Chapter Text
Shane almost trips over the man he brings home that night.
He’d left town later than he meant to. He’d gotten caught up at the docks, with Troy, fussing over one of his double-enders. The first of the salmon won’t start running until late spring, so now was the ideal time to take out the boats and check for wear and tear accrued during winter storage.
Barrett’s boat was fine. He’s so attuned with them that Shane believes he would have caught any issue before the boats got dragged down to the marina in the first place, but he still needs to examine them for his own peace of mind. Shane had gotten conscripted into helping, though he would have volunteered if Troy had asked. He knows that Troy trusts his eye, and these boats have become familiar enough to Shane in the last few years that he’d be able to find the smallest defect almost as fast as Troy.
When there were no flaws to be found, Troy decided he wanted to clean the hull and deck. A chore they’d all helped him do before the boats were put away for winter, but Shane was happy to give it a second pass.
Then the time had gotten away from Shane, Rose had convinced him to eat something hot at the inn with her, the Pikes and J.J. had swung by, and then it was dark by the time Shane was walking home.
He sticks to the pebbled coastline, a path he knows well, which is why he’s not looking at where he’s putting his feet. He sees the unidentifiable mass ahead of him but doesn’t think anything of it. Logs wash up on this stretch of beach all the time.
When he draws near and the lump makes a weak, pained gasp, Shane nearly gets tied up in his own feet out of surprise.
He catches himself, because all that time on the water has to be good for some sense of balance. Shane lowers himself to the ground in a controlled descent, blinking in the darkness, trying to focus his gaze enough to identify the shape beneath him.
It’s a man, not a hunk of pale driftwood like Shane had assumed. He’s all gooseflesh, curled up in on himself with long hair clung close to his scalp, soaked and speckled with sand. It’s overcast, there’s no moonlight, but Shane could swear he was glowing anyways.
He doesn’t respond to the press of Shane’s fingers to the side of his head. Shane pulls away almost as fast as he touches though, because the dampness on the side of the stranger’s head has heat, and a thickness that can’t be water. Shane confirms it when he brings his fingers to his nose and inhales, the scent of iron bitter and familiar.
A touch to his bare shoulder does nothing to rouse the man. Shane tries to come up with a plan as he wipes his bloody fingers on the rocks. All he knows is that this man is out in the cold, the dark, half-naked, injured, and alone. Abandoned, maybe.
And maybe he’s earned it. Shane doesn’t know his face, and the salmon aren’t running yet so town isn’t overrun with strangers. People don’t just come to Irina Bay. Especially not with their faces bashed in.
Shane shouldn’t be making this decision because he’s never been any good at reading people. But something in his gut has decided that whatever this man has done, he can’t have deserved this. Shane knows the world is full of monsters, and that some of them look beautiful until it’s too late, but he’d like to think that no one truly awful could look so innocent. The stranger’s eyes are closed and he’s cold, but there’s something in the set of his jaw, the way his brow is relaxed in unconsciousness, the plush press of his mouth as he faintly pants out breaths, that makes Shane decide he’s safe.
Safe enough, at least. That he doesn’t deserve to freeze to death, not when Shane’s cabin is so close, and he can at least warm him up and keep the tides from drowning him.
He knew the man was about his size when he went to lift him upright. Shane had forgotten how heavy someone got if they weren’t helping you carry them.
Shane looks down to adjust his hold and jerks his head away and upward as fast as he can.
The stranger had not washed up half-naked.
It’s fine. Shane’s seen other men naked all his life. Not a big deal. Working on fishing boats means long days and little privacy. Shane wouldn’t consider himself a particularly modest person.
It’s just this man. That he does not know. Who is limp in his arms and has blood in his hair. It’s one further layer of helplessness and it’s making something flare up in Shane that’s entwined with the embarrassment he feels on the stranger’s behalf.
He just needs to get him in his cabin and not look at him.
Shane doesn’t know where he finds the strength to get the man’s legs under him and in a safe hold to carry him, but it comes easy enough once he can get his brain to shut off. From there, he has to focus on walking on the uneven rocks that make up the beach, and that’s enough to distract him until Shane’s on his own doorstep.
