Sveta comes out to visit the cottage for a weekend sometime in August post-wedding. She is NOT enamoured with the Canadian wilderness, but Ilya has been campaigning to get her out of the United States for awhile and this is likely step two or three of an exhaustive plan so she's letting it happen. She doesn't know if she's going to let him convince her to move to fucking Ottawa of all the fucked places but she's curious to see him try.
And they are sitting around Shane Hollander's fucking fire pit, and Ilyusha has his head on his husband's shoulder, which is nice to witness and cute enough that Sveta snaps a picture of them. She wasn't allowed to have these sorts of pictures on her phone for a very long time and she likes seeing her friend this way. She likes it just as much as the blurry images she recieves from Sasha living his best life in Paris, pinned between beautiful people of every gender. She likes it just as much as the pictures her mother sends her whenever she's in Detroit and sends Sveta pictures of her aunts and cousins and dogs all made up in hats.
She hasn't hardly swallowed the last of the wine in her glass when Shane leans over and tips the bottle towards her. She's been waited on hand and foot since arriving here--a natural consequence of one of the homeowners being her childhood best friend and the other being that friend's husband, who is still mildly afraid of her.
Shane discovers that the bottle is empty when only a trickle exits into Svetlana's glass. He tilts it up and says, "Oh, we have another."
Ilya rises from the couch with the energy of a ressurected corpse. "I'll get it," he says, waving at both of them to stay sitting. "No, don't get up, I'll--sit down, Hollander."
Sveta elected, long ago, to ignore the way that Shane lets Ilya boss him around. She can read between the lines and that's none of her business--at least not until she can put Ilyusha between herself and Sasha and interrogate him about it, preferably somewhere within earshot of Shane Hollander and his easy blushes.
Shane still looks a little dazed when he says, "It must be weird for you. To see him like this."
"I have seen Ilyusha drunk many times."
"No, I mean, like...here?"
"In Canada? I can't really say I saw it coming, no."
"No, like..." Shane sighs, shifts in his seat. "I dunno. Settled, I guess? Married. It must be weird to you that he, like, got married."
Sveta opens her mouth and barks out a single, harsh laugh that scares a bird on the lake into flight.
Shane jumps in his seat and says, "Okay, I get that it's funny, but--"
"Shane Hollander," Sveta says, leaning over the arm of the admittedly very comfortable patio chair she's sprawled over. "You think I'm surprised that Ilya got married? Ilya Rozanov?"
Let it never be said that Shane Hollander doesn't rise to a challenge (Nobody has ever said this; he is the most competitive person on the continent) because he levels his eyes at her and says, "Yes."
Sveta barks another laugh at the sky. So many fucking stars out here.
"Let me tell you a story." She turns herself to face Shane, empty wine glass cradled to her chest, bundled into her (very nice, purposefully and fashionably frumpy) sweater. "There was this roaving band of girls in our neighborhood. Fucking feral. And we would meet up on this playground. Ilyusha would be there with his mother and I would be there with my nanny and the girls--I don't know. Anyway, he was the only boy. The things they made him do, Shane. Their favorite game was to make him lay on his back like a baby while they pretended to feed and rock him. They fed him grass."
"And one day he gets tired of being the baby and says, if we're going to play house, I should be the husband. And the girls say, okay Ilyusha. You can be all of our husband."
Shane huffs out a laugh, and visibly considers the repercussions of being jealous of a band of young Russian children from the previous century, and then laughs again.
"I think I was worried, maybe, you know. Because even at that age, I had some idea how some Russian men thought of being a husband." Svetlana lets the thought percolate for a moment, souring the story just slightly. "But Ilya just starts saying, Hello my beautiful wives. I'm back from work at the factory. How nice to come home to my beautiful wives. On and on. Oh how I love my beautiful wives! I will use my factory money to buy you all beautiful coats!"
"He did not," Shane says, but he's got most of his fist in his mouth at this point, just fucking gnawing as he pretends not to be charmed. Or maybe is just very, very charmed.
"And for years after, he would call those girls his wives. He remembered their birthdays every year. He cosigned on an apartment for one of them while she was unemployed. Another, I think he still pays for her mother's medical treatments."
Shane smiles a melancholy, sweet smile at the fire. "He's...a good guy. A great guy."
"Yeah. But that's...that's just how he is." Shane shrugs. "But, you know, none of that really has anything to do with--"
"Let me tell you another story," Sveta says, interrupting the spiral. "I love my father, yes? He always treated me well. My mother never had anything bad to say about him, he never said anything bad about her. I'm a very lucky girl, to have a good papa like him."
"Sure," Shane says, easily, because he was also a child whose father kissed and hugged him.
"But his best friend was Grigory Rozanov. Who was...not so."
"I wasn't around Grigory all the time. Or even a lot. But whenever I was, and I heard the way he spoke to his women--Irina, later Polina--Ilya would get this look on his face. Mad, yes, but also embarrassed. He would look at me like he wished I wasn't there to see it. And every time he would say, I'm sorry about that."
Shane glances over his shoulder, probably anticipating Ilya's return. Sveta somehow gets the feeling that he'll return exactly once she's said what needs saying.
"The first time he came back to Moscow after moving to the US, he said to me..." Sveta purses her lips, because this makes her emotional, and she doesn't very much like being emotional. "He said that the world was far too cruel to walk through it alone. And that he didn't know why people were so cruel to the person they had chosen to walk through it with." She tilts her head, meets Shane Hollander's eyes. "He said...I have always told myself I will have the strength not to be cruel."
Shane's eyes are catching the firelight in a new, specific way.
"And as you know," Sveta says, tone lighter. "Ilya Rozanov is one of the strongest people on this fucking planet."
"Would you excuse me?" Shane mumbles, scrambling out of his seat.
Sveta nods, and winks in the direction of the pale-eyed shadow that's been looming over the kitchen counter this whole time, and never does get her refill of wine.
