#but for a minute can we just imagine this was filmed with sid and kris. just close your eyes and imagine it.

[sportsthoughts]

Day 30 of offseason gifs - PO and Drew doing... whatever this is

[knifeshoeoreofight]

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

(sorry that cover photo is so huge, not sure how that happened)

Zhenya has missed people before. He’s been away from someone he’d been in a relationship with before. Nothing, though, has left a void quite like Sid’s absence has.

The whales’ migration can take up to two months, or more. Magda will stop to feed or socialize, and she’ll slow down if her baby needs to rest. The soonest that humpbacks start showing up in Labrador and Newfoundland is around the month of April. It’s February now.

Zhenya’s saving grace is the sheer amount of work he has to do. He’s got his neglected research to compile and to analyze, and he has to either start planning out his classes for the next term, or start preparing to resign.

He has a little money put away, but not the amount he’d have if he’d had any idea that he was going to be uprooting his entire life.

“What are you going to do?” Flower asks him gently, over the tub of coral samples Zhenya is helping him with. Zhenya just looks at him, unable to answer.

“We’ll ask around,” Letang promises. “See if there are any openings in the Maritimes.”

“What about MUN?” Fleury says, lighting up. “Their marine biology program is great.”

Zhenya knows about Memorial University of Newfoundland. He corresponded with a few of the researchers there before arriving in the Maritimes to begin his own work.

“Don’t know,” he says, shame rising in his throat. “Don’t know if my English good enough for teaching at university level.”

“Mon chum,” Letang says, clapping a hand on his shoulder and giving him a little shake. “You just spent most of a winter teaching a merman, who you had zero words in common with at the onset, how to communicate in American Sign Language, a language that you yourself didn’t even speak before now . I think you can handle teaching some snot-nosed freshmen the difference between their echinoderms and their cnidarians.”

“Okay no,” Geno says, wrinkling his nose. “Those so different—“

Flower cackles. “See? You could do it. People love an accent. It’s been scientifically proven that you listen better to a speaker with a foreign accent. I saw it in an article somewhere.”

“Where? Buzzfeed?” Letang teases, before being sidetracked by the sample he’s working with. “Oh good job mon bébé, polyps out!”

Fleury stifles a laugh. “See, I told you,” he whispers to Zhenya. “You’re within your rights to mock him mercilessly.”

Zhenya watches Letang, dark, sleek head bent over his work. “It’s fine,” he says, and smiles. “I understand.”

Fleury knocks their shoulders together companionably. Comforted, Zhenya gets back to work.

***

They’re finishing up last minute tasks before they start flying out. Letang and Fleury—

He really, really should stop thinking of them that way.

Kris and Marc-Andre.

Kris and Marc-Andre are suffused with excitement about returning home to their families. Zhenya has accidentally turned up in the background of enough Skype calls home that when Veronique calls as Marc-Andre is packing to leave, she greets Zhenya warmly as well.

“You should visit sometime!” she tells him, and Marc-Andre sits upright.

“You should! he exclaims. “You have some time before you, uh, need to be in Labrador. Come stay with us! Stretch out those savings a little bit.”

Zhenya feels relief sweep through him. “Really?”

“Really,” Vero says with a warm smile. “We have a guest room.”

That night, like he does every night, Zhenya checks the satellite data right before he falls asleep, to check where Sid and the whales are. The tags pinged next to each other, right where they should be.

It’s the first night since Sid left that he falls asleep with some measure of peace.

***

After that it’s a whirlwind of packing, changing flight details, and trying to explain to his parents over terrible quality video chat that he’s resigning his tenure track position and moving, jobless, to Canada for the foreseeable future.

His mother is just upset but his father gives him a long, assessing look and asks: “So. What is their name?”

Zhenya is almost relieved. “Sid. His name is Sid.”

His mother closes his eyes at the pronoun. They know about his bisexuality and what it would mean if he ever got serious about a man. He knows how much they love him and yet how worried the political and social climate in Russian make them.

“Does he make you happy?” His mother asks, her voice wobbly.

“So happy, Mama,” Zhenya says. Because it’s true.

It’s all she needs to hear. “Alright. Be happy, baby, and be safe. And send me a picture of this boy, I want to see him.”

