Title: Scalene

Author: Bernie

Pairing: Sergei Fedorov / Ilya Kovalchuk

Rating: R mentions of slash, drug taking

Summary: A romantic heart still glows on the horizon of a souring world view.  From a review of a Steve Earle CD.

 

links to other parts You really do need to read the first two for this to make sense

A/N's "Avery" Darren McCarty's daughter

"Isabella" Steve Yzerman's daughter.

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Murzik dear

Vozlyubleny sweetheart, or beloved

 

*           *

 

Valentine’s day reminds Sergei of Ilya. It is the heaps of heart shaped chocolates everywhere. When he steps out of his car to pay for gas there are greasy packets of plastic looking candies wrapped in grimy pink and white bows. 

 

When he walks into the convenience store there is chocolate all around him in heart shaped boxes. They are pink and white, and have protective covers shielding their sweet offerings from prying fingers.

 

In the boxes, the candy-shapes are arranged like the spots on a butterfly's wing. Red and yellow and blue balanced on either side, like a butterfly kept under glass.

 

It has been a long time since Sergei has bothered with Valentine’s Day. In the past he remembers - if not exactly caring about Valentines Day- at least going through the motions.

 

The last couple of years Sergei had brought chocolates for Avery and Isabella, all the players taking in chocolates for the daughters of other players. But for a moment all this candy around him reminds Sergei of Ilya, and his sweet tooth.

 

He had considered buying some. In the drug store he had paused for long moments in front of the red and pink display, but in the end had decided not to. Or in a daze had simply passed the display without paying attention to where his feet were taking him. He had stared for just as long at the milk, hypnotized by one percent or two percent, dazzled by the bread, by fifteen types of bagels, by a million types of orange juice that creep up to the ceiling is towering piles of packaging that is green and red and pink and blue and painful to stare at in the flickering fluorescent lights.

 

Sergei feels blinded, tricked into a fantasyland made up of food. He stumbles backwards, against walls made of chips and peanuts and makes for the cash register girl who is stacked cupcakes and sparkling frosting, wishing him luck in his game and taking his money.

 

Sergei escapes to the outdoors.

 

In the end he had forgotten what it was he had wanted and had just grabbed what was closest, and when he threw everything in his car he saw he had purchased a packet of little hearts in silver foil.

 

They are stupidly tiny, Sergei thinks. They are annoyingly sliver. They are horribly chocolate.

 

In his car Sergei flicked through radio stations, adjusted his seat, discarding every CD he had with him before finally driving home.

 

His house is white, and closed, and quiet. Sergei walks through all the rooms, turning on the radio and the television, the lights and the lamps, until the darkness begins to retreat. The air is filled with the smell of the coffee machine clicking to life, the red light of the answering machine; a blinking reminder of the outside world that Sergei ignores.

 

In the kitchen he collapses into one of the chairs. This is the worst time of the year. Not the stupid day, or the vile damp weather, or the long season, but everything. Sleeping only a few hours between practice and plane rides, the injuries that have turned from nagging to serious, the teammates who are sick of each other, the ending that has never been closer but could not be further away. Sergei’s world is collapsing in on itself, and even as he fights to keep them open he can feel his eyes closing.

 

He rests his head on the table, and he watches the coffee dripping down into a black alert pool. And he knows if he could get up he could have a cup, and it would slide down his throat as bitter lovely wakefulness.

 

The television blares and Sergei tries to concentrate of the words, but they are a sweet lulling rhythm of their own, win, lose, win, lose, play again.

 

The windows, the half that is visible underneath the yellow curtains, are clouding and fogging with condensation. From his pillowed arms his house looks so bright and homey. Sergei thinks it looks so alive and beautiful. Condensations drips down the window to fill the ledge with icy white puddles.

 

It is this image of coffee and condensation, black and white, and hot and cold, that Sergei holds onto. What he sees behind his eyelids even as these things slowly fade away. When Sergei opens his eyes again he is still in the kitchen, the coffee is sludge in the pot, the light bulbs have blown, and Sergei thinks there is an open window somewhere. It is cooler and he starts as he hears the chairs around him scraping across the floor.

 

He is not alone anymore. Although Sergei doesn’t open his eyes he can hear them talk as they sit around him. He can feel their snowy hands stroke his hair and tease him for being tired. He feels a pair of wintry lips press themselves to his hair saying 'hello'.

 

When he finally looks up they are conversing softly in Russian, with its harsh sounds and guttural moans. For a second Sergei thinks it is a different langue, there is no roll to the staccato sounds of his native tongue, and he can’t remember it they really spoke like this or if his memory is operating at the wrong speed.

