Chapter Text
It was far too quiet, and his head was killing him. Those were all the thoughts that Ilya could muster. There was no hum of the locker room, no thuds of pucks, no chirping from the back of the bus. There was only a rhythmic, mechanical hiss-click and the odd smell of ozone and disinfectant. Something was wrong.
He forced his eyes open. The bright light was so aggressive. Where was he? Why was he here? He wasn’t in a hotel room. He was in a room that seemed to be made of beige plastic and stainless steel. A hospital room. What the fuck? Had he gotten laid out in the Raleigh game? No. No, that couldn’t be. They had won. He remembered that. Four to one. Troy had his best game in a long time. They had been in the locker room, celebrating. He had a shower. And then…then what? The last thing he remembered was making it onto the bus. They had been heading to the airport.
“Ilya? Rozanov? Can you hear me?” Ilya turned his head, and it felt like his neck was full of rusted gears. His head burned, and his vision swam, but he blinked it away. Sitting by the bed was Jim Benson. Ilya had only met him once. Jim was the Assistant General Manager of the Centaurs. Jim looked like shit. No other way to say it. His suit was wrinkled and unkempt, as if he had been wearing it for days. His eyes were bloodshot with deep, dark circles, and he was holding a stack of folders with trembling hands. He seemed surprised but relieved that Ilya was looking at him. Jim ran his fingers through his short brown hair. He looked like he was about to cry.
“Jim, why are you here?” Ilya was so fucking confused. Make any part of this make sense.
“Ilya, you were in an accident,” he said softly. Fuck, thought Ilya. I’m being told I’m benched for the rest of the season. But why send Jim? Why not Coach Wiebe? And one of the team trainers? Why the fuck was Jim here? He needed to call Shane.
“Accident?”
The tears in Jim’s eyes really started to well up. “Fuck, I don’t even know where to start, Rozanov.” He wiped his eyes roughly with the back of his hand. “We’re in Savannah, Georgia. This is the ICU. You just got out of ten hours of surgery.”
“Surgery?” Ilya felt like a moron just repeating Benson’s words, but he was having a hard time with his English at the moment. Ilya went to lift his arm and realized he couldn’t. His right arm was stretched out next to him, encased in a total forest of metal. Pins and rods were jutting grotesquely from his skin, which was mottled red and purple. The whole thing was held together in a carbon-fiber frame. It looked like some kind of engineering project, not his arm.
“My hand,” Ilya whispered, looking at it. His panic began to bubble up, and he felt his heart begin to race.
“Ilya, it’s…it’s going to be fine,” Benson tried to reassure him, but it didn’t seem to reach his eyes.
“What the fuck happened?” Ilya asked in horror.
“There was a mechanical issue with the plane.” With a jolt, Ilya remembered the shock and the flip of his stomach as the plane dropped in the sky.
“Where are the boys?” Ilya asked.
“Ilya, is there someone you want us to call? You have a brother?”
“No.” He waved his good hand dismissively. “Where are the boys? Coach?”
Jim made direct eye contact with him. Ilya felt sick. “Listen, Ilya. You’re on a lot of drugs right now. But we need to do this. You need to know.” He pulled out some papers from one of the folders he had been clutching like his life depended on them. “The flight from Raleigh to Tampa was carrying forty-eight people,” Jim began. His voice took on a flat, robotic tone. It was like he was reading his grocery list. “Twenty-three rostered players, seven coaching staff. Six medical or athletic training staff. Four equipment managers. Three office staff. Five flight crew.” He paused for a moment. “Does that sound correct to you?”
“Probably.” Ilya was so uneasy that he really thought he was going to throw up. A nurse stepped into the room but stayed by the door. Ilya realized she was there in case he did throw up.
“Do you remember any part of the flight?”
“The flight was, how you say, turbulent.” He hated how his language skills took a nosedive when he was tired, stressed…under the influence. And this circumstance felt like all of the above.
“Yes. Turbulent. Okay.” Benson looked like he was trying to find the words as well. “The airplane lost one of its engines,” he started again. “The debris from the engine caused significant damage to the wing and tail of the plane.” Jim swallowed heavily. “The pilots attempted an emergency landing just off Altamaha Sound. It was,” a tear rolled down his round cheek, “Unsuccessful.”
Ilya had no words. The silence was heavy. After what felt like a lifetime, Jim continued. He was reading off one of the pieces of paper. “At this time, the recovery team has accounted for forty-seven victims.” Ilya felt like his heart stopped at the word victim. Forty-seven victims. Forty-eight on the plane.
“Forty-seven,” Ilya repeated.
“Ilya, it’s everyone. They’re all gone.” He began to sob. Ilya mentally catalogued all the people who would have been on that plane. Bood. Troy. Haas. Haas was practically a child. Hayes. Coach Wiebe. Harris. The dam broke, and Ilya began to sob with him.
After several minutes of just sitting there weeping, Jim stammered, “They found you 400 yards from the main wreckage. Your arm was pinned, but you were there. It’s a miracle, Ilya. You’re a miracle.”
“Some fucking miracle.” He spat, the word tasting like bile. He looked at his ruined arm. He tried to wiggle his fingers. Nothing. He was so incredibly panicked, but tried to pull himself together. “What do we do?” he said. In challenging situations, his father was always pragmatic. Although he was harsh and brutal, it was one thing he admired about the man.
“We need to release a statement.”
“How long has it been since the accident?”
