Chapter Text
Mornings in Hasetsu reminded Yuuri of the cats that skulked in the narrow strip of alleyway beside his shop. They snuck up on you from the darkness, creeping around the edge of your vision. Their movements slow, almost sluggish, yet precise in every step, every flick of the tail, every twitch of the ear. They weren’t quite as noisy as the seabirds that plagued the docks, but their presence practically begged to be noticed, even if they tried to look indifferent about it. Most of all, they made Yuuri uncomfortable. Which should say a lot about how he perceived mornings in Hasetsu.
This groggy Thursday morning was no different from any other and the familiar salty tang of the air was lost on Yuuri, who had been born and raised off that smell, that ocean brine. Not everyone was born at the very edge of their island country, and he happened to be one of those people. Sometimes he thought about that too much. Hasetsu wasn’t densely populated and any person in town who lived past the age of seventy was automatically a local hero. It was also one of those places that was tiny enough that knowing the names of the family who lived two streets down from you was nothing so admirable as a medal from the prime minister himself.
Luckily, it was the height of spring so the need to shovel snow wasn’t on Yuuri’s list of things to worry about today. There were, however, a lot of cherry blossom petals. Usually there weren’t this many blossoms so late in the year, but he chalked it up to that climate change phenomenon that the news had been talking about for the past decade or so. He liked the flowers though… It probably went without saying, since he was the proud owner of a flower shop himself.
“G’morning, Yuuri,” greeted the old fisherman as he passed, tipping his cap and bowing his head a little in Yuuri’s direction. He was a familiar face that walked this street on the way to his fishing spot at the same time every morning. “Setting up for the day?”
“Good morning,” Yuuri said with as genuine and lively a smile as he could muster at seven in the morning. “I have your wife’s arrangement ready in the back, if you’d like to get it now.”
“Oh, good work, m’boy,” the old man said, laughing. It was a reedy, yet coarse sound that might be mistaken for wheezing, but he was known for it. “I’ll pass by for it after my morning reel. Can’t let the day swim me by, you know.”
Yuuri laughed, too. Strange laugh or no, the fisherman’s delight was infectious and Yuuri had been born easily swayed by the emotions that others wore on their sleeve. “Yes, of course. I’ll see you later then, sir.”
The man bid farewell and continued on his way to his usual spot on the bridge that spanned a thin stretch of ocean between Hasetsu and Kyuushu. Yuuri had known him all his life, much like he’d known practically every senior citizen in town. If he kept up with the way he lived now, he would probably end up one of them too. It wasn’t the worst way to end up—there were definitely worse things—but it just didn’t sit well with him. Not for the first time, he wondered if he shouldn’t have gone to high school and university in Tokyo. Maybe then, he wouldn’t be thinking all these complicated thoughts of wanting something more. Not for the last time, he took the thought and stashed it under a rug in his mind like if he ignored it long enough, he could look under the same rug to find that it had disappeared on its own.
Okay, that’s enough brooding for the rest of the morning, he thought to himself, reaching up with his arms and stretching with a small groan. He shuffled inside to start the process of making the shop appealing to passing eyes. He particularly liked the way the cherry blossoms on the ground made a sea of pink surrounding the entrance, and patted himself on the back for deciding against sweeping everything away.
His watch read exactly 8:01 by the time he was turning the sign hanging on the door from “closed” to “welcome.” It was a minuscule lateness that nobody would notice, given that hardly anyone stopped by at this time of day anyway. He leaned backward against his hands on the counter and imagined himself standing on a beaten dirt trail, edged by a thick wood on one side and on the other, a field of flowers wider than his own mind could imagine fully. Horizon to horizon it stretched, an ocean of blood-red poppies, quartz dandelions, feathery white daisies, all underneath a cerulean sky. There were hundreds upon thousands of other flowers, most of which he couldn’t name, and most likely his mind had made them up completely, but as he walked down the dirt path and watched as sunlight filtered through the canopy overhead and dappled his somewhat tan skin, he felt happier than he ever could have been stuck in a town on the southernmost tip of Japan in a tiny flower shop that he was bound to give up to help his sister take over his family’s hot spring.
He opened his eyes to the sad truth of his shop—his temporary piece of freedom from his fate tied to Yu-topia. It wasn’t that he hated it—no, he loved his family and the onsen. He loved the smell of old tatami and wood, of steaming water fresh from the bowels of an underwater volcano, of pork cutlet bowls fried and seasoned to perfection by his mother, just for him. It was a slice of heaven. Just not the slice that he wanted a bite out of.