 

Anna’s voice is like fingernails on a blackboard, and Pavel's is low moans and whimpers. Sergei listens closely; sure he has no idea what they are saying, that this conversation never happened, that they were never in his kitchen, sitting at his table, talking like this.

 

He finally picks up his head and looks at the two of them. The lighting does not suit Anna; she looks washed out in the grey pall. Her hair is pulled back too tightly, and Sergei notes with some satisfaction the lines forming around her eyes from too much tanning and sun.

 

Pavel’s skin is so pale it seems to glow in the kitchen, dragging all the light around him toward him so he can reflect it back. He is dazzling, he is magnetic, and Sergei imagines he can see moths beating their wings against the window trying to get to him, to the light they see. Even fairer still is the skin that can be seen at his neck and wrist. But the light accentuates all that is dark about him, the hard lines of his cheekbones, the deep canyons that have been carved out of his arms.

 

They are discussing dull things Sergei realizes finally. They are all, him included, trying to decide where to go for dinner. He hears his own voice thin and hesitant, quivering in the flickering darkness of the kitchen mediating between the two of them. They did have this conversation Sergei remembers, sitting here in the kitchen, they did say these things to each other with him playing referee, being the grown up voice between their bickering. The wine in front of Anna is so red it is black.

 

There are scratchy lines across this movie in Sergei’s memory; he wonders why this memory of all the others is being replayed. This boring sitting in kitchens and talking. It’s a like a tape played to many times so the dialogue fades in and out, the tape hisses and pops.

 

Anna sighs as she can’t get Pavel to agree with her choice of restaurant, she drags her finger around the rim of her wineglass making an odd echoing musical note. Pavel winces at the noise and still refuses to go to the club Anna had selected. Sergei sees her pout, her hand resting on the rim of the glass and as Sergei watches her fingernails lengthen and grow until they score lines on the sides of the glass. Little cracks forming on the skin of the wineglass and red wine beading on the sides of the goblet, bubbling and leaching down the stem onto the table. 

 

Her finger’s sharpen to points and form into needles, into syringes. Sergei watches her snake her hand across the table and slide her fingernails into the skin of Pavel’s wrist.

 

Sergei wakes up. He blinks into the sudden brightness of the kitchen, his neck sore from the angle he was resting on. He remembers Anna actually threw the glass at Pavel who ducked and laughed at her anger. She stormed out as Sergei had watched the red weeping down the walls. The last time, that was the very last time the three of them were together in this house.

 

Sergei stretches his arms over his head. He looks at the coffee, he looks longing at the other room, but falls asleep again before he can move.

 

It is a different kind of light that trails over Ilya. Loving light that stretches its warm hands over the planes of his back, over the soft unshaped contours of his body. It is delicate and muted, rosy light like from candles.

 

There are other hands and palms and fingers running over Ilya's body. Fingertips of another kind. Fingertips trailing over the warm blood covered bones of Ilya’s back. Reading the bumps and soft curves as Braille, exploring the flesh coloured fable of his body.

 

Fingers attached to smooth white skinned arms. Colourless skin covering porcelain bones.

 

Ilya rolls to his back; the delicate fingers trace the pattern of his heart across his chest, redoing the shape of his ribcage from the outside. There are starbursts of light in Ilya's eyes, an obvious flowering of desire and need settling across his features as long languid fingers spiral up his chest and pause, pressing, palm down onto his heart.

 

Ilya's cheeks are flushed vermillion and as his blood boils up into thick creamy lava in his veins, into clotted sluggishly moving tar. His heart can clearly be seen beating redly, crimsonly, wetly, against the prison of his ribs.

 

A brunette head bends over his chest, the sharp shards of his white teeth clearly visible in the flickering candelabras that light the room.

 

At first it appears as a perfect clean incision, four circles on Ilya's white flesh, the head moves slightly lower down, the teeth still embedded in the skin, tearing jagged hunks of meat and muscles up.

 

Blood drips from his mouth onto Ilya's stomach and Dany licks it up. His pointed tongue cleaning his pink lips white. Ilya lies gasping on the bed, watching as Dany’s head dips down to tease and nibble at the jagged opening.

 

"Share." Sergei looks at Dany, stretched possessively over Ilya on the bed. "Don't you want to share Sergei?"

 

Sergei leans forward and kisses Dany lightly. "I want Ilya." Sergei says back softly, licking across Dany's lips.

