Breton, they make out like teenagers; panting, messy. Ilya is just about to reach for Shane’s fly when—

“Stay with me,” whispers Shane, pulling back for air before leaning in again, murmuring against Ilya’s lips. “Please stay. Don’t make me beg.”

And, God, for a moment, Ilya will indulge, because it breaks his heart when Shane pleads for things that can’t happen. He locks their lips together again, places a steadying hand on the back of the seat and uses the other to anchor himself to Shane’s thigh, suddenly aching with it.

“We’d stay in a new place,” Shane keeps fucking babbling, muffled. “Not in Bedford. Maybe West Petpeswick, with a huge fucking mansion on the water.”

“A mansion?” Ilya kisses his nose, his dimples, his freckles. Every single freckle, if he could.

“Or a small house in Lunenberg,” is the breathless response. “We could paint it all the colours of the rainbow and get fat on lobster in the summer.”

Ilya rests his forehead against Shane’s shoulder. He frees his arms from their awkward angles and pulls Shane closer, until they’re both a heap of limbs spilling over the middle seat.

“What would my name be?” It’s a courtesy more than anything, just to confirm that his suspicions are right.

Shane’s subsequent bark of amusement is only outweighed by his audible misery. 

“Whatever you like, любимый,” he sighs. “You can keep ‘Ilya,’ if you wouldn’t be happy with anything else. People see what they want to see.” 

Ilya, but not Rozanov. Ilya, but not Stanley Cup champion, hockey legend. Ilya, but not Ilya fucking Rozanov. The gradations of his character are multitudinous. To strip it all away for Shane would be inimical to everything he’s ever worked for or accomplished in his life for himself. He thinks of the Halifax waterfront, and of the trees in Point Pleasant Park.

He’s greedy, yes. He wants it all—but not enough to leave his own corpse behind, still warm. 

“I will not be so selfish,” says Ilya, “as to tell you what I want again, because Shane, if you come back only to abandon me a second time, I will never fucking forgive you.”

Bright lights, loud cheering, mostly forgotten between the two of them.

“Oh,” Shane turns his head, his mouth at Ilya’s temple. “Oh, Ilya.”

“If you want to come back, I need you to want to stay.” Ilya sits up straight, and grabs Shane’s face so that he can’t avert his eyes.

“And if I don't come back at all?” The question is soft, dangerous. Fuck, Hollander.

“Then I’ll live without you, one way or another.” Even as Ilya says it, and even as the mere idea has him recoiling internally, giving him a brief flash of vertigo, he knows it to be true. He existed before Shane, he has existed since Shane left, and as the sun rises over the next morning, and the next, he will still persist, until such a time as his heart stops beating. “I don't want to, but I will.”

Shane’s mouth shuts with an audible click. It would just be—too easy, Ilya thinks. To stay in this province forever and become another lost soul. To take on a new identity, go to the grocery store every weekend, and hold Shane at night again. To loop each day and live the lie that the world never needs to change, and wait for all the people they once knew to forget that they ever existed. It would be the hardest thing he’d ever put himself through, worse than living in the closet.

In silent agreement, they detangle themselves and step out into the wind again. Ilya takes the driver’s seat.

Shane inserts disc 08 to start the ride back. It’s moody but inoffensive bedroom pop, and listening the whole way through gets them almost out of Cape Breton. Ilya stays silent as Shane switches to disc 07, and familiar piano filters through the speakers.

Around Antigonish again, they stop to top up the gas and stretch their legs. Ilya wanders into the Esso bathroom to piss, and when he comes out, he sees Shane peering at a shelf of books.

“Hold my coat?” Shane asks, looking like he’s already dreading the inside of the facility. It hadn’t been too terrible, admittedly, but he shrugs and takes the article anyway. 

The shelf is full of bargain books, some obviously better cared for than others. He skims the spines: romance book, romance, comic, mystery, thriller, comic, romance, mystery—and blinks at the title wedged between Dan Brown and Spiderman. Strangers, by Taichi Yamada. When he pulls it out, he finds that the front cover has been ripped off, and the back is attached to the spine with scotch tape. The sticker on the first page says $2.

Ilya may not believe in real ghosts, but he seems drawn to them at every turn. Entropy, perhaps, or maybe it’s his mother talking to him. Whatever it is, when he gets back to Montreal, he is going to read again, and write again, and maybe someday, tell his own story. 

The strength of his own conviction surprises him. But he’s been surrounded by books this whole trip, and there’s a restless itch beneath his skin to capture the portrait of his life before it slips away, half competitive urge and half need. Like Shane’s pictures, maybe.  

