Chapter Text
There were a great many things that hadn’t changed this morning.
Shane had woken in Ilya’s arms. Like always. Warmth at his back, a heavy arm slung over his waist. He had lain still for a moment, watching the soft slackness of Ilya’s sleeping face, the absence of performance in it and smiled at it like an idiot. Like always. He’d untangled himself from sheets and limbs and started the kettle. Let the tea steep while the shower ran hot and steady. Steam, tile, routines, the familiar choreography of morning. Like always. Towel around his waist, he’d wrapped both hands around the mug and walked to the window to take in the view as he drew his first sip. Like always.
Except the world outside wasn’t his.
The lake stretched out wide and frozen, pale and endless beneath a snow-heavy sky. Beautiful, objectively. But it wasn’t Montreal. Or the cottage. Or the particular curve of shoreline he knew by heart. The room behind him was immaculate — warm woods, expensive fabrics, everything curated to feel effortlessly perfect.
It was luxurious.
It was comfortable.
It was not theirs.
And that unsettled him. There was something about occupying perfection that belonged to someone else — something temporary, almost staged. As if they were guests in a version of a life that hadn’t been built by them. Reminded him of the countless nights in expensive hotel suites. The time before. Before he was Ilya’s. Before they’d decided to start sharing the real thing together.
And in all honesty, it should have just felt exciting. A change of scenery. A long weekend carved out of a season that rarely allowed for it. Him and Ilya somewhere else, enjoying new ice and each other. It did feel like that. Mostly.
It would have felt more like that if Misha weren’t here.
The thought came with a familiar tightening in his stomach, in his chest. A tightening that traveled to the fingers around the still hot mug, whitening the knuckles. It was unfair. Shane was being unfair.
He knew that.
Ilya didn’t get to see his friends often. Didn’t have many he held onto from before. An old teammate flying in from Russia, someone with whom Ilya had learned to play hockey with as little kids, someone who had stood beside him through Olympic pressure and the strange, isolating intensity of representing an entire country — that mattered. It should matter. Shane understood loyalty. Understood history. Understood what it meant to share something formative with someone. Understood he should’ve just been happy for Ilya.
Instead, there was this low, nagging itch under his skin. Not quite fear. Not quite anger. Something closer to displacement. As if he’d been pushed half a step out of alignment in a space he hadn’t realized he’d claimed.
It was selfish.
Petty.
A little small.
He took a slow sip of tea, letting the bitterness settle on his tongue. He wasn’t worried. He wasn’t insecure. And he absolutely wasn’t jealous.
Though, if he were being honest, there were things it made perfect sense to be a little jealous of.
For one — the language they shared.
Misha and Ilya could speak in Russian. Did so when the conversation drifted to something Shane didn’t know or wasn’t there for or when he was busy with something else and they were left catching up. They shared a language. Not the trimmed-down version of English Shane and Ilya shared, complete with missing articles and half-finished idioms and the occasional misfire that turned into laughter. Russian between them was fluid. Rapid. Layered. It rolled and cracked and softened all at once — full sentences stacked on sentences, hands moving, shoulders bumping, voices rising and falling in a cadence Shane could feel but not follow.
It was intimate in a way that had nothing to do with touch.
Shane knew how to say: Yes. No. Please. Thank you. I love you. Yes, sir. Lawn mower.
It didn’t exactly qualify as fluency. Though I love you — ya tebya lyublyu — had felt like a victory the first time he’d said it and meant it. There was something grounding in sharing even that much. It wasn’t nothing.
Still. It wasn’t this.
And then there was the more superficial, thoroughly uncharitable layer of it.
Misha was — objectively — very good-looking. Tall. Blond. Blue-eyed in that almost unfair way. Broad shoulders, easy posture, the kind of muscle definition that came from a slightly different training philosophy than Shane’s. He’d gotten a clear enough view of it at the indoor pool the night before, whether he’d intended to or not. That hadn’t helped.
Misha was also fun.