Outside, he heard rustling and the all-too familiar sound that he had grown to be wary of: paws in plants. He scrambled to lift the bit of countertop that wasn’t eternally fixed in place and ducked out from beneath. By the time he was outside, he was hearing the dog and its owner debating over whether or not it was okay to destroy the pink and yellow carnations on display. Yuuri felt his shoulders sag with relief when he noticed that the dog’s owner was winning the argument.
He also noticed that the owner wasn’t speaking in Japanese. Though of course, since the dog was no longer pawing through the carnations, Yuuri didn’t feel any immediate need to start a conversation that would likely have ended up one-sided. So he was now in the precariously awkward situation of being miraculously unnecessary yet also necessary at the same time. He hovered at the entrance, wondering when he would be required by sheer politeness to speak in unsure English.
The dog—a giant brown poodle much bigger than any dog Yuuri had ever seen on this island—barked enthusiastically as its owner scratched it affectionately behind the ears, murmuring words of compromise. Maybe a new toy or an extra treat once they got back to their hotel room. The foreigner, likely a tourist, straightened and turned around and all at once Yuuri was accosted by how un-Japanese the man looked.
Light grey hair parted on the side and swept over half of his forehead, above eyes so painfully blue that Yuuri felt like he was looking into caverns of solid ice, and a complexion fair enough to be declared a crime against humanity. Yuuri automatically felt smaller, though he was clearly wider, and he pulled uneasily on the back of his collared white button-up shirt.There was no way for him to hide his flabby stomach and chubby fingers, but he found that if he focused on other anxieties, his extra fleshy parts seemed slightly less there. For now he tried to focus on not butchering his English.
“Sorry about that,” the likely-a-tourist said. His tongue rolled his r’s a little too much and ‘th’ disappeared into a ‘z.’ Yuuri figured he must be European. “Makkachin loves gardens even more than I do. I think she misses the one back home.”
“N-Not at all,” stammered Yuuri, who for all his experience catering to foreign tourists at the family hot spring, was suddenly tongue-tied. “I love dogs.” He wasn’t sure what had spurred him into blurting that out, but he wasn’t lying. He’d always wanted a dog. He’d just never found the right one.
“Really?” The tourist’s blue eyes shone with a brightness that was almost childish. “They’re the loveliest companions, I can assure you.” As if to second this statement, Makkachin lifted her nose and barked, tongue lolling.
Yuuri smiled, but then he caught sight of a few bent stems and fallen leaves. His spirits fell. Nothing could sour his mood faster than ruined flowers.
“Oh, no.” The tourist had followed Yuuri’s line of sight and seen the blooms cocked at unnatural angles. “I’m so sorry.” He fumbled around his back pockets and pulled out a black leather wallet. “I’ll pay. How much?”
Yuuri was tempted to decline the offer. After all, it wasn’t as though he had ordered Makkachin to stick her paws into the display. But money on its own was already hard to come by. He hardly ever got any customers and having flowers shipped cost more than he could ever hope to deny. Reluctantly, he inspected the damage and said, “Three carnations… around five hundred yen.” In reality, they were worth seven hundred, but the beautiful tourist didn’t need to know that. Neither would he ever need to know that Yuuri had just thought him beautiful.
The tourist fingered through paper bills for a few seconds until Yuuri told him that it was a coin. Nodding, he finally fished out a five hundred yen coin and handed it to Yuuri.
“Thank you,” Yuuri said, and he meant it.
There was a bit of an awkward pause where neither of them quite knew what to say. Yuuri, for his part, didn’t want to be stuck there slowly coming to terms with how badly he needed that five hundred yen. His heart felt much heavier all of a sudden.
“Coffee,” the tourist blurted, making Yuuri’s eyes widen. He cleared his throat and tried again. “There’s… a café near the beach. I passed it on the way here. Would you mind if I…?”
It took a good minute of staring, blinking, and flustered silence for Yuuri’s brain to register, slowly, that he was being asked out—probably—on a date by an attractive foreigner. His cheeks flushed and his gaze fell to the cherry blossom petals between his feet. It was a surreal moment, that second when he said, “I don’t… mind.” He heard the tourist relax with an audible sigh, saw the slight shuffle of his feet. Yuuri brought his eyes up to the drooping carnations. “I go out for lunch at twelve.”
“Twelve it is,” said the tourist, grinning. “I’ll come back then.”
