Mean Dom Ilya is so important to me because he's depicted so lovingly in the show, with none of his edges sanded down. I never want to stop talking about how he navigates love and pain and vulnerability and cruelty. He's so intimately familiar with all of it. Born from the worst of it, from a father who abused him the same way he abused his mother, "he was so hard on her", so much so that she couldn't survive it.
But Ilya finds love in the cracks. He doesn't disown his father. Right up until his death Ilya made sure he was taken care of, reminding him gently when his dementia made him forget, looking after him on his breaks back home and paying his brother to do the same when he was away. For Ilya, it's not just something he tolerates out of obligation. His voice breaks on the phone with Shane when he says in Russian, "it kills me that he took care of my father and I didn't."
It's a twisted knife to love someone who was cruel to you. To grapple with the dissonance of cruelty and love. To feel drawn to the thing that repulses you, took your mother from you, took the part of you that knows you are worth something, that you're real.
Ilya sees how it can play out if you try to ignore the cruelty you were given. "My brother is, I don't know, scared. It makes him terrible." Ilya could say that he doesn't understand why his brother is the way that he is, but he gets it. "He always hated me, and I know why, but it kills me." Ilya knows he could be the same way, if he let himself. He knows how it feels to want to be cruel.
And then he meets Shane. And there is that twisted knife again, that terrible dissonance, the desire to be vulnerable and cruel, to cause pain and find love. And Shane is scared but not scared. He is shaking Ilya's hand, twice, reaching out to him again and again, no matter how much of a risk it is, Shane does not chicken out, even when he feels like he's going to die, and he's scared. It's scary but he's brave. Shane sees Ilya, cruelty and all, and says I'm willing to take the risk, I am drawn to you, you make life thrilling.
And Ilya gets to experience something so profound it rips my heart out. He falls in love with Shane while he teases him, makes him squirm, makes him beg with tears welling up in his eyes. Ilya doesn't try to ignore his desire to be cruel. He is vulnerable to the way it shapes him, the way it makes him move through the world. Ilya is at his most honest when he shows Shane his spark of cruelty. And Shane could reject him for it - to which Ilya, if he wants to break the cycle of abuse, would have to accept.
But Shane doesn't reject him. He has everything to lose, and still, he finds a way to trust Ilya, to take that risk, to prove that love is found in the cracks, in the ways we see each other and find a way to say, you scare me but I love that about you. Life with you is not without pain, but I don't want it to be. I want you just as you are, because of who you are, you are worth something, you are real.