Effortlessly, recklessly fun. The kind of person who suggested things instead of evaluating them. Who laughed loudly. Who nudged Ilya toward dares and spontaneous plans and half-baked adventures that weren’t dangerous, exactly — but often risky and unnecessary. Shane watched the way Ilya responded to that. The way his grin widened, dimples cutting deep into his cheeks. The way his eyes sharpened with that familiar spark — not competitive, not defensive. Just alive. Looser. Lighter. And it wasn’t that Ilya wasn’t fun with Shane. He was. In quieter ways. In tender ways. In ways that felt built rather than ignited.
But this was different. This was fire. And Shane had always been more ice than spark.
Then there was the history.
Because Misha wasn’t just an old Olympic teammate. He was part of Ilya’s childhood. Same academy. Same brutal winters. Same culture that prized endurance over softness. He’d been there when Ilya lost his mother. He’d known Svetlana for years. The three of them carried a shared archive of memories Shane would never fully access. That would remain stories told in shorthand, glances exchanged over references he couldn’t decode.
There was something untouchable in that kind of bond. Shane understood sharing formative experiences. Understood how they etched themselves into you. That didn’t mean he liked standing adjacent to one.
He could still picture the way Ilya had burst into the living room when Misha called, eyes bright, smile splitting his face open.
“Misha is coming! We’ll have so much fun! Come. Let’s book. That fancy ski place you like in Whistler.”
That had been it. Shane would have agreed to anything in that moment. Would still. He’d do a lot to keep that particular light in Ilya’s expression. It hadn’t helped that he’d been halfway through a New Yorker essay when Ilya announced it — something dense and thoughtful about geopolitical something-or-other — and the collision of his quiet afternoon and Ilya’s explosive excitement had felt almost symbolic.
And now here they were.
One day in.
One day of inside jokes delivered too quickly for him to catch. Of smiling a beat late. Of choosing beer instead of ginger ale because Ilya and Misha were downing vodka like it was an Olympic sport. One day of nodding along to stories from training camps and teenage chaos, contributing nothing, offering nothing. One day of sliding his hand under the table, finding Ilya’s fingers, needing the small confirmation of pressure in return.
Needing to know that it was still him that Ilya wanted. The dark-haired, freckled, boring him. The one who read essays on Sunday afternoons and stared at sunsets and firepits and knew the call of the loon. The one who measured before he leapt.
Not the golden, reckless, shared-history version glowing across the table.
Ilya squeezed his hand back every time. Every single time. He’d pulled Shane close without hesitation. Kissed him. Pressed soft reassurances into his mouth, into his hair, into the space just below his ear. He hadn’t drifted. Hadn’t grown distracted. Hadn’t once made Shane feel secondary. It should have been enough. It mostly was and at the same time, irrationally, it also made it worse.
Because there was nothing to justify the tightness in Shane’s chest. No evidence. No slight. No omission. He knew he should say something. Open his mouth. Admit that this — this strange cocktail of displacement and insecurity — was sitting heavier than it made sense to. Ilya would listen. Ilya would take it seriously. Possibly too seriously.
And maybe that was the problem. Because it was two more days. Just two more days of Ilya laughing too loud and speaking too fast and slipping into Russian like muscle memory. Two more days of an old friendship being celebrated.
If Shane had to absorb a little discomfort for that, it wasn’t catastrophic. He’d endured worse for far less. It wasn’t that big a deal. Not to him. Would be to Ilya, Shane knew that, but then again Ilya didn’t need to know.
Arms slid around his bare waist.
“Too loud,” Ilya murmured, voice rough with sleep.
Shane didn’t startle — he rarely did — but he felt caught all the same.
“I haven’t made the slightest noise,” he said evenly, leaning back into the contact.
“Your body, no,” Ilya replied, mouth brushing the curve of his shoulder. “Your brain is too loud. I could hear from bed.”
There it was again. That unnerving fluency. Not in English. In him. In Shane.
Shane lifted the mug and took a slow sip, buying a second to steady his expression.
“It’s almost time,” he said. “You told Misha we’d meet him for breakfast at nine before going skiing. I don’t like cutting it close. You know me.” Which was also true. Just not the whole truth.
