Archive of Our Own

Ilya frowned when he reached across the bed to where Shane should have been, and instead found it empty and cold. He had made a list of plans for his day off with his husband. It was supposed to start with blowing him from under the blankets. That plan was, apparently, already out the window.

He sat up slowly, yawning as he glanced at the alarm clock Shane kept on his nightstand. It was just past eight, so there was still plenty of time to get the morning back on track. Ilya slipped out of bed and headed down stairs in search of his husband.

He found Shane in front of the fridge, half of its contents on the counters, sorting through every item it contained.

“What are you doing?” He asked.

Shane flinched, startled by the sudden sound of Ilya's voice. He settled quickly though, turning his attention back to the food on the counters.

“Cleaning out the fridge. Why do we have three bottles of ketchup in here?”

Ilya blinked. Shane's brows were furrowed in a way that suggested he was very deep in thought about said bottles of ketchup. He’d seen that look before, more times than he could count. Shane had a bad habit of focusing on a task to the point of obsession, and after over a decade together, Ilya knew when to stay out of Shane's way.

Besides, Ilya really shouldn’t have been surprised by the odd behavior. It was his and Shane’s first time going into the playoffs together while on the same team and they both were feeling the pressure. It was no shock that Shane's way of handling it involved finding as much control as possible. In the pre-playoff rush, that meant cleaning every inch of their house.

De-cluttering- Shane had called it when Ilya found him knee-deep in one of the guest room closets an hour later. They didn’t necessarily own a lot of things, Ilya didn’t feel like there was an excess of items in the house. Shane wasn’t even getting rid of much. He mostly just opened up a closet, moved around the items inside, then moved on to the next location. It was when he had reached the primary bedroom closet that he really sank into it.

“You really are going to dig through this one too?” Ilya had asked when Shane began working.

“I’ll leave your stuff alone,” Shane said, waving him off.

Ilya had left it at that, and elected to give his husband space. Everyone deals with stress differently, and Ilya had known Shane for long enough to know getting in the man's way once he had made up his mind was pointless.

So, Ilya gave up on his list of plans and spent his morning with Anya. She was always good company, and their long walk together was his own kind of stress relief. It gave Ilya time to sort through his own feelings about the playoffs. The stress, the pressure, the excitement. He had every intention of leading the Centaurs to a cup that year.

When he returned from walking Anya, he found the house to be quiet. Shane was likely still upstairs. Ilya glanced at the time, a little past noon, which meant Shane had been at it all morning. With a sigh, he headed upstairs to retrieve his husband.

“Shane, do you want lunch?” He asked as he rounded the corner of their bedroom and stepped towards their walk-in closet. “I can make you-”

The sentence died in Ilya's throat as he stepped into the closet and found Shane sitting on the floor with a shoebox in front of him.

The cardboard was weathered. A piece of tape held one of its corners together, and the whole thing had aged into a yellowish hue. Shane was holding the lid in one hand, but Ilya's presence made something snap in him and he quickly placed the lid back onto the box, eyes wide.

“I’m sorry,” Shane said quickly, like a kid getting caught doing something they shouldn’t.

Ilya didn’t need to look inside to know what the shoebox contained. For a brief moment, he considered if this should make him angry; but no, Shane had no idea what was inside, and it wasn’t like Ilya had any intention of hiding it.

“It is okay,” Ilya said with only an ounce of hesitation.

“I wasn’t trying to snoop,” Shane explained.

“You can snoop,” Ilya said slowly, careful to pronounce the last word correctly. He didn’t use it often. “Is not a secret that I have pictures of myself.”

Ilya crossed the space between them, and sat down on the carpet next to Shane. Shane’s frightened expression had gone softer, but he still looked a little sheepish when his eyes lifted to Ilyas.

“I didn’t know you had these,” Shane said.

Ilya reached for the box, and pulled the lid back off. Without looking, he plucked the first picture out and held it in front of both of them to see.

“There is not many,” Illya said as he looked at a picture of himself. Ten years old, captured in mid-stride at the ice rink, oblivious to the camera. “I took what I could find the last time I was in Russia.”

There were precious few photographs left in his fathers home. The first twelve years of Ilya’s life were practically erased from physical memory as if his childhood had vanished along with his mothers life. However, there were a few that he had stolen in those chaotic days following his fathers death. Now, those pictures lived in a shoebox in his closet.

“How old were you there?” Shane asked at his side.

“Ten.”

Shane gently took the picture from Ilya's hands, bringing it close to his face to look at it. “It was still fun for me at that age. Still felt like just a game,” he said softly.