“You gonna get that?” Shane’s voice is suddenly in his ear, laced with mild amusement, and Ilya jerks in place at the surprise. For a brief second, he’d thought—but no—

“Yes,” he exhales, turning to face him with the book clutched in his free hand. “Why not? Looks interesting.”

Shane gives him an odd look, but ultimately shrugs and takes his coat back. Ilya glances down at the book again. Then, with renewed determination, takes off for the till. After handing over a toonie, he and Shane walk back to the Camry, mildly more prepared to tackle the last leg. 

It’s when they’re on the road again and 06 is playing quietly that Shane asks another question:

“Would you come and visit me?”

Ilya doesn’t startle, but he tightens his grip on the steering wheel as he considers it. Could they do that? Occasional flights? It reminds him a little too much of being in his mid-twenties, and the secret back-and-forth he’d had to endure in Ottawa. He swore he’d never do that again.

“Who would I visit,” he asks in return, knowing it’s cruel, but unable to stop his scars from showing. “Arthur, or Shane?”

When he glances over, Shane’s expression is a blank canvas staring out at the road. No solution is forthcoming, and Ilya turns his attention back to driving.

Garde ton armure pour veiller tard, sings the speakers in the car. Tes faiblesses cachées dans tes histoires. 

“I just need to think, okay?” Shane’s head hits the window with a quiet thump. “I’m sorry. I just need to think.”

If anything, Ilya believes he could benefit from less thinking. He knows better than to say so.

When 06 finishes, they spend the rest of the drive listening to the radio. Or, more accurately, Ilya hits the FM button and listens while Shane manages to drift off. With the quiet roads ahead of them, he can almost believe he’s alone again; just his mother and his thoughts for company.

As they roll to a stop in front of Shane’s driveway, the sun is setting, casting the front yard in twilight hues. 

Ilya switches the engine off. The car plunges into silence, no longer mindlessly filled with radio chatter.

“You’re leaving tomorrow, right?” 

In the almost-darkness, it feels as though they can whisper their most terrible truths, and have them dissipate in the transience. 

Here’s one: “I think it’s time to go.”

He doesn’t need to; he could extend his stay, and maybe even crash in Shane’s place, now that they’ve slept together again. But Elijah’s voice echoes like a mirror in his mind, and he knows he’ll sink if he stays. This city is a tar pit, indeed.

“If it’s the last time I see you,” says Shane, turning in his seat. “I want you to know that—I do remember your vows, and our wedding, and it was the best day of my life, second only to every following day I spent married to you.”

Dumbfounded, Ilya gapes at him. Shane is shaking, his lower lip trembling, suddenly on the verge of tears. But he’s also visibly reining himself in, and Ilya can see exactly where the cracks have torn him open. Where he’s trying to stay strong.

“Oh,” he exhales, and then he’s unbuckling himself and reaching, reaching, cursing the centre console for keeping them separated. Shane releases a shuddering breath into Ilya’s throat. His pulse skips fast. 

“I love you,” Shane chokes out. It’s a harsh and raspy thing. “Я тебя люблю. God, I don’t want to cry.”

Ilya doesn’t know how long they spend holding each other; he only rubs circles between Shane’s shoulderblades, and kisses jet black hair. Nearly fifty, and still, he feels everything in this world as strongly as he did when he was twelve. He never wants to let Shane go. He must do so, even if he needs to drag himself away kicking and screaming. 

With a light tug to the back of Shane’s head, they’re kissing, wet and salty but perfect. It's absolution and apology all at once. And Ilya does forgive him, of course he does. How could he not?

“I love you,” he repeats again and again, helpless, thumbing Shane’s tears away and cradling his beloved face. This beloved stranger, one who may elude him for as long as he lives, even as the heat of his skin warms the pads of Ilya’s fingers. If this is the last time they see each other, that’s the main thing he wants Shane to take with him. That, and:

“Shane,” he pulls away, only slightly, only to tip their foreheads together. “You’re still the bravest man I know.” 

Because it’s cowardice not to come back, but carving a new life for yourself takes bravery too. Living every day, even as a ghost, takes bravery. It takes bravery to keep breathing.

When Shane kisses him once more, he knows it’s the last time. He makes it count.

Ilya doesn’t wait to see if Shane safely makes it to his front door. Once the trunk is shut, he shifts the car to drive and tears out of the street, unable to bear the burning maelstrom in his chest, the swooping of his stomach.