“Mm. I do,” Ilya said softly near his ear — and the tone suggested he knew more than Shane was offering. “I’ll bring your clothes. You get ready while I shower. Misha can wait. He’ll find someone to flirt with. He always does.”
He’d bring Shane’s clothes.
Some things, at least, remained constant.
Ilya choosing what he’d wear. Ilya deciding the shape of him before the day began. Their dynamic, solid and intentional and chosen. It steadied Shane in a way very few things did. Even when the outside —or inside— world felt slightly off-balance, this did not.
A kiss landed at the base of his neck, raising a trail of goosebumps down his arms. Then Ilya was already moving toward the closet.
Shane didn’t turn to see what he’d pick.
He rarely did.
He’d never cared much about clothes — not the way Ilya did. Texture, cut, silhouette — those were languages Ilya spoke fluently. Handing that decision over had felt, from the beginning, like an exhale he hadn’t known he’d been holding. Relinquishing control in small, contained ways had turned out to be clarifying.
And Ilya had taken to it with unapologetic enthusiasm.
A light smack landed on his ass, sharp enough to pull him cleanly out of his thoughts. It was followed by a playful squeeze.
“Get dressed, golubchik.”
The outfit was laid neatly over the chair. Waiting.
“Yes, sir,” Shane replied, a faint smirk curving his mouth before he could stop it.
Some things, at least, were exactly as they should be.
The hotel dining room was the kind of place that made you feel underdressed regardless of what you were wearing. Shane was not underdressed. Ilya had seen to that. He'd stopped arguing with Ilya's taste approximately four months into whatever this was between them and had never found a compelling reason to resume. The room, however, was doing its level best to make him feel like he should be holding a glass of something champagne-adjacent at nine in the morning, and that was not the register Shane operated in. No matter how many luxurious hotels he’d stayed in, he always felt out of place in them.
Misha was already there and that wasn’t helping either.
He was leaning back in his chair looking like someone who had never once felt underdressed in a dining room in his life, coffee in hand, grinning at something on his phone. He looked, Shane thought without particular charity, annoyingly well-rested and ready to charm everyone in close vicinity. Shane adjusted the collar of his shirt a little awkwardly as they approached the table.
"You're late," Misha announced, without looking up.
"Ten minutes does not count as late," Ilya said, voice still rough with sleep.
"Yes it does. Late." Misha set the phone face-down and looked up, spreading his hands in a gesture of magnanimous forgiveness. "But I forgive you. I had good company,” he nodded toward the far end of the room where a woman in a very expensive ski outfit appeared to be making deliberate eye contact with their table, “and you lovebirds need your alone time.”
Oh good. Sexual innuendos in the classy hotel dining room at 9:12 am. Exactly how he liked his morning to start. Well. That was not entirely true. If he was alone with Ilya, that might have been exactly how he’d like his morning to start.
Ilya dropped into the chair across from Misha, and patted the chair next to him, looking up at Shane.
Shane sat, taking the menu, mostly to do something with his hands and eyes that didn’t involve looking at or interacting with anyone else. Ilya reached over and took it from him, before landing a quick kiss to his lips.
A server appeared. Ilya ordered without consulting the menu or Shane — eggs, smoked salmon, dark rye, fruit and espresso.
"Same for him," Ilya said.
The server nodded. Moved on.
Misha's mouth curved. He said nothing, but the curve of his mouth said quite a bit. Shane knew he didn’t know all the details of his and Ilya’s relationship. He also knew it didn’t take a genius to figure certain things out. The thought made his face heat and he turned to look at the view.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the mountain was breathtaking in its massive indifference, white peaks catching the early light. The groomed runs were already marked with the first tracks of early skiers, clean lines cut into fresh powder. Shane had checked the conditions before coming down. Force of habit. The overnight snowfall had been exactly what the forecast promised, six inches on an already solid base, visibility strong, winds low.
It was, objectively, a perfect day for skiing.