Hockey was always serious for Ilya. Since he was a child, there was always a pressure around him to be good at the sport. In his adulthood, and especially in the last couple years, it had become jarring to realize he was having fun again. He’d forgotten that feeling.

Shane relaxed a little at his side as Ilya reached for another picture. He pulled up one of him and Alexei. He was younger in this one, around five or six years old. He and Alexei were sitting next to each other at the kitchen table. They were…smiling. Not quite posing for the camera, but both laughing, captured in wide-mouthed grins.

“Is that your brother?” Shane asked, leaning into Ilya's shoulder.

“Yes. This was new years I think,” Ilya said, eyeing the decorations in the background of the photo. “This was when we still got along mostly.”

“When did you stop getting along?”

Ilya didn’t need to think about his answer. “When our mother died.”

From the corner of his eye, he could see Shane’s head turn towards him, no doubt trying to read the expression on Ilya's face. Any mention of his mother typically had the same reaction from Shane. Careful observation, and the kind of quiet concern Ilya was still getting used to.

“He got mean after that. I think maybe he was sad, or scared. I was easy target. We fought a lot,” he admitted slowly.

Ilya risked a look to his husband, who was staring him down with intense focus. He did his best to keep his expression soft.

“Did he hurt you?” Shane asked carefully.

Ilya shrugged and looked back at the smiling boys in the picture. “Not badly. I was tough kid.” It was the kind of half-truth he was getting better at getting past.

Ilya spent a lot of time talking about his childhood in therapy. It was getting easier, but easy was pretty subjective when he had spent most of his life trying to forget his childhood completely.

Shane put a hand on Ilya's thigh.“You shouldn’t have had to be.”

“I know.” Ilya looked over at Shane and offered a small smile. “We were closer when we were younger,” he continued. “We played hockey together for little while. Alexei never was much good though.”

“Not compared to you,” Shane said, smiling back a little.

“No,” Ilya agreed. “Not compared to me.”

Shane reached into the box, carefully lifting up another picture.

“You know, I was just thinking about this,” Shane said as he looked at it.

“About what?”

“Old pictures. Remember last Christmas when mom got out the photo albums?”

Ilya remembered that night distinctly. Yuna had two glasses of wine with dinner then insisted on showing Ilya Shane's baby photos. They spent the better part of two hours looking at old pictures. At first, Shane kept trying to shut down the whole operation but eventually he relented, and sat with his mother while they gushed over how cute Shane was as a kid.

“I do not have as many as your mother.”

Maybe he did, once, before his childhood had been erased. He had several memories of his mother with a camera, and was certain there had once been more.

Shane lifted a picture of Ilya as a baby. Ilya had only known it was of himself because of the visible mole on his cheek. He was all of a month old, swaddled in a blanket, and asleep in a bassinet.

“You were so cute,” Shane said, a softness entering his voice that hadn’t been there before.

“I still am cute,” Ilya teased.

“You know what I mean.”

Shane shuffled through the box some more, and lifted out another object.

“Really?” He mumbled as he lifted a pack of cigarettes up.

The label was in Cyrillic, a Russian brand he could never find in Canada. He’d bought the pack the last time he was in Russia, several years ago now.

“For special occasions,” Ilya said with an easy smile.

Shane, predictably, frowned and opened the top of the pack to find one cigarette missing.

“Only one?” He asked, brow raised.

“I smoked that one on our wedding day.”

“Mm, so that’s where you snuck off too,” Shane said, shaking his head in disapproval despite the amused smile on his face. “And what are the rest for?”

“Well, when we win the cup together for starters.”

Shane laughed a little at that and lightly nudged Ilya in the ribs.

Ilya pulled out another photo, and felt his heart stutter as he looked down at it.

“Is that your mom?” Shane asked, quieter now.

Ilya gazed down at the photo of him and his mother. They were actually posing in this one- standing next to each other outside.

“Yes,” Ilya breathed.

Irina was wearing a large coat that covered most of her frame, but her face was clear and in focus. Ilya remembered her as being beautiful. Still, seeing her face was a reminder that Ilya looked like her. They had the same eyes, the same arch of their nose. Most importantly to Ilya, they had the same smile.

“You look like her,” Shane said, echoing Ilya's own silent thoughts.

“I always did.”

“She’s beautiful,” Shane added quietly.

Like most things, he was right.

“She was wonderful,” Ilya added, and set the photograph aside in a safe pile he was forming.

They sat there for a while, looking at photos from Ilya's childhood. An ache sat in his chest the entire time. His childhood hadn't been a very happy one, but there were moments of joy. His family was always complex, but they had still been a family. There was something healing about seeing those brief moments of joy through the pain.