By the time he makes it to the Bedford highway, he realizes—with a renewed sense of nausea—that he doesn’t even need the GPS to take him back to the city.

Spring Garden Inn Bed and Breakfast stands as weathered and sturdy as ever when he turns into the side street and reclaims his parking space. Above him, the night sky is only dotted with a few clouds, revealing the faint smattering of stars above. Somehow, the light hasn’t yet completely polluted the view.

He grabs his bag from the trunk and locks the car, then belatedly remembers the book in the centre console. It feels wrong to leave it to the elements; besides which, he finished The Great Gatsby before he left. With a groan, he unlocks the car and grabs the novel, then locks it once more.

After schlepping it up the steps, he enters to a chorus of now-familiar creaks and makes his way to the kitchen. His skin feels paper-dry and disgusting. If he sleeps tonight, it’ll be a miracle.

“Michael?”

And, oh. Mrs. Kerrigan is there, silver hair askew, wrapped in a large, knit cardigan. She sits at the corner of the main dining table with her thin hands clutching a cooling cup of tea. Her gaze is far away and distracted, and fixed unsteadily on the wall of photos.

Don’t feed into her delusions. Just wait until she comes back, says the memory of Elijah’s warnings. 

“Just Ilya,” he murmurs, carefully moving to the head of the table beside her and taking a seat. He leaves the book on the table and his bag on the floor. God, but she’s shaking all over, tremors rippling in the undoubtedly cold liquid between her palms. Would his mother have done the same, if their places were reversed? He wants to take care of her, he wants to reach into her head and extricate the fog from her wisdom. “Mrs. Kerrigan, are you alright?”

“Michael,” and she sounds mildly distressed, or maybe admonishing. She doesn’t look at him. “You need to wash the coffee. People will get sick.”

His father would say similar things, but never with an undercurrent of fondness. A cold dread prickles down Ilya’s spine as he fishes for something to say that won’t hurt her. Was this what it was like for Andrei, when he could be bothered to deal with their deteriorating family? Ilya had only demanded that care be provided, never going out of his way to check. Andrei could have blown all the money up his nose, could have abandoned Grigori and their stepmother to an empty home, dragging their feet inside concrete cages.

“Irene,” he tries, a little hysterical and too emotionally exhausted, “would you like a new cup of tea?” 

“Tea,” she mutters. Her eyes are glazed over now. “Tea, yes, for your wedding guests?”

She’s like a satellite knocked out of orbit, adrift. His mother would be the same way sometimes, unmoored and so deeply troubled and so unable to hide it from her child. If Ilya picks through the fragments of memories, upturns them enough, he might discover some yet-unseen truth that can help him now.

“Tea for you.” Hesitantly, and with Elijah’s absence glaring at him, he touches the back of her hand. Where he’d expected her to be freezing, her skin is only cool beneath his fingertips. He peers at the contents of her mug: decaf Earl Grey, Twinings. Mildly disgusting, but Elijah must have been the one to prepare it, just as he must have been the one to sit her down comfortably and leave her to her thoughts.

A frown pulls at her face.

“I don’t need,” she trails off, and when she blinks, there’s a glimmer of confusion. Her gaze flits down to the cup, and then up again, and then—

“Oh!”

Lucidity, wondrous and relieving, returns to her corporal form. Animated once more, she smiles at him.

“Hi, Mrs. Kerrigan,” he greets, and tucks his hands between his thighs so he doesn’t do something uncalled for and invasive, like hug her. 

“Mr. Rozanov,” she returns. “How are you? Did you just get back from Cape Breton?”

He sucks in a breath, holds it for a second, and releases it. It’s hard to believe he was there this morning, elated, immortalizing himself in the waves.

“Yes,” he relaxes slightly. “It was beautiful.” That much is genuine, at least.

“I’m glad you liked it,” she says. “We’ve got some family there, but haven’t been in a while. Hard to keep in touch, you know.”

Isn’t that how it always is. Before he can voice the thought, he looks at her hands again and stands instead. 

“Let me get you another cup,” he murmurs, taking the cold mug when she releases her grip on it. 

The Inn has hot water from a fancy-looking machine that hums in the corner of the kitchen. He dumps out the existing contents of the mug in the sink, tosses the tea bag in the garbage bin beneath it, and rummages in the cupboards for another bag of Earl Grey. He takes two out of a little box and finds his own mug from the other day back on a shelf with the rest. Its upside-down hockey stick handle is cold when he grasps it.