"So," Misha said, leaning forward and wrapping both hands around his coffee mug. "I was looking at the area map this morning."
Ilya reached for the bread that had materialized on the table. He didn't say anything, but his eyes started glinting in that way they did when he smelled something fun brewing— an alertness, a readiness for whatever was coming, like a frequency he'd been tuned to for a very long time.
"There's a backcountry section," Misha continued. "North face, past the resort boundary. Local guides take groups out there, I checked." He paused. "Not that we’d need a guide."
Shane’s stomach tightened. Not backcountry skiing. Anything but backcountry skiing.
Ilya bit into the buttered bread. His eyes moved to the window, to the mountain, calculating something Shane couldn't read.
"How's the snowpack?" Ilya asked.
"Stable. Low risk avalanche report. North face has good consolidation after the overnight.” Misha grinned. “Not like Krasnaya Polyana."
Ilya made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a groan, a sound with a story behind it that Shane did not have access to. He added it to the file.
"Was one time," Ilya said.
"A very memorable time," Misha said with a laugh.
Shane spread butter on the dark rye that Ilya had already put on his plate, watching them. Backcountry. He knew what it was. He knew it the way he knew most extreme winter sports things — theoretically. As something needlessly risky. Something you engaged in with little to no control over several aspects of it. And so something that made him uncomfortable. Something to be avoided.
He skied well. Had always skied well; clean technique, good edge control, the kind of competence that came from growing up rich somewhere where winter lasted a serious amount of time and your parents considered the outdoors non-negotiable. But he skied well marked runs, groomed trails, the occasional steep black diamond on a good day.
The backcountry was something else entirely.
Misha was already pulling up the map on his phone, tilting it toward Ilya. "We can come in from here, follow this ridge, there's a natural bowl that feeds down — there's video online, some guy took it last week. Untracked. Incredible."
Ilya leaned in to look. The spark was already there, his dimples threatening to appear.
"Yeah," Ilya said, low and pleased. "I see it. That's a beautiful line."
Then he turned, full on smiling now. Looked at Shane. His smile was there, but his eyes softened, dimmed the excitement, turned attentive. The look that meant he was thinking about Shane, not about the mountain — though he hadn't yet stopped thinking about the mountain.
"You've done backcountry before?" he asked.
Shane sipped his coffee. Such a simple question, asked without edge or expectation. Just information gathering. Just Ilya being Ilya, caring about things like preparation and experience and whether Shane could handle something like that. Safely.
The sensible answer was already forming itself in his mind. Not really, I've stuck mostly to groomed runs. Don’t like the idea of how risky it is. Avalanches don’t sound particularly fun. I’d rather not. An honest, practical answer he'd have given to anyone else. Anyone else that wasn’t Ilya in front of exciting, not-boring, backcountry-skiing Misha.
The sensible answer sat right there, perfectly available.
"Yeah," he said. "A fair amount. Some pretty serious terrain."
Ilya studied him for a half-second. Not with suspicion. Shane didn’t lie. And not just because it was Ilya’s number two rule for him —with number one being keeping himself safe and wasn’t that just wonderful under the circumstances? — but also because he valued trust immensely. He swallowed hard, sipped his coffee again. Ilya was still looking at him as if trying to reach a decision and Shane held the look, easily schooling his expression to neutral. Gave nothing. Years of practice. His strongest skill after hockey.
"Good," Ilya said, and returned his attention to Misha's phone. "Then we go."
Misha raised his coffee mug in a small, satisfied toast.
"I'll check for beacon rental," Ilya said.
"Already done," Misha said, with the efficiency of a man who had been planning this since before anyone else woke up.
Shane set his mug down. Picked up his fork. The eggs were good and the mountain outside was brilliant and white and enormous and he was definitely not going to think too carefully about what he'd just agreed to, what rules he’d just broken —no smashed— because it was fine. He skied well. He was a professional Hockey player in excellent condition. It would be fine.
