The haunted happiness of Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander. They are teammates, lovers, spouses, winners, business partners, icons. Later, after retirement, they are hall-of-famers, philanthropists, Ottawa celebrities, coaches, trainers, parents. They're good to the people in their lives and they're good to each other. They love each other beyond reason and beyond sense. They fuck like rabbits into old age and build a life that every queer person deserves to have. They beat the odds. They prove that you can have it all.
So why do they feel like someone is watching them?
It's Ilya, white knuckled, staring into the bathroom mirror because he sees himself standing behind him in the mist of the shower, blood on his face and something that looks like the jagged remnants of an airplane armrest sticking out of his side. His wrists are a bloody mess of an open wound. There's white powder under his nose and someone else's wedding ring on his right ring finger. His other self is a mess of gore. Harm done to him and harm done to himself. His other self never learned. His other self is nothing more than the sum of a bad childhood and patched-up life, never enough to help him rise from the darkness. A swift and violent end. Blink and he's gone. At least it's fast. Ilya had always thought his life would be fast.
It's Shane, going for a run and suddenly feeling more out of breath than usual. He stops, clutching his chest, trying to breathe evenly. Yoga breathing. But it doesn't matter because the other version of himself is still running, picking up the pace to nearly a sprint. His other self can't stop. He has to win and perfect his form and win and beat his own scoring record and win and get married and win and be a husband be a father be the best be the thing he's always striven to be. He's always had goals. His other self achieved all of Shane's goals. His other self cannot stop running. Shane clutches his chest. His other self has chest pains all the time, but he can't stop to assess them. His other self dies before he can before he can see it coming. His other self dies slowly, while going so fast. Shane feels himself die.
These deaths are more real than their lives, some days. Some days they look at each other and wonder, who are you? What are you doing in my life? When will it all go back to normal? When will I die instead of living a beautiful, wonderful life?
Shane takes Ilya's hands in one moment like this. He puts one on his waist and one on the back of his neck. He presses Ilya's knuckles, encouraging him to squeeze, to bunch up Shane's skin and muscle in his hand.
"Need me, sweetheart?" Ilya asks, soft and toneless.
"Yup," Shane says, eyes open, taking in their reality. "Need you."
They don't know that the other sees death all the time. They don't tell each other that the alternative to living life apart is death.
Instead, they breathe. They press their rings together and know, that in this life, they made the right choices. They breathe again. The thought of another fork in the road, of a sloppy choice made wrong, makes it hard to breathe some days. Some days they can taste the loneliness of their other selves. After all, they outnumber them by infinite amounts.
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