Chapter Text
The week with the team home was healing in the best of ways, but hockey waits for no man, and no injury. Before Ilya could really settle, the boys were gone, duffles packed and fists pumped before they headed out on a brutal Western Conference road trip. In their stead, the WAGs had mobilized. They had rotated through over the days, with casseroles, and company, and small children who idolized him as the hockey god he was, and didn't care one lick that one leg was out of commission.
The Monday two weeks after the hit, Connie Marlow was in his kitchen, her presence marked by the rhythmic, steady chopping of vegetables for a soup that smelled like the childhood Ilya rarely talked about. Bee St. Simon sat at the kitchen island. Her laptop glowed as she cross-referenced Ilya’s medication schedule with the physical therapy notes Sarah Hammersmith had left behind.
They were building a fortress out of spreadsheets and Tupperware. Every four hours, Bee would appear with a glass of water and two pills, her face a mask of calm authority. He was currently on a rotating cycle of nerve stabilizers and anti-inflammatories, but the pain was still a constant, jagged presence. It felt like a hot wire coiled tight around his shin, making every heartbeat feel like a dull thud against the bone.
She had been with him all weekend. They had spent hours on the deep black sectional while the TV flickered with bad 90s rom-coms. It was a silent tradition they’d shared since they were both young in a new city, struggling to make sense of a new world, language, way of life. Ilya loved all the partners of the Bears, but these three? He had been semi-adopted by this trio years ago, and he had long since stopped fighting their presence. They had welcomed him like a younger brother back when he was young, lost, and masking it all with cocky, jagged armor. This was a team and a family that had always loved him unapologetically.
A sickening guilt settled in his gut whenever he looked at them for too long. He had planned to leave them at the end of this season, taking his free agent status and abandoning this city for Ottawa. That had been the plan, devised in the quiet of midnight between soft sheets and softer hands. It was a secret path to a future where he and Shane didn't have to hide. Now he was reliant on their generosity, and their love, all the while he had been plotting is departure.
He needed to heal. Fast. Get back to the ice. Score goals. Win games. Show the world he was still the best there ever was. Make it all worth it. Play one last year with Boston, win the Cup for them as a way for saying 'Thank You' for everything they had done... and then give it all up for Shane, and a new home, and a future.
That plan broke a bit more on a Tuesday in the team’s medical facility. It’s always Tuesdays. Paul, the team doctor, pulled up the high-resolution scans and went quiet.
"It’s a gap, isn't it?" Ilya asked. He wasn't looking for someone to blame. It was just physics, the way the spiral fracture had decided not to knit.
"It’s a gap," Paul confirmed, his voice heavy with clinical weight. "The alignment is off by several millimeters. If we leave it, the bone will heal skewed. It’s no one’s fault, Ilya. Sometimes the anatomy just doesn't cooperate with the plan."
Ilya leaned his head back against the headrest of his wheelchair, a necessary tool to get through the meandering hallways of the arena. "Surgery then?"
"Surgery then," Paul echoed. "We'll introduce a titanium nail through the center of the tibia. It's the most reliable way to get you back."
"How long?" Ilya perked up at that, but didn’t let himself have too much hope. His voice sounded thin even to his own ears. "How long until I am back on the ice?"
Paul sighed, a sound of heavy professional honesty. "Realistically? Four to six months before you’re playing at game speed. Maybe longer. We’re early in the season, and you're young and healthy, but between the surgery, the hardware integration, and the muscle atrophy, you’re looking at a return in the spring at the earliest. If everything goes perfectly."
"So if we make it to the playoffs, maybe I am Hockey Jesus," Ilya said, but the joke felt like lead in his mouth. The math was already spiraling in his head. Four months was March, and six months was May. The prime window for free agency started in July. He was supposed to be at the peak of his value, a healthy, elite center ready to headline a new era in Ottawa. Instead, he’d be a guy with a metal rod in his leg trying to prove he wasn't a liability.
Paul huffed out a laugh, missing the internal collapse. "Yeah, kid, you can be Hockey Jesus. But that doesn't mean the leg is back to one hundred percent the second you lace up. The summer is where the real work happens. That’s when we get you truly strong."
Ilya went quiet. Summer. In the summer, he was supposed to be in Ottawa. Now, the timeline for just standing up was bleeding into the timeline for leaving. He took a deep breath and finally, softly, let the mask drop.
"I…It has been a lot, Paul," he whispered. "The pain. It is the feeling of my skin being too tight for my own leg. I am…concerned about surgery."
"I know," Paul said softly. "Which is why we’re going to be very aggressive with pain management after the hardware goes in. We’ll use a nerve block for the first twenty-four hours to give your brain a rest from the limb entirely. After that, it’s a strict rotation: nerve stabilizers and the heavy stuff for the breakthrough pain. We aren't going to let you white-knuckle this one. We've got you."
Ilya could only nod.
That night, he called Shane, who was four hours away in a hotel in New Jersey, playing hockey and scoring goals.
"Can we move it?" Shane asked, his voice low and fast. "If we push it to next week, I can be there for the discharge. We’re going to be in Boston."
Ilya let out a weak, raspy chuckle. "Shane. You want to postpone surgery for a hockey schedule? You are very illogical for a man who loves spreadsheets."