Ilya's hand found his knee under the table, resting there. Shane sipped more of his perfectly brewed espresso, then exhaled slowly through his nose, perfectly controlled and invisible. Two more days, one of them spent backcountry skiing. Shane being as exciting and fun and daring as Misha for once instead of his usual boring self was worth it. Ilya was worth it.
It was going to be fine.
The chairlift to the resort's uppermost boundary ran slower than the others.
Shane had noticed this on their first run the day before and filed it away as a minor grievance — one of those operational details that existed for perfectly sensible reasons and remained irritating regardless. Especially now, the slowness was giving him too much time to think.
Shane sat between Ilya and Misha, their skis dangling in a loose row over the drop. The two of them were talking across him — or Misha was, largely, and Ilya was listening with interest. Misha was describing the line they'd take from the boundary gate, then traverse along the ridge, the natural chute that funnelled into the bowl below, the section of uncut powder that had been sitting untouched since the overnight snowfall. His hands moved despite the poles hooked over his wrist. The light caught the blond in his hair that peeked beneath his helmet.
Shane looked at the mountain ahead and kept his breathing measured.
He was fine. He was a good skier. His form was good, his fitness was excellent. He had been skiing since he was four years old. He was going to be completely fine.
The powder was the part he was less clear on.
He'd read three articles on his phone while Ilya and Misha were getting their equipment and watched a twelve-minute video called Backcountry For Intermediate Skiers, which had been only moderately reassuring and extremely fast. He understood the principles. He'd taken note of the bit about weight distribution in variable snow — centred stance, let the skis find the surface, don't fight the depth. He'd noted the part about reading the terrain ahead rather than reacting to it. He'd also noted, with less enthusiasm, the part where the presenter cheerfully mentioned that most beginners found the transition from groomed resort skiing to uncut backcountry terrain humbling.
"—and from the lower bowl it feeds naturally back toward the resort boundary," Misha was saying. "Maybe forty minutes of descent total, if we take our time. Probably less with you two." He said you two with a gesture that bracketed Shane in with Ilya as though it were a foregone conclusion, which was the kind of casual generosity Shane both appreciated and found mildly destabilizing, because it meant the expectation was already set and the window for honesty had closed.
Ilya turned to him then, checking in on him rather than asking something. His eyes moved over Shane's face with unnerving thoroughness.
"You're quiet," Ilya said.
"I'm always quiet."
"Different kind of quiet." He said it without accusation.
"It's the altitude," Shane said lamely. "And the cold."
"Is not that cold."
"It is."
Ilya studied him for another moment. Shane held the look with the steadiness that had served him well across several years of competitive hockey and an embarrassing number of situations where someone was trying to determine whether he was lying. Then Ilya's mouth curved slightly.
"You look like adrenaline," Ilya said. "The good kind. You get like this before a big game. Eyes like—" he made a small gesture near his own face, narrowing his own eyes.
It was a reasonable misread. Shane was going to let him have it.
"Something like that," Shane said.
Ilya leaned in and pressed a brief, warm kiss to his lips. It was such an Ilya thing. A total absence of self-consciousness in affection, the way he gave it like it cost him nothing and withheld it for no one.
Shane exhaled through his nose.
Ilya grinned. Pressed his shoulder against Shane's. Returned his attention to the ridge above them.
Misha was watching the view instead, tipping his face into the wind with the relaxed pleasure. Looked like someone for whom mountains were a native language. Maybe they were. Maybe he and Ilya had grown up ascending and descending things that made this ridge look decorative.
Shane thought about the YouTube video. Centred stance. Read the terrain ahead.
He was gonna be fine. He could do this.
The boundary gate was modest. An orange marker, a sign in French and English, and a brief negotiation with a groomer who was deeply accustomed to experienced skiers making this exact request and had assessed all three of them in about four seconds. They signed off on the liability form without ceremony. Misha signed his name with a theatrical flourish, for no reason other than that this was apparently the kind of person he was.
Beyond the boundary, the mountain changed immediately.
