Chapter Text
Ilya Rozanov squinted into the darkness of his childhood home. He fumbled for the light switch next to the door, illuminating a space crowded with boxes, paths lined with random objects curving their way through the mess. The stale air gave the impression of having been undisturbed for a long time, though Ilya knew that Alexei had been here just a few days ago.
Alexei, 4 days ago
Come get your shit in the next week or we’re gonna throw it out
Ilya had gotten the text a week after Alexei had called him to let him know that their dad had passed. It had been the first time they’d spoken in years. Ilya had unsubtly inquired as to when his brother wouldn’t be present and had made plans to take the trip then. It had been easy enough to find a time when he didn’t have to interact with his brother. Alexei clearly had no interest in seeing Ilya either.
The living room was chaos, but it was the years of memories suspended in the too-still air that made Ilya want to scream. He wasn’t supposed to be here, in Ottawa, in the house where he had spent his teen years. He had never planned to come back here. Yet here he was, completely unprepared to sort through the detritus of a life that was no longer his. He didn’t know why he hadn’t just told Alexei to throw it all out. For a generous fraction of the drive from Montreal he had kept Svetlana on the phone to bitch to her about exactly that. Why would he return to this nightmare to scavenge for pieces of the life he left behind?
Ilya sighed and made his way to his childhood bedroom, where he swung the door shut and dropped his bag, both more forcefully than was necessary. He felt a fog surrounding him from just being here, pressing in on his skin and making him shiver. He wanted to curl up on his old bed and lay there for a couple, or perhaps a dozen, hours, but he couldn’t do that. The plan was simple: get in, grab whatever was worth keeping, and get out. Be home tomorrow afternoon, if not earlier. He had left Montreal in the late morning, so it was only early afternoon now. Best to get to sorting now and get it done as soon as possible.
Ilya forced himself to start sifting through his old things, going drawer by drawer through the small white dresser across from his bed. The top of the dresser was coated in a thick layer of dust. He was surprised his father had kept his room untouched after all these years, but he supposed that was just Grigori’s way: shut the door on the disobedient, defective child so he wouldn’t have to think about him. The blight on his perfect family was not real if he didn’t acknowledge it.
Ilya finished going through the dresser, taking no small joy in throwing his old bras in the trash. He moved to the bookshelf next, then to his closet. He was pleased with his progress—maybe he could even get home tonight. Ilya cleared out the shoes and clothes and various mess in his closet, mostly tossing things into the donation box. At some point, the sun sank below the horizon, and Ilya turned on his bedside lamp to stave off the shadows.
He reached back into the closet, fingers skating over the top shelf until they landed on a box. With just a bit of scrabbling at the worn material of the lid, Ilya was able to maneuver it down to eye level. His breath caught in his throat at the sight of the familiar painted white cardboard, the top decorated with a name written in puffy green paint and surrounded by glitter.
Despite a rising wave of emotion that warned him not to look inside, he opened the lid to the box. It was full of pictures, notes, and trinkets. The top photos were of him and his mother. He sifted through these slowly, eyes greedily drinking them up as he slowly sank onto the bed. These were the things that had drawn him to venture back into this house. A couple tears slipped down his cheeks as he stared and stared at Irina’s face, at her lips pressed against his fat baby cheeks, at her smiling at a five-year-old Ilya, their resemblance already shocking even at that age. He choked out a hiccuped sob as he found what was probably the last photo of them together, taken just outside of their Moscow home, both of them beaming and bundled up to protect them from the cold. 16 years later and he still missed her so much he felt he could disappear into it. There was so much he wanted to tell her, so much that he knew she would understand that no one else in his family could.
Ilya swiped at his face and moved to close the box, but another photo caught his eye.
Ilya, pink with exertion, his hair long enough to be tied back into a sweaty, frizzy ponytail. His face was pulled into a broad smile as he gazed at the other person in the photo, the person around whom his arm was slung so carelessly. The other person was looking back at him, her smile smaller than Ilya’s but equally content. Her hair was straight, shiny and black, cut to shoulder length. Her skin was also flushed, but not enough to obscure the freckles that crept from cheekbone to cheekbone across the arch of her nose.
It was the only picture Ilya had of two of them—he had thrown all the rest away nearly ten years ago in a fit of inconsolable rage-laden grief. He ran his finger along the edge of the photo, a million memories pushing against the carefully constructed dam in his mind. It wasn’t that he never thought of her, but here, now, it was not something he could afford. Quickly, before he could descend deeper into his memory, he blinked himself out of the daze. He stuffed the photo back beneath the others and firmly shut the box, ignoring the other notes and keepsakes. He would look at those when he was safely hundreds of miles away.
Ilya gently placed the box atop the other items he planned to keep. His task complete, he slunk down to the living room to collapse on the part of the couch not covered in half-sorted household items. He rallied his exhausted brain enough to order a burrito from a nearby late night spot, hoping that eating something might give him enough energy to make the drive back to Montreal tonight. Once the order was placed, he let his phone drop from his hand and sank back further into the couch, still and silent, staring into nothing.
After his food arrived Ilya made his way to the kitchen, relieved to find that the glasses and plates had not been packed up yet. When he grabbed the delivery bag from the dining room table to throw it away he almost didn’t notice what was lying underneath it. The table was covered in mail—bills, junk, fliers—so it would have been easy to miss one cheery envelope, printed with a custom address label. But that label was the same as it had been for countless years prior—the same script with a small holly decoration underneath. Ilya couldn’t help himself.
He ignored the voice in his head calling him a masochist and gingerly opened the red envelope. Ilya stared down at the card, a sick curiosity crawling up from his stomach. He took in the photo on the front: a family standing somewhere in the mountains, no doubt on some ridiculous camping trip. Yuna and David Hollander, their arms around—
What the fuck. Ilya’s awareness fled his body, hovering somewhere over in the corner of the ceiling. Distantly connected to the hollow shell of his physical form, he could observe as its heart kicked into a frantic rhythm and its hands started shaking. What the fuck.
Between Yuna and David stood a man with dark eyes and a strong nose, a familiar, awkward-in-front-of-cameras smile stretched across his face. Ilya’s consciousness crept back into his body only to be deafened by the pounding of his heart in his ears. His fingers still did not feel like they belonged to him. He brought the card close, too close, to his face, but the photo was nowhere near the level of resolution that would have allowed Ilya to detect freckles.
Ilya’s eyes moved to the text on the bottom of the card. It read, “Happy Holidays from the Hollanders! Love, Yuna, David, and Shane.”
Shane.
Shane.
Oh my god.
Ilya stared again at the man—Shane—standing with his arms around his parents. Ilya’s brain felt like it had been shaken like a snowglobe, once settled memories now floating all around him, beautiful and disorienting. These moments begged to be examined through this new lens, one where his best friend—the person who he now knew he had been in awful, high school, puppy dog love with—was a man, was like him.
Emotionally exhausted and helpless against the pull of his own desire, Ilya allowed himself to remember.