He pours Mrs. Kerrigan a cup first, then makes one for himself. 

“Thank you, darlin’,” she sighs, and nods at the book beside him. “New read? That’s not one of mine.”

In the upset, he’d almost forgotten it was there.

“Strangers.” He slides it closer to her so she can read the stained and stickered first page. A thought strikes him.

“Mrs. Kerrigan,” Ilya wants to know, looking down at his mug and the steam wafting gently from it, “why did you give me a copy of The Great Gatsby?”

She takes a sip of her own tea and closes her eyes with a contented hum.

“I’ll tell you a story,” she says in lieu of an answer, or maybe it’s part of one. When she sets the cup down again, she wraps her fingers around it. Her expression is inscrutable, but her eyes are shiny. “Let me tell you a story, Mr. Rozanov.”

Ilya hopes his silence is tacit permission enough, because there’s a strange lump building in his throat that won’t go away, no matter how much he swallows. She seems to understand, and after another sip, she tells him her story.

“Back when Elijah was in high school,” she begins—

Back when Elijah Kerrigan was in high school, Irene managed the Atlantica Hotel, a building that stands as something almost anachronistically contemporary at the edge of Quinpool. She had enough money to send him to a private school in the South End, tucked across from Saint Mary’s and right off of Inglis Street, and because education was more important than anything for her, he attended from grades ten to twelve. Senior School, they called it; not high school. Potato, potato.

She’d liked the school over the other private schools in the city because all the children from kindergarten to Grade 12 were in one place, and the sense of community was palpable. They’d recently undergone a large renovation, adding a massive extension to their Middle School campus; so, instead of being split between two buildings a block away from one another, they’d united into a singular, beautiful thing.

One Spring evening, when she’d made her way to the front loop to pick him up after Debate Club ran late, she saw a young woman standing at the old doors. The main entrance had since been moved to the renovated section, and they kept the old one locked permanently.

Nobody was around in that late, late afternoon, save for a few people kicking a soccer ball around the basketball court. Elijah had let her know that he’d be another fifteen minutes, so she’d settled down to wait.

Only, of course, she’d watched as the young woman sat on the old steps, as though a great burden had been placed on her, and she’d witnessed her youthful face crumpled into despair. She’d felt with all her heart when the woman began to cry.

It wasn’t a considered decision; one moment, Irene was in her car, and the next, she was crouched next to the stranger, holding out the half-full pack of Scotties she kept on the dash.

The woman had startled, face wet and eyes wide. Curly baby hairs, which otherwise would have framed her pale face, stuck to her cheeks instead. She’d stammered out a thank you. She’d laughed nervously and dabbed the tears away. But it was clear they wouldn’t stop coming, and soon, her features had twisted again.

“Are you a student here?” Irene had asked politely, but it was Uniform Day—every second Wednesday—and seeing as the woman wasn’t in uniform or visibly high-school-aged, well. She could connect the dots.

“I used to be,” the woman confirmed. She’d recently graduated from university, and she was visiting friends who still lived in the city, and she’d thought to see the old haunt again. Her name was Beverly; her old classmates called her Ben. She hadn’t known about the renovations. Irene, for her part, had introduced herself as Elijah’s grandmother.

Let’s go for a walk, she had then suggested, because anything must have been better than sitting on cement and crying. The time would pass waiting for her grandson anyway. Show me the school you used to know.

And Beverly had led her to the old campus, which had transformed into a French immersion. While technically private, the gates leading to the back of the property were open. People walked their dogs in the field on weekends, and had been doing so forever.

So they’d walked up the road, passing by the old gym and what used to be the Grade 4 pavilion, and they’d gotten their shoes muddy, walking onto the damp and trampled grass.

Relief at the sight seemed to relax Beverly’s demeanour as they made a wide loop around. Still, she carried herself with the distinct impression of a spooked animal. Her tears had dried. She clutched at the tissues in her fist like a lifeline.

She’d said, “I can’t believe the swings are still here,” and Irene couldn’t believe it either, for it looked as though the wood was rotting, and the chains holding the dark blue seats were stiff with time and rust. She’d said, with no small amount of wobbling in her voice, “Everything else is still here.”

The jungle gym, tilting on its side. The wooden triangle. The worn ropes.

When she was in Prep School, Beverly had explained, the very back of the field used to be a small hill. A U-shape berm they’d called the burm. Many games of capture the flag had been played there, and its brambles and bushes had served as ideal locations for club hideouts and hushed conversations. For stolen kisses and secret sights. For banks of white rocks, which had served as currency to trade imaginary resources.