Outside of fishing season he never locks his front door, so entry is easy at least. It’s once Shane gets inside the cabin that it occurs to him he doesn’t have anywhere to put the stranger.
There is his bed. But if Troy is going to have him on his hands and knees scrubbing cedar, Shane’s going to need every ounce of relief his mattress might provide.
Shane dumps him in a chair, draping one of the cleaner rags retrieved from his kitchen over his lap to offer some semblance of dignity. From there, Shane can move the rain gear he stores on his bench to the table and drag the bench towards the fireplace. He knows he shouldn’t fall asleep with the fire burning, but the stranger is so wet and cold Shane can’t leave him like that.
He gets a low fire going, bucket half full of seawater in reach so it can be put out easily later. Shane seems to accumulates quilts more than any other possession, so he uses one to cushion the hard surface of the wooden bench. He leans back to survey his work but finds his eyes pulled to the mystery man he’d dragged into his home.
Shane has clothes to spare. It’s not hot enough to sleep in linen, so he retrieves two cotton nightshirts. He frowns at the thought of getting blood on one of the shirts, on his bedding, and looks back to the stranger.
He selects the darker of the two shirts, partially fills a metal cup with some of his precious drinking water, and steals another rag from his pile. The faint glow of the fire is enough to illuminate the shape passed out in one of Shane’s chairs, detail easy to make out before he draws his other chair close.
Detail like the curve of his lips, his shockingly smooth skin, a mole Shane hadn’t noticed when they were in the dark. A few strange, circular scars dance down his neck, not as severe as the jagged one on his upper thigh.
Shane has lived a life too, there’s the scar on his shoulder and the ones littered on his hands from years of working on the ocean. He feels like there’s something more violent with the stranger’s scars, but maybe that has more to do with the tacky blood drying in his hair.
“Hey,” Shane says gently, as he presses a hand to the man’s arm. The flesh is warmer than when Shane picked him up, easy to tell even before Shane gives the muscle a squeeze to test for any sign of consciousness. “Hey, want to wake up for me?”
The man evidently does not. Shane dips the rag in the clean water and gets to work.
There’s a wound to the side of his face that Shane can make out now that he’s got his hair pushed out, carefully massaging the blood from where it’s tangled in his hair. He’s been struck, near his temple, by something with a sharp edge that’s torn the skin as well. Shane is going to need to find Dr. Hayes tomorrow, because he’s not sure if the wound needs stitches and doesn’t even have beer in the cabin to use as an antiseptic.
The rag stops darkening with blood, but Shane keeps gently rubbing the cloth to hair until he’s certain he’s gotten everything out that he can.
The stranger is still pretty damp, even with the low heat radiating from the fire, and Shane figures it’s time he gets over himself. He adds the rag and ruined cup of water to the growing clutter on the table before taking the one he’d placed in the man’s lap for modesty’s sake, and uses that to towel him dry. It’s not perfect, and Shane’s afraid of moving him too much will send him careening to the floor considering he’s still limp. He manages, and gets the man in the spare nightshirt one sleeve at a time, taking care to button it back up all the way to the top.
Clothed and less bloodied, Shane transports him to the bench. It’s easy to get him lying down and wrapped in a blanket. Shane watches the stranger’s face, counts his breaths as the rise and fall of his chest becomes steadier. He doesn’t think the wound on his temple is bleeding anymore.
Getting himself ready for bed is a well-traveled routine, though Shane had forgotten to take his shoes off when he dragged the stranger inside and is kicking himself for it now. He strips, is in his own nightshirt, when he checks on the man again.
The back of Shane’s hand to his forehead then his cheek confirms his worry, that the man is still colder than he’d like. His breathing is even, at least.
Shane’s eyes go to the fire, then to his own bed. He can stay up. Just a little while longer.
He retreats to the mattress, but doesn’t lie down. It’s silly, propped up against the wall and buried under blankets and fur, but this way Shane has line of sight on the lump under the blanket that is the battered stranger he’s let into his home. The fire too.
He’ll just stay up a little longer. Give the fire a bit more time to warm him up, then Shane will douse it and go to bed.
Just a little longer, he thinks, watching the faint shifting of the quilt that betrays the rise and fall of the stranger’s chest.