The texture of it shifted under Shane's skis on the first traverse. The surface was uneven in a different way than groomed runs were uneven. Variable, alive, almost. Packed density under a float of fresh snow that required a constant low-level recalibration he hadn't needed on the resort side. He could feel his body adjusting automatically in some places, the athlete in him taking over, and then hitting the edge of its competence in others and having to think, which was the part he hadn't anticipated. He'd thought his body would simply know. It mostly did. Just not entirely.
Ilya had gone first down the initial traverse, cutting a clean line through the ridge with the ease of someone who had done this exact thing across ten different mountain ranges and hadn't particularly noticed. Misha had gone second with a whoop that carried out over the bowl and disappeared into the white below. He was — Shane was not going to dwell on this, but — he was exceptional. Controlled aggression, with complete ease in variable snow, enjoyment rather than management.
Shane had gone third.
He'd picked his line carefully. Stayed wide of the steepest pitch. Kept his stance centered, as instructed by the YouTube presenter he was no longer being ironic about in the privacy of his own head. The traverse had been fine. His edges found the surface, held, released when he asked them to. He'd gotten to the shoulder of the bowl above the first open section and stopped to assess, and in the process of stopping he'd nearly overcorrected on a patch of wind crust that he hadn't read correctly and had to throw out a pole plant that was purely corrective and absolutely nothing else.
Ilya had been looking at the bowl below. He hadn't seen.
Shane had stood very still for two seconds and taken inventory of himself — joints, balance, breathing — before continuing.
Now they were into the bowl proper, and this was the part, Shane conceded internally, that warranted all the enthusiasm. The snow was untouched. An unbroken expanse of white that curved gently away from the ridge and opened into a wide, almost theatrical descent. The light hit it differently than it hit groomed runs. Colder. The landscape was wild, breathtaking in its vastness. He understood, despite himself, why people did this willingly.
He tracked Ilya down the fall line watching his rhythm. Marveled at the way he absorbed the variable surface and continued through it rather than reacting to it, the precision of every turn, every body tilt. He tracked Misha too, pushing harder into the steep, leaving wider arcs. The two of them were talking as they skied, when they were close enough, shouting in Russian across the distance between them.
Shane fell into his own rhythm somewhere in the middle third of the bowl. It wasn't Ilya's rhythm. It wasn't Misha's. But it was his, and it was working, and somewhere in the process of managing variable snow and reading terrain and staying on his edges he stopped narrating it in his head and simply skied. Different terrain, same physics. He banked a clean turn through the deepest section of the powder and the floating feeling he got was exhilarating.
Misha had pulled up at the natural shelf about two-thirds of the way down, waiting. Ilya swung in beside him and they stood looking back up the bowl, watching Shane complete the section. Shane came in beside them and stopped cleanly.
"Clean," Misha said approvingly. "Good read through the middle."
"He skis well," Ilya said, as if Shane weren't standing directly to his right, full of pride and admiration. Made Shane's chest swell, his face heat up despite the cold and he lowered his head, sending a shy smile to the snow.
Misha was now looking at the lower section, the final feed toward the resort boundary. His head tilted at a specific angle. "There's a small natural drop," he said, pointing to a vague point in the white. "Just before the treeline. Maybe two metres. You can see the lip from here if you pay attention. Good landing." He looked at Ilya.
Shane looked at the drop. Or what he thought was the drop.
He knew what it was. He'd seen it from above. The landing did look clean and the longer he focused his eyes the more well defined the lip looked. He'd taken drops before on resort runs. On good days when his confidence was tidy and the snow was predictable and he knew the surface beneath the landing zone.
He watched Misha ski down ahead of them, build speed with a straightforward unhesitating line, hit the lip, hang in the air, and land in a spray of powder that rose and caught the golden light.
He heard Ilya make a whoop sound beside him. Appreciation. Recognition. It made Shane’s chest burn. He could do this too. He could land this.
Shane drew in a breath, then dropped in.