“The first time I learned what a petition was,” recounted Beverly, “was when the school announced that they were demolishing the burm for safety reasons, because teachers couldn’t see behind the U, and all the kids passed a piece of scrap paper around at recess to sign their names.”

And Irene had imagined it, a horde of small voices wanting to save the space they’d called their own. They hadn’t known what the demolition would bring; they didn’t understand that a child had sliced their arm open on the fence marking the end of the property and nearly bled out before a teacher was found. They weren’t privy to the politics surrounding the lack of supervision. They only knew their own stories.

“Mrs. Kerrigan,” Beverly had confessed. She was crying again in the centre of the field, silhouetted by a sunset sky. “I think I’ve committed the unforgivable sin of self-invention.”

And Irene had understood, just as Ilya understands now. His breath is shallow in his chest as he pictures the scene. Putting all your childhood into an image, an idea, trusting it to stay there while you go out into the world and grow. Coming back only to find it’s disappeared. Kicking every rock over to see if the soil underneath has any familiarity. Chasing it so that it can go back to its place, safe in the hollow of your chest, never to be known again. 

“So you know what I told her,” says Mrs. Kerrigan. “I told her, as I’ll tell you now: Even if nothing else ever stays the same, the past lives on in you. It’s part of you.”

The tea in his hands is lukewarm when he drinks it, but his mouth is dry, and the lump in his throat is a formidable thing. 

No—Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams.

“Mrs. Kerrigan,” says Ilya, voice and heart breaking, “I miss my mother.”

In this liminal space where time has collapsed, in the quiet and old bones of the Spring Garden Inn, Mrs. Kerrigan reaches out to cradle his hands in hers. His vision blurs, and instinctively, he looks up at the ceiling.

“Honey,” she soothes, but the words continue to spill out of him messily, and he’s not sure whether he’s even speaking English.

“I want her to know that I loved her more than anything else. But I’m so—” The air is thin, like he’s high up in the mountains, untethered to the ground, beaten back and forth by the wind. “I’m angry with her, too, because she had someone who needed her, and she left me alone.”

Unbidden, the image of Shane’s smiling face flashes across his mind. Self-invention; the office of the telephone inventor without a telephone. Oh, God.

“And even though I have to,” he chokes, “I’m so tired of leaving the things I love behind.”

Grigori’s ghost sneers at him from beyond the veil, long dealt with and carefully packaged in his mind, but present all the same, at least for this weakness. In some ways, his father was correct: A part of Ilya will always be stuck in his mother’s bedroom, screaming.

Mrs. Kerrigan continues to shush him, and her thumbs are soft where they rub his knuckles. Steady, steady. 

“Ilya,” she says. “I told Beverly one more thing before we parted ways.”

He swallows around nothing. Hot tears continue their path down his face unimpeded, but he manages a quick nod. Collect yourself, man. Fuck.

“I told her, ‘The grief lingers, but it’ll pass by like an old friend in a grocery store.’” 

A wild, broken squawk of laughter escapes Ilya’s lips, its existence unknowable until it reaches his own ears. He musters the courage to meet Mrs. Kerrigan’s gaze again.

“You’ll be okay,” she decides, tapping his hands twice and pulling gently away. Ilya senses the impending close to their conversation, one of their last before he checks out in the morning to make the drive to Quebec.

“Wait, please.” He swipes at his eyes and blinks until the room comes back into focus. “I’m sorry. What became of the girl? Beverly? Do you know?”

Mrs. Kerrigan looks thoughtful for a moment, but of all things, she simply shrugs. 

“When you’ve lived as long as I have,” she smiles, conspiratorially, “you meet so many people, all of whom have their own journeys, and you realize you’re just a blip, most of the time. What do you know, Beverly was a blip in mine.”

Ilya breathes, feeling the torrent of emotions begin to recede into a calm drizzle. Something loosens in his chest. Marie, Henry, Elijah, Mrs. Kerrigan. Alexander Graham Bell. An amnesiac Arthur, who carries the fragments of Shane inside him like an incomplete puzzle. Blips, all.

“But I imagine,” she fiddles absently with the teabag, “she’s moved on in her life, as do we all.”

The next morning, Ilya is predictably zombie-like as he makes a coffee for the road, but there’s also something buzzing under his skin. After tea with Mrs. Kerrigan, he’d ventured out to buy a donair for dinner and ended up sitting at a table by the window of the restaurant with Strangers, devouring both the story and the wrap. 

