Chapter Text
Days 1823-3277
"Your move, Little Bear," Ilya's mother says.
Her voice is made of light-spun gossamer. It tickles his ears like an early morning breeze.
She sits across from him, elbows on knees, chin rested on loosely clenched knuckles.
She is so big. Her body fills Ilya's vision so that she is all he can see.
Or, maybe Ilya is small.
Yes! Small! he realizes. From the way his head tilts to look up at her. From the way his dangling feet kick the open air.
Between them is a checkered board, and on it two wooden armies lined up to attack.
Ilya stretches his arm, stretches his whole body to reach a frontline piece, moves it ahead two squares.
"Good, Little Bear. That's good."
Ilya is flying—no, not flying, gliding.
He looks down.
Blades—on his feet. Stick—in his hands.
Ilya is playing ice hockey. He's watched enough recordings to recognize the sport.
There are people. Thousands. Maybe millions. Their faces are shrouded in a luminous haze.
Shane is there, too, just ahead. He looks back at Ilya and smiles before pivoting, rapping his own stick against the ice.
Rap, rap, rap.
The flick of Ilya's wrist as he passes the puck to Shane is as natural as the urge to kick a rock.
It makes brief, breakneck contact with Shane's stick before he sends it flying perpendicular.
He sinks the puck into the net.
The people around them erupt, their voices melding together in joyous benediction.
The door is ajar, letting out muffled bursts of shock-ripened grief.
The shape the slanted light makes is a knife across the hardwood, and Ilya approaches, carefully, avoiding the creaky floorboard.
Grigori.
Ilya knew it had to be. It's his parents' room after all. Well, his father's, now, anyway. He doesn't dare go inside.
The bed sinks under his father's, weight. He is curled over onto himself, wilting.
When Ilya was almost too young to remember, his mother planted peonies in the garden. Every summer, he marvelled at their bloom; how impressive they were, how proud. And every fall, he marvelled in a different way, for there was no other flower he knew of that underwent such a unsettling display of decay.
A shiver spiders down Ilya's spine, and he knows that Grigori knows he is watching.
The man rises. He looks one thousand years old.
Ilya feels nothing at the same time he feels everything. Inside his chest is a silent battle. Inside his chest is a magmatic ball of fire and iron, threatening to obliterate him.
The door slams, the already narrowing sliver of connection between them severed.
Hard lines blink into focus.
Concrete, metal.
Ilya's in a stairwell, narrow and colourless.
It should be colder. Should be harder. Should be pressing down, closing in, but all he feels is warmth, and it. Is. Glorious.
Inside is safe. He knows that, somehow. Inside there is hope and possibility and a third thing his mind does not want to acknowledge. Because it will hurt. Because it will burn too brightly. Like looking directly at the sun.
Oh, fuck!
Ilya left his armour somewhere, his mask. Where did he put it? He can't remember now. On a counter? Buried in a pile of throw pillows?
"Your cab is definitely here." The voice ripples through him in velvet waves.
Lips on his lips. He knows them well. Knows them like the creak of his left knee when he kneels.
Like of the creak of the floorboard outside his parents' bedroom.
Grass tickles the backs of Ilya's arm, licking at his bare skin, poking through his t-shirt.
The air is chilly but not unpleasant, and he knows it is night before he even opens his eyes.
Stars. As far as the eye can see.
At first he's annoyed. More stars? But then a delicate hand reaches out from beside him, points up at the sky.
"There you are, little bear." His mother's voice is both injury and salve.
Ilya can't be more than five, what with the reedy way he replies, "Ursa Minor."
"Yes! Very good!" she coos. "And there I am." Her finger is long and thin, and Ilya follows the line of it up to Ursa Major.
The nodes of it are sharp. Neither constellation looks like a bear at all, but he takes comfort in his mother's certainty when she says, "There you are," and "There I am," because up there they are enduring.
His eyes chart back to Ursa Minor, homing in on the constellation's brightest star: Alpha Ursae Minoris.
Polaris.
The North Star. The guiding star.