-
Shane hasn’t begun to adjust his sleep for the early mornings that fishing season demands, but he’s always up before dawn. It’s not usually with the press of metal to his throat.
He registers the weight of solid wood on his back before Shane realizes there’s a man in his bed, so he’s annoyed about how he’s going to probably be sore all day before his brain can catch up and remind him to be afraid.
It’s the stranger he brought inside last night, because of course it is, because Shane is no good at reading people and has no sense for danger. The man’s breathing is no longer steady, the flair of his nostrils would betray that even if Shane couldn’t see the rapid rise and fall of his chest, as he tries to keep one eye on Shane and seemingly take in the rest of the room.
Shane can see his chest because the man is naked again. Great.
“Hey,” Shane starts, and stops, because of the increase of pressure on his neck.
Shane wants to laugh when he looks down and realizes it’s his own skate being held to his throat. His mother was always admonishing him for not keeping his new skates at his parents’ house in the warmer months, said that hanging them on his wall made a poor decoration, that the sea air would corrode them.
He kept all his cutlery tucked away, the hatchet he chops firewood with hidden with the rest of the supplies that go to maintaining his home, any of his own gear he brings on the boats is in the trunk with his fishing clothes. The fire poker is the only thing in the cabin he’d ever worried about an intruder being able to turn against him, and he keeps that snug to the fireplace, hidden if you aren’t looking for it.
And then there’s his ice skates. Of course the stranger had gravitated to the giant blades hanging on the wall.
Shane holds both of his hands up in a clear show of surrender, movement jostling the blankets he’s wrapped up in. The man’s eyes fall to them, eyes narrowing with suspicion. He takes his free hand to peal the top quilt back, stroking the layer beneath made of fox pelts.
The stranger is distracted, and Shane doesn’t waste the advantage. He swings for the hand holding the skate, knocking it clear out of either of their reaches. Once his neck is free from the kiss of metal, Shane goes to strike the stranger’s head, making contact with his wounded temple. The man sprawls back on Shane’s bed, making a sharp noise of pain. Shane uses the time to free his legs from under the tangle of sheets and blankets, launching himself on top of the prone stranger.
They’re close in size, but Shane’s stronger. The softness of the other man’s stomach may just be a layer of fat hiding muscle, but Shane’s going to assume it’s not, stay out of his own head and pin down the man he let in his own home after a total lapse of good sense.
The stranger doesn’t go easy. He wrestles a foot free, tries to hit Shane’s groin with it, but gets caught in the nightshirt. His nudity is a weakness now, because there’s nothing to obstruct Shane from shifting his knee and pressing between the stranger’s legs, threat clear.
He’s got a vise grip on the other man’s wrists, but Shane knows that’s not why he stops fighting him. The stranger is still panting, eyes wide with fear, as he bears his teeth into a snarl.
The attempt at ferocity doesn’t move Shane. “What is your fucking problem?”
It comes out harsh, exhausted, it makes the man drop his lips and hide his teeth instantly. He tilts his head, brow rising in something adjacent to confusion.
Fuck, what if when he hit his head it had taken his tongue from him? Shane had heard stories about that, about men at lumber mills, out at sea, who take one bad blow and can’t talk for the rest of their lives. The hit to his head hadn’t looked that bad, had it?
Then the man moves his lips again, spitting out something fast and bright in a flurry of words that are definitely not English.
Shane is only capable of carrying rudimentary conversations in Squamish and Finnish. He’s better with Chinook Jargon. French too, but only because the Boiziau family keeps him sharp. He knows Halkomelem when he hears it, but avoided working boats with native speakers unfamiliar with Jargon because Shane can barely do more than exchange pleasantries.
Whatever the stranger is speaking, Shane’s never heard a language like it before.
“I got none of that,” Shane admits, squeezing the stranger’s wrists harder.
The man huffs out an exhale, lower lip curved to blow the air up his own face. It makes the dried curls hanging over his forehead flutter.
“My English bad,” he warns.
“Better than nothing.”
“Okay.”
They stare at one another, neither saying a word.
Shane gets distracted, is trying to determine the color of the other man’s eyes, before he remembers that he’d woken up to him holding a skate to his throat. He jerks his head, making a short nodding motion, trying to prod the man to speak.
The man beneath him shakes his head. “What?”