Yuuri nodded, unable to imagine that this was all really, truly happening. It was most likely just an act of courtesy. Something that Westerners or the wealthy did, thumbing money out of their pockets for strangers without a second glance. Thinking this way was sobering, and now he could trust himself to speak. “Have a good morning,” he said with a polite incline of his head.
“You too.” Beckoning to Makkachin, the tourist left him, walking until he disappeared round a corner. Once he was gone, Yuuri let out a heavy sigh, shoulders dropping. It was nice to hope that he’d been noticed, maybe a bit crazy to think that he’d been asked out, but daydreams were only daydreams and his tiny flower shop was still the only thing that was ever cruelly real.
The tourist arrived three minutes past noon with Makkachin and a smile that would likely bring every woman in Japan on their knees. Needless to say, Yuuri was feeling incredibly overwhelmed by the fact that he’d really come back at noon, just as he’d promised. Yuuri had been predisposed to think that he’d dreamed up that entire morning, that he’d just been sleeping on his feet. The three broken carnations in his display told him otherwise.
“Shall we?” The tourist’s hair glinted silver wherever the noon sun caught it and he walked with a supple grace that made Yuuri second guess his every move. What did he even look like next to this stranger? Fat, clumsy, a person haphazardly put together. He almost squeezed his eyes shut, hoping that none of this was real, that none of the eyes that followed them down the street were really there. But it was inevitable. Hasetsu was a small town and gossip was a livelihood.
At least Makkachin was more than ecstatic about the arrangement. She pranced around ahead of them, sniffing street lamps and gutters incessantly, pausing only whenever the tourist clucked at her but quickly falling back to the habit. Her tail was up and wagging the entire time, which made Yuuri feel much lighter than he thought he would be.
He and the tourist managed to make it to the café without exchanging much conversation. Mostly, they’d been watching Makkachin investigate every nook and cranny of Hasetsu that she could get his nose on and into. Fairly new, the café was a familiar spot to Yuuri—one that he’d always passed by to and from the shop every since it had been built a year ago. It had an outdoor section with a pleasant seaside view and menus in both English and Japanese. Definitely a tourist hot spot. They even let Makkachin in, on account of her good behavior, which the tourist vouched for in his heavy accent. Yuuri said nothing about the three carnations that lay in the bottom of a waste basket.
After they’d settled in with Makkachin resting at their feet and ordered their lunches with two cups of coffee, Yuuri felt his unease creep back in. He could feel the tourist’s eyes on him the entire time, and couldn’t stop fidgeting in his seat. He knew that the silence was growing in length and awkwardness but he was too absorbed by how he just knew he looked like the lesser of the pair.
“How long have you had that flower shop?”
The question was sudden but not, Yuuri realized, unwelcome. “A year and a half,” he replied. “You’re… a tourist?” It was a stupid question and he didn’t really know why he was asking it. It was too late now anyway.
“I’m here for work, actually.” The tourist pressed his lips into a thin line that made Yuuri think he might not be passionate about his work. “I came out to Hasetsu for to get away for a while. I’ll be gone again tomorrow.” He said this with such a poignant expression that Yuuri almost told him to stay longer. There was something inherently moving about this tourist’s sadness. Or maybe that was just Yuuri.
“Can I ask what you do?” he ventured as the tourist brought his coffee to his lips.
“I’m a wine maker. Or, more specifically, my family is. I’m more of… the ambassador.”
“Ambassador?”
The tourist waved his hand dismissively. Between sips of coffee, his eyes had grown distant and unfocused. “I go here and there trying to get people to like what we make. Nothing spectacular.” There was something in the way he said the last two words that explicitly signified an end to the discussion. It was time for Yuuri to pick up another topic, if he could.
He did. “Do you like Hasetsu? So far?”
“I love it,” the tourist flashed him a grateful smile. “It’s quiet and the people are friendlier than back home.” He laughed good-naturedly. “Makkachin and I have been almost everywhere.”
“Have you been to the hot springs?”
The tourist’s eyebrows shot up. “Hot springs?”
Yuuri jumped on this. No tourist could come to Hasetsu and leave without visiting the hot springs at least once. “You should go,” he said. “It’s relaxing and we have great food.”
“‘We’?”
He blushed. He’d tried not to make it obvious that his family ran the hot spring. He didn’t want to sound biased when he promoted it to others. It also let him avoid awkward questions. “It’s… my family’s,” he said sheepishly.
The tourist made a sound of approval. Then his blue eyes glinted curiously. “Why are you working a flower shop when you’ve got a family business?” he asked.