He built the speed the same way he’d watched Misha do, carving a clean, straight line to the lip. He hit the lip right. The air was correct, the hang time was more or less what he'd expected, and for a single suspended second it was perfect. And then his skis met the snow in the landing zone and found something unexpected under the fresh surface. A hidden compression, a buried change in density. The kind of thing a better-prepared skier would have probed for, or simply had the backcountry instinct to absorb. His weight shifted fractionally forward, the tips bit in, and then his left ski caught on something — rock or root under the snow — and the correction he'd intended to make was slightly too late and slightly too much.
He went down.
He tumbled. One ski released at the binding and he skidded out sideways across the landing zone and into the softer snow at the edge of the natural shelf below the treeline. His poles scattered. His right hand flew up, instinct to cover his head. It hit the packed surface and made a brief, declarative statement of jolting pain that it was going to spend the next twenty-four hours deciding how seriously to take.
He groaned, then rolled to his back, lay face-up for a moment. The sky above the treeline was very white and very quiet. His wrist was throbbing. His vision blurred for a second, before he managed to focus it again.
He heard Ilya before he saw him. Yelling his name.
He heard Ilya yelling his name and the sound of edges on snow, fast and unceremonious. Then there was a cascade of snow across his jacket as Ilya dropped beside him into a hard stop.
"Shane." Not a question. Both hands found him immediately — his shoulders, his chest, his face, his helmet. Checking. Methodical and barely controlled. "Talk to me. Where."
"I'm fine," Shane said, to the sky.
"Where are you hurt."
"I'm not—my wrist." He paused, eyes managing to meet Ilya’s. He swallowed hard. "It's nothing, it’s fine."
"Shane."
"I landed on it. It's fine,though. I've taken harder hits than this during warmup." All of which was true. He sat up. The wrist registered its opinion clearly but not catastrophically. More of a localized complaint that said bruised, possibly worse, but definitely not broken. He'd played through worse. He knew the difference. Mostly.
Ilya's expression was not the one he used when things were fine, though. It was the other one, very still, very focused, its warmth consolidated into something like fierce protectiveness mixed in with fear.
"I saw the weight shift," Ilya said. "You overweighted the tips."
"I know what happened. There was something under the snow.”
“Yes and you didn't read it."
"Ilya."
He stopped. Said something very briefly in Russian that wasn't directed at anyone and had the weight of a thing he was choosing not to finish. Then his hands were back — helmet, the back of Shane's head, careful and thorough. "Can you stand?"
"Yes." Shane moved to do so. "See."
Ilya stood too. Did not look convinced. Misha had come back up from below and stood a few feet off, reading the situation. “Call for help?” He asked.
"No. We ski out," Shane said. "It's not far. I can make it to the boundary, it's just a bruise."
"We're not skiing out." Ilya's tone was a door slamming. "I have emergency number for the resort patrol. They come to us."
"I don't need patrol—"
"I didn’t ask you."
Shane felt his stomach drop at the tone. That tone Ilya used when he meant to say this conversation has concluded. Shane stood in the snow in the silence of the backcountry and looked at him.
Ilya was already pulling out his phone.
He looked at the mountain. At the clean untracked line they'd made through the bowl above — his among them, clean through the middle, which Misha had noted and Ilya had said skis well about with that particular proud note. He looked at the drop and the displaced snow of the landing and the scatter of his poles against the white.
Misha moved quietly to collect them.
Ilya was talking into the phone. His other hand found Shane's nape and stayed there.
Shane looked at the sky above the treeline again. Still white. Still quiet. His wrist hurt. His body hurt in that way falls hurt after the adrenaline swelled down. The admission of that was private and specific and he had no current plans to share it aloud in any more detail than he already had.
"You're in pain," Ilya said, lowering the phone.
“Barely.”
“You’re not that subtle, Shane.”
"I wasn't trying to be anything."
"We’ll see." Ilya looked at him sidelong, in a way that said we'll come back to this without specifying when or from which direction. Then his arm moved around his shoulders. Shane let out a slow, measured breath.
The patrol would take maybe twenty minutes.
He had twenty minutes of mountain silence, and Ilya's arm, and the particular task of deciding what — if anything — he was going to say about what had happened. He decided, quietly and without announcing it to anyone, that he was going to say as little as possible.