There you are, Ilya says silently. Only he's not talking about his mother.
Everything is pulsing. Everything is thumping.
The lights, the bass, the bodies.
Ilya's heart beats in time with the music. It's unpleasant in a way it shouldn't be.
He swivels, expects to see Sveta, but she's nowhere. Why does he feel like he's going to vomit? He's too sure-footed to be drunk yet, his vision too crystal.
A woman comes into focus, just the back of her. She wears a painted-on slinky silver dress. The rose-gold waves of her hair reflect the stuttering LEDs. She is attractive, from what Ilya can tell, but not his type. Ass too flat. Tits probably too small.
She's dancing with someone—a man—running her hands up the muscled plane of his chest. Why can't Ilya look away?
The man turns his head in Ilya's direction.
It's—Shane?
How is this possible? Ilya wonders in a flash of lucidity.
They lock eyes. And then—
Ilya is drowning.
The undertow is vicious, pulling him down, squeezing the last dregs of hope from his lungs.
As Ilya drifts—farther, deeper—the lights dim and so does Ilya's will. He stops kicking, stops reaching.
Until a single star appears beyond the surface of the water.
There you are.
Ilya reaches.
The EEU's anthem fades in and so does Ilya's consciousness.
He's on a stage, flanked by a dozen or so flags and even more officials in uniform.
The Appointment Ceremony. The day the four cosmonauts chosen to travel to Alpha Centauri were announced to the world.
Banners and flags wave back and forth in the windless afternoon air. It is as much a celebration as it is the death rattle of a nation.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Ilya knows there's nothing left of it, and a barbed lump forms in his throat as he realizes who must be standing to his right.
The desire to see her face again barely outweighs his fear, but it does, and he swivels his neck to see Sveta.
Sveta! Sveta! Beautiful, loyal, wonderful, Sveta.
Her hair is smoothed back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, and she wears the same uniform Ilya does: a red jumpsuit with burgundy cuffs and collar. On her chest is a mission patch featuring an embroidered sun at the centre with paper-chain children encircling it. On each of the four cardinal points is an animal: a deer, a snake, a magpie, and…a bear.
Kamchatka.
"Ilya, smile, today is our big day," she says, nudging him in the ribs with her elbow.
But Ilya cannot smile.
In part because there is a cigarette pinched between his lips.
On instinct, he inhales, and all around him the world glows like an ember.
Sveta tugs his sleeve so that they're facing each other. She takes his hands in hers, then leans in to kiss him on the cheek. In his ear she whispers: "Fly, Ilya. Be happy."
He begins to cry, because he knows what comes next. Her hands feel suddenly brittle in his. Mercifully, he blacks out just as they begin to collapse.
He smells the evergreens at the same time he sees them, standing tall and protective like sentinels.
The scene has a déjà vu quality to it, familiar yet not. A more peaceful moment has never existed. Ilya knows that, somehow, as he looks out upon the still lake and the citrus-bright sunrise reflecting onto it.
Wildflowers dapple the ground below; they remind Ilya of his mother's favourite silk scarf. She had told him, "Whenever you miss me, look up at the night sky, and you will find me." And he does do that, even if he doesn't have to. He sees her everywhere.
"Mama, I'm not alone anymore," he says aloud. If he listens closely, he hears her reply in the lap of the water against the rocks, the cheerful chirp of the birds, the snap of twigs underfoot—
Ilya glances over his shoulder to see Shane walking toward him, basked in morning light, a mug of coffee in each hand.
It hits Ilya like a punch in the gut how beautiful he is, how he doesn't ever want whatever is going on between them to ever go away. The lengths he would go to preserve it. The light years.
Shane hands him a mugs, sets his own down behind Ilya, then throws a blanket over his shoulders.
They stay like this, leaning into each other as two magnets are wont to do.
Ilya could stay here for an eternity.
Except, there's somewhere else he's supposed to be, and it tugs on his consciousness like a lure.
He doesn't fight it, because something tells him where he's headed will be just as perfect.