Jim checked his watch. “About 20, 21 hours. Nearly a day.”
“What do people know?”
“We are contacting the families. We have said that there was an accident, but have not provided any additional information.”
“You will have to say what happened.”
“Yes.”
“You will have to say it is only me.”
“Yes.”
“They are all dead.”
“Yes.” Ilya broke down again, hot tears coming down his face. He didn’t even attempt to wipe them away. “Please let me call someone for you,” Jim pleaded.
“Where is my phone?” Ilya gasped, panicked.
“I don’t know. They don’t know where much of anything is yet.”
Ilya tried to sit up, but it seemed like his entire right side was a mess. The external halo held his arm in place, but his leg also seemed firmly useless. “Get me a phone,” Ilya snapped. “Please,” he added.
“Just tell me who. I’ll get them here.”
Ilya sighed. “Shane Hollander.”
Jim seemed confused, but let it roll off. “I will get Hollander here.” Ilya suddenly felt the need to make excuses.
“The charity. He will be worried.” Ilya knew it was a flimsy excuse, but now that they had started playing the respectful friend angle, it would be the most understandable.
“I’ll take care of it.” Jim stood, and the nurse at the back of the room opened the door for him.
“The doctor would like to talk to you about your injuries,” she said softly.
“Is fine,” Ilya said. He was already feeling wrung out. Benson had said it would be fine, right? A man in a white coat entered. He didn’t look like one of the team doctors Ilya usually worked with. He didn’t have that “get back on the ice” energy that Ilya was more accustomed to. His doctors were used to taping guys together and sending them back out. This guy looked like he would be appalled by that attitude.
“Mr. Rozanov, I’m Dr. Arren.” He pulled up a rolling stool to the bedside and looked into Ilya’s eyes. “I know you have been given an immense amount of information, but I need to walk you through what’s happening with your body. Before I continue, do you want me to notify a translator? The medical stuff can be tricky.”
Ilya stared at the ceiling. “Is fine. Benson said I was fine. When can I leave?”
“Mr. Rozanov, you aren’t leaving here for a while.” Dr. Arren said firmly. “When you were in the accident you were in a brace position. Your head was down, your arms were protecting your neck, you had your feet planted. This saved your life, but also meant that you had some injuries. Your hip…your femur got pushed backward out of the socket. The good news is that it was a clean dislocation - no fractures to the bone, but the ligaments were very strained. I don’t want you to put any weight on it for a couple weeks.”
Ilya grunted at him. Sure. Dislocations could be bad, but he’d seen guys come back from those. “What else?” he said tightly.
Dr. Arren’s face tightened. “The concussion, of course.” Ilya frowned at him.
“I do not care about the concussion.” No, he cared about the arm.
“The arm is a…bigger issue.” He pulled up an X-ray on the iPad that was frankly horrific. During the impact, and what we believe was a slide afterward, your arm was caught between your seat and part of the airplane’s cabin. Your arm was crushed. The radius and ulna - the two bones in your forearm - they shattered. It’s what we call a comminuted fracture. Basically, your bone turned into gravel. I won’t lie to you. It’s not easy to come back from these.” Ilya felt nauseous as he thought of being dragged along the ground…hundreds of meters.
Ilya looked at the carbon fiber frame and the pins disappearing into his swollen purple skin. If he hadn’t been able to see it was part of his own arm, he wouldn’t have believed it. Dr. Arren continued. “You can see the external fixator. Sometimes we call it a halo. We couldn’t use plates or a normal cast because the bones are too small to work with normally. We have to hold your bones there, and once they heal up, we can talk about other options.”
Ilya swallowed heavily. “How long?”
“At least twelve weeks. Maybe longer.” Ilya sighed. 12 weeks was long, but was just the rest of the season. He would be fine. But there was another issue.
“Why does my hand not move?” Now it was Dr. Arren’s turn to sigh.
“That is the most difficult part of this. There is a nerve that runs right along the bone in your arm. The radial nerve. In the crash, that nerve was pinched. It took them several hours to find you and extract you from the wreckage,” Dr. Arren said softly. “In that time, you were pinned under the weight for hours. You have what we call a wrist drop. The nerve isn’t able to talk to the muscles that lift your hand or move your fingers.”
“You will fix this?” Ilya’s voice was small. He knew the answer.
“A nerve is not like a bone. We did everything we could in your initial surgery. The nerve is intact. It’s not severed anywhere. This means there is some hope, Ilya.” He gave Ilya a small smile. “I don’t want to promise any miracles. But the nerve may start to wake up in some weeks or months, or it may never. We will have to wait and see.”
The room felt like it tilted. Everything was spinning. Never. A hockey captain who would never be able to hold a stick again. “I need to play,” Ilya whispered. “For them.” He didn’t know where those words came from.
“Right now, we need to focus on healing one day at a time. I’m moving you out of the ICU. There’s no reason for you to be here anymore. You are in much better shape than any of us expected. We had no idea what you would be like until you woke up. Focus on that.”
He gave Ilya what was probably supposed to be a reassuring pat on the leg, but Ilya just felt numb, the weight of the grief and the injury being too much. The doctor left, and all that was left was the hiss-click of the machines. He closed his eyes, picturing Haas, Troy, Wiebe and the others, overwhelmed with the fact that these men were not just in the next room recovering from their own scrapes. Ilya didn’t think of himself as particularly religious, but he began to pray for this terrible nightmare to end.