He’d felt unsettled and exposed when he returned to the Inn, disturbance lingering even through two cigarettes. And, though he’d gotten under the covers early, he’d found himself plagued by a dogged and insistent urge to be introspective—a compulsion that wouldn’t let up until the early hours, by which time he’d fallen into an uneasy sleep.

“Merry Christmas, hon,” says Mrs. Kerrigan behind the desk, chipper while she hands him his printed receipt for the week. 

There’s a long drive ahead of him again, and while he’d contemplated stopping in Montreal for a night first, he’d soon realized that it was already Christmas Eve, and he had an apology to make in person. 

“To you as well,” he swallows, folding the piece of paper and tucking it in his coat pocket. “And, and, Mrs. Kerrigan—”

“Oh, sweetie,” she interrupts, and makes her way around the desk to draw him into a hug. She’s sturdy, and she smells like baked goods, and Ilya hugs her back as tightly as he can without crushing her.

When she pulls back, she pats him on his elbows.

He tries not to feel too pathetic when he swallows around another lump in his throat. “Thank you, Irene.”

“Safe travels, Ilya.” She punctuates the sentiment with another pat.

It feels as though he’s on the road again between one breath and the next, the radio on and the heat blasting. Funny; when he first started the trip, all he’d wanted to do was get the fuck out of Montreal and find somewhere to disappear, and now, all he wants to do is sleep in his own bed again. But even that needs to wait until after Christmas.

While he drives out of the city and makes his way towards the highway, he imagines it all: repurposing the corkboard in his bedroom-cum-office to showcase all the people in his life he’s grown to consider family. Moving back into the bigger bedroom and reorganizing the closet. Cleaning, so much cleaning. Carefully moving Shane’s things to the background instead of the foreground in everything, keeping him in the space as a tribute, and not a haunting.

Calling Svetlana.

Maybe they’ll make a celebration of it; they’ll eat their weight in bagels. They’ll order a bucket of poutine. They’ll storm the Plateau and laugh at all the university students, and they’ll finally talk again. 

All that you love will be carried away, but sometimes, you can take comfort in the reminders. His shoes are still coarse with debris from Martinique Beach. There’s a hoodie in his bag from Rivière-du-loup, two books on the seat beside him, and crumbs from Cape Breton. Like a crashing wave to shore, he embraces it all.

By the time he reaches Ottawa, it’s almost 10 PM, and he’s not even sure if Yuna and David will be awake. They’re frail now, only just younger than Mrs. Kerrigan, but they’d braved the winters missing Shane with quiet dignity, and Ilya had quietly resented them for doing what he couldn’t fathom.

The animosity is gone; there’s only trepidation, as well as the all-consuming need to express his regrets.

“Ilya?” David opens the door. He looks so worn, and so shocked.

“Dave.” Ilya exhales. With his bag over his shoulder, with his increasingly violent tremors, with the sensation of anxiety burning a pit through his core, he feels like a prodigal son awaiting his judgement.

“My God.” David stands aside, beckoning him inside and quickly closing the door to keep out the cold. His bag hits the ground with a soft thump. Then Ilya is being embraced, pulled into David’s arms between heartbeats, and the warmth of it all does wonders to settle him. “My God, we were so worried.”

A small note of confusion breaks through the comfort. Ilya gently extricates himself.

“Worried?” He shakes his head. “No, no, I came to apologize for—everything.” Abandoning them when they needed him to stay strong, eight years ago. Pushing them away, getting drunk at their yearly vigils, making a fucking mess all the time, almost smearing the Irina Foundation’s name. There’s hardly an appropriate place to start.

“Ilya,” repeats David, this time like a prayer. “You weren’t answering your phone, and nobody knew where you’d gone, and we thought.” He grabs for Ilya’s hands, trembling. “God, we thought we lost our other son.”

“David? Who is—?” 

From around the corner, Yuna appears, clearly ready for bed, a soft robe over her patterned pyjamas. She makes an injured noise, something between a wordless exclamation and a relieved sob, and Ilya finds himself squeezed between both Hollanders. 

“Never, never,” she mumbles into his shirt, which is stale with travel and likely ruining her nightly face care. Greedily, Ilya clings to her, and to David, wondering not for the first time how he got so lucky. 

Then Yuna leans back, looking furious.

“You are never allowed to disappear again,” she admonishes, and— 

And Ilya can only watch as she bursts into tears. No, that can’t be right. He immediately hugs her again, shushing gently and rocking in place. 