"I'm being perfectly logical," Shane countered, though there was a tremor in his voice. "I am calculating the best way to ensure you aren't waking up to a room full of people who aren't me. I should be the one holding the ice pack, Ilya. Holding your hand! That's the plan."
"The plan has a gap in it, Shane. Just like my bone." Ilya closed his eyes, leaning his head against the cool glass of his bedroom window. "I have the girls here. They are cross-referencing my life. I will be fine."
"I hate this," Shane whispered, the logic finally failing him. "I hate that I’m sitting in a Marriott while you’re being prepped for surgery. We should have planned for this. We planned for everything else!”
“Mhm, yes, should have planned after you got a concussion. Though I was good, got to you right away.”
“Fuck you, it was your team that hurt me.”
“Again Marlow, he feels terribile.”
“Yeah, well, I feel terrible now. I just want to be there, to help you.”
"Is the price of the secret," Ilya said softly. "Just come when you can."
The morning of the surgery arrived with a clinical, pre-dawn chill. The WAGs moved with the practiced, military precision of women who spent half their lives managing crises while their husbands were time zones away. Ilya felt like a passenger in his own body as he was processed through pre-op, the hospital hallways a blur of fluorescent lights and sanitized air. He had dressed in the only thing that felt safe: an old McGill sweatshirt that still carried the faint, lingering scent of cottage pine and Shane’s laundry detergent. It was a fragile tether to a summer that now felt like a hallucinated dream.
The anxiety wasn't just about the procedure; it was the suffocating weight of everything that was slipping away. Every time a nurse asked him to confirm his identity, Ilya wanted to tell them he didn't know who he was anymore. He wasn't the elite athlete who was supposed to be negotiating a blockbuster deal in Ottawa this July. He was a project on a gurney.
He was terrified of the pain, of the invasive reality of being cut open, and of the realization that no matter how well the surgeons worked, he would wake up with a piece of industrial hardware forever wedged where his own strength used to be.
The Bears were three hours behind on the West Coast, but the locker room group chat was already buzzing with aggressive well-wishes. It provided a necessary, mindless hum of normalcy against his mounting dread.
‘Make sure they take the right leg... or is it the left?’
‘Found your replacement,’ Cliff Marlow texted, attaching a photo of a single orange practice cone on the ice with a poorly photoshopped ‘81’ on the side. 'better at puck drop already.'
‘Enjoy the nap and the absence of Marlow’s snoring.’
‘Just a heads up, the hospital doesn't serve Mountain Dew in the recovery room. Your body’s going to go into total shock when it realizes what actual water tastes like.’
Ilya stared at the screen, the light reflecting off the sterile plastic of his ID bracelet. The casual chirping from the guys felt like a lifeline and a weight all at once. They were treating this like any other injury, a temporary stint on the IR before he’d be back in the room, making fun of their tape jobs. He loved them so much. He let the phone slip onto the thin hospital sheets, the vibration of the incoming messages thrumming against his hip until a nurse stepped in to wheel him toward the theater.
Ilya drifted back to the surface, the world appearing through a soft, hazy lens of cotton and muted glass. The anesthesia still clung to his edges, turning the room into a watercolor blur where the sharp edges of his life felt safely tucked away. The nerve block had done its work. His left leg was a distant phantom, a heavy weight that belonged to someone else in another room. He felt light, untethered from the crushing dread of the metal and the lost months, drifting in a pleasant fog.
He blinked slowly, his vision eventually settling on a figure hunched in the chair beside his bed. The man was wearing a faded, oversized Bears sweatshirt and a team hat pulled low, looking small and uncharacteristically still. It was a soft, grainy image that felt more like a memory.
"Who is this intruder?" Ilya croaked.
Shane looked up, and for a second, Ilya thought he was seeing things. He blinked a few times, but the vision didn't change. There he was: freckles and Boston Bears gear and all.
"Oh, him?" Connie said from the corner, not looking up from her book. "That’s Hammersmith’s little brother, Mark. Visiting from out of town. Very quiet kid. Bit of a wallflower."
Shane reached out, his fingers trembling slightly as they brushed hair from Ilya’s forehead. "The WAGs are terrifyingly efficient," he whispered. "They handed me this sweatshirt and told the nurses I was a cousin. I’m technically on the guest list as Mark Hammersmith. I think I go to Boston College."
“Boston University.” Connie replied, flipping a page in her book.
"Better hockey team!" Shane smiled, his eyes never leaving Ilya's face. "So hi, I'm Mark. Big fan."
Ilya let out a drug-heavy huff of a laugh. "Mark. You are a very bad Mark. Your freckles are too Canadian."
"I'll remember that for next time," Shane said.
"No, no next time," Ilya sighed. He couldn't imagine doing this again. Too many nights in hospital beds.
"Hey, I'm here, I've got you," Shane said, his hand locking with Ilya’s. "You did great. No complications. Flying colors. I love you."
"I love you too," Connie chirped back, but Ilya could hear her smile.
Ilya squeezed back, his eyes drinking in this man.
"We are very bad at secrets," Ilya whispered, his voice fading.
"We’re terrible at them," Shane agreed, leaning his forehead against the side of the mattress, not letting go of Ilya's hand. "Go back to sleep. I’m not going anywhere."
Ilya let the darkness take him, the last thing he felt being the warm, steady anchor of Shane’s palm against his own.