Thinking about Ilya, I end up thinking about how canonically Ilya listens to Bad Bunny, which to me is such a fun fact about him that I can't help but smile. (I made a whole playlist about it because the chance of Ilya listening to the same music that surrounds me is amazing)
And then I think about DtMF.
An album whose driving storyline is about missing home, the people who lived there, the things you've left behind, and it inevitably leads back to Ilya.
To wishing he had more pictures of his mother, to have the chance to turn back time so he could hug her again, wishing he didn't have to loose anyone else. Dreaming about Russia, not the one he dreads going back to, not the Russia of his father or the place he can't come back to, but the one he grew up in with his mother, where he fell in love with hockey, where he met Svetlana.
Because while we know that Ilya doesn't want to come back to Russia, it would not be far fetched to think he wishes he at least had the chance, or that he'd had something to come back to, something worth it. Because at the end of the day those are his roots, his childhood, his language, the first things he ever knew, there's familiarity and comfort there, for Ilya, not everything is corrupted, he wishes not everything was corrupted.
There's always guilt about leaving, even if you're doing what's best, there's always hurt when you remember what could have been. A thousand what-ifs, what if my father wasn't sick? What if my brother wasn't an ass? What if, what if, what if...
But there's a reality that he doesn't get to have any of that, that for Ilya to be able to have the life he wants and deserves he can't stick to hypotheticals, to dreams, so he needs to leave everything behind, build something new an ocean away.
And Ilya wants that, he needs it. But he would always dream of a world where he could have always had it.