“Why are you here?”
“You tell me!” He tries to shrug, but Shane’s hold on him doesn’t give him much to work with. “I wake up in strange house, man sleeping like upyr.”
Fair point. Not the upyr, whatever that is, but Shane probably wouldn’t be entirely reasonable if he woke up in an unfamiliar home in someone else’s clothes.
“I found you on the beach, unconscious and bleeding.”
The man is quiet for a moment, eyes squinting, before the tension falls from his face and he frowns. “Bleeding?”
Shane takes his hand to gently tap the wounded side of the other man’s face, where he’d hit him moments earlier. The man’s fingers follow, poking with more force than Shane would dare, and winces in pain right after doing so.
Shane’s torn between amusement and concern before it catches up to him that he’s given the stranger a free hand. But he’s not attempting to strike Shane, he’s using the hand to ghost over his own skin, tracing the shape of the wound and trying to gently assess damage.
“We don’t need to fight,” Shane says.
The man’s hand stops moving and his gaze shifts, heavy on Shane. “You found me?”
Shane nods.
“You bring me inside, dress me?”
Shane nods again.
“Why?”
Shane can’t explain it, not in any way that makes sense. “You were cold. You looked like you needed help.”
“I could be bad.”
“But you’re not.”
The man lolls his head, pointedly looking at the ice skate that had been swatted halfway across the room.
Shane frees his other hand, gives the man the chance to shove him off completely and go for the blade again. Rose will invent a new way to call Shane stupid if this ever gets back to her, but Shane’s not thinking about that right now.
He’s confident that the man beneath him is not a bad one, just lost and hurt. And Shane doesn’t want to hurt him. Someone, or something, had already done that enough.
The man could stop looking at Shane so intensely though. There’s a smile tugging at his lips, a light in his eyes that Shane doesn’t want to look too closely at.
He raises both hands above his head, a mirror to the surrender Shane offered earlier, but this one given freely.
“I could be very bad.”
Shane shakes his head, trying to keep his own smile from forming. “You’re not.”
He gets off the other man, finds the nightshirt discarded on the bench he’d slept on. The fire died at some point in the night, and it takes Shane very little effort to get it going again. The nightshirt is fine, not even missing a button, so he throws it back at the stranger in his bed.
Because the man is still in his bed, attention back on the fox fur blanket. And very much naked.
He startles when the shirt hits his shoulder. He doesn’t say anything, just picks up the nightshirt and looks at it, then Shane.
“Please put some clothes on?” Shane tries. “For me?”
The man shakes his head but still does as Shane asks. Shane uses the time to retrieve the skate from where it had gotten knocked, though it takes him longer to find its pair. He finds it in his front door, wedged in the gap beneath the handle. It’s easy to remove the skate, and when Shane tests the handle, to his confusion he finds it working and unlocked. As he’d left it. He’s not sure what the stranger was trying to accomplish.
Shane knots the laces of the skates and returns them to their hook. He jumps reflexively when he turns, not having heard the man he’d let into his cabin sneak up behind him. His light eyes are flicking between the ice skates and Shane, and that wound on the side of his face looks like it hurts, but it’s not doing anything to dull any sense of curiosity.
He’s not going anywhere. He’s hurt, Shane’s going to get him a doctor at the very least. He should probably introduce himself.
He holds out his hand to the other man. “Shane.”
The man frowns at Shane’s hand. He slowly shakes his head as he goes to point to his chest instead. “Ilya.”
Shane tilts his head, realizing a beat later than he probably should. “Oh!” He copies the motion, pointing to himself. “Shane. I’m Shane.”
“Shane.”
He offers his hand to the stranger, to Ilya, as he tries to ignore how the way his name sounds in the other man’s mouth makes his toes want curl. “Let’s start over?”
Ilya looks at the hand before trying to catch Shane’s eye again.
“You take it. With your own?”
Ilya cautiously reaches out, hold loose and barely making contact with Shane’s hand as he does. He flinches but doesn’t bolt when Shane shakes their hands.
“It’s nice to meet you Ilya.”
The other man makes an amused noise, even as he drops their hands. “Nice to meet you, Shane.”