 

Sergei wakes up again, alone again in his warm yellow kitchen.  He remembers Ilya's voice breaking into that dream.

 

“You were saying my name.” He turns to the voice in the room and sees Ilya sitting on the bed Indian style, with his blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

 

“Why were you saying my name? Who were you telling to stop?” Ilya sounds less accusatory and more half asleep.

 

Sergei blinks and looks at Ilya carefully. “Go back to sleep” he finally mutters. “I just drank to much before I went to sleep." And although he can feel Ilya staring Sergei rolls over and pretends to sleep. Finally he does drift off as he feels Ilya curling up against his back. 

 

He has never dreamed of Ilya before, of something that did not happen. "Share" he thinks, Dany would not share Ilya he made that clear. Sergei does not share himself with anyone. He stumbles around the house, finally collapsing in his bedroom.

 

He can't fall asleep so he stares at the ceiling, without looking at the television screen he keeps his finger on the up button on the remote so the picture flickers on the screen and the colours being reflected on his ceiling explode like fireworks.

 

They have no pattern and no shape. They can never be repeated and are gone before Sergei can burn them onto his memory.

 

He turns the clock radio on his bed stand on, listening to the midnight sports show. He shivers, his room is freezing is blazingly hot, he collapses back against the bed, sulking, staring at the ceiling,

 

Sergei spent the night before Valentines Day with Ilya. The young man had discovered the chocolates in the refrigerator next to the milk. Sergei had assumed he had eaten them then, but that night lying in bed Ilya peeled off the foil and smeared the chocolate over Sergei chest, licking the sticky raspberry filling off of Sergei.

 

They share a too-sweet too-sticky kiss.

 

“You should not have had those,” Sergei teases gently, “I think they have liquor in them.”

 

And Ilya laughs, a low dark sound in his throat, “I will not tell if you don’t murzik.” His sweet breath blows over Sergei’s mouth, too much sugar making Sergei’s teeth ache.

 

Sweetness that Sergei remembers few days later when Ilya is clinging to him.

 

“Dany has someone." Ilya sobs.

 

“Dany is in love.” Ilya whispers between gulping breaths.

 

“Dany says this person is the one.” Ilya cries softly the wet straw of his eyelashes brushing Sergei's neck. Sergei does not know what to tell him, so says nothing as the white rain of Ilya’s tears fall on him. 

 

It does not seem so unusual to Sergei to be comforting someone complaining about the person they really love, or really want.  Pavel often babbled about Eric, or Gino, or a hundred other people. Never Anna, which would have annoyed her. But her, bitching about tennis and respect and Pavel never calling, amateurishly trying to get information about a Pavel she did not know at all.

 

She was even more of a baby that Ilya Sergei realises with a start. Even younger. He feels Ilya’s sigh, sopping wet against his cheek, and he pulls him closer. He realises as he does it that he is cradling Ilya exactly as you would a child. He is horrified, the taste of Ilya’s tears dripping into his mouth like vinegar when Ilya kisses him. He can feel them sliding his throat. He tries not to gag, tries not to kiss Ilya’s neck, and tries not to breath in to deeply the embalming smell of his salty weeping.

 

Ilya can remember the conversation, in which he managed not to break down in tears in front of Dany.

 

"He was really happy." Ilya says softly. It is early in the morning, still night for most people, who would not be up, but of course Sergei is.

 

"Really, bright eyed, and happy."

 

"That is very unfair." Sergei says to the top of Ilya's head.

 

"I listened to him." Ilya whispers. "Telling me all about this person. Telling me about being in love and being compete."

 

"I know." Sergei replies softly.

 

"Go to sleep." He tells Ilya, stroking his hair. "It will all be better in the morning."

 

"Won't." Ilya replies closing his eyes and shaking his head.

 

"Will too." Sergei smiles.

 

"Won't." Ilya insists smiling despite himself.

 

"Will too. I promise." Sergei has no idea why he felt compelled to add that, Ilya is practically a sleep anyone and probably didn't even hear it.

 

Sergei sits protectively over Ilya sleeping.

 

‘Sleeping like a baby.’ He thinks, bemused, why did he only realise how young Ilya is. The disgust is gone, replaced by wonder. Ilya’s face is an unmarked map. There is only the promise of lines, frowns of concentration on his forehead.

 

He images Ilya with someone else, someone to flood Ilya with sweetness, to protect him.