He sends her a carefully selected and cropped photo of him and Sid, cut off well before Sid’s waist, his webbed hands hidden and his mouth closed over his sharp canine teeth. Kris had taken it as they sat on the boat, Zhenya with his hands raised as he explained something, Sid gazing at his face with an expression that manages to be focused and warm all at once.

“Oh Zhenya,” his mother texts him after he sends it. “He loves you so much. I can see it so clearly. I’d love to meet him someday.”

“I’d like that too,” Zhenya replies, and hopes it will be possible one day.

***

Most of the time he’s staying with Vero and Marc-Andre he works feverishly on his paper about whale vocalization, just to have it out of the way. The rest of the time, he’s organizing the massive amounts of data they have on Sid, from video footage to field notes to all the teaching materials they’ve amassed.

Marc-Andre helps him whenever he’s free, and Kris comes over often to lend a hand as well. Zhenya feels bad as they hole up in Marc-Andre’s home office, leaving their bemused wives talking in the living room.

“Maybe…” he says to them both. “Maybe it’s okay. To tell Vero and Cath. I know was my idea not to tell, and I’m so thankful you do for me. But maybe won’t hurt, to let them know.”

“Oh thank god,” Marc-Andre cries, and drapes himself dramatically over the table, dislodging about three carefully sorted stacks of paper. “It’s been killing me not to tell her.” He take a deep breath as if to start shouting for his wife but Kris plasters a hand over his mouth.

“For fuck’s sake. Let’s get some basic data together and wait until all the babies are in bed, at least.”

They edit together a Cliff’s Notes string of video clips, and get ready to let the women in on the secret.

***

“So,” Kris says, when they gather in the Letang living room that night. “We, us and Evgeni, have been working on something special. We weren’t sure how much was safe to tell to whom, but. You both obviously deserve to know what’s happened this summer.”

Cath and Vero exchange glances, and then turn back to Kris, standing in front of the TV where they’ve hooked up Zhenya’s laptop.

“We knew something was up,” Cath says. “Just not what.”

“Okay, so.” Kris explains. It started when this guy-” he points the remote he’s holding at Zhenya. “Found some weird noises on his hydrophone recordings, and we invited ourselves over to help investigate.”

“Coral so boring, need distract,” Zhenya says with faux sympathetic understanding.

“Shhhh, you,” Kris continues. “So we took a boat out, put the hydrophones back in. This is what we heard.” He plays the audio. Cath and Vero look at each other, clearly unsettled.

“Just wait,” Kris says, and plays the footage of the first time Zhenya saw Sid.

It’s strange, to see everything unwind on the television, like some kind of film. To hear the stunned gasps of the women, and to imagine what all of this looks like to someone seeing it for the first time.

“Oh my god,” Vero breathes, hand hovering in front of her mouth. Cath’s eyes are wide as saucers.

They’ve got footage from the time they started teaching Sid to the time his ASL was nearly fluent. Like this, Zhenya can also see how Sid looked at him, from the start. With fascination, then with affection, then with something more. He can see the same progression bloom in his own face.

Cath gasps at the next clip, one Marc-Andre or Kris must have taken when Zhenya wasn’t looking. In it, he’s leaning over the side of the boat, and Sid has raised himself in the water to meet him. It’s the pure, naked love in Sid’s eyes that makes Zhenya’s breath catch, and makes him feel like he’s dived deep, water pressure pushing in on his chest.

He doesn’t feel like he deserves that look.

When all the clips are finished playing, the women sit back, stunned and speechless. After a long moment, Vero turns and looks at Zhenya.

“You, and he?” she asks, clearly not sure she should ask.

Zhenya pulls his shell necklace out from under his shirt. “Yes. He’s— yes. We’re.” He can’t finish.

“Ah,” she breathes, and to his surprise, she gets up and comes over to wrap her arms around him.

“That must be hard,” she says, and Zhenya buries his head in her shoulder. She smells of lavender laundry detergent and peach shampoo. He hadn’t known he needed the hug and the acknowledgement of what he’s going through, until this moment.

Vero takes his face in her hands, and behind her Cath gives them a still-slightly-dazed smile. “You’ll be okay,” she tells him. “What happens next?”

***

What happened next, is Zhenya books a ticket to Newfoundland, and keeps watching the satellite feed, and gets used to missing Sid the way humans adapt to any kind of pain.