“this is ilya, i will never listen to your voicemail” and shane takes that to heart!!
he thinks ilya doesn’t ever listen to his messages, so maybe he starts leaving one here and there. maybe they’re nothing really, just a note to say he tried to call. sometimes leaving off with “oh, this is shane. by the way” he calls when he knows ilya won’t be able to pick up; “hey, uh. i know you won’t get this, but i was thinking about you. i miss you. i know you’re just in ottawa but… sometimes it feels a lot further. i love you.” and sometimes he’ll be watching a game and god. he wants to talk to ilya about that play, so he’ll leave message about it. shane never really tells ilya that this is something he does.
ilya knows, of course. watches his voicemail fill up little by little. always makes sure there’s space for new ones. has ones that he listens to so often that knows them by heart. memorizes the way shane laughs because he thinks no one will hear it, the sound of his breath on the other line between words. he listens to every one of them.
Took a crack at this – thank you for letting me play with this amazing premise!
Hi. This is Ilya. I will never listen to your voicemail.
The greeting wasn’t a joke or an exaggeration—it was the truth. Shane leaves messages anyway, confessions to a digital void that will never judge him, never push him away.
At least, that’s what he thinks.
Excerpt:
Shane had first heard that message when Ilya disappeared from Boston’s lineup in Nashville. No explanation, just “undisclosed reasons” and a media blackout that meant someone was injured or got arrested. Shane had called from a hallway outside the dressing room, heart hammering, and gotten the voicemail. That flat recorded statement: I will never listen.
Shane had left a message anyway. “Hey, just—saw you didn’t travel with the team. Are you okay? Call me back.”
And… Ilya… had called back, eventually, saying he’d seen Shane call. His father was dead. He was in Moscow. No, he hadn’t listened to whatever boring message he’d left. The greeting wasn’t a joke or an exaggeration—it was the truth. Ilya saw missed calls and responded to those. The actual messages disappeared unheard into the ether.
Ilya held the phone away from his ear and looked at it incredulously before dragging it back. “What you mean, five hundred gigabytes is ’plenty’?”
“Sir, that’s actually quite a generous amount of storage for personal use—”
“Is not personal use. Is professional.”
“I see. What kind of professional files are we talking about? Video editing? Photography?”
Ilya’s thumb hovered over the screen where Shane’s last voicemail sat, timestamped 2:47 AM, duration 00:47. “Audio files.”
“Audio files don’t typically require that much space unless you’re working with uncompressed formats. Have you considered converting to MP3?”
“No.”
“Well, that could save you significant—”
“I need original quality.”
The customer service rep paused. “Are you a music producer?”
“No.”
“Podcaster?”
“Chert voz’mi, net! No.”
“Then what—”
“Look.” Ilya switched the phone to his other ear. “How much for two terabytes?”
“Two terabytes? Sir, that’s—can I ask how many audio files you have?”
Ilya scrolled idly, glancing at the ever-growing list. 1,847 voicemails. He’d organized them by month, then by time of day, then by—he stopped scrolling. “… Many.”
“Right. Well, two terabytes would run you $99.99 monthly—”
“Fine.”
“—but I really think we should discuss your storage management strategy first. Are these files backed up elsewhere?”
Ilya thought about the external hard drive in his desk drawer. And the second one in his closet which Svetlana had asked about twice. And the USB drive in his gym bag that he refused to explain, because professionally on the ice and extremely unprofessionally off it, he was obsessed with Shane Hollander. “Yes, I am not stupid.”
“Then you could delete some of the physical copies—”
“No! I mean. I need all locations. For safety.”
“For… safety?”
“What if house burns down?”
“Well, that’s exactly why you have the cloud backup, sir. The physical drives would be destroyed, but your files would be safe in the cloud—”
“But what if cloud… breaks?”
A long pause. “The… the cloud doesn’t really ’break,’ sir. There are redundancies built into—”
“Everything breaks. Is technology. You never have phone die?”
“That’s not the same as—”
“Or computer crash? Lose everything?”
“Sir, cloud storage has multiple server backups across—”
“So you admit. Needs multiple backups.”
The rep’s sigh crackled through the speaker. “I’ll upgrade you to two terabytes.”
“Good. And for comparison, three terabytes is how much?”