 

Sergei slips off the bed, wrapping a bathrobe over his shoulders he walks outside in the snow. He doesn’t even feel it around him; he can still feel Ilya’s tears on his cheeks although they would be ice by now. Everything is bright and glowing, Sergei feels the snow burning his feet with its iron cold and revels in the sensation. He lets his disgust with sleeping with someone thirteen years younger than him fill his body again.

 

He laughs then, the sound tinkling, and echoing off the stalactites of ice growing from his eves. When Sergei opens his mouth and breathes in he can feel snow and cold and the air slide down his throat, like long knives piercing his chest and digging deep into his heart.

 

Thirteen years is a long time, it is the lifetime he has spent in America. He is a lifetime away from the Pavel he first met and fell in love with. The first Pavel, the untouched, pure-as-snow Pavel, who ended up breaking his heart.

 

There are thin slices of glass in Sergei's heart. Syringes, filled with clear liquid. "What do you want Pavel?"

 

The clean snow is like a movie screen where Sergei can see the past playing it's film over and over and over again.

 

Sergei sees his face looking at Pavel in the dark.

 

His best friend, his oldest friend, the friend of his heart turns dreamy cloudy eyes on him.

 

"Anything." Pavel laugh softly and crawls over the bed to where Sergei is sitting.

 

"I want anything and everything. I wanted to be out of Russia and I am. I want to be rich and I am. I want to play hockey and I am. I want you and I have you."

 

Pavel smiles. "Do you want what I have? Do you want what I want?"

 

"I want you Pavel." Sergei replies.

 

"Well," Pavel's smile becomes greedily coy, "you can have other things as well."

 

Sergei watched him, crawl over the bed to the table and collect sharp and glittery objects. Twist his arm around and slide the needle into the vein.

 

And not knowing what to expect Sergei felt blank and separate and further away from Pavel than before. This was it, this vague nothingness? This unconnectedness? This unfeeling, this unattached low cloud? This is what Pavel had ruined lives and hearts and friends for? For this. Sergei slept poorly that night and did not dream.

 

He woke up early and quietly freaked out in the silence of Pavel's house. And he has felt that way ever since.

 

Sergei could have told Pavel, would have if only he had known, that you could become disconnected more quickly, and more cheaply in ways that are not chemical induced. Breath in deep the cloying sweet scent of betrayal and loss, and breath out everything you had. And then inside you is nothing. No feeling, no past no future, no breath to share.

 

Sometimes, randomly, unbidden Sergei will look down to his arms, even though he could be fully clothed, sitting on the bench in the middle of a game and see Pavel's head leaning over his elbow softly licking up small bubble of blood that that syringe left on his skin. He can feel the grate of Pavel's tongue across his exposed nerves and his frame become over sensitized, and breathing in sends a quiet shudder of sensation that racks his body.

 

He feels that, shaking. The whisper of disquiet like when someone walks over your grave. A sudden sense that spider fingers are wiggling up his skin, that butterflies beating their wings against his neck, fluttering under his chin.

 

There is no one else around him, it is early in the morning and everyone else in the world is tucked up in bed. For the first time in a long time Sergei feels alone. For the first time in a long time he wishes he were not.

 

For something to do, and because he is to scared to go back in the house and terrified by who he will find in there Sergei draws Ilya's name in the snow with his toes. He draws Pavel's and Anna's and they are frozen in time. Very slowly Sergei sweeps snow over all the names, so they can't be seen, even though he suspects were he to get down on his knees and paw through the drifts the names would still be there. White on white, blonde on blonde.

 

"You're freezing." Ilya stands behind Sergei feeling his body shake from the tremors of the cold inside him.

 

"Yes." Sergei replies and laughs lightly. His hands shake as he pours coffee into the cup he is holding.

 

"Do I get some of that?" Ilya looks over Sergei's shoulder as he puts the coffee pot down.

 

"No." Sergei smiles and runs cold fingers across Ilya's face. "You are too young to drink."

 

"I am old enough to have done many things." Ilya smiles, "why do you think I am too young?"

 

"Because you are very young. Very precious, but very young."

 

"When you get too cold do you say weird things like being drunk? Ilya asks laughing, "why did you go outside like that, you should know snow is cold, you're Russian."

 

Sergei just laughs at this wrapping his hands around the coffee mug and not quite managing to drink it with his shaking hands.

 

"Stop laughing." Ilya smiles but he looks worried, "come and have a shower with me, my flight leaves soon."

 

Sergei lets himself be pulled into the shower, doesn’t wince at the water that is to hot, submits to the feeling of Ilya's hands on him.

 

"Would you tell me…?" Ilya stops and throws water over his face. "Never mind."