“I was going to go into town and come back with our doctor? I fish, I don’t know anything about the human body, but I think someone needs to look at that wound on your head.”
The man, Ilya, takes a half step back and gives Shane long look. “You fish?”
Shane nods. “Mostly just when salmon come back to spawn. We don’t even have chase them into the river. The bay gives us enough to work with. We put away the gillnets out once the season is over, but I’ve got some other tricks. Spots where I’ll go trolling before Barrett wants the boats out of the water.”
Ilya’s mouth has dropped half open, and Shane really is not good at reading people, but he knows confusion when he sees it.
“I’m a fisherman?” He tries. “I do other things. But I make most of my money fishing.”
“Fishing.” Ilya says, repeating the word to himself. “Okay.”
“Okay? I’ll come back with the doctor?”
Ilya nods, gaze distracted and wandering around the modest cabin. “You want me here?”
“I mean. Ideally. Would be strange to bring Dr. Hayes to an empty house.” He looks around, not seeing anything out of place in his home, other than the bench having been drug to the fire as a makeshift bed for Ilya last night. “I can make breakfast when I come back?”
Ilya’s eyes are back on him, heavy. “Why are you helping me?”
“Because…” Shane trails off, staring at the other man and Shane doesn’t know if he’s ever really appreciated the indulgence of the window, the one Ryan had told him was a bad idea. The glass is dingey, the seal could be better, and Shane can’t see out it clear enough to get a real view of the water. But right now, between the whispers of dawn and the firelight, Ilya is somehow glowing in Shane’s home.
Curls turned golden, eyes soft, and something deep in Shane twists in sadness at the thought of whatever danger it was that brought Ilya to him.
Ilya leans away a little and then the light isn’t catching his hair quite the same anymore. “Because…”
Right. Talking. “Because it’s what I’d hope someone would do for me. If I got lost, hurt.”
“Mm,” Ilya hums. “You would be missed, I think. Not lost for long.”
“Are you? Missed?” He taps his own temple, the spot where Ilya’s been struck. “Do you know what happened?”
Ilya rocks his head back and forth. “Not really.”
Which isn’t the same as no. “Do you know where you are?”
“Canada?”
“Yeah, British Columbia. We’re north of Vancouver, pretty small fishing town. It’s called Irina Bay.”
Ilya barks out a sound that might be a laugh. “Really?”
“Yeah, do you know it?” It’s not important enough of a place to be most maps that Shane’s seen.
“No,” Ilya gnaws on his lip, looking like he’s trying to bite down a smile. “No, is just…”
Shane waits, but Ilya doesn’t elaborate.
“Okay,” he says slowly. “Breakfast when I’m back, then?”
Ilya nods, heads for the fire, and the view of his calves makes Shane’s throat go dry at the sudden thought of what impression he might give with a strange man in his home just in shirtsleeves. Not that Dr. Hayes would judge Shane. It's just not what had happened.
He pulls out an extra set of clothes when he dresses, keeping his eyes on his unmade bed. He’s got his socks and spare set of clothes in hand when he fusses the blankets even.
When Shane looks to the fireplace, he finds that Ilya is already watching him. He does not think about how long Ilya might have been watching him for. He makes a point to keep eye contact as he strides across the room and drops the clothes in Ilya’s lap.
“Dress,” Shane orders, not stopping on his way to the dining space so he can sit and get his socks and boots on.
He can hear Ilya moving around, and spares a quick glance over before heading for the door.
Ilya’s changing in the middle of the room with zero shame. Shane registers that he’s naked, that now in proper lighting he can appreciate the curve Ilya’s ass, before he slams his eyes shut with force.
It’s no use. He can see it just as clearly in his memory, etched on his eyelids.
Shane opens his eyes, stares at the grain of his table and counts the lines until he stops hearing the sound of movement. When he looks back, Ilya’s watching him again.
“All good?” The other man asks.
Shane is on his feet as quickly as he can get them under him. “Yeah. Be back soon.”
He grabs his keys on the way out, but doesn’t stop to lock the door. He’s not trapping Ilya in his cabin. If the other man wants to leave, he can’t stop him. He’ll just have to explain to Dr. Hayes that no, there really was a stranger Shane had dragged in from the coast last night, and hope he doesn’t sound like he also hit his head.