“I won’t,” he promises, weak with guilt, “I won’t, I’m sorry.”

“Oh my God,” she cries, barely intelligible into his shoulder. “Oh my God, my baby.”

He says it again into her hair, as he imagines he’ll be saying again for quite some time, thinking of the Kerrigans, and the Parks, and his own mother. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

David wraps his arms around the both of them once more, and in the hallway mirror, Ilya sees a portrait of a family: Three Hollanders, united in relief.

David and Yuna insist on waiting until the morning for him to explain why he dropped off the map, so he spends the night in Shane’s childhood-bedroom-turned-guest-room, and falls asleep looking at the poster of his husband beside other images of hockey heroes, junior trophies, and sundry memorabilia. 

They allow him to sleep in, too, though he knows by the way the door’s been left open a crack that they’d checked on him at some point in the night. He brushes his teeth in the washroom across the hall and comes back to find some of his old clothes in the closet: a Boston Bears shirt, neatly folded, and a pair of running shorts. It’s warm in the house, and he doesn’t plan on venturing outside, so he tugs them on.

When he finally makes his way downstairs, there’s dim sum on the table in white styrofoam containers. The plastic bag they were in lies deflated on the kitchen counter. David and Yuna sit with steaming cups of tea in front of them: David with a book, and Yuna with her tablet. 

“Merry Christmas,” he greets, suddenly shy. He doesn’t want to trouble them, but he also doesn’t know if they’re at the point where he can help himself to their food, even though he’s admittedly ravenous.

“Merry Christmas,” says Yuna, in a sing-song sort of way, and David echoes her distractedly. She pauses from her tapping and glances up at him, glasses magnifying her eyes. “What are you doing? Come on, grab a bowl, get some coffee, there’s plenty.”

It must say something that she’d merely sniffed at the Boston shirt instead of giving him shit, but maybe they’re both feeling fragile. Gratefully, he finds his usual bowl from the cabinet—Centaurs-themed—and takes a pair of chopsticks out from the utensil drawer. The coffee in question is instant, which he prepares and takes a sip of gratefully before returning to the table.

There’s a conversation to be had, still, but it doesn’t hang over his head like the Sword of Damocles. Rather, after demolishing the remaining BBQ pork buns and shrimp dumplings, he tells them about Svetlana’s visit.

“And I couldn’t,” he swallows, faltering, then sips his coffee. “I didn’t want to embarrass you anymore after last year, so I left.”

Yuna, who had shifted her undivided attention to him after he started talking, cuts in to protest.

“Ilya,” she says, deadly serious, “we weren’t kidding when we said we love you unconditionally.”

“But I still want to apologize.” He looks at her, at the bags under her eyes and at how thin she’s become, and he knows he’s contributed to her stress. If he could get through a single conversation with his in-laws without bawling like a child, he would very much appreciate it. The inner corners of his eyes are burning already, and his voice is thick when he continues.

“I know I was—” there’s no way to say this “—very difficult, the last several years, and I didn’t take care of you like I should have.”

“Apology accepted,” David says, easily. Just like that.

The gravity of it is so stunning that Ilya drops his chopsticks. They bounce harmlessly off the table, one landing on the edge and one landing on his lap, sending sticky rice flying.

Yuna takes a tissue and picks up the grains while Ilya straightens the chopsticks, mortified.

“You love him so much,” she remarks, voice kind, but no nonsense, still. The dirty tissue finds a temporary home in an empty take-out box. “And you were hurting so badly, and we didn’t know how to help, either.”

“That shouldn’t have been your job—”

“No, let me finish,” she interrupts. “We weren’t perfect. You were all alone in that apartment, Ilya. We all should have been together more. That said.” 

Reaching across the table, she closes her hand over Ilya’s.

“You can’t change the past, okay? We just do better going forward.”

He nods, mutely, not trusting his voice. A whole trip to the Maritimes and countless hours spent on the road, and she sums up everything he’d been struggling to understand. Yuna Hollander, his hero for life.

She pushes the box of siu mai towards him. “Now eat—if you’re here, you’re going to help us clean the house, and you need energy for that.”

The house is, of course, almost scarily neat already. But Ilya picks his chopsticks up again, and it’s the best fucking breakfast he’s had in eight years.

The sun hasn’t quite set when he finishes vacuuming, and it makes the living room take on an indigo and burnt-orange palette when he wanders in, following his nose to the scent of mulled wine and dinner. 