There it was: the awkward question that trumped all other awkward questions. It’d been a year and a half since he’d set up shop in the hopes of quelling his thirst for something more. But all it had done was confuse him and make him long for other things. Things he’d never even seen.
“It’s… complicated,” he muttered.
Seeming to sense Yuuri’s discomfiture, the tourist nodded and switched topics with much more ease than Yuuri had. They talked about Hasetsu, and then about Russia, where the tourist was from, apparently. Weather, food, music, dogs, Makkachin. Anything and everything that they could talk about without touching upon their jobs and the tourist’s family. Soon enough, the food arrived, and they were quiet once more, absorbed in more important things. Like eating.
After a while, the tourist looked up at Yuuri, took another sip of his coffee and had that sparkling look of curiosity in his eyes again.
“What do you think of soulmates?” he asked with an enthusiasm that looked, well, strange on him. It was a brazen look, sweet and raw like the first bite of an apple. Yuuri swallowed his carbonara and frowned.
“Soulmates?” He hadn’t thought about that in years. Not since Yuuko and Takeshi. And yet the mark that wrapped itself around his left hip hadn’t faded in the slightest. It wasn’t even that he felt cynical about finding his fated partner. It was just… he had so many other things to worry about and grieve over. This was just another thing he couldn’t do anything about. What was the point in adding it to his growing list of anxieties? “I haven’t really thought about it.”
The light in the tourist’s eyes faltered a little. “Oh. But you do think it’s possible, right?”
“Mm… yeah. Sure,” Yuuri knew that even as he said it, it sounded far from the truth. “It’s common for people to find their soulmates.” Not impossible for anyone to be alone, regardless. “It’s not… foolproof though.”
“That so?” The tourist leaned back. The gleam in his eye had vanished and he was, once again, the mysteriously attractive foreigner without a name. The apple left in open air, darkening, turning stale. Was he really so hopeful that he could find his soulmate? It seemed kind of silly, if Yuuri let himself think about it more than he already did or didn’t.
Then, just like that, lunch was over and they were walking back to the flower shop. The tourist was on his phone, his Russian spilling over his lips in clipped bursts and erecting a barricade between them in Yuuri’s imagination. He felt painfully awkward, part of him aching to make easy conversation, but most of him wishing that this was over and done with. His hands deep in his jacket pockets, fingers twitching, he hated how he was making everything so much more complicated than it needed to be. This man was only a tourist, and he was only a flower shop owner.
The tourist ended his phone call a few seconds before they arrived at the shop’s shadowed entrance.
“Thank you for the meal,” Yuuri told him. “It was delicious.”
“Thank you for the company,” the tourist said, smiling. It was only now that Yuuri realized that his was a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m sorry about the flowers.”
“It’s alright, really. They weren’t much…” A lie, of course.
“They were lovely. Everything here is.”
Yuuri looked up at him and felt that little rush of pride that every Hasetsu resident got whenever a foreigner complimented the town. It wasn’t much, but it was everything they had.
“Come visit again,” Yuuri found himself saying. He paused, clenched and unclenched his hands in his pockets. “I can show you more.”
The tourist blinked. “Yes,” he said, and this time, his smile made his icy blue eyes soften. “I’d like that very much.”
Maybe it was the ocean brine in the air, the salty sea breeze. Or maybe it was the cherry blossoms at their feet. Or maybe it was the way they held each other’s gaze a second longer than they should have. Or maybe it was just the carbonara Yuuri ate for lunch.
In any case, there was something more and he could somehow tell that he wasn’t the only one between them who knew.
“My name is Victor,” the tourist said, in a voice so quiet it might have been conspiratorial.
Yuuri echoed his name and felt his cheeks grow hot when Victor shot him a bemused smile. “I’m… Yuuri,” he said. “I’ll see you again…?”
Victor’s eyes studied him for a moment, then two. “I’ll see you again,” he repeated. In his mouth, touched by his accent, the words sent a shiver down Yuuri’s spine. They were almost electric and he couldn’t stop repeating them, over and over, in his head, even after Victor and Makkachin were long gone and the only ones he had to whisper them to were the four walls of his bedroom.
It’d been years since he’d felt this way and he could hardly tell himself it was a funny feeling because Yuuri Katsuki knew what having a stupid crush felt like. He knew how giddy it would make him feel in his waking hours and how emotional it would make him as he dreamt. He knew the joy it promised.
He also knew the pain it entailed.