Shane was flipping through more pictures when his hands stilled on something in the shoe box. He lifted it carefully and turned it once in his hands.

Ilya's stomach dropped.

“What’s this?” He asked carefully.

Ilya forced air into his lungs. He could lie. Easily. Shane wouldn’t be able to prove him wrong if he did, but Shane had already seen the tension in Ilya, the sudden pause in his breath.

“A letter,” Ilya said, reaching out to take the envelope from Shane.

“From who?”

“From Mama.”

Shane shifted himself to look over Ilya's shoulder while he pulled the paper from the envelope and unfolded it. It was probably a mistake to do so, but he only realized that once it was already open.

The note was written in Cyrillic. Shane’s Russian was improving a lot, but Ilya doubted he could read anything off the page.

“It’s written for you?” Shane asked.

“For us all. It says that she loves us. That she is sorry.”

“Oh,” Shane whispered as the pieces came together in his own mind.

“My father tried to throw it away but I pulled it out of the trash and kept it. I don’t know why. I guess it felt important to me,” Ilya said, brushing his fingers over the ink before carefully tucking the letter back into its envelope. He wouldn’t read it, and had never really had a desire to re-read his mothers final words.

“I think it’s good that you kept it,” Shane said gently, “All of this, really,” he added, motioning to the box in front of them.

“I did not know how important some pictures could be,” Ilya admitted. “It makes me sad there are not so many of us.”

There were a lot more these days. Since coming out, with no real reason to hide, Ilya had taken every opportunity to take pictures of them together. They lived in a safe folder on his phone, and he frequently backed up the pictures to his laptop. However, there was a long stretch of time that would always be void of physical memory for them. That was something they couldn’t change.

“We have plenty of time to take pictures together,” Shane said at his side.

Ilya turned to look at his husband and couldn’t help but smile. Once again, Shane was right. They had the rest of their lives to collect memories.

***

It was probably stupid to be so nervous about a birthday present, but Shane spent most of the evening thinking about it. He just wasn’t sure how Ilya would react, and that uncertainty was enough to send him spiraling.

It was still a wonderful evening. Shane's parents had come over, with the cake Yuna had insisted on making. Shane made dinner, and Ilya tried to help but mostly just annoyed Shane in the kitchen, which was far more endearing than it had any right to be. Ilya turned into a softer version of himself around Shane's parents. Childish in a way he never really got to be.

Shane waited until his parents left their house to retrieve Ilya's present.

“I told you not to get me anything, Hollander,” Ilya grumbled from the couch, despite the smile on his face as Shane rounded the corner with the gift.

He had wrapped it in the leftover pink and purple paper they had from Jade and Ruby’s birthday a few months ago.

“I know what you said,” Shane said, setting the wrapped present down in front of Ilya.

The large, flat shape made the gift pretty obvious, but Ilya still gave Shane a suspicious look as he tore away the paper.

His hands froze before he fully finished unwrapping it.

“I didn’t actually get you anything,” Shane said. “Unless you count the frame, I guess.”

Ilya stared at the picture frame, and the photos it contained.

“Shane,” he breathed.

Shane's chest tightened. Maybe it was a bad idea. Maybe it was too much.

“You don’t have to hang it if you don't want to,” He said quickly, “I just thought it was better than a shoebox.”

The frame didn’t hold every picture Ilya had kept. Instead, Shane had carefully selected the ones that felt the most important and carefully arranged them across the canvas. It created a collage-style effect.

“The glass is museum quality. So they won't fade from UV or anything,” Shane continued, filling the silence.

“Shane,” Ilya repeated, finally looking up to meet Shane's eyes. Ilya's voice was steady, but Shane could see the glassy look in his eyes.

Shane held his breath.

“This is beautiful,” Ilya finally said.

Shane immediately took the place on the couch next to Ilya, and quickly felt the familiar warmth of his husband's embrace.

“I was worried you’d think it was too much,” he admitted.

“It is perfect,” Ilya whispered, pulling away just enough to place a gentle kiss on Shane's cheek. “Even though you have made me cry on my birthday.”

Shane smiled a little sheepishly at that. “Sorry.”

“Do not be sorry. I love it.”

“You do?” Shane asked, uncertainty still lingering.

“Yes,” Ilya said, “thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Shane shifted his position so that he could properly hug Ilya.

“I love you,” Shane said into Ilya's neck.

Even though he heard it every day, he still felt his body relax at Ilya’s reply.

“I love you too, моя любовь.”