David stands at the stove, an old apron tied low behind his back and his book open, pages-down beside him on the counter while he stirs. Music plays quietly on the portable boombox behind it. With the cover down on the table at breakfast, he hadn’t been able to see—but it’s Klara and the Sun. Kazuo Ishiguro, again.

“Hungry?” asks David, oblivious to Ilya’s curiosity.

“I missed your cooking,” Ilya responds honestly.

At that, David leaves the spoon in the pot and cups Ilya’s face with his hands, bringing him down to place a benedictory kiss on his forehead. They’re still delicate with each other, then.

That’s fine. They’ll move forward together.

When Ilya stands straight again, he nods at the counter. The song, he recognizes from Yuna’s disc collection. When everything’s made to be broken—

“What’s the book about?”

Humming, David peers over the pot and places a cover on top of it. He raises his eyebrows at Ilya.

“You’re really interested?”

Not that Ilya never showed an interest in his reading material before, though he’d mostly always been distracted by other things. Oh, but Ilya can’t wait to show him the books he received. They’ll be boring old men who read the New Yorker together.

“I’ve been reading more,” he confesses. “I want to write one day.”

He receives a bright grin for his efforts. “That’s fantastic to hear.” And then: “It’s about being human, and learning what that means, and finding humanity in yourself.”

Aren’t all books? But, well. Ilya has said that he’s fucking sick of ghost stories.

“Can I borrow it when you’re finished?” He blurts out. 

Before David can answer, the doorbell rings. The older man tilts his head to the side, a mild furrow already pulling at his brow. 

“Expecting guests?” Ilya guesses, but he knows that’s not right; they would have told him. At David’s continued puzzlement, he adds: “I’ll just get it.”

There’s not a long walk from the kitchen to the door, but the path includes a turn around a corner, which is why Ilya is alone and unseen when he freezes.

Standing on the doorstep, wrapped in the same grandpa coat he’d been sporting for the last week and holding an envelope, is Shane Hollander. On the street beyond, past the yard, the taxi he must have arrived in drives off. 

Shane doesn’t—look any different. Still the long hair he wears as Arthur, and the shifting of his weight from side to side. But there’s a determined line on his face that is classically Hollander, and Ilya can’t help the hope that blooms in his chest.

“Hi,” says Shane. He’s not yet loud enough to be heard in the kitchen, especially not under the hum of the fan or the song. 

“Hi,” Ilya parrots. It must have cost a small fortune to fly here on a day’s notice.

A small gust of air hits the both of them. Ilya should invite him inside. Shane should be pushing Ilya aside to come in, seeing as this is his house.

But he squares his shoulders instead like he’s about to win a face-off, bracing against the cold, and maybe a confrontation. He opens the envelope, and from it, fishes out a photo. Ilya takes it when it’s offered, reverently cradling the edges, careful not to touch the ink.

It’s him at the Bell museum, with the plane in the background. He’s framed by it, hands tucked neatly in the pockets of his jacket, and though he’s angled away from the camera, he’s looking over his shoulder. He doesn’t remember smiling, but there it is: the familiar, crooked outline of his own grin. The one reserved for his husband.

“I still don’t remember a lot,” Shane declares, “and I’m never going to be the Shane Hollander you knew again.”

Ilya stares at him uncomprehendingly, holding the print in his hands. Waiting.

“But that’s not an excuse to stay stuck.” Between one blink and the next, Shane worries his bottom lip, nervous. “I thought about it, why I'm here and what I'm doing, and I don’t care if this is a dream. I don’t want to live as me without you.”

The simplicity of the answer is—hysterical, actually.

A disbelieving smile threatens to split Ilya’s face, and the wheezing follows not long after.

God. God, but it’s all so simple.

“You’re laughing at me,” says Shane, plaintively. There’s a twitch at the corner of his mouth. That funny, beautiful, sad mouth.

“You don’t want to,” Ilya catches his breath. Then, as easily as his own apology was accepted: “So don’t.”

Later, at their leisure, they’ll begin to build bridges again with the rest of the world. They’ll start with Yuna and David, and Ilya will attempt to politely stand aside while they reconcile with one another. It’ll be a hopeless endeavour; he’ll be grabbed and included before he can move more than a metre away. They’ll hug, the four of them, and they’ll cry, and they’ll figure out a way to deal with the public fallout. They’ll do it all together.

For now, though, Ilya laughs again as Shane finally pulls him in by the collar for a kiss—all the light of the sun flooding the world with colour once more, but so unremarkable all the same, like sand carried by the sea breeze.