i think that maybe one day ilya’s going through an old box of stuff from moscow, maybe sveta sent it to him after the funeral and he put it in a cupboard somewhere. he doesn’t like thinking about moscow on the best of days, but shane wants to clean out their garage so there he is, sat on the floor with the box spread out in front of him.
He finds an old binder or something, a photo album, very very few photos in their at all, mainly pictures of the city, of his old house, family portraits, a few pictures of birds. soon, it’s clear that this was made by Irina.
he’s flipping through and there are more blank pages than filled ones, and then he finds a few old pictures of himself, yellow with age and with some small water damage in places, but it’s him, in hockey gear, at the dinner table, maybe the odd birthday. ilya knows shane would love to keep them in a shared album somewhere. and he’s just about to call for his husband when he turns the page and-
it’s undeniably her, the curls he remembers, the red lipstick. a photo of her looking into the camera and then a similar one, taken immediately after, of her laughing.
and tears spring to his eyes, he’s hit with every detail he’s forgotten in the decades since he last saw her. that small mole on her chin, her silver earrings she always wore at home, her-
Ilya realises through the age of the photo you can almost make out her freckles
how could he have forgotten her freckles? he never took too much notice of them, probably mostly covered by makeup, but now- now, he can’t imagine forgetting them.
Shane finds him 20 minutes later, cradling the album and sobbing silently, and ilya surges towards him and kisses- well, he doesn’t kiss him, he kisses his freckles. and when shane asks what happened, ilya shows him the photos, and shane meticulously picks out a double picture frame and has them safely copied and preserved in their entryway. somewhere ilya will always be able to come back to and remember the freckles that maybe- possibly- gave him the first spark when he met shane.
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