 

"Tell you what?" Sergei asks idly

 

“What is it like to be in love?”

 

“What?” Sergei turns to Ilya, “why are you asking that question?”

 

“I…” Ilya focuses on the wall slightly above and to the side of Sergei’s eyes.

 

“Haven’t you been in love?” Sergei asks.

 

"I thought I had been in love." Ilya shrugs. He puts his warm hand against Sergei's still cold chest. "You still have snow on your robe. What are you going to wear?"

 

"Nothing, seeing as it is about three feet to my bed." Sergei tugs Ilya against him. "Why did you ask that?"

 

“I thought I was, but now I am not so sure. Dany is rooming with Shawn now, Slava and I are together. He and Igor are definitely in love.”

 

Sergei half-smiles at the way Ilya’s nose wrinkles up a little bit when he says this.

 

“Oh yes, they are.”

 

"And Dany thinks he is in love with Simon."

 

“And you Sergei?”

 

“Am I in love? No, not anymore, or maybe more in love with the past with the love than the love itself.”

 

“>Can you say that in Russian so it makes sense<?”

 

Sergei feels his smile get a little bit bigger with this. “>It doesn’t make sense in any language.< Just because you’re questioning it, doesn’t mean you weren’t in love, it just means, that it’s over.”

 

“And the past is the past?” Ilya asks, leaning against Sergei and leaning against his cold neck.

 

“Yes.” Sergei replies. "Come to bed."

 

They stand for a moment in the bedroom as Sergei sheds the towel he had put on, feeling pins and needles as the blood ran back to his skin as Ilya briskly runs the skin of his arms, laughing at the goosebumps.

 

"Bed." Sergei turns up the heat in the room slightly and pulls Ilya to him under the covers.

"I have to catch a plane." Ilya says softly allowing himself to be pushed onto the bed, watching Sergei turn up the heat.

 

Ilya puts his hand over the tattoo on Sergei’s arm, blackly there, like a scar, like an accusation, like a memory that should be buried in the past.

 

“I do like you.” Ilya whispers sleepily.

 

“I like you to.” Sergei half-smiles again and kisses the top of Ilya’s head.

 

Ilya looks up and grins. “You are so cute when you smile.”

 

Sergei actually blushes a little bit but kisses Ilya again. “Thank you. You’re cute too.”

 

"Let me." Ilya whispers, sliding his warm hands down Sergei. Kissing down his body, his hot breath sliding across Sergei's chest.

 

On him and inside of him, Sergei lies back against the bed, feeling Ilya hot and scalding inside of him. It is just flickers of sensation, not adding up to much. Ilya whispers in Sergei's ear, that he is going to stay, that practice is optional.

 

It is on the tip of Sergei’s tongue to remind Ilya to not fall in love with him but instead says, "please stay" even though he thinks Ilya seems to have fallen asleep, leaning against Sergei by the bed.

 

Holding Ilya in his arms Sergei feels a weird flutter, but thinks it must be Ilya’s breath on his chest and pushes the hair on Ilya’s face back from his eyes.

 

Sergei rolls onto his back, pulling Ilya with him and stares at the ceiling again, his ceiling, but he is not really seeing it, or much of anything. He is not even seeing the past, though he hasn’t realised it yet.

 

He feels the weird flutter again. In his chest, a burn, a wince, and he drifts into his own light sleep, in the pale room that is warm from the heat turned up. 

 

In his sleep Sergei rolls to his side and Ilya rolls with him, so they are breathing into each other’s mouths, Ilya’s sweet tangy breath filling Sergei's nose. Although his dreams are fitful and threaten to turn again to the past Sergei dreams mostly that he is driving in the countryside in spring with the top down in his car.

 

He isn't in Russia or America, he is in Mexico, with Popocatepetl in the background.

 

And the weird noise, the strange sensation, is like changing gears badly in a car. He can feel Ilya laugh beside him, put his hand over Sergei's, and smoothly put the car in gear.

 

Sergei feels the sensation again as Ilya rolls against him, as his arms tighten around Sergei in his sleep as his own Ilya-dreams take their usual shape of skating and hockey and feeling the wind blow in his hair.

 

And as Sergei rolls onto his back, sleeping so deeply that he will miss practice for the first time ever for sleeping in, the weird fizzing in his chest almost wakes him up.

 

He scratches the smooth skin over his chest, feeling the steady rhythm of his heart and Ilya's pulse in the wrist draped on his waist. Really he is so beautiful when he smiles.